Дональд Уэстлейк - Forever and a Death

Airport Boulevard ran almost south out of Changi, and flowed smoothly into East Coast Parkway, the big new road built to service the big new airport. Now they curved westward, and the brightly lighted towers of Singapore stood out ahead of them, a crystal island on an island, shimmering with light that at times looked hot, at times looked very cold.

Bennett slowed, dawdling in the left lane, the evening breeze a noisy but welcome rush through the Honda’s open windows. Two minutes, less, and that taxi rushed by, the three in lively conversation in the back seat.

“Well, they aren’t suspicious of anything, are they?” Bennett commented, as he pulled in behind the taxi, three vehicles back. “Not worried, not looking around, not checking their back trail. Not concerned about a thing. Now, that makes it easier, doesn’t it?”

In his world, Richard Curtis moved from one tower to another. Everywhere he went, it seemed, there were plate glass views of sky and land and city and sea, sprinkled with the tiny unimportant dots that were human beings; barely to be noticed.

This Tuesday morning, Curtis was in his office, with its two walls of huge windows high above Marina Bay, by ten past nine. Margaret, his long-time secretary, an efficient selfless woman who was twenty years older and thirty pounds heavier than when she’d first come to work for him back in Hong Kong, was waiting for him with a variety of briefings and updates on RC projects in half a dozen parts of the world, but they’d barely gotten underway when the internal telephone on Curtis’s desk made its nasal buzz.

Margaret, standing beside the desk, answered the phone, spoke briefly, then told Curtis, “It’s reception. There’s a Mr. Bennett here, he says he has a nine-thirty appointment with you.”

“And so he has,” Curtis said.

He was pleased with himself. Yesterday on the plane, he’d gone methodically through the filing system in his brain and he’d come up with the perfect man to do what needed to be done. Colin Bennett would do anything to prove himself, redeem himself in Curtis’s eye, and Curtis knew it. A blank check, that’s what Colin Bennett was, for Curtis to spend as he saw fit.

“Tell them,” he said, “to put him in the small conference room. I won’t be long with him, and then we’ll get back to all this.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and relayed the order, as Curtis got up from the desk and left the office.

By the time Curtis got to the small conference room, an interior space without the usual panorama of windowed view, Bennett was already there. He didn’t look good. He was hangdog for such a big man, and shabby. The last few years hadn’t been good to him.

He was eager, though. He stood next to the free-form teak conference table, and when Curtis entered he fairly leaped to attention: “Good morning, sir! Good to see you after all this time.”

“And you, Colin.” First, Curtis shut the door, then he extended his hand.

Clearly, Bennett hadn’t known if he would be considered worthy of a handshake, and was hugely grateful that the answer was yes. He pumped Curtis’s hand, not too long, not too hard, then said, “I’ve got them, you know. I’ve got them right now.”

“Good man.”

“They’re in Little India,” Bennett reported, “in a place called Race Course Court Hotel, on Race Course Lane.”

“What kind of place?”

“One of these redone ones,” Bennett said. In addition to all the new hotels built in Singapore the last few years, a lot of the older seedier places had been given facelifts, with new plumbing and new wiring and the luxury of air-conditioning. “It’s mostly Americans there, I think. Young, not a lot of money.”

That sounded right for Planetwatch people. Curtis said, “Would there be phones in the rooms?”

“Oh, I should think so.”

“Good. Did they take a suite?”

“No, two rooms,” Bennett said, and his large flat face wrinkled in confusion. “I thought it would be man woman in one, man in the other, but it isn’t.”

“They’re fairies,” Curtis said.

“Oh.” Laughing at himself, Bennett said, “Thick, I am. And that’s a pretty girl to be wasted like that.”

You have no idea how she would have been wasted, Curtis thought, and said, “I’m going to send you to a shop in Sim Lim, called Vanguard Electronics.”

Bennett, apparently remembering Curtis’s instruction yesterday to write down Jerry Diedrich’s name, now whipped out a small notepad and pen from his pockets and repeated, “Vanguard, in Sim Lim.”

“You’ll ask for Charlie.”

“Charlie,” Bennett echoed, and wrote it down.

“I’ll have rung him,” Curtis said. “He’ll give you equipment for bugging their phone. The room where the men are, not the other one.”

“Oh, sure,” Bennett said.

“I’ll want you to check into this hotel— What is it?”

“Race Course Court Hotel.”

“Unattractive name,” Curtis decided. “You’ll check in there for the next few days, try to get a room near them. The phone bug is a radio, and its range isn’t very far.”

“Will do,” Bennett said.

“I’ll be paying for the bug,” Curtis told him, “but you should put the hotel and other expenses on your credit card, and I’ll reimburse you.”

Looking sheepish, Bennett said, “Mr. Curtis, I don’t have any credit cards just at this minute.”

So things are that bad for you, are they? Curtis said, “We’ll have to give you cash, then.”

“Wouldn’t it be better, sir, if I used a corporate card?”

It would not; Curtis didn’t want Bennett connected to RC in any way. He said, “I know what you mean, hotels don’t expect cash, but I wouldn’t want it to get to Diedrich somehow that someone from RC Structural was staying in the same hotel.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Bennett said.

“You’ll have a story for them,” Curtis suggested.

Bennett looked surprised, then smiled. “Well, I’m a local citizen,” he said, “with a Singapore passport, so I’m moving out of my house because the entire building is being fumigated and repainted, and the owner’s reimbursed us all in cash.”

“That’s very good.”

Bennett preened under the praise. He’d kill for me, Curtis thought, surprised to realize it was true. And that he might have to.

Turning away, Curtis said, “Let me just ring Margaret.”

“Yes, sir.”

Curtis rang Margaret from the phone on the long sideboard, saying, “Have someone bring me five thousand dollars,” meaning the Singapore dollar, worth slightly more than half the U.S. dollar. Hanging up, he said, “Colin, the situation here is this. This fellow Diedrich has a mole somewhere in these offices.”

Bennett looked both astounded and offended: “How could that be?”

“Maybe we’ll answer that when we find the mole. And that’s your job.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The reason Diedrich is here,” Curtis explained, “and I know the only reason he’s here, is to find out my future plans, so he can disrupt them. That means he’ll be making contact with the person here who’s been feeding him information.”

Bennett said, “Excuse me, Mr. Curtis, but are you sure? When I worked for you, sir, everyone I knew was loyal.”

“A week ago today,” Curtis told him, surprising himself by how much had happened within the last week, “I performed an experiment at an island off the Australian coast. There had been no public announcement, there was no information about that experiment released outside these offices. But Diedrich and the Planetwatch ship were there.”

“Mm,” Bennett said, and shook his head. “You’re right, someone must have told them. Sir, I honestly can’t think why anybody’d act that way.”