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.