Eddie gave him an irritated glare, but said nothing.
Nina straightened. ‘Once we’re rescued, we’ll go to New Zealand. I want to find out who’s behind what just happened.’ Her voice became as cold as her surroundings. ‘And make them pay for it.’
14
Auckland, New Zealand
‘There it is,’ said Eddie, staring across the water. The Tahatu was moored on a long wharf west of Auckland’s Viaduct Harbour. ‘Let’s find out what those arseholes have to say.’
‘If they’re still there,’ Nina said. She, Eddie and Cheng had taken the first available flight from Melbourne, but the sea journey to Australia had taken four days, the Chinese bulk freighter that rescued them far from speedy. Even with considerably further to travel, the Tahatu reached its home port before them. She had already been informed that the Royal New Zealand Navy patrol vessel which intercepted the mercenaries’ ship had let it sail on. There had been no evidence of their murderous activities, so no cause to detain them.
‘Somebody’s there, look.’ There was a figure on the cluttered foredeck. ‘Even if the mercs have buggered off, the crew must know something.’
They headed along the harbourfront, passing a ferry terminal and a sightseeing seaplane dock, an elderly de Havilland Beaver growling from its jetty. ‘Shame the Destiny Sunset didn’t have one of those aboard,’ said Eddie. ‘We’d have got to Melbourne a lot quicker.’
‘Do you think Imka has found a flight to South Africa yet?’ Cheng asked.
‘I’m sure she has by now,’ Nina replied. ‘My God, though. That poor woman. Not only is her fiancé dead, but she found his body. Nobody should have to go through that.’
‘She found what was left of his body,’ Eddie noted grimly. ‘What the hell did that to him?’
‘Maybe it was whatever the mercenaries were trying to find,’ Cheng suggested.
Nina grimaced. ‘That’s a cheery thought.’
They reached the Tahatu. The tramp freighter was being unloaded, crates and pallets sitting on the quayside and more items stacked on its main deck. A large and muscular East Asian man carried another box down the gangway. He gave the new arrivals a look of deep suspicion.
‘Hello!’ Eddie called with affected cheer. ‘You the captain?’
The man shook his head. ‘On the bridge,’ he replied. ‘You cops?’
‘No, we’re looking to hire a ship,’ said Nina. ‘We were told the Tahatu might be available?’
He appeared conflicted, putting his cargo down and regarding the trio warily before finally nodding. ‘Okay. I get Captain Nick.’ He waved for them to follow him aboard.
‘Huh,’ said Nina quietly as they reached the deck. ‘They were definitely geared up for anything they might find on the iceberg.’ As well as numerous pallets of food and bottled water, enough to sustain an expedition for weeks, she saw cold-weather clothing and tents, climbing gear, scuba tanks and drysuits.
The crewman led them to the bridge. Its occupant turned to greet them. Nina had expected a grizzled old sea dog to match his vessel, but instead found a handsome and well-built Maori man in his forties, a small tā moko tattoo running down his chin like an ornate blue beard. It was partially obscured by several days’ stubble, though, the captain looking sleep-deprived and harried. ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Hi,’ said Nina, extending her hand. ‘Professor Macy Garde, from Columbia University. In New York?’
He shook it, cocking his head quizzically. ‘You’re a long way from home.’
‘I’m a climatologist, I travel a lot. Wherever you go, there’s weather!’ She laughed a little.
He managed a polite chuckle. ‘Nikau Jones – but you can call me Nick. I’m the Tahatu’s captain. Thanks, Yuda.’ He nodded at the crewman, who left the bridge. ‘So what can I do for you?’
‘We’re looking to hire a ship to take us to . . . Campbell Island,’ she said, drawing the name from some obscure corner of her memory. ‘For climate research.’
‘You’d be better off in Christchurch or Dunedin. You’d save a couple of days’ sailing time, and there are people down there set up for going that far south.’
Eddie gestured at the equipment on the deck below. ‘Looks like you’ve got the gear for it.’
A flash of anger in the captain’s eyes. ‘Previous clients. They left it behind; said they didn’t need it any more.’
‘That’s some expensive equipment,’ said Nina. ‘You could probably get a lot of money for it.’
Jones shook his head. ‘I just want it off my ship.’
‘Not the best voyage?’ said Eddie.
The Maori gave him a sharp look. ‘I’ve had better. But the Tahatu isn’t available for hire, for a very simple reason – most of my crew just quit. The only man who’s stuck with me is Yuda, and the two of us can’t run the ship on our own, so it’s not going anywhere until I recruit some replacements. You’ll have to find someone else. Sorry.’ He nodded towards the exit.
Nina wasn’t going anywhere. ‘Why did they quit?’ she asked. ‘Problem with your clients?’
He scowled. ‘You could say that. Now, if you’d—’
‘These clients of yours,’ Eddie cut in, ‘you wouldn’t know where we could find ’em, would you?’
The captain’s eyes went wide. ‘Aw, shit,’ he muttered. ‘Who are you really? Police?’
‘No, but we can call ’em,’ said the Yorkshireman. ‘Unless you want to tell us who hired you to take them to the iceberg?’
The realisation that his guests knew about his last voyage knocked the wind from Jones. ‘I . . . Okay, look, I don’t know much about them. I didn’t want to know.’
‘Well, we do want to know,’ said Nina. ‘Because your clients sank our ship and tried to kill us!’
‘I didn’t know they were going to do that, I swear!’ the New Zealander protested. ‘When they started taking out guns and rocket launchers, I was whoa, what the hell? We tried to stop them, but they pulled guns on us! Har— The leader,’ he quickly corrected himself, ‘left three of his men aboard while the others went into the iceberg. We were all held at gunpoint until they came back!’
‘We know his name’s Harhund,’ she said. ‘And we also know most of his men didn’t come back. I think he’s got other things on his mind than threatening you.’
‘Yeah, like explaining to his boss why he fucked up so badly and didn’t even get everything he was sent for,’ added Eddie.
‘That coffin wasn’t all he was after?’ said Jones.
Nina shook her head. ‘Not by a long shot.’ She softened her tone, trying a different approach. ‘Look, what did Harhund tell you? What exactly did he hire you for?’
Jones hesitated, then reluctantly answered. ‘He hired us to catch up with a ship surveying an iceberg. The Torrox, right?’ She nodded. ‘They had all this gear,’ he indicated the equipment below, ‘so I figured they were planning to go onto the iceberg. I didn’t know they wanted to go into it!’
‘Or to attack the Torrox?’ said Eddie.
‘I told you, no! You think I would have taken them if I’d known? They paid a lot of money, but even if it had been ten times as much I wouldn’t have let them use my ship for that.’ He looked down at the deck, away from his interrogators. ‘They killed all the sailors on the other ship, even . . . even the survivors in the water. They shot them. And there was nothing we could do about it.’ His eyes flicked back to Nina, desperate. ‘There was nothing I could do! You have to believe me – they would have shot us too!’
‘There’s something you can do,’ she replied. ‘Tell us how to find these bastards. We need to know who hired them.’
‘We can protect you,’ said Cheng, joining in with the exchange for the first time.
Nina gave him a look of mild surprise, but pressed on. ‘Is there anything else you know? Any
paperwork that might give us a trail to follow?’
Jones shook his head. ‘Harhund took everything.’
‘Did they leave any guns?’ asked Eddie. ‘I know people who can trace serial numbers.’
‘No, they tossed them all overboard. The big stuff, anyway. They kept some pistols – must have been worried about us tossing them overboard after what they did.’
‘What about the money they paid you?’ Cheng said. ‘That must have come from an account that can be traced.’
Another shake of the head. ‘They paid in cash and bearer bonds.’
Eddie snorted. ‘Bearer bonds? Were you hired by Hans Gruber?’
‘Didn’t that strike you as, y’know, incredibly dubious?’ said Nina. ‘Like a pretty obvious sign they were doing something criminal?’
‘I didn’t even know what a bearer bond was! I had to look it up. But I didn’t think about it too much,’ admitted Jones. ‘I didn’t want to think about it. It was a lot of money – more than enough to clear all my debts. And I just figured, maybe someone spotted a shipwreck on the iceberg and Harhund was in a rush to get there before the Torrox so he could claim salvage rights. It happens sometimes, there’s a lot of money in it.’
Nina sighed in frustration. ‘So you can’t tell us anything about Harhund’s employer? Didn’t he report in after they found the coffin?’
‘Yeah, but he made everyone leave the bridge while he used the satphone. I didn’t hear what he— No, wait!’ The Maori’s expression intensified as he searched his memory. ‘Before we left port, he talked to someone on his mobile. Must have been his boss, because he called him “sir”. He said a name, but . . . It was an English name, something really ordinary . . . Miller!’ he exclaimed. ‘He called him Mr Miller.’
‘Yeah, that is really ordinary,’ Eddie noted sarcastically. ‘Might as well be Smith for all the good it does us.’
‘We can narrow it down when we start searching, though,’ said Nina. ‘Whoever it was is probably based in New Zealand, maybe even Auckland, because why send a ship from here when they could have beaten us to the iceberg if they’d gone from Australia?’
Her husband nodded. ‘They’d need foreign connections to get hold of those weapons an’ all. New Zealand cracked down on guns after that massacre in Christchurch.’
‘Right. And someone with stacks of bearer bonds sitting around is probably very high up in the business world – they’re mostly used by corporations.’
‘The bonds Harhund gave me all have company names on them,’ Jones said. ‘They’re like share certificates, right?’
‘Sort of . . . Wait, what kind of corporations?’ asked Nina.
‘Mostly pharmaceutical companies. I checked that they were all still in business to make sure the bonds were worth what Harhund said.’
Eddie frowned in thought. ‘So what does having a lot of bonds from pill companies mean?’
‘It means,’ said Cheng, ‘that whoever provided them is probably a senior executive of a pharmaceutical corporation.’
‘And he’s called Miller, and he’s based in New Zealand,’ Nina added. ‘Now that makes it a lot easier to narrow down the search!’
‘I can narrow it down even more!’ said Jones. ‘You’re not from here, so you wouldn’t know him, but there’s a guy called Donny Miller. He’s rich, sort of a playboy, always in the news – and he’s the boss of a pharma company.’ He pointed towards the skyscrapers of central Auckland to the east. ‘That tower there, with the blue logo? It’s theirs.’
‘Why would some yuppie hire mercenaries to steal a hundred-thousand-year-old coffin?’ Eddie asked, glaring at the distant building.
‘I don’t know,’ Nina replied. ‘So let’s ask him.’
15
‘So is he the right guy?’ Eddie asked.
Nina looked up from Cheng’s laptop. ‘Donny Miller is everything Jones said, according to the local news and gossip sites,’ she said. ‘Rich, powerful, connected – and the kind of asshole who’d be constantly getting the finger in New York because you know he’d always park his Ferrari in a disabled space.’ She turned the screen to show him a picture of a man of around forty, whom she would have considered handsome if not for an expression of oily, self-satisfied smugness that she imagined was a permanent fixture. ‘CEO of Miller & Family Inc., born in the States but emigrated to New Zealand about fifteen years ago, granted instant citizenship along with his mother on the grounds that they were rich and . . . well, that’s pretty much all the Kiwi government cared about back then.’
‘Let me guess – they came here because they think civilisation’s about to collapse and they want to hide out in a bunker a long way from rampaging mobs of poor people?’
‘Actually, he lives in a fancy penthouse right here in town.’ Nina looked towards the window. They were in a room on the tenth floor of a hotel with a view across Auckland’s central business district. The city’s premier landmark, the Sky Tower – the southern hemisphere’s tallest building, though rivals in Australia were under construction with the intention of stealing its crown – dominated the vista, a slender spire stabbing over three hundred metres towards the clouds. ‘His mom fits the whole “ultra-rich survivalist” bill, though. She’s got a big estate on South Island. She ran the company until a few years ago, when our smirking friend here took over.’
‘The question is,’ said Cheng, visibly fidgeting because someone else was using his computer, ‘did he hire the mercenaries?’
‘Like I said, let’s ask him.’ Nina, like her husband, had years before learned first-hand the benefits of a waterproof phone; hers had survived its immersions intact. A modicum of web searching provided contact numbers for various divisions of the Miller & Family headquarters. She decided to aim straight for the top and called the executive office, as expected reaching a secretary. ‘Hi, this is Macy Garde, from the Times in New York,’ she said. ‘Is it possible to speak to Mr Miller?’
‘I’m afraid he’s very busy,’ came the polite reply. ‘You’d have to make an appointment. I’m sure something could be arranged for, let me see . . . the middle of next week?’
‘That’s a shame, I was kinda hoping to speak to him right now. Otherwise we’d have to run the story about Mr Miller’s involvement in a criminal conspiracy without any comment from him, and I’m sure he’d like to put forward his side of the story before it goes to press. It might not even need to go to press if he can clear up a few questions.’
‘I’ll . . . I’ll see if I can reach him. One moment, please.’ Tinny hold music came down the line.
Eddie nodded approvingly. ‘Nice.’
‘You work at a university, you meet a lot of kids who fancy themselves as the next Woodward or Bernstein. I guess it rubs off.’
The secretary returned. ‘Please hold for Mr Miller.’
‘Thank you.’ She switched her phone to speaker so Eddie and Cheng could hear.
A click of connection, then: ‘Yes?’
‘Mr Miller?’ said Nina.
‘Yeah. Who’s this, and what’s it about? Sounds like you were making a threat, and let me tell you, people who threaten me regret it.’ Despite having lived in New Zealand for many years, Donny Miller still had an American accent, though inflections on some of the vowels showed his adoptive country had taken a hold.
‘My name’s Macy Garde, from the Times in New York. I want to talk to you about iceberg D43, a man named Harhund, Professor Nina Wilde – and a golden coffin.’
There was a protracted silence. ‘Mr Miller?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I’m here,’ came the reply, the pushy arrogance gone – until it surged back at full force. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. I warn you, if you libel me I’ll put you in debt for the rest of your life, and you’ll never work—’
Nina looked to Eddie and rolled her eyes before speaking again. ‘Mr Miller,
there were survivors from the Torrox.’ The revelation cut him off mid rant. ‘They were picked up by a Chinese cargo ship and taken to Melbourne. I’ve spoken to them; they identified Harhund, and our investigations led to you.’
When Miller spoke again, his tone was guarded. ‘What do you want?’
‘I want to talk to you. In person. I want to hear your version of events. I’m sure a man in your position couldn’t possibly have intended there to be any loss of life – you could set the record straight and make sure the right people are brought to justice.’
‘I could . . . meet you today, yes,’ Miller eventually said. ‘Can you come to my office?’
Eddie put his hand over the phone. ‘Not a fucking chance,’ he whispered. ‘Needs to be somewhere public.’
‘I know,’ Nina replied. ‘But we don’t know the city, so where . . .’ She looked up – and saw the Sky Tower through the window. The hotel room had brochures for Auckland’s tourist attractions; she signalled for Cheng to bring them. ‘Does it have an observation deck?’ she wondered, quickly flipping open the relevant pamphlet and finding that as well as various attractions involving dangling from its upper floors, it did indeed have a viewing deck, and places to eat and drink. ‘Okay, that’s about as public as you can get!’ She gestured for Eddie to lift his hand. ‘I’d prefer to meet at the Sky Tower.’
‘The Sky Tower, okay,’ said Miller. ‘We’ll meet in the Sugar Club at . . . noon. Okay?’
It was now just before ten thirty. ‘Yes. I’ll see you there.’ She ended the call.
‘We need to get over there right now,’ said Eddie, eyeing the landmark. ‘He’s probably calling a goon squad to stake the place out already. If we get there first, we can watch for anyone turning up.’
Cheng stood, but Nina waved him down. ‘No, no,’ she told him. ‘You stay here.’
‘But you might need me,’ he protested.
‘I do need you – to look after the key.’ She glanced at the golden relic, still in the waterproof pouch. ‘As soon as Miller realises who I really am – and I doubt it’ll take long – he’ll want to know what happened to it. You have to keep it safe.’
The Resurrection Key Page 17