“Don’t be modest,” Marcus said. “You and your crew get things right most of the time.”

“There’s a ‘but’ in your voice,” Kannaday said.

“You’ve good ears,” Marcus said. “The ‘but’ you hear is that Uncle Salty likes things to be right all of the time. He doesn’t like movies that flop, magazines that don’t make a profit, and real estate that loses value.”

Salty was the Australian media’s nickname for Jervis Darling. It was inspired by the big, stealthy saltwater crocodile of the Northern Territory. Kannaday had no idea whether Darling liked the epithet or not.

“This is a different kind of business,” Kannaday said. “There has to be leeway for the unexpected.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Marcus said as he activated the system. He picked up the headset and hung the earpiece around his left ear. “Unfortunately, we can’t really afford that leeway, can we?”

“What do you mean?”

“Failure can result in more than a financial loss for everyone concerned,” Marcus said.

As much as Kannaday disliked giving Marcus his due, the kid was right. Failure in this enterprise could result in death or the kind of jail term that would make death the preferred option. On the other hand, like all the men on board, Kannaday obviously felt that the risk was worth it. Kannaday was earning 75,000 dollars a week. His men were taking in 6,000 each. Darling put the money in an escrow account in the Cayman Islands. At the end of each two-year stint, the money would be theirs. They had six months to go on this leg. And they did not have to do any other kind of smuggling for this employer. No drugs, no guns, no terrorists. They already knew the handful of players in this game, so there were rarely personnel changes and very few surprises. The only thing that made no sense to Kannaday was what was in this for Jervis Darling. The captain did not understand why a multibillionaire would be interested in taking a risk of this magnitude.

Marcus contacted Jervis’s personal secretary, Andrew Graham. Andrew was at the Darling compound in Cairns. The secretary said he would transfer the call to Jervis Darling’s private line. Marcus handed Kannaday the headset. Kannaday placed the entire unit over his head. Marcus did not get up, so Kannaday leaned on the metal desk. He looked at the thermometer-like spectrometer on the wall in front of him. One cable ran from the base of the unit to Marcus’s computer. Another ran to a battery pack on the desk. The device ate up a lot of electricity, but they could not afford to be without it. This room adjoined the laboratory. If there were a leak, software in Marcus’s computer would notice a photopeak on its internal graph. That would cause an alarm to sound.