“Such as see Mr. Brevizin.”
A little pause, and, “Who?”
“The lawyer, Brevizin. You—”
“Oh, right! When Mr. Curtis and I had our little, whadayacallit, difference of opinion. That’s all over now.”
“But that was one of the things you had to do, see Mr. Brevizin. Were you doing other things at the same time, having to do with Richard Curtis? Other people you were seeing?”
“That’s all done,” Manville said. His voice had risen half an octave, he sounded as though he might be getting irritated, or upset. “I don’t have to talk about that.”
“Mr. Manville, I’m not accusing you of anything, I merely—”
“Captain Zhang killed himself, that’s what I heard, and that’s what you’re looking into. That’s what you’re looking into, isn’t it?”
“Yes it is, but—”
“I was on his ship for a while, ate some meals at the same table with him, heard him talk Chink with his crew, and that’s it. If you want to know why he did the chop on himself, you’ll have to ask somebody else.”
“I see,” Fairchild said. Firmly holding down his own irritation, he said, “Well, I appreciate your speaking with me, in any event.”
“Inspector, I’ll tell you the truth,” Manville said.
He was sounding more and more like a tough guy, less and less like an engineer. “I want to get along with Mr. Curtis these days,” he said, “and he asked me to call you, so here I am. But I don’t think he wants me to talk about me and him, so that’s what I’m not gonna do.”
“I understand completely,” Fairchild said. “Thank you, Mr. Manville. If I want to call you again…”
“I’m here,” Manville said. “Working hours.”
“Fine. Thank you.”
Fairchild replaced the receiver, and sat tapping his pen point against his memo pad, but wrote nothing down. Manville had not been exactly as anticipated, but on the other hand it was now easier for Fairchild to understand the battle of wills that had gone on last week between him and Curtis. He sounded like a man who could be quick to anger and quick to action. A diamond in the rough, it could be, a fellow from the wrong side of the tracks like Fairchild himself, got his education, became an engineer, highly thought of, but with the guttersnipe still there inside him, ready to be called upon.
And Manville supported Curtis, that was the important thing. So that should settle it; except that it didn’t, not quite. Something faintly buzzed at Fairchild’s attention, some fold in the fabric. Or it could be simply the possibility that Manville was lying now merely to cement his newly good relationship with Curtis.
But had Manville’s reaction to Kim Baldur’s name been a lie? Surely not. That had been real contempt in the man’s voice. Baldur’s description of Manville’s heroics against the thugs who’d boarded the Mallory certainly fit with the man Fairchild had just encountered, but that man wouldn’t be likely to save Kim Baldur from anything. Push her in harm’s way quicker than offer a helping hand.
Five minutes had passed, by the desk clock. Time to make sure no one was pulling a fast one. Fairchild buzzed for Sergeant Willkie, and when he appeared said, “Call that Singapore number, would you? And buzz me when it starts to ring.”
“Right, sir.”
Fairchild sat thinking, and the buzzer sounded, and he picked up to hear the phone ring, and then a female voice: “RC Structural.”
“Mr. Curtis, please.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Curtis won’t be back until tomorrow.”
“Who’s second-in-command there at the moment?”
“Did you want Mr. Lowenthal?”
That was right, according to Fairchild’s information, that was one of Curtis’s vice-presidents. Fairchild said, “No, let me speak to Mr. Manville, please.”
“May I tell him who’s calling?”
“Inspector Fairchild.”
“One moment, please.”
It was in fact forty seconds by the clock, and here was Manville’s tough voice again: “That was quick.”
“It turned out I do have one more question,” Fairchild told him. “Sorry to interrupt your work.”
“Don’t worry about it. What’s the question?”
“During your time at Kanowit Island, did any other ships come by, make contact with Captain Zhang or anyone else on the crew?”
“Naw. We were alone out there until the very end, when those Planetwatch idiots showed up.”
“Well, thank you, Mr. Manville.”
“Any time.”
Fairchild hung up, satisfied. That was Manville, and he was in Singapore, and that was the office number of RC Structural.
There was nothing here. It was all smoke and mirrors. The public catfight between Curtis and Manville had got caught up in a young woman’s self-aggrandizing fantasies, and that was that. Captain Zhang had killed himself, for whatever reason, without a doubt. The two Planetwatch people had watched him unlock his door and enter his room. Very soon thereafter, he had leaped from the window. There was not the slightest sign that anyone else had been in the room. It was not murder, it was suicide, and the case was closed. If Zhang had been engaged in smuggling of some sort, the story would come out sooner or later. For now, there were other cases to think about. It had seemed briefly that Zhang’s death would lead to some more complex situation, but it had all dissolved into nothingness.
Fairchild tapped the buzzer on his desk, and when Sergeant Willkie’s head popped into view in the doorway he said, “Call that lawyer, Brevizin, thank him for making himself available, and tell him I won’t need to speak to him after all.”
“Right, sir.”
As a result of which, Inspector Fairchild did not get to hear Andre Brevizin describe the events involving Kim Baldur, both on the Mallory and here in Brisbane, that George Manville had last Friday related to him.
21
The corporate jet owned by RC Structural had cost sixty-five thousand dollars U.S. per month merely to exist, with its crew and its parking slot at Hong Kong International Airport, and the expenses went even higher whenever Curtis actually used it to go anywhere, so that was the one contraction he’d permitted himself when the money started to tighten and the mainland bastards were squeezing him like an orange. He’d moved his operations to Singapore, but did not move the plane to Changi Airport there, selling it instead—at a decent price, at least—to one of the Chinese businessmen growing sleek on the carcass of the city they’d just killed.
Which meant, these days, when Curtis had to undertake a long flight, he went commercial. But that was all right; he usually took Singapore Air, they knew him, and they treated him well. In fact, he wasn’t at all certain, after this current operation was finished and he was rich again, that he’d buy another jet for himself. That was, at his level, no longer a toy that impressed anybody.
Today’s flight was at five in the afternoon, it would take under four hours, and arrive in Singapore before seven.
The Daimler that Curtis had loaned Pallifer, that had been used to spirit George Manville away to Kennison, was back in Curtis’s possession, along with Harben, the driver, so he rode out to Brisbane International in smooth quiet, spending most of the trip on the phone with aides in his office in Singapore. He’d been away from his workaday business too long.
It would be good when this other stuff was out of the way, mission accomplished, and he could go back to being an ordinary businessman again. He thought of it that way, an oddity, one extraordinary act in the life of an ordinary businessman, who’d been driven to this extreme. But there was so much tension in this plan, and so much he was called on to do that he would never even have thought of doing before. When he’d said, with passion, to that policeman, that he’d never heard of a businessman killing an environmentalist, he’d meant it, meant that it was true, and it was true, and it was something entirely different that, in another compartment in his brain, Richard Curtis was now planning to kill many more than merely o
ne environmentalist. They’d pushed him to it, those bastards, they’d left him no choice but this, to play the game just as hard as they did. Harder.
The airline’s meet-and-greet waited for him at the curb in front of the terminal building. She was an attractive young Asian woman in a dark blue uniform, a clipboard held to her breast by her left forearm in echo of the Statue of Liberty. She’d been the one to walk Curtis through this process three or four times before. Her smile was radiantly welcoming. “Good afternoon, Mr. Curtis. So nice to see you again.”
“And you.” He didn’t remember her name, if he’d ever known it.
She turned to speak a quick word to the skycap waiting behind her, and he nodded, and moved toward the car as Harben came around to open the trunk. “Your luggage will be taken care of,” she said, “and I have your ticket, so all I need is your passport. You’d like to come to the lounge?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
There was great bustle at the main doors to the terminal, down to his right, but the meet-and-greet led him away to the left, down a quiet corridor where they were almost immediately alone. This passage not only took him to the VIP lounge, it also meant he was not in the main part of the terminal three minutes later, when Kim Baldur and Jerry Diedrich and Luther Rickendorf arrived in a cab.
Curtis had a scotch and water in the lounge while the meet-and-greet took his passport and ticket away to handle the formalities for him. He read a Wall Street Journal he found there, and was amused to see that the paper still thought there was some story left in his little public dance with George Manville. Neither he nor George were actually mentioned, but the story, a rehash of various questionable activities by Robert Bendix and his Intertekno over the last several years, was clearly inspired by last weekend’s flap. So now Bendix receives a little unwelcome publicity, while Curtis goes about his business unobserved; things couldn’t get much better than that.
Half an hour later, the meet-and-greet was back, to smilingly hand him his passport and ticket, and escort him to the plane, along with two other businessmen, one a Brit, the other Japanese. Their route was back hallways, mostly empty, not emerging into the normal public area until they were almost to the gate, where the last of the other passengers were straggling aboard. Standard first-class passengers would have been boarded first, for the coach passengers then to sidle past on their way back to steerage, but the ones brought by the meet-and-greet arrived last, when the fuss and bustle were over. At the gate, the meet-and-greet wished her trio a bon voyage and went away, clipboard still shield-like at her breast, while Curtis and the other two were now greeted by equally smiling and equally attractive stewardesses, who took hand luggage (Curtis had none) and drink orders, and escorted their VIPs to their seats.
Curtis always took an aisle seat, for greater mobility; and what is there to see out of a plane window, after all? Today, his seatmate was a purple-jowled angry-eyed American, already at work, reading what appeared to be a legal brief and making small meticulous notes on a yellow legal pad.
Curtis was immediately reminded of the policeman, Fairchild, and his own crabbed notes, even smaller than this fellow’s handwriting, in that notebook of his. Well, he’d done what he could, with both Fairchild and the lawyer, Brevizin, to put out the fires Manville and Kim Baldur had started. With just a small amount of luck, the whole episode would quickly blow over and be forgotten. No crime, no criminals, nothing to investigate, no cause for suspicion. One Chinese sea officer, dead by his own hand, and one idiotic young woman with an overly rich imagination; nothing more.
He accepted his scotch and soda and silently toasted his own success. His seatmate, after one quick scowling glance to reassure himself that Curtis wasn’t a beautiful woman, had gone back to work, which was also a plus. Curtis wasn’t one for chitchat on airplanes.
Almost immediately, they were taxiing, and as the pilot’s voice told the crew to prepare for takeoff the stewardess came by to reclaim Curtis’s now empty glass, and just like that they were in the sky. Curtis pushed his seat back and his leg rest out, and dozed, smiling, thinking of how well things were going.
Half an hour later, some alteration in engine sound or plane movement brought him awake, to see his lawyer friend still busy. Time for a magazine. He would prefer Scientific American to Black Enterprise, but he’d take what was there. Rising, he walked back to the eye-level shelf where the magazines were stacked, looked through them, settled for Newsweek, and glanced down the aisle at the crowded coach section as he was about to turn back to his seat.
Jerry Diedrich.
Curtis stopped. He had never actually met Diedrich, but he’d seen him at a distance several times (several irritating times), and he’d seen Diedrich’s self-satisfied face in newspapers at least twice. That was him, in the aisle seat of three, talking with a very animated young woman in the middle seat.
Kim Baldur.
It had to be. Curtis had never seen her conscious, but he remembered that sleeping face, and this was her.
And how very lively she was, alive.
Baldur and Diedrich, together, on their way to Singapore. And the man on the other side, the window seat, the blond Germanic-looking one; was he part of the group? Yes; he turned and spoke to the other two, then looked out his window again, at the nothing out there.
Curtis turned away, not wanting to be recognized. He went back to his seat, the forgotten magazine still in his hand, and the stewardess asked him if he was ready for his snack. Yes. And wine? White, please.
While he ate the caviar, and the shrimp, and the hearts of palm, and the other delicacies, Curtis considered the situation. Those three were on their way to Singapore.
There could only be one reason. They hadn’t succeeded in obstructing him in Australia, so they would pursue him to Singapore. They had a mole somewhere in his organization, a spy, he was sure of it; they’d learned he was traveling back today and were on his trail. Diedrich would stop at nothing, would use every advantage, to interfere, to cause trouble. And this time it just couldn’t be allowed.
Who is the mole? Who is the spy in my camp? How do I find him, and how do I get rid of him—and of those three back there?
This new project kept constantly moving him into areas beyond his experience as a businessman. In all his enterprises, he had nearly two thousand permanent employees, plus the thousands more hired for specific short-term jobs in construction and the like, but who among them would be useful for the tasks he now had to assign? Those three would get off the plane in Singapore. They had to be met somehow, they had to be dealt with. The spy in Curtis’s bosom had to be dealt with.
In the seatback ahead of him there nested a telephone. Who could he call, and what could he say, to have these problems taken care of? He thought about his employees, the ones he knew, and he tried to pick and choose and find the right one. He had no one in Singapore like Morgan Pallifer, and it was too late now to phone Pallifer back in Australia and tell him to hurry in their wake. The three had to be intercepted somehow when this plane landed.
Who in Singapore did he know, and trust? Who could handle a thing like this?
The remains of the snack were taken away. Curtis slid his tray into its space in the armrest. He leaned forward and snapped out the telephone.
THREE
1
Colin Bennett drove his little Honda Civic out the East Coast Parkway to Changi International Airport, followed the signs to Terminal 2, and stopped as close as possible to the glass doors where the arriving passengers streamed out, deploying into the taxis and buses and limousines and private cars funneled into orderly ranks; neat and tidy and controlled, like everything else in Singapore.
His Timex said quarter to seven (he’d long ago pawned the Rolex), so the Air Singapore flight from Sydney should be landing just about now. Changi was noted for its efficiency; within fifteen minutes, that flow of incomers over there, through with Customs and reunited with their luggage, would include the travelers from Australia.
Bennett picked up the three pages of faxed photos from the seat beside him, and studied them once again.
Jerry Diedrich. Always with his mouth open, always looking aggravated and aggrieved. The perfect look for those morons at Planetwatch.
“This is your lucky day, boyo,” he told himself, and smiled out at the endless herd of travelers, waiting for Jerry Diedrich to appear. “You’ll have no trouble pickin him out,” he assured himself, “and the next thing you know you’ll be fat and happy again, and damn well time for it, too. God bless Richard Curtis and keep him warm and content.”
Colin Bennett had started talking to himself two years ago, after the wife and kiddies left. He didn’t blame Brenda, he knew he’d turned mean and solitary after he’d lost his job, but there hadn’t seemed to be any way to break out of the pattern. Self-destructive, nasty, he’d become someone no one wanted to be around except himself, so that’s who he talked to.
He didn’t blame Curtis either, for firing him. Curtis had had damn good reason. And Curtis hadn’t even known the full extent of the mess Colin Bennett had made of things. He didn’t know a man had died.
Bennett was a construction man by trade, or had been, a big burly fellow—too large for this Honda Civic, for instance, which he seemed to wear rather than ride in—who had worked for RC Structural for nine years before he’d made his beaut of a mistake. In that time, he’d moved up from crew foreman to works manager, running the whole damn site for the engineers. In those days, he was outgoing and popular, a cheerful rowdy sort of man who claimed he got along with everybody because he looked like everybody, which was very nearly true. His father had been half English and half Malay, while his mother was half Dutch and half Chinese, and the mixture had created a big man whose squarish face featured slightly uptilted eyes, a gently mashed nose, a broad mouth and high prominent cheekbones. His ears lay flat to his skull, and his hair was straight and thick and black, now beginning to gray at the sides.
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