13
Red Dragon
August 27, 11:00 p.m. SGT
Keppel Shipyard was quiet this late at night. As the taxi drove me along the road skirting the fenced yard, the empty parking lots inside stretched beneath the stars. The skeletal frames of massive boom cranes cut geometric figures against the gray-black sky while below hulked the behemoths of oceangoing vessels—commercial ships, pleasure yachts, and military cruisers—all at various stages of assembly or refit. Some ships floated serenely in the bay; others were in dry dock.
Only a few security lights shone.
I had the driver drop me off at the west gate. I showed the guard my passport, and he verified my name against a list on his computer.
“It’s a long way to your build, Miss Brenner,” he said. “You want me to find someone to give you a lift?”
“That won’t be necessary. I want to walk around and get a feel for the place.”
“At night?”
“I like the ambiance.”
He stared at me, surely convinced I’d lost my mind. But I didn’t want anyone hovering over my shoulder. I smiled to make my words convincing. He shrugged and rummaged around in the shelves behind him, returning with a flashlight and a folded glossy. “Hard to see much of anything in the dark,” he said as he handed the items to me. “That’s a map of the yard.”
“Thank you.” I’d already memorized where I needed to go, but the Maglite would serve much better than my flimsy hotel flashlight. “I’ll return the torch when I’m done.”
“Be safe.”
He gestured me toward a pedestrian entry. A buzzer sounded and the gate clicked open.
I followed the road and moved at a fast clip. It felt good to stretch my legs and let the night air clear my head. The guard’s shack and the main gate faded to pinpoints of light as I approached the water and turned west, heading past a series of platform supply ships fallen silent without their masters. I’d never realized how eerie a shipyard could be at night after the workers have left and darkness turns the boats into lurking dragons, the cranes into pterodactyls. At every creak and scrape, I found myself glancing over my shoulder for pursuit. I narrowed the beam on the Maglite and blocked part of the glass with my fingers, making myself less conspicuous.
After a mile, I could make out the concrete-block office and the viewing platform Emily had taken me to the night before. Fifteen minutes later, I stood at the edge of the wharf, surprised by the metallic taste of fear in my mouth.
Fear of what I might find, I supposed. Fear that if I kicked over a rock, I wouldn’t be able to hide from whatever crouched beneath it.
My sister’s choice to conceal something on Red Dragon ate at me. Had she been ensnared in a world impossible to escape? Was the hidden space linked to her supposed suicide? Or to China’s interest in her?
“Damn it, Cassandra,” I whispered as I stared up at her yacht. “What were you doing? Why didn’t you tell me?”
You’ll figure it out, sis, came Cassandra’s imagined voice. You always do.
“Maybe not this time,” I answered out loud. “Give me a clue.”
Far off, a night bird called. Wind ruffled nearby flags.
Workers had doused the interior lights, but in the security lights, Red Dragon ’s hull glowed. I stepped onto the aluminum-and-steel passerelle—the gangplank—which was mounted near the aft of the ship and bridged the gap between the wharf and the boat. It swayed beneath me as I climbed, and the chain railing clanked. Below, black water obscured the hull.
My heart pounded in rhythm with my footsteps as I hurried up the passerelle’s stairs.
At the top I stumbled, my feet betraying my unease. I steadied myself, slipped out of my dirty street shoes and into deck slippers, and tucked my sneakers out of sight in case someone came by.
Red Dragon boasted five decks—lower, main, wheelhouse, upper deck, and the sundeck. The owner’s suite was on the main forward deck. Aft of the master stateroom were the guest cabins and a salon—the marine equivalent of the living room. On the deck above were a library; a second, smaller salon; and a gym. Crew resided in the lower deck along with Mr. Mèng’s marine science lab, the panic room or citadel, and the engineering space.
I hurried up the curving flight of stairs to the main deck. There I punched in the access code Emily had provided for the yacht’s living quarters. I raised the Maglite. Its bright beam cut through the darkness, sparking off copper trim and glittering glass. I passed through the immense salon, with its gravity-defying chandelier and the comfortable groupings of sofas and chairs and tables, slowing despite myself to admire an immense library table carved from the rare wood of the yellow pear tree, the grains flowing beneath my light. Past the table was a wet bar carved from what I knew to be Brazilian kingwood, backed by a copper-framed mirror as large as a king bed.
Everything spoke of opulence and comfort—no expense had been spared, no possible luxury overlooked.
I strode down the wide passageway past the guest cabins. A second code gave me access to a private section of corridor leading to Mr. Mèng’s stateroom. As I reached for the room’s door handle, a faint scraping sounded from a distant place on the boat. I froze.
I strained my ears, but the noise faded, then stopped. I pushed the door open and stepped inside the stateroom, once again gaping at the opulence of a place that rivaled any penthouse suite in a five-star New York City apartment.
I paced the length and breadth of the suite, confirming what I already knew—the space was indeed smaller than the floor plans in Cass’s safe had indicated. Cassandra’s black space was here. Somewhere.
I called up a mental image of the general arrangement plan Cassandra had locked away in her office. According to the GAP, the hidden area would be behind the wall against which the king berth was placed.
I approached the duvet-covered, many-pillowed bed.
Bracketing the low ebony headboard and rising on the wall above it was the intricate mosaic of a dragon, a twin to the beast encircling the skylight that I’d noticed on yesterday’s walk-through with Emily. Formed out of thousands of tiny wood tiles selected from different trees—black to rich browns to red—the dragon shimmered in the Maglite’s beam, almost as if it were alive. It was a stunning piece of art. And, if I was right, the gateway to Cassandra’s secret: a passage to her phantom room.
Beginning on the left side of the mattress, I slowly moved my hands up and down over the tiled surface, feeling with my fingertips for anything that yielded beneath my touch. When I’d searched as high as I could reach, I climbed onto the berth and continued my exploration of the wall.
A subtle inconsistency in texture, an unexpected roughness that would allow someone to find the location even in the dark, guided me to a square of four tiles.
I gently pressed each tile, then tried pressing all four at once.
A faint click sounded to my left, and the outline of a door appeared on the wall next to the berth.
For a moment I merely gawked at it, my heart racing as I pondered the implications of such careful concealment and the intricacy of the engineering. Then, afraid of what I might find, I hopped off the berth, slid into the narrow gap behind the built-in nightstand, and pushed open the door.
My flashlight revealed a ten-by-ten space. On my right, two large metal boxes took up almost half the floor space. I propped the hotel flashlight on the floor to keep the door from swinging shut and possibly trapping me inside. Then I opened the lid of one box.
It was filled with Tasers—illegal in Singapore but not unusual on superyachts due to the ever-present risk of piracy. I checked the second box; it contained stun grenades, often called flash-bangs. Also illegal. And a dazzle gun—a nonlethal weapon that uses an intense blast of green light to disorient and temporarily blind a person.
I returned to the first box—I’d glimpsed something beneath the Tasers. My flashlight picked out the glint of gold. I propped the torch on the corner of the box, removed some of the Tasers, and reached down. My fingers curled around one of the gold objects, and I eased it free.
It was a one-kilo gold bar roughly the size of a smartphone and weighing maybe two pounds. Given current gold prices, I knew its worth approached $70,000 US.
Holy damn.
I removed a handful of Tasers; there were a lot more bars. I did a calculation—maybe a million and a half dollars’ worth of gold hiding in Cass’s black area.
A flush of adrenaline burned through my body like a lit fuse.
If someone wanted to launder money—say, money made smuggling weapons or art or drugs—gold was one of the best ways to do it. Preferred by crime syndicates around the world.
The hell, Cass?
That thought was quickly followed by another: Who knows about this? Charlie Han?
Feeling sick, I closed the boxes. I shined the light around the room to see if I’d missed anything, hating to think of what else I might find. I spotted another door, its outline nearly invisible in the textured wood. It was on the wall opposite the door I’d entered through.
It took me a minute to open this second door, which also had a concealed pressure latch, although nothing as elaborate as the mosaic dragon on the outer door.
A wave of warm air greeted me. A steep set of stairs led down into darkness. The Maglite picked out only a handrail and a bend in the stairs.
Go on, sis, said Cassandra’s voice in my mind. What are you waiting for?
But I was frozen.
Was this room a second access leading to the panic room on the lower deck? That would explain the contents of the boxes: weapons for protection, gold for bribes if worse came to worst.
Certainly, if terrorists and state actors had an interest in Mr. Mèng, then a door that was nearly impossible to find made sense. For garden-variety pirates, a heavy lock would have sufficed. Or a door hidden in the back of a wardrobe. Even a simple trapdoor concealed beneath built-in seats or in the floor. Pirates were usually in a hurry, grabbing the most visible goods and anxious to flee before the authorities arrived.
The sophistication of the concealment suggested fear of an equally sophisticated attack.
I stepped onto the first stair. The stairwell, unlike the open areas of the ship, was crude and unfinished. The air smelled faintly of oil, as if the stairwell led to the technical area of the ship—the engine, the heating and cooling systems, everything required to keep the yacht running.
Maybe it didn’t lead to the panic room.
I’d descended two more steps when, from far away, a thump and the sound of voices warned me that I wasn’t alone on the boat. My first thought was to pull both doors closed and flee down the stairs. But for all I knew, I’d be trapped.
Instead, I retreated, pulling the second door closed and hurrying to the first one. I grabbed the hotel flashlight, closed the door, and turned to face the doorway.
No one was there. Acting on instinct, I darted into one of the built-in wardrobes and pulled the door almost closed. I turned off the Maglite.
Seconds later the overhead lights came on, and I watched through a crack in the door as Emily Tan strode into the room. Trailing close behind her was a hulking cinder block of a man dressed in black trousers, a dark tee, a black ball cap, and sporting a tiger tattoo. Dai Shujun. Phil Weber’s so-called business associate.
He isn’t the kind of man you want dogging your steps, Weber had said . We suspect Dai is affiliated with one of China’s crime syndicates.
And now here he was. With Emily.
When he turned sideways, hands on his hips while he surveyed the room, I glimpsed the handle of a gun tucked into his waistband.
What the hell was Emily and Dai’s connection? I sensed link chaining into link, pulling tight.
“Nadia?” Emily said. “Are you here?”
I held still, breathing through my mouth.
Emily turned to Shujun. “I’ll search here. You check the guest cabins.”
After the man left, Emily went to the berth. I saw the bent outline of her head as she took in the disturbed duvet and the pillows I’d scattered during my search for the hidden compartment. She stood there a long moment. Then she smoothed the duvet, straightened the pillows, and turned.
“Nadia?”
Now I didn’t breathe at all. I could almost imagine her eyes meeting mine through the narrow slit in the wardrobe door. But then she moved away.
“Nadia, if you are here, there is something you should know,” she said. “Few things with Red Dragon are as they appear. Charlie Han is only one manifestation of the dangers that threaten you. These dangers grew too great for Cassandra to manage, and she chose death over what men might do to her. I do not want you to die as she did, alone and afraid.”
I squeezed the Maglite to keep my hands from shaking.
“Finish Red Dragon ,” Emily said. “Turn it over to Mr. Mèng and leave Singapore. Do this as quickly as you can. If you pry, if you ask questions, if you behave in any way other than as a professional yacht builder come to finish a big project, you put yourself in terrible danger. Do you understand? The man accompanying me tonight ... he is dangerous. And he and others are watching you, waiting for you to make a mistake. To pry. To ask the wrong questions.”
I willed myself not to move even as my heart pounded hard enough to send blood roaring through my ears.
Emily cocked her head as if listening, then said, “There is an expression that comes from imperial China. The phrase is, ‘Chu songs on all sides.’ It concerns a great war between two men who would be emperor, and how one was tricked into fleeing when he heard the enemy singing songs from his homeland and thought his own troops had deserted him. What it means now is for someone to be besieged and hopelessly alone. That is you, Nadia. You are surrounded.”
She leaned toward the wardrobe as if she knew I was there.
“Do not trust anyone,” she said in a whisper.
After a moment Emily’s retreating steps echoed back to me. She’d gone into the passageway. I heard her voice and—presumably—Shujun’s deeper rumble. Their voices rose and fell, occasionally vanishing, as they moved around the yacht. Forty-five minutes later, their steps sounded on the gangway.
I waited another half hour, then crept out of the wardrobe.
I stood in the doorway for fifteen more minutes. There came only the normal sounds of a yacht in its shipyard. The creak of metal. The faint swinging of the chain railing of the passerelle.
I left the owner’s suite, hurried back down the passageway, let myself out the door, then jerked to a stop as a shadowy form appeared next to the passerelle.
Lifting my chin, I forced a bravado I didn’t feel. “Who are you?”
The figure stepped forward. The form of a man took shape, but I could make out no details.
“Dai Shujun?” I worked to make my voice firm. “I’m a friend of your friend. Phil Weber.”
The man raised his arm. Even in the gloom I saw that he held something. A gun? A knife?
I didn’t wait to find out. Without time to punch in the code and return inside, I spun and raced along the exterior walkway. Steps echoed my own. Heavy, insistent.
Predatory.
Halfway down the length of the boat, I darted up an external staircase to the upper deck. At the top, I glanced behind just long enough to see a shadow ascending the stairs after me. I burst into a second salon—a cozy space where crew would serve evening cocktails to the guests. My feet barely touched the floor.
Surprised to find the door to the captain’s bridge standing open, I sprinted through the room, my gaze flitting over the controls that governed the vessel, the blank screens that would spring to life when Red Dragon launched. I considered locking myself in the bridge or the captain’s quarters and calling for help. But I didn’t know if the communications systems were online. Trapping myself here was a temporary solution at best.
I climbed the spiral staircase to the sundeck, realizing I was only delaying the inevitable. I should have gone down instead of up and buried myself in the crew quarters or inside the yacht’s technical area.
But even there a persistent hunter would find his prey.
I stood in open air. Lights glittered on the horizon. Closer by, the shipyard’s security lights glowed with a fierce irony—they couldn’t help me. The sundeck offered nothing but deck chairs, an empty infinity pool, and a wet bar. Feeble barriers. It was a dead end. I looked wildly about for a hiding place.
The man’s footsteps closed in. I approached the railing and shined my light down the curved side of the ship.
Forty feet below, the dark waters of the harbor sloshed against the ship, disturbed by movement somewhere else in the bay.
I raised the Maglite, holding it like a weapon.
My pursuer appeared in the doorway, a mere shadow. I cried out as a brilliant green light exploded in my field of vision, blinding me.
A laser gun.
I turned and scrambled blindly for the railing, dropping the Maglite. My hands found the rail, the cool metal grounding me. Although I was temporarily blinded, I knew the harbor’s waters, black and still, waited below.
Another flare of light behind me. I clambered over the railing. I would have to hurl my body far into empty space to avoid smashing into the lower decks.
The image of my sister’s face during her fall from the hotel balcony flashed before my laser-dazzled eyes. Her fear, her desperation, perhaps resignation at the inevitability of the descent.
I leaped into the void.