Fairchild said, “Inspector, how deep underground are these tunnels?”
“Fifty feet.”
“And the bank vaults, how deep are they?”
“Usually, about the same.”
Fairchild said, “That’s what he plans to do, then. Steal as much gold as he can lay his hands on, probably out of the Bank of China, open up the cross tunnels, flood them, set off the soliton.”
Inspector Ha said, “But that would be— That isn’t theft, that’s mass murder!”
George said, “At the end of it there won’t be any evidence.” He gestured again at the windows. “Everything you see out there,” he said, “will fall into the harbor, turn into mud and debris. No one will know what if anything was stolen. No one will know what happened or how it happened, or who was responsible.”
Inspector Ha digested this. “I am not convinced.”
Fairchild said, “I understand how you feel. But we know Curtis plans to use this thing, we know he’s killed at least one person to cover his tracks and tried to kill these two here, and we know his anger is aimed at Hong Kong.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt Mr. Curtis’s intent,” Inspector Ha said. “I can see that he has the motive and I accept that he has the means. But what of the opportunity? Strangers can’t merely wander around in those tunnels, you know. The construction job you’re suggesting, digging cross tunnels, breaking into bank vaults, couldn’t be done without somebody noticing.”
“We don’t know how he plans to do it,” Fairchild said, “but we are certain sure he does intend to.”
“There’s one way I can think of he might do it,” George said. “Curtis is in construction, that’s his primary business. In Hong Kong, there’s so little space, even with all the landfill — all the reclaimed land — that buildings are constantly being torn down so new ones can be built. Fifteen-, twenty-year-old buildings are demolished. Right now, there are probably twenty construction sites over there.”
“More,” Inspector Ha said.
“What if one of them belongs to Curtis?” George asked him. “Through a dummy corporation, a dummy name. It would look as though he’s building upward, like everybody else, but secretly he’d be burrowing down.”
Luther said, “Maybe he has Jackie Tian fronting him.”
Inspector Ha looked alert. “Jackie Tian? What does he have to do with Richard Curtis?”
“Two weeks ago,” Luther told him, “he visited Curtis in Singapore. A friend of ours — now disappeared — who works for Curtis, saw a fax from Tian to Curtis saying a diver they were going to use had been arrested and they’d have to find another.”
Martin Ha got to his feet and walked around the table to stand and look out the window. Kim was surprised to see that he stood straighter now, he seemed to fit the uniform better. Looking away from them, out toward the view, he said, “I must tell Wai Fung you’ve succeeded. I am alarmed.”
3
For Luther, the last few days had been muffled, without resonance, like a pistol shot in a padded room. Or as though his brain and all his senses were in that padded room. Nothing came through to him with much impact or clarity. It was as though he watched the world now on a television monitor, listened to it through a not-very-good sound system.
He still went through the motions. He thought about the problem of Richard Curtis, he took care of his own needs, he responded quite normally to Kim and George and the others, but it was all simple momentum, nothing else. He went through these motions because there was no way to stop them, short of death, and he didn’t much feel like death right now; it would simply be the state he was already in, intensified.
He supposed he grieved for Jerry, but even that was muffled. He couldn’t find in himself much enthusiasm for revenge or justice, though he continued to trudge along with the others in Curtis’s wake. What he was realizing, and even that slowly and without much force, was that in grieving for Jerry he was grieving for a part of himself. Jerry had been his id, the outward expression of all those emotions and instant reactions that Luther had never quite managed to feel or express on his own. Without Jerry, he was merely the cool and amiable somnambulist he used to be, but now with the added memory of there having been once a Jerry.
He wondered what would become of him now. He was done with Planetwatch, of course, that had merely been the place Jerry had led him. None of the previous scenes of his life seemed worth repeating, but what else was there? He might even go back to Germany, ignore his father, live one way or another on his own. Not that it mattered.
It might be interesting, in fact, to stay here in Hong Kong, particularly if they didn’t after all manage to thwart Curtis. To stay at the Peninsula — switching to a Hong Kong view room, of course — to sit in a comfortable chair by the window, and to watch the towers across the way begin to tremble, to shudder, then to fall to their knees, window panes snapping out into the air like frightened hawks, walls dropping away, floors tilting, desks and filing cabinets and people sliding out into the world, then to feel the power ripple in this direction across the harbor, to see it come like a ghost in the water, to feel it tug at the landfill on this side, the buildings swaying, the yachts and junks and huge cargo ships all foundering and failing and staring with one last despairing gaze at the sky, then the harbor boiling, this very building bending down to kiss the sea...
What a spectacular sight. Who would want to look at anything else after that?
Well, yes, that was possible. In the meantime, though, the effort was still being made to save that city over there, and all its people, and all its gold, and all the many ships in the harbor. Inspector Ha was on the telephone, talking to assistants, making plans. Soon, they would all go inspect one of the air-conditioning tunnels.
That would be interesting.
The last part was a metal staircase down through a conical concrete tube slanting through the earth beneath the bank. The elevator only descended so far.
Luther was at the back of the pack of seven descending toward the tunnel. The bank building’s head of security was first, in his tan uniform and Sam Browne belt, then the building’s operations manager in white shirt and hardhat, then Inspector Ha, Tony Fairchild, Kim, and George. Luther preferred being last, it meant he didn’t have to wonder what expression, if any, was on his face.
The tunnel was a roughly circular concrete tube, twelve feet across, with a flat metal floor. The three water pipes, gray plastic, a foot in diameter each, were above their heads, filling the upper curve. Electric lights in translucent white plastic shields were spaced at long intervals on the walls, alternating left and right and giving just enough illumination to move around.
To the right, the tunnel ended in seven or eight feet at a blank concrete wall, just beyond where the three pipes bent upward and out of sight. To the left, the tunnel was absolutely straight, the distance vague and difficult to see.
The security chief and building manager and Inspector Ha all had flashlights, and they now played them on the walls to both sides as the group moved slowly forward, toward the seawall. Inspector Ha had told the building people only that information had been received that a potential breach of the tunnel was being planned by people whose ultimate goal was the bank vault, which was just a foot or so through the wall to their left at the point where they started their inspection. The security chief had said that kind of attack was impossible, they had motion sensors, not for the tunnel but certainly for the vault, but Inspector Ha had explained that all tips from normally credible sources had to be looked into, and he personally would at least like to know what the tunnel looked like, so here they all were.