‘My wife, Yin Lee,’ he introduced her. ‘Yin is my co-pilot, or captain if I’m drunk enough.’
Yin directed a curt nod at Ethan and Lucy as she cleaned her hands on a rag, evidently having been busy fixing something inside the aircraft. Now that they were standing closer to the Catalina it became clear to Ethan that despite the white paint flaring in the sunlight the aircraft was very much a work in progress. Oil streaks stained the wings and many of the panels that had once been mangled in whatever crash had originally damaged the aircraft looked as though they had been beaten back into shape on Arnie’s forehead.
‘Are you sure this thing can make it all the way to Cambodia?’
‘Are you sure you can pay me to get you all the way to Cambodia?’ Arnie shot back.
‘We’ll get you the money,’ Ethan promised, ‘one way or the other. I suspect you’ll need it to finish your repairs and turn this wreck into a proper aircraft. When can we leave?’
Arnie looked at Ethan and Lucy for a long moment, evidently weighing up the pros and cons of risking his quiet life for some extra cash. As if on cue, Lucy opened her bag and pulled out a thick wad of American dollars. Displaying a hitherto unsuspected mercenary streak, she grinned at Arnie with a glint in her eye.
‘Should be enough for a decent paint job,’ she suggested mildly.
Arnie winced, at himself rather than Ethan and Lucy, as he took the wad of cash and turned to call over his shoulder.
‘Lock the repairs down and check the tanks,’ he said to Yin. ‘Let’s get her ready for flight.’
XVII
‘Repeat it to me, slowly.’
Yuri Polkov rested his chin on wiry hands that were interlocked before him as he looked up at the two men. Both of them were standing with their hands clasped before them, bulky muscles stretching the fabric of their cheap suits. Both were square headed, broad jawed former soldiers and if they’d had a brain cell between them they would not have known how to use it.
‘They slipped away from us,’ said the first man, Sergie, his head pulled down upon a thick neck as though he feared Yuri might throw something at it. ‘We did not dare follow them too closely. We can’t find them anywhere.’
Yuri looked away from the two men and out across the board open water to where the islands of the Phillipines crouched low against the horizon. The yacht upon which he sat was one of several owned by his company and berthed in Singapore, and had been diverted to the South China Sea as soon as Yuri’s jet had lifted off from O’Hare International in the United States. He had fervently hoped to have laid his hands upon Lucy Morgan and have brought her to the yacht by now, but instead he found himself baffled as to how easily Morgan had escaped.
‘She could not have known we had followed her here,’ Yuri pointed out to the two men standing before him. ‘And yet you managed to expose yourself and scare them away in the space of a single morning?’
The second man, Abram, shook his head. ‘They were already on their toes. They dove a site off the coast of Yonaguni but came under attack from gunmen. They fled, then boarded a freighter headed south, so we took passage on another vessel sailing the same route. But when we docked, they were nowhere to be seen. Either they got off before they left, or they got off before they docked again. I don’t know if something spooked them or not, but the guy who was with her looked sharp, like he might be ex-military.’
‘They were covering their tracks,’ Sergei added. ‘One of them might have contacts in the area.’
Yuri clenched his interwoven fingers in frustration. ‘Are you sure you saw them board this freighter?’
‘One hundred per cent,’ Abram nodded. ‘The vessel is still docked less than twenty miles from us. There are a lot of small fishing vessels out here. If Morgan or her companion knew local people, they could have left the freighter and found passage ashore. Smugglers use the technique regularly.’
Yuri leaned back in his seat folded his hands in his lap as he looked at the thugs before him. Hired by his son Vladimir, who lacked his father’s sense of decorum, both of the men were idiots for hire. If the man with Lucy Morgan was in any way familiar with either military life or the criminal underworld, he would have spotted Sergie and Abram for what they were from a hundred yards away. That could have been enough for him to take flight, especially if he was aware of the sensitive nature of what Lucy possessed.
‘Dismissed,’ Yuri uttered and waved the two men away.
Yuri listened to the sound of the water slapping against the yacht’s hull as he thought hard. He was not the only person pursuing what Lucy possessed, of that much he could be sure, and now he wondered who else might have entered the game at such a crucial juncture. The value of Lucy’s knowledge and of what she might find was almost incalculable, not something that could be measured in millions or even billions of dollars. It represented a paradigm shift in human nature, a turning point that would go down in history to be remembered for millennia, and Yuri Polkov was determined to be the man whose name would be associated with that turning point.
‘Vladimir!’
Yuri’s son strode out onto the deck from the yacht’s interior and moved to sit opposite his father. ‘Yes, papa?’
‘I want you to dismiss all of your thugs. Send them back to the Gulag or wherever they came from.’
‘But these men are loyal father, and will do…’
‘They are buffoons!’ Yuri snapped, barely able to contain his fury.
Vladimir ground his teeth in his jaw, and Yuri wondered what his son had promised those idiots of his in return for their work. Money? Drugs? More?
‘We must seek to locate Lucy Morgan once more, and this time we will face them ourselves.’
‘They’re as slippery as eels,’ Vladimir replied with visible distaste. ‘They will see us coming and flee long before…’
‘Ah, my son,’ Yuri murmured, ‘so often do you judge. Your distaste for Doctor Morgan is born of the fact that you were unable to persuade her to talk in Chicago, that your supposed charms had no effect on her. Your solution is anger and the threat of violence, yet that response is the very reason they flee us.’
‘We should have grabbed her when we had the chance and made her talk!’ Vladimir slammed his fist down on the table.
Yuri merely smiled and shook his head. ‘No, my son. We should have taken her to dinner and shared her fascination and her enthusiasm, encouraged her to share her secrets by choice, not by force. Then, and only then, would we have disposed of her.’
Vladimir smiled tightly. ‘It would help, papa, if I knew what we were looking for?’
Yuri sat back and exhaled softly as he glanced out over the oceans.
‘We seek the answer to a question about human history that nobody has been able to explain,’ he said. ‘The ancient ancestors of modern humans had existed in a hunter-gatherer state for hundreds of thousands of years. But suddenly mankind began building cities, forming agriculture and advanced technologies, and that growth blossomed simultaneously in widely separated geographical areas, from the Indus Valley to the Levant to the Americas.’
Vladimir leaned back in his seat, clearly disinterested but humoring his father’s obsession.
‘Surely that’s just natural growth after the end of the Ice Ages?’
‘There had been some developments, simple dwellings, domestication of animals and rudimentary agriculture. But then the people of the Indus valley began the construction of major cities around five thousand years ago. At the same time the Sumerians began to build cities in Mesopotamia, between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. There is no record of gradual development or progression because the cities sprang up almost instantaneously. Both civilizations supposedly independently invented the wheel and a script called cuneiform. The Indus valley script, known as Dravidian, hasn’t been fully deciphered even today.’