Donald Moffitt - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 57, No. 7 & 8, July/August 2012

“Sit down, Mr. Tabi.” It had been “Adrian” all through dinner. “You are not playing this at all wisely. The smart thing to do, the thing to do if you wished to deflect suspicion from yourself, would be to stay and listen. Instead, you react with the flight response.”

He slowly sat down again. “You have made an outrageous accusation against me. I don’t put up with that kind of insult. If you were a man, I would punch your lights out.”

“Better. It’s only fair that you be given the chance to defend yourself.”

“Enola, what’s going on?” Nicki asked, her eyes wide.

“I’ve found Ray Zielinski, Veronica, or rather Erica has.” Adrian shot me a quick hostile look, but otherwise didn’t react.

“Oh, my God,” Nicki said. “He’s dead.”

“No, Veronica, he is quite alive. Unfortunately, he was one of Mr. Tabi’s confederates in the commission of the crime.”

“Never heard of him,” Adrian said.

“Don’t be absurd. Mr. Tabi, I give you leave to object to any of my conclusions, but please do not think that you can convince me of anything by bluster or equivocation. Let me tell you what I know, and how I know it, and then you can say whatever you like to refute it.”

“This is all crap. Oh, all right, go ahead.”

“This matter all began with Oliver Long’s illegal amassment of an immense personal fortune. He was under investigation by the SEC for insider trading. We may accept his guilt as fact because it was to escape arrest that he fled from the country in the superyacht. In this, all parties are in agreement. But we must ask ourselves why he chose such an unorthodox avenue of escape. Wouldn’t it have been simpler and faster to get a flight out of the country?”

“Not if he were on a watch list,” I said.

“Exactly, Erica. The Chengfeng is under Dutch registry. The Netherlands take the strictest view of any nation on earth concerning the territorial sovereignty of vessels under their flag. Unfettered by the security constraints at an airport, Chengfeng’s departure from the United States was simply a matter of weighing anchor and leaving. And she was capable of traveling several thousand miles before needing to refuel. What could be better?

“But where would Long go? His first priority would be a safe haven. His second would be the money. At first blush, one would suspect somewhere in the Caribbean or Atlantic — the Caymans or the Bahamas. That would mean going through the Panama Canal, though, where he could be stopped. Besides, Oliver Long was a man of the Pacific Rim, being Chinese.”

“Chinese? Not American?” I asked.

“He had an American education, Erica, but he himself was from Hong Kong. The surname Long is a common Chinese one, meaning “dragon,’ and he had even given the yacht a traditional Chinese name.”

I mentally kicked myself. I had been so busy looking for the boat that I forgot to take a good look at the man.

“Offshore banking is a burgeoning industry in the Pacific,” Miss Enola continued. “Hong Kong has a thriving international banking trade, as does nearby Macao. Several Pacific Island nations have established offshore banking facilities. So on balance, a better option was to head west. This conjecture is supported by the discovery that Chengfeng crossed the San Pedro Channel on her departure instead of entering its southbound lane, as she would have done had she been headed for the canal. The only way her actual course made sense is if she were transiting the open ocean.”

“But even the Chengfeng couldn’t hope to cross the whole Pacific Ocean on a single tank,” I said.

“Of course not. Long must refuel somewhere, but this was simple because the only place within reach is Hawaii.”

“But wouldn’t he be taking a big risk by refueling in the U.S.?” Nicki asked “He could be arrested.”

“A small risk, rather. If he remained on board and if the yacht refueled at anchor from a barge instead of pierside, most people would never know he’d been there. So I subcontracted an agency in Honolulu to check for any superyachts contracted to be refueled by barge in any Hawaiian ports within the time that Chengfeng might be expected to arrive. As it turned out, such an engagement was made for the port of Hilo on the Big Island. After learning that, the next thing I needed to know was if the yacht would make the rendezvous. I had a strong feeling that it would not.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“You provided the necessary data yourself, Erica. You found out that the LM-200 fire suppression tanks had been replenished.” She pointed to the ceiling at one of the sprinkler heads. “Do you see those nozzles? You would be correct in assuming that they are there to combat a fire should one erupt, but you would be wholly incorrect to assume that they spray water. In fact, they are part of an LM-200 fire suppression system. LM-200 is a suppression agent stored as a liquid but discharged as a gas, designed to immediately extinguish flames without causing water damage. It is the preferred agent for many applications, such as vaults containing precious art, and for ships’ engine compartments.

“The Chengfeng’s LM-200 tanks were replenished, most likely replaced. Why?”

“The stuff must have been past its sell-by date,” Adrian said, smirking.

“Nonsense. It is entirely stable and does not require replacement at any interval unless it is used. The only reason for changing the tanks would be to prevent the system from putting out a fire. But that is a rather baroque method for disabling the suppression system, since it could have been done by any number of less detectable means, and makes little sense — unless whatever substance replacing the agent was itself designed to actually exacerbate the problem.”

She looked up at the sprinkler heads again. “I told you that LM-200 was discharged as a gas. There are other agents that are discharged as a fine spray, like gasoline through a fuel injector in an internal combustion engine. What if the LM-200 were replaced by something as volatile as gasoline?”

“Uh-oh. It would turn the whole engine room into one big bomb,” I said. “It would still need something to spark it, though.”

“Precisely. Something like a cigarette, my dear,” Miss Enola said. “The tanks were replaced by Herbert Holloway, the engineer, who could be safely numbered among the conspirators. He would have a plan, something simple. What if he knew his assistant would provide the spark himself?”

“So you asked me to find out if the assistant engineer was a smoker.”

“Correct.”

“That’s crazy,” Adrian said. “You decide the ship exploded because you guessed somebody liked to smoke? How could you know he’d light up? How would you get the system to discharge even if he did? It only goes off if there’s an actual fire.”

“There are any number of means of forcing it to discharge, Mr. Tabi. Such systems have manual releases — one of them could have been tampered with. I’m sure you came up with an elegant solution. An infrared sensor designed to trip the system at the flick of a lighter would be very simple to install.”

“Then why didn’t the Chengfeng blow up in Santa Monica Bay, the first time the guy lit up?”

“Because the sensor wasn’t activated. It would be configured to some other device, perhaps a timer, to make sure that the explosion occurred far away from likely observation. Personally, I like the idea of it being activated by GPS when Chengfeng would be safely in the middle of the ocean.”

“More unsupported guesswork.”

“Nevertheless, let us accept it as an hypothesis. If true, then Holloway would have needed help setting it up. Hence my reference to him as a conspirator, since he couldn’t have accomplished it on his own. I would guess, for example, that the nozzles required replacing to effectively distribute the aerated gasoline or whatever replaced the LM-200. A time-consuming task. Obviously, he couldn’t enlist Clint Roland, the assistant engineer, who was intended to be a victim. So to whom else might he turn? Again, Erica provided the answer.”