Дональд Уэстлейк - Forever and a Death

Jerry said, “But it has to be something to do with that wave, that soliton wave.”

“Listen,” Mark said, “I’ve got to get off here, I’m going to be late getting back to the office as it is. Jerry, here’s the phone number of a friend of mine, he’s somebody we can trust. I’ll be at his place every day at six. You call me from a pay phone, not from your room, and I’ll tell you what if anything I’ve learned.”

“Very good,” Jerry said, pocketing the small card Mark had given him. “I’ll have some Planetwatch folks do some digging — quietly. Without telling them why.”

Mark said, “And I’ll snoop around, see if I can find anything that uses the soliton.”

Luther said, “You have access to that sort of information?”

“I can get access,” Mark said. “I was part of the support team for Kanowit. I didn’t go out to the island, but I filled special requests. George Manville used to phone me all the time.”

Kim started. “You know George Manville?”

“Of course. I like him, to tell the truth, I think he’s a good guy.”

Kim found she could hardly speak. “How is he these days?”

“No idea,” Mark said. “Haven’t seen him since he went off to Kanowit.”

Kim said, “But didn’t he come back to Singapore with Mr. Curtis?”

“Not that I know of,” Mark said. “Haven’t seen him around, anyway. Do you want me to look him up?”

“Not needed,” Jerry said, putting a hand on Kim’s shoulder. “We know all we need to know about George Manville.”

All at once, Kim wasn’t so sure about that.

“I don’t like this,” Colin Bennett told himself. “I think they’re up to something.”

What he didn’t say out loud, because he didn’t want to have to acknowledge it to himself, was that he thought they were onto him. “ Don’t queer this with Curtis,” he begged himself, whispering inside the car, afraid to overhear himself.

But there was no denying there was a difference in the manner of those three people. He’d become aware of it only gradually, so he couldn’t say for certain when the change had taken place, but it seemed to him it had been after their hawker center lunch on Wednesday.

So far as he could tell, at that lunch their friend Mark had once again failed to appear; at least, Bennett hadn’t seen them meet or exchange words with anybody. At one point, the girl had wandered off by herself, but it was the men who knew Mark and expected to meet with him, so Bennett had stuck to the men, and he was absolutely certain that nobody had approached them.

Then the girl had come back, and they’d had some palaver, looked at a map or something — he was discreetly too far away to see exactly what that was — and then took a city bus to nowhere in particular, as though they were no more than tourists.

In fact, since then, they’d behaved as though that’s really all they were, tourists. There were no more phone calls from or to Mark from their hotel room. They went out in the mornings, but not to anywhere in particular, as far as he could tell. Late in the afternoon on Thursday and Friday, Jerry Diedrich made brief phone calls from a pay phone wherever they happened to be, but no secret rendezvous followed; and on Saturday he didn’t even do that.

Something had changed. They had been urgently trying to meet this fellow Mark — a disloyal employee of Richard Curtis’s, that was certain — and they had failed twice to meet him, and now they acted as though they didn’t care. As though they had no agenda at all.

There was only the one explanation possible. Somehow.

In some way, they’d come to realize they were being observed. And they would do nothing to make trouble for themselves or their friend Mark so long as they knew the observation was ongoing.

This was no good. Bennett had phoned Curtis on Friday, to assure the man he was still on the case but that nothing had as yet turned up, and Curtis had told him, “We can’t take much longer on this.”

“I’m on them, Mr. Curtis, night and day.”

“I have to leave the city next week,” Curtis had said. “I need this situation resolved before then, Colin. Can I count on you?”

“Absolutely, Mr. Curtis.”

But it wasn’t working the way it was supposed to. The less urgency Diedrich and his friends showed, the more urgency Bennett felt. Curtis wasn’t paying him to sit around in hotel rooms and cars. Curtis was paying him to solve a problem called Jerry Diedrich, and he wasn’t solving it.

And now here it was Sunday, and the three of them left the hotel in mid-morning and, after a brief stop at the local Planet-watch storefront, walked to where they could catch the #7 bus, westbound. Out Orchard Road they went, in the bus, Bennett unhappily trailing after in his little Honda, feeling the heat of the day, having to stop a block or so back every time the bus stopped, having no idea where they were going because they didn’t talk to one another on the phone anymore. They rode the bus all the way out to the end of Orchard Road, then walked on to Holland Road and the entrance to the Botanic Gardens.

The Botanic Gardens! Bennett knew it well, it was an annual event when he was a schoolchild for a class trip out to the Botanic Gardens. The city was proud of the Gardens, and deservedly so. It was natural for schoolchildren to visit, and tourists. But it was not at all natural for a grown-up native Singaporean to be hulking around the Botanic Gardens all by himself in the hot humid middle of a Sunday, and Bennett found his frustration and unease steadily edging over toward resentment.

Would they at last meet the mythical Mark here? Unless Mark had disguised himself as a Boy Scout troop, Bennett didn’t see how it was possible.

We can’t have another week like this. Time to do something. Time to do something Richard Curtis will like.

Monday was a day of frustrations and irritations for Richard Curtis. First, when he arrived in the offices at nine-thirty that morning, Margaret presented him with a fax from Jackie Tian in Hong Kong:

“Diver unavailable. Arrested on smuggling. No substitute yet.”

This was bad news. The project needed a skilled scuba diver, skilled and trustworthy, and Tian had a man who had been used in any number of dubious operations in the past, sabotage and smuggling, working for management and labor and government, whoever would pay him. This was a hell of a time for the man to be caught.

And if Tian had no substitute, what was Curtis supposed to do about it? He did use divers himself sometimes, in his construction projects around the world, but they were all legitimate employees, simple workers skilled with scuba equipment; none of them could be approached with this assignment.

“Margaret,” Curtis said, “ask Personnel to put together a list of all scuba divers in our employ. On any of the projects.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I want their work history,” Curtis said, “with us, of course, but also, where we know it, with others. And any personal information we might have on each of them would be good.”

“Yes, sir.”

She went off to take care of that, and he returned to the Kanowit architects.

This project was both fascinating and frustrating in a number of ways. To begin, with, it was a relatively small island, and they would have to pack it with a lot of different elements without giving the impression of overcrowding.

Then there was the soliton, the way the island had been recreated, which would leave a deceptively smooth and inviting surface. Down inside there, however, would be undigested chunks of the old Japanese buildings, and jagged blocks of coral. For items like cisterns, swimming pool, basements, the golf course lake, they would very literally be digging into the unknown, with always the possibility of creating a subsidence or discovering an air pocket.