Five minutes had passed, by the desk clock. Time to make sure no one was pulling a fast one. Fairchild buzzed for Sergeant Willkie, and when he appeared said, “Call that Singapore number, would you? And buzz me when it starts to ring.”
“Right, sir.”
Fairchild sat thinking, and the buzzer sounded, and he picked up to hear the phone ring, and then a female voice: “RC Structural.”
“Mr. Curtis, please.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Curtis won’t be back until tomorrow.”
“Who’s second-in-command there at the moment?”
“Did you want Mr. Lowenthal?”
That was right, according to Fairchild’s information, that was one of Curtis’s vice-presidents. Fairchild said, “No, let me speak to Mr. Manville, please.”
“May I tell him who’s calling?”
“Inspector Fairchild.”
“One moment, please.”
It was in fact forty seconds by the clock, and here was Manville’s tough voice again: “That was quick.”
“It turned out I do have one more question,” Fairchild told him. “Sorry to interrupt your work.”
“Don’t worry about it. What’s the question?”
“During your time at Kanowit Island, did any other ships come by, make contact with Captain Zhang or anyone else on the crew?”
“Naw. We were alone out there until the very end, when those Planetwatch idiots showed up.”
“Well, thank you, Mr. Manville.”
“Any time.”
Fairchild hung up, satisfied. That was Manville, and he was in Singapore, and that was the office number of RC Structural.
There was nothing here. It was all smoke and mirrors. The public catfight between Curtis and Manville had got caught up in a young woman’s self-aggrandizing fantasies, and that was that. Captain Zhang had killed himself, for whatever reason, without a doubt. The two Planetwatch people had watched him unlock his door and enter his room. Very soon thereafter, he had leaped from the window. There was not the slightest sign that anyone else had been in the room. It was not murder, it was suicide, and the case was closed. If Zhang had been engaged in smuggling of some sort, the story would come out sooner or later. For now, there were other cases to think about. It had seemed briefly that Zhang’s death would lead to some more complex situation, but it had all dissolved into nothingness.
Fairchild tapped the buzzer on his desk, and when Sergeant Willkie’s head popped into view in the doorway he said, “Call that lawyer, Brevizin, thank him for making himself available, and tell him I won’t need to speak to him after all.”
“Right, sir.”
As a result of which, Inspector Fairchild did not get to hear Andre Brevizin describe the events involving Kim Baldur, both on the Mallory and here in Brisbane, that George Manville had last Friday related to him.
21
The corporate jet owned by RC Structural had cost sixty-five thousand dollars U.S. per month merely to exist, with its crew and its parking slot at Hong Kong International Airport, and the expenses went even higher whenever Curtis actually used it to go anywhere, so that was the one contraction he’d permitted himself when the money started to tighten and the mainland bastards were squeezing him like an orange. He’d moved his operations to Singapore, but did not move the plane to Changi Airport there, selling it instead — at a decent price, at least — to one of the Chinese businessmen growing sleek on the carcass of the city they’d just killed.
Which meant, these days, when Curtis had to undertake a long flight, he went commercial. But that was all right; he usually took Singapore Air, they knew him, and they treated him well. In fact, he wasn’t at all certain, after this current operation was finished and he was rich again, that he’d buy another jet for himself. That was, at his level, no longer a toy that impressed anybody.
Today’s flight was at five in the afternoon, it would take under four hours, and arrive in Singapore before seven.
The Daimler that Curtis had loaned Pallifer, that had been used to spirit George Manville away to Kennison, was back in Curtis’s possession, along with Harben, the driver, so he rode out to Brisbane International in smooth quiet, spending most of the trip on the phone with aides in his office in Singapore. He’d been away from his workaday business too long.
It would be good when this other stuff was out of the way, mission accomplished, and he could go back to being an ordinary businessman again. He thought of it that way, an oddity, one extraordinary act in the life of an ordinary businessman, who’d been driven to this extreme. But there was so much tension in this plan, and so much he was called on to do that he would never even have thought of doing before. When he’d said, with passion, to that policeman, that he’d never heard of a businessman killing an environmentalist, he’d meant it, meant that it was true, and it was true, and it was something entirely different that, in another compartment in his brain, Richard Curtis was now planning to kill many more than merely one environmentalist. They’d pushed him to it, those bastards, they’d left him no choice but this, to play the game just as hard as they did. Harder.
The airline’s meet-and-greet waited for him at the curb in front of the terminal building. She was an attractive young Asian woman in a dark blue uniform, a clipboard held to her breast by her left forearm in echo of the Statue of Liberty. She’d been the one to walk Curtis through this process three or four times before. Her smile was radiantly welcoming. “Good afternoon, Mr. Curtis. So nice to see you again.”
“And you.” He didn’t remember her name, if he’d ever known it.
She turned to speak a quick word to the skycap waiting behind her, and he nodded, and moved toward the car as Harben came around to open the trunk. “Your luggage will be taken care of,” she said, “and I have your ticket, so all I need is your passport. You’d like to come to the lounge?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
There was great bustle at the main doors to the terminal, down to his right, but the meet-and-greet led him away to the left, down a quiet corridor where they were almost immediately alone. This passage not only took him to the VIP lounge, it also meant he was not in the main part of the terminal three minutes later, when Kim Baldur and Jerry Diedrich and Luther Rickendorf arrived in a cab.
Curtis had a scotch and water in the lounge while the meet-and-greet took his passport and ticket away to handle the formalities for him. He read a Wall Street Journal he found there, and was amused to see that the paper still thought there was some story left in his little public dance with George Manville. Neither he nor George were actually mentioned, but the story, a rehash of various questionable activities by Robert Bendix and his Intertekno over the last several years, was clearly inspired by last weekend’s flap. So now Bendix receives a little unwelcome publicity, while Curtis goes about his business unobserved; things couldn’t get much better than that.
Half an hour later, the meet-and-greet was back, to smilingly hand him his passport and ticket, and escort him to the plane, along with two other businessmen, one a Brit, the other Japanese. Their route was back hallways, mostly empty, not emerging into the normal public area until they were almost to the gate, where the last of the other passengers were straggling aboard. Standard first-class passengers would have been boarded first, for the coach passengers then to sidle past on their way back to steerage, but the ones brought by the meet-and-greet arrived last, when the fuss and bustle were over. At the gate, the meet-and-greet wished her trio a bon voyage and went away, clipboard still shield-like at her breast, while Curtis and the other two were now greeted by equally smiling and equally attractive stewardesses, who took hand luggage (Curtis had none) and drink orders, and escorted their VIPs to their seats.