42
TWENTY-EIGHT HOURS AFTER being freed from the NSA’s clutches, Kurt and Joe landed in Singapore. They’d boarded a flight at Dulles, gladly paid through the nose for first-class tickets, and literally flew to the other side of the world.
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
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.”
