But not sleepy, not the way she’d been before. Now she was too tense to be sleepy, too worried, too frightened. People coming here to this ship to kill her? It was unbelievable, and yet she had to believe it.
Would she hear them arrive? Would they find her?
Would Manville and the captain be able to help?
She couldn’t sleep, not at all. She lay there in the darkness, eyes open, looking at nothing, and nearly two hours later she heard the distant thump.
24
Morgan Pallifer once had his own ship, but that was years ago, in a completely different ocean. He had the ship because he and the Colombians were useful to one another, and then he lost the ship because the situation changed.
Oh, he was still useful to the Colombians; it’s just that he was useful in a different way. He became useful to the Colombians as a bargaining chip in their sub rosa dealings with the American authorities. They would permit Pallifer and his lovely sloop, the Pally, to be caught by agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration when he made landfall at South Carolina with the cabin of the sloop full of duffel bags full of white plastic bags full of cocaine. The Pally was impounded, having been used in the drug trade, and Morgan Pallifer spent seven hard years in a Federal maximum-security prison, and now, gracious me, Morgan Pallifer can’t vote in American elections anymore. Hah!
Oh, he understood how it worked, he wasn’t bitter. The Pally had been in his name, but the Colombians had actually bought it for him, so it was really theirs, so they could take it away from him and give it to the DEA if it suited their needs. And he’d had four terrific years sailing the Colombians’ ship and spending the Colombians’ money, so it wasn’t a bad deal to pay for it with seven years cowering like a cur in that Federal kennel. The American authorities were enabled to rack up yet another wonderful public success in their war on drugs — success after success, and yet nothing changes — and they got to do it by putting away some scruffy unimportant American citizen without harming their vitally important geopolitical interests with the Colombians.
Morgan Pallifer wasn’t bitter, but he wasn’t stupid, either. He did his seven years hard, he worked in a marina in Newport Beach, California for the three years of his parole, and the instant he was a completely free man he applied for and got a new passport and got the fuck out of that country. He’d been a citizen of the Pacific Rim ever since, nearly thirty years now, working when he had to, stealing when he could, living on the sea as much as possible, working other men’s boats but never his own.
Sometimes the boats belonged to Richard Curtis, a good man in Morgan Pallifer’s estimation, who occasionally needed to get around various regulations by bypassing the normal import-export routes, and when that happened, Curtis knew Morgan Pallifer was someone he could depend on, and Pallifer knew Richard Curtis had good money and good boats.
Today, Morgan Pallifer was 62, lean and leathery and mean as a snake. His faded blue eyes could almost look kindly at a distance, but they were not.
Tonight’s work was straightforward, and lucrative. Pallifer had a good power launch of Curtis’s, and a three-man crew of his own, people he could rely on. He’d done this kind of thing before, though not for Curtis, so this was a new level of their business relationship, and one that Pallifer was happy with. He would do his customary efficient job tonight, and Curtis would be pleased, and who knows what other interesting work might lie ahead? He might even have his own ship again one of these days, in waters not polluted by the Americans’ high piousness and low dealings.
They came out from Brisbane Bay after dark, and made their approach to the Mallory keeping the bigger ship to port, so the bulk of Moreton Island lay behind them, to make them just that much harder to be seen. They swung around behind the white yacht, as it sluggishly moved shoreward like some fat nun waiting for the bandits, and Pallifer, at the helm, saw the space along the starboard side of the yacht where a launch was missing.
Did the birdies fly away? Or do they want poor old Morgan Pallifer to think they flew away?
Pallifer was good with boats. He brought this launch in tight to the Mallory’s flank without quite touching her, and behind him Arn swung the grappling hook forward and back, and in the darkness it looked like an unlit chandelier. Arn flung it high, and the curved arms of it cleared the rail up there, and at once Pallifer turned the wheel, so that the launch eased away from the white side of the yacht, making the rope more taut, out at an angle from the ship, so skinny little rope-muscled Arn could shinny up it without trouble.
Pallifer had not brought with him the ship’s plan of the Mallory that Curtis had loaned him, but he remembered the layout, and had planned accordingly. Just ahead of him on this side was the door to the storage area, for loading supplies, a plain white metal door in the ship’s white skin that was barely visible and that would be at deck level when Mallory was in port. Now, once Arn was aboard and had tossed the grappling hook back down into the sea between them for Frank to reel in, Pallifer eased the launch forward to that door. Above, Arn would be scurrying inside the ship into the main corridor, racing down the interior stairs, and then hurrying forward to the storage area. In just a minute, this door would open, and there it was, and there was Arn.
Frank and Bardo were the muscle. While Pallifer held the launch steady beside the open door, those two leaped across the moving space, holding onto the ends of ropes. Aboard, they looped the ropes around small stanchions just inside the doorway, to make the launch fast to the yacht, causing only one thump to sound when the two vessels came together. Once they were secure, Pallifer switched off the launch’s two engines and stepped aboard the Mallory.
This wasn’t his kind of ship. It was more like a country house than something seaworthy, with its carpeted stairways and expanses of glass. This wasn’t the sort of vessel Pallifer loved to sail on and craved to own.
But he wasn’t here to put an option on the Mallory, was he? No, it was a simple killing he was here for, that’s all. Two killings, to be turned into one natural death and one disappearance.
Except that the subjects weren’t where they were supposed to be. Pallifer and Arn and Frank and Bardo padded through the ship, undisturbed, knowing the crew would all be asleep and the captain obediently blind and deaf on the bridge, and when they got to cabin 4, where the disappearee was supposed to be bunked, the place was empty. No clothing, no personal possessions left behind. He’d moved out.
They went down one deck to cabin 7, where the natural death was to be waiting, and it, too was empty, but here at least the bed had been used and left mussed. And so had the bed in the cabin across the way, number 6. So the man had come down here to guard the woman, but then they’d both gone somewhere else.
Where? Off the ship? Pallifer didn’t believe it, not from Curtis’s description of the girl’s condition. No, more likely, the two of them had set loose that launch and then hidden themselves somewhere aboard the Mallory, because they’d be thinking all they were up against was some simple stupid riff-raff. They wouldn’t be expecting Morgan Pallifer.
The four men stood in the corridor between cabins 6 and 7, and Pallifer said, “All right, we’ll find them aboard somewhere, but I’d best check in first with Curtis. He wanted me to ring if there was a complication.”