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 one 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.