One by one, General Suyanto fed the photos into the paper shredder by his desk. For a time, celebrity had given his wayward daughter fulfilment in life; in fact, they had been getting on – so much so that he’d even believed her gift of the submarine was genuine, until her greedy outburst.

Paris? Good God, Sura, what were you thinking? Those real estate brochures in her email cache were a reminder she wasn’t thinking straight. Clearly, the liberal views she’d picked up at that infuriating English university continued to contaminate her priorities.

Suyanto consigned the last image to oblivion and sighed.

‘When this little adventure is over, my girl, you will knuckle down, or I’ll have you married to a man strong enough to handle you. Either that, or committed.’

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Port Moresby Cargo Terminal, Fairfax Harbour, Papua New Guinea

Nash was taking refuge in the terminal’s air-conditioned office when the glass doors swung open and Frank Douglas strode in on a wave of hot air.

‘Robbie, lad, great to see you!’

‘Likewise.’

They shook hands awkwardly, laughed, then gave each other a hug.

Feeling how skinny the other man was, Nash stepped back and observed him critically. Douglas’s faded khaki dungarees, cinched up tight by an army belt, were comically baggy, and the disturbing yellow cast about his skin and eyes was much more pronounced than it had been three weeks ago in Margaret River.

‘Hey, are you feeling OK, Frank?’

‘Had a touch of malaria last week, but I’m good to go. How about you, kiddo? Ready to rock and roll?’

Nash forced a grin he didn’t feel. ‘You bet.’

He should have been jumping out of his skin with excitement, but the debacle in the Octopus was weighing on his mind. Had the panic attack been a one-off, or was it something more insidious? Added to the pressure was that, for the first time in his professional life, Nash was being paid for his services, as opposed to creating and selling a product, and with his doubts unresolved he felt uncomfortably like a fraud.

Douglas jabbed a gnarled thumb at the exit. ‘Come on, then, we’d better fetch your container before it goes missing.’

Outside, the midday heat struck like a moving wall. The concrete and steel of the long wharves were shimmering in a blinding glare, and Nash had to screw up his eyes despite the sunglasses he was wearing. A handful of docked freighters, mostly from Australia and New Zealand, were being relieved of their shipping containers. The sluggish harbour beneath their hulls was a milky coffee, awash with multicoloured plastic bags which billowed like jellyfish. A stink of anaerobic mud and fuel oil thickened the foetid atmosphere.