Read Online Dead Sea by Peter Tonkin - Free Book Online

across Nantucket Bay. Comes with the territory. Father of boys –
you worry
. Father of girls—’
    â€˜
You pray
. Yes. I get that. So do husbands.’
    â€˜Some husbands. Some wives. Some prayers, I guess . . .’ A light flashed beside Nic. Communication failed abruptly.
    The Fox programme had cut to footage Richard had not seen before. Shots of
Katapult
sailing like a white gull across the deep blue of Te Namo Lagoon from Willy’s digital camera; others of
Flint
being whirled like a snowflake across the stormy grey of English Bay.
    And this cut to a big, bright map of the Pacific Ocean. All sixty-four million square miles of it. Three bright red spots gave the current positions of the yachts and of their objective. Richard strained to get some kind of accurate fix from the display, but with no success. The spots were too small; the map was too big. He sat back, his frown deeper still. He’d check up more closely on his own laptop later. In the meantime he wanted to listen.
    â€˜And you can see at once,’ said the voiceover from the invisible commentator, ‘that
Katapult
has made little progress so far. She is all but becalmed there a little north and east of Tuvalu, well south and west of Hawaii, in the middle of that huge, featureless, mid-Pacific wilderness. Whereas
Flint,
on the contrary, is sailing almost at the limit of her design speed and seems to have covered a great deal of distance. Just not quite in the right direction so far! She has been pushed well off course by the storm system above her – though she could hardly be sailing any faster, as I say. And Doctor Tanaka’s bottle, the famous good ship
Cheerio
has also made surprising progress – and is very nearly at the spot he predicted it will have reached in seven days’ time from now!’
    It was just after two a.m. in Manila but the man who occupied the equivalent flat to Richard’s at the top of the huge building that housed the main offices of Luzon Logging in the heart of Quezon City rarely slept. He too was watching the Fox Network programme, but unlike Richard he was not bothered with the excited tones of the voiceover. He had turned the sound off and was watching the subtitles instead. He slept little and was careful how he listened because of the terrible damage done to his ears. His head was long, lined, bald. His nose was pronounced. Hooked. His chin was broad and square. He had been a striking man given the mixed heritage from Dutch/Indonesian parents that had left his skin the colour of old ivory. Now he was simply memorable because of the great black boxes that clamped to either side of his skull like the jaws of a vice. If he took them off – loosened them, even, he was profoundly, helplessly deaf. His ears and much of the delicate bone structure immediately within them had been catastrophically shattered by an uncontrolled plunge from high in the air to the bottom of a deep river.
    A disastrous fall for which the deaf man blamed Richard Mariner.
    The long, dark Indonesian eyes watched the screen intently. Then, when the programme was finished, an unsteady hand rewound it so that the intent gaze could observe the bikini-clad forms of the eight contestants once again.
    Like Richard, he recognized that the message here was one of vulnerability, not of sexual availability. But the problem was that this man was excited by power. And he most enjoyed exercising it over people who were vulnerable. It was the exploitation of vulnerability, the pressure he could bring to bear on his victims towards helplessness and humiliation that most excited him. It was a pleasure that he practised in private on the rare occasions that the desire overcame him. And those few victims whose helplessness he enjoyed to the full never survived to tell the tale.
    And now his greatest enemy seemed to have sent eight of his most attractively vulnerable associates in two almost laughably fragile craft into the