‘We can narrow it down when we start searching, though,’ said Nina. ‘Whoever it was is probably based in New Zealand, maybe even Auckland, because why send a ship from here when they could have beaten us to the iceberg if they’d gone from Australia?’

Her husband nodded. ‘They’d need foreign connections to get hold of those weapons an’ all. New Zealand cracked down on guns after that massacre in Christchurch.’

‘Right. And someone with stacks of bearer bonds sitting around is probably very high up in the business world – they’re mostly used by corporations.’

‘The bonds Harhund gave me all have company names on them,’ Jones said. ‘They’re like share certificates, right?’

‘Sort of . . . Wait, what kind of corporations?’ asked Nina.

‘Mostly pharmaceutical companies. I checked that they were all still in business to make sure the bonds were worth what Harhund said.’

Eddie frowned in thought. ‘So what does having a lot of bonds from pill companies mean?’

‘It means,’ said Cheng, ‘that whoever provided them is probably a senior executive of a pharmaceutical corporation.’

‘And he’s called Miller, and he’s based in New Zealand,’ Nina added. ‘Now that makes it a lot easier to narrow down the search!’

‘I can narrow it down even more!’ said Jones. ‘You’re not from here, so you wouldn’t know him, but there’s a guy called Donny Miller. He’s rich, sort of a playboy, always in the news – and he’s the boss of a pharma company.’ He pointed towards the skyscrapers of central Auckland to the east. ‘That tower there, with the blue logo? It’s theirs.’

‘Why would some yuppie hire mercenaries to steal a hundred-thousand-year-old coffin?’ Eddie asked, glaring at the distant building.

‘I don’t know,’ Nina replied. ‘So let’s ask him.’

Chapter 15

15

‘So is he the right guy?’ Eddie asked.

Nina looked up from Cheng’s laptop. ‘Donny Miller is everything Jones said, according to the local news and gossip sites,’ she said. ‘Rich, powerful, connected – and the kind of asshole who’d be constantly getting the finger in New York because you know he’d always park his Ferrari in a disabled space.’ She turned the screen to show him a picture of a man of around forty, whom she would have considered handsome if not for an expression of oily, self-satisfied smugness that she imagined was a permanent fixture. ‘CEO of Miller & Family Inc., born in the States but emigrated to New Zealand about fifteen years ago, granted instant citizenship along with his mother on the grounds that they were rich and . . . well, that’s pretty much all the Kiwi government cared about back then.’

‘Let me guess – they came here because they think civilisation’s about to collapse and they want to hide out in a bunker a long way from rampaging mobs of poor people?’