He directed them through the ship down to the storage room, where they’d boarded. The outer door stood open there, the moving night sea hissing outside, the two ropes snaking in to the stanchions, their powerful launch nestled snug against Mallory’s side. There, Manville ordered them to put the wounded man down on the metal floor and then to sit next to him. “Take off your shoes,” he told them, and said to Kim, “Throw those pistols into the launch.”
The leader said, “You’re gonna take our boat?”
Manville ignored him. “Kim, get their shoes. Don’t get between me and them. Take the laces out. You two. Face down on the floor.”
The leader said, “I don’t think I can let you do this.”
He’s dangerous, Manville reminded himself, and he meant to kill me, so this is what I’d better do. He pointed the pistol at the leader’s head, just as the leader was putting a hand behind himself to lever up, to stand.
But then the leader looked at Manville’s face, and as Manville was about to squeeze the trigger the leader abruptly dropped back, hands up in front of his face, saying, “All right. All right.” And now, for the first time, a small flicker of fear did show in the man’s eyes.
I would have killed him, Manville thought, astonished at himself, a little disapproving of himself. I was going to kill him, and he saw that.
The two men lay face down on the metal floor, as he’d ordered. He said, “Hands behind your backs. Kim, use the shoelaces, tie each one’s thumbs together. Tie them tight. Use a lot of knots.”
“Not their wrists?”
“No. If you tie their wrists, their hands are still free, and they can untie one another. If you tie their thumbs, they can’t use their hands anymore.” He had no idea how he knew this, or how it had occurred to him, but he knew he was right.
Once Kim was finished, Manville used the other two laces to tie their ankles, then helped Kim into the launch, saying, “I’m sorry, we’re going to have to do the bumpy trip, after all.”
“That’s all right,” she said, “I’m a lot better.”
Manville climbed into the launch and started the engines. Then he went back to the open door to deal with the ropes, and the leader had twisted around, was propped on one elbow, staring at him. Their eyes met. The leader said, “I’d like to run into you again some time.”
“I wouldn’t,” Manville said, and freed the ropes.
Two
1
Kim had never felt so alone, or so vulnerable. The late morning sun was hot, the day was beautiful, Brisbane reared up all around her like a glass version of the city of Oz, but alone here on this launch on the Brisbane River, tied up to a support at the southern end of the William Jolly Bridge, still she felt cold, with an interior cold the warm sun and the inviting city couldn’t reach.
She was alone in the world. Would George Manville come back? He had saved her life, out there on that ship, he had carried her here, and he had promised he would come back, but would he? Wasn’t it time for him to start taking care of his own life? Hadn’t he made it clear that from here on she was only a burden, an added difficulty when he had his own safety and his own future to worry about?
There had been no conversation at all at first. The nighttime journey in from the Mallory had been slow and bumpy, and had taken all of Manville’s concentration. Not that it had been hard to find the way; Brisbane was a bright pink dome of light against the blackness, just ahead of them to the west. But they were running without lights, in case Curtis’s killers decided to pursue them in one of the Mallory’s launches, and there was no telling what might be anchored or floating in the darkness out ahead. They didn’t want to foul their propellers with some fisherman’s cast-off net or somebody’s lost rope.
This launch was larger and more elaborate than the ones belonging to the ship. It had a proper cabin, with a galley and two proper bunks, one above the other, and Kim spent most of the night on the lower bunk, to ease the soreness as they jolted their way across the bay. Manville had to stay up at the wheel, so there was no conversation between them until, in early morning, she at last climbed out to look at the nearby city sparkling in the fresh sunlight and say, “What do we do first?”
“Hide,” he said, “while I try to find somebody who can help.”
Surprised, she said, “Hide? Aren’t we going to the police?”
“To say what?”
“But— They tried to kill us!”
“Who did? Kim, Captain Zhang isn’t going to back up anything we say, and why should he? And without him, who are we? A disgruntled ex-employee and an environment nut. You don’t even have ID, or a passport, or a visa for this country. What are you going to tell the police, and how are you going to prove it? You can’t even prove who you are.”
“But— They can’t, they can’t just do things like that, and get away with it!”
“Of course they can.”
Morning water traffic was coming out of the wide river mouth now, past the harbor cranes and warehouses and fuel storage tanks; commercial fishermen, barges, private sailboats, excursion boats to take the tourists to see the birdlife on St. Helena Island in the bay. Heading inbound against most of that traffic, Manville had to keep his attention on his steering, while Kim sat on the white vinyl-covered bench behind him and watched the city come closer and the day begin, and she wondered, once they got ashore, what they could possibly do.
The Brisbane River, as twisty as a discarded piece of string, meandered through nine miles of switchbacks through the city, flanked by new glass skyscrapers stacked next to colonial-era buildings of stone and brick. Kim felt she must look very strange, with her matted hair and her borrowed grubby sweater and jeans, and these rubber-tire-soled shoes, but there was so much river traffic, and so much going on ashore as well, that she soon decided nobody was paying any attention to them, and she relaxed a bit.
Several high bridges crossed the river, connecting the two halves of the city. Manville passed a number of them, then said, “Isn’t that a railroad station?”
It was, over there to the left. Just visible beyond some sort of park or fairgrounds. She said, “You want to take a train somewhere?”
“No. But they’ll have phones and phone books, and an ATM, and probably whatever else I need. Curtis knows by now that we got away, and I don’t know exactly what he’ll do, but he’ll certainly try to find us and at the same time he’s sure to try to make us look like criminals or crazies or something, just to protect himself. You might be able to get out from under, with that Planetwatch group to help you, but he could pretty well put a stop to my making a living anywhere in the world.”
“Oh, my God! I hadn’t even thought.”
“I can’t waste a lot of time,” he said. “I’ve got to get hold of some friends, start fighting back. There; we’ll stop there.”
It was a bridge. Just beyond the next curve in the river, the William Jolly, at a quieter place than that fairground back there. Manville cautiously steered them in toward the shallower water, tied the launch to a stanchion where he could get ashore and up to the roadway, and said, “You’ll be all right here for a while. I’ll get back as soon as I can.”
“Okay.”
“If the river police come by, tell them your boyfriend went for beer.”
She smiled at that, and shook her head. “I’ll tell them you went for sunblock. Because that I could use.”
“I’ll bring some,” he promised, and said, “See you soon,” and left her there.