“That’s what they tell me,” Ha said, and spread his hands. “I don’t like it either.”
Tony said, “Inspector, they aren’t doing clerks’ hours, are they? Nine to five? We need them at work round the clock.”
Ha looked dubious. “The civil service...”
“Will also drown,” George said.
Troubled, Ha said, “It’s difficult to explain that without telling too many people too much about the circumstances. We don’t want to cause panic.”
“If this isn’t a good time for panic,” George said, “when is?”
Tony felt the need to assist his fellow inspector. He said, “George, I understand what the inspector is saying. We don’t want a panic because in fact a panic would be worse. A million people trying to leave this island all at once would be a disaster.”
“I appreciate that,” George said. “But we’re not talking about somebody who’s going to blow up a building. Curtis means to take the city down.” To Ha, he said, “Inspector, I’ve worked on this process, I’ve seen it in action on Kanowit Island. If he’s gotten through to enough tunnels, and if we don’t stop him before he sets off the charges, every bit of reclaimed land on this island, including where we are right now, is going to be reclaimed sea. Curtis isn’t going to give us until Thursday. I’ll be surprised if he gives us till tomorrow.”
Ha said, “But what if he isn’t ready to invade the bank vaults? He might still have to wait.”
“What it comes down to,” George said, “is which he wants worse, revenge or profit. If he’s afraid he won’t have time to take the profit, because we’re breathing down his neck, I’m certain he’ll settle for revenge.”
“Another thing,” Kim said, “is that if he’s stopped, there’s evidence against him. But if he destroys this city and everybody in it, there won’t be any evidence, people won’t even know what happened.”
Ha looked very worried. He said, “I’ll speak to my opposite number in the buildings department. I’ll call him now, and I’ll tell him as much as is needed to make him as frightened as I am, and I’ll ask him not to spread the news any more than he has to.”
“Good,” George said.
“In the meantime,” Ha told them, “is there anything any of you can think of that might help point us in the direction of one construction company rather than another? Anything Curtis might have said or done?”
George thought about it. It seemed to him that there was something, something nagging at the back of his mind. He thought back to the dinner at the ranch in Australia, to Curtis’s stories of getting started in the business. “I think I may have an idea,” George said, “about what name Curtis could be using. For whatever corporation he set up.”
Kim said, “He could call it anything, George.”
“But I think he’d like to stamp it with his personality somehow,” George said. “He’s a man who puts his initials on his dinner plates.”
Tony, intrigued, said, “What do you think he’s going to do? Not RC, surely.”
“No, that would be too obvious,” George said. “But he told me, at that ranch of his, that station in Australia, he married into the construction business, and his first wife’s grandfather started the business, here in Hong Kong. The old man called it Hoklo Construction. After the boat people who first came here as pirates. Curtis said his wife’s grandfather called his company Hoklo because he wanted always to remember that the Hoklo had blended in with everybody else, so anybody could be a pirate. A pirate can hide in plain sight.”
Tony said, “But would he name this company Hoklo? Wouldn’t that point right at him?”
“Some variant on it,” George said. “Some version of it that only Curtis, maybe, would understand.”
Inspector Ha was already standing, had walked over to a phone mounted on the wall and was talking into it, and he now held up two fingers for quiet. They all waited.
“Thank you,” Ha said into the receiver after another few minutes had passed, and he hung it up with a click that echoed through the now-silent room. He returned to the table. “Your instinct may have been right this time, Mr. Manville.”
“Really?” Tony said. He was a bit surprised. He hadn’t really believed Curtis would have the time or the inclination to play catch-me games. “Hoklo Construction?”
“No, Xian Bing Shu,” Ha told him. And when he saw that none of them had any idea what this meant: “Xian Bing means a pie, the sort you eat. He’s hiding in plain sight, don’t you see?”
“And what does ‘Shu’ mean?” George asked.
“Rat,” Ha said.
8
By midnight, Curtis was back aboard Granjya, with everything in position. Tian and Bennett and the diver would do their jobs, and by three in the morning the operation would be under way. The attacks on the bank vaults would be swift and massive, and soon done. From the beginning of the operation until the drone submarine full of gold came out of the breached seawall should be less than an hour. And thirty minutes later, it would all be over.
He was still just a little troubled by that last half hour, but it shouldn’t be a problem. He would have preferred to set off the soliton the instant the submarine was clear of the seawall, but then the submarine too would be caught up in the wave and the destruction. Thirty minutes was long enough for the submarine to cross the harbor, following Granjya out to sea, but it shouldn’t be long enough for Bennett or Tian or anyone else to get clear. Wherever they were on the island’s flats, they would die.
Of course, not everyone on Hong Kong Island would die. Some people living on the peaks, the steep heights behind the main city to its south, would survive tonight. But Jackie Tian and Colin Bennett and the rest of the crew were not likely to find their way to the peaks in that final half hour. Real money lived up there — Curtis himself had lived up there, in the old days — and he doubted any of the people working now for Xian Bing Shu had ever even been to the peaks, unless it was for the purpose of burglary.
No, they would all stay in the city, and they would all die. And with them Rickendorf and Mark Hennessy and George Manville. Manville no doubt had brought the girl Kim along, so she would go, too. And there would be no one on the face of the earth who would have any reason to believe that Richard Curtis had had anything to do with the cataclysm that struck Hong Kong.
They wouldn’t even know, in all that chaos, that the gold was gone.
He knew he should sleep for a while, and had actually set the alarm for two-thirty, but he was too keyed up to lie down. The months of preparation, the tension, the mistakes with Manville and the girl, the constant risk of being exposed, the doubt that at the end he’d be man enough to go through with it, all were coming to a head tonight.
Had he left anything undone, any threads that could lead to him? He didn’t think so. The Farrellys were prepared, if necessary, to swear to the world that Curtis had been at Kennison constantly this last week. The drone submarine, a standard model used in undersea exploration by everybody from fisheries scientists to oil companies, had been bought by Xian Bing Shu, and Xian Bing Shu was absolutely untraceable to Richard Curtis.
The Hsus, operators of the Granjya, knew only what they needed to know, and were not curious by nature. If, in future, they were to realize they’d been party to the destruction of Hong Kong, they would be too implicated themselves to dare come forward. Besides, they were being paid well, and knew they would be paid well for more work in the future.
In the meantime, the Granjya stood at the western end of Victoria Harbor. Once the submarine was out of the tunnels and trailing them, the Granjya would head west and then south around the end of Hong Kong Island, through Sulphur Channel, between Kennedy Town and Green and Little Green Islands. They would stay well west of the new airport off Lamma Island, then at last turn east and south toward Kaohsiung, four hundred miles away.