Forever and a Death

by Donald E. Westlake

  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.