Rembrandt's Ghost (6 page)

Barely two hundred feet long and thirty-three feet wide, she had a draft of eleven feet when the pumps were operating. Originally equipped with depth charges, a four-inch gun forward, antiaircraft pom-poms, and a pair of twenty-millimeter cannons, she’d long ago been stripped down to a rusty hulk with only an old twelve-gauge in the captain’s cabin for protection and a few other bits of weaponry hidden here and there just in case. Originally designed for a crew of seventy, she now got along with eleven, from Hanson on the bridge to McSeveney in the engine room and his hulking, mute Samoan wiper, Kuan Kong. There was a single lifeboat in case of emergency: a twenty-seven foot vessel dogged down on makeshiftdavits in the stern, where the depth charge rails had once been fitted. At best she could barely make twelve knots’ headway but usually cruised at closer to seven.

Originally painted in blues and grays, the
Queen
had suffered through a number of color changes over the years from black to green to dull red and back to black again, the superstructure white, the funnel scarlet with a large black B, and everything streaked with rust. The bow and stern quarters and the bridge were wooden-decked and desperately worn while the rest was riveted plate steel. It was a credit to her builders that she was still afloat after almost seventy years of battling through wars, storms, and pounding seas, even though she obviously and sometimes noisily showed her age.

Almost as though in defiance of Hanson’s bleak line of thought, there was suddenly a racketing roar from the bowels of the ship as the ancient copper-pot cast-iron steam engine rumbled into shuddering life. A few seconds later, McSeveney’s voice came echoing up through the wheelhouse speaking tube.

“Captain! D’ye ken that lovely sound?” he called.

Hanson stepped off the flying bridge and into the small shelter of the wheelhouse. “Thank you, Willy!” he said, bellowing into the old-fashioned funnel-necked instrument. He rang the engine room telegraph himself, repeating the request into the speaking tube. “Ahead slow. Let’s get off this reef.”

A few seconds later the churning propeller dug in and the
Batavia Queen
, like the reluctant dowager she was, began to move out to sea again.

One hundred thirty miles farther up the coast, the notorious pirate known simply as Khan, or sometimes as Tim-Timan, the Faithful One, rested in his temporary home—a native
rumah
, a house built on sticks in the estuary of the Rejang River’s northwest channel. His fingers, heavy with gold rings, played with the necklace he wore like worry beads. The necklace was strung with dozens of human teeth, some yellow and dark with age, others whiter and much more recent. One or two still even had gnarled dangling bits of nerve and pulp attached. The necklace had been a gift from his grandfather on his mother’s side, the infamous
penghulu
, Temonggong Koh.

From his swinging hammock on the wide verandah Khan could see the other houses of the riverbank village,
rumahs
like his. A few were open-sided bungalow-style barracks built by the Japanese during the war, and there was even an old longhouse or two like the one his grandfather had been raised in, filled with smoke and laughter and the ghosts of the men, women, and children whose shrunken, withered heads were lined up on the rafters, row after row of trophies from a savage past.

Like many modern members of his tribe, Khan was part Malay, part Chinese, and part indigenous Melenau native, but unlike any other Khan could claim direct descent from the original White Rajah himself, Charles Brooke, the adventurer who came to Sarawak in the mid-1800s and whose family had ruled like Oriental potentates for a hundred years. Not only could he claim it, but he could prove it, for although his brutal features were those of a Chinese-Malay half-caste, Khan had bright blue eyes—blue eyes capable of casting spells, seeing through lies, and envisioning the future, or so some superstitious subjects of his pirate kingdom believed. It was an idea that he encouraged and sometimes even half believed himself.

A brief squall pushed in from the ocean and suddenly the air was full of hissing rain that rattled on the old tin roof of the
rumah
like handfuls of thrown pebbles. Khan slipped out of the hammock and walked to the edge of the covered porch, looking out over the rain-tattered river. His feet were bare on the woven mats that covered the floor and he wore only a simple black-checked sarong. He was thick-bodied and tall, hard muscles rippling, his gold-brown skin gleaming with a faint sheen of perspiration. His hair was jet-black, cut in the severe bowl-and-bang style of his ancestors. He was
iban
, a sea dyak, and every inch a warrior
penghulu
of his clan.

He picked up the cup resting on the verandah railing and took a swallow of the fiery
tuak
rice wine it contained, swishing the harsh liquor around in his mouth, then spitting it out over the railing and into the river below. The rain began to slow, the sound of it on the roof above him tempered to the slow drumming of angry fingers.

Once upon a time, it had seemed that Khan might have traveled on a different path. He was James How Ling Singbat Alaidin Sulaiman Khan back then, the younger son of Sarawak’s minister of health under Stephen Kalong Ningkan, a privileged young man who had attended the prestigious Lodge School, won entry into Phillips Academy Andover in America and then went on to Harvard and a combined degree in business administration and international law.

During his long time abroad—more than a decade—letters from his family told of change in his homeland, none of it for the better. Corruption set in like a disease, infecting everything it touched. His father had been ousted from his post, his lands and money taken, and finally his dissentingvoice silenced by the swinging blade of an assassin’s parang in a Kuching alley.

Returning to his native land, he found his mother dying of despair, his older brother now a high-ranking and corrupt civil servant in the Judiciary, and the country committing slow suicide under the self-serving regime of Haji Abdul Taib Mahmud as her natural resources were auctioned off to the highest bidder, her forests and rivers destroyed, and her people abused and slaughtered. Then his mother died and he was alone.

Taking the few remaining assets that were left to him, James How Ling Khan fled to the upriver jungles of the Rejang, renewing friendships and native family ties, forging a pirate empire that had no allies only enemies, preying on the ships of any nation foolish enough to pass within range of his wrath and his fleet of marauding gunships spread out from Sumatra to Zamboanga in the Sulu Sea, lurking like sea snakes in hidden river bases just like this one.

There was other business as well; there were endless shipments of North Korean methamphetamines and counterfeit American currency to move, raw opium from Vietnam, slipper orchids from Sabah, sometimes special human cargo quietly left on the lonely beaches along Northern Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria, and always, and very profitably, guns and other weapons ferried to the Kumpulan Mujahidin Malaysia terrorists, Darul Islam, Abu Sayyaf, Moro National Liberation Front, Jemaah Islamiya, and anyone else prepared to pay Khan’s exorbitant freight rates.

Through the beating pulse of the rain Khan heard another, deeper sound that resolved itself into the familiar, lumbering thunder of his personal boat,
Black Dragon
, one of a half dozen World War Two “Karo-Tei” subchasers he’d discovered, forgotten and derelict in an old camouflaged pen on an uninhabited island in the Sulu Sea. Based on stolen plans for the prewar American “Six-Bitter” Coast Guard ships, the Karo-Tei were sixty-foot-long shallow-draft cutters powered by twin eight-hundred horsepower aircraft engines and capable of speeds up to thirty-eight knots.

The small ships were heavily armed with twin twenty-millimeter cannons and an aft machine-gun tub. They were completely constructed from wood, which made their radar shadows almost invisible, and they carried a crew of fifteen, more than enough men to capture any unarmed vessel afloat in any weather. They were the deadliest weapons in Khan’s arsenal, and over the years, he had made them even more fearsome with Russian-made RPG rocket launchers, sophisticated navigation electronics as good as or better than those of any ships sent against him, and refurbishedengines that made him fleet as the wind and just as hard to see or catch.

The narrow, V-hulled boat appeared out of the misty rain, nosing gently through the shallow waters of the estuary, her flat gray and stealthy paint job making her as elusive as smoke. Khan smiled coldly as she approached, powerful engines backing.
Black Dragon
, more a home to him than anything had been since he’d returned to the South China Sea.

The engines of the sleek gunboat died and
Black Dragon
slid the last few dozen yards silently. A seaman appeared on deck, barefoot, picking up the forward line. The boat bumped gently against the floating dock directly below the
rumah
, and the seaman jumped down and secured the line to a wooden cleat. A short, squat figure stepped out of the wheelhouse, crossed the deck, and stepped down onto the dock. He reached the heavy bamboo ladder at the end of the dock and climbed easily up to the verandah. He was dressed in camouflage greens and combat boots, and there were three official-looking stars on each one of his epaulettes. His skin was dark, burned to the color of old leather by the sun after years of exposure. The man’s hard features were Chinese. His name was Fu Sheng and he was Khan’s second in command. The two men had known each other for almost twenty years.

Khan’s old friend clambered onto the porch.

“
Apa kabar
, Dapu Sheng?” Khan asked in Tanjong, an ancient dialect spoken by fewer than a hundred people, most of them members of his own Rejang River clan. “What news?” Dapu was Fu Sheng’s nickname: Big Gun.

“Kaba baik, tuan,”
replied Fu Sheng, bowing slightly. “The news is good, master.” He continued. “I have spoken with our people at the shipping company. They have confirmed the situation. The ship is some way south of us still.”

“And the business in London?”

“It proceeds,” said Fu Sheng. He shrugged. London was only a place he’d heard of, never seen, and matters there did not really concern him.

“Follow the ship but do nothing yet. As to London, keep me informed.”

“Yes,
tuan
. Will you remain here?”

“Three days, only, then come for me. Those clowns from the Maritime Enforcement Agency are due for one of their patrols. Let them find nothing.”

“I don’t know why you go to such lengths to hide,
tuan
,” said Fu Sheng. “Their pencil has no point,” he scoffed. “We have more ships than they do, and more guns.”

“I don’t want to make war, Dapu Sheng. I want to make money. We pay bribes for that reason— to keep their pencil dull.”

“It isn’t the honorable thing,
tuan
,” growled Fu Sheng, refusing to give in, his voice tinged with anger and regret.

“Perhaps not, old friend, but it is the prudent thing. We live in a world that holds honor in no esteem. It is extinct, just like the words we speak.” He reached out and laid his hand on Fu Sheng’s broad shoulder. “It is not the time.”

“Will the time ever come?”

“Perhaps sooner than you think, Fu Sheng. Our ancestors are calling. If we heed them we shall have our day.”

“You speak in riddles,
tuan
.”

“Perhaps.” Khan smiled. “But then again, what are riddles except mysteries waiting to be solved?”

“Very mysterious,” said Billy Pilgrim, staring at the painting on its tabletop easel. He and Finn Ryan were standing with James Tulkinghorn in his small, book-lined conference room. The table the easel sat on was oak, dark and very old. It looked as though it belonged in a monastery, and Finn could just imagine silent hooded monks eating their simple meals around it.

The painting itself was small, no more than a foot square. It showed an almost comical little ship, full sailed and high decked, running through stormy seas. In the background was a clearly defined reef with crashing surf and behind that a jungle landscape. The sky was painted in vivid sunset colors. The famous signature appeared in thick, almost italic letters in the lower right-hand corner:
Rembrandt
.