Hell Ship

CHAPTER 1

Any passersby would have assumed that Alexandra Vaccaro was attempting a complex juggling act, but the reality was somewhat more prosaic: she was just looking for her keys.

The shoes were the problem.

She wasn’t normally given to making impulse purchases, and certainly not Prada knock-offs sold by a shady-looking guy on the sidewalk near the College Park Metro Station. But they really were very nice shoes — silver pointed cap toe pumps — and she had the perfect outfit to go with them; a slinky black cocktail dress that made her green eyes glitter like emeralds, her not-quite-natural blonde highlights shine like gold, and her Mediterranean olive complexion looked like a killer tan. And while she was, as a general rule, morally opposed to purchasing counterfeit merchandise, she felt comfortable making this one exception since there was no way on earth she’d ever be able to afford the genuine article.

Even so, she had been on the verge of walking away from the vendor empty-handed and with no regrets, when a vaguely familiar female voice had reached out from across the street. “Allie?”

She had groaned, even without knowing for sure who the person was. No one called her Allie anymore, hadn’t in years, not since….

She looked in the direction of the shout and saw a stocky woman wearing a US Navy service khaki uniform, crossing the street and waving. As the woman drew near, Alex could easily distinguish the silver bar pinned to the woman’s collar. Mustering a smile that was about as genuine as the “Padra” pumps, she extended both hands in a “come hug me” gesture and squealed: “Lynn? Oh, my God? Look at you.”

On later reflection, Alex recognized that the encounter — or something like it — had probably been inevitable. This close to the nation’s capital, the odds of running into someone from the bad old days of boot camp were pretty good.

With as much poise as she could muster, she congratulated the recently promoted Lieutenant Junior Grade Lynn Baker and deftly turned the conversation away from a discussion about her own life. Alex could see the unasked question in Lynn’s eyes, but she made sure that no opportunity to ask it ever arose.

The unexpected reunion, which lasted no more than ten minutes, had nevertheless thrown her itinerary into a state of chaos. She’d arrived at the National Archives just as the staff was heading to lunch, and so a ten minute delay put her more than an hour behind schedule.

Don would scold her for being so late.

He was a decent enough employer, but he had an almost slavish devotion to orderliness, which included living nearly every waking moment according to schedule. Part of that owed, she imagined, to his profession; a historian — a military historian, no less — he was attuned to how complex systems like governments and civilizations could collapse with astonishing suddenness if the citizens did not mind the details. But Alex suspected that much of his insistence on orderliness stemmed from his desire to be in control of his environment. An invalid — paralyzed by a sniper’s bullet during the Vietnam conflict and thereafter confined to a wheelchair — Don had to rely on others for even the simplest of actions. As his research assistant, Alex had to be sensitive to his whims, and while her position allowed her to operate independent of his schedule, she did her best to avoid thumbing her nose at his rage for order. She certainly didn’t relish the idea of explaining to him how everything had fallen apart because she’d been distracted while window shopping.

She had however decided to treat herself, and as she headed back into the Metro station, her primary mission accomplished, she bought the shoes.

Now an hour later, standing literally on the threshold of her destination, she had cause to regret that self-indulgent decision.

Her keys were in her purse, which hung over her left shoulder. The plain cardboard box with the shoes was tucked under her right arm, and in her left hand, she held a thick manila envelope, containing nearly four hundred pages of recently declassified naval engagement records from World War II. She tried switching the shoe box to her left hand, but the keys remained just out of reach in the hidden depths of the purse. She was going to need both hands to do this, and that meant admitting defeat and surrendering to the notion that she would have to set her burdens down.

Alex hated admitting defeat.

Instead of setting the shoebox down, she placed it against the closed door and shifted her left hip to brace it in place so that she could—

The door swung open.

That’s not right, Alex thought, overcoming her initial surprise and catching the shoebox before it could drop to the floor.

Don insisted the door be locked and bolted; she had turned the key to the deadbolt herself before leaving.

A visitor?

That was unlikely. Except for her, Don rarely had houseguests and his nurse came in the evenings, unless of course there was a….

She swallowed. An emergency. But no, even in that worst case scenario, someone would have called her mobile number. Standing there, framed by the doorway, she shuffled a few more possibilities, all of which brought her back to that original observation.

Something wasn’t right here. Something was very wrong.

She curled the sheaf of documents into a half-roll and stuffed it into her purse. Six inches of it stuck out awkwardly, but she ignored this and shifted the bag so that it hung behind her, out of the way. Then she opened the shoebox and took out one of the ersatz designer shoes, gripping it around the instep, holding it up so that the three-inch heel looked almost like a fisherman’s gaff hook. With a final deep breath to steel her courage, she started inside.

She immediately noticed a sulfurous smell, faint but unmistakable, and knew that her worst fears must certainly be true. Still, she had to know.

The front room was exactly as she had left it, with not so much as a couch throw pillow out of place. She cast a glance toward the kitchen, similarly in perfect order, and kept moving.

Her heart was pounding and despite everything she’d ever learned about dealing with a situation like this, she found herself breathless, almost giddy, as she turned into the hallway that led to Don’s office and bedroom.

The office door stood half-open, affording her a mostly unobstructed view of what lay beyond. It was not at all as she had left it, but was somehow exactly what she expected.

Papers were strewn about like confetti after a New Year’s party, and her first absurd thought was that she would have to clean the mess up. Thousands of sheets of paper — faxes, photocopies of old letters and pictures, manuscript drafts — covered the carpet like an early season snowfall. And in the midst of that white chaos sat her employer, Don Riddell.

He was in his wheel chair, as he always was when she saw him, and she half-expected him to look up and bark at her for being tardy, but even a casual glance told her that would never happen.

A tiny dark spot, dribbling red, marked the spot where something about the diameter of a pencil had bored straight through Don’s forehead.

That was how his life had ended. The uncountable cuts and abrasions on his face and arms told the story of what had happened in the preceding minutes.

Strangely, she felt dissociated from the horror she now beheld. She felt an urge to rush forward, check for a pulse, find some way to save him, but she knew that was merely the human instinct for denial.

Don was dead.

Tortured, she thought. Murdered.

“Damn it.”

There was a soft rustle of movement behind her, and she whirled to confront the source.

In that instant, she saw only the gun. The man who held it was an indistinct shape — dark clothes and blurry features — but the pistol, equipped with a six-inch long suppressor, absorbed her awareness the way a black hole consumes light. As if in slow motion, she saw the weapon come up, swinging toward her like a compass needle seeking magnetic north.

She overcame the spell, raised her eyes to meet the gunman, and struck before he could pull the trigger. She raked the high-heel shoe across the back of his gun hand. The sturdy molded tip bit deep, gouging a bloody furrow in his skin. The man jerked away, involuntarily triggering a round. The suppressor did its job well; Alex barely even heard the report over the sound of blood thundering in her ears. She felt a spray of hot vapor on her face, and felt a rush of something moving rapidly past her ear.

The man retreated down the hall a few steps — removing himself from the reach of her high-heels — and raised his left hand to steady his aim for a second shot, but Alex had also moved, hurling herself into Don’s office, removing herself from the gunman’s line of sight. She ducked behind the motionless form of her stricken employer, and as the killer appeared in the doorway, she gripped the rubber coated push handles of his wheelchair and using it like a battering ram, charged headlong.

The gunman tried to backpedal, but he was too slow by a heartbeat. With her head down, Alex did not see the collision, but she certainly felt it. The wheelchair came to a very abrupt halt, nosing forward and pitching her headlong over the resulting jumble of chair and human bodies. Her foot caught something as she tumbled past, but she recovered quickly, got her feet under her again, and charged through the house. She expected at any moment to feel the burning impact of a bullet, but if the killer managed to get a shot off it came nowhere near her.

She burst through the front door and never looked back.