A larger river swept out of the distant jungle on the left and rolled down, step by step, fall by fall and pool by pool on to a broad, winding, island-filled stream that opened into the inrushing ocean. Robin had an instantaneous glimpse of new marinas coupled with ancient commercial dock facilities. A tall, gracefully arched bridge. A massive breakwater lined on one side with warehouses and on the other with tall hotels. Then the camera whirled away, dipped and started to rise again. And there, reaching out of the precipitous heart of a jungle-clad cliff, on the edge of a placid lake at the foot of a tall waterfall, there was a vision of pure white. As though a Carrara marble outcrop had been transported here from Italy’s Amalfi coast and then carved into the shape of a fantasy by Frank Lloyd Wright, the building half clung, half floated above the vertiginous cliff slope that tumbled down to the northern outskirts of the town as they cut into the vegetation on the lower slopes and stood low above the long white beach leading back down to the old commercial dock and the broad mouth of the river.
The camera wheeled once more with stomach-churning abruptness and soared onwards towards the beautiful white house. Again, the size of the picture was difficult for Robin to judge. What she at first assumed was an outreaching balcony, edged with a low white wall, was suddenly revealed to be a huge garden with shady palms, elegant topiary and manicured lawns fit for a golf course, at the rear of which lay a half-covered swimming pool that must have been near Olympic size. The camera swooped over this, under the awning which extended from an upper veranda and in through cavernous doors made of smoked-plate glass in a zoom that would have flattered Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles into a massive, Mexican-styled open-plan area, all decorative tile and white adobe.
Robin was just beginning to come to terms with the abrupt transition when her phone went off. She pulled it out automatically. Richard’s face filled the screen. ‘It’s Richard,’ she told Nic. ‘I’d better take this.’
‘OK,’ said Nic amenably. He reached forward to freeze the screen. ‘We’ll look around the inside when you’re finished. But remind him we’re meeting up for dinner tonight. The Sky Room, Breakers Hotel, Ocean Boulevard. Be there at eight; we’re all booked in. My treat this time.’
‘God,’ said Robin. ‘Look at the time. I’d better get back and change pretty damn quickly …’
NINE
Both of his companions were silent — though it seemed to Richard to be a speaking silence, as Jane Austen might have put it — down to the taxi rank outside the port authority building. Neither could or would put into words what they were thinking, but Richard reckoned that Antoine had some pretty serious worries about the legal implications, which might be well above his pay grade. Sin was simply smouldering at the thought of taking containers that did not contain his cargo aboard before he could begin to unload the containers that did contain his cargo — and get on with the job he was being paid to do. But before Richard had even snagged a cab or either one of them had begun to unburden their soul, Jose Guerrero joined them. ‘Nice move, Mr Mariner,’ said the major affably. ‘But I’m not sure you’ve thought it all through.’
That makes three of you, thought Richard. ‘How’s that, Major?’ he enquired affably.
‘If you’re taking my containers on board your ship, then I guess you’re taking me. And my command.’
‘That’s fine by me,’ answered Richard. ‘Captain Sin?’
‘We have little room for supernumeraries,’ observed the captain rudely. ‘But if you insist, Captain Mariner, we would try and find suitable accommodation. How many men are there in your command, Major?’
‘Half a dozen. Four men, two women. Logistics. Medics.’
‘That will be no trouble. We can supply food and rest areas. If you eat Chinese rather than Mexican, that is, and if you have nothing beyond basic requirements. I assume we will not be providing overnight facilities.’
‘That depends on how fast the docks are cleared,’ said Richard, cutting into the increasingly acid exchanges. ‘But if push comes to shove, I expect you can manage something, Captain Sin.’
‘If push,’ snapped Sin, ‘comes to shove.’ He spat the final word as though ‘shove’ was one of his obscure Chinese insults, like sons of rabbits.
As he thought this, Richard opened the rear door of the cab that had pulled up in obedience to his signal. ‘Are you riding down to the docks with us, Major? Or waiting for your own people?’ he enquired, calmly and courteously.
‘I’ll wait,’ answered the major shortly, reacting to Sin’s tone rather than Richard’s emollience. ‘And I trust you — and we — will be able to get through the traffic jams down to the dockside.’
As it happened, the cab was able to avoid the worst of the jams by scooting down West Ocean Boulevard and Pico Avenue — more or less the reverse of the route that had brought them safely up here earlier — so that Richard, Antoine and Sin were dropped within walking distance of Sulu Queen’s gangplank little more than a quarter of an hour later. Even so, a long, grey evening was beginning to draw in. As he walked through the unnatural quiet of the dockside, Richard suddenly realized he still hadn’t called Robin. He dialled her mobile and her face filled the screen almost at once.
‘God,’ she said as contact was made. ‘Look at the time. I’d better get back and change.’
‘Change?’ asked Richard. ‘What for?’
‘Dinner, you dope. Nic’s taking us to the Sky Room at the Breakers Hotel. We’re due at eight. It’s a “good luck” meal for the girls on Katapult8 and a “thank you” to us for last night. We’ll have missed the sunset by more than an hour but the view should still be spectacular.’
‘So’s the food!’ called Nic, from seemingly far away.
‘Eight o’clock,’ said Richard. The clock in the top of the screen told him it was well after five now. He looked up at the thickening overcast. ‘Wouldn’t have been much of a sunset tonight in any case,’ he said. ‘You hitching a ride on the Bell?’
‘Yes, she is!’ called Nic as Robin hesitated for a moment.
‘Ask Nic if he can he pick me up where you dropped me at lunchtime.’
‘Sure, Richard,’ called Nic. ‘Be there at six!’ And Richard began to wonder whether Robin had her cell on speakerphone.
‘You get that?’ asked Robin.
‘I’ll be there if I can get Sulu Queen sorted out.’
‘We’ll be there if Nic can get the girls back off Katapult8 in time. He’s gone off to call then in now.’
‘Gotcha. Come in, Katapult8, your time is up! Something like that?’
‘Something like that, lover,’ she answered.
By the time Richard was standing at the spot Nic’s Bell had dropped him off more than six hours earlier, the docks were beginning to come to life again. The security lights were on and an urgent bustle was building beneath their yellow brightness. The crane beside Sulu Queen was lifting the first few TEUs and loading them aboard his vessel with pinpoint accuracy and practised forethought — heaviest at the bottom of the columns, lightest at the top. Stevedores and crewmen were securing the lateral lashings in place, tightening turnbuckles and twistlocks as though Sulu Queen might set to sea with the one-hundred-and-twenty-foot TEUs of the National Guard’s equipment stowed aboard.
Which was why, during much of the intervening time, Major Guerrero had been standing stolidly on the far side of Captain Sin to Richard, while Antoine had been monopolizing the ship to shore, talking things through with the senior legal officers at Southey-Bell, calling Richard through as and when he needed the owner’s weight to back up what they were doing — and proposing to do.