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“Confess.”
    “You should have got off at Macau,” I told him. “You would have got clean away.” I held up the bloodstained ninja gear I’d found in his room, the leather palm with the lethal steel hooks that could tear open a throat with a single slap.
    At that point Oharu fought, of course, but his responses were disorganized by the alcohol that Sancho and Jorge had been pouring down his throat for the last hour, and of course Sancho was a burly slab of solid muscle and started the fight by socking Oharu in the kidney with a fist as hard as hickory. It wasn’t very long before we had Oharu stretched out on his bed with his arms and legs duct-taped together and I was booting up Jesse’s computer, which I had found in Oharu’s desk drawer.
    “Our next stop,” I told Oharu, “is Shanghai, and Shanghai’s in the People’s Republic, not a Special Administrative Region like Hong Kong or Macau. If we turn you in, you get shot in the back of the head and your family gets a bill for the bullet.”
    Oharu spat out a blood clot and spoke through mashed lips. “I’ll tell them all about you. ”
    I shrugged. “So? Nothing we’re doing is illegal. All we’re doing is recovering an item on behalf of its legitimate owners.”
    “That’s debatable. I could still make trouble for you.”
    I considered this. “If that’s the case,” I said, “maybe we ought not to keep you around long enough to say anything to the authorities.”
    He glowered. “You wouldn’t dare kill me.”
    Again I shrugged. “ We won’t kill you. It’ll be the ocean that’ll do that.”
    Sancho slapped a hand over Oharu’s mouth just as he inhaled to scream. In short order we taped his mouth shut, hoisted him up, and thrust him through his cabin porthole. There he dangled, with Sancho hanging onto one ankle and Jorge the other.
    I took off his right shoe and sock.
    “Clench your toes three times,” I said, “when you want to talk. But make it quick, because you’re overweight and Jorge is getting tired.”
    Jorge deliberately slackened his grip and let Oharu drop a few centimeters. There was a muffled yelp and a thrash of feet.
    The toe-clenching came a few seconds later. We hauled Oharu in and dropped him onto his chair.
    “So tell us,” I began, “who hired you.”
    A Mr. Lau, Oharu said, of Shining Spectrum Industries in the Guangzhong Economic Region. He went on to explain that Dr. Jiu Lu, or Jesse as we’d known him, had worked for Shining Spectrum before jumping suddenly to Pacific Century. Magnum had suspected Jesse of taking Shining Spectrum assets with him, in the form of a project he was developing, and made an effort to get it back.
    “This got Jiu scared,” Oharu said, “so he tried to smuggle the project out of Guangzhou to Taiwan, but his ship went down in a storm. You know everything else.”
    “Not quite,” I said. “What is the project?”
    “I wasn’t told that,” Oharu said. “All I know is that it’s biotechnology and that it’s illegal, otherwise Jui wouldn’t have had to smuggle it out.”
    A warning hummed in my nerves. “Some kind of weapon?”
    Oharu hesitated. “I don’t think so,” he said. “This operation doesn’t have that kind of vibe.”
    I took that under advisement while I paged through the directory on Jesse’s computer. Everything was in Chinese, and I didn’t have a clue. I tried opening some of the files, but the computer demanded a password.
    “Where did you send the data?” I asked.
    “I never sent it anywhere,” Oharu said. “I was just going to turn it over to Mr. Lau when I got off the boat tomorrow.”
    “You have a meeting set?” I asked.
    A wary look entered his eyes. “He was going to call.”
    “Uh-huh.” I grinned. “Too bad for Mr. Lau that you didn’t get off in Macau and fly to Shanghai to meet him.”
    He looked disconsolate. “I really am an Andean folk music fan,” he said. “That part I didn’t make up. I wanted to catch your last