Forever and a Death

1

Martin Ha loved his daily commute. There were times when he thought it was the best part of his job, particularly on the bad days, which were fortunately rare. But on all days, in all weather, he loved his commute.

For one thing, he began it later than most other workers, not having to be in his office until ten in the morning, Monday through Saturday. And for another thing, he could be leisurely, traveling by bicycle and ferry, not crowded into a tram or a careening bus or stuck in traffic jams. And finally, he could commute in casual clothes, and change into his uniform when he got to work.

And so it was this Monday morning, a sunny day, moderately humid, the moisture in the air somewhat muffling the perpetual clack of mahjong tiles from every balcony, every side street, every cafe. Dressed in tan canvas shoes and white knee socks and tan shorts and a white short-sleeved dress shirt, his cellphone hooked to his belt, Ha kissed his wife Nancy, wheeled his bicycle out of the apartment, and took the elevator down to the street.

Martin Ha lived on a comparatively quiet side street in the middle-class neighborhood called Hung Horn, southeast of Chatham Road, an area heavily populated by the city’s Chinese civil servants, in which group, dressed for his commute, he seemed barely likely to belong. Mounted on his bicycle, teetering slightly as he made the turn onto Ma Tau Wai Road, this slender knobby-kneed serious-expressioned man of about 40 looked as though he might be a rickshaw driver on his day off. He didn’t look like anybody important at all.

Ha rode his bike down Ma Tau Wai Road and right onto Wuhu Street and then left onto Gilles Avenue, all the while ignoring the usual press of traffic that raced and squealed and struggled all around him, the other bicyclists, the hurrying pedestrians, the taxis and trucks and double-decker buses and even, though this was off their normal grounds, the occasional bewildered tourist. Gilles Avenue led him at last to the new Hung Horn ferry pier. Until just a few years ago, where he now stood had been Hung Horn Bay, next to the main railway terminal, but the bay had been filled in just recently, to make more precious land, on which had been built the opulent new Harbour Plaza Hotel, five minutes from the railroad terminal and even closer to the ferry pier.

The ferry ran every ten minutes or so, and took only fifteen minutes to cross the harbor, and this was what Martin Ha loved. The view from the ferry. Out in front of him, across the sparkling water, Hong Kong Island gleamed and blazed in the sunshine, its glittering towers bunched together like the crowded upraised lancetips of some buried army. Behind him, almost as huge, almost as modern, almost as gleaming and sleek and new, clustered Kowloon, Hong Kong’s mainland extension, the gateway to China. In the old days, you could take the train from that railway terminal beside the ferry dock on Kowloon and travel all the way across Czarist Russia and all of Europe to Calais in France, and then board one more ferry, and be in England. The jet plane had changed all that, of course, but the sense of it was still there, the ribbon that tied two worlds together.

Off to his right, as he stood against the side rail of the ferry, holding his bicycle with one hand and watching the great glorious harbor around him, Ha could see other ferries at work, particularly the green-and-white boats of the Star Ferry, the ferry the tourists rode, a trip half as long and half as glorious as this voyage Ha took twelve times a week.

At Wan Chai Perry Pier, Ha mounted his bike again for the short ride down Harbour Road and Fenwick Pier Street and the pedestrian walkway over broad and busy Harcourt Road down to Queensway Plaza, behind police headquarters. As he approached the building, the salutes began.

Three minutes to ten. In his blue uniform of a full Inspector in the Hong Kong Island Police, formerly the Royal Hong Kong Police, Martin Ha settled himself at his desk by the windows overlooking Arsenal Street and looked at the various papers that had been placed here by Min and Qi, his assistants. There were the overnight reports of crimes in the various districts, the reports of undercover agents, and messages from those who felt they needed to speak directly with the inspector.

The last twenty-four hours had not been bad in Hong Kong, Ha was happy to see. Pocketpicking was still the most persistent and irritating crime in the city. The Big Circle gang had not been heard from, not for several weeks now; good.

The Big Circle was a very loose association of mainland criminals, some of them former Red Army soldiers, who would sneak across the border from time to time to pull off usually pretty spectacular robberies, mostly of banks and jewelry stores. Their raids generally seemed to have been scripted by the same people who made Hong Kong’s action movies, with plenty of high-speed car chases and flying bullets. Now that Hong Kong was Chinese, the mainland authorities were making more serious efforts to capture or at least control the members of the Big Circle, so that particular crime wave might be at last ebbing.

Ha got to his phone messages last, and among them was surprised to see one from Inspector Wai Fung of Singapore. Ha had never met Wai Fung in the flesh, but they had spoken a number of times on the phone and communicated even more by fax, and their departments had cooperated in a number of smuggling cases.

Was this more smuggling? Intrigued, Ha intercommed to Min to return the call from Singapore, and three minutes later he was put through.

“I apologize for having to ruffle your day,” Wai Fung said.

Ha was aware that an unruffled day was Inspector Wai Fung’s dearest wish in life, but he himself didn’t mind a little excitement from time to time, so long as he could win at the end. He said, “Smuggling?”

“Not this time, no. In fact,” Wai Fung went on, and Ha could sense the man’s unease, “I can’t tell you with any certainty what the problem is. I can only tell you a group of people are coming to see you, and that, although I would prefer not to believe their story, I’m very much afraid they may not be simple alarmists.”

“Who are these people,” Ha asked, “and about what do they wish to alarm me?”

“One is a police inspector from Australia,” Wai Fung said, “from Brisbane there. I believe his rank is roughly equivalent to ours.”

“I don’t think I know any Australian police.”

“This one is named Tony Fairchild.”

Writing that down, Ha said, “And the others with him?”

“Three. Two men and a woman. The ones who first became aware of the problem.”

“And what is the problem?”

“There is another man,” Wai Fung said, “lately of Hong Kong, now of Singapore, named Richard Curtis. He is in the construction business. Very successful.”

“I remember that name,” Ha said. “A corner-cutter, as I recall.”

“I’m sure he is,” Wai Fung agreed. “But also wealthy and with some acquaintances of importance.”

“Yes, of course. Is he in trouble?”

“It seems,” Wai Fung said, “he might be the cause of the trouble. At least, these people claim he intends some massive destruction very soon, possibly in Hong Kong, and most likely in connection with the stealing of gold.”

“Gold.” There was a lot of gold under Hong Kong Island, of course, not in veins in the ground but in vaults within banks. It sounded like the Big Circle gang again, combining destruction with robbery. “But that doesn’t sound quite right,” he said. “Forgive me for saying so. A businessman has other ways to obtain gold. He doesn’t run into a bank with guns blazing to steal it.”

“Nevertheless,” Wai Fung said, “there does seem to be sufficient evidence to suggest an investigation might be in order.”

And better on my turf than yours, Ha thought. He said, “This Australian policeman and the others. They have the evidence?”

“They have very little that you or I might call evidence,” Wai Fung told him, “but they have a story you ought to hear.”

Ha said, “That sounds ominous. As though I’ll be opening a hornet’s nest.”

“They are staying at the Peninsula. They are waiting for you to call,” Wai Fung said. “Do please keep me informed.”

“Certainly I’ll let you know what happens, if anything happens.”

They made courteous farewells, then Ha spent a moment in thought, brooding at the phone. Some unnamed trouble, waiting to be uncorked at the Peninsula, Hong Kong’s most luxurious hotel, an unlikely venue for lurking trouble.

Phone this Australian inspector and his friends? Or perhaps learn a bit about Mr. Richard Curtis first.

Ha intercommed to Min: “A former Hong Kong resident, Richard Curtis, businessman in construction. See what we might have on file about him.”

The surprising thing, Ha thought, as he sat in the air-conditioned back of his official Vauxhall, feeling the slight forward tug of the Star Ferry taking him back across to Kowloon, was how little the city had changed. Everyone had thought the transition from British rule to Chinese rule would be fraught with problems, particularly political and social problems, everything but economic problems, but everyone as usual had been wrong.

In hindsight, it was easy to see why. For one hundred fifty years, Hong Kong had been ruled by an oligarchy installed from a far-off capital, London. Then, for just a few years, there was an attempt to paste a democratic smile on this autocratic face, but the instant the pressure was released the smile fell off, and now Hong Kong was once again ruled by an oligarchy installed from a far-off capital, Beijing. Nothing had changed.

Except, of course, for some of the gweilos living in Hong Kong, the expats as they called themselves, the Europeans and Americans, but mostly the British, who had done well by serving the far-off capital of London but couldn’t be expected to receive the same opportunity to batten off the far-off capital of Beijing.

The ones who belonged to the working class, the barmaids and jockeys and interior decorators, mostly took it in good part, vanished when their work permits expired — or shortly after, when they were found to be still on the premises — and were presumably now living much the same lives in Singapore or Macao or Manila or half a dozen other neon-lit centers of the Pacific Rim.

At the other end of the spectrum, a few Richard Curtises had also found the world shifting beneath their feet. The homes they’d enjoyed for so many years up on the Peaks, the steep hills in the middle of Hong Kong Island, behind and south of the main financial districts, they’d sold off to their Chinese counterparts, entrepreneurs who now made their comfortable livings in exactly the same way the Curtises used to do. Those who’d left had sold those mansions on the Peak before the real estate crash; not bad. And if they hadn’t gotten quite as much in the sale as they’d have liked, well, how much money did any one rich person really need?

So maybe it was true that, although Ha could see that here in Hong Kong nothing had changed and nothing would change and life would go on very much as before, for a few British barmaids or American businessmen life had changed, in that they’d had to call the movers and buy a one-way ticket somewhere else. But none of them had been destroyed by it. No one had died or gone to jail. No one had been ruined; certainly not Richard Curtis, now living the same life as before in Singapore.

Curtis, in fact, was one of the people Hong Kong was better off without, a man who was a little too quick with a bribe or a lawsuit, a little too given to ruthlessness and sharp practice. The dossier Ha had been given on the man showed him to be a sharper who expected his contacts and his influence to keep him safely above the law. It must have been quite a bump when he’d suddenly discovered that the rules had changed.

But could the man seriously harbor a grudge? Was that even possible? It seemed to Ha that it was not possible, though the people he was on his way to see would try to convince him otherwise.

Well, he thought, either they will convince me after all or I will have at the very least had an excellent lunch at the Peninsula.

2

Kim found the Peninsula Hotel astonishing, and she’d found it so even before she’d first seen it. When the four of them arrived yesterday at Hong Kong International Airport, a uniformed chauffeur had been there, holding up a sign with fairchild printed on it. He had led them to a white Rolls Royce sent by the hotel to pick them up. The hotel, it seemed, kept a fleet of these white Rolls Royces for the use of its guests. That was the first astonishment.

Then there was the hotel itself, an imposing C-shaped structure, ten stories tall, with a newer twenty-story addition above the central part. Fountains splashed in front, the doormen wore white uniforms, and the lobby was huge, all gold and white, colonnaded, columned and corniced. A string quartet played Mozart, and clumps of package-tour travelers with nametags and identical shoulderbags and harried expressions, who would have cluttered and dominated most settings, here seemed to be swallowed and muted by these vast dignified spaces.

And now the suites. It had been decided, mostly by Andre Brevizin, consulted via long-distance telephone call, but with Inspector Fairchild in full agreement, that a show of luxury would make them more credible to the Hong Kong police. “It is a city centered on the acquisition of money,” Brevizin had said. “You’ll never be listened to there if you look poor.”

So here they were in suites, the inspector in one, Luther and George and Kim in another, across the hall. Brevizin was covering the cost of the inspector’s suite, while Luther had made one more international phone call and then told George and Kim, “It’s all right. My father will pay.” George had tried to argue, but Luther had smiled his now-sad smile and said, “No, don’t worry. It’s good for him sometimes to pay.”

Their suites were in the new tall addition, so they had views out over the nearby buildings. Inspector Fairchild had what was considered the better view, south toward Hong Kong Island across the harbor, but Kim found the northern view over Kowloon and the New Territories endlessly fascinating, a colorful gaudy jumble like a really complex jigsaw puzzle in which you had to study every piece for a good long time.

When, that is, she could bear to look away from the suite itself. The wide central room was luxuriously furnished in deep blue, gold and ivory, and contained a full bar. One part of the room was a kind of office, with a fax machine and an elaborately furnished desk. Chinese prints on the walls and some Chinese pieces of furniture reminded you where you were. Off the main room, to left and right, were large bedrooms, also with spectacular views, and marble bathrooms with Jacuzzis. Kim moved between these rooms in a happy daze. She was a long way from Planetwatch III.

Luther’s father, whether he knew it or not, had also treated them all to a wonderful dinner last night, downstairs at Gaddi’s, one of the hotel’s three terrific restaurants, and she and George had then slept in cool quiet on their giant bed, the jeweled lights of Kowloon outside making a muted rainbow of the room, and they inside it. Her ribs felt almost healed by now; making love was no longer a problem in engineering.

When the phone rang, the ornate clock over the bar in the living room read exactly one o’clock. “He’s prompt, this inspector,” George said.

The three of them had been sitting here in the living room waiting, George reading another of his paperback thrillers, Kim looking out at the colorful city below, Luther just staring at his hands and quietly thinking.

And then the phone rang. Luther answered, murmured a bit, then hung up and said, “It’s time.”

Kim had decided to dress for maturity at this meeting, so this morning she’d gone to one of the hotel shops and bought a very plain just-above-the-knee dark blue skirt, black pumps, and a short-sleeved white blouse with a ruffle at the throat, charging it all to the room, which was to say, Luther’s father once more. She felt more than her usual self-confidence as the three of them trooped across the hall to the other suite. They had invited the inspector to meet them here to avoid the distractions and lack of security of a restaurant and also to emphasize the luxury just a bit.

Hotel staff had set up an elaborate round table for them by the windows, with Hong Kong Island gleaming over there like cutlery in a drainboard. The table was covered in white linen, the service was all white and gold, and two white-uniformed, white-gloved waiters seated them, with Inspector Ha facing the view most directly.

The inspector was a little man who seemed to Kim quite wrong for the part. Inside a very serious and distinguished dark blue uniform decorated with much insignia and braid was someone who looked like he might be a messenger or a pushcart vendor. I wonder, Kim thought, if he can see past our appearances, our uniforms. And whether he’ll see past Richard Curtis’s.

Wine was poured, sparkling water was poured, small plates of delicious food were presented, and the two waiters retired behind the bar, handy if needed but out of earshot of the conversation at the table.

Inspector Ha said, “My friend Wai Fung in Singapore tells me you intend to alarm me.”

Fairchild said, “It seems only fair. You shouldn’t be the only one in the room not alarmed. The danger is to your city, after all.”

Inspector Ha said, “Wai Fung was vague about the threat, but promised you would all be more specific.”

Fairchild said, “You explain it, George,” and George did, describing briefly the work he’d done for Richard Curtis on Kanowit Island, and that Curtis had told George he would be using the method, the soliton, again in a larger way, in a dangerous and illegal way, and that he would get a lot of gold by doing it. When he finished, Fairchild said, “We don’t know exactly where he intends to pull this off, but when last heard from, he seemed to be headed in this direction.”

“There’s no record of his having entered Hong Kong recently,” Inspector Ha said, “I checked on that this morning.”

Luther said, “There wouldn’t be. He’s trying to keep his skirts clean.”

With a gesture at the windows, Fairchild said, “We think he’s probably on one of those boats out there. One yacht out of a hundred, five hundred.”

George said, “As for where he’ll do it, this is a very specific technique, it isn’t something that can be done just anywhere. It needs a combination of landfill and tunnels.”

Inspector Ha put down his fork and leaned back in his chair. To Kim, he looked grayer.

Fairchild said, “You know his target.”

Inspector Ha nodded at the windows. “Hong Kong Island has been added to and added to. The island used to end far back at Queens Road. Just about everything you’re looking at on the flats is reclaimed land.”

They all looked at the gleaming towers, and Kim remembered the great bruise of water thundering at her from Kanowit. She suddenly felt cold.

George said, very quietly, “Inspector, you’re using the wrong word.”

“What word?”

“Reclaimed,” George said. “Everyone likes to talk about reclaimed land. ‘The new airport is on reclaimed land.’ It’s a wonderfully solid word, but it is a distraction.”

Ha said, “From what?”

“The Dutch reclaim land,” George said. “They build dikes, and force the sea back, and the lands they find are called polders. They’re solid and real, the same lands they always were except they used to have water on them.”

He waved a hand toward the window. “That isn’t reclaimed. It’s landfill.”

Inspector Ha said, “Reclaimed is more... dignified.”

“But landfill is what it is,” George insisted. “Inherently unstable, never quite solid. And now I suppose you’ll tell me there are tunnels under there.”

“Yes, of course,” the inspector said.

Fairchild said, “What are they? A subway line, something like that?”

“No no,” Inspector Ha said, “many tunnels. In Hong Kong, as you know, air-conditioning is a necessity. The most efficient and inexpensive way to cool those buildings over there is with water from the harbor. There’s a tunnel from the seawall in to almost every one of those buildings. The longest is to the Bank of Hong Kong, at three hundred yards.”

“Three football fields,” George said. “But those would be pipes, not tunnels.”

“Pipes in tunnels,” Inspector Ha said. “The pipes have to be maintained. There are design differences from building to building, but the basic structure is a tunnel of concrete ten to fifteen feet in diameter, with three separate foot-wide pipes in it, one to bring water in, one to bring it out, and the third as standby.” Frowning at George, he said, “But you suggested these tunnels, for this soliton thing to work, have to be interconnected. The air-conditioning tunnels are sealed from one another, going only from the seawall to one specific building.”

“But,” George said, “they won’t be far from one another. At night, a crew could make side tunnels, and then conceal them again.”

Fairchild said, “Inspector, how deep underground are these tunnels?”

“Fifty feet.”

“And the bank vaults, how deep are they?”

“Usually, about the same.”

Fairchild said, “That’s what he plans to do, then. Steal as much gold as he can lay his hands on, probably out of the Bank of China, open up the cross tunnels, flood them, set off the soliton.”

Inspector Ha said, “But that would be— That isn’t theft, that’s mass murder!”

George said, “At the end of it there won’t be any evidence.” He gestured again at the windows. “Everything you see out there,” he said, “will fall into the harbor, turn into mud and debris. No one will know what if anything was stolen. No one will know what happened or how it happened, or who was responsible.”

Inspector Ha digested this. “I am not convinced.”

Fairchild said, “I understand how you feel. But we know Curtis plans to use this thing, we know he’s killed at least one person to cover his tracks and tried to kill these two here, and we know his anger is aimed at Hong Kong.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt Mr. Curtis’s intent,” Inspector Ha said. “I can see that he has the motive and I accept that he has the means. But what of the opportunity? Strangers can’t merely wander around in those tunnels, you know. The construction job you’re suggesting, digging cross tunnels, breaking into bank vaults, couldn’t be done without somebody noticing.”

“We don’t know how he plans to do it,” Fairchild said, “but we are certain sure he does intend to.”

“There’s one way I can think of he might do it,” George said. “Curtis is in construction, that’s his primary business. In Hong Kong, there’s so little space, even with all the landfill — all the reclaimed land — that buildings are constantly being torn down so new ones can be built. Fifteen-, twenty-year-old buildings are demolished. Right now, there are probably twenty construction sites over there.”

“More,” Inspector Ha said.

“What if one of them belongs to Curtis?” George asked him. “Through a dummy corporation, a dummy name. It would look as though he’s building upward, like everybody else, but secretly he’d be burrowing down.”

Luther said, “Maybe he has Jackie Tian fronting him.”

Inspector Ha looked alert. “Jackie Tian? What does he have to do with Richard Curtis?”

“Two weeks ago,” Luther told him, “he visited Curtis in Singapore. A friend of ours — now disappeared — who works for Curtis, saw a fax from Tian to Curtis saying a diver they were going to use had been arrested and they’d have to find another.”

Martin Ha got to his feet and walked around the table to stand and look out the window. Kim was surprised to see that he stood straighter now, he seemed to fit the uniform better. Looking away from them, out toward the view, he said, “I must tell Wai Fung you’ve succeeded. I am alarmed.”

3

For Luther, the last few days had been muffled, without resonance, like a pistol shot in a padded room. Or as though his brain and all his senses were in that padded room. Nothing came through to him with much impact or clarity. It was as though he watched the world now on a television monitor, listened to it through a not-very-good sound system.

He still went through the motions. He thought about the problem of Richard Curtis, he took care of his own needs, he responded quite normally to Kim and George and the others, but it was all simple momentum, nothing else. He went through these motions because there was no way to stop them, short of death, and he didn’t much feel like death right now; it would simply be the state he was already in, intensified.

He supposed he grieved for Jerry, but even that was muffled. He couldn’t find in himself much enthusiasm for revenge or justice, though he continued to trudge along with the others in Curtis’s wake. What he was realizing, and even that slowly and without much force, was that in grieving for Jerry he was grieving for a part of himself. Jerry had been his id, the outward expression of all those emotions and instant reactions that Luther had never quite managed to feel or express on his own. Without Jerry, he was merely the cool and amiable somnambulist he used to be, but now with the added memory of there having been once a Jerry.

He wondered what would become of him now. He was done with Planetwatch, of course, that had merely been the place Jerry had led him. None of the previous scenes of his life seemed worth repeating, but what else was there? He might even go back to Germany, ignore his father, live one way or another on his own. Not that it mattered.

It might be interesting, in fact, to stay here in Hong Kong, particularly if they didn’t after all manage to thwart Curtis. To stay at the Peninsula — switching to a Hong Kong view room, of course — to sit in a comfortable chair by the window, and to watch the towers across the way begin to tremble, to shudder, then to fall to their knees, window panes snapping out into the air like frightened hawks, walls dropping away, floors tilting, desks and filing cabinets and people sliding out into the world, then to feel the power ripple in this direction across the harbor, to see it come like a ghost in the water, to feel it tug at the landfill on this side, the buildings swaying, the yachts and junks and huge cargo ships all foundering and failing and staring with one last despairing gaze at the sky, then the harbor boiling, this very building bending down to kiss the sea...

What a spectacular sight. Who would want to look at anything else after that?

Well, yes, that was possible. In the meantime, though, the effort was still being made to save that city over there, and all its people, and all its gold, and all the many ships in the harbor. Inspector Ha was on the telephone, talking to assistants, making plans. Soon, they would all go inspect one of the air-conditioning tunnels.

That would be interesting.

The last part was a metal staircase down through a conical concrete tube slanting through the earth beneath the bank. The elevator only descended so far.

Luther was at the back of the pack of seven descending toward the tunnel. The bank building’s head of security was first, in his tan uniform and Sam Browne belt, then the building’s operations manager in white shirt and hardhat, then Inspector Ha, Tony Fairchild, Kim, and George. Luther preferred being last, it meant he didn’t have to wonder what expression, if any, was on his face.

The tunnel was a roughly circular concrete tube, twelve feet across, with a flat metal floor. The three water pipes, gray plastic, a foot in diameter each, were above their heads, filling the upper curve. Electric lights in translucent white plastic shields were spaced at long intervals on the walls, alternating left and right and giving just enough illumination to move around.

To the right, the tunnel ended in seven or eight feet at a blank concrete wall, just beyond where the three pipes bent upward and out of sight. To the left, the tunnel was absolutely straight, the distance vague and difficult to see.

The security chief and building manager and Inspector Ha all had flashlights, and they now played them on the walls to both sides as the group moved slowly forward, toward the seawall. Inspector Ha had told the building people only that information had been received that a potential breach of the tunnel was being planned by people whose ultimate goal was the bank vault, which was just a foot or so through the wall to their left at the point where they started their inspection. The security chief had said that kind of attack was impossible, they had motion sensors, not for the tunnel but certainly for the vault, but Inspector Ha had explained that all tips from normally credible sources had to be looked into, and he personally would at least like to know what the tunnel looked like, so here they all were.

There wasn’t much conversation once they began, moving forward very slowly, playing the light over the curve of the walls, one or another of them occasionally moving closer to study a section. The wall was pitted concrete, and took the light with many tiny black shadows, like a moonscape, so it had to be stared at very closely before you could be sure exactly what you were seeing.

Luther trailed the others. The air was cool but slightly dank, probably because of the water streaming through two of the pipes overhead. It made him think of the family’s tomb in the cemetery outside Dusseldorf, where five generations of Rickendorfs and their spouses were stowed away in stone drawers, or the cremated ones in urns on an ornate stone shelf. There had been family occasions, mostly church-related, when the whole family had driven out to visit the cemetery, when Luther was much younger and his grandparents still alive, but those customs had fallen into disuse now. It used to amuse him to think of presenting Jerry’s body to the family for storage in the tomb in the drawer beneath the one reserved for himself; now, when he remembered that, he could only think: No, no one will visit Jerry’s grave, ever.

They walked ten minutes before they reached the seawall, where the building manager explained that the blank end wall they saw was three courses of brick behind the visible sheathing of concrete. Where the pipes vanished into the wall there were thin black grommets.

They hadn’t spotted anything out of the ordinary, but they repeated the flashlight inspection on the return trip, moving even more slowly than before. Luther still trailed, not really with the group, following them but not a part of them, not studying the wall as the others did, his thoughts far away.

Then he heard a sound. A faint scraping sound. He moved on another step before the sound registered, and the fact that it had come from behind him. Behind him. But the others were all in front.

Luther turned to frown at the empty tunnel behind him. Would they have rats in this place? No, it was all kept very clean, and the whole tunnel was sealed, no way in or out except that door down there that the group was converging on, and then the flight of metal stairs leading upward.

But he had heard something, he knew that. He took a step back the way he’d come, seeing only the converging lines of the pipes overhead, the dim lights at regular intervals, the pools of darkness between, the seawall now only a vague blur, far away. He took a second step back, trying to see, trying to hear.

Again. The tiny brushing sound of someone trying not to move, but unable to stay forever still.

Luther looked up, and the man hurtled onto him from on top of the left side pipe. He’d been hiding up there, on that too-narrow space, out of direct light, above the area they’d been searching with the flashlights. He hadn’t expected anybody to come in here, and had only managed to hide just barely out of the way, but the pipe was narrow and it had been difficult to maintain his balance, so he had made that sound.

And now he was committed. Luther looked up, and had only time to register with blank astonishment that it was the man Bennett from Singapore, the man who’d killed Jerry, when the weight of him knocked Luther back and down, hitting his head against the curved-in concrete wall just above the metal floor. Bennett’s weight stayed on him, Luther dazed from the hit on the head, Bennett’s hand clamping down hard over Luther’s nose and mouth, his other hand closing on Luther’s windpipe.

The others were too far away, they were almost to the door. Luther had been behind them, and then he’d stopped, and then he’d turned back, and by now they were too far away, they couldn’t have heard the small thud of the bodies falling, the small scrapes and grunts of the struggle.

Luther was tall and slender, strong but not as powerful as this big man bearing down on him, his weight pressing down, his hand squeezing shut Luther’s throat, Luther feebly struggling, not really conscious.

Far away, they started through the doorway. Even if one of them were to look back, what would they see? Shadows, between the dim lights.

Luther’s hands pulled helplessly at the man’s hand on his throat, he tried to kick the floor but Bennett’s legs held his legs down, he tried to twist his head this way or that way, but the other hand stayed clamped on his nose and mouth.

The door down there shut. The lights switched off.

4

Mark had been terrified for so long that it had become dull, like an old wound that wouldn’t heal. It was dulled by fatigue, and by hunger, and by physical pain, and the despair that comes from knowing they are going to kill you, when they please, how they please, and that by the time it happens you’ll be relieved that at last it’s over. So the terror was dulled, and familiar, and no longer struck at him with such sharp pangs of agony and disbelief, but it was still there, inside his head, every waking second and every second of exhausted sleep; absolute unrelenting terror.

It had begun — it felt as though it had begun years ago, that he’d been a slave in this underground place most of his life, but it had begun less than a week ago, when he left Singapore with Richard Curtis. Curtis had told him they would fly to Sydney, but when he got to Changi Airport Curtis handed him a first-class ticket to Taipei instead.

Mark expressed surprise, naturally, and Curtis said, “This is to throw the competition off the track.” And he never thought a thing about it.

He’d trusted Curtis, he’d believed in Curtis, and more than that, he’d believed in himself, in his own decision to be loyal to Curtis from now on. Having made that decision, everything should have been all right.

He still hadn’t been worried when they got to Taipei and the plans changed again. They took the transit passenger route through the terminal, as though to pick up their Sydney flight, neither having checked any luggage, but then they were met by a pilot from a small charter company, and Curtis had explained to Mark they would be making a small sidetrip to Okinawa to see someone there who was a part of the new secret enterprise. Tomorrow they would fly from there on to Sydney. And still Mark had believed him.

This was a night flight, so it had taken him longer to realize they weren’t traveling over water. If they were on the way to Okinawa, shouldn’t there be water below? Clearly, they were on their way to some other part of Taiwan.

That was when doubt first touched at Mark, and a little shiver of fear. What was going on? He was alone in this small plane with Richard Curtis and the pilot. Had Curtis found out that Mark had been spying on him? Was he going to open the plane’s door and hurl Mark out into the jungle below?

But then he would rather throw Mark into the ocean, wouldn’t he? To be sure no body was ever found. So it had to be something else. But what?

As they were about to land — somewhere — Curtis had given him another explanation: “I like it that you don’t ask a lot of questions, Mark,” he’d said. “That shows you can keep quiet, keep discreet.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’ve probably noticed we’re flying over land.”

“Yes, sir, I did.”

“We’ll be landing at Kaohsiung, it’s a port on the southern coast of Taiwan.”

“Are we taking a ship, sir?”

“Good man,” Curtis had said, and smiled at him, and patted his arm. “This thing I’m doing is absolutely hush-hush, Mark,” he’d explained, “but you can’t keep your movements private when you travel by commercial air. A boat it is.”

And a boat it was. A black Daimler met them at Kaohsiung airport and drove them to the port, where a cabin cruiser waited for them. Not as big as Curtis’s yacht, it probably slept six, had a very small galley kitchen, and a crew of two, husband and wife, both Chinese. The ship was called Granjya, it flew the Chinese flag, and it was aboard her that the terror began.

The instant they were aboard, the wife cast off and the husband steered them away from the dock and toward the harbor mouth. Curtis led the way through the small common room to the cabins aft, saying, “I’m in the cabin on the right, and that’s yours on the left. You might as well unpack, we’ll be aboard for nearly twenty-four hours.”

“Yes, sir.”

Curtis closed his cabin door behind himself, so Mark did the same, noticing the clean simplicity of the cabin, with its bunk-beds, built-in drawers and minimal floor space. Out the round porthole, the lights of Kaohsiung swiftly receded, black night rushing in, and he felt the difference underfoot when they cleared the harbor and moved out onto the open sea.

He was in the cabin only a minute or two, laying out his possessions on the top bunk, deciding he’d sleep on the lower, when there was a sharp rap at the door. Expecting Curtis, he crossed to pull the door open, and the man from that day in Curtis’s office shouldered in, shoving the door out of the way, punching Mark very hard in the stomach.

Reeling, doubled over, bile in his throat, Mark felt panic and blank astonishment. The man he’d delivered the money for, the one who’d been following Jerry and Luther, who’d done something to Jerry, was here! In this room, shutting the door behind himself. And when Mark stared upward at him, mouth strained open, air all shoved out of him, the man punched him in the face.

Oh, Luther, tell them! Tell the police, force me to change my mind, convince me, make me stay in Singapore and tell the police what I know, make me stay, anywhere but here! Luther, let me not be here!

The second punch had knocked him to the floor, and now the man kicked him, time after time, wherever there was an opening. Mark curled into the corner between the bunk and the porthole wall, trying to protect himself with arms and legs, but the kicks kept on and kept on; and then stopped.

Dazed, Mark lifted his head, blinking through tears, and the hulking man was just going, carrying Mark’s luggage with him. The door snapped shut behind him. A lock snapped into a hasp out there.

He was bleeding, cuts and bruises on his face and head and hands and arms. Every movement hurt, and he thought certain he’d throw up, but it never quite happened. He lured me here, Mark thought, really afraid now, really afraid, he lured me here to get revenge. And there’s nothing I can do.

They didn’t feed him at all on the trip, and for a while it seemed as though they wouldn’t let him sleep either. Twice he fell asleep, and both times his tormentor came in and woke him again, with fists and feet. Mark was shaking, he was babbling, he was begging a chance to speak to Curtis, see Curtis, just a word with Curtis, but the man ignored him as though he hadn’t spoken at all.

They didn’t let him out to use the ship’s only toilet, though he begged and pleaded, and finally there was nothing to do but use the lowest of the built-in drawers, closing the drawer afterward but still aware of the stench, still aware of how they were destroying him, making him less than human. And fear had loosened his bowels, so he had to keep opening the drawer, even though he wasn’t being fed.

But then they did at last at least let him sleep, the next afternoon, and it must have been so he’d be unconscious when they made their way into the new harbor, so he wouldn’t raise any alarm, attract any attention. The ship was at anchor in the harbor and it was night again when they came back, the big man kicking him awake, dragging him to his feet, shoving him out of the cabin. He was pushed and prodded to the common room, where Curtis, dressed in black pullover and slacks, turned away, saying, “Bring him along, Bennett.”

Mark started to speak, to beg, to explain, to talk, but a heavy hand cracked him across the right ear, and Bennett said, low and menacing, “Not a sound.”

There was ringing inside his ear, pain everywhere.

Not a sound. Mark went out on deck, after Curtis, and there was a motorboat there, with a dark figure at the wheel. All around them was a city, huge, towering, great glass walls reflecting back the stars and the city lights and the thousand movements of the water.

Where was he? While he was trying to make sense of it, Bennett casually cuffed him to the bottom of this new boat, and he lay there, defeated, finished, knowing it didn’t matter what city this was. He’d die in it, that’s all.

He hardly knew how or where they went. The motorboat thudded across the harbor, the hard ride of it increasing all of his pains, and then it stopped at some unlit pier and Bennett leaned down to squeeze Mark’s jaw and whisper again, “Not a sound.”

Mark knew he didn’t need an answer, didn’t want an answer, already knew the answer. Bennett dragged him up onto his feet, and again he followed Curtis.

They went up a wooden flight of stairs and along a dark passageway between buildings and out onto a dim-lit street of warehouses or factories. A black van was there, with Chinese characters in white on the side. As Curtis went up front to sit beside the driver, Bennett opened the van’s rear door, picked Mark up by the shoulder and the belt, and tossed him into the van. There were coils of rope in there, large plastic cans. Mark lay on them, stunned, and Bennett climbed in, shutting the door behind himself.

Mark could see almost nothing. They drove through dim streets, and then more brightly lit streets, and then paused, and then bumped over some barrier and into somewhere, and Mark heard what sounded like a large gate being closed. Bennett got up as the van stopped, opened its rear door, and clambered out. Mark, not wanting to be thrown around again, scurried after him, but Bennett slapped him on the head anyway, to knock him down on the dirt behind the van.

The van drove off, spurting stones and dirt onto Mark’s face, and then Curtis came back and said, “Put him on his feet.”

There was no point trying to do it himself, they wouldn’t let him. Bennett yanked him upright, and Curtis said, “Look at me.”

Mark looked at him. Everything else was blurry, but Curtis’s eyes were clear, and very cold.

Curtis said, “You’re still working for me, Mark, but now your job will be a little different.”

“Mis—”

Bennett hit him openhanded but hard, across the ear. Mark flinched and whimpered, and stayed silent.

Curtis went on as though there’d been no interruption. “I have a lot of work to be done here,” he said, “and I’m shorthanded. I would have enough people, if I had enough time, but because of you I don’t have all the time I need, so I’m shorthanded. Naturally, you want to make up for the trouble you’ve made—”

Mark opened his mouth, but then caught himself and shut his mouth again.

“—and happily you can.” To Bennett, he said, “Take him where I showed you on the map, give him to Li. At least you two can speak the same lingo with each other.”

Curtis went away, and Bennett pointed. “Walk over there.”

Mark took a step, and another, and managed to walk.

And now he saw that he was in some sort of large construction site. The thing must take up half or more of a city block, with wooden fence all around the perimeter, blue plastic sheathing on the three or four stories already built, many construction vehicles parked here and there, but only the sparse worklights left gleaming.

Put me to work, he thought, put me to work? Where?

Bennett prodded him to the building under construction and through the blue tarpaulin. It was darker inside, only a few bare bulbs lit on the meager superstructure of the lower part of the building. Bennett shoved Mark over to the big square vertical tube of a cage where the construction elevator would be, and pushed the button.

Is he going to take me to the top, Mark wondered, and throw me off? He hadn’t the strength to resist.

The elevator came up, not down, rising from some basement level. Bennett pulled back the accordion gate, shoved Mark aboard, followed him, and started them down again. The elevator, a cage in a cage, moved slowly downward, through an excavation only minimally built on, beams and posts to support the work above. Then it ran through a kind of floor, which should have been the bottom of the excavation but was not, and descended through darkness, and then into a different kind of light, an interior dim light, as the elevator descended into a tunnel.

The tunnel was very rough, the earth walls and floor uncovered, the plywood sheets of the ceiling crudely shored up. Temporary electric wire sagged from light fixture to light fixture along one side. The tunnel started here at the elevator and continued for about twenty-five feet into darkness. At the other end was a massive bulldozer with a deep scoop mouth, faced this way and filling the tunnel, looking impossible here.

A side tunnel led off from this one, and that’s where Bennett moved Mark, with pokes and prods. In the smaller tunnel stood a low rubber-wheeled tram. Two men with shovels were filling the tram with dirt and rubble thrown back to them by four other men digging at the face of the tunnel. The men wore only shorts and shoes; it was hot down here.

Bennett spoke in an Asian dialect to one of the men filling the tram, who stopped, nodded, and looked at Mark with pleased interest. He was thin and harsh-eyed, and the sweat ran down his face and chest.

Bennett turned away without a look at Mark, and the worker came over to push his shovel into Mark’s hands and point at the pile of dirt. Mark understood; this is my new job with Curtis Construction.

He stepped over to the dirt pile, which kept growing from the work of the men at the tunnel face, and started to dig, throwing the dirt into the tram. The dirt was surprisingly heavy, the job an immediate strain on his back and shoulders. He watched the other man working here, and tried to imitate his moves; stand where he could throw the dirt to the side, which used only the arms, instead of to the front, which strained the back.

The man, Li, waved a hand to attract Mark’s attention, and then did a little hand-running gesture: work faster. All right. Mark worked faster, and Li went off to get another shovel.

There was no day or night. There was no time passing, it was all the same; dig and dig and dig. The crew he’d been working with went away, replaced by another, but they didn’t let him stop working. He was exhausted, he fell down sometimes, but they would merely give him angry kicks and make him get back to it.

From time to time there was food, and they let him join them, and it was always cooked rice and bowls of lukewarm water. He was starving, he ate everything they gave him, and it was never enough. They aren’t feeding me as though I’m a prisoner, he thought, they’re feeding me as though I’m a work animal that must be kept in fuel for a little while, until it dies.

Back in the main tunnel there was a portable toilet, so at last he could go to the bathroom like a human being, but if he stayed in there more than a minute they pounded on the door, and cuffed him on the side of the head when he came out.

Sometimes he would fall and simply be too weak to rise, no matter what they did, so then they would let him sleep where he was, for a while; never for long enough. His body, not used to this kind of labor, screamed with pain. His hands were bloody shreds, but he had to keep holding the shovel, bending, lifting, throwing. The pain was awful, but when he stopped the pain they gave him to force him to go on was worse.

The tunnel they were digging was almost as large around as the main one behind them, but even more primitive, as though no one intended to use it for long. While the men at the face dug, burrowing downward and forward from the top, and Mark and one other man filled the tram, other men removed and replaced and emptied the tram, and other men worked with the beams and the plywood to shore up the ceiling and hold back the bulging walls.

After a while, the men digging at the face came to something solid, which pleased them. Mark didn’t dare spend too much time looking, but it seemed to be some sort of underground wall, possibly of concrete, convex, curving toward them. Excited, the men cleared more of it, working their way down the wall across a narrow band, not bothering to clear to left and right. They threw dirt back more quickly than ever, and Mark worked and worked.

Then everyone stopped while another man arrived, a more important man, in shirt and long pants, and carrying something that looked at first like a space-age machine gun. Everyone stepped out of his way, and Mark leaned, grateful, against the tram, and the man stepped over to the newly reached wall. He aimed his machine at it, and it was some sort of high-powered laser, shooting a thread-thin beam too bright to look at directly.

The man was very skilled. He scored the concrete wall with a kind of long narrow vertical oval, perhaps four feet high, a foot and a half wide, just large enough for a man to slide through. He scored several times on the same line, cutting at an angle inward, until he’d sliced all the way through. Then Li came forward with two metal handles, which were fastened with screws to the concrete. Grasping the handles, two of the men lifted the cut section out and away, and Mark saw there was some sort of dim-lit room beyond it. A cool breeze came in from that room, like the sympathetic touch of an angel. Mark cried, feeling that touch, but no one noticed or cared.

Bennett appeared, from the main tunnel. Mark looked at him like a beaten dog, but Bennett paid him no attention. He went through the new opening into that distant room, spoke back into the tunnel, and the man with the laser and four other men went through, carrying shovels and a rolled-up length of canvas. The cut-away piece of wall was put back snugly into place, and the nice cool breeze stopped, and work began again.

It was some time later that the laser man was there once more. More of the wall had been exposed, completely clearing it on the left, and the laser man scored a vertical line down that side, as though to open the wall completely to the same size as the tunnel. This time, though, he didn’t cut all the way through, just drew that line partly into the concrete, to make it weak.

Then it was another time. The plug in the concrete wall was sometimes open, sometimes shut. Men brought back heavy loads of dirt wrapped in the length of canvas. Men went through with their tools, and later they came back.

The clearing of the wall on this side was nearly done.

Mark looked up and Luther went by. He stumbled, he seemed dazed, he looked at Mark without recognition and moved on, shoved by Bennett.

Luther? Mark tried to think. Was Luther here? Had he forgotten? Was Jerry here? He tried to think, but it was very hard to think.

A hand smacked him across the back of the head. He bent over the shovel, and worked.

5

No one noticed that Luther was missing until they were in the elevator on the way back up to lobby level. Kim was thinking how strangely ordinary the tunnel had seemed, like somebody’s wine cellar, only longer, or the basement under a very old house, and then she found herself thinking about poor Luther, how remote he seemed these days, how he didn’t seem to react to or even much notice anything around him. And then she realized he wasn’t there. “Luther!” she said.

Everybody looked at her, not knowing what she meant, and then they all made the same discovery. Mr. Hang, the building manager, gave them a look more exasperated than accusing, and said, “There was one more of you!”

“Luther,” George said. “We left him behind.”

Captain Sahling, the rather impatient chief of the building’s security, snapped, “The man didn’t stay with us? Why did no one keep an eye on him?”

Mr. Hang said, “We’ll have to send someone down for him.”

Kim said, “Can’t he just get the elevator?”

“The door to the tunnel,” Captain Sahling said, in the iciest of tones, “is kept locked. In fact, both doors, at the head and the foot of the staircase, are kept locked. Someone will have to go down to release him.”

The elevator took them up to the lobby, a high echoing place of glass and chrome, with a marble floor that made footsteps ring out as though everybody were suddenly more important. Captain Sahling spoke in irritable Chinese into his walkie-talkie, then the six of them stood around waiting, to one side, away from the traffic to and from the elevators. George and Tony Fairchild took turns trying to placate the captain, assuring him that Luther had been under a strain lately, that they all appreciated that this was taking up more of the captain’s time than he’d bargained for, and they were certain Luther would be completely chagrined when he came up. The captain reacted to all this with stiff impatience, and Kim noticed that Inspector Ha and Mr. Hang didn’t bother trying to soothe the captain’s ruffled feelings at all.

Two slim young security men in tan uniforms hurried into view, saluted their captain, and took an elevator down. Captain Sahling assured them all once more that he was a busy man. Mr. Hang said he was sorry Luther hadn’t managed to call out to them or knock on the door to attract their attention, because he would be in darkness down there. “Poor Luther,” Kim said.

Captain Sahling’s walkie-talkie made its sputter. The reactions of Inspector Ha and Mr. Hang to the transmission in rapid Chinese suggested some sort of bad news.

Captain Sahling, more irritable than ever, snapped something angry into his walkie-talkie, and it rasped a response. One more exchange, and he glared at them with fury compounded by doubt. “They say,” he reported, “he isn’t there.”

George said, “That’s impossible.”

“Nevertheless.”

Mr. Hang said, “We must go back down.”

“I will go,” Captain Sahling said.

George said, “We’ll all go, Captain.”

The captain was going to argue, but then decided not to, and they all rode the elevator back down to the lowest basement and the small bare concrete room where the two young security men stood, looking awkward and embarrassed, afraid they were about to be blamed for something.

In addition to the door to the stairwell, there was one metal door from this room to the rest of the sub-basement, but it was locked and had not been disturbed. Captain Sahling spoke with the security men and then, more calmly, Inspector Ha spoke with them, and then everybody trooped down the stairs again and into the tunnel.

There was no one there. Luther was gone. They spent ten minutes searching the place, and there was no sign of Luther, no sign of any other way in or out. At last they gathered again at the door to the stairwell, not knowing what to do next. Their flashlights bobbed uncertainly, pointing this way and that. Captain Sahling, who clearly resented situations he couldn’t control, said, “I don’t know what your friend has done.”

George said, “Our friend? Captain, it’s your tunnel.”

Sahling stared at him, then looked away, down the length of the tunnel. “Is it?” he asked.

6

Mr. Curtis was furious, and Bennett understood why, but what else could he have done? If he’d killed the German and left the body there, that would have been worse, wouldn’t it? There was no time or way to invent an accident. So those people had a disappearance on their hands, that’s all, no way to be absolutely certain what had happened. Maybe the German had even walked off on his own. After all, the others had forgotten all about him, they’d walked off themselves and left him there.

“All right, all right,” Curtis said, at last calming down a little. “You did what you had to do.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The three of them stood in Curtis’s quarters on the site, a small construction trailer kept strictly for his use, the rare times he was here. Half of it was an office, simple but complete, with Internet access and fax machine, where they now talked. The other half was a bedroom and bath, which Curtis had never used.

Bennett had brought the German directly here, because what else was there to do with him? Curtis had been seated at his desk, computer screen open before him, and when he’d seen the German he’d jumped to his feet, yelled at Bennett to shut the door, and had demanded to know where the German had come from and what was going on. Now, the first shock of it done, he was a bit calmer. “All right,” he said. “The damn fellow can do some work for us.”

“Oh, good, sir, like the other one.”

The German was recovered now from his tussle with Bennett, but merely looked at them both with a vague expression on his face, as though they were speaking a language he didn’t understand. Gesturing at him, Bennett said, “Should I give him to Li too?”

“No, I don’t want them together,” Curtis said. “Take him to the other side, there’s a dig supervisor named Chin.”

“Good, sir.”

“And come back.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bennett took the German by the arm and led him outside. Halfway across to the building, the German made a sudden dash toward the main gate, and Bennett had to grab him and hit him several times to calm him down. But then he went along quietly.

They were digging cross-tunnels in two directions from here, trying to reach as many water tunnels as possible, so Bennett delivered the German to the work crew on the second side, then returned to Curtis, now at the large table, with construction plans laid out. Looking up at Bennett, he said, “Any trouble?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Come over here.”

Bennett went over to stand beside Curtis and study the plans. God, it was good to be back in construction again! To be standing in a site office, shoulder to shoulder with the boss, looking over the plans. This, Bennett thought, is where I’ve been supposed to be, lo, these many years. “Yes, sir,” he said.

Looking at the plans, Curtis said, “We don’t have as much time as I’d hoped, Colin.”

“No, sir.”

“Them being here in Hong Kong, and in one of the tunnels, suggests they know far too much.”

“It’s that Mark Hennessy, sir,” Bennett said, meaning, there’s a bad employee, and here, sir, right here at your side, is a good employee.

Curtis said, “I suppose part of it is Mark, but not all of it, he didn’t know that much. I think it’s mostly George Manville, figuring things out. Why I didn’t get rid of him when I had my hands on him I’ll never know.”

“You thought he could still help you, sir.”

“Well, I was wrong about that,” Curtis said. “But it isn’t going to stop us, Colin.”

Us. “No, sir!”

Bending over the plans, Curtis said, “We’ve linked seven of the tunnels. I’d hoped for ten, and more profit, too.” He tapped the plans. “There’s some gold out there we won’t be getting, Colin.”

“We’ll be getting a lot, sir.”

“Oh, yes, I know we will. But we’re going to have to do the job right now.”

Surprised, Colin said, “Now, sir?”

“Tonight.” Curtis looked away, at the flat rectangle of window framing the sunlit construction site. Within, the air-conditioning faintly hummed, “In a way,” Curtis said, and Bennett knew he was talking mostly to himself, “it’s better to have them here. Deals with everything at once.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re going to be my eyes and ears, Colin,” Curtis said, and there was a knock at the door. Curtis said, “That’ll be Jackie, I just called him to come over. Let him in.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bennett didn’t much like Jackie Tian, his manner of being on the inside track here in Hong Kong, but he’d never let either Tian or Curtis know it. He crossed to open the door, and smiled a big smile at Tian, saying, “How are you?”

“Good,” Tian said, curtly, as though Bennett were too unimportant to care about. Entering, he said, “Afternoon, Mr. Curtis.”

“Hello, Jackie, we’ve had a little problem here.”

Tian looked at Bennett as though assuming he was the cause of the problem, and said, “What’s that?”

“The people who’ve been bothering me are here in Hong Kong. Colin found them in one of the bank tunnels, but they didn’t see him.”

Surprised, Tian said, “In the tunnel? You mean, they know what we’re doing?”

“They can’t know everything,” Curtis said, “or they’d be in this room with us right now, and a number of policemen as well. But they know something, they know too much to risk waiting anymore. As I just told Colin, we’ll have to change our plans, cut back on what we hoped to accomplish, and run the operation tonight.”

Tian frowned down at the construction plans on the table, though Bennett doubted the man could read them. “Will that work?” he asked. “We aren’t everywhere we wanted to be, are we?”

“We’re close enough,” Curtis told him. “There’ll still be plenty of profit for all of us, Jackie.”

“Good,” Tian said. “I’m ready to go live somewhere else for a while.”

Curtis laughed, sounding a bit shrill. “I think we all are, Jackie,” he said. “Now take a look at this.”

The three men bent over the table as Curtis moved a finger along the various tunnels. “Jackie,” he said, “your job is the bulldozer and the vaults. Is the submarine hooked to the bulldozer?”

“It’ll trail me like a geisha,” Tian said, “everywhere I go. It’s on the wheeled carriage.”

“All right. Once we start, we’ll have to move very fast. They’ll know something’s happening, their alarms will be going mad, but they won’t know where we’ve come from and they won’t know where we’re going and they won’t be able to come down to interfere with us.” Turning, he said, “Colin, that’s where you start. The first set of explosives are in position—”

“Yes, sir.”

“—and you’ll set them off when Jackie says he’s ready. He’ll radio you as he moves, and you’ll be in here with the controls.”

“Yes, sir.”

“When the submarine’s full,” Curtis said, “Jackie, you’ll come up out of there, with your crew. But moving fast, Jackie.”

“Count on me,” Tian said.

“When Jackie radios you that he’s clear,” Curtis said to Bennett, “you fire the explosives, to breach the seawall at the ends of the tunnels.”

“Right, sir.”

Curtis said to Tian, “Is the new diver here?”

“He’ll be here tonight,” Tian promised.

“He stays in the tunnel with the submarine,” Curtis said. “Once the tunnel fills with water, he uses the external controls to guide it down the tunnel and into the harbor. Then he switches it to radio control, and I guide it from there.”

“Right.”

“Then he comes back through the tunnel and up here.”

Tian said, “Why doesn’t he just go out across the harbor, come out anywhere?”

“And be questioned?” Curtis shook his head. “The only safe way in and out, Jackie,” he said, “is this construction site. That’s what it’s here for.”

“Fine,” Tian said.

Curtis turned back to Bennett. “Now, the second set of explosives,” he said, and tapped the plans here and there, “we’re going to have to move. We’re in fewer tunnels, the physics changes, and to be honest, I’d feel more comfortable if I had George here to look at my figures. But I’ve done it, and I know I’m right.”

Bennett hadn’t the first idea what Curtis was talking about, but that didn’t matter. “Yes, sir.”

Curtis said, “I’ve marked the new positions. They all move, all six of them, slightly. But the exact position is important, all right, Colin?”

“Absolutely, sir,” Bennett said. He frowned at the plans as though to memorize the new positions of the explosives, though in fact he’d be carrying a set of the plans with him when he made the changes.

“Once the tunnels are flooded,” Curtis said, “you trigger the second explosives with the radio.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You will then have thirty minutes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“When those explosives go,” Curtis said, and turned his bland eyes on Bennett, “they will destroy every bit of evidence of what we’ve done. I think it possible there’ll be some damage even here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t try to leave the island,” Curtis said, “but do get away from this neighborhood. Maybe east, over toward Wan Chai. I want you all safe,” Curtis assured them.

“Yes, sir,” they both said.

7

They were all gathered around Inspector Ha’s table. After the inspection of the tunnel under the bank building, and the disappearance of Luther Rickendorf, they’d come back here to police headquarters and this conference room, where they sat around the long oval pale-wood table on gray swivel chairs with black plastic arms.

Inspector Ha shook his head ruefully. “I have always been proud of how large and important our city is, how dense, how many people we have put together on this small island. More here than in Manhattan. But now, to find one man in it, one wealthy man, here illegally, with who knows how many people working for him, paid to keep him hidden...” He spread his hands, to show the complexity of the task.

“An army,” Tony said, feeling glum. “That’s what Curtis has, an army at his disposal. Of course, we have an army, too, or you do, Inspector, but Curtis also has time on his side.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” George said. “If he has Luther, and I guess he must, then he knows we’re here. He knows we’re close. So if he can speed up what he’s doing, he will, even if it means he loses some of the loot he’s after.”

Ha said, “Mr. Manville, I agree with you that he must be using one of the current construction projects to cover his activities. He’s probably staying on the site when he comes to the city, and when he leaves he’ll do so late at night in a small boat. If he does that, we’ll never find him, and never prove anything against him. So we are trying now to learn which construction site is the front for Richard Curtis.”

Tony said, “There can’t be that many. And they’re controlled by the city, aren’t they?”

“Yes, of course,” Ha agreed. “The buildings department must give permits, do inspections. The trouble is, none of these large construction projects are done by one company, it’s always a consortium, some of the same people but not all, shifting groups becoming involved. The corporate names are always new. We have to search through the records, track down every principal on every site, make sure the developers are who they’re supposed to be. The buildings department is working on that right now.”

Tony said, “How long to complete the search?”

“They estimate they’ll have gone through everything by Thursday.”

George, looking ready to jump out of his skin, cried, “Thursday!”

“That’s what they tell me,” Ha said, and spread his hands. “I don’t like it either.”

Tony said, “Inspector, they aren’t doing clerks’ hours, are they? Nine to five? We need them at work round the clock.”

Ha looked dubious. “The civil service...”

“Will also drown,” George said.

Troubled, Ha said, “It’s difficult to explain that without telling too many people too much about the circumstances. We don’t want to cause panic.”

“If this isn’t a good time for panic,” George said, “when is?”

Tony felt the need to assist his fellow inspector. He said, “George, I understand what the inspector is saying. We don’t want a panic because in fact a panic would be worse. A million people trying to leave this island all at once would be a disaster.”

“I appreciate that,” George said. “But we’re not talking about somebody who’s going to blow up a building. Curtis means to take the city down.” To Ha, he said, “Inspector, I’ve worked on this process, I’ve seen it in action on Kanowit Island. If he’s gotten through to enough tunnels, and if we don’t stop him before he sets off the charges, every bit of reclaimed land on this island, including where we are right now, is going to be reclaimed sea. Curtis isn’t going to give us until Thursday. I’ll be surprised if he gives us till tomorrow.”

Ha said, “But what if he isn’t ready to invade the bank vaults? He might still have to wait.”

“What it comes down to,” George said, “is which he wants worse, revenge or profit. If he’s afraid he won’t have time to take the profit, because we’re breathing down his neck, I’m certain he’ll settle for revenge.”

“Another thing,” Kim said, “is that if he’s stopped, there’s evidence against him. But if he destroys this city and everybody in it, there won’t be any evidence, people won’t even know what happened.”

Ha looked very worried. He said, “I’ll speak to my opposite number in the buildings department. I’ll call him now, and I’ll tell him as much as is needed to make him as frightened as I am, and I’ll ask him not to spread the news any more than he has to.”

“Good,” George said.

“In the meantime,” Ha told them, “is there anything any of you can think of that might help point us in the direction of one construction company rather than another? Anything Curtis might have said or done?”

George thought about it. It seemed to him that there was something, something nagging at the back of his mind. He thought back to the dinner at the ranch in Australia, to Curtis’s stories of getting started in the business. “I think I may have an idea,” George said, “about what name Curtis could be using. For whatever corporation he set up.”

Kim said, “He could call it anything, George.”

“But I think he’d like to stamp it with his personality somehow,” George said. “He’s a man who puts his initials on his dinner plates.”

Tony, intrigued, said, “What do you think he’s going to do? Not RC, surely.”

“No, that would be too obvious,” George said. “But he told me, at that ranch of his, that station in Australia, he married into the construction business, and his first wife’s grandfather started the business, here in Hong Kong. The old man called it Hoklo Construction. After the boat people who first came here as pirates. Curtis said his wife’s grandfather called his company Hoklo because he wanted always to remember that the Hoklo had blended in with everybody else, so anybody could be a pirate. A pirate can hide in plain sight.”

Tony said, “But would he name this company Hoklo? Wouldn’t that point right at him?”

“Some variant on it,” George said. “Some version of it that only Curtis, maybe, would understand.”

Inspector Ha was already standing, had walked over to a phone mounted on the wall and was talking into it, and he now held up two fingers for quiet. They all waited.

“Thank you,” Ha said into the receiver after another few minutes had passed, and he hung it up with a click that echoed through the now-silent room. He returned to the table. “Your instinct may have been right this time, Mr. Manville.”

“Really?” Tony said. He was a bit surprised. He hadn’t really believed Curtis would have the time or the inclination to play catch-me games. “Hoklo Construction?”

“No, Xian Bing Shu,” Ha told him. And when he saw that none of them had any idea what this meant: “Xian Bing means a pie, the sort you eat. He’s hiding in plain sight, don’t you see?”

“And what does ‘Shu’ mean?” George asked.

“Rat,” Ha said.

8

By midnight, Curtis was back aboard Granjya, with everything in position. Tian and Bennett and the diver would do their jobs, and by three in the morning the operation would be under way. The attacks on the bank vaults would be swift and massive, and soon done. From the beginning of the operation until the drone submarine full of gold came out of the breached seawall should be less than an hour. And thirty minutes later, it would all be over.

He was still just a little troubled by that last half hour, but it shouldn’t be a problem. He would have preferred to set off the soliton the instant the submarine was clear of the seawall, but then the submarine too would be caught up in the wave and the destruction. Thirty minutes was long enough for the submarine to cross the harbor, following Granjya out to sea, but it shouldn’t be long enough for Bennett or Tian or anyone else to get clear. Wherever they were on the island’s flats, they would die.

Of course, not everyone on Hong Kong Island would die. Some people living on the peaks, the steep heights behind the main city to its south, would survive tonight. But Jackie Tian and Colin Bennett and the rest of the crew were not likely to find their way to the peaks in that final half hour. Real money lived up there — Curtis himself had lived up there, in the old days — and he doubted any of the people working now for Xian Bing Shu had ever even been to the peaks, unless it was for the purpose of burglary.

No, they would all stay in the city, and they would all die. And with them Rickendorf and Mark Hennessy and George Manville. Manville no doubt had brought the girl Kim along, so she would go, too. And there would be no one on the face of the earth who would have any reason to believe that Richard Curtis had had anything to do with the cataclysm that struck Hong Kong.

They wouldn’t even know, in all that chaos, that the gold was gone.

He knew he should sleep for a while, and had actually set the alarm for two-thirty, but he was too keyed up to lie down. The months of preparation, the tension, the mistakes with Manville and the girl, the constant risk of being exposed, the doubt that at the end he’d be man enough to go through with it, all were coming to a head tonight.

Had he left anything undone, any threads that could lead to him? He didn’t think so. The Farrellys were prepared, if necessary, to swear to the world that Curtis had been at Kennison constantly this last week. The drone submarine, a standard model used in undersea exploration by everybody from fisheries scientists to oil companies, had been bought by Xian Bing Shu, and Xian Bing Shu was absolutely untraceable to Richard Curtis.

The Hsus, operators of the Granjya, knew only what they needed to know, and were not curious by nature. If, in future, they were to realize they’d been party to the destruction of Hong Kong, they would be too implicated themselves to dare come forward. Besides, they were being paid well, and knew they would be paid well for more work in the future.

In the meantime, the Granjya stood at the western end of Victoria Harbor. Once the submarine was out of the tunnels and trailing them, the Granjya would head west and then south around the end of Hong Kong Island, through Sulphur Channel, between Kennedy Town and Green and Little Green Islands. They would stay well west of the new airport off Lamma Island, then at last turn east and south toward Kaohsiung, four hundred miles away.

Throughout the trip back to Taiwan, the submarine would run half a mile behind them, close enough to monitor but far enough away so there would be no obvious link between them. And in Kaohsiung he owned a waterfront godown where submarine and contents could be stored while gradually he moved the gold into his bank accounts, slowly converting it from heavy cumbersome yellow metal to impulses in cyberspace.

The radio and phone were set up in the main cabin, amidships, between the helm up forward and the sleeping cabins aft. Curtis paced in and out of the main cabin, first to the port deck and then to the starboard, out to the soft night air and the distant city lights, then back inside, pacing like an animal in the zoo, unable to stop himself.

This was the tense moment, the final moment. If something were to go wrong, what then? Over there on Hong Kong Island, if Bennett and Tian and the others were to fail, or if the soliton failed, or if the submarine for some reason failed, what then?

He would flee. If he had the submarine but the soliton failed, he would cut loose of the submarine, give up the gold, because they would know it was gone. He would take the same route as originally planned, use the same subterfuges, finish his journey at Kennison the same as before, ready to try again when circumstances improved. He would hold off his creditors, somehow, just a little longer.

But nothing would fail. Everything was prepared, and everything would work, and tomorrow he would become again what he had never stopped being all along: a businessman, a construction expert, a solid man in a solid world, no better or worse than the men around him. Once this was done, he would be Richard Curtis again.

It was nearly two in the morning when the call came from Bennett. That was too early, and worrisome. Curtis said, “What is it?”

Bennett said, “Our German guest has gone out.”

Startled, Curtis said, “Left the property?”

“Oh, no,” Bennett said, “he won’t be leaving the property.” He sounded grim and determined, a man out to prove himself.

“Well, that’s good.”

“What it is, I think,” Bennett said, “I didn’t prepare him as well as I prepared Mark.”

He hadn’t been beaten into despair, in other words. So he’d fought back somehow, escaped from them, was somewhere on the construction site. But the gates and the tall fences would hold him in, and the crew would find him, sooner or later. Or the soliton would get him. “Colin,” Curtis said, “I’ll leave all that to your judgment.”

“Thank you, sir. You see, what it is, sir, he’s just like gone for a walk around the property. When he comes back. I’ll talk to him like I talked to Mark, get him to understand the situation here.”

“You do that,” Curtis said.

“I’ll speak to you later, sir,” Bennett said.

The next call came ten minutes later; still too early. It was Bennett’s voice again, sounding tense and worried. “Policemen at the gate, sir.”

“Don’t let them in!”

“Oh, no, sir, I know that.”

“Is Jackie there?”

Mulish, Bennett said, “Right here, sir.” At times, Bennett’s resentment of Jackie Tian as a co-worker could be amusing; at the moment, it was only irrelevant.

Jackie’s voice, no-nonsense, tough, came on: “Yes, sir?”

“Start now,” Curtis said.

9

Martin Ha did not like gunfire. In the first place, most people weren’t very good at it, especially when excited, and having bullets miscellaneously in the air meant no one was safe anywhere. In the second place, it made it more difficult to interrogate people afterward, since they tended either to be distracted by wounds or dead. In the third place, it tended to create a terrible mess, hard to conduct an investigation in and nasty to clean up. There were more places, but those would do.

And they were why Ha continued to speak reasonably through the chain-link gate at the Xian Bing Shu construction site even when he was convinced that the two hard-hatted crew members inside the gate were merely stalling for time, and time was the one thing he simply could not give them.

Ha had arrived here five minutes ago with a sizable force, three police cars and a police bus, for a total of twenty-three men, with more on the way. (Tony Fairchild was also on the way, with his group, but Ha was sure Tony was professional enough to keep the civilians well away from the operation.)

The site looked perfectly ordinary from the outside, half a city block enclosed in a high chain-link fence supplemented by board fence here and there, with a deep excavation within and a shrouded building armature starting upward. Work was clearly going on despite the hour, but this wouldn’t be the first time in Hong Kong that construction worked three shifts, the owners as anxious to get into their new building as, ten or fifteen years from now, they would be to tear it down again.

Ha had arrived, had left his force at the curb, and had proceeded alone to the gate, where he’d been met by these two mulish workmen refusing to open up. Since then, he had repeatedly explained the situation, calmly and reasonably. That he was a police officer, that they came within his jurisdiction, and that they were required by law to do what he ordered them to do, which at this moment was to open the gate.

They responded, sullenly and doggedly, that they’d been ordered by their boss not to open the gate at night for anybody at all, and they had no intention of risking their jobs for somebody they didn’t know; people in the office were trying to call the boss right now, that’s what they claimed, but their lack of urgency was as palpable as Ha’s sense of urgency.

Still, he hadn’t contented himself with nothing but talk. He’d already ordered the armored personnel carrier from the police garage, and when it got here, they’d do what they had to do. In the meantime, he continued to try to convince these people that the results of their actions, if they interfered with the police in the performance of their duty, would be much worse than the potential of making their boss angry.

Sergeant Noh called from the curb. He stood beside the car he and Ha had arrived in, and now he called, “Inspector!” and when Ha turned to look at him he made a quick beckoning gesture. He looked worried.

“I’ll be right back,” Ha promised the workmen, and went over to Noh, who said, “The Cathay Bank building has just lost power.”

That was two blocks west of here. “They’ve started,” Ha said, and here came the personnel carrier, rumbling down the street. “Sergeant, move the vehicles out of the way.”

“Sir!”

He went out to the street, to talk with the driver of the personnel carrier, which was a beefed-up panel truck with bullet-resistant metal sides and a reinforced grill that made it a fine battering ram. The driver, a young uniformed police officer, saluted and Ha said, “I’ll tell those people one last time we’re coming in whether they like it or not. If I signal to you, go through the gate.”

“Yes, sir.” The driver smiled, looking forward to it.

When Ha approached the gate again, the two workmen had been supplemented by at least a dozen more, all of them looking tough and ready for anything. He kept his attention on the first two, saying, “Have you reached your boss yet?”

“No.”

“Well, we’re coming in.”

A large bulldozer started up the slope of the excavation, moving rapidly this way. To block the gate?

One of the new men said, “We got our orders. We won’t let you through the gate.”

“I’m afraid you will,” Ha said, and turned to signal the driver of the personnel carrier. As he lifted his hand, the windshield of the personnel carrier starred and crazed and went opaque, and a sudden loud report boomed from behind him.

He turned back, astonished, thinking this was not an occasion that called for gunfire, didn’t they realize that, and the rifleman shifted aim to shoot Ha in the chest. As he staggered back, seeing the rifleman aim at the personnel carrier again, half a dozen of the workmen produced pistols and started firing.

Ha was dead before he hit the ground.

10

Jackie Tian steered the bulldozer directly at the rough-coated bulging concrete wall. The man with the borer had earlier scored around the four sides of the cleared area, making a line like that between postage stamps; when Tian hit it, at twenty miles an hour, the wall popped away from the broad iron bulldozer blade, splintering into a thousand jagged rocks, all scattered ahead of him. Directly across the Interbank Building water tunnel he drove and through the scored wall on the opposite side and the next connecting tunnel.

Bumping along behind him like a dachshund on a leash was the submarine, lashed to a four-wheeled trailer and chained to the rear of the bulldozer. The sub, fifteen feet long, tapered fore and aft, had rudder and exterior propeller at the rear but no conning tower. Compressed air between its inner and outer bulls would keep it buoyant, even with two or three tons of gold aboard. Its electronic gear was all in a thickly shielded cone in its nose. Three screw-shut hatches along the flat top gave access to the cargo area.

Behind the sub came thirty men, carrying shovels, wearing workgloves and headlamps beside their shorts and shoes. They cleared the rubble Tian created, to quicken the return journey, and kept moving, their lights casting quick narrow smoky beams in the temporary cross tunnels.

Third tunnel. The gold was to the left. Tian moved the levers to turn the treads and drew back the blade. The bulldozer swiveled on its treads, huge in this space. The right corner of the blade gouged out a chunk of the far wall as he made the turn.

As he started down the tunnel, nearly filling it from side to side, his head just beneath the water pipes, submarine and workmen trailing behind, the tunnel’s lights abruptly flicked out. So everything was on schedule.

Bennett sat at Richard Curtis’s desk in Richard Curtis’s trailer and felt like a captain on the bridge of a giant ship. Seated here, he could keep in touch with Jackie in the tunnels and with Mr. Curtis himself, on his ship in the harbor. When the time came, he would be the one to detonate the explosives in the seawall, flooding the tunnels. When the diver came back after releasing the submarine into the harbor, it was Bennett who would arm the final set of explosives in the tunnel, to remove all evidence of what they’d done, and it was then Bennett who would lead Jackie Tian’s work crew through the construction site, the false building seemingly under construction there, and out the concealed exit into Partition Street, away from the main gate and all the police.

He could hear the occasional gunfire, and didn’t much like it. That was Jackie Tian’s way to do things, loud and violent and tough. Bennett was an engineer, a construction man. He wished there’d been some other way to keep the police out while the bank vault was being breached. He wished he’d dealt properly with those people in Singapore, because then there would be no police outside to deal with now.

Well, but here they were, and there was no other way to deal with them. The Jackie Tians and their willing workers were useful at times. Half an hour, no more, was all they needed, and then the gold would be gone, and so would Bennett and Tian and the diver and all the workmen. All who survived.

The diver was a Malay named Sharom, who had come late to the project. He did not know his predecessor, but he understood the man had been arrested on some sort of smuggling charge not related to this job here.

Sharom had known Jackie Tian for years, not well, but trusted him to be competent and professional, and he knew Tian felt the same way about him. His specialty was industrial sabotage. If you wanted a competitor’s offshore oil-drilling operation to run into expensive difficulties; if you wanted your aging freighter to sink in such a way the insurance company could never prove it had been scuppered; if your operation needed an illegal dead-of-night explosion in a coral reef or other protected waters, Sharom was your man.

Tonight’s operation was a simple one, for which he was being well paid, the first half of his fee already in his account in Jakarta. He trailed the bulldozer and the sub and the workcrew through the tunnels, dressed in his wetsuit. Scuba tank on his back, goggles pushed down around his throat, headlamp gleaming. He carried his flippers, and wore thin-soled rubber thongs he’d store inside the wetsuit when the time came.

On his utility belt he carried a small radio, which would switch on the submarine’s engine once the tunnels were full of water, and which he could use to direct the sub down the straight run of the tunnel to what would then be a gaping hole in the seawall. He would swim just beside or above the sub, shepherding it along the way. Once the sub was clear of the seawall, the radio would also alert the other operator, who would take over control.

Sharom understood the other operator was also the employer in this operation, but didn’t know himself who the man was, had never met him, didn’t need to. Jackie Tian was all he needed to know.

Ahead, in the darkness criss-crossed by headlamp beams, the bulldozer crashed into the vault wall.

Tony Fairchild couldn’t believe what had happened. Inspector Ha was dead. Tony had liked Inspector Ha, had found him congenial and knowledgeable. He could certainly not be faulted for having put himself in harm’s way, because who could have expected this level of violence? Four police dead, including Inspector Ha and the driver of an armored personnel carrier and two other officers. And undoubtedly there were some dead or wounded among the people inside.

Both sides had now pulled back from the fence, the people on the inside having driven a large bulldozer smack up against the gate on their side, so it couldn’t be forced. Anyone attempting to get to the fence with wire-cutters could expect to be shot down before they could accomplish a thing; thus, one of the police dead.

Tony and George and Kim sat in the van that had brought them here, parked now a safe distance from the site entrance. In one way or another, they’d all expressed their shock at the death of Inspector Ha and their frustration at the stalemate, and now there was nothing to do but wait.

George was having the worst problem with that. Twice now, Tony had had to restrain him from leaving the van, saying, “You aren’t going to do any good out there, George, leave it to the professionals.”

“We don’t have the time!”

“I’m well aware of that. But they’re bringing up reinforcements, we’ll soon be through the gate.”

“If not,” George said, “we’re all going to die. Right here.”

The workmen formed a kind of bucket brigade, moving the heavy gold ingots from their pallets in the vault out through the breached wall and into the submarine. A little farther down the tunnel, some security people had emerged from a door and been shot down by Tian’s people, who now guarded the staircase there, to see to it they were not disturbed.

Steadily, the submarine filled with gold. Sharom sat on the rear bar of the trailer to remove his thongs and put on the flippers.

The walkie-talkie on the desk in front of Bennett crackled twice, then spoke in Jackie Tian’s voice. “Coming out.”

Bennett’s hand strayed to the button that would detonate the seawall explosives, but then all at once he was in Belize again, visualizing another man in another tunnel, the sudden onrush of water. He closed his eyes, and his hand moved back from that button to pick up the walkie-talkie. “Let me know when it’s safe to set off the charge.”

“Naturally.”

Sharom was alone. His headlamp was the only light, shining on the abandoned bulldozer, the submarine on its trailer, the new ragged hole in the wall to the vault. He could hear the radio talk, knew when they meant to blow the seawall, and stepped into the vault to be out of the direct line of it.

Fortunately, he’d thought to put in ear plugs. The sound of the blast, in this long tubular enclosed space, was like a physical punch, booming down the tunnel, an invisible landslide. Sharom closed eyes and mouth, covered nostrils, and waited. When the vibrations eased, he looked out, leaning through the hole in the wall, aiming his headlamp down the tunnel.

Here it came. The water had side-channels to fill, long tunnels to inundate, so it came on strongly but not in an overpowering rush.

As water rose around him, Sharom removed the ropes holding the sub to the trailer. Now the water was above the sub’s propellers, so Sharom started its engine and felt the sudden surge in the water as the propellers spun. Slowly he moved the submarine forward, swimming along behind it.

The water filled the tunnel, and the side tunnels, and six other water tunnels. Power failed in several of the buildings. The submarine arrowed out into the harbor, a slender black metal fish. Sharom released control, and turned back.

11

It was when the man hit Luther on the back of the head with a fist-size stone, when he felt the pain and a runnel of blood trickling down his neck, that he finally snapped out of the stupor he’d been in ever since Bennett had dropped on top of him in the water tunnel. He turned to look at the man who’d hit him, a short compact pugnacious Chinese, who gestured angrily at the pile of rubble in front of them, making it clear Luther was working too slowly. The man tossed the bloodied stone into the tram and glared at Luther, hands on hips. Luther lifted the shovel, turned, and hit him in the face with it.

That time he used the flat of the shovel, but in the melee that followed he used the edge; it made a very adequate lance, producing quite satisfactory gashes in arms and foreheads.

They were working in one of the temporary side tunnels, and Luther retreated as he fought, out of the tunnel, then saw the construction elevator off to his left, one man there, waiting for it, the elevator descending. Luther ran for the elevator, clutching the shovel, and swung it at the man as the elevator stopped at the bottom.

Yank open the accordion gate, jump in, find the buttons, push Up, jam the gate shut with the shovel handle. Workmen tried to get at him through the gate, but had to drop away as the elevator jolted upward. The last he saw was the supervisor who’d hit him, shouting urgently into a walkie-talkie.

He didn’t ride all the way to the surface, but got off at a sub-basement, then sent the elevator on up toward the top of the shaft without him. This was a storage area, with only one worklight, that one near the elevator shaft cage. Stacks of lumber, rolls of wire and plastic, barrels of nails, were all jumbled any which way. Luther moved into the darkness away from the elevator, certain he could find hiding places in here until he could figure out his escape.

It took him a little while to realize there was no pursuit. He was hiding here, in the middle of a collection of barrels, and no one was chasing him.

Why not? Rising from his hiding place, he roamed the darkness in here, moving slowly, not wanting to fall through some invisible hole in the floor, and eventually came across a ladder leading upward. In the next quarter hour, he managed to zigzag his way to the surface, where the lights were, and the structures, and men moving around.

And now he saw why they felt they needn’t waste time and manpower searching for one runaway. The construction site was completely enclosed by high fences, some wooden, some chain link, razor wire running in a coil along the top. If he tried to climb that to escape, forget the razor wire, he’d be spotted before he was halfway to the top and shot dead.

Giving up the thought of escape, at least for the moment, he moved back into the shadows, hunkered down, and waited to see what would develop.

This was not long before the actual shooting began, and when it did it startled him, because he’d been thinking about shooting, and at first he couldn’t tell who was shooting, or why, or at whom. Then he saw the bulldozer race up the road slope from the bottom of the excavation, saw it placed to block the gate, and realized what must be going on.

What could he do? He was seated now on a stack of pipes meant for scaffolding, just inside the blue plastic sheathing of the building under construction. Ahead of him was the muddy floor of the excavation, spotted with construction vehicles, but now empty of workmen or anybody else. Fifteen or twenty feet from where he sat the steep slope of the dirt access road angled up to where the bulldozer blocked the entrance. To both sides, the excavation fell away steeply just inside the fence.

The police would only be able to come in through that gate, and the bulldozer would probably have to be blown out of the way with dynamite. How much time did the authorities have, to come to that conclusion and then to act on it?

Not enough, Luther thought, not enough time at all.

He had never driven a bulldozer, but he had driven similar machines in the Alps, when he worked for the ski lodge. He remembered that they didn’t operate at all like an automobile, didn’t even have a steering wheel, but separate levers to manage the right and left treads.

Wait. Think this through, don’t be hasty. What was it about acceleration? There are floor pedals; which is the accelerator?

Neither. That’s another lever, on the left or the right. Which? One on one side controls speed, the other on the other side controls the blade. What do the pedals do? Brake.

Well, that’s all I can remember, he thought. When I get there, it will come to me right away or somebody will shoot me while I’m thinking about it. So I hope it comes to me right away.

The nearest vehicle to where he now sat was a small flatbed truck with two stacks of Sheetrock on it, covered by clear plastic tarps. Would the key be in the ignition? Almost certainly yes; several people would drive each of these vehicles, none of which would be leaving the site. So all he had to do was get up on his feet and walk over there.

Still he hesitated, people had been shooting, though the shooting had stopped now. But they had been shooting, and if they saw someone in motion they might start to shoot again.

Should he run, or walk? If he ran they would know he was their enemy and they might start shooting at him at once. If he walked, they might at first think he was one of them. On the other hand, he was taller than any of them, and much more blond, so if he walked they would have more time to study him and realize he could not be one of their crew.

There isn’t time to waste here, you know. And yet he continued to sit on the stack of pipes, leaning forward slightly, looking out from his concealment at that flatbed truck. Am I a coward? he asked himself. He didn’t think he was a coward. He’d braved the mountains, he’d braved the ocean, he’d braved his father’s scorn. And yet, there was something about people shooting at you, something different about that.

For God’s sake, let’s do it, he told himself. There’s no one else to do it, so let’s do it. Stop thinking about it and just stand up and do it.

He stood up. He walked out of his protected shadow and across the open dirt to the flatbed truck. He saw no one, heard no one cry out, heard no shooting.

There were no doors on the truck, and the bench seat was covered by a tattered rattan throw. A key ring dangled from the ignition.

Luther slid behind the wheel and somebody shouted.

He bent low, turning the key, and the engine coughed into life, very loud, so he couldn’t hear if the shout was repeated. He shifted into low, and drove abruptly up the access road.

The bulldozer loomed ahead. He jerked the truck to a stop without bothering to shut off the engine, jumped out onto the dirt, and the truck rolled slowly backward, down the slope. He ran up beside the bulldozer, climbed the tread, grabbed the vertical metal post holding up the canopy, and swung himself into the seat.

Something pinged off the muffler, that thick vertical black pipe in front of him, rising from the engine. They are shooting at me!

Where was the starter switch? Oh, God, that was the part he hadn’t thought out ahead of time.

It’s outside! It’s on the canopy support post I grabbed coming up!

He leaned down low to the right, feeling for the starter switch, hearing another ping somewhere, then being aware of shooting out in front of him, and thinking, don’t shoot at me, I’m on your side!

Starter switch. Yes; the big engine roared into life.

Blade control, which was the blade control? Here on the right. The instructions for everything in this cab were very clearly laid out, in Chinese.

The blade was down on the ground, almost touching the chain-link gate. Luther moved the blade control, and the blade tried to press lower, nearly lifting the bulldozer.

He moved it the other way, and the blade lifted, scraping the gate.

He would never figure out reverse. Could he just make it move forward? Transmission and engine-speed controls here on the left.

Yes! The machine strained forward, treads slipping on the loose dirt, the gate bending but not breaking.

More pings all around him. He had to get out of here. Hunkered low, feeling bullets punch into the seat behind him, he pushed the right-hand steering lever forward, the left-hand steering lever back. The bulldozer swiveled leftward, and as it did the blade yanked the right side of the gate out of its hinges, metal snapping and flying everywhere.

Reverse, reverse, right lever back, left lever forward, swivel the other way, feel a beebite on the left side of the head, just above the ear, no time to think about it.

Sprong! The gate gave way, and Luther brought both levers straight, and the bulldozer shot out onto the road, pushing the wrecked gate ahead of it. He was too excited and confused, and couldn’t figure out how to stop the thing until it ran into a police bus on the other side of the road.

Fortunately, the bus was empty.

12

The diver’s voice spoke from one of the walkie-talkies: “Job done. Coming back.”

“Yes,” Bennett said in response. He put that walkie-talkie down and grabbed the other one to say into it, “Jackie? Where are you?”

“Coming out,” Tian’s voice said. “We can only do ten in the elevator at a time.”

“There’s more shooting up here, Jackie,” Bennett said, and he knew his nervousness could be heard in his voice, and he envied the tough calm that Tian still showed.

“Hold them off,” Tian said, “we’re coming out as fast as we can. The diver isn’t back yet, either.”

“He’s on his way,” Bennett said, and the phone rang, which must be Curtis.

Yes. What was in Curtis’s voice was triumph: “We’ve done it, Colin!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you set the last timers?”

“Not yet, sir. Jackie’s crew and the diver are still coming out.”

“Well, set them, man. They still have thirty minutes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do it now, Colin.”

“Yes, sir, I will.”

“And, Colin?”

“Sir?”

“Leave the phone off the hook. I’ll be listening to what happens there, and you’ll be able to talk to me any time you have to.”

“Very good, sir.”

“And start those timers.”

“Yes, sir.”

When Jackie Tian rode the elevator from the level above the flooding up to the surface, traveling with the last of his work-crew, he found the rest of his men milling around inside the area swathed in the blue plastic tarps.

“Bulldozer’s gone,” one of them said.

Tian looked around an edge of plastic. He saw an armored personnel carrier, windshield shattered, slowly driving down the access road from the smashed-open gate. A couple of men sniped at the personnel carrier from behind parked trucks, but he could see it was all over.

“We go now,” he decided, and signaled to his men, and they trotted after him in a long line away from the battle, toward the passage to the alley leading to Partition Street.

“I have to leave here now, sir,” Bennett said into the phone, knowing how panicky he sounded but unable to stop it. “The police broke through, they’re coming this way.”

“Did you set the timers?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Leave the phone off the hook.”

“But I have to go now, sir, I—”

“Leave it off the hook!”

“Yes, sir,” Bennett said, and dropped the phone onto the desk. Standing, he ran around the desk, and pulled open the door, and blue-uniformed policemen swarmed in.

Sharom swam through the flooded tunnels, his headlamp showing the way. At the end, there was a ladder, and he climbed it to the level above the water. He pushed the button there to summon the elevator, and while waiting for it he changed out of his flippers and back into the rubber thongs.

Then the elevator came, and he rode upward, flippers under his left arm. When he got to the surface level and stopped, the elevator cage was surrounded by uniformed policemen, most of them pointing pistols or rifles at him. When he raised his arms, the flippers fell to the floor of the cage.

In six places in the flooded tunnels, carefully positioned by Colin Bennett following Richard Curtis’s precise instructions, tucked against side walls in the pitch blackness, were rectangular metal boxes, each about the size of a child’s coffin. The boxes had hinged tops and padlocks, and inside, in waterproof plastic bags, were the timers, the radio receivers, the detonators and the slim tubes of TNT.

Water had already seeped into the boxes, but that didn’t matter. The timers chittered quietly to themselves, unreeling the seconds. When they judged the instant was right, one after the other, they would detonate.

No one explosion would be very severe, but every one of them would agitate the water in these confined tunnels, every additional one increasing the agitation, until the sixth explosion would be like attaining free-fall. The energy would now renew itself, the water shoulder more space for itself, pressing outward, crumbling the concrete, eating the landfill, turning all the island below the clustered tall buildings into porridge.

Curtis sat at the table in the main cabin of Granjya, telephone to his ear, his eye on the radio and sonar that controlled the submarine. Granjya plowed steadily through the night, south and west, and the submarine obediently followed.

Through the phone, he could hear a confusion of people milling around in his office at the construction site. Voices spoke, too far away from the receiver for him to make out what they were saying, but from the sound of it he believed they’d captured Colin.

What would he tell them? Would he implicate Curtis? Not that it mattered. Nothing that anyone in that room could say would matter, before long.

All those lights, he thought, looking out at Hong Kong Island as it receded in the night, all those lights will soon switch off. Forever. I won’t see it, he thought, but I’ll hear it, the beginning of it. In just... twenty-seven minutes.

13

The shooting seemed to be over. Manville followed Tony Fairchild down the steep gradient of the access road, Kim beside him. Fairchild walked beside the new inspector, the overweight man who’d been rushed in to take Inspector Ha’s place, whose name Manville hadn’t caught. Fairchild was trying to establish some rapport with this new man, but Manville didn’t think he was getting very far.

Well, the new man had a lot on his plate. Some sort of insurrection in the center of the city, and apparently a nearby theft of a lot of gold. Also, vandalism in the water tunnels. And he was coming to it all from a standing start.

As they walked down the slope, Manville saw a small sullen cluster of prisoners off to the left, two bodies on the ground nearby awaiting transportation, and uniformed policemen everywhere. More lights were being brought in, the blue plastic sheathing was being stripped from the shell of the building-that-wasn’t, and the construction vehicles were being moved out of the way.

Unfortunately, Luther had been taken off to the hospital because of a graze wound on the side of his head before Manville could ask him about circumstances inside here. Where was Bennett, that was the question. The tunnels had been flooded, they knew that much. Was the soliton set?

As they neared the bottom of the slope, Manville called to Fairchild, “Do they have Bennett? Do they know where he is?”

Fairchild paused for Manville to catch up, as the new inspector strode on. “They have someone in the site office,” he said, “and a diver. We’ll go see.”

As they started across the cleared excavation toward the trailer containing the office, Manville said, “We don’t know how much time Curtis has given us.”

“Bennett may know,” Fairchild said. “I gather they may have used a submarine to take the loot away. If it’s in the harbor now, Curtis won’t want to do anything that might sink it.”

“If it’s in the harbor now, it’s leaving the harbor fast,” Manville said.

The site office was crammed with people. Bennett and a short olive-skinned man in a wetsuit sat on a bench to one side. A dozen policemen milled around the room, searching drawers, testing walkie-talkies, getting in each other’s way.

Manville crossed to Bennett.

“You,” Bennett said.

Manville unconsciously raised two fingers to the scar on his cheek. “Did you set the explosives?”

Bennett gave him a dull look, and a policeman angrily snapped at Manville in Cantonese to get away from the prisoners. Ignoring him, Manville said, “Bennett! Do you want to die?”

The policeman tugged at Manville’s arm, and the new inspector called, “Inspector Fairchild! Get that man away from the prisoner!”

“Inspector,” Fairchild said, “we have to stop the next round of explosions.”

“We’re in control here now,” the new inspector said. “There will be no more explosions.”

Manville said, “You don’t understand—”

The new inspector said, “Inspector Fairchild, you cannot bring these civilians in here. I must demand they return to the street, to the other side of the barricade.”

Manville said to Fairchild, “He doesn’t know about it. Inspector Ha was trying to avoid panic, remember? He told as few people as possible what was happening here. This man hasn’t the first idea what’s going on.”

“Inspector Fairchild,” the new inspector announced, “I don’t know what lenience my predecessor demonstrated for you, but I must insist on my orders being carried out. If you don’t have these people removed, my men will remove them.”

“We need them here,” Fairchild began, and Manville turned back to Bennett: “Did you or did you not set the explosives?”

Again the Chinese policeman yanked at Manville’s arm, yelling at him, but this time, with sudden ferocity. Fairchild spun on him, towering, red-faced, and roared, “Let the man ask his questions!”

The policeman, stunned, looked to his inspector for guidance. Tony turned his glower on the new inspector. A long silent moment went by, when no one spoke or moved.

They just got out from under the British thumb, Manville thought. They aren’t going to like being yelled at by this big overbearing Australian.

But then the new inspector’s professionalism broke through, and he snapped something at his policeman, who nodded, though grudgingly, and backed off. The new inspector made an imperious come-closer gesture at Fairchild and said, “Come here, sir, and explain yourself.”

“I will, Inspector.”

While Tony did, Manville turned back to Bennett. “If you didn’t set the charges yet,” he said, “for God’s sake, tell me so. If you did, let’s undo it before we’re all killed.”

“We’ll be all right,” Bennett muttered, not looking at him.

“We’ll be all right?”

“Maybe get a block or two away.”

“Man, don’t you know what Curtis has set up?”

“It’s a robbery,” Bennett said. “I expect I’ll do time.”

“It’s a massacre! Bennett, have you heard about the soliton?”

Before Bennett could answer, a ragged creature crashed into the office, crying, “Help me! Help me! I’m an American! Help me!”

Everybody stared at the man in bewilderment. He wore tattered grubby shorts and the remnants of shoes. He was unshaven, filthy, hair matted, wounds and scars all over his body. “My name,” he moaned, “is Hennessy.”

Kim, in awe, whispered, “Mark?”

“Kim!” Mark lurched toward her across the office. He dropped to his knees in front of her, staring up at her. “Don’t let them,” he begged. “Kim, don’t let them.”

“Mark.” She went to her knees beside him, starting to touch him but then clearly afraid that any touch would only increase his pain.

“Mark Hennessy,” Manville said. And then, turning to Bennett: “You recognize this man? You know he worked for Curtis?” Manville leaned down toward the quivering man. “You have to tell Bennett about the soliton.”

Mark shook his head, confused. “But you... you know what it is. You built it.”

“But if he hears it from you, he’ll know I’m not making it up, trying to fool him. Tell him, Mark. What is the soliton?”

“You used it at the island, Kanowit Island.”

“Tell him what it does.”

“Turns land — landfill — turns it into mud.”

“How?”

“Water in tunnels, explosives in water.”

Wheeling on Bennett, Manville said, “He told you it would just remove the evidence, didn’t he? But you’re the evidence, Bennett, we’re all the evidence. There’ll be probably six explosive devices, am I right?”

Bennett frowned at him. “Well, what do they do, then?”

“Every part of this island that has been added to,” Manville told him, “will be gone. And the buildings on it, all of them. And us.”

“He told me—”

“You believed him? You believed he’d let you live, to hold this over his head?”

Bennett shook his heavy head, back and forth, back and forth.

“You set them.”

“Yes.”

“How long ago?”

“I don’t know, ten minutes, maybe less.”

“For how long?”

“Thirty minutes.” Bennett looked up at Manville. “Couldn’t we get away in time?”

“From the city? How do you switch it off?”

“You don’t,” Bennett said, sounding surprised. “No one ever said anything about switching it off.”

Manville laughed, without mirth. “No fail-safe, once again. Naturally.”

Tony Fairchild said, “Can we get to the explosives, switch them off manually?” Beside him, the new inspector was looking ashen-faced and terrified.

Manville said, “They’re underwater, in the tunnels. We’d need divers, we’d never get divers here in time.”

One of the policemen in the office suddenly noticed something and spoke up. “That telephone,” he said, “is off the hook.”

They all stared at it. Tony strode to the table, picked up the receiver, listened, reacted, and turned to say, “I heard him hang up.”

Manville said to Bennett, “Curtis?”

Bennett nodded.

Fairchild said, “George? Is there really no way to stop it?”

Kim said, “I can go.”

14

Kim had never been so frightened in her life. All she could see in her mind’s eye was that great boulder of hard gray water rolling at her from Kanowit Island, surrounding her, submerging her, beating her into a rag doll.

She was now wearing the other diver’s wetsuit and goggles and headlamp and flippers and air tank, thanking heaven he was a small man so it more or less fit. She moved strongly through the black tunnels. The water filling the tunnels was clouded, already beginning to mix with dirt from the temporary cross-tunnels. In a little while, you wouldn’t be able to see down here at all. Of course, in a little while, there would be no down here.

The more she thought about the urgency of the job, the need for speed and efficiency, the more anxious she became. And she knew that could be fatal. She’d almost fallen down the ladder into the water, unable to control her feet in flippers on the ladder rungs. And she didn’t want to dive or fall into that water, because who knew what debris might be in there, to cut her or knock her out.

And now, when she should be concentrating on swimming forward, finding the bombs, defusing them, all she could think about was the destroyer wave off Kanowit Island, all she could do was feed her fear.

George hadn’t wanted her to come down here. None of them had wanted her to do it, none of them would have asked her to risk her life to save theirs — to save everyone’s. But who else was there?

For about two seconds there had been the idea of convincing the other diver of the peril of the situation, and having him come down here, but everybody agreed he wouldn’t understand the danger and would most likely just swim through the tunnels and out the breached seawall and away.

So it had to be her. George had said it wouldn’t be necessary to disarm all six bombs, even if there’d been time, and there surely was not that much time. “These three,” he’d said, pointing them out on the construction plans, and Kim concentrated on what she had to do when she got down below.

It was simple, if she could only remember it. Through the first cross-tunnel, then down that water tunnel a little way to the right, and that would be number one. Back, find the next cross-tunnel, take it, pass through the next main tunnel to go to the next main tunnel, and to the left, and that would be number two. Then back the way she’d come, all the way back, past the ladder, down a different tunnel, another left into a cross-tunnel, another right, and there would be number three. And then, as quickly as possible, scoot back to the ladder and up.

“The other three,” George had said, “will do some damage, but there won’t be enough pressure to build up the soliton wave. As long as you’re out of the water once they start to go off, you’ll be all right.”

Be all right. She didn’t see how she could possibly be all right, she didn’t see how any of them could be all right.

There. In the increasingly murky water, there it was, on the floor, next to the wall, looking like a flattened footlocker. On an elastic loop around her wrist was the padlock key Bennett had dug out of the desk drawer, and when she hunkered beside the box to try the key, it worked.

How much time was left now? Ten minutes? Less?

Her hands fumbled when she pulled the wire-clippers from her belt. “Just cut the wires between the timer and the detonator,” George had told her. “It’s a very simple device. Cut the wires, and move on.”

The wires. She squeezed the wire clippers, and the wires were tougher than she’d expected. More time wasted. She had to cut the wires one at a time. At least that worked.

Clippers back into utility belt; don’t drop them!

The headlamp glow reflected back at her more and more from the dirty water. She slid along the right side of the water tunnel, finding the cross tunnel mostly by feel, moving on.

What if the water becomes too dirty to see in at all? How can I move fast if I’m blind?

It took more swimming than it felt to her like it should have, more than she could afford, but then her fingers brushed something hard against the wall and she felt along its outline. The second box. Knowing how to do it now, she moved more quickly, but reminded herself not to hurry, not to make any mistakes. Her heart pounded inside the wetsuit as she manipulated the clippers, then slid them back into her belt and kicked out and away, reversing course, swimming as strongly as she could back the way she’d come.

Oh, how she wanted to climb that ladder when it came dimly into view, but no, not yet, there was more to be done. One more. Without disabling one more, she’d only have weakened the soliton, not prevented it. Maybe only a hundred thousand would die rather than millions — that was some victory, she supposed. But not an entirely satisfying one. Especially given that the dead would include her. And George.

She swam past the ladder and on down the dark tunnel, only able to see the side of the tunnel she was nearest to. Her own movements agitated the water, mixing it more quickly with the dirt in the side tunnels. It was like swimming in a sewer. Like swimming in a nightmare.

She kept her head down, kicked harder, took the turns George had shown her. Box number three was there where it was supposed to be, but she couldn’t see it at all, had to open the padlock by feel, grope around inside it for the wires. She found them and braced the clippers against them, shifted her grip for greater leverage — and the clippers slipped from her hand.

She fumbled for them, grabbed at them, and missed.

For a second she couldn’t breathe. Just a second, but it was the most painful second of her life, physically painful, like she was being crushed from all sides at once. She forced herself to take air in, forced herself to focus. You’re going to die down here, she told herself, and strangely it succeeded in calming her down.

She stretched her arm out, groped along the bottom of the open box, praying, and when her fingers made contact with the rubber-sheathed grips of the clippers she seized them.

No more time. The wires had to be cut, and no time to do it one by one. Grimacing, she forced the jaws of the clippers together around the wires, squeezed hard with both hands. She’d have sworn she could hear the clippers bite shut as the wires split. It was done. She’d done it.

But the relief she felt was short-lived. For even if the explosives that were left wouldn’t create a soliton wave, they would be more than enough to snuff out the life of one unfortunate diver caught in their path. She’d miraculously survived one underwater explosion already — no one beat the odds twice.

She let the clippers fall and tore back through the tunnel, scraping her hands painfully as she went because she couldn’t see, had to do it all by feel.

She almost went past the ladder. It brushed her left leg as she went by, and she realized what she’d been about to do, to swim endlessly down this tunnel, directly into the explosions. She reversed, felt around, couldn’t find it, couldn’t find it, couldn’t find it, there!

Get these damn flippers off, get them off. She kicked them away, her shaking hands clutching at the ladder rungs, and she started to climb.

Her head had just broken the surface, seeing the floor another eight feet above her, the ladder extending upward to that platform there, when all at once the water around her vibrated, and then lifted, and she was underwater again, clinging to the ladder, the water reaching for her with a million fingers, trying to pluck her off the ladder, drag her away. The water surged upward around her, powerful, lifting her, then drained back, bearing strongly downward, still trying to carry her with it, she still clutching hard to the rungs, stupid with fright.

The first bomb has gone off. I really am going to die here.

The water receded, foaming, her head was in air again, and a hand was there, reaching down for her. She looked up, gaping through the goggles, and it was George, holding onto the ladder just above her, reaching down for her.

She put one shaking hand in his, and he pulled upward, and they both rose out of the water to collapse onto the floor, the water boiling eight feet below. She lay there gasping, on her side, the air tank still cumbersome on her back, the goggles still on, looking blearily out and down at the water heaving in the darkness below.

Distant thunder boomed. The water heaved upward as though to recapture them. They clung to each other and watched it rise, and then it fell back, quiet again.

Solemnly, “I don’t ever want to dive again,” Kim said.

George laughed, and kissed her, and they didn’t care about the third and last explosion.

15

Curtis paced the narrow portside deck of Granjya, staring northward, watching the glittery lights of the island city far away, willing it to happen. Thirty-two minutes. Thirty-three.

Could they possibly have stopped it, defeated the soliton? He knew the charges were located where they should be. How could they have stopped him? They’d have to send divers into the tunnels, the water in the tunnels would be filthy, they wouldn’t have the time or the people to do all that. And there’s no other way to stop the soliton.

Thirty-four minutes.

It’s George, somehow. George Manville has done this to me. He should be dead, the man should be dead, and in any case he’s nothing but an unimaginative engineer, how can he stop me?

Curtis had always known this was a possibility, but he’d had to go forward anyway. His position was untenable and getting worse. He had to get out from under or go under, ruined, disgraced. So he’d had to make this gamble, and now he’d lost.

Thirty-seven minutes.

It wasn’t going to blow. George Manville, of all people, had beaten him. (He never even thought of Kim.)

But was this any worse than to fail the other way? To be sued, hounded, taken through bankruptcy courts, reviled by everyone who used to shake his hand and drink his liquor. If things had worked out...

If things had worked out, he would have had all the money he needed to solve his problems, and he would not have had one breath of scandal to touch upon him. He would have had his revenge on the city that had tried to destroy him, and he would have continued to be Richard Curtis, owner of Curtis Construction and RC Structural, respected, accepted everywhere in the world.

Well, he had failed, and now that failure was behind him, and it was time to start again. He still had a very few trusted people — the Farrellys at Kennison, for instance — he could rely on. Richard Curtis would have to disappear forever, and gradually he would have to build up a new identity. He had lost a battle, that’s all, not the war.

To disappear meant totally, and that meant he had to start now. Defeat had made him tougher, more decisive. He knew what had to be done, and he wouldn’t shrink from doing it.

There was a pistol in his cabin, an Iver Johnson Trailsman .32. He went there and got it, and walked forward to where the Hsus stood together, he at the wheel, she seated in the bolted-down chair beside him, chatting. Curtis shot her first, in the head, and then her husband, quickly, before he could think about it. Then he rolled the bodies over the side.

This was the first thing. No one must know how he left Hong Kong, where he went. Before, he’d been in a position where he could trust the Hsus to keep silent, because they would want more of his work in the future. But now, they would know he was a fugitive, and they would not want to be linked to him, and they would go to the police at the very first opportunity. So they wouldn’t get an opportunity.

He could operate this ship alone. The thing to do now was choose a new destination, because the authorities would surely know by now he’d come to Hong Kong from Taiwan, so he could not go back to Taiwan.

There are other places in this world, some not even as far away as Taiwan. There was Macao, for instance. Farther off, but possibly even more useful, there was Vietnam. Or the Philippines.

He could decide all that later. The main thing now was to deal with the submarine, get farther away from the Chinese coast, and at last get some sleep, an hour or two of sleep before daylight.

It would be very good if he could keep the submarine, but he didn’t dare. If he were stopped, he was Mark Hennessy, with a partly burned passport, due to an accident on board. (All of Mark’s travel goods were still aboard, and he would arrange a small fire in the main cabin to back up his story.) But he could not be Mark Hennessy, an innocent traveler, if he were leashed to a submarine carrying a full load of gold ingots, so unfortunately the submarine would have to go.

But not the gold, or at least not all of it. He would bring, say, a dozen ingots aboard Granjya, hide them, and have that as the base for his next fortune. So, once the Hsus were out of the way, he throttled back the Granjya engines to their slowest forward speed, just making enough headway into the chop so the ship wouldn’t begin dangerously to roll. Delicately, with the radio controls, he brought the submarine to the surface and then forward, to hover beside Granjya, maintaining the same speed, while he got a rope around the rudder, just forward of the propeller.

There was nothing else on the sleek machine to tie onto, but he had both vessels moving at the same speed, in the same direction, so everything would be fine so long as they were tethered together in at least one spot. And this transfer wouldn’t take long.

The top of the submarine, when it rode on the surface, was below the side deck of Granjya. Curtis had to lie on his stomach on the deck and reach down to the central hatch cover of the submarine, a round metal wafer three feet across, with crescent indentations for handholds. Tugging on two of these indentations, he was resisted at first, and then the cover turned easily. So easily that all at once it was free, and sliding off the metal hull to fall away into the water. Not a problem; the whole submarine would be scuttled soon.

The interior was not full. The top two feet of stowage space was empty, so Curtis couldn’t reach the nearest ingots from the deck of Granjya. He had to slide under the rail out over the submarine and lower himself through the hatch.

Now it was easy. He bent down, grabbed an ingot, was surprised by how heavy it was, but lifted it up and turned to push it onto the deck of Granjya, under the lower bar of the rail. Then he transferred a second ingot, and then he paused; they were really very heavy.

When he lifted the third ingot and turned, the deck of Granjya was too far away. Some wave had slightly altered the two vessels’ courses.

No matter. They were still tied together. What Curtis had to do now was get to the rear of the submarine, grab the rope, bring the two boats back in line.

It seemed to him too dangerous to try to crawl over the top of the submarine. It was probably too slippery, and he didn’t want to wind up in the water, even with Granjya right there next to him. So he slid down into the submarine, lay on his back on the lumpy ingots of gold, and opened the aft hatch cover from inside. All of this was taking longer than he’d expected.

This cover also slid away into the sea. Curtis slithered along the gold, raised himself through the aft hatch, and by the running lights of Granjya he could see that the two vessels had now yawed widely from one another, like an alligator’s mouth opening very wide. Both ships tried to move steadily forward, but each was hampered by the other, and they were turning almost disdainfully away from one another, the submarine attached by the rope around its rudder at the rear now facing almost directly away from the prow of Granjya.

The rope! Curtis saw it was going to happen, and lunged, but too late. The ships made one more incremental turn away from one another, and the rope tying them together met the spinning propeller of the submarine, and the propeller neatly sliced through.

Immediately the ships lunged away from one another. Curtis saw the lights of Granjya rapidly recede. There were no lights on the submarine.

Dive into the sea? He couldn’t possibly hope to swim fast enough to catch up with Granjya. But if he stayed in the submarine, what then?

Granjya’s lights were fainter, they disappeared. Curtis was getting wet. As the waves ran over the submarine, water ran inside through the two open hatches.

He was in pitch blackness, in this small heaving boat on the surface of the sea. It was riding lower, taking on water faster.

There was no light anywhere in the world, except far away to the north, far away, the cold white sheen of Hong Kong against the night sky. Curtis, standing in the hatchway on his gold ingots, his body moving with the roll of the submarine, kept his eyes on that far-off pale glow.

After a while, the lights were still there, but he was not.