Given that I hailed from a family of Aymara street musicians who also formed a private intelligence-gathering agency, at the moment operating in tandem with a water ballet company aboard a passenger ship disguised as a Tang Dynasty palace, I was not about to discount the less unlikely possibility that the old gambler and his nurse were a pair of assassins, so I slipped the entertainment director a few hundred Hong Kong dollars for the key to the old man's room and gave it a most professional going-over.
No throat-ripping gear was discovered, or anything the least bit suspicious.
Sancho and a couple of cousins also tossed the Hopping Vampires' cabin, and they found throat-ripping gear aplenty, but nothing that couldn't be explained with reference to their profession.
The entertainment director had got through to the people on Jesse's speed dial who he believed were Jesse's employers, but he was Cantonese and his Mandarin was very shaky, and he wasn't certain.
Because of the smallish crowd on board, and consequent low demand, we were scheduled for only one show that night, and I confess that it wasn't one of our best. The band as a whole lacked spirit. Our dejection transmitted itself to our music. Even the presence of our mascot Oharu in his poncho and derby hat failed to put heart into us.
After the show, Jorge and Sancho carried Oharu off to the Western Paradise Bar while I visited the entertainment director and again borrowed his passkey.
I found a yellow Post-It note and wrote a single word on it with a crimson pen.
And when Oharu stepped into his cabin with Jorge and Sancho behind him, I lunged from concealment and slapped the note on his forehead, just as the Taoist Sorcerer slapped his yellow paper magic on the foreheads of the Bloodthirsty Hopping Vampires in their stage show.
Oharu looked at me in dazed surprise.
"What's this about?" he asked.
"Read it," I said.
He peeled the note off his forehead and read the single scarlet word, "Confess."
"You should have got off at Macau," I told him. "You would have got clean away." I held up the bloodstained ninja gear I'd found in his room, the leather palm with the lethal steel hooks that could tear open a throat with a single slap.
At that point Oharu fought, of course, but his responses were disorganized by the alcohol that Sancho and Jorge had been pouring down his throat for the last hour, and of course Sancho was a burly slab of solid muscle and started the fight by socking Oharu in the kidney with a fist as hard as hickory. It wasn't very long before we had Oharu stretched out on his bed with his arms and legs duct-taped together and I was booting up Jesse's computer, which I had found in Oharu's desk drawer.
"Our next stop," I told Oharu, "is Shanghai, and Shanghai's in the People's Republic, not a Special Administrative Region like Hong Kong or Macau. If we turn you in, you get shot in the back of the head and your family gets a bill for the bullet."
Oharu spat out a blood clot and spoke through mashed lips. "I'll tell them all about you."
I shrugged. "So? Nothing we're doing is illegal. All we're doing is recovering an item on behalf of its legitimate owners."
"That's debatable. I could still make trouble for you."
I considered this. "If that's the case," I said, "maybe we ought not to keep you around long enough to say anything to the authorities."
He glowered. "You wouldn't dare kill me."
Again I shrugged. "We won't kill you. It'll be the ocean that'll do that."
Sancho slapped a hand over Oharu's mouth just as he inhaled to scream. In short order we taped his mouth shut, hoisted him up, and thrust him through his cabin porthole. There he dangled, with Sancho hanging onto one ankle and Jorge the other.
I took off his right shoe and sock.
"Clench your toes three times," I said, "when you want to talk. But make it quick, because you're overweight and Jorge is getting tired."
Jorge deliberately slackened his grip and let Oharu drop a few centimeters. There was a muffled yelp and a thrash of feet.
The toe-clenching came a few seconds later. We hauled Oharu in and dropped him onto his chair.
"So tell us," I began, "who hired you."
A Mr. Lau, Oharu said, of Shining Spectrum Industries in the Guangzhong Economic Region. He went on to explain that Dr. Jiu Lu, or Jesse as we'd known him, had worked for Shining Spectrum before jumping suddenly to Pacific Century. Magnum had suspected Jesse of taking Shining Spectrum assets with him, in the form of a project he was developing, and made an effort to get it back.
"This got Jiu scared," Oharu said, "so he tried to smuggle the project out of Guangzhou to Taiwan, but his ship went down in a storm. You know everything else."
"Not quite," I said. "What is the project?"
"I wasn't told that," Oharu said. "All I know is that it's biotechnology and that it's illegal, otherwise Jiu wouldn't have had to smuggle it out."
A warning hummed in my nerves. "Some kind of weapon?"
Oharu hesitated. "I don't think so," he said. "This operation doesn't have that kind of vibe."
I took that under advisement while I paged through the directory on Jesse's computer. Everything was in Chinese, and I didn't have a clue. I tried opening some of the files, but the computer demanded a password.
"Where did you send the data?" I asked.
"I never sent it anywhere," Oharu said. "I was just going to turn it over to Mr. Lau when I got off the boat tomorrow."
"You have a meeting set?" I asked.
A wary look entered his eyes. "He was going to call."
"Uh-huh." I grinned. "Too bad for Mr. Lau that you didn't get off in Macau and fly to Shanghai to meet him."
He looked disconsolate. "I really am an Andean folk music fan," he said. "That part I didn't make up. I wanted to catch your last show."
Somehow I failed to be touched.
I shut down the computer and looked through the papers that Oharu had got out of Jesse's briefcase. They were also in Chinese, and likewise incomprehensible. I put them aside and considered Oharu's situation.
He had murdered my employer, and besides that cut into my action with Leila, and I wasn't inclined to be merciful. On the other hand, I wasn't an assassin, and cold-bloodedly shoving him out the porthole wasn't my style.
On the third hand, I could see that he was turned over to the authorities once the ship reached Shanghai and let justice take its course. Getting shot in the neck by Chinese prison guards was too good for him.
But on the fourth hand, he could make trouble for us. The knowledge that there was illegal biotechnology being shipped to Taiwan was enough to make the Chinese authorities sit up and take notice.
"Right," I said, "this is what's going to happen." I pointed to the ninja gear I'd laid out on the bed. "In the morning, the cabin steward is going to find your murder implements laid out, and it will be obvious that you killed our employer."
He glared at me. "I'll tell the police all about you," he said. "They're not going to appreciate Western spies in their country."
"You're not going to get a chance to talk to the police," I said. "Because by then you'll have gone out the porthole."
He filled his lungs to scream again, but Sancho stifled him with a pillow.
"However," I said, raising my voice a little to make sure he was paying attention as he flopped around on the bed, "we'll wait till we make Shanghai before you go into the drink, and we'll untie you first."
Oharu calmed somewhat. Once I had his attention, I continued. "You won't go to your Mr. Lau for help, because once your employers realize you're a wanted man, they'll cut your throat themselves."
He glared at me from over the top of the pillow. I signaled Sancho to lift the pillow off his face.
"Where does that leave me?" he asked. "Stuck in Shanghai in the early morning, having swum ashore soaking wet?"
"You're the ninja," I said. "Deal with it."
The plan went off without complications, which did my morale some good. Tang Dynasty made Shanghai about fo
ur in the morning and pulled into its pier. Oharu's porthole faced away from the pier, and out into the drink he went.
I suppose he made it to shore, though I won't mourn if it turned out otherwise. All I know is that I never saw him again.
The cabin steward went into the room about seven o'clock with Oharu's breakfast tea and was horrified to discover the murder gear lying in plain sight. The alarm was raised. I was asleep in my cabin by then, with Jesse's computer under my pillow.
Tang Dynasty discharged its passengers, then the crew spent the day scrubbing the ship from top to bottom. The entertainment had the day off, and the band took advantage to see a few of the sights of Shanghai, although we went in pairs, just in case enemy ninjas were lurking somewhere in the crowds. We wore our everyday clothes, not our traditional ponchos, and the locals probably thought we were Uighurs or something.
Laszlo and the guys went off to refill their helium cylinders. I don't think Leila and the mermaids left their cabin. I tried to tell her through the door that she was the least likely of any of us to be murdered, but I don't think I succeeded in reassuring her.
In the course of the night, Thunderbolt Sow pulled into the next berth in a cloud of sandalwood incense. I kept an eye on the ship, and an ear too, but I neither saw nor heard the evil-eyed Perugachi or his minions.
That day Jesse's replacements turned up, a white-haired Dr. Pan and his assistant, a round-faced, bespectacled Dr. Chun, who radiated enough anxiety for both of them. Each of them had bodyguards, slablike Westerners with identical ponytails—I won't swear to it, but I believe the language they used among themselves was Albanian.
"Another three dives," Laszlo said, "maybe four. The first to clear the wire away and get started on moving the mast. The second to finish with the mast, then another to open the hatch. If cargo's shifted on top of your box, we might need another dive to clear that away. But we should be finished tomorrow."
Dr. Pan gave a smooth smile and said that was good, then lit one of his little cigars. Dr. Chun didn't look any less anxious than he had at the start of the meeting.
That night our shows went off as per normal, if you consider scoping the audience for potential assassins to be normal, which for us it all too often was. We'd been over the passenger manifest, and the only last-minute additions had been Dr. Pan and his party, so I thought we were reasonably safe.
When we awakened next morning we were anchored off Hong Kong Island, and I joined the water ballet guys in their launch with a box of dim sum I'd nicked from the kitchens. To my disappointment, I found that the mermaids were not going along.
"It's so unprofessional," Laszlo complained. "They think someone's going to come along and rip their throats out."
"You could offer them hazardous duty pay," I suggested hopefully.
"But it's not hazardous!" he said. "Diving to seven atmospheres breathing exotic gasses is hazardous—but do I hold you up for extra money?"
I shrugged—he'd tried, after all—and resigned myself to a heavy lunch of dim sum.
In short order we were bobbing in the swell over the wreck, and Laszlo and one of the guys went down on the first dive of the day. As the dive plan called for Laszlo to stay under the water for over two hours, I was surprised to see him break the surface ninety minutes early.
"What's wrong?" I asked as I helped him over the gunwale.
His face was grim. "You've got to go down and look at it yourself."
"What is it? Did Perugachi get the cargo?"
"Maybe the cargo got him," he said, and he turned to one of the Apollos. "Sztephen," he said, "take Ernesto down to the wreck, show him around, and make sure he doesn't die."
Sztephen gave me a dubious look while he struck a pose that emphasized his triceps development. I gave him what was meant to be a reassuring grin and reached for my wet suit.
Because I'd been so thoroughly narked on my last trip, Laszlo insisted that I make this one on Trimix, which involved two extra-heavy cylinders on my back and a mixture that was fifty percent helium, fifteen percent oxygen, and the rest nitrogen. We also carried stage cylinders on our chests, for use in decompression, which we were to rig to our descent line as we went down.
It was all unfamiliar enough to have my nerves in a jangle by the time I splashed into the briny lamenting the fact that while I breathed Trimix instead of air the consolations of nitrogen narcosis were beyond my reach. Still, the descent went well enough, and the great stillness and silence and darkness helped to calm my throbbing heart.
Which was a pity, because my heart slammed into overdrive again once I saw Goldfish Fairy. The wreck lay with a black cavern just behind the bows, where the covers to the fore hatch had been thrown off. Much of the cargo had also been lifted from the hold and thrown over the side, where it lay in piles. Such of the cargo as I saw seemed to consist of T-shirts with the Pocari Sweat logo on them.
But Pocari Sweat was not long in my thoughts, because I observed something pale and geometric protruding from the after hatch, and when I kicked toward the object, I discovered that it was a brilliant white pyramid.
No, I corrected on further inspection, not a pyramid—a tetrahedron, a four-sided figure with each side making an equilateral triangle. It had broken out of the hatch, and its colorless tip had shoved aside the mast and was reaching for the surface, sixty meters above. The brilliant whiteness of the tetrahedron was so striking that it looked like a belated iceberg turned up too late for the sinking.
So fascinated was I by this object that I let myself drift toward it, only to be checked by Sztephen, who seized my arm and drew me back. There was an expression of horror on his face.
I decided that Sztephen had a point. Whatever this thing was, it wasn't in our dive plan, and it might be in some way hostile.
It occurred to me to wonder whether it was a surprise that Fidel Perugachi had left for us.
I made a careful circuit of the after hatch to judge the object's size—a proper estimate was difficult, as the tetrahedron's base was in the darkness of the hold, but it seemed about eight or nine meters per side. Then my heart lurched as I saw another, tiny tetrahedron—about the size of my palm—on the deck near the rail. I drifted downward to get a look at it, and this time saw a number of even smaller pyramids on the ship's hull, leading down to a cluster of them on the muddy bottom, none of them larger than my fingernail.
I began to have a feeling that all of them would be Giza-sized, given time.
I made a circuit of Goldfish Fairy in order to see how far the pyramid plague had spread and found a smaller number of the four-sided items on the other side of the barge. I checked the forward hold, and there I saw the cause of it all. Fidel Perugachi's crew, when they realized that the forehold didn't have what they were looking for, and that they didn't have time to open the rear hold, had tried to break into the after hold through a hatch high in the bulkhead. But the hatch hadn't opened because the cargo in the aft hold had been thrown forward when the Goldfish Fairy hit the bottom, and Perugachi's raiders had tried to force it open with the jacks they'd brought to shift the fallen mast.
They'd ended up opening more than the hatch, I thought. Their attempt to shove the hatch open had broken whatever contained Jesse's biotech.
It wasn't Fidel Perugachi who had created these objects. These pyramids now growing silently beneath the sea were what we'd been hired to prevent.
I reckoned I'd seen enough, so I signaled to Sztephen that it was time to head for the surface, and he agreed with wide-eyed relief.
It took some time to rise, as we had to pause every three meters or so for a decompression stop, and at certain intervals we had to shift to a different gas mixture, first to Nitrox 36 and then to O2, making use of the cylinders we'd tethered to our line. Sztephen assisted with the unfamiliar procedures, and I managed them without trouble.
We were at a depth of twenty meters, hovering at our decompression stop while juggling a formidable number of depleted cylinders, when we heard the rumble
of a boat approaching and looked up to see the twin hulls of a catamaran cutting the water toward our launch.
My overtaxed nerves gave a sustained quaver as the jet-powered catamaran cut its impellers and drifted up to the launch. I could only imagine what was happening on the surface—Pearl River pirates slitting the throats of everyone aboard; water police from the People's Republic putting everyone under arrest for disturbing the wreck; Fidel Perugachi sneering as he brandished automatic weapons at the hapless Apollos of the water ballet; ninjas feathering everyone aboard with blowgun darts . . .
Whatever was happening, I wasn't going to be a part of it. I probably wouldn't actually die if I bolted to the surface from a depth of twenty meters, but ere long I'd be damned sick with a case of the bends, and hardly in a condition to aid my cause.
So Sztephen and I sat in the heavy silence, both our imaginations and our nerves running amok, while we made our regulation number of decompression stops, the last being at ten meters. A myriad of schemes whirled through my mind, all of them useless until I actually knew what was going on above our heads.
The last seconds of our decompression stop ticked away. While Sztephen watched with puzzled interest, I reached for one of the Nitrox cylinders and removed the first-stage regulator, the device through which a diver actually breathes the contents of the cylinder. I then turned the valve to crack open the cylinder slightly and produced a satisfying stream of bubbles that rose unbroken to the surface. Then I did the same to another cylinder.
Anyone on the surface, looking for divers, would be able to track us simply by observing our exhaust bubbles rising. I had now given them a false bubble trail to watch.
The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories Page 25