9
Singapore Financial District
August 27, 8:00 a.m. SGT
The next morning I stood yawning in the marble-and-steel lobby of Sixty-One Robinson in Singapore’s financial district. Emily was at the lobby desk, requesting a key card so that I could access Ocean House’s administrative offices on the fourteenth floor.
She wouldn’t kill herself, Isabeth had said as we spoke through the long night.
But Guy’s voice, broken and hoarse, came across the miles: She was troubled, Isa. Something was wrong. Our Cass was hurting again.
I’ll arrive in Singapore as soon as I can, Rob had assured me. Two days.
My early-morning conversation with my beloved Matthew had lasted less than five minutes. Come home, he’d said. Let me take care of you.
I wish I could. But I’m staying to finish Cass’s build.
A brief silence, then: I understand.
The obligation of work was the language we both spoke.
On the fourteenth floor, Emily stopped at a door with a brass plate that read O CEAN H OUSE , S INGAPORE . Inside was a neutral-palette reception area with a love seat, two chairs, and a receptionist’s desk, all empty. A hallway led off each side of the lobby. The doors I could see were closed, the rooms silent.
“Most of our staff are at the shipyard today,” Emily said. “A few, like the design team, work primarily from home. Mr. Mèng and all but three members of his SFO team are in Shanghai.”
SFO—single family office. Ultra-high-net-worth individuals, UHNWIs, typically have an SFO to administer not only their financial assets and personnel but also certain physical properties such as planes and boats. Yacht specialists from Mr. Mèng’s personal SFO handled Red Dragon ’s employment contracts, payroll, insurance, and other responsibilities, including overseeing the build and paying Ocean House as each stage of construction was completed.
Emily turned down the right-hand hallway and unlocked the door to the first room, stepping in ahead of me to flip on the lights.
“This is Cassandra’s office,” she called from within. “Mine is located next door.”
I remained near the gold-and-beige love seat, unwilling to cross the threshold. A clock on a side table ticked in a syrupy voice. Far away, in another world, the elevator dinged.
Emily reappeared from inside Cass’s office. “Nadia? Would you rather wait?”
Would I? I shook my head and moved into the doorway. The room smelled like Cassandra—her perfume, her shampoo. I caught the woodsy tang from a recently burned candle. It was the scent of sea and pine.
Just like home.
I braced myself against the doorjamb.
Emily straightened something on Cassandra’s desk.
“You are tired,” she said.
I nodded.
“I will get you coffee.” Her voice was brisk. “How do you prefer it?”
Grateful that she would give me time alone with my thoughts, I scraped up a thin smile. “Cream, please.”
I listened until the outer door closed behind her, then forced myself to enter the room. I removed my jacket and purse and set my briefcase on the floor next to the desk.
The office was in the state of casual disarray that was a hallmark of Cassandra’s work and personal life. On a drafting table sprawled open notebooks, rolled-up blueprints, and a scattering of pencils and rolls of drafting tape along with a magnifier and a couple of architectural symbol templates. Her desk held a calendar, an assortment of drafting tools, and a marine design engineering book. A raincoat had been tossed over the desk chair, and an umbrella leaned in the corner. Two bookcases dominated one wall at a right angle to the immense windows. The shelves held only a handful of books, a few local souvenirs, and a row of framed photos.
Near the windows, with their magnificent view of the district’s skyscrapers, a sago palm turned brown. Dust motes floated in the air.
The photographs drew me. I crossed the room.
Cass had arranged the pictures in chronological order. The first was of our great-grandparents Josef and Hedy Brenner—Pop and Nana—standing on the porch of their home in Austria sometime in the years leading up to World War II. Next came a few shots of our grandparents Erich and Clara, followed by our parents’ wedding picture on Bainbridge Island—Isabeth glowing in a beaded Parisian gown, Guy in a tuxedo and rare good humor.
Finally came a photo of all of us—Isabeth and Guy, Rob, and Cass and me. We stood next to the sign marking the entrance to our Seattle shipyard. All of us were smiling. Cass had her arm around my shoulders.
I picked up the photo of my family, the one with Cass’s arm around me. A stab of pain caused me to blink back tears.
“What happened, sis?” I whispered.
Cass had been quiet lately, it was true. And Guy had sensed something was wrong. Now I had the indisputable fact that Red Dragon was behind schedule and Emily’s word that the fault lay with Cass. There were also the strange facts surrounding her death. The fancy hotel and fancy clothes and the white powder.
The man who’d witnessed her fall.
When Cass had plunged into depression in college, I’d been the one she’d turned to. Why not this time? What had she been keeping from me and why?
The outer door opened and closed, and Emily entered Cass’s office, balancing two cups of coffee and her key card. Her gaze went from my face to the photos and back.
“Your sister loved all of you very much,” she said, looking at the photo as she handed one of the coffees to me.
I replaced the photo. She’d loved all of us. But maybe not enough to stay.
Emily moved toward the desk. “Are you ready to start going through everything for Red Dragon ?”
“Almost. But can you first give me a little more time? Say, an hour? That will make sure the coffee hits my nervous system and gets me moving.”
I tried on a wan smile.
Emily’s expression fell just short of a frown, but she was clearly displeased. I understood. She must be tired of passing all the delays on to George Mèng.
“Last night you were anxious to get started,” she said.
“I only need an hour.”
Her expression turned neutral. “Of course.”
After Emily left again, I didn’t waste any more time thinking about the past. The hour I wanted was not to reminisce or to allow space for my grief but to see if I could figure out why Red Dragon was late and where the stateroom’s missing dimensions were without Emily looking over my shoulder.
The woman remained a black box. Trust, but verify —a strategy Guy told me had guided American politicians during the Cold War. Of course, he also liked to say, Trust no one.
Since I couldn’t verify, I wasn’t prepared to trust.
The first thing I focused on was the large whiteboard behind Cassandra’s desk, which showed a high-level timeline for Red Dragon ’s final weeks: the outfitting and launching of the boat, followed by two sea trials. On the first trial, we would travel north and east through the South China and Philippine Seas to Shanghai, where Mèng’s personal belongings would be stowed and Red Dragon would be provisioned for the second leg of the sea trial. The second, shorter journey was to Apo Island, a marine sanctuary in the Philippines.
The last, glorious date—November 10—was for the commissioning of OH M/Y 243, when she would be christened Red Dragon . Someone had drawn a line through the date with a red dry-erase marker and written a question mark above it.
I stepped back to take in the full board. All through the earlier phases—planning, engineering, creating the hull and superstructure—everything had gone according to schedule. This much I knew from Cass’s reports and my previous night’s tour of the boat.
As proof, Cass had taped up photos of the yacht in various stages of completion.
Things had started to go haywire after Red Dragon was moved from the construction yard to the outfitting facility, where she now waited. It was clear from the residue of dry-erase marker visible on the whiteboard that the dates had changed and changed again.
I turned away. I’d find no answers here. Only signs of trouble.
Next, I opened the safe next to her desk using our shared set of codes. It was empty save for Red Dragon ’s general arrangement plan—the GAP. Essentially, details of the boat’s floor plan. During a build, the customer gets a simplified version of the GAP while the designer maintains the technical version, which includes details of the electronics, plumbing, and wiring as well as the layout.
This GAP was stamped D RAFT in red letters. Odd that Cass had locked it away. Was it so no one got confused and worked off an old version? That would suggest a shoddily run office, which was not Cass’s style.
But maybe the GAP held the secret to the missing space.
I carried the bound GAP to the drafting table, cleared a space, and laid it out. I began flipping through pages.
Everywhere—in the margins, sometimes scrawled in ink over the drawings—were Cass’s notes, her tight, angular penmanship so different from my own loopy style. She’d made design enhancements, written in requests from George Mèng, even added whimsical sketches, like a guest diving off the swim platform and a shark swimming near the hull. Some of her notes were specific in detail, with bullet points and dates. Others, like a rectangular outline in the hull—perhaps space for an additional trimming tank—were vague. Doodles without commitment.
Now I understood why she’d kept it. She’d used the general arrangement plan as her working pad, a place to capture ideas before jettisoning some and committing others to the current digital plan. She’d likely locked it away because it was personal. A private physical design board.
I turned to the section detailing the master stateroom.
There I found a black twelve-by-twelve square labeled “tech,” located behind the wall that held Mèng’s berth. In yacht design, black areas were a way to designate space for computer-related technical items—routers, switches, servers, peripheral devices. These were primarily associated with the bridge; I’d never seen a tech area next to a master stateroom, or a tech room that couldn’t be readily accessed. Maybe it had to do with Mèng’s work as an AI designer.
On my laptop, I opened the specs Cass had uploaded to our Ocean House shared cloud account. The most recent updates were from two weeks ago. The black tech area had vanished from the schematics, replaced by an enlarged lounge area.
Cass had simply erased the void.
A chill settled on my shoulders. I made an immediate decision. Tonight, late, I would go alone to Red Dragon to find this missing space and determine its true function. If all I found were slots for switches and conduits for coaxial and fiber-optic cables, I would figure the room had to do with Mèng’s AI work and move on.
If it held something more sinister, maybe it would be time to panic.
I returned the GAP to the safe.
I walked to Cass’s desk, sat down, and hunted through the deep drawers for a laptop. No luck. Perhaps it had vanished, like her phone and her keys. Or maybe she’d taken it home—I’d check when I went to her condo.
I opened her leather-bound calendar. It was an old-style planner with two pages allotted to each day. Many of her appointments, I suspected, would be in her phone’s calendar app. But maybe there would be something. Cassandra had always enjoyed the visceral feel of old-fashioned paper and pen. And some part of her had never entirely trusted technology. The curse of man, she’d sometimes called it.
Emily had said that Cassandra’s mysterious absences from the office—and her equally odd visits to an astrologist—had started five weeks ago. I flipped back two months, looking for a snapshot of her life before things had begun to change in July.
I found appointments with vendors, shipyard staff, team members from Mr. Mèng’s SFO, and what I guessed were social meetups or possibly romantic dates; most of these were at two of the city’s expat hubs—the American Club and the Tanglin. Cass had been living the life.
I pushed away the day planner and squeezed my eyes shut for a moment against the pain I felt at her familiar writing, her self-chiding notes like, “If I don’t get my hair cut soon, they’ll need a Weedwacker.” Or, “Makeup or nose job? Ha!”
I toed off my shoes and gave myself a moment, curling into a fetal ball on the chair until the worst of the pain had passed. It was like riding a ship in a storm, waiting for calmer seas.
After a time, I straightened and pulled the calendar back toward me. Knowing how Cassandra liked to tuck away reminders and note cards, I picked up the calendar and gently shook it. A single business card fell out and floated to the floor. I snatched it up.
D R . S AYURI S ARAVANAN
P ROFESSIONAL V EDIC A STROLOGER
B ABOO L ANE , L ITTLE I NDIA
Cass’s mysterious astrologist. Maybe Dr. Saravanan could offer a few answers. I was looking on my phone for Baboo Lane when I heard Emily return. I palmed the card and slipped it into my purse as she appeared in the doorway. She looked flushed, as if she’d hurried. She carried an umbrella, from which she shook a mist of silver drops.
She unbuttoned her raincoat. “Did I give you enough time, Nadia?”
“For now, thank you.”
“Key staff will arrive in the early afternoon. We need to eat, so I thought we would have a quick lunch first. Also, Mr. McGrath from NeXt Level, the firm Cassandra hired to handle security on board Red Dragon , is hoping to meet you for dinner at the Tanglin Club. Would you like me to tell him yes?”
I had no appetite, but I agreed to both lunch and dinner. I had to eat to keep up my strength; plus I wanted to see the Tanglin, where Cass had gone for dinner at least a few times. And I needed to get the details from McGrath of what sort of security measures had been installed on the boat.
Details about which Cass—in her reports—had been unusually vague.
I hadn’t thought too much about that before.
Now the issue of security felt paramount.