The coroner handling Mark Miller’s death saw no evidence of anything other than natural heart failure. The body was immediately cremated at the request of someone who claimed to be Miller’s uncle, but he cannot be found. Analysis of the alleged uncle’s handwriting is underway.
Miller was known to have underworld connections and a record of arrests, but no convictions. Other than his presence on the ship and his unexpected departure, no evidence connects him directly to Dr. Hartquist’s murder, although two crew members recognized him as probably the man Dr. Hartquist was dining and dancing with the evening of the 17th.
No identifiable fingerprints, other than those of the deceased and various crew members, were found in the stateroom. Even if Miller did know Dr. Hartquist and was in her room on the night of June 17–18, that would not be enough to demonstrate that he committed the murder.
Captain Ricardo set down the draft report and put his head in his hands. First, the crew had failed to verify every passenger’s passport long before the ship arrived in Yangon. That would have found both O’Mara and Halvorson.
Second, to anyone at Royal Asia reading the report, it would be obvious that allowing any passenger to disembark without constant supervision was a mistake. Ricardo was thinking about preserving the quality of the passengers’ experience in Yangon, but that was only one consideration.
I’m the one who botched the investigation, he sighed to himself. That fact swirled in his head as he looked for a way to minimize the effect of his errors. There was no way of ensuring that Mark Miller would not disappear in Yangon unless every passenger was detained aboard the ship, but for how long? The investigators only arrived four days later! Whoever arranged for the elimination of poor Dr. Hartquist, and then Mark Miller after the deed was done, would not have been deterred by anything we did.
Ricardo paused. Maybe I’m not thinking enough like Inspector Poirot. What difference does it make if the crime could not have been prevented? The criminal could have been caught!
Captain Ricardo was by now deeply fearful about his own future. This one disaster could bring my entire career to an end. I have an unblemished record as a ship’s captain, but I’m not a trained investigator. There is nothing in the Captain’s Manual or training on how to handle the situation I faced. I did need to concentrate on docking the vessel. I did my best to reassure my passengers and crew that the murderer was not a threat to anyone else, without fabricating stories out of pure supposition and speculation. But there was only so much I could do.
For the most part, I was successful. Passengers and crew went on with their vacations and their work without fear. One damn passenger, however, filed a complaint to Royal Asia about the way I handled the matter. And the media got the story.
Will Royal Asia blame me for the bad publicity? A claimed lack of security onboard ship, the allegedly dangerous crew member, the failure to secure every passenger? How long could I have sequestered them? Maybe it’s time to retire gracefully, before I’m asked. He requested retirement as of December 31, 2020. His request was granted. He departed without the usual formalities and celebrations.
Having ruled out Xavier, Marie and Jon concluded that Mark Miller was almost certainly Hartquist’s murderer, but the trail seemed to end there. These murders were carefully organized and executed, involving extensive preparation and a fair amount of expense. Hartquist’s demise was unlikely to have been Miller’s own idea. If he was a hired assassin, who hired him? Where did the money come from for him to arrange to be on the same ship with a forged passport, and then fly to Jakarta and stay in the elegant Hotel Ciputra?
Reviewing every scrap of information, Marie and Jon had one other clue, which also pointed to the larger conspiracy. Mark Miller had made a call to a Geneva cell phone from his own cell phone shortly after he went to his hotel room. If they could track down the recipient of that call, they might yet untangle the threads of the larger story.
It would take some time to get the Swiss and Indonesian authorities, and then the cell phone service providers, to release the phone records, but there was still a small hope of finding the truth about Dr. Ilsa Hartquist’s death. Marie and Jon were just beginning that search.
Chapter 4
Phuket
The February 2021 conference of AOSIS, the Alliance Of Small Island States, assembled on the lush tropical resort island of Phuket, Thailand. The 44 AOSIS Member States and observers came from every corner of the globe—Singapore to Trinidad & Tobago, Cuba to Papua-New Guinea, and the Republic of Maldives to the Federated States of Micronesia.
Of the AOSIS entities, 39 are Members of the United Nations, comprising almost 28 percent of the developing countries, and 20 percent of the UN’s total membership. Together, AOSIS Member peoples constitute five percent of the world’s population, more than the US or Western Europe—all facing a precarious future.
The peaceful, sunny beach weather that made tourists visiting Phuket happy belied the reality of coming changes in the climate. Increasingly destructive monsoons would threaten Phuket and many parts of the world with unlivable, destructive conditions.
Inside the elegant Casa Blanca Hotel and the modern, efficient Phuket Convention Center, the pervasive mood was anxiety and gloom. The delegates had one immediate focus in mind. They must quickly persuade the incoming American President, Edwardo Gonzalez, formerly a Democratic US Senator from Texas, and the rest of the world’s governments to take aggressive measures to delay and ultimately minimize the sea-level rise that would otherwise inundate their countries, either entirely or in their most heavily inhabited coastal regions.
Many of the delegates had participated in the Paris Accords negotiations, follow-up meetings, and other climate-related forums. They had known Dr. Ilsa Hartquist well, both in person and through her scientific papers, public advocacy, and media presence. They had looked to her for guidance, believing she was both honest in her analysis and insightful in her advice.
Dr. Hartquist understood in terrifying detail as a scientist what they knew firsthand—that the AOSIS Members’ peoples would bear the most immediate and devastating brunt of climate change: rising sea levels inundating their coastal homes, more powerful and frequent typhoons causing destruction and discouraging tourists, ocean acidification decimating their fisheries, and unpredictable weather conditions making their subsistence agriculture increasingly unreliable and inadequate to their needs.
The most low-lying AOSIS States would disappear completely beneath the waves like slowly sinking ships; more would become uninhabitable as a practical matter. Prospects for economic progress and healthy, thriving communities would evaporate. Their citizens, more than 60 million people, would suffer impoverishment and physical dislocation. Whatever their native talents, it was difficult to see how refugees dispersed in other lands would survive economically without their traditional fishing grounds, farmland, and social structures, even if any other government would take them in.
The progressive closing of borders to Syrian refugees and African boat people, and the political backlash against immigration in Europe and the United States since 2015 were ominous. AOSIS government leaders rightly feared that their citizens, mostly dark-skinned and uneducated beyond elementary school, would not be rescued at all.
Dr. Hartquist had addressed several AOSIS Conferences and Work Group meetings, most recently in January 2020. Her presentation reiterated the substance of her 2018 New York Times editorial advocating SRM in the form of a tropospheric veil over the Arctic Ocean. The delegates warmly welcomed her remarks.
Member governments large enough to have their own scientific and technical expertise had independently reviewed her scientific analysis and agreed her projections were fundamentally correct. The excess carbon dioxide would be fatal in the long term, but increased