A trip to the hotel to unpack and a call to an old friend who’d helped him years back had left Kurt with nothing to do but get some sleep. As it turned out, he was too damn tired to make it off the couch and fell asleep right there.
His two-hour nap ended when the phone rang in the darkness.
Startled awake as if he’d been jabbed with a cattle prod, Kurt lunged for the phone. He grabbed it as he tumbled off the couch, picking up the receiver just in time to prevent it from going to the message system.
“The White Rajah,” a voice he didn’t recognize said.
“What?” Kurt asked.
“You are Kurt Austin?”
“Yes.”
“I was told to call you,” the voice said. “And to explain where you will find what you’re looking for. The White Rajah.”
“Wait,” Kurt said. “What is the—”
The phone line went dead, and a dial tone soon followed. Kurt placed the receiver back on the cradle and leaned against the front of the couch.
“Where am I?” he mumbled to himself.
He remembered flying, changing planes at LAX, and then part of the next flight. He remembered checking in at the hotel. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Singapore.”
He looked around. The room was utterly dark except for a clock radio between the beds opposite him. The clock read 7:17 p.m. It felt like three in the morning.
Kurt stood awkwardly and pounded on the door to the adjoining room.
“Get up,” he grumbled to Joe. “Time to go to work.”
The door opened seconds later. Joe stood there, clean-shaven, hair gelled, wearing an Armani shirt and white linen slacks.
Kurt stared at him dumbfounded. “Don’t you sleep?”
“The night calls me,” Joe said, smiling. “Who am I to refuse?”
“Yeah, well, somebody else called me,” Kurt said. “So while I shower, you find out what on earth the White Rajah is. I’m guessing it’s a hotel or a bar or a street.”
“Is that where we’re going?”
Kurt nodded. “Someone’s going to meet us there,” he said.
“Who?”
“That’s the thing,” Kurt said. “I don’t have any idea.”
FORTY MINUTES LATER, looking refreshed and like a more conservative version of Joe, Kurt Austin marched into the friendly confines of the White Rajah, a restaurant and bar that had once been an old English gentlemen’s club in the Victorian era, when the English had a substantial influence on the island of Malaysia.
Kurt wandered through several large rooms with exquisitely carved mahogany paneling, hand-blown glass-block skylights, and overstuffed leather chairs and couches that looked as if Churchill himself might have once sat on them.
Instead of bridge tournaments between retired members of the British East India Company and captains of industry smoking pipes and thick cigars, he saw the young and wealthy of Singapore dining on oysters and knocking back expensive drinks.
An informal count registered the crowd to be mixed about fifty-fifty: half were Western expatriates and the rest local citizens or visiting Asian businessmen.
Circling back around to the front of the house, Kurt took a seat at the main bar, which appeared to be made from a thin sheet of alabaster lit from below. It looked almost like glowing amber.
“Can I get you something?” a bartender quickly asked.
Joe smiled. Kurt knew he’d been to Singapore before. “I’ll have a Tiger,” he said.
“Perfect choice,” the bartender said, then turned to Kurt. “And you, sir?”
Kurt was still looking around, scanning for someone, anyone he might recognize, including the contact he’d phoned upon landing. No one looked familiar.
“Sir?”
“Coffee,” Kurt said. “Black.”
The man nodded and hustled off.
“Coffee,” Joe said, apparently surprised at Kurt’s choice of beverage. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”
Above them blue light flickered through the glass blocks of the skylight; either heat lightning in the distance or an approaching thunderstorm.
“I don’t even know what day it is,” Kurt said. “I barely know what planet we’re on.”
Joe laughed. “Well, don’t blame me if you’re up all night.”
“Somehow,” Kurt said, “I have a feeling I’m going to be.”
Kurt looked at the wall behind the bar. A six-foot canvas displaying a strapping Englishman in colonial garb stood front and center.
“Sir James Brooke,” Kurt said, reading the inscription on the brass plate at the bottom.
The bartender returned with their drinks and seemed to notice the focus of their attention. “The White Rajah,” he said.
“Really?”
“He put down a rebellion against the Sultan of Brunei in 1841 and was granted the title Rajah of Sarawak. He and his family ruled a small empire in what we now call Kuching for about a hundred years, until the Japanese invaded in 1941.”
“But Sarawak is across the strait,” Kurt said, knowing Sarawak and Kuching were on the neighboring island of Borneo.
“Yes,” the bartender said. “But when the war ended, the family gave the territory back to the British Empire. The club here was renamed in his honor.”
As the bartender shuffled off, Kurt took a sip of the rich, bold coffee, another step on the road to feeling like himself again.
Joe looked over at him. “So what are we doing in Singapore?” he asked. “Aside from getting a history lesson?”
Kurt began to explain. “Twelve years ago I did a salvage job down here,” he said. “One of my last jobs for the company before joining NUMA.”
Joe cocked his head. “Never heard this story.”
“It’s probably still classified,” Kurt said. “But since it matters now, I’ll give you the gist of it.”
Joe pulled his chair closer and glanced around as if looking for spies. Kurt laughed a bit.
“An E-6B Prowler got into trouble and went down in the South China Sea,” he said. “It was a prototype. There was all kinds of equipment on it that we didn’t want the other side finding, and the other side included China, Russia, and North Korea.”
“Still does, for the most part,” Joe said.
Kurt nodded. “The pilot was using a new side-scan radar and running right along the edge of Chinese airspace. We had reason to believe he’d gone off course and crossed over the line.”
“Ah,” Joe said. “I can see why that would be a problem.”
“You know the rules of salvage,” Kurt said. “In the open ocean it’s finders, keepers, but if that plane was even one foot inside Chinese territorial waters and they found out about it they’d park half their fleet on top of it and shoot at anyone who came within ten miles. Even if it wasn’t, we knew they’d be after it.”
“Yeah,” Joe said. “Chance of a lifetime.”
“Exactly,” Kurt said. “So we concocted a story that we’d rescued the pilot and recovered the wreckage. Even faked video of him being pulled out of the sea and wing sections being hauled aboard a tender. In the meantime, my team and I rounded up a group of locals who could look for the wreck and salvage it without raising any suspicions from the Chinese.
“The guy who helped set it up was a CIA contact known as Mr. Ion. This guy is a half American, half Malaysian operator. He knew everybody and how to get pretty much anything. Still does, from what I hear. But he works the middle ground. You can usually trust him to do what he says and keep it quiet, but you can’t count on him not working for the other guys once you’re gone.
“Anyway, he helped us build the team, including a guy who was with us from Day One. Andras.”
“Was he a problem?” Joe asked, tipping back the beer.
“Not until the very end,” Kurt said. “He even sniffed out a traitor who was connected with the Chinese secret service. But after we set up the lifting rig and got ready to make our move, we caught some bad weather. Three days of sitting mad
e me nervous. Too close to the finish line to pause like that. I decided we would lift the Prowler despite the weather. I rounded up the team, but Andras was nowhere to be found.”
“What happened?”
Kurt took a slug of the coffee. “We got out to the site, and the aircraft was gone. Word was, Andras had been bought out by the Russians. They were just starting to fall in love with capitalism, and one of the things they were selling like hotcakes was MiGs. With the avionics and technology in the Prowler, they could have leapt forward a generation overnight.”
“So that guy was a snake even back then,” Joe said.
Kurt nodded.
“What’d you do?”
“On my first dive to the sunken jet, I’d rigged up fifty pounds of charges. My orders were to blow the plane up if we couldn’t lift it or if we pulled it off the bottom and got caught by the Chinese. The explosives were still on the plane, and they were armed and just waiting for a signal. I uplinked to the satellite and triggered them. Somewhere over Kamchatka a Russian jet exploded. Poor souls flying it probably had no idea what their cargo was.”
Joe shook his head softly. “Rough business.”
“Yeah,” Kurt said, feeling a tinge of remorse for the poor flight crew even after all this time. “So is this. And this time when someone suffers, I’m going make sure it’s Andras.”
Joe looked around. “I’m with you. You think we’re going to find him here?”
“Not him,” Kurt said. “But someone who knows how to find him.”
Kurt picked up the coffee and took another sip.
The way he saw it, Andras had beat him twice. No doubt the man had been paid when he handed the E-6B Prowler over to the Russians. The explosion was their problem. And if history was any guide, he was probably already counting the cash for delivering the kidnapped scientists to whoever they were given to. Then again…
Kurt looked up at the oil painting of the White Rajah. He remembered Andras insisting he’d be a king when this was all over. He wondered what the man was up to.
Kurt finished the coffee and motioned for another. As the bartender refilled his mug, Kurt turned around to check the room.
He assumed whoever had called him would be able to find him and then some kind of deal for the exchange of information would be crafted. But, so far, no one had approached, no note had been passed, no waiter or bartender had suggested another party was waiting to see them.
All around, the patrons dined, glasses clinked, and the occasional flash of blue lightning lit up the skylight above, but nothing out of the ordinary happened.
It was odd. At times in his past, Kurt had felt a sixth sense telling him he was under surveillance. He didn’t even feel that here. It was more like they’d been shunted off to a siding and left there to rot, like a railcar rusting to pieces in waist-high weeds.
He began to wonder if he’d been fed bad information.
And then the double doors across from him opened and a trio of men came in. Two hulking bodyguards. With dark-tanned faces and square jaws, they looked more Samoan than Malaysian.
In front of them was a smaller man, mostly American-looking with some Malaysian features. He had soft eyes, relatively smooth skin. Short dark hair spiked with gel stood atop his large round head, one that seemed way too big for his narrow-framed body. The slightest touch of gray could be seen at his temples.
From his clothes and casual manner he might have been able to pull off mid-to late thirties, but Kurt knew him to be older, pushing late forties by now.
“Ion,” Kurt said, standing.
The man turned upon hearing his voice. He focused on Kurt from a spot between his two bodyguards. Recognition took a few seconds, and then a smile washed over Ion’s face.
The smile was false and forced, and it vanished almost as quickly as it had come. A sign that could mean only one thing: trouble.
43
IN THE SWANK CONFINES of the White Rajah, the man who called himself Ion took a step backward. His new position placed him between and behind his guards, who stiffened, and focused their attention on Kurt like a laser.
As Kurt studied them, all he could see was a World Wrestling tag team ready to start body-slamming him and Joe if either of them made any false moves.
Now feeling safe, Ion spoke. “Standards must be dropping to allow someone like you in here, Austin. I must complain to the management.”
“No need for that,” Kurt said. “Give me a little bit of information and I’m gone like the wind.”
“Information costs,” Ion said. “With inflation the way it is, the price gets higher every day. But tell me, what are you after? And how much are you willing to pay?”
“You owe me,” Kurt said. “What I need will square us.”
“I owe you nothing,” Ion insisted.
Kurt had expected as much. “In that case, I offer you the right to keep your reputation. You’ll have to decide what that’s worth.”
“My reputation?” Ion said. “What are you babbling about, Austin? And make it quick, I have reservations.”
Kurt’s chest swelled, but he made no other outward move. “I explain the consequences that will face you once I wipe the floor with your bodyguards and pound the information out of your overly large, egg-shaped skull.”
He waved his hand around the room. “I can only imagine how that will damage your standing among these good people.”
Ion’s face showed the exact reaction Kurt had hoped for: anger, but coupled with a hint of fear and calculation. Maybe he would listen. And then again…
Ion took a hurried breath, puffed himself up for a few seconds, and spoke to his bodyguards.
“This man is a threat,” he said. “Deal with him.”
A wall of Samoan muscle flexed and began moving toward Kurt. One man pounded a fist into an open palm, and the other twisted his neck to the side, cracking it loudly and smiling. Apparently, they were ready for battle.
Kurt realized the one advantage he still had: both men were staring at him and only him. Ion had said, “This man is a threat,” not, “These men…” He hadn’t realized that Joe, in his sharp-looking clothes, had anything to do with Kurt.
Kurt’s hand found the coffee mug behind him. As the big brutes reached a distance of five feet, Kurt swung it toward them.
The piping hot liquid splashed across both men’s faces. The coffee was not hot enough to scald or scar, but the surprise and sting of it snapped the heads of both men to the side, eyes shut tight.
In that instant Kurt charged, lowering his shoulder and hammering it into the first guard’s torso just below the sternum. It felt like crashing headlong into a tree, except the man stumbled backward as Kurt drove through him, legs pumping hard. It was a perfect tackle that would have made any linebacker in the NFL proud, and it sent both men crashing into a table and onto the floor.
Even as Kurt attacked, Joe was springing into action. He hopped to his feet, grabbed a barstool, and slammed it across the shoulders of the other guard. The man crumpled and groggily began to crawl away. Joe let him go and turned to see if Kurt needed any assistance.
Kurt had landed on top of the bodyguard he’d tackled, but the man was far from out. Eyes half opened, he shoved a hand into Kurt’s face, catching him under the chin. It was a jarring blow, but Kurt shook it off and dropped an elbow hard between the man’s neck and shoulder, hitting the pressure point.
The man’s head tilted back in pain, offering a perfect shot at his jaw. Kurt fired a right cross with every ounce of strength and adrenaline in his body. It slammed the man in the chin, snapped his head sideways, and put him out like a light.
It all happened so fast, the patrons of the restaurant had only enough time to register shock; gawking; drawing back, and looking horrified. A couple had made it out of their chairs but still held their drinks. This wasn’t the kind of club that needed bouncers, so no one appeared ready to throw Kurt and Joe out, though the bartender now held a Louisville Slugger in his hands.
Kurt stood slowly, and the crowd began to relax. Some looked upset at having missed all the fun.
Kurt turned back to Ion, actually surprised at how well it had gone.
Ion’s gaze went from Kurt to Joe to each of his beaten men. He looked horrified at first, and then disappointed, and then he locked his gaze on Kurt and shrugged his shoulders as if to say “Oops.”
And then, just when Kurt thought the man would give in and talk, he spun like a cat and raced out the door.
“Damn,” Kurt said.
Caught off guard by Ion’s flight, Kurt scrambled over the unconscious Samoan and rushed outside. Joe was right behind him.
“There,” Joe said, pointing
Ion was on their right, racing down the street on foot. They took off after him, running along the empty sidewalk.
Kurt might have expected Ion to go for a car, but most likely he didn’t drive himself here, the Samoans drove. And even if he had the keys, a man like Ion wouldn’t self-park, he’d use the valet. And not wanting to get caught and pummeled while the kid at the valet stand went looking for his Maserati or Mercedes, Ion had no choice but to hoof it to wherever he was going.
That suited Kurt just fine. Catching Ion in a footrace didn’t sound too hard. At least, that was, until it started to rain.
On the one hand, the rain cleared the sidewalks of the few remaining pedestrians; on the other hand, it reduced the visibility sharply. And when Ion cut to the right, dashing off the sidewalk and into an alley, Kurt almost missed him.
He whipped around the corner and saw Ion fifty yards ahead, passing under the veil of a streetlight. He and Joe raced on as the rain poured down harder.
“I can’t believe this little guy can run so fast,” Kurt shouted.
“He must know who’s chasing him,” Joe said.
Kurt guessed that adrenaline would play a part in it, but he doubted Ion could stay at full speed for as long as he and Joe. And all those laps, at home, in the gym, and on the Argo, were about to come in handy.
Ion glanced back at them and quickly turned in to another alley. Kurt and Joe chased. As Kurt made the turn, Joe slipped on the wet pavement and went down hard. He slid across the sidewalk and crashed into a large concrete planter. He bounced right back up, barely missing a step.
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