"A million kina is a lot of money."
"Yes. Wait here." Picking up his machete, Kuikui moved purposefully toward the open doorway. His friends waited in the darkness.
"What is it?" The voice on the phone sounded more anxious than ever.
"What"s going on?"
"Probably nothing, pren Eric." Wahgi spoke in a whisper.
"Just some noise outside. My friend Kuikui went to check on.. .."
The staccato burst of sound splintered in the Huli"s eardrums. He had heard that sound before, once during a riot and again during a military parade. It was the sound of a gun going off. An automatic gun that could fire many shots without stopping. Gembogi sprang for his machete while Wahgi grabbed the briefcase and stumbled toward the rear of the shack.
The voice on the phone never stopped talking.
"Wahgi! What was that? It sounded like an uzi!"
"We are being shot at!" Clutching the phone in one hand and the briefcase in the other, Wahgi pushed up against the back wall of the shanty. Outside were plank walkways and below, the sewage-saturated part of the harbor that surged back and forth beneath Koki.
"In the briefcase!" the voice on the phone told him.
"A plastic egg the size of a man"s fist! Put it next to the phone."
Fumbling among the devices and papers, Wahgi found the object described and did as he was told. An electronic tone sounded from the phone, in response to which a red light appeared on the side of the container.
"I did what you told me to," he stammered into the phone.
"What do I do now?"
"Run, jump, get away, Wahgi--and throw it at the people with the guns!"
"Kuikui, Gembogi, run away!" he shouted. There was no reply as he tossed the container onto the floor and pushed through the flimsy rear wall of the shack.
As he did so, three men burst through the doorway.
Two were tall and European while the third was Melanesian, but no Highlander. A slim, fine-featured coastal man, Wahgi saw in the glow of the lights they carried, probably from down near Milne Bay.
As he fell toward the outriggers moored below, the sun seemed to come out behind him. It was a sun full of thunder, as the shack, the wooden planks on which it sat, and a portion of the surrounding walkways erupted in a ball of white-hot flame. Screams filled the air as other shanty dwellers explosively roused from their sleep staggered out of their thrown-together homes to gape at the fireball rising in their midst.
Wahgi landed hard in an open outrigger, twisting his ankle and hitting his jaw on the side of the narrow craft. But there was nothing wrong with the rest of him. Carefully placing the briefcase in the bottom of the boat, he untied it and began stroking toward sh.o.r.e, toward Ela Beach. As he paddled, the phone jabbered frantically at him. He ignored it, occasionally looking back over his shoulder. Where the shack had been was a flame-lined hole in the above-water walkway.
The supporting stilts had been blown off right down to the water. There was no sign of his temporary home, of the other two men who had lived there, or of the three heavily armed intruders who had burst in on him.
They had not paused to talk or to ask questions, Wahgi reflected. They had simply shot their way in.
He was sorry for Gembogi and Kuikui, and angry at what had happened to them, but he now knew one thing for certain: the briefcase and its contents were unquestionably worth a million kina.
Maybe two million, based on what had just happened.
Safely ash.o.r.e on the narrow city beach, he abandoned the outrigger to the vagaries of the harbor currents.
Exhausted and out of breath, his left ankle throbbing, he threw himself down under a coconut palm and opened the briefcase.
".. . are you there, Wahgi! Can you hear .. . ?"
"What happened?" he asked von Maltzan.
"What did you do?"
"Those gunmen were after the briefcase," the foreigner explained. He did not need to do that. Of course the gunmen were after the briefcase. Did he still think Wahgi was stupid?
"I used the phone to activate the grenade you threw at them. Where are you? Are you all right?"
"Yes, I am all right. But my friends are not."
"I"m sorry. Now will you listen to me and not hang up anymore? If you do, I won"t be able to help you."
"Never mind that." Tasting wet saltiness in his mouth, Wahgi felt of his teeth. One was missing, knocked out when he had hit the side of the outrigger, and blood was trickling over his lip and down his chin.
To a Huli it was nothing more than an inconvenience.
"I want my reward."
"Yes, yes, of course, but.. .."
"I want it left for me in a paper-wrapped package at the main airport cargo pickup counter, with my name on it. By tomorrow morning."
"It"ll be there, Wahgi. No problem. But please, do one thing for me.
Leave this phone on in case you run into trouble again. That way I can help you. Keep it close at all times. Other people want what is in the briefcase, and as you have seen this morning...."
"It is night here."
"All right, all right. As you have seen this night, these others are willing to kill to get it."
"I will not turn the phone off again," Wahgi promised.
"Good! Tomorrow morning, at the Jackson"s Airpoil cargo counter. Look for your package."
The voice went away, but the green light remained on. Wahgi surmised that it indicated the line was still open to him if he needed to use it. Looking around, he sought and found a picnic bench across the street from the Ela Beach hotel. In an emergency, he could run in that direction. Port Moresby hotels always had guards on duty around the clock. They would not interfere in a fight to help him, but their presence might well discourage an attacker from using a gun in the presence of armed witnesses.
Stretching out on the warm sand beneath the table, he felt he had done all that he could until morning.
Dreaming of a million kina and sorrowing for his dead kinsmen, he fell into a deep and placid sleep.
Parker put the silencer to the side of the sleeping man"s head and pulled the trigger once. There was a soft phut followed by the sound of bone splintering.
Blood spurted briefly, quickly dropped to a trickle.
Uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the silencer, he placed it and the gun back in their respective jacket holsters.
"Poor dumb black fella he murmured emotionlessly to his companion as the other man picked up the briefcase.
"Never had a clue what he was dealing with."
McMurray murmured something into the telephone in the briefcase before turning it off and closing the case.
"Probably thought he was safe, he did. Wouldn"t have understood if you"d taken the time to try explaining it to him." After a quick look around to ensure that they had not been observed at work they headed for the car parked in the nearby beach lot.
"Tracked the phone"s location via satellite search from Zurich and its internal GPS pinpointed it for us. There was never any place for the sorry b.u.g.g.e.r to hide."
"Not as long as he left the phone on sending out its signal." Parker opened the door on the driver"s side and slid behind the wheel, nodding at the briefcase as he did so.
"The bonds still in there?"
His colleague nodded.
"Doesn"t look like they"ve been touched. A hundred and sixty million Swiss francs worth of convertible paper." His eyes gleamed.
"It"s b.l.o.o.d.y tempting, you know."
"Now, mate, none o" that." The engine on the rented car coughed to life.
"You know they"d send blokes like us after us if we were to try and disappear with that."