Forever and a Death by Donald E. Westlake

Author:Donald E. Westlake
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Titan

21

The corporate jet owned by RC Structural had cost sixty-five thousand dollars U.S. per month merely to exist, with its crew and its parking slot at Hong Kong International Airport, and the expenses went even higher whenever Curtis actually used it to go anywhere, so that was the one contraction he’d permitted himself when the money started to tighten and the mainland bastards were squeezing him like an orange. He’d moved his operations to Singapore, but did not move the plane to Changi Airport there, selling it instead—at a decent price, at least—to one of the Chinese businessmen growing sleek on the carcass of the city they’d just killed.

Which meant, these days, when Curtis had to undertake a long flight, he went commercial. But that was all right; he usually took Singapore Air, they knew him, and they treated him well. In fact, he wasn’t at all certain, after this current operation was finished and he was rich again, that he’d buy another jet for himself. That was, at his level, no longer a toy that impressed anybody.

Today’s flight was at five in the afternoon, it would take under four hours, and arrive in Singapore before seven.

The Daimler that Curtis had loaned Pallifer, that had been used to spirit George Manville away to Kennison, was back in Curtis’s possession, along with Harben, the driver, so he rode out to Brisbane International in smooth quiet, spending most of the trip on the phone with aides in his office in Singapore. He’d been away from his workaday business too long.

It would be good when this other stuff was out of the way, mission accomplished, and he could go back to being an ordinary businessman again. He thought of it that way, an oddity, one extraordinary act in the life of an ordinary businessman, who’d been driven to this extreme. But there was so much tension in this plan, and so much he was called on to do that he would never even have thought of doing before. When he’d said, with passion, to that policeman, that he’d never heard of a businessman killing an environmentalist, he’d meant it, meant that it was true, and it was true, and it was something entirely different that, in another compartment in his brain, Richard Curtis was now planning to kill many more than merely one environmentalist. They’d pushed him to it, those bastards, they’d left him no choice but this, to play the game just as hard as they did. Harder.

The airline’s meet-and-greet waited for him at the curb in front of the terminal building. She was an attractive young Asian woman in a dark blue uniform, a clipboard held to her breast by her left forearm in echo of the Statue of Liberty. She’d been the one to walk Curtis through this process three or four times before. Her smile was radiantly welcoming. “Good afternoon, Mr. Curtis. So nice to see you again.”

“And you.” He didn’t remember her name, if he’d ever known it.

She

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.