The girl was alive. Could he have told her parents that? But then so many more questions would have come from them, questions he was terrified to answer. What had happened on the ship? What had been intended, and by whom? And what was Captain Zhang’s role in it all?
The girl was alive, or she’d been alive when she’d left the ship with that engineer. But was she still alive, were either of them still alive, or had some other of Curtis’s men caught up with them? Should he say the girl was alive, if he didn’t know?
But what if she were still alive, and finally came forward, and told everything that had happened on the ship? Then people would know he had lied, and they would demand to know why.
He had never wanted to be involved in this. He was good at his work, and that was all he’d wanted. He wasn’t supposed to have these burdens.
He sat on the side of the bed. Next to the telephone were a ballpoint pen and a notepad, the name of the hotel at its top in Japanese and English. Zhang picked up pen and pad and wrote, under the letterhead, “Yanling.”
What would he say next? What would he tell his wife? There was insurance; they would be taken care of. This way, there would be no shame and no disaster. But how could he tell her all that, on a scrap of paper in a hotel room, under a name in Japanese and English?
“I love you,” he wrote, and put the pad and pen back next to the telephone, and got to his feet.
It all started because of the girl, the diver. If she had not launched herself into the sea, nothing bad would have happened.
Zhang reached the window, and bent forward. Without pausing, he put both hands on the windowsill and launched himself headfirst into the air.
12
“I’m really sorry, Jerry,” Kim said yet again, and yet again he gave her his rattled martyr look and said, “It’s all right, Kim, it really is.”
When she’d first seen him collapse like that, downstairs in the lobby, she’d thought he’d been shot, that one of Richard Curtis’s killers had found her and fired at her and missed and killed Jerry. But then Luther dropped to his knees beside him, and called, “Jerry! Jerry!” and Jerry’s eyes fluttered, and Kim realized he’d only fainted.
Not only; she wouldn’t dare say he’d only fainted. Jerry was taking it all very seriously. And it’s true he’d hit the floor hard, falling sideways, bruising his left hip and raising a shiny bump on his head, above his left ear, just in front of the hairline. Luther kept putting fresh wet, cold washcloths on it, from the bathroom sink, so it wasn’t getting any worse, but it wasn’t getting any better either.
As Luther and Kim together had helped the quivering Jerry back to his feet, he’d looked at her with still-frightened eyes and said, “You aren’t a ghost. You’re real.”
“I’m real, Jerry,” she promised him, and for the first of many times she said, “I’m really sorry,” and he assured her it was all right, and she and Luther helped him to rise and walk to the elevator. They went up in it together and into their room, which was a surprising mess, clothing and luggage and personal effects strewn just everywhere, the bed rumpled and unmade.
Kim helped Luther straighten the top cover so Jerry could lie down. Luther went away for the first of the wet washcloths, and Kim told her story.
Parts of it she had to tell more than once, particularly the suggestion that George Manville, Richard Curtis’s chief engineer on the Kanowit Island project, creator of the shock wave that had reconfigured the island and threatened the delicate coral of the barrier reef and almost killed Kim herself, wasn’t a villain after all. Not a bad man, but a good one.
“He saved my life,” she told them more than once, and described how astonishingly Manville had shot the killer, and how brilliantly he’d arranged their escape from the ship, and how, through some friend of his in Houston, he’d even made contact with a lawyer here in Brisbane who was going to help them all, but how now it was all messed up.
“I don’t know where he is,” she said. “I don’t know what happened to him.”
“Got on with his life, I suppose,” Jerry said. He still didn’t get it.
But Luther did, by now. He said, “You’re sure it was just coincidence, them seeing you there. The people who chased you.”
“Yes, of course, it had to be,” she said. “Only George knew where I was, and if he was going to turn me over to those people he could have done it a long time ago. In fact, he never had to save me in the first place.”
Luther said, “Would they have known you were waiting for Manville?”
“Probably. They knew I’d got off the ship with him, they probably figured we were hiding out together.”
“So,” Luther said, “they might have gone back to where they saw you, deciding that you had been waiting to meet up with Manville again.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” she agreed. “I got so lost, running away from them, it took me forever to find the Mall again, and of course by then he wasn’t there.”
Luther said, “So either he was captured by them or he escaped the way you did.”
“I went to the parking lot where we left the car,” she said. “George rented this little red car, and it was still there. I called the lawyer’s office, but it was almost five o’clock by then, and everybody was gone. He wasn’t at the Mall, and he didn’t pick up his car. So that’s when I tried to call you two, at the Planetwatch office down in Sydney, and the people there said you were up here, and which hotel, so I just waited in the lobby. And I’m really sorry, Jerry.”
“It’s all right, Kim, it really is.”
“Well,” Luther said, “there’s nothing we can do now. It’s nearly six o’clock on a Friday afternoon, everybody’s gone away for the weekend. What I suggest you do, first you should call your parents.”
“Oh, my God, I have to!” Kim said, startled by the realization. “They were told I was dead, weren’t they? What time is it in Chicago?”
“They’re here,” Luther said. “Well, not here, in Brisbane, but here in Australia.”
Kim blinked. “They are? Why?”
“Because you’re dead,” Jerry told her. His voice sounded hollow, as though he were speaking from a tomb.
“I’m really sorry, Jerry,” she said, almost reflexively by now.
Luther said, “They’re down in Sydney, in a hotel there, you should phone them soon.”
“Yes. I will. But then, what about George?”
“I think,” Luther said, “Manville was right when he said you shouldn’t go to the police yet, until he’d had legal advice. But now things are different. I think you should stay here tonight” — Jerry gave him a startled look, and Luther went smoothly on — “we’ll get you a room as close to this one as we can, and then in the morning you can telephone the place where you and Manville were staying, to see if he’s come back. If he hasn’t, we’ll go look for the car in the parking lot. If it’s still there, I vote we go to the police.”
“Oh, absolutely,” Jerry said. “This is Richard Curtis at his worst, his absolute worst. I know some people think I harp on him too much, but now you get a sense of the man, you see what it is he’s capable of, what we’re up against. The police, absolutely.”
“Thank you, Jerry,” Luther said, and said to Kim, “Do you want to call your parents from here, or wait till you’ve got your own room?”