Sea Of Terror

Chapter 3

"Wow, mommy! this must be the biggest boat in the whole world!"

"Well, I don't know about that, sweetheart. But it is big, isn't it?"

"And Daddy's going to meet us here, right?"

"That's what he said, dear."

Nina McKay leaned against the railing on the main promenade, looking down at the line of passengers coming up the gangway and checking in with the ship's officer standing at the entrance. She still wasn't at all sure this cruise idea was a good one, Her mother could be… commanding at times, and often going along with her pronouncements was the simplest course of action.

"Mommy?"

"Yes, dear."

"When is Daddy going to come back and be with us?"

She sighed. "I don't know if that's going to happen, Melissa. We talked about that, remember?"

"I know, but I want him to come back home."

"I don't want to talk about that right now."

"You never want to talk about that."

"That's enough, Melissa. Mommy's tired!"

She looked up into the gray overcast, watching the wheel and plunge of seabirds. She didn't want to talk about it. Maybe it was time for that last phone call to her lawyer. It was time to end this.

"Daddy!" Melissa shrilled, standing on tiptoes and waving wildly. "I see Daddy!"

Nina looked down and saw Andrew McKay emerging from the glass doors to the cruise ship terminal and security area.

She resisted the momentary urge to wave.

It didn't look like he'd seen them up here in any case.

Andrew McKay crossed the pier toward the banner-bedecked gangway leading up to the Atlantis Queen's quarterdeck, and wondered again what the hell he was doing here.

Well, of course he knew. Nina's mother had explained it all to him quite carefully, in words a three-year-old could understand. The woman could be incredibly forceful when she put her mind to it — the perfect image of the rich, southern matriarch.

Nina had left him four months ago, and taken Melissa with her. Eleven years of marriage, flushed down the pipes for no rational reason that he could see at all. Nina's mother apparently thought that a little Mediterranean cruise was all that he and Nina would need to rekindle the romance and find each other again.

Fuck that…

Seabirds darted and shrieked, drowning out all else. He stopped and looked up at the enormous ship.

According to the travel brochure, the Atlantis Queen was 964 feet long, 106 feet wide, and displaced some ninety thousand tons, making her the largest, as well as the newest, of the Royal Sky Line's fleet. She was a damned floating city, with a passenger complement of almost three thousand and a crew of nine hundred, with so much glitter and glitz that passengers could spend two weeks on board and never see the ocean, never even know they were at sea.

Rich people doing rich-people things. He shook his head and continued up the gangway.

At the top of the ramp, a uniformed ship's officer greeted him with a public-relations-perfect smile. "Good afternoon, Mr. McKay," he said. "May I see your ticket and your passkey, please?"

McKay handed them across, and the officer made a note on his electronic pad with a stylus. "You're in Four-one-one-four. That's fourth deck, on the port side. Your wife and daughter are in Four-one-one-six, the adjoining stateroom, as requested." If he thought the living arrangements were strange, he gave no sign of it. "They both checked in about an hour ago. Would you like for me to page them?"

"Uh… no. That won't be necessary."

"Very good, Mr. McKay." He began explaining the need to keep his key card on him and that he should wear the plastic bracelet if he wanted to use the pool, the spa, or some other ship's surface where he might not have a pocket handy. McKay listened to the spiel, thanked the man, and walked on past into the ship.

He wasn't sure he was ready to see Nina just yet. Perhaps a drink at one of the ship's several bars first…

For Adrian Bollinger, this cruise represented a chance at a whole new life.

Tabitha Sandberg clung to his arm. "Oh, look at her, Adrian! Isn't she gorgeous?"

"She's all of that," Bollinger replied. "Not as gorgeous as you, of course."

"Oh, you…" She gave him a playful slap on the arm. "You're just saying that."

"No, Tabby. I'm not. Not now. Not ever."

They stepped through the glass doors and started across the dock toward the gangway.

A new life.

Bollinger had to admit to himself that he'd pretty much wrecked his old one. Trading shares on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange had been a lucrative life but an ungodly high-stress life as well. Too much money, not enough sense… He'd made mistakes. Bad ones. And he'd ended up as a guest for three years at a state correctional institution. His wife had left him; his daughter refused to talk to him. And they hadn't wanted him back at Tarleton Financial, not a guy with a prison record.

Somehow, though, somehow he'd managed to fight his way back. A friend with another firm, one of Bollinger's old competitors, in fact, had gotten him back on the trading floor at 11 Wall Street. He was damned good at what he did… and this time he was determined not to let the adrenaline or the stress get to him.

One day at a time. He'd been clean and sober for almost ten years, now.

At the bottom of the gangway, he stopped and turned Tabby to face him. "Happy us," he told her. "Not happy birthday, not merry Christmas. Happy us"

"You're the best there is, Adrian," she said. "Happy us!"

She sounded as though she meant it completely. Sincerity, Bollinger realized, was a damned rare commodity these days.

He'd met Tabitha at a party in New York City just a year ago, and she'd become an incredibly important part of his life… a constant reminder that there was more out there than Wall Street, more than stock quotes, more than work. She'd agreed to move in with him two weeks ago, and as a kind of celebration he'd surprised her with tickets for a flight to England followed by a cruise on board the Atlantis Queen. Tabby was something of an armchair historian, and a two-week cruise through the Mediterranean, stopping in at ports rich with history from Marseilles to Alexandria, was just what the stockbroker had ordered.

And why not? He could afford it. He'd gone from well-off to impoverished and fought his way back to wealthy. Money, he'd learned, definitely was not everything.

And now that Tabby was in his life, he could use his money to celebrate that fact.

"Good afternoon, folks," the officer at the top of the gangway said. He gave them his spiel and handed them their keys. "Stateroom Five-oh-eight-seven," he said. "That's four decks up, starboard side and aft. Enjoy your cruise!"

"Thanks," Adrian Bollinger said, grinning as he gave Tabby a squeeze. "We certainly intend to!"

Rubens' office NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland Thursday, 0825 hours EDT

"Shit" Rubens exploded. He stared at the bright blue screen on his computer monitor for a long couple of seconds. "Not again!"

Of the sixteen agencies operating within the U. S. government, the National Security Agency arguably was the most technically advanced. From the mammoth machines of the Tordella Supercomputer Center, to the secure internal server networks within the agency itself, to the various shared networks and databases theoretically connecting all of the various government and law enforcement agencies and departments both in the United States and abroad, the NSA had long prided itself as having the very best IT systems, personnel, and equipment of them all.

So why the hell did they have to put up with these system crashes that were becoming more and more routine?

He touched an intercom button. "Pam? NCTC is offline again. Get me Lowell on the phone."

"Yes, sir."

Charles Lowell was the closest thing the National Counterterrorism Center had to an IT head; he was in charge of the complex tangle of databases, some classified, some not, that were intended as a resource to be shared among all government agencies taking part in the War on Terror.

And the project had been a nightmare from the start.

It wasn't Lowell's fault, of course. The problem was that the database project itself was simply so big, so complex, and involved so many different programmers and design tracks that it was almost impossible for any one person to see all the parts and how they had to work together at once.

The NCTC had spent half a billion dollars to upgrade the foundering system through a project called Railhead, and things rapidly had gone from bad to disastrous. At the moment, the system was nearly useless, and a lot of data collected through enormous cost and effort had gone missing.

The Counterterrorism Center had been trying to address the issues for several years, but things looked little better than they had when a Congressional oversight committee had flagged the project in 2008.

Rubens had come up to his office from the Art Room to run the name Nayim Erbakan through the sieve. It seemed strange that the man was smuggling what appeared to be a kilo or so of drugs — heroin, most likely — from England back to the eastern Med, and on a cruise ship no less. Maybe the guy just hoped to sell his wares to the rich tourists, but after a while intelligence officers developed a hyper-paranoid sixth sense about anything out of the ordinary, and Rubens was curious about this one.

But as soon as he'd tried to run the search through the TIDE database, the Center's network, one of several connecting various government agencies, had crashed.

"Mr. Lowell on the secure line, sir."

He picked up the handset. "Lowell? Rubens."

"The system's down," Lowell said. "I know. We're working on it."

"You've been working on it for six years. When is it going to work?"

"You've seen the schedule. The upgrades are supposed to be complete by 2012."

"If they come in on time. Can you put someone on a special search for me?"

Lowell sighed. "No promises. What is it?"

"A name. Nayim Erbakan." He spelled it out, waiting as Lowell jotted down the letters and repeated them back. At least the Turkish used the Western alphabet. One of the serious problems with the TIDE database was the problem in transliterating Arabic names. Was it "Mohammed," "Muhammad," or "Mohamed"? The answer, often, was yes, and cross-referencing numerous alternate spellings as well as aliases all for the same terrorist was part of the reason the database project wasn't fulfilling expectations.

"Got it," Lowell told him. "Any background?"

"He was just detained by MI5 in Southampton," Rubens told Lowell. "He was carrying five concealed plastic bags that might be drugs. I'd like to know if he's working with one of the major drug cartels over there… or if he has terrorist connections." Numerous terrorist operations financed their operations with drugs, especially lately, since the United States had begun aggressively freezing the bank accounts of organizations connected with al-Qaeda.

"I'll see what I can do, Rubens," Lowell replied. "But I can't keep taking my assets off important projects just to do your homework for you."

"You're there so we can do our homework," Rubens growled. "And right now you're the dog that's eating it!" He hung up the phone, scowling. Usually he was more diplomatic than that, but Lowell's bureaucratic pettiness had provoked him.

Sometimes, Rubens thought, it was a toss-up as to who your worst enemies were in this game — the terrorists or the turf-guarding bureaucrats right here at home. TIDE's effectiveness depended on each of the U. S. agencies tasked with counterterrorism to feed data into the TIDE database, but those agencies shared a long history of mistrust and miserly secretiveness with regard to one another… and with good reason. An intelligence agency's funding depended, at least in part, on its success as perceived by Congress. If your operatives gathered a key piece of intelligence, handing it over to a competing agency might mean that they got a bigger slice of the budgetary pie, possibly at your expense.

There wasn't supposed to be any competition. The FBI was responsible for domestic threats, the CIA for gathering intelligence overseas, the DIA for military intelligence, the NSA for electronic eavesdropping worldwide, and so on, but with terrorists ignoring international boundaries, responsibilities inevitably overlapped.

It is, Rubens thought, a hell of a way to run a railroad, or a war.

Turning back to his computer monitor, he backed out of the screen showing the NCTC system's baleful error message and connected with the network serving the NSA's Deep Black program.

At any given time, Desk Three might have six or eight operations going worldwide. He tried to keep up with them all, of course, but some were decidedly low priority. They had a field team in Lebanon now, and he called up a status report. Maybe they could be diverted to Ankara for a look at Turkey^s police records.

The team had been assigned to Operation Stargazer, a routine and low-risk op being conducted in conjunction with the CIA, designed to slip an electronic Trojan horse into Syrian intelligence.

Here they were. Howard Taggart and Lia DeFrancesca. Good.

"You are sure this will bypass the main gate?"

"Yes, sir. It's an access for heavy equipment, but it's rarely used." Ghailiani was sweating heavily, squeezed into the cab of the six-ton lorry between Khalid and the driver as they made the final turn off Herbert Walker Avenue and into an alley between two enormous warehouses. The terminal was a hundred meters to the left, the gate just ahead.

"Pray you are right, Mohamed." The truck squeaked to a stop, the way ahead blocked by a padlocked chain-link gate. "I need to get out."

Khalid opened the passenger door and stepped down into the alley. Ghailiani followed. He fished inside the pocket of his slacks for the key he'd taken from the terminal security office forty minutes ago.

He'd been hoping to find the gate guarded. Security around the Royal Sky Line dock in Southampton had been tight, lately, and it was possible that an armed guard would have been posted, if only to foil would-be smugglers from reaching the dock and the Atlantis Queen's hold.

But there was no one here. He unlocked the heavy padlock, pulled the chain from the fence, and swung the gate open. Khalid waved the truck through.

The truck turned left and kept going as Ghailiani closed the gate.

Ghailiani and Khalid would follow the truck on foot.

"Everybody stay together!" Donald Myers fluttered his hands, trying to get the group's attention. "Please stay together! We still need to go through the security gate!"

He was, Myers thought, getting too damned old for this nonsense. A docent of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland, he'd been guide and nanny for more tour groups now than he really cared to think about. Lately, it seemed, his job had been less about lecturing on eastern Mediterranean culture than it had been about herding rich little old ladies from one point to another and trying to keep them all together, a process uncannily like attempting to herd cats.

This time around, he was responsible for a group of eighteen, fourteen of them women, four of them men, and all of them over sixty. They'd signed up for the Atlantis Queen tour to Greece and the Near East, and he was there to give lectures on a variety of topics, from art in ancient Greece, to the Bible as history, to the writings of Homer; but sometimes he felt that he was little more than a poorly paid babysitter.

Leading the way, he stepped through the metal detector, then turned and waited for the rest. Ms. Jones and Mr. and Mrs. Galsworthy stepped through okay, but the alarm sounded as Ms. Dunne, waved through by an impatient security guard, set off the metal detector with her walker.

"Oh, dear," Ms. Dunne said, looking about. "Did I do that?"

"Over here, please, ma'am," the guard said. He began using a wand to check Ms. Dunne from head to toe, to make sure that it had been her walker that had triggered the device and not, Myers thought with wry amusement, a bomb hidden beneath her knit cardigan.

The others followed, one by one.

"Mr. Myers?" one elderly woman said after she'd stepped through.

"Yes, Ms. Caruthers?"

She pointed. "What does that sign mean?"

Just beyond the metal detector they were faced now by a somewhat ominous white tunnel and several blue-uniformed security guards. A sign on a metal pole to one side read:

Please form single line for x-ray security screening.

Procedure is safe and unobtrusive.

Passengers may request hand search in lieu of X-ray scan.

The procedure is for your safety.

Royal Sky Line regrets the inconvenience, and hopes you have a wonderful cruise. thank you.

"Just another security precaution," Myers told her. "Like it says. It's 'for your safety.'"

"X-rays can be harmful," Caruthers told him. "My doctor told me so."

"Ms. Caruthers, I'm very sure they wouldn't do it to people if there was any chance of harm."

"It's just like in that movie, Elsie," Ms. Jordan said, placing a reassuring hand on Caruthers' arm. "The Terminator, I think it was. The one with Arnie Schwarzenegger, before he became governor of California? The security people could see him on a big screen as a moving skeleton, remember?"

"That wasn't Terminator, Anne," Caruthers snapped back. "It was Total Recall And that's beside the point."

"But they could see he was carrying a gun!"

"Well, I'm not carrying a gun," Caruthers said with a defiant upward lift of her chin. "And I'll keep my skeleton to myself, thank you!"

Myers sighed. He didn't like Ms. Caruthers, and she didn't like him. The woman had once had the effrontery to correct him in the middle of a lecture he'd been giving back at the Walters, part of a Western arts lecture series presented by the museum foundation. She'd actually interrupted to correct him on some fine point about Doric and Ionic columns in front of the rest of the class.

The fact that, when he'd looked it up, he'd found she'd been correct only made it more irritating.

"You have to go through, Ms. Caruthers," Myers told her. "Either that, or let the guards frisk you. It's for your safety."

"Young man, I don't have to do anything! They want to frisk me like I was some kind of criminal? I won't stand for this!"

"Well, if you wish to leave the group —," Myers began, but she cut him off.

"As tour guide you can make special arrangements," Caruthers told him. "People like us shouldn't have to go through these machines like we were riffraff! And you should have known that, and made those arrangements in advance!"

"What seems to be the problem here, folks?" a security guard asked, joining them. The tour group was piling up now in front of the X-ray machine as they came through the metal detector, bringing progress to a halt.

"I'm sorry, Officer," Myers told the man. "Ms. Caruthers, here, has some concerns about the safety of this X-ray scan."

"It's perfectly safe, ma'am," the guard said. "You'll get more X-ray radiation walking outdoors on a bright, sunny day."

"My sunblock," Caruthers told him with an acid touch to her voice, "is over there, in my carry-on luggage, which you people seem to think is hiding bombs or drugs or something!"

"Ma'am — "

"On my flight from Baltimore, they confiscated my knitting and a plastic bottle of water, and then they made me take off my shoes so they could see if I had explosives hidden inside them!"

"I'm sorry, ma'am, but — "

"Young man, I am sixty-nine years old and I'm not a threat to anybody! Except, perhaps, to certain overzealous civil servants and incompetent tour guides!"

"Please, Ms. Caruthers!" Myers said. "If you make a scene — "

"So now I'm making a scene, am I? Good! I refuse to be frisked like a common criminal, and I refuse to be zapped by X-rays! What are you going to do about it?"

"I'm going to ask you to step outside the line, ma'am," the guard said, "so we can allow the other passengers to continue boarding."

"What's the matter, Elsie?" Nancy Haynes asked, grinning. "Don't want your picture took?"

"I don't know about this," Mabel Polmar said, looking worried. "Elsie's right about X-rays. My doctor told me when I had my hip surgery last winter that I couldn't have too many X-rays, or else I'd — "

"It's safe, Ms. Polmar," Myers said. He turned to the guard. "Look, is there anything else we can do?"

"Company rules, sir. Everyone goes through the scanner, or they allow themselves to be searched."

"I'd better discuss this with your supervisor, then."

"Very well, sir. But can we get the rest of these people moving? They're holding up the line."

"Okay. Let me go through and show them it's okay."

He walked into the white smooth-surfaced tunnel, turned, and held out his arms. "See, everyone? Nothing to it!"

One by one, the members of Myers' tour group followed him through the tunnel, some hesitantly, some with dogged determination, some fearfully, some with good-natured banter. Judy Dunne hobbled through step-by-step with her walker. Myers hoped that the security personnel were getting a good look at all of their skeletons, or whatever it was that they were looking at. A more unlikely terrorist group he couldn't imagine… though Ms. Caruthers did come close. She was, in his opinion and at the very least, a royal pain in the ass.

A few — Caruthers, Polmar, Jones, the Kleins, Kathy Morton — chose to follow the security guard off to the side and were engaged in a spirited discussion with him.

The Elderly Ladies' Home Terrorist and Sewing Circle, Myers thought. With a grimace, he turned and walked back to join the discussion.

This really was going to be his last time as a tour group guide.

The gray morning's overcast was breaking at last, giving way to bright sunlight. Several hundred feet aft from the Atlantis Queen's boarding gangway, the garage-sized doors to her main cargo hold on A Deck had been slid open and another lorry filled with crates of provisions drove up alongside.

Chester Darrow picked up his electronic clipboard and walked down the loading ramp to meet with the driver. "Good afternoon!" he called cheerfully. "What do you have for us?"

"More food," the driver said with a disinterested shrug. "Where do you want it?"

"Let's see what it is first," Darrow said. "What's the lading number?"

A cruise ship the size of the Atlantis Queen had a population as large as many towns — almost three thousand in all. The amount of food and other consumables required for a two-week cruise was staggering in its amount and in its variety. So far, Darrow had checked aboard twenty-five tons of beef, five tons of lamb, five and a half tons of pork, four tons of veal, a ton of sausage, seven and a half tons of chicken, three tons of turkey, nine tons of fish, and two tons of lobster… and the loading was continuing as more and more shipments arrived at the pier. In two weeks, the four restaurants on board the Queen would run through almost twenty-five tons of fresh vegetables, four thousand liters of ice cream, four tons of rice, five tons of coffee, fifteen tons of potatoes, twenty tons of fresh fruit, five tons of sugar, and twenty thousand liters of milk. Her alcohol lockers routinely stocked over four thousand bottles of assorted wines, three hundred of champagne, four hundred of vodka, five hundred of whiskey, and a thousand of assorted liqueurs… not to mention some eighteen thousand cans or bottles of a bewildering selection of beers.

The Atlantis Queen's guests and crew wouldn't consume all of that vast mountain of food and drink in two weeks, of course. A percentage was held against the possibility of a delay somewhere along the line and as a precaution against the unthinkable — that the ship's larders would actually run out of something toward the end of the cruise. The ship's commissary department would also have the opportunity to buy fresh provisions along the way — in Greece and Turkey, especially — if anything in the ship's computerized lists of stores appeared to be running low.

Odd, the manifest the driver handed Darrow was in a different format than the one routinely used by the Royal Sky Line. It listed the truck's contents as two tons of rice, three tons of potatoes, and one ton of sugar… but he'd already checked four tons of rice on board that morning and they weren't scheduled to receive any more. There'd been a screwup somewhere down the line.

"I'm sorry," Darrow said, handing the clipboard back.

"I can't take this. I'll need to check it with the commissary office."

"Is there a problem here?"

Darrow looked around and saw two of the ship's Security officers approaching along the pier from aft. He recognized one as a guy named Ghailiani. He didn't recognize the other one, though that was hardly surprising. There were nine hundred Royal Sky employees on board this ship; you couldn't possibly know them all.

"Nah, not a problem," Darrow told him. "I think this shipment is for someone else, though."

"What makes you say that?"

"It's not our inventory form, for one thing. And I can't tell if it's been screened. I don't see a customs stamp, either." All shipments of cargo and provisions were carefully checked before they were loaded aboard ship, by security personnel, by customs officers, and even by public health inspectors. Bombs, smuggled contraband, and diseases were three things that could give the company a very bad public image, and every step was taken to make sure that none of those got on board. "Come to think of it," he added, paging through the manifest, "I'm not sure how he even got in here."

"Let's take a look," the second security man said. "Maybe the right papers are in the back."

Darrow shrugged. "Sure."

The lorry had been backed up until it was directly alongside a huge Dumpster on the pier, and Darrow had to turn sideways to squeeze through the narrow passage. The truck's tailgate came down with a bang, and Darrow pulled himself up onto the cargo bed. It was dark inside, the space filled with a number of large crates masked in deep shadow.

"You have a torch?" he called back. "It's bloody dark in — " He caught movement out of the corner of his eye. "What the hell?"

"What's wrong?" the security officer called from outside.

"I thought I saw — "

Someone grabbed Darrow from behind, a hand clamping down over his mouth, an arm pinning his arms at his sides. A second shadow emerged from behind the crates in front of him, and he felt something hard and metallic rammed against his ribs.

He tried to scream.

Three sound-suppressed gunshots, sharp, hissing chirps, cut through the close darkness. Darrow bucked once, then sagged in the arms of the man behind him.

"Merciful Allah," Ghailiani said in the light outside the truck. "Forgive me."