“Where did you send the data?” I asked.
“I never sent it anywhere,” Oharu said. “I was just going to turn it over to Mr. Lau when I got off the boat tomorrow.”
“You have a meeting set?” I asked.
A wary look entered his eyes. “He was going to call.”
“Uh-huh.” I grinned. “Too bad for Mr. Lau that you didn’t get off in Macau and fly to Shanghai to meet him.”
He looked disconsolate. “I really am an Andean folk music fan,” he said. “That part I didn’t make up. I wanted to catch your last show.”
Somehow I failed to be touched.
I shut down the computer and looked through the papers that Oharu had got out of Jesse’s briefcase. They were also in Chinese, and likewise incomprehensible. I put them aside and considered Oharu’s situation.
He had murdered my employer, and besides that cut into my action with Leila, and I wasn’t inclined to be merciful. On the other hand, I wasn’t an assassin, and cold-bloodedly shoving him out the porthole wasn’t my style.
On the third hand, I could see that he was turned over to the authorities once the ship reached Shanghai and let justice take its course. Getting shot in the neck by Chinese prison guards was too good for him.
But on the fourth hand, he could make trouble for us. The knowledge that there was illegal biotechnology being shipped to Taiwan was enough to make the Chinese authorities sit up and take notice.
“Right,” I said, “this is what’s going to happen.” I pointed to the ninja gear I’d laid out on the bed. “In the morning, the cabin steward is going to find your murder implements laid out, and it will be obvious that you killed our employer.”
He glared at me. “I’ll tell the police all about you,” he said. “They’re not going to appreciate Western spies in their country.”
“You’re not going to get a chance to talk to the police,” I said. “Because by then you’ll have gone out the porthole.”
He filled his lungs to scream again, but Sancho stifled him with a pillow.
“However,” I said, raising my voice a little to make sure he was paying attention as he flopped around on the bed, “we’ll wait till we make Shanghai before you go into the drink, and we’ll untie you first.”
Oharu calmed somewhat. Once I had his attention, I continued. “You won’t go to your Mr. Lau for help, because once your employers realize you’re a wanted man, they’ll cut your throat themselves.”
He glared at me from over the top of the pillow. I signaled Sancho to lift the pillow off his face.
“Where does that leave me?” he asked. “Stuck in Shanghai in the early morning, having swum ashore soaking wet?”
“You’re the ninja,” I said. “Deal with it.”
*
The plan went off without complications, which did my morale some good. Tang Dynasty made Shanghai about four in the morning and pulled into its pier. Oharu’s porthole faced away from the pier, and out into the drink he went. I suppose he made it to shore, though I won’t mourn if it turned out otherwise. All I know is that I never saw him again. The cabin steward went into the room about seven o’clock with Oharu’s breakfast tea and was horrified to discover the murder gear lying in plain sight. The alarm was raised. I was asleep in my cabin by then, with Jesse’s computer under my pillow.
Tang Dynasty discharged its passengers, then the crew spent the day scrubbing the ship from top to bottom. The entertainment had the day off, and the band took advantage to see a few of the sights of Shanghai, although we went in pairs, just in case enemy ninjas were lurking somewhere in the crowds.
We wore our everyday clothes, not our traditional ponchos, and the locals probably thought we were Uighurs or something. Laszlo and the guys went off to refill their helium cylinders. I don’t think Leila and the mermaids left their cabin. I tried to tell her through the door that she was the least likely of any of us to be murdered, but I don’t think I succeeded in reassuring her.
In the course of the night, Thunderbolt Sow pulled into the next berth in a cloud of sandalwood incense. I kept an eye on the ship, and an ear too, but I neither saw nor heard the evil-eyed Perugachi or his minions.
That day Jesse’s replacements turned up, a white-haired Dr. Pan and his assistant, a round-faced, bespectacled Dr. Chun, who radiated enough anxiety for both of them. Each of them had bodyguards, slablike Westerners with identical ponytails- I won’t swear to it, but I believe the language they used among themselves was Albanian.
“Another three dives,” Laszlo said, “maybe four. The first to clear the wire away and get started on moving the mast. The second to finish with the mast, then another to open the hatch. If cargo’s shifted on top of your box, we might need another dive to clear that away. But we should be finished tomorrow.”
Dr. Pan gave a smooth smile and said that was good, then lit one of his little cigars. Dr. Chun didn’t look any less anxious than he had at the start of the meeting.
That night our shows went off as per normal, if you consider scoping the audience for potential assassins to be normal, which for us it all too often was. We’d been over the passenger manifest, and the only last- minute additions had been Dr. Pan and his party, so I thought we were reasonably safe.
When we awakened next morning we were anchored off Hong Kong Island, and I joined the water ballet guys in their launch with a box of dim sum I’d nicked from the kitchens. To my disappointment, I found that the mermaids were not going along.
“It’s so unprofessional,” Laszlo complained. “They think someone’s going to come along and rip their throats out.”
“You could offer them hazardous duty pay,” I suggested hopefully.
“But it’s not hazardous!” he said. “Diving to seven atmospheres breathing exotic gasses is hazardous- but do I hold you up for extra money?”
I shrugged- he’d tried, after all- and resigned myself to a heavy lunch of dim sum.
In short order we were bobbing in the swell over the wreck, and Laszlo and one of the guys went down on the first dive of the day. As the dive plan called for Laszlo to stay under the water for over two hours, I was surprised to see him break the surface ninety minutes early.
“What’s wrong?” I asked as I helped him over the gunwale.
His face was grim. “You’ve got to go down and look at it yourself.”
“What is it? Did Perugachi get the cargo?”
“Maybe the cargo got him,” he said, and he turned to one of the Apollos. “Sztephen,“ he said, “take Ernesto down to the wreck, show him around, and make sure he doesn’t die.”
Sztephen gave me a dubious look while he struck a pose that emphasized his triceps development. I gave him what was meant to be a reassuring grin and reached for my wet suit
Because I’d been so thoroughly narked on my last trip, Laszlo insisted that I make this one on Trimix, which involved two extra-heavy cylinders on my back and a mixture that was fifty percent helium, fifteen percent oxygen, and the rest nitrogen. We also carried stage cylinders on our chests, for use in decompression, which we were to rig to our descent line as we went down.
It was all unfamiliar enough to have my nerves in a jangle by the time I splashed into the briney lamenting the fact that while I breathed Trimix instead of air the consolations of nitrogen narcosis were beyond my reach. Still, the descent went well enough, and the great stillness and silence and darkness helped to calm my throbbing heart.
Which was a pity, because my heart slammed into overdrive again once I saw Goldfish Fairy. The wreck lay with a black cavern just behind the bows, where the covers to the fore hatch had been thrown off.
Much of the cargo had also been lifted from the hold and thrown over the side, where it lay in piles. Such of the cargo as I saw seemed to consist of T-shirts with the Pokari Sweat logo on them.