Steve was looking out his side window at the passing bustle of Brisbane, not interested in the conversation. So Pallifer quit his grinning, and said to Manville, “She run away from us. Would you believe that? She run away clean, but that’s why we knew you’d show up at the same place.”
“Oh,” Manville said, and turned to look at the back of Steve’s head. “That’s why you said she was out of breath.”
Steve turned to give Manville his own cold look. “I’m done with talk for today,” he said, and turned aside, and looked out the window some more.
Pallifer said, “Steve isn’t your social type. Steve is more your killer type. And the situation is, Mr. Curtis asked Steve and Raf and me to collect you and Kim — Kim? is that it? — yeah, Kim. To collect you and Kim, because he misses you. He said to me, he said, ‘Morgan, that George Manville is a right smart engineer, I could use his brains some more, so would you just collect him and bring him to me, so we can let bygones be bygones?’ And I said, ‘Mr. Curtis, I will. But what if it turns out this Manville makes trouble?’ And you know how he is, Mr. Curtis, you know how he talks. He just shrugged, you know how he does, and he said, ‘Oh, if he makes trouble, kill him.’ Now, you know I’m not lying to you, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Manville said.
“And this isn’t a lie, either,” Pallifer told him. “You pestered me out on that ship, you truly did. I didn’t like it, and I must say I don’t like you. Now I know Mr. Curtis would like it better if you didn’t make any trouble, but I’d like it better if you did. You follow me?”
“I won’t make trouble,” Manville said.
“Well, that’s a shame,” Pallifer told him, “although it will make Mr. Curtis’s day. Now, we got about four hundred miles to travel, so just you take it easy, don’t do any scheming with that bright brain of yours, and everything will be okay.”
Apparently, Manville believed him. To Pallifer’s astonishment, the son of a bitch folded his arms, put his head back, shifted his body around into a more comfortable position on the seat, and closed his eyes.
It was more than four hundred miles, though not many more, all of it almost perfectly due west. Out of the city of Brisbane, they stayed on route 54 past Ipswich and Toowoomba, on the rim of the Great Dividing Range, and on to Dalby, where they left the main road for the almost as big Route 49, dipping slightly south to run across the Darling Downs, the great fertile flatlands, boring but fecund, with mile after mile of cotton and wheat, sprawling ranches, tiny towns, huge sky.
Twice they stopped for everyone to walk off into the fields to relieve themselves, both times with Manville where the others could keep a close eye on him. At St. George, with darkness just creeping up behind them, the sun out in front of them floating downward toward the broken line of hills to the west, they stopped to refuel, again giving Manville no opportunity to make a move unseen.
Beyond St. George, with a great bruised sunset burning its way down the sky, the chauffeur squinting and ducking his head behind his dark glasses, the farms of the Darling Downs petered out, giving way to herds of grazing sheep and cattle, none of whom paid any attention in the gathering darkness to the occasional passage of headlights out on the road. The land looked dryer here, reaching away in brown folds, like a tumbled blanket.
At the small settlement of Bollen, they turned left again, onto a much smaller and more twisty road, climbing into dry hills. They passed Murra Murra, barely a dozen lights in the blackness, and then turned off onto an unmarked dirt road that twisted up into the dark, posting back and forth, detouring around the hillocks. They drove past groups of shaggy-coated cattle that blinked in their headlights and shuffled slowly out of their way, bumping their shoulders together as they went. They drove on for three or four miles, over rolling open country, the Daimler taking the terrain like a good powerboat on a moderate sea, and then all at once they crested a rise and a bowl of lights appeared before them, down a farther hill, like a wide low glass jar full of fireflies.
It was a house, a ranch, what the Australians call a station, a sprawling adobe structure, two stories high, ablaze with light. Spotlights mounted high on the exterior walls flared on the road, showed a helicopter squatted with drooping rotors near the entrance, made tiny sharp black shadows among the tough grasses that covered these hills.
“Look at that,” Pallifer said, nudging Manville, who didn’t respond, and pointing at the helicopter, as they drove on by it.
“Your friend Mr. Curtis, he’s so excited to see you again, he flew out here already.”
The Daimler drove past the front of the house, with its deep wooden-posted porch dotted with rough wooden benches and small tables, and followed the faint track of the road around to the side, where a tan overhead garage door in the flank of the building, near the rear, one of three such doors in a row, all the same color as the adobe of the building, was already lifting up out of the way, welcoming them.
The Daimler drove inside, into a space already flanked by two other vehicles, under strong overhead lights. The garage door, one solid piece of metal in an electrically operated track, angled back down again and snicked shut. A minute later, all the exterior lights went out.
10
“Let me do the talking,” Jerry said.
“I always do,” Luther told him.
They’d flown up from Sydney this morning, as Jerry had promised Kim’s parents he would, but then had wasted precious time on the wrong assumption that Captain Zhang would be living on his ship. The crew members they’d approached had been no help at all, either not speaking English or pretending not to, but then a smooth young Japanese gentleman in a suit had come by, at the gangplank where Jerry and Luther were frustratingly being held, not permitted even to board the Mallory, and the gentleman had turned out to be with the company that was replacing the ship’s missing lifeboat. He it was who told them that Captain Zhang was staying at a hotel in town, the Tasman Crest — “As am I myself” — during the time the ship was forced to remain in harbor.
The Tasman Crest was a mid-range smallish hotel near City Hall that seemed to cater to Asian businessmen almost exclusively, which was probably why their cabdriver had seemed surprised when they gave it as their destination. The young woman at the desk rang the captain’s room for them without result.
“You could wait for him,” she offered, with a gesture toward a seating area nearby.
“Thank you,” Jerry said, and they went over to sit on broad low chairs with thick pale green cushions and bamboo arms. A fountain was nearby, a gentle plash of water onto polished stones, an unobtrusive white noise which would make any conversation in this place something close to confidential.
Jerry was feeling more and more frustrated. “We don’t know what he looks like, only the sound of his voice. What if he isn’t in his uniform? He could go in and out a dozen times, and we wouldn’t know.”
“She said she called room 423,” Luther said. “And the key is in that slot, along with a message. Possibly two messages. Jerry, don’t turn around, I can see it fine from here. We just have to wait.” And when Jerry didn’t respond to that: “What are we going to do tonight?”
They’d decided to spend tonight in Brisbane, staying at a Sheraton because Planetwatch got a group discount, so now Jerry permitted Luther to distract him with a discussion of how they’d spend their evening. There were good seafood restaurants here, and good jazz clubs, and other clubs that might be of interest. They wouldn’t be bored.
“Ah,” Luther said, and got to his feet.