She had been part of this, she thought. And it was no small thing. Now that she was standing alone at the bow's railing, with the primordial surging of the deck beneath her feet, she could feel what she'd done. A little moment of numinous prompting, a mystic satisfaction. She had been doing the work of the world-she could sense the subtle flow of its
Taoist tides, buoying her up, carrying her.
Standing there, shedding tension, breathing the damp mon- soon air under endless gray skies, she could no longer believe in her personal danger. She was bulletproof again.
The pirates were the ones with problems, now. The Bank's brass were all over the deck, in little conspiratorial groups, muttering and looking over their shoulders. There was a surprising number of brass on this ship-the first ones aboard, apparently. She could tell they were bosses, because they were well dressed, and snotty looking. And old.
They had that tight-stretched, spotty vampire look that came from years of Singapore's half-baked longevity treat- ments. Blood filtering, hormone therapy, vitamin-E, electric acupuncture, God knew what kind of insane black-market bullshit. Maybe they had stretched a few extra years out of their expensive meddling, but now they were going to have to go off their treatments cold-turkey. And she didn't imagine it would be easy.
At dusk, a large civilian chopper arrived with a final load of refugees. Laura stood by one of the tall, gently hissing wind columns as the refugees decamped. More top brass.
One of them was Mr. Shaw.
Laura flinched away in shock, and walked slowly toward the bow, not looking back. There must have been some kind of special arrangement, she thought-this Abadan business.
Probably Shaw and his people had set it up long ago. Singa- pore might be finished, but the top data pirates had their own survival instincts. No cheap-shot Naurus and Kiribatis for them-that was for suckers. They were headed where the oil money still ran fast and deep. The Islamic Republic was no friend of Vienna's.
She doubted that they'd make it there scot-free, though.
Singapore might try to ditch the Bank gangsters and the evidence, but too many people must know. There'd be a hot trail to a ship with this many big operators on it. The video press were already swarming into Singapore under the shadow of the Red Cross-eager pioneers of another gunless global army, packing mikes and minicams. Once the ship was out in international waters, Laura was half convinced that reporters would show up.
Should be interesting. The pirates wouldn't like it much- their skin blistered under publicity. But at least they'd es- caped the Grenadians.
There seemed to be an unspoken conviction among the
Singaporeans that the Grenadians had finished. That with the
Bank scattered, and the Government in ruin, there was simply no point left in their terror campaign.
Maybe they were right. Maybe successful terrorism had always worked like this-provoking a regime till it crumbled under the weight of its own repression. "Babylon Falls"
-they'd bragged about it. Maybe Sticky and his friends would now slip out of Singapore in the confusion of the revolt.
If there was any sanity left in them, they'd be glad to run, puffed and proud, triumphant. Probably amazed to be alive.
They could swagger back to their Caribbean shadows as true voodoo legends, new-millennium spooks nonpareil. Why not live? Why not enjoy it?
She wanted to believe that they'd do it. She wanted it to be over-she couldn't bear to think back to Sticky's feverish menu of technical atrocities.
A shudder struck her where she stood. A rocketing wave of intense, unfocused, ontological dread. For a moment she wondered if she'd been pellet-shot. Maybe Sticky had dosed her while she was unconscious and the fear drug was just now coming on... . God, what an awful suspicion.
She remembered suddenly the Vienna agent she'd met in
Galveston, the polite, handsome Russian who had talked about the "evil pressure in a bullet. "
Now, for the first time, she was grasping what the man had meant. The pressure of raw possibility. If something was possible-didn't that mean that somewhere, somehow, some- one had to do it? The voodoo urge to truck with demons. The imp of the perverse. Deep in the human spirit, the carnivo- rous shadow of science.
It was a dynamic, like gravity. Some legacy of evolution, deep in human nerves, invisible and potent, like software.
She turned around. No sign of Shaw. A few yards behind her, Bad Luck was retching, loudly, over the guard rail. He looked up, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.
She could have been him. Laura forced herself to smile at him.
He gave her a look of tremulous gratitude and came to join her. She almost fled at once, but he held up a hand. "It's okay," he said. "I know I'm dosed. It comes in waves. I'm better now."
"You're very brave," Laura said. "I'm sorry for you, sir. "
Bad Luck stared at her. "That's nice. You're nice. You don't treat me like a leper. " He paused, hot little rat eyes studying her. "You're not. one of us, are you? You're not with the Bank."
"What makes you say that?" Laura said.
"You're somebody's girl friend, is it?" He grinned in a cadaverous parody of flirtation. "Lot of bosses on this ship.
Top brass goes for those hot Eurasian girls."
"We're getting married, la," Laura said, "so you can forget all about it, fellow."
He dug into his jacket. "Want a cigarette?"
"Maybe you'd better save them," Laura said, accepting one.
"No, no. No problem. I can get anything! Cigarettes, blood components. Megavitamins, embryos.... My name's
Desmond, miss. Desmond Yaobang."
"Hi," Laura said. She accepted a light. Her mouth imme- diately filled with choking poisoned soot.
She couldn't understand why she was doing this.
Except that it was better than doing nothing. Except that she felt sorry for him. And maybe the presence of Desmond
Yaobang would keep everyone else at a distance.
"What do you think they'll do to us, in Abadan? Do with us, I mean." Yaobang's head just topped her shoulder. There was nothing obviously repulsive about him, but the chemical fear had etched itself into the set of his eyes, the lines of his face. It had soaked him through with an aura of creepiness.
She felt the strong, irrational urge to kick him. The way a flock of crows will peck an injured one to death.
"I dunno," Laura drawled, contempt making her careless.
She looked at her sandaled feet, avoiding his eyes. "Maybe they'll give me some decent shoes.... I'll be okay if I can make a few phone calls."
"Phone calls," Yaobang parroted nervously, "capital idea.
Yes, get Desmond to a phone and he can get you anything.
Shoes. Surely. You want to try it?"
"Mmm. Not just yet. Too crowded."
"Tonight then. Fine, miss. Splendid. I won't be sleeping anyway."
She turned away from him and put her back to the rail. The sun was setting between two of the whirling wind columns.
Vast underlit cloud banks of mellow Renaissance gold. Yaobang turned and looked as well, biting his lip, mercifully silent.
Along with the filthy brain buzz of the cigarette, it gave
Laura an expansive feeling of sublimity. Beautiful, but it wouldn't last long-the sun sank fast in the tropics.
Yaobang straightened, pointed. "What is that?"
Laura looked. His paranoia-sharpened senses had caught something-a distant, airborne glint.
Yaobang squinted. "Some little kind of chopper, maybe?"
"It's too small!" Laura said. "It's a drone!" Light had winked briefly from its blades and now she'd lost it against the clouds.
"A drone?" he said, alarmed by her tone of voice. "Is it voodoo? Can it hurt us?"