all week. With nothing to do but wait out the extended stops, they had noisily formed a consensus that officials were searching for the cargo ship's hijackers, or for confederates who might try slipping across the border from Malaysia to assist in their getaway.
Max didn't know about that; he had been too preoccupied with a security analysis at the ground station to follow the story's every sensational development. Still, he had noticed men in the epauleted uniforms of the Singapore Police reinforcing the usual contingent of customs bureaucrats, and assumed something very much out of the ordinary was in the air.
Of course, he'd had other things pressing on his mind as the bus continued fitfully over the Johor Strait and then onto the Bukit Timah Expressway, skirting a lush, carefully managed flourishing of parkland as it bore south to Ban San terminal. If Kirsten had finally dug up the evidence he'd been hoping to obtain from Monolith's computer databases, then the shadow play he'd initiated the day they met was about to reach its conclusion. But at what cost to her? She would be finished at Monolith. And the hard, cold truth was that he would be nearly finished with Kirsten.
Yes, she deserved better, much better, than she was bound to get from him in the end.
Blackburn had discharged the matter from his thoughts for the remainder of the trip in. Upon reaching the station on Arab Street, he had switched to a city bus and ridden it into the center of town, where traffic had once again slowed to a crawl, this time due to typical rush-hour congestion. Convinced he could make better progress on foot, he'd gotten off on Orchard Road and strode hurriedly west past the sleek, glass-fronted shopping centers lining the street like modern crystal palaces, their facades reflecting hard-pointed sun-darts that stung his eyes in spite of his dark glasses.
Now he swung right onto Scotts, squinting into the glare toward yet another exclusive shopping strip and the high tower of the Regency beyond.
Kirsten was waiting at her usual spot beside the main entrance, her hair pouring loosely over the shoulders of an eggshell-colored dress, looking out into the busy oneway thoroughfare, probably expecting him to arrive with the steady stream of cabs and buses moving past the hotel. As he approached her, Max instantly felt the mingled guilt and desire that always swelled up in him when they met. She had given herself to him without inhibition, and in its own way his craving for her was equally fierce, but Max did not love her as she had come to love him, and he had told her that he did only because it forwarded his selfish objectives. And though his lies and manipulations had profaned even their moments of greatest intimacy, he knew that he would keep leading her down the garden path until he got what he wanted.. and that it wouldn't even be that hard.
No, God help me, not hard at all, he thought, stepping quickly toward where she was standing.
Xiang sat behind the dashboard of a panel truck outside the Hyatt's service entrance on the uphill side of Scotts Road. Less than half an hour earlier, the truck's original driver had been delivering fresh linens to the hotel. Now his naked corpse was in back, wrapped in a red-stained tablecloth from the very pile of linens he had been unloading when the Iban stole up behind him. Blood trickled from the ear through which Xiang had inserted his six- inch kanata needle, rupturing the man's eardrum, driving the needle up into the soft meat of his brain via the auditory canal, killing him instantly and silently.
The white uniform blouse that had been stripped from his body had smears of blood on the collar and was almost impossibly snug on Xiang, but he felt confident no one would notice it while he remained in the truck. Still, he was growing anxious. Where was the American? He could not stay parked at the loading ramp indefinitely without arousing suspicions.
Wrestling down his impatience, Xiang dipped his head slightly to look as if he might be resting behind the wheel. And waited. With luck, the murdered driver would soon have company.
Back on the street, the rest of the strike team had assumed various positions around the hotel, two covering its doors, a pair in front of the Royal Holiday Inn complex across the street, another four dispersed between the north and south corners of Scotts Road.
The men were similar in general appearance. Black-haired and stony-eyed, with angular features, skin the color of sunbaked clay, and compact builds over which the muscles were strung like taut leather cords. Each had concealed a weapon of one kind or another in the loose-fitting, casual clothes that allowed them to troll unnoticed among the hurrying crowd.
The swarm of people posed no hindrance to them. Nor did the remaining daylight. It would have been riskier to strike in darkness, when the street was emptier and activity along its sidewalks would be less frenetic. At night their movements would draw the eye like sudden ripples in a still pond; now the noise and confusion of pedestrian traffic would camouflage them in plain sight.
The woman had been standing at the Hyatt entrance for some time, looking out at the street as if she expected someone to join her at any moment. And, of course, that was exactly the case. They had been stalking her for days like wolves on the hunt. Tonight she would draw their real quarry into their circle, and they would do the job they had been paid to do.
Now the woman chanced to look in the direction of Orchard Road and her eyes widened.
The watchers took note. She smiled, waved, her expression pleased and a little excited.
The watchers observed this as well.
They turned in the direction she was facing, their eyes keenly anticipant, tracking the path of her gaze. Finally, they thought as one. Though the man walking toward her wore aviator sunglasses, he was easily recognizable as the individual in their photographs. He raised his hand in an answering wave and stepped up his pace.
'Max!' she called, descending the hotel steps.
The watchers moved in to take them.
Chapter Six
'Get it straight, Alex. It isn't the locks, but the keys your friend Gordian should be training his sights on… ah, stuff it up this contraption's wire-clogged asshole, I'm falling behind the pacer!'
In his career heyday, Rear Admiral Craig Weston, Ret., had been among the biggest of the U. S. Navy's big fish in his position as chief officer of SUBGRU 2, the command organization for all attack submarines on the Atlantic coast, based, along with the primary student training facility of America's submarine force, in Groton, Connecticut. This included the three nuclear submarine squadrons docked along the deceptively tranquil New England shoreline, as well as two squadrons split between home bases in Charleston, South Carolina, and Norwalk, Virginia — a total of forty-eight SSNs, one research submarine, and numerous support vessels. Considering that the payload of conventional and nuclear munitions aboard a single SSN was sufficient to erase a major coastal city from the map, the magnitude of the destructive force that had been under Weston's control was, in a word, remarkable.
For Alex Nordstrum, the best part of observing Weston on the rowing machine at the Northwest Health and Fitness club was seeing how much of that force he seemed to have taken with him into retirement. A tall, lean man in his late sixties with a silver flattop crew cut, stormcloud-gray eyes, and a jaw like a lofty mountain ledge, Weston approached his morning workouts with utmost seriousness and concentration… and a biting ferocity that was often manifested as a rather prolonged salvo of expletives, characterized by creative anatomical references, and uttered at a volume just quiet enough to avoid violating the gym's rules of acceptable conduct.
'Son of a bitch! I'm on you now, you hungry fucking crotch louse!' he growled, accelerating the rhythm of his strokes. He was wearing gym shorts and an athletic shirt to showcase — quite intentionally, Nordstrum believed — a physique that would have been impressive on someone thirty years his junior, and been considered truly phenomenal on a man his age in the best of health. Having recently undergone a program of intensive chemotherapy to combat prostate cancer that had metastacized to his lymph nodes, Weston had almost achieved superhuman status in Alex's estimate. Lateral muscles bulged in his thighs as he began his drive. Abdominals and pectorals that looked two inches thick flexed under his tank top midway through his extension. Biceps swelled on his arms as he pulled the handles to complete his stroke, then leaned back in toward the flywheel for his recovery, his hips swinging slightly, the tension cord vibrating like a bowstring.
