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  Gordian turned from the window and ran his eyes around the table, letting them settle briefly on each face, each member of the coalition that had gathered around him. Parker was immediately — almost physically — struck by the realization that some of the old steel had returned to his gaze.

  "We should discuss our travel arrangements for the trip to Washington," Gordian said. "I think we're ready for the next round."

  Chapter Five

  SINGAPORE

  SEPTEMBER 18, 2000

  FROM THE STRAITS TIMES:

  Investigation of "Phantom" Freighter Continues

  Authorities Increasingly Look Toward Piracy As Explanation for Crew's Disappearance

  Singapore — Nearly 48 hours after the freighter Kuan Yin was mysteriously abandoned by its crew in Sembawang Harbor, its undelivered cargo remains in the possession of local customs officials, who have revealed that they are consulting with their Malaysian counterparts and the Piracy Center in Kuala Lumpur regarding the possibility of a hijacking at sea.

  According to Tai Al-Furan, a spokesman for the Customs Ministry, the vessel is licensed to Tamu Exports, a commercial shipper based in East Malaysia. Mr. Al-Furan confirmed that it left Kuching Harbor sometime on the evening of Sept. 15 with a manifest of general wholesale goods designated to arrive in Singapore that same evening. No other stops were scheduled in transit. It was also revealed that the ship was fully laden when found at anchorage early on the morning of the 16th, adding questions about the motive for a pirate raid to deepening concerns about the present whereabouts of its crew, which is said have consisted of almost a dozen seamen.

  "The shipowner is being very cooperative and has provided our investigators with a complete list of those who were legitimately aboard the Kuan Yin when it set sail," Mr. Al-Furan told reporters.

  While Mr. Al-Furan acknowledged fears that the crew members may have been forced to evacuate at sea by a hostile boarding party — giving rise to speculation that the vessel was commandeered as a means of gaining the perpetrators false documents and illegal entry into Singapore — he expressed optimism that a more routine explanation might be found for their disappearance.

  "We are keeping open minds about what may have happened to them, and see no reason to jump to any conclusions at this point," he stated.

  Mr. Al-Furan would neither confirm nor deny rumors that signs of armed violence, including apparent bullet holes, have been discovered by police in the vessel's lower deck.

  Despite joint efforts by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to combat maritime crime, the frequency of pirate attacks in China and throughout the region— many of them sponsored by underworld syndicates — has increased by more than 50 % over the past decade, with their level of violence also escalating. Last year alone over 400 seamen were either assaulted or killed by pirates, an alarming figure in light of recent improvements in the equipment and interdiction methods used by counter-piracy patrols….

  They had been following the woman for two days. According to their information, the American would likely appear tonight. And it would be tonight that they struck. Otherwise, it might be another week before they had their chance, a week during which the investigation of the Kuan Yin hijacking would broaden and escalate into a manhunt, and the assumed identities of the ship's crew would become increasingly useless to Xiang and his men. They wanted to be long gone from Singapore by then.

  The guest house they had been staying in was a shuttered, run-down building crammed between two other dilapidated structures in a twisty l. Arong not far from Fat B's. They had booked three rooms at a cheap rate, and though the accommodations in each were limited to a few sagging cots, a shaky corner table ringed by some equally lopsided chairs, and a washbasin with a dripping faucet, the out-of-the-way location and sordid atmosphere discouraged tourists and other meddling transients from seeking the place out, which was Xiang's only real requirement.

  In fact, comfort was the last thing on his mind this evening.

  His tattooed chest bare, he sat with both arms on the table, having wedged a small piece of cardboard under one of its legs to steady its irritating wobble. On its surface before him was a photograph of Max Blackburn. To his right was a candle he had set to burning in a flat metal ashtray. Beside the candle was a long, thin needle with a round ceramic handle. Across the room from Xiang, two of his men, Sang and Kamal, had pushed their cots to one side and given themselves space for the supple, tiger-style martial arts exercises of karena matjang. The shades were drawn and the electric fixtures in the room were off, and the candlelight projected their weaving shadows onto the walls and ceiling.

  Thrown loosely across one of the cots were the clothes they would be wearing when they took Blackburn and the woman later on that night. Nondescript khakis, denims, and long-sleeved cotton shirts. The clothes of soft, weak people who lived safe and easy lives.

  I suggest you get something to wear that will let you blend in, the peacock at the bar had said. His advice had been well taken, though he'd thought Xiang too witless to detect the mockery behind his neutral expression. Perhaps assuming size and stupidity went hand in hand. It was a mistake people often made in dealing with the Iban. And it only played to his advantage.

  Now Xiang reached out with his large right hand, lifted the needle off the table, and held its carefully sharpened end into the flame. Let the others practice their kata. He had his own special method of preparation, of steeling himself for what lay ahead of them.

  He waited silently, holding the needle out by its handle, watching it heat up. When it was red-hot he pulled it out of the flame, then raised his left hand in front of his face, his fingers straight up and close together. He stared at it for several moments, his eyes slitted with concentration, almost as if he were reading his own palm. The glowing needle was still in his opposite hand.

  Now he brought the needle horizontally toward his left hand, aligning its tip with his little finger just below the upper joint. His lips pressed tightly together, he slid the needle into the finger, piercing the soft flesh behind its pad, pushing it through until the tip came out the other side with a little squirt of blood.

  Perspiration filming the wide expanse of his brow, he drove the needle further into his hand. It penetrated the fourth finger below the knuckle, cauterizing his flesh as it lanced on through and then exited again, its point emerging to prick his middle finger.

  Xiang continued pushing in the needle until it had skewered all of his fingers except his thumb, rotating it once or twice to avoid nicking bone. There was an almost trancelike absorption on his face.

  Slowly, then, he curled the hand into a fist around the needle. A minute went by, two, three. His fist tightened. He felt the needle's heat and pressure blaze across the inner joints of his fingers. Blood greased his wrist and went splashing down onto the photograph of Max Blackburn. The more excruciating his pain became, the harder he squeezed down on the invasive metal, causing the skin of his fingers to stretch and bulge around its length. The dribble of blood quickened and intensified, slicking his forearm, covering the image on the photo. His fist tightened some more. The pain was a wave to be ridden and crested by sheer force of will, and he did not want it to stop.

  He sat there with glazed and unblinking eyes, oblivious to the other two men as they continued their ritual exertions, their shadows slipping back and forth across the room, integrating and drawing apart in the liquid patterns of their millennium-old fighting techniques.

  "It will be done," he hissed under his breath. "It will be done."

  His fist tightened, tightened, tightened.

  A half hour later, Xiang pulled the dripping needle from his flesh.

  He was ready.

  The second time they'd been together — the first was that crazily exciting weekend in Selangor, when Max Blackburn swept into her life like a whirlwind, swept her into bed before she had a chance to think about what she was doing, or even ask herself whether anybody was at the wheel in
her swoony little head — the subject of Marcus Caine's business ethics had come up in their conversation. Actually, Max had brought it up. Over dinner at a Thai restaurant on Scotts Road, she recalled.

  They had finished their meal, and were on their second bottle of claret, and a half hour later would be grappling breathlessly in Max's suite at the Hyatt, the clothes they had shed leaving a scattered trail to the door. In between, though, they had drunk their wine and discussed her employer. Briefly, it was true. Very briefly, because they'd both been looking forward to more delightful activities than talking shop. But long enough to touch off a sequence of events that would eventually turn her world inside out.

  The workday over, alone except for the cleaning woman out in the corridor, Kirsten Chu sat in the quiet of her office knowing that she was about to blow her career, and perhaps her entire life, to smithereens. Maybe sometime in the future, just so it would make clear and easy sense, she would convince herself that it was done out of conscience, moral indignation, and her refusal to become a passive accessory to acts that went far beyond the boundaries of international law. A woman of principle. Yes, that assessment by way of fuzzy hindsight had a nice ring, and would make her feel good about her decision in the reflective moments of her dotage. But right now, running an internal truth check, she could find only one overarching motive for what she was doing.

  Of all the damn reasons in the world, it was out of love and longing for a man she barely knew anything about.

  How bloody romantic.

  Kirsten glanced at her wristwatch and saw that it was five-thirty, almost time to be off; Max was meeting her outside the Hyatt in half an hour. She popped the disk that would be the instrument of her professional demise out of her computer's CD-R drive, and for several moments afterward just sat there shaking her head, staring at the lethal circle of plastic, remembering that conversation at the restaurant as clearly as if it had occurred only yesterday.

  Ah, Max, Max, Max. The question he'd posed to her was fairly indelicate, and probably would have been off-putting if it had come from anyone else. But that was the essential Blackburn, wasn't it? He had a way of saying things to her that other people couldn't, not without instantly and appropriately causing her defenses to harden. Indeed, she had felt vulnerable to him from the beginning.

  He somehow turned tactlessness into a disarming quality, perhaps because he knew it worked for him, and took such confident pleasure in his knowing.

  What he had asked, seemingly out of the blue, was whether she had any strong feelings about her employer's "underhanded corporate tactics." As if it were an obvious given that there was something wrong with the manner in which Marcus Caine did business. The sky is blue, the sea is wide, Marcus Caine is an unscrupulous crook. Elementary, my dear Kirsten.

  At first she hadn't known what to say, had just looked at him over the rim of her wine glass, wondering if he really expected her to say anything. And he had just waited, letting her know that he did.

  "I think," she'd replied finally, still hoping to avoid the subject, "your question is in violation of our declared truce."

  "Nope, I've checked the rules, and they're very clear that it's acceptable," he said, that self-assured, damnably engaging look in his eyes. "Feel free to answer without risk."

  She had not understood why his question made her so uncomfortable. Not then, and not for a while afterward. She had not yet been willing to admit, either to Max or herself, that he'd touched upon an already raw nerve. That the financial irregularities she had been noticing at Monolith — irregularities, ah, yes, she'd always thought of them like that at the time, always trivialized the significance of anything suspicious that crossed her desk — could be routinely explained away.

  "Well, I'm sure that's his reputation among sour-grapes competitors, and his adversaries in protracted political battles," Kirsten said, more sharply than she'd intended. Charming as he was, Max's cockiness had irritated her. "Otherwise…"

  "Actually, I was thinking of the class-action lawsuit against him a couple of years back," Max said. "You remember it?"

  As one among an army of publicists who'd worked to stem the tide of bad press arising from that affair, Kirsten had remembered it all too well. Because Caine's new operating system was second only to Microsoft Windows in popularity — and catching up fast — it was common practice for software manufacturers to provide Monolith with pre-release versions of their products for compatibility trials. This was a mutually beneficial, even crucial, arrangement, since an operating system was useless without programs that could run within its graphic environment, and a program was dead on the shelf unless supported by one of the three standard operating systems.

  The problems occurred when Monolith began patenting and marketing software that the developers claimed was nearly identical to the beta programs they'd sent out for evaluation. Their charge was that Caine's techies had lifted their intellectual properties, made minor changes to their graphic interfaces and proprietary architecture, and then stamped a Monolith logo on the retail packaging. In essence, that Monolith had rapaciously stolen their products and sold them as its own.

  Sitting across from Max in the restaurant, Kirsten had put down her glass and leaned forward, her arms folded on the table.

  "You certainly must know the matter was resolved out of court," she said.

  "With a huge cash settlement from Caine."

  "That isn't the same thing as an admission of guilt.

  When you're a public figure, it's sometimes worth a great deal to get an issue out of the spotlight. Especially when the alternative is to let it drag on and become an impossible distraction."

  Max had spread his hands. "There are other bones to pick with Caine. His flagrant disregard of the OECD anti-bribery convention, for instance."

  "You just said it yourself, Max," she said. "It's an international convention, not a formal treaty. Meaning that it has no teeth. It's hardly a crime or a sin for Marcus Caine to exploit the gutlessness of its signatories… especially the French and Germans, who until last year were giving tax deductions to companies that exchanged cash payoffs for foreign contracts."

  She paused, took a breath. "For God's sake, I'm not going to sit here and defend everything my boss does professionally. Nor can I vouch for what he's like personally. But he's the first man to own a truly interactive cable television network with affiliates on four continents, which makes him an entrepreneurial genius from my standpoint. If his competitive methods are occasionally ruthless, than so be it. What counts to me is that they're legal—"

  "Or at least have never been conclusively proven to be illegal"

  "— and that he pays his employees very, very well," she'd gone on, speaking right through his interruption.

  "I'd point out that there's real merit to the old cliche about money not being everything, but that would be kind of a cliche in itself," Max said. He gave her a tight smile. "Wouldn't it?"

  She looked at him with an odd mixture of consternation and amusement.

  "Tell me, Max," she said. "Do you extend your services to UpLink for free? Troubleshooting around the world like a knight errant in Roger Gordian's holy crusade to link all of humanity with cellular phones and wireless faxes?"

  If not for Max's frank, earnest look, what he'd said next might have caught her altogether by surprise. As it was, it instantly made her regret her sarcasm.

  "Roger Gordian is a great man, and I would lay down my life to protect him," he'd said simply.

  Whammo.

  Now, looking back at that night, she recalled nearly being blown off her seat by those words. Somehow, their incredible strength and conviction bulldozed through her remaining emotional barriers, and caused her feelings for him — feelings she'd believed, or wanted to believe, consisted overwhelmingly of physical desire — of lust, leaving aside the delicate frills and flowers — to soar toward honest-to-God romantic love at warp speed. That had been a new and startling emotion for her, and she hadn't quite know
n how to handle—

  A voice from the doorway suddenly intruded on her thoughts. " Wah! Excuse me, Miss Chu. Thought everybody go home. Come back later or not?"

  Kirsten had identified the cleaning woman by her Singlish even before she looked up to see her head poking through the door. When she'd first returned to Singapore after completing her education at Oxford, Kirsten's ears had been forced to undergo a crash readjustment to the local patois, an idiosyncratic hodgepodge of English, Hokiien Chinese, and Indian phrases that jangled unharmoniously in the air wherever she went, and seemed especially favored by working-class immigrants from neighboring islands and the Philippines.

  Perhaps, she thought wryly, this was because they enjoyed watching upscale kiasu suffer migraine attacks while deciphering the latest term that had been added to the mix.

  "No, Lin, that's okay." She clicked her computer into its preset shutdown routine and turned it off. "I was just wrapping up here."

  The door opened wider and Lin clattered in with her cart.

  "Why you work so late, lah? Is Friday night, should go out, get away from office." She winked. "Where your handsome American?"

  Kirsten smiled, reached for her briefcase, and put the CD-R into an interior pocket — right beside the digital audio recorder on which Max would find a little something extra that was bound to make him ecstatic.

  "Actually, the handsome American and I are planning to meet at his hotel and then dance away the night at Harry's," she said. And, as far as she was concerned, drink it away too. After turning the information she'd uncovered over to Max, information that might bring down a company that had been more than generous to her with its professional advancements, and that the group-centered Eastern traditionalist in her insisted was deserving of her loyalty, come hell or high water, she would need a whole lot of something potent to wash away the bad taste in her mouth.