Curtis always took an aisle seat, for greater mobility; and what is there to see out of a plane window, after all? Today, his seatmate was a purple-jowled angry-eyed American, already at work, reading what appeared to be a legal brief and making small meticulous notes on a yellow legal pad.
Curtis was immediately reminded of the policeman, Fairchild, and his own crabbed notes, even smaller than this fellow’s handwriting, in that notebook of his. Well, he’d done what he could, with both Fairchild and the lawyer, Brevizin, to put out the fires Manville and Kim Baldur had started. With just a small amount of luck, the whole episode would quickly blow over and be forgotten. No crime, no criminals, nothing to investigate, no cause for suspicion. One Chinese sea officer, dead by his own hand, and one idiotic young woman with an overly rich imagination; nothing more.
He accepted his scotch and soda and silently toasted his own success. His seatmate, after one quick scowling glance to reassure himself that Curtis wasn’t a beautiful woman, had gone back to work, which was also a plus. Curtis wasn’t one for chitchat on airplanes.
Almost immediately, they were taxiing, and as the pilot’s voice told the crew to prepare for takeoff the stewardess came by to reclaim Curtis’s now empty glass, and just like that they were in the sky. Curtis pushed his seat back and his leg rest out, and dozed, smiling, thinking of how well things were going.
Half an hour later, some alteration in engine sound or plane movement brought him awake, to see his lawyer friend still busy. Time for a magazine. He would prefer Scientific American to Black Enterprise, but he’d take what was there. Rising, he walked back to the eye-level shelf where the magazines were stacked, looked through them, settled for Newsweek, and glanced down the aisle at the crowded coach section as he was about to turn back to his seat.
Jerry Diedrich.
Curtis stopped. He had never actually met Diedrich, but he’d seen him at a distance several times (several irritating times), and he’d seen Diedrich’s self-satisfied face in newspapers at least twice. That was him, in the aisle seat of three, talking with a very animated young woman in the middle seat.
Kim Baldur.
It had to be. Curtis had never seen her conscious, but he remembered that sleeping face, and this was her.
And how very lively she was, alive.
Baldur and Diedrich, together, on their way to Singapore. And the man on the other side, the window seat, the blond Germanic-looking one; was he part of the group? Yes; he turned and spoke to the other two, then looked out his window again, at the nothing out there.
Curtis turned away, not wanting to be recognized. He went back to his seat, the forgotten magazine still in his hand, and the stewardess asked him if he was ready for his snack. Yes. And wine? White, please.
While he ate the caviar, and the shrimp, and the hearts of palm, and the other delicacies, Curtis considered the situation. Those three were on their way to Singapore.
There could only be one reason. They hadn’t succeeded in obstructing him in Australia, so they would pursue him to Singapore. They had a mole somewhere in his organization, a spy, he was sure of it; they’d learned he was traveling back today and were on his trail. Diedrich would stop at nothing, would use every advantage, to interfere, to cause trouble. And this time it just couldn’t be allowed.
Who is the mole? Who is the spy in my camp? How do I find him, and how do I get rid of him — and of those three back there?
This new project kept constantly moving him into areas beyond his experience as a businessman. In all his enterprises, he had nearly two thousand permanent employees, plus the thousands more hired for specific short-term jobs in construction and the like, but who among them would be useful for the tasks he now had to assign? Those three would get off the plane in Singapore. They had to be met somehow, they had to be dealt with. The spy in Curtis’s bosom had to be dealt with.
In the seatback ahead of him there nested a telephone. Who could he call, and what could he say, to have these problems taken care of? He thought about his employees, the ones he knew, and he tried to pick and choose and find the right one. He had no one in Singapore like Morgan Pallifer, and it was too late now to phone Pallifer back in Australia and tell him to hurry in their wake. The three had to be intercepted somehow when this plane landed.
Who in Singapore did he know, and trust? Who could handle a thing like this?
The remains of the snack were taken away. Curtis slid his tray into its space in the armrest. He leaned forward and snapped out the telephone.
Three
1
Colin Bennett drove his little Honda Civic out the East Coast Parkway to Changi International Airport, followed the signs to Terminal 2, and stopped as close as possible to the glass doors where the arriving passengers streamed out, deploying into the taxis and buses and limousines and private cars funneled into orderly ranks; neat and tidy and controlled, like everything else in Singapore.
His Timex said quarter to seven (he’d long ago pawned the Rolex), so the Air Singapore flight from Sydney should be landing just about now. Changi was noted for its efficiency; within fifteen minutes, that flow of incomers over there, through with Customs and reunited with their luggage, would include the travelers from Australia.
Bennett picked up the three pages of faxed photos from the seat beside him, and studied them once again.
Jerry Diedrich. Always with his mouth open, always looking aggravated and aggrieved. The perfect look for those morons at Planetwatch.
“This is your lucky day, boyo,” he told himself, and smiled out at the endless herd of travelers, waiting for Jerry Diedrich to appear. “You’ll have no trouble pickin him out,” he assured himself, “and the next thing you know you’ll be fat and happy again, and damn well time for it, too. God bless Richard Curtis and keep him warm and content.”
Colin Bennett had started talking to himself two years ago, after the wife and kiddies left. He didn’t blame Brenda, he knew he’d turned mean and solitary after he’d lost his job, but there hadn’t seemed to be any way to break out of the pattern. Self-destructive, nasty, he’d become someone no one wanted to be around except himself, so that’s who he talked to.
He didn’t blame Curtis either, for firing him. Curtis had had damn good reason. And Curtis hadn’t even known the full extent of the mess Colin Bennett had made of things. He didn’t know a man had died.
Bennett was a construction man by trade, or had been, a big burly fellow — too large for this Honda Civic, for instance, which he seemed to wear rather than ride in — who had worked for RC Structural for nine years before he’d made his beaut of a mistake. In that time, he’d moved up from crew foreman to works manager, running the whole damn site for the engineers. In those days, he was outgoing and popular, a cheerful rowdy sort of man who claimed he got along with everybody because he looked like everybody, which was very nearly true. His father had been half English and half Malay, while his mother was half Dutch and half Chinese, and the mixture had created a big man whose squarish face featured slightly uptilted eyes, a gently mashed nose, a broad mouth and high prominent cheekbones. His ears lay flat to his skull, and his hair was straight and thick and black, now beginning to gray at the sides.