“Come on!” Tristan responded with a laugh. “You don’t really think Royal Australian police are that efficient, do you?”

The uniformed man in the passport control booth barely looked at her.

The flight was peacefully uneventful. Once again Marissa was amazed by the expansive Pacific. Until this trip, she’d had no idea what a big ocean it was. In silent testimony to how much better she was feeling now that she had Tristan to count on, Marissa soon drifted off to sleep.

Right on schedule, the Qantas jet’s wheels touched down with a thump at Kai Tac Airport at 5:43 P.M., giving Marissa her first sight of Hong Kong. Despite the purpose of their trip, she couldn’t help feeling a shiver of excitement.

From the air, the colony had looked like a peaceful collection of rocky, forested islands set in an emerald-green sea. But from the airport runway it already looked quite different. Across the impossibly congested harbor of bobbing vessels, it looked starkly urban, like a futuristic city crowded with skyscrapers of concrete, steel, and mirrored glass. Even through the plane’s porthole she could sense the exotic, mysterious nature of the busiest and richest of all Chinese cities.

Formalities at the airport were swift. As they waited at the luggage carousel for their “swag,” as Tristan called it, they were approached by a representative from the Peninsula Hotel, where Tristan had booked adjoining rooms. To Marissa’s surprise, they were escorted out of the terminal building to a waiting Rolls-Royce.

“Isn’t this a bit extravagant?” Marissa asked as they pulled out of the airport. “This must be one fancy hotel.”

“And why not!” Tristan said. “Don’t you Yanks have the expression ‘you only go around once’? I’m on holiday and I haven’t been on holiday for years. I intend to try to enjoy myself, even if we are here on serious business.”

Marissa wondered what Robert would say when he saw the charges.

The hotel car quickly got bogged down in rush hour traffic, the likes of which Marissa had never seen. She was shocked when the driver said traffic was better than usual.

Even in the hushed interior of the Rolls-Royce limousine, Marissa was overwhelmed by the clamor and clutter of the city. As Tristan had implied, it was different enough from the Australian outback to make her think she’d traveled to another planet.

They were snared in a crush of double-decker buses, trams, cars, bicycles, motorbikes, and people, lots of people. By the time they arrived at the hotel, Marissa felt drained, as if she’d had to walk the entire route.