Дональд Уэстлейк - Forever and a Death

The radio and phone were set up in the main cabin, amidships, between the helm up forward and the sleeping cabins aft. Curtis paced in and out of the main cabin, first to the port deck and then to the starboard, out to the soft night air and the distant city lights, then back inside, pacing like an animal in the zoo, unable to stop himself.

This was the tense moment, the final moment. If something were to go wrong, what then? Over there on Hong Kong Island, if Bennett and Tian and the others were to fail, or if the soliton failed, or if the submarine for some reason failed, what then?

He would flee. If he had the submarine but the soliton failed, he would cut loose of the submarine, give up the gold, because they would know it was gone. He would take the same route as originally planned, use the same subterfuges, finish his journey at Kennison the same as before, ready to try again when circumstances improved. He would hold off his creditors, somehow, just a little longer.

But nothing would fail. Everything was prepared, and everything would work, and tomorrow he would become again what he had never stopped being all along: a businessman, a construction expert, a solid man in a solid world, no better or worse than the men around him. Once this was done, he would be Richard Curtis again.

It was nearly two in the morning when the call came from Bennett. That was too early, and worrisome. Curtis said, “What is it?”

Bennett said, “Our German guest has gone out.”

Startled, Curtis said, “Left the property?”

“Oh, no,” Bennett said, “he won’t be leaving the property.” He sounded grim and determined, a man out to prove himself.

“Well, that’s good.”

“What it is, I think,” Bennett said, “I didn’t prepare him as well as I prepared Mark.”

He hadn’t been beaten into despair, in other words. So he’d fought back somehow, escaped from them, was somewhere on the construction site. But the gates and the tall fences would hold him in, and the crew would find him, sooner or later. Or the soliton would get him. “Colin,” Curtis said, “I’ll leave all that to your judgment.”

“Thank you, sir. You see, what it is, sir, he’s just like gone for a walk around the property. When he comes back. I’ll talk to him like I talked to Mark, get him to understand the situation here.”

“You do that,” Curtis said.

“I’ll speak to you later, sir,” Bennett said.

The next call came ten minutes later; still too early. It was Bennett’s voice again, sounding tense and worried. “Policemen at the gate, sir.”

“Don’t let them in!”

“Oh, no, sir, I know that.”

“Is Jackie there?”

Mulish, Bennett said, “Right here, sir.” At times, Bennett’s resentment of Jackie Tian as a co-worker could be amusing; at the moment, it was only irrelevant.

Jackie’s voice, no-nonsense, tough, came on: “Yes, sir?”

“Start now,” Curtis said.

Martin Ha did not like gunfire. In the first place, most people weren’t very good at it, especially when excited, and having bullets miscellaneously in the air meant no one was safe anywhere. In the second place, it made it more difficult to interrogate people afterward, since they tended either to be distracted by wounds or dead. In the third place, it tended to create a terrible mess, hard to conduct an investigation in and nasty to clean up. There were more places, but those would do.

And they were why Ha continued to speak reasonably through the chain-link gate at the Xian Bing Shu construction site even when he was convinced that the two hard-hatted crew members inside the gate were merely stalling for time, and time was the one thing he simply could not give them.

Ha had arrived here five minutes ago with a sizable force, three police cars and a police bus, for a total of twenty-three men, with more on the way. (Tony Fairchild was also on the way, with his group, but Ha was sure Tony was professional enough to keep the civilians well away from the operation.)

The site looked perfectly ordinary from the outside, half a city block enclosed in a high chain-link fence supplemented by board fence here and there, with a deep excavation within and a shrouded building armature starting upward. Work was clearly going on despite the hour, but this wouldn’t be the first time in Hong Kong that construction worked three shifts, the owners as anxious to get into their new building as, ten or fifteen years from now, they would be to tear it down again.

Ha had arrived, had left his force at the curb, and had proceeded alone to the gate, where he’d been met by these two mulish workmen refusing to open up. Since then, he had repeatedly explained the situation, calmly and reasonably. That he was a police officer, that they came within his jurisdiction, and that they were required by law to do what he ordered them to do, which at this moment was to open the gate.

They responded, sullenly and doggedly, that they’d been ordered by their boss not to open the gate at night for anybody at all, and they had no intention of risking their jobs for somebody they didn’t know; people in the office were trying to call the boss right now, that’s what they claimed, but their lack of urgency was as palpable as Ha’s sense of urgency.

Still, he hadn’t contented himself with nothing but talk. He’d already ordered the armored personnel carrier from the police garage, and when it got here, they’d do what they had to do. In the meantime, he continued to try to convince these people that the results of their actions, if they interfered with the police in the performance of their duty, would be much worse than the potential of making their boss angry.

Sergeant Noh called from the curb. He stood beside the car he and Ha had arrived in, and now he called, “Inspector!” and when Ha turned to look at him he made a quick beckoning gesture. He looked worried.

“I’ll be right back,” Ha promised the workmen, and went over to Noh, who said, “The Cathay Bank building has just lost power.”

That was two blocks west of here. “They’ve started,” Ha said, and here came the personnel carrier, rumbling down the street. “Sergeant, move the vehicles out of the way.”

“Sir!”

He went out to the street, to talk with the driver of the personnel carrier, which was a beefed-up panel truck with bullet-resistant metal sides and a reinforced grill that made it a fine battering ram. The driver, a young uniformed police officer, saluted and Ha said, “I’ll tell those people one last time we’re coming in whether they like it or not. If I signal to you, go through the gate.”

“Yes, sir.” The driver smiled, looking forward to it.

When Ha approached the gate again, the two workmen had been supplemented by at least a dozen more, all of them looking tough and ready for anything. He kept his attention on the first two, saying, “Have you reached your boss yet?”

“No.”

“Well, we’re coming in.”

A large bulldozer started up the slope of the excavation, moving rapidly this way. To block the gate?

One of the new men said, “We got our orders. We won’t let you through the gate.”

“I’m afraid you will,” Ha said, and turned to signal the driver of the personnel carrier. As he lifted his hand, the windshield of the personnel carrier starred and crazed and went opaque, and a sudden loud report boomed from behind him.

He turned back, astonished, thinking this was not an occasion that called for gunfire, didn’t they realize that, and the rifleman shifted aim to shoot Ha in the chest. As he staggered back, seeing the rifleman aim at the personnel carrier again, half a dozen of the workmen produced pistols and started firing.