'Well, yes. On his cell phone. I think I suggested it to you earlier—'
'And?'
'There was no answer, sir.'
Nimec was silent a moment. There had been something odd about Joyce's tone from the moment he'd identified himself, and now he suddenly realized what it was. She was covering. And had been right off the bat.
'Joyce,' he said at last, 'maybe its my imagination, but you're sounding very protective.'
She cleared her throat. 'Sir, Mr. Blackburn was rather vague about his plans before he left. But…'
'Yes?' he prompted
'Well, to be truthful… I think they were of a personal nature.'
'You think he's cozied up somewhere with his girlfriend? Is that it?'
'Um, perhaps… I mean, not that he specifically told me—
'Your loyalty to Max is admirable. But besides your suspicion that he's gone off on an amorous toot, are you sure you're not keeping anything from me?'
'No, sir. Absolutely nothing.'
'Then let me know soon as he materializes,' Nimec said, and hung up the phone.
Seconds later he rose from behind his desk, switched off the light, and headed for the shower. If Max was deliberately trying to stay incommunicado, he was either having much too good a time accommodating his Monolith executive, or — to be fair — becoming overly preoccupied with the more substantial aspects of his investigation. Both possibilities left Nimec feeling annoyed and a little uneasy.
When he finally got Blackburn on the horn, he intended to find out what he'd been doing, and if necessary remind him where he ought to be focusing his attention.
Independence was acceptible within limits, but no information was worth the problems Max could cause by taking things too far.
Its diesels purring quietly in the late-night fog and darkness, the twenty-six-foot pleasure boat was within fifteen kilometers of the northern Sumatran coastline when Xiang, gripping the foredeck rail, sighted the bright glow of a floodlight almost directly abeam.
He remained still and calm at the foredeck rail, checking his wristwatch.
The yacht was traveling with its cabin and running lights off, but there was a chance it had been picked up by the radar or thermal-imaging sweeps of a fast patrol boat. Only a very small and random chance, though. He was confident the vessel's theft would not yet have been detected; his men had taken it out of its slip after midnight, stealing aboard when the landing had been nearly deserted, disconnecting its uncomplicated security alarms with a few clips of a wire cutter.
Restrained and tranquilized, the American had been driven to the head of the landing in the panel truck his captors had used during his abduction, then been brought onto the ship while its motors were warming up.
No one had been there to challenge the pirates. Investigators searching for the Kuan Yin's hijackers had established tight controls at the airports, causeway, and commercial shipping docks — the obvious corridors of departure — but there hadn't been any strengthening of surveillance and inspection efforts at the marinas where the wealthy berthed their yachts and sailboats.
Xiang had counted on the improvised cordons being spotty, and planned from the beginning to exploit their inevitable holes. Singaporean authorities were used to chasing common smugglers, and tracking down illegal workers from Thailand and Malaysia whom they would herd into detention camps, flog with a cane, and send back to their native countries with their heads shaved in disgrace. They had no experience dealing with a manhunt of any scope, and even with the computerized IBIS command-and-control system they'd purchased from the Brits making it easier for field units to coordinate their efforts, they were far out of their league. Unlike the boat people washing up on their shoreline as if they were beached fish after a storm, Xiang and his outlaws were neither desperate nor docile.
Now Xiang peered into the conical beam of light shining at a right angle to him and waited, his jacket flapping in the warm south breeze. He could hear the grunt of a small outboard above the slapping of wavelets against his keel. Good, he thought. The boats manned by naval task forces were sped along by turbocharged engines and water-jet drives. This was nothing so modern or formidable.
As Xiang stood leaning over the rail, the floodlight suddenly went out and the heavy-hanging sea mist knitted water and sky into a screen of undivided blackness. He dropped his eyes to his wristwatch again, waited exactly five seconds, then looked back out at the water.
The light blinked rapidly on, then off, then on.
He glanced over his shoulder. Through the cabin windshield, he could see several of his men in the cockpit. Behind the wheel, Juara looked out at the searchlight, then lowered his head to study a compass and chart in the faint glow of the binnacle. After a moment Juara straightened up and nodded to Xiang, confirming that they were at the proper coordinates for their rendezvous.
Pleased, Xiang undipped the high-intensity flashlight from his belt, held it out in front of him, and returned the hailing signal with his response. On, off, on, off. Then on and off again after a fifteen-second interval.
He hung on the rail until he could see the outline of the pickup launch, then went quickly into the cabin and down the gangway to the lower deck, wanting to assure himself that the prisoner was ready to be brought ashore.
Chapter Ten
'Seriously, Jason, this ought to be called 'Cholesterol Corner' or 'Arterial Sclerosis Way' or something,' Charles Kirby said, looking down at his Rudy Guiliani hero sandwich, which contained a precarious mountain of corned beef, pastrami, Muenster cheese, and Swiss cheese, with a dripping mantle of Russian dressing and coleslaw at its lofty summit. Altough he had been tempted by the Barbra Streisand, with its multiple strata of turkey and roast beef, he'd found himself incapable of reading its name off the menu, thinking it had a rather unmanly ring.
'Why's that?' Jason Weinstein said, and stretched his mouth to encompass a pastrami, corned beef, and liver-heaped Joe DiMaggio, which he'd chosen over a Tom Cruise only because he'd never been a big fan of the latter's movies.
Kirby pushed his chin at the window. 'Well, with that Lindy's Famous cheesecake place on the corner, and the Famous Ray's pizza joint across the street, somebody could build a famously successful practice opening a walk-in cardiac center on the block, don't you think?'
Jason shrugged indifferently, bit into his food, and reached across the table to grab a half-sour dill off the pickle dish, visibly chagrined over its nearer proximity to Kirby. Why Jason hadn't simply asked him to pass the pickles across the table rather than opting for the boardinghouse reach, as his grandmother would have called it, was something that Kirby couldn't for the life of him understand. He was a Wall Street lawyer, for God's sake. Where the hell were his dining manners?
He reached for his knife and fork, cut a wedge off his sandwich, and ate it in silence, having decided that any attempt to raise it to his mouth would result in an unstoppable landslide of sliced meat and cheese — Jason's ability to perform that gravity-defying task notwithstanding.
Suppose you need to have grown up in Brooklyn, he thought.
Jason chewed and swallowed with unfettered relish. 'Better than sex, isn't it?'
'Maybe not for me,' Kirby said. 'But pretty good, I admit.'
Jason gave him a look that said there was no accounting for taste.
'Okay, talk. Why'd you spring for lunch?'
Kirby sat for a moment.
'You represent the Spartus consortium. Or at least your firm does,' he said. 'I want to know who's buying its stake in UpLink.'
