Dead Sea (30 page)

As so many things aboard
Dagupan Maru
seemed to, it fell to First Officer Sakai to clear up the professor's mess. After the meal was finished and everyone had left the dining room, he dragooned seaman Ido into mopping the floor and washing the walls while Nagase and Izumi wrapped the corpse in plastic sheeting and carried it up to the weather deck.

Here Sakai paused, looking out across the wide afternoon with something of a frown. There was a strange taint on the air. It smelt like diesel fuel, mixed with rust and rottenness. If there was an odour of dead water, he thought, this would be it. Then he shrugged, not being a particularly imaginative man, and gestured to his seamen to dump the late Professor Tanaka overboard.

Inevitably, as they did so, Sakai looked down to see the corpse fall. And he was surprised to observe that his ship seemed to be pushing through a floating island made of rubbish. And Tanaka fell on to this. There was a hollow
thud
rather than a final
splash
. He did not sink immediately. Instead, his body lay across two sizeable oil drums that had been lashed together with yards of indestructible plastic rope. The wind took the sheeting and blew it wide. Just for a moment, Sakai found himself staring into the eyes of the man he had brought aboard little more than a week ago. The barrels beneath Tanaka stirred, thumped together with a doleful
Boom!

The dead man nodded as though he knew some secret deep beyond the living man's comprehension, and began to slide silently into the oily water.

Sakai went back to his cabin to wash – only to find it occupied by Sittart and his unnerving protégé. As he stooped to pick up the kit that was now piled in the corridor, in preparation for moving the second officer down the pecking order of accommodation, he overheard a snatch of conversation.

‘This is a lovely cabin, Professor. It is larger than my rooms at home.'

‘Don't give it a thought, my dear. Nothing is too good for the woman who has settled some old scores for me and rid me of two of my bitterest enemies.'

R
ichard woke up.

He knew he was alive because of the pain. This came as a relief as well as a surprise. The last things he remembered with any clarity were being hit by the side of a skidding car and deciding, as he flew backwards through the rain-filled Tokyo air, that his luck had finally run out. But now, providentially, his head hurt. He opened his eyes and the brightness hurt. He moved his head and his neck hurt. He tensed to sit up and discovered that his whole body hurt. He relaxed back on starched, unfamiliar pillows and thought.
Where am I and what's going on?
At least thinking didn't hurt.

‘Hey,' said Nic's familiar drawl, ‘I think he's coming to, Jim.' And even that quiet observation hurt because Richard's ears hurt. And also because it necessitated a physical reaction and a reply.

Richard opened his eyes again. The painful brightness resolved itself into a white-painted room with two anxious faces standing at a bed foot looking down at him. ‘Hey, Nic,' Richard croaked. ‘You OK?'

‘Yeah. And it's all thanks to you that I am. I owe you one. You pushed me out of the way and took most of the force. You're one big bruise. Head to foot.'

‘Bruise?' asked Richard, flooding with relief. ‘Nothing broken?'

‘Doctors say not,' answered Jim Bourne. ‘You'll be stiff and sore for a while and you've had pretty severe concussion, but no major breakages internal or skeletal. Apparently the kerb was enough to break the car's momentum and knock it offline. It's been found down by the docks. Burned-out. No clues. Could have been an accident as likely as anything else, given the amount of
drifting
that goes on down there.'

‘Police?' asked Richard.

‘Officer Izawa,' answered Nic. ‘At some length. But as far as he's concerned, it was just a case of two reckless tourists bumbling about in a dangerous place and getting involved in the kind of accident that happens down there all the time. No deaths. No clues. No case.'

‘Of course.' Richard nodded. Regretted it. ‘How long have I been out?' he asked, easing his shoulders in preparation for more decisive movement.
Bruises,
he thought.
How bad can that be, after all?

‘In and out for two days and a night. It's eight a.m. now. Jim and I just got here. Jim flew in yesterday after you had that talk with Audrey at Crewfinders.'

Did I?
thought Richard.
Then how come I don't remember
 . . .

‘But they say you slept well last night,' observed Jim cheerfully. ‘You've had periods when you were compos mentis enough to be throwing out orders like Bligh of the
Bounty
 . . .'

‘And others when you were more like Rip Van Winkle,' added Nic.

‘Two days!' Richard sat up without further thought. Discovered he could handle the pain. ‘We've got to get moving!' Swung his legs out of bed and thought for a moment he must be wearing purple pyjamas. ‘Get moving,' he repeated a little less decisively.

‘Yeah,' said Nic. ‘You made that clear when you were in Captain Bligh mode. But you're the only one holding us up now that Jim's here to hold the fort in Tokyo – and everything's in place like you ordered.'

Richard had only the vaguest memory of giving any orders at all but he wasn't about to admit this for fear of being held back to undergo further medical checks – especially now that he was getting the measure of just how badly bruised he was. He glanced automatically at his left wrist but there was a bandage round it instead of his trusty Rolex. His blood went cold with fear that the beloved timepiece might be broken.

‘Eight a.m., local time,' confirmed Jim helpfully. He handed over the watch from a bedside table and Richard checked it – at least it seemed undamaged – and slipped it over the bandage.

‘What is this place?' he asked as he began to pull himself out of bed, gathering the hospital robe more tightly as he moved.

‘The Fuku Sunshan private hospital,' answered Nic. ‘It's the one my guys at Tokyo Greenbaum use. Part of the health plan. You became an honorary employee when you saved the boss's butt. As far as the health plan goes, anyway.'

‘How close to the airport is it?' asked Richard as he tried to push himself erect. And failed. Sat down again and gathered his strength.

‘Close enough,' answered Jim. ‘And all your kit is here, packed and ready.'

‘Christian Hassang and the folks at the Mandarin said
Hi
and
Bye
,' supplied Nic. ‘They sent the flowers.' He gestured and Richard looked through a doorway into a private room which seemed to have become a greenhouse.

‘I need a laptop and an update,' grated Richard. ‘And some clothes.' He tried again. And this time he made it to his feet.

‘Clothes and laptop are next door somewhere under the greenery,' answered Nic. ‘Update's easy. All three vessels are closing with the bottle. We're looking at maybe a day – probably no more than that. Time's tight.'

‘How are the girls?' demanded Richard, taking his first steps like an over-adventurous toddler.

‘They seem OK,' answered Nic shortly. ‘Communications come and go. We didn't tell them about our little contretemps. Or about the lottery ticket. And I guess they're keeping stuff from us too.'

‘OK,' decided Richard. ‘I'll have a look at the laptop while I dress. Nic, what do I need to do to get checked out of here?'

‘I'll go see . . .' Nic vanished.

‘Jim. Is there a car?'

‘A Merc in the private car park five floors down and a Gulfstream in the corporate bay at Haneda Airport. Both fuelled up and ready to go.'

Richard leaned against the wall as he stepped into his underwear then sat a little gingerly on a providentially firm sofa to put on his socks. As he did this, he scanned the readout on the laptop screen over the top of his purple-splotched calves.
Cheerio
was flashing cheerfully at three two point five degrees north one six two degrees west. ‘The middle of nowhere with a vengeance,' he mumbled to himself.

Reona Tanaka's laptop was switched on and accessing the Tokyo University cloud, which was registering it at 350 miles north of the bottle.
Katapult
was 200 miles east and
Flint
seemed to be about the same distance west of it. All four signals were as far away from dry land as it was possible to get. Three-and-a-half-thousand miles away from where Richard was sitting now, as the crow flew.

‘Chuck over that shirt, would you, Jim?' he asked, his mind racing. ‘And alert both the driver and the pilot that we're ready for the
off
.'

By the time Nic came back, Richard was dressed, washed, shaved and experimenting with the least painful way to carry his case.

‘That's done,' said Nic cheerfully. ‘They didn't like letting you go without another series of tests but I said you didn't have time. So they've given you this medication to take if the pain gets too severe or if you really start to stiffen up. Watch it, though. It'll make you drowsy.'

‘If anything goes wrong I promise not to sue them,' said Richard.

‘I told them that when I signed the waiver,' said Nic. ‘You promise not to sue them. Or haunt them.'

‘Very funny,' grated Richard. ‘Let's hit the road.'

‘Been there, done that,' chuckled Nic, taking his friend's suitcase and turning to lead the way out. ‘
Hitting the road
is what got us in this hospital in the first place.'

The car sitting in the private car park, gleaming beneath the watery sunshine of a promising-looking morning, was a brand-new Mercedes E Class Avantgarde. Among its other advantages, it was configured to allow full use of all the communications equipment they had with them, so Richard was able to double-check the readings he had scanned on the laptop as the taciturn driver pushed the saloon as close to its 150 mph top speed as law and circumstances allowed. Then he was able to contact the twenty-four-hour desk at Crewfinders in London and double-check the arrangements he and Audrey had put in place during a conversation he could not remember having more than twenty-four hours ago. While he did this, Nic contacted the airport again and alerted the pilot that they were on their way confirming that a flight plan had been filed and clearances put in place on the expectation that they would be lifting off as soon after ten local time as humanly and bureaucratically possible.

Then the three men went into closed conference while the car sped like a black rocket along a route which, Richard noted with a subconscious shiver, was all too close to the one that had taken them to Rage and the nearly fatal dock area. But soon enough they were turning on to Metropolitan Expressway 1, and not long after that, they had to close their equipment down as the Mercedes plunged into the tunnel designed to take them under the water and out on to the island which contained the airport itself. And nothing much more than the airport, in fact. A lot like a good number of islands, large and small, between here and Canada, thought Richard.

They eased past the Terminals One and Two, and sped directly down to the handling areas where they drew up beside the gleaming Gulfstream G650 in Greenbaum International livery that was parked on the apron. Richard made use of his initial stiffness and slowness getting out of the Merc to admire the jet that seemed to tower above him. It was as near as dammit, he knew, a hundred feet long from nose to tail and a hundred feet wide from wing tip to wing tip. The folding stairs were down and the three businessmen climbed aboard to find a range of officialdom awaiting them. Even allowing for three executives, half-a-dozen officials and four crew members, the passenger compartment seemed spacious and thinly populated. Richard stooped – painfully and uneasily – though he could just about have stood erect in the very middle of the cabin, and folded himself into a leather-covered sofa as soon as he was able.

A certain number of the necessary questions had already been answered by the pilots, flight engineer and the air hostess who were wearing the green uniform of the Greenbaum International flight crew. Nic was an old hand at this and what little he could not settle on behalf of Richard and himself was covered by Jim, as a senior executive with Heritage Mariner, who went with the men from Customs, Immigration and Security, when they all left the plane.

Twenty minutes later, the pilot reported that they had clearance and a place in the queue for lift-off. So it was, as planned, a little after ten a.m. local time, that the Gulfstream accelerated down the runway with its twin Rolls-Royce BR725 A1 – twelve engines powering up to maximum revs, and lifted into the watery sunshine of the lower air above Tokyo Bay.

At the earliest possible opportunity, the air hostess came over to the two occupants of the exclusive executive cabin and enquired, ‘What can I get for you, gentlemen?'

And Richard answered, feelingly, ‘
Food!
'

By the time the Gulfstream was levelling out at 40,000 feet over Chiba and the east coast of Japan was falling away at a whisper less than the speed of sound behind her sleek belly, Richard was tucking into smoked salmon and scrambled eggs on pale but plentiful toast. The percolator was chugging cheerfully and the aroma of Blue Mountain high roast Arabica coffee was filling the atmosphere.

At last he sat back, sated, with a cup of the nut-brown nectar in his hand and enquired, ‘How long to Henderson, Nic?'

The answer was, ‘Just over two hours at Mach point nine five.' And a little more than one hundred minutes later, the Gulfstream was throttling back towards 500 knots and settling on to the long finals that would bring it to a safe landing on Sand Island in the south-west section of the remote Midway Atoll, a couple of thousand miles east of Tokyo.

Like many of the deserted atoll islands in the vast emptiness out here, Midway, famous as the most decisive naval battleground of the War in the Pacific, had once been a USAF base. It was unmanned now but nevertheless kept stocked with supplies and fuel for emergencies. The last one had been way back in June 2011, but the avgas was still kept fresh and plentiful by the Boeing Corporation. The Greenbaum International Gulfstream touched down there at twelve forty-five Tokyo time, which was sixteen forty-five local.