Sabotage (22 page)

This is your captain speaking … we are about to experience a power outage … trouble with one of our generators … technicians are addressing the problem … return to your staterooms immediately … remain there until further notice.

The message had filled him with doubt. Did it make sense? He remembered Selvaggio saying the generators could power a city of sixty thousand, but they didn't power everything. He walked to the nearest bar. The bartender had returned to his cabin. Rove hopped behind the counter and pushed a button on the soda fountain. The faucet gurgled, and a few drips spurted before the pressure ran out. He tasted the cola. There was little sweetness; the electronic valves hadn't dispensed any syrup.

He judged by the fading daylight he had less than an hour before the ship's corridors would become too dark to navigate. He jogged to the buffet at the Century Oasis. Passengers had begun to stream out. The staff were ushering guests to the exit, shrugging and shaking their heads at people asking what the fuss was about. Some crew appeared unfazed, as if the blackout were a routine drill, while others stood wary.

Ducking and squeezing through the throng, muttering half-formed apologies to those he jostled, Rove worked his way upstream into the restaurant. It was hard to move; guests were vacating in mass exodus.

The serrated edges of a familiar voice caught him.

“We're on cabin lockdown. You're going the wrong way.”

Rove stared back at the flat lips that had pronounced the words, then at the malevolent blue eyes that echoed them. The blond, tuxedoed wall of a man registered in Rove's index of faces. The diamond ring seated on the waiter's middle finger confirmed his memory.

“No more canapés, I see,” Rove said.

“We're closed. Go to your cabin.”

“My wife left her diamond bracelet at the dinner table.”

“You boarded alone.”

“We didn't board together.”

Rove made a motion to circumvent the obstacle and felt a clamp of flesh around his forearm.

“I think you're a liar,” the man said.

Rove's thumb shot into the crewman's wrist and pinched a nerve into a bone. The tendons in the crewman's arm tightened. He jerked away, his lips breaking their perpetual flatness.

“And I think you're a lousy waiter,” Rove said. “Step aside. I'll return to my cabin after getting the bracelet.”

Distance grew between them as the crowd kept moving. Rove ducked down and continued working against the outward flow. He cast a sidelong glance at a sign that read
Buffet Open 24 Hours
and noted the irony. The crowds soon thinned, and he realized he probably looked like a jewelry thief scouring the restaurant for dropped valuables. Sure enough, he found what he was looking for. On one of the tables sat someone's forgotten camera. He picked it up and pushed the “on” button. Nothing happened—no lens movement, no power light. He set it back on the table.

He made his way to the galley, where cooks and busboys were salting meats and wrapping foods in foil and cellophane. They could hardly see their own hands, it was so dark inside. Light was fading fast. They opened refrigerators sparingly to preserve the cold.

“What are you doing here?” a waitress asked behind him.

Rove glanced over his shoulder. “Finding out what's wrong.”

“Please return to your cabin.”

“You sure are an adamant bunch. It's not fully dark yet.”

“It will be soon.”

“I'll go in a minute. Quickly, do you have any electric can openers?”

“Sir, I'd rather not have to ask you again. Please return to your—”

“Miss, please bring me a damned can opener.”

She fetched the tool from the kitchen and huffed, “Here you are.”

He knew the situation had probably made her nervous, and the last thing she needed was an unruly passenger. He tried not to upset her, but he didn't want to have to explain.

Rove tried it. The blade wouldn't spin. “This doesn't work. Do you have another? How about an electric cork remover? This is actually important.”

“Sir, this can't possibly—”

“Just find it!”

His outburst made her curious. The waitress returned with a second electric can opener. “Try this one.”

Rove pushed the button. “Doesn't work.” He tossed it onto the counter.

She escorted him out. “Go directly back. Please follow our emergency protocols.”

He descended one flight below the lido deck. If it weren't for the portholes, the halls would have been pitch black. A din of voices followed the tightly packed river of people, elbows jamming against one another as passengers made for their staterooms. He kept wondering, what could cause every electronic device onboard to die? Built-in components had failed—but so had remote ones.

An unseen force, surely nothing inadvertent, had laid siege to the ship. His next observation confirmed the hunch. Despite the power breakdown, people had no trouble accessing their staterooms through keycard scanners. He noticed a fortified metal sheath encasing the locking mechanism. Somehow the doors' electrical components remained unaffected. Rove read into the clue. If his theory were correct, shielded keycard scanners would have indeed been impervious to damage, along with the cards themselves, which had been issued at the departure port inside thin titanium protectors.

Had there been an unauthorized weapons test? The location didn't make sense. They were too close to the Baltic. Maybe the outage was a calculated element of an attack. If someone had planned to take over the ship, disabling power would be a good start. But who? As Selvaggio had pointed out, few pirates raided cruise ships. They had better luck with freighters. And what pirates could afford equipment powerful enough to black out a cruise liner? Few had the capital or internal organization required for an attack on that scale.

If an attack were forthcoming, it would happen soon. Confused prey meant easy prey. Hardly five minutes had passed since the outage, and near pandemonium had broken loose. It was an ideal time to strike.

Two crewmen had tried to stop his queries. If he hoped to investigate further, he'd have to blend in with them. Nudging his way through the crowd, Rove descended several flights toward the bottommost decks and entered a staff-only zone.

He walked with authority, and people were too harried to question him. He turned into a hall lined with crew members' staterooms. A man about Rove's size was leaving his cabin. The man brushed by, and Rove caught the portal with a toe before it closed. He sidled through the doorway and changed into a uniform.

He returned to the sundeck, where starlight illuminated a strange spectacle to the northeast. Rove trained on a spot midway from the horizon. There were five shapes, five wakes. He didn't need binoculars to appreciate their speed.

*   *   *

A hook snagged the rail next to Rove.

They're preparing to board, he reasoned as he observed the foreign crewmen from the bulwarks. The corsairs had pulled alongside the
Pearl Enchantress,
their crew unraveling ropes with grappling hooks, extending ladders, and dropping anchors off both port and starboard sides of the cruise liner. These heavyset minions were unscrewing lids to cargo boxes.

By now the lido deck was clear. No one else roamed the walkways.

Keeping safely out of sight, he peered over the bulwark and noted details pertaining to the five ships and their crew. More than half of them blond, the sailors spoke a language he couldn't understand. A Scandinavian tongue, he guessed. He leaned toward Norwegian.

The contents of the boxes came as no shock to him. They had guns. Automatics. Each man strapped a firearm around his torso before beginning the climb by rope ladder to the lido deck. The men looked fit to hoist at least twice their own weight.

Rove guessed each corsair could house thirty men; together, it meant there were around a hundred and fifty armed soldiers. Dispersed over twenty levels, between seven and eight armed hijackers would cover each deck, or maybe a few more, since only fourteen levels had cabins. Three thousand passengers could surely resist a hundred and fifty armed hijackers, though not without bloodshed and coordination. The latter was the limiting factor. Rove had faith in man's bravery. No doubt there were enough passengers willing to fight to reclaim the ship. But being confined to cabins, they had no way of organizing their resistance.

The grapplers clanged against metal rails, showing the
Pearl Enchantress
to be surrounded. The hook nearest Rove jangled as a climber ascended. He considered casting off the hooks. He would foil a few climbers, but invite retaliation from the rest. There were too many of them, climbing too fast.

Expecting soon to see fingers and faces appearing over the ledge, he took cover inside and peered through a window as their boots hit the deck. The invaders gathered and stood at attention beside the Neptune's Sanctuary pool, waiting for their chief to arrive with instructions. They pointed flashlights haphazardly, forcing Rove to duck to avoid catching any beams.

The leader appeared, and the lights steadied. Rove peeked up again and took in the man's height and girth. He was built like a wrestler without the chiseling, the muscular bulges smeared around a torso in top-heavy proportion. The cheekbones were obtrusive to the point of looking primitive. Rove noticed the red hair, the
Firecat
tattoo on his bicep, the latent violence behind a sullen expression. Despite his unsightly features, the man had a graceful gait and bearing.

Unprepared for an encounter, Rove located the nearest stairway and dropped one flight. He found a canvas fire hose coiled behind a glass panel near the elevator doors. He shattered the glass and strapped the hose over an arm, using a pocketknife to slice through the canvas. His blade was small and rusty, the canvas rugged and durable, making for slow cutting. When he finally got through, he looped the severed coil over a shoulder.

The closed door of the penthouse beckoned him—he knew he'd be safe inside—but first he checked on Fawkes. Hearing his knock, the steward let him in at once, wearing the look of a kid who'd crept into a cemetery on a midnight dare. Tiny shards of glass dusted his trousers.

“Jake, what the devil?” he asked. “I heard banging against the window. When I looked out, I saw rope and feet. Something's wrong, Jake. The captain hasn't told us everything.”

“I know. I was just on the lido deck. We're being boarded by about a hundred and fifty Scandinavian pirates. Their vessels have moored off both sides of our ship.”

Fawkes blinked rapidly through his spectacles. “
Pirates?
But Selvaggio said…”

“I know what Selvaggio said, and it made sense. These guys obviously have access to more resources than your average hijacker. Where and how they got them, I don't know.”

“Where'd you get that uniform? And why the fire hose?”

“I grabbed the uniform from a crewman's closet on a lower deck. Good for accessing private areas without hassle, though it may prove unnecessary with the crew confined. The fire hose will come in handy soon enough.”

“But you cut it!”

“It's not for putting out fires.”

“Whatever you say, mate.” Fawkes pulled a flashlight from his pocket and flipped the switch back and forth. “My beamer doesn't work. This is no simple blackout. I don't know what Selvaggio's keeping from us, or why.”

“He probably wants to prevent panic.”

Fawkes grumbled, “I'm not panicking. I just want to know what's amiss.”

“So do I,” Rove said. “Something tells me we'll find out soon.”

“Look out for yourself, mate. Perhaps you'd like to stay in here with me?”

“I better not. Just checking on you. If anything bad happens, bang the wall. It's important you stay in your cabin as Selvaggio said. These pirates have weapons, maybe for stray passengers.”

“What's going to happen to us?”

“I don't know, Lachlan. But I'll be damned if I let them ruin my vacation.”

 

PART III

NIGHT DIVE

 

TWENTY

Hurtling like a spearhead, the train blasted along steel rails and pitched left through mustard plains. Bearing southwest, fifteen cars coasted through the European countryside, making a sound like a horse's gallop as the wheels hit the rail joints. Austin was reminded of a nineteenth-century locomotive.

He stared out the coach window. Ahead, flat meadows sloped into gently rolling hills. Victoria reclined in the bed of her sleeper, studying the collection of fake passports the bellboy had found in the assassin's trunk.

“Let's see,” she said. “We've got United Kingdom, Canada, France, Slovenia, Russia, and the Czech Republic. Think any are real?”

“I doubt he's British,” Austin answered. “His accent seemed fairly neutral. Can't say anything about the others.”

“I'll bet one is legitimate.”

“Why's that?”

“To have been able to penetrate Glitnir and learn about Baldr, he's no amateur. Probably trained by a government intelligence agency, maybe still working for one. But I don't think any government's behind the heist. Stealing Baldr is a brazen move, enough to provoke serious conflict.”

“Which means he's playing for a second team, maybe for hire.”

“Right, and if that's the case, he wouldn't give them everything about himself. Maybe a few aliases, but he'd keep his real identity with him as a firebreak. In case he had to cut and run.”

The sleeper car went black for several seconds as the train entered a tunnel. When they came out, a ticket collector passed through the car and punched their stubs.

“I still see no guarantee they're not all bogus,” Austin said when the collector left. “We can't be sure he ever worked for an intelligence agency.”

“No, but remember the flask he gave the bellboy?”