Here the car rolled to a stop.
Shaw and Ingrid got out into the cold night air. Away to their left they saw a fleet of sampans lying, some out in the creek, others lying a dozen deep in trots at two or three ramshackle jetties, wooden structures running drunkenly out into deep water and looking as though they were held together by string and good intentions. The sampans appeared deserted, but Shaw knew that beneath each of the midship canopies whole families would be ekeing out a sordid, pathetically overcrowded existence of poverty and hardship and complete lack of privacy.
He asked, “What now?”
“The chauffeur will call up a sampan, Smith.” As the girl spoke the Chinese gave a shrill cry, which, after waiting briefly, he repeated twice more. At last a dim, bent figure emerged from beneath the canopy of a sampan out in the creek, and after some further delay this sampan got under way and edged in to lie at the end of one of the wooden jetties, the befouled water lapping gently at its sides.
Shaw and Ingrid followed the chauffeur along the jetty and jumped down into the sampan. Ingrid told the Chinese driver to wait with the car, and then the sampan was cast off by its villainous-looking navigator and propelled into deeper water by a hefty shove from a pole. Thence it moved out of the creek into the bay proper under the impulse of a single long-bladed oar. After half an hour’s irritatingly slow progress across the water the rowing stopped and gently the craft bumped against the accommodation-ladder of a large motor-yacht, a fast-looking, sumptuous affair painted in white and gold-leaf. Under the moon Shaw could see clearly the name Lac Brienz painted on a board fixed to the bulkhead of a deckhouse.
A tall man wearing a white dinner-jacket stood at the head of the accommodation-ladder, looking down at the sampan in some surprise.
Ingrid called up to him, “Monsieur Dahl, may we come aboard, please?”
“Why, my dear, of course! What a happy surprise, to be sure!” The voice was pleasant and easy. “I am delighted to see you.”
“No more than I am to see you tonight, Monsieur Dahl,” Ingrid said as she went up the ladder with Shaw behind her. At the top she turned to make the introductions. “May I introduce a friend of mine? This is Mr. Smith… Smith, this is Monsieur Dahl, formerly of Zurich.”
The two men shook hands. Dahl was a man of around sixty, a tall, thin man with a sensitive, mobile face and greying hair. Shaw looked into his eyes; his impression was of a decent man. The smile as he shook hands was genuine, the face was trustworthy and sincere. Dahl said, “You will come to my stateroom, please. I am sure there is much purpose in this visit, young lady!” he added to the girl. He took her arm and led her aft along the deck to a companion-way. Shaw followed them down, and into a sumptuously fitted stateroom opening off a carpeted alleyway. A steward in a starched white jacket presided over a tray of drinks. Dahl dismissed him and poured the drinks himself. As he did so he said, “Now, my little lady, you may tell me what is on that busy mind of yours.”
She said abruptly, leaning forward with her fingers interlaced around her knees, “I wish for help — help for Smith and for me also. I shall come quickly to the point. I need not ask you, M. Dahl, if you remember Rudolf Rencke.”
Dahl’s hand jerked; a little whisky split from the glass which he was carrying across to Shaw. He said, “No, you need not ask that certainly. But why, exactly, do you remind me of a man I would so much prefer to forget?”
Ingrid glanced across at Shaw. Her face 'was pale now, he noticed, pale and determined. She said crisply, “Smith will tell you as much as he thinks able to, M. Dahl. After that, I shall have some things to say to you. I have already promised Smith that you will help him, by the way.”
Dahl’s face broke into a broad smile. “Have you indeed, young lady? Then it seems, as a chivalrous man, that I am already committed!”
Afterwards Shaw knew that it was Ingrid who had clinched the deal. She had done most of the talking, and she had done it to extremely good effect. Dahl, it seemed, had a helicopter which he kept on a private airfield outside the town of Sapporo on Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island. This helicopter, he said, he was very willing to place at Shaw’s disposal providing Shaw could find his own air transport to Japan.
“I can fix that all right,” Shaw said. “Monsieur Dahl, I don’t know how to thank you for this.”
The Swiss smiled and shrugged. “Please think nothing of it. I shall be amply repaid by your complete success since, as I would gather, that success will lead to Rencke’s being dealt with as he so much deserves. Apart from this, I ask only that you take good care of Miss Lange.”
Shaw said promptly, “I’ll do that, all right — by leaving her in the care of her cousin. Or of you, M. Dahl.”
Dahl shook his head. “I am flying tomorrow to Zurich on business. Besides, Miss Lange is a very determined young lady… and something tells me she has decided to fly north with you.” He looked at the girl. “Is this not so?”
“It is,” Ingrid answered firmly. “Now, Smith, there is to be no argument on this matter. I have told you already, I mean to help you. Remember what I said at Mi Ling’s. It was to help you and to destroy Rencke that I came here to Hong Kong. I do not mean to be cheated out of that. I—"
“But look—”
“No, I will not look, Smith!” she said almost fiercely. “I repeat once again, it is for this that I have come, for this that I have approached M. Dahl on your behalf.” She beat a fist against her breast. “There is something here… I feel it constantly… that will not rest until I myself have seen Rencke destroyed!”
Shaw looked into her eyes; she meant every word she had uttered. He said with a smile, “I’m not licensing you to kill! But you can come as far as Sapporo anyway, providing you’re willing to do exactly as I tell you from now on out. All right?”
She came to him and put her arms around him. She kissed him. “Very much all right!” she said.
The chauffeur-driven limousine was still waiting when Shaw and Ingrid went back to the creek in the sampan. They were driven on Shaw’s orders to Kai Tak airport, after which the chauffeur took the car back to the Shanghai Hotel. Shaw had an interview with a high official of the airport and within ninety minutes of leaving the Lac Brienz he and the girl were heading out for Tokyo, where another flight had been booked ahead for Sapporo. At Sapporo, Dahl had promised, they would find his pilot, an Australian named Ewan MacAllister, waiting for them with transport to the private airfield. MacAllister, it seemed, was always looking for excitement. “You can trust him,” the Swiss had said. “Before you leave I shall give you a letter for him. If there is trouble you will find him most useful.”
NINETEEN
The ships searching for the unknown recovery base were nothing like enough and they couldn’t hope to cover efficiently in the time left an area as vast as all the North Pacific, though the fleet had been reinforced by every available long-range aircraft. The huge area of search extended from the Equator roughly up to the 60th Parallel, and from the China coast to 120 degrees West longitude; for, as Shaw had suggested, the recovery operation could be planned to take place from a ship on station, waiting for the capsule to be ditched near her. The searching vessels were steaming to their limits, the USAF land-based squadrons were flying right around the clock, but so far nothing, no clue of any sort, had been discovered and nothing in the least untoward had been reported by any of the patrols.