Pallifer nodded, considering that. “You say the girl came off another ship. No documents on her?”
“Identification? None. No passport, no driver’s license, nothing.”
“If I was them,” Pallifer said, “and I didn’t want to bother with the law just yet, I’d hole up in one of the tourist sections around here, up or down the coast.”
“And how would you find them?” Curtis asked. “Drive up and down the beach?”
“Well, he has to pay his way, doesn’t he?” Pallifer said. “He’ll use credit cards, won’t he?” Pallifer turned his head to look at Curtis, and he was almost smiling. He said, “How hard is it to get a look at a man’s credit card history?”
“Not hard,” Curtis said, “if you want to wait two weeks or a month, to find out where they used to be.”
“He’s an American,” Pallifer pointed out. “Lots of tourists around here, but damn few of them American. He’s got to use his own name, because that’s what’s on the card. The transactions go through one of the banks here in Brisbane, don’t they?”
“I’m not sure how that works,” Curtis said, “but I have people who know. We’re looking for an American credit card being used somewhere around here today.”
“When I find ’em,” Pallifer said, “is it the same as before?”
“The girl should disappear,” Curtis told him. “No body, no questions, she doesn’t get to tell anything to Diedrich. If you can hold onto Manville, do, and let me know. He’s the engineer, he could still be valuable.”
“He could be trouble,” Pallifer said, and the phone rang.
“If he’s trouble, of course, you kill him.” Curtis picked up the phone: “Curtis.”
“Richard. It’s Robert here.” Bendix, though American, had been living in Switzerland for so long, avoiding U.S. Federal tax indictments, that he was beginning to develop a faint German accent.
Curtis said, “Robert, I have to admit I’m a little disappointed in you.”
Surprised, Bendix said, “What? Have I done something?”
“I have an engineer that works for me,” Curtis told him, “a brilliant man, George Manville.”
“I’ve heard the name.”
“Of course you have. I just now learned that he’s been betraying me.”
“I’m shocked to hear that,” Bendix said, sounding calm.
“He offered several of my business secrets for sale,” Curtis said. “Bids on projects, sourcings of materiel, things like that.”
“These grubby little people,” Bendix said. “Tsk, tsk.” He said it that way: tsk, tsk.
“He offered this information to you,” Curtis said.
“Why, the swine,” Bendix said. “I hope I threw him out on his ear.”
“I’m afraid,” Curtis said, “you gave him a hearing. I believe you even looked at some of the documents he’d stolen from me.”
“Perhaps I was drunk.”
“I’m here in Brisbane now,” Curtis went on, “where I just discovered this thievery, and I’m sorry, Robert, but I have no choice but to go to the police.”
“Perfectly understandable,” Bendix assured him. “Unfortunate, of course, but I quite see where you have no alternative.”
“None. It will probably mean, as well, that I’ll be forced to say some unpleasant things about you in the press.”
“Speaking of swine,” Bendix said. “Well, I’ve been spoken of unkindly before.”
“I’m sure you have.”
“Now, you know, Richard,” Bendix said, “I’m certainly not going to admit to having encouraged this fellow.”
“No, of course not.”
“However,” Bendix said, “I suppose I could manage not to deny it very forcefully either. I’m rather good, in fact, at being coy.”
Curtis laughed. “I’m sure you are. I’d like to watch some time.”
“Never. How’s Brisbane?”
“Warm. How’s Geneva?”
“Cold. Nice talking to you.”
“And you, Robert.” Curtis broke the connection, then dialed the hotel operator: “Police headquarters, please.”
3
Luther walked into their cabin and Jerry was still seated there, crosslegged on his bunk, gazing moodily at nothing at all.
“We’re there, Jerry,” he said. “Come outside and watch.”
Jerry came back from far away, and gave Luther a bleak look. Sighing, he said, “I’m dreading this, Luther.”
“The parents, you mean.”
“Of course the parents.”
“Well,” Luther said, “brooding in here isn’t going to get it over with any faster. Come out on deck, look at the world.”
“The world,” Jerry said, as though repelled by the idea, but he did obediently get up from his bunk and follow Luther out of the cabin. The two went single file down the narrow corridor and up the ladder to the foredeck.
Planetwatch III had already rounded South Head and was well into the harbor waters called Port Jackson, surrounded by the hugely sprawling city of Sydney. Ahead soared the perfect arch of Sydney Harbour Bridge, uniting the two halves of the city, while just this side of it and to its left sat poised the Opera House, that great gleaming white bird with folded wings.
Usually Jerry both enjoyed this view and was appalled by it, the great spread of massive buildings up the hillslopes from gleaming beaches both beautiful in themselves and horrible in their implications of massive environmental damage. He could dwell endlessly on the contradictions as their little ship steamed slowly westward into the harbor.
But not today. Today, Jerry saw nothing, because out there in front of him, somewhere in all that muscular teeming space, were Kim Baldur’s mother and father.
Of course they’d been told, as soon as possible. Two days ago Kim had gone over the side and disappeared, most certainly dead. As soon as Planetwatch III had gotten out of range of those deadly waves, Jerry had radioed to the Planetwatch office here in Sydney to report what had happened, and they in turn had notified the main Planetwatch headquarters in Seattle, who had informed Mr. and Mrs. Baldur in Chicago. Who had immediately flown here, and had been waiting for the slow-moving Planetwatch III since last night.
It was Jerry’s responsibility. It was his responsibility that Kim had done that rash thing, that foolish thing, thinking he would want her to do it, and so it was his responsibility to face the parents, answer their questions, accept whatever blame they wanted to put on him.
Today. Now. In that city, closing around him as the ship turned to port to enter Woolloomooloo Bay, closing around him like the gleaming white teeth in the jaws of the world’s most massive shark.
Planetwatch maintained a storefront office on George Street in The Rocks, a lesser tourist and shopping area overlooking Sydney Cove. Amid the restraint of the restored 19th-century buildings of the neighborhood, Planetwatch’s shop window of color photographs of ecological horrors blown up to gargantuan scale struck a strident note that only Planetwatch’s supporters couldn’t see.
It was in the conference room behind the store area that Jerry and Captain Cousseran, along with three local Planetwatch volunteers, met the parents, all of them seated on the uncomfortable green vinyl chairs around the free-form cream-colored Formica coffee table under the fluorescent ceiling lights, in the conversation area away from the main long rectangular conference table. Michael Baldur was a large man in his mid-fifties, with large jowls and black-framed eyeglasses and thinning gray hair; he was dressed in the same discreetly expensive dark blue pinstripe suit and white shirt and dark figured tie he would wear to his executive’s office in a large merchant bank in Chicago’s Loop. Kristin Baldur was a tiny woman who tried not to look as though she were in her late forties. Her medium-length ash blonde hair was carefully informal, her makeup insistently discreet, her Hermès scarf casually but perfectly draped over her padded shoulders. She had clearly been a beauty in her youth, of a delicate and more powerful sort than her healthily attractive daughter.