one too!” Colin sighed. “This is a fucking nightmare. I just wish we could get off this boat and go have a decent cup of coffee somewhere. I know this is supposed to be one of the coolest new yachts in the world and I should be so grateful, but frankly, it feels like a floating prison to me.” His face darkened, and Nick looked at him uneasily. Nick could sense that Colin was slipping fast into one of his deep funks. An idea began to take shape in his head. He whipped out his cell phone and began scrolling through his contacts, leaning over to Mehmet and whispering in his ear. Mehmet grinned and nodded eagerly.
“What are the two of you whispering about?” Alistair asked, leaning over curiously.
“I just had an idea. Colin, are you ready to bail out of this pathetically lame bachelor party?” Nick asked.
“I would like nothing more, but I don’t think I can risk offending Bernard and, more important, his father. I mean, Bernard pulled out all the stops to entertain us in grand style this weekend.”
“Actually, Bernard pulled out all the stops to entertain himself,” Nick retorted. “Look how miserable you are. How much more of this do you want to endure, just so the Tais won’t be offended? It’s your last weekend as a single man, Colin. I think I have an exit strategy that won’t offend anyone. If I can make it happen, will you play along?”
“Okay … why not?” Colin said a little trepidatiously.
“Hear, hear!” Alistair cheered.
“Quick, quick, we have a medical emergency. I need you to stop this boat, and I need our precise coordinates right now,” Nick demanded as he rushed into the yacht’s pilothouse.
“What’s the matter?” the captain asked.
“My friend is suffering from acute pancreatitis. We have a doctor below, who thinks he might have begun bleeding internally. I’m on the line with the life-flight rescue chopper,” Nick said, holding up his cell phone anxiously.
“Wait a minute, just wait a minute—I’m the captain of this ship. I’m the one who decides whether we call for medical evacuations. Who’s the doctor below? Let me go see the patient,” the captain gruffly demanded.
“Captain, with all due respect, we don’t have a moment to waste. You can come look at him all you want, but right now, I just need the coordinates from you.”
“But who are you speaking to? Macau Coast Guard? This is highly irregular protocol. Let me talk to them,” the captain sputtered in confusion.
Nick put on his most condescendingly posh accent—honed from all his years at Balliol—and glowered at the captain. “Do you have any idea who my friend is? He’s Colin Khoo, heir to one of the biggest fortunes on the planet.”
“Don’t get snooty with me, young chap!” the captain bellowed. “I don’t care who your friend is, there are maritime emergency protocols I MUST FOLLOW, AND—”
“AND RIGHT NOW, my friend is below deck on your ship, quite possibly hemorrhaging to death, because you won’t let me call for an emergency evacuation!” Nick interrupted, raising his voice to match the captain’s. “Do you want to take the blame for this? Because you will, I can guarantee that. I’m Nicholas Young, and my family controls one of the world’s largest shipping conglomerates. Please just give me the fucking coordinates now, or I promise you I’ll personally see to it that you won’t even be able to captain a piece of Styrofoam after today!”
Twenty minutes later, as Bernard sat in the diamond-shaped Jacuzzi on the uppermost deck while a half-Portuguese girl tried to swallow both of his testicles under the bubbly water jets, a white Sikorsky helicopter appeared out of the sky and began to descend onto the yacht’s helipad. At first he thought he was hallucinating from all the booze. Then he saw Nick, Mehmet, and Alistair emerge onto the helipad, holding a stretcher on which lay Colin, tightly bundled up in one of the yacht’s silk Etro blankets. “What the fuck is happening?” he said, getting out of the water, pulling on his Vilebrequin trunks and rushing up the steps toward the helipad.
He ran into Lionel in the corridor. “I was just coming to tell you—Colin is feeling horribly sick. He’s been doubled over in pain for the past hour and throwing up uncontrollably. We think it’s alcohol poisoning, from all of his boozing over the past two days. We’re getting him off the boat and straight to the hospital.”
They ran to the helicopter, and Bernard looked