Soldier of God

ONE

No one could help but spot the tall, gangly man with the chocolate brown complexion and ridiculous Hawaiian print shirt at the baggage claim area in Juneau International Airport. Everyone noticed that he retrieved too many leather satchels and overstuffed B4 bags to reasonably carry, and that he wore striped Bermuda shorts when it was in the low forties and drizzling outside. But his broad smile seemed to be genuine and was infectious. He was a man in his mid to late forties, with flashing dark eyes under a sharply defined brow that complimented a sculpted aquiline nose and high cheekbones, who knew that he cut a silly figure but who nevertheless was having a grand time. His laugh was the best of all, a rich deep baritone that boomed across the hall as the last of the luggage off the Air Canada flight from Vancouver came out on the moving carousel.

The man was content to wait his turn with dozens of people, many of them older couples on their way to or from cruise ships up or down the Inside Passage. Everyone was in a holiday mood, and the tall man joked and laughed with the people around him, putting everyone at ease, and making this trip just a little extra special. Characters were rare in these difficult times, and the man’s Caribbean British accent was pleasant as was the mellifluous timbre of his voice.

“Of course I know that I’m not dressed for the cold, madam,” he told a frail; white-haired old woman waiting in line. His smile widened. “In Trinidad it is never cold.”

The woman was puzzled by the man’s answer, as was her husband and others around them.

“Don’t you see, mum? I want to be cold.”

“You do?”

“Yes. It’s a new experience.”

Her husband smiled and shook his head. “I don’t think you’ll like it,” he said.

“Isherwood?” one of the passengers asked, holding up a duffel bag he’d snagged from the carousel.

“Yes, Thomas Isherwood, and that is my bag, my good man.” He retrieved his bag from the passenger, then gathered up his other luggage and with a toothy grin strode across the hall toward the exits, leaving in his wake the scent of Bay Rum cologne and a few good-natured chuckles.

When he was out of sight, he ducked down the corridor that led to the car rental agencies. Alaskan wilderness and wildlife posters adorned its walls. He went into a men’s room, where in a stall he changed into jeans, an oiled wool Irish fisherman’s sweater, a light jacket, and wafflesoled, lightweight nylon hiking shoes.

The man who emerged still traveled as Thomas Isherwood from Port of Spain, Trinidad, but no one from the Vancouver flight would have recognized him; the Caribbean bonhomie was gone, replaced with the matter-of-fact bland indifference of a well-heeled businessman here to catch fish no matter how much effort or money it cost. The face was the same, but the expression was so completely different it was as if he were wearing a mask.

Isherwood walked past the car rental counters and went outside where he loaded his bags in a cab. A steady cold rain fell from a darkly overcast sky. He ordered the driver to take him to Flights over Alaska Air Charters, then sat back and allowed himself to relax for a few minutes. He’d been on the go for three days, since he left Switzerland, maintaining several different personas, and the effort was draining, though if need be he could continue his charade for weeks or months, even years.

This was nothing new for him. Home was just another word that held little or no real meaning, though his wife and children were in Switzerland for the moment, and his many aunts, uncles, cousins, two sisters, and three brothers were scattered across Saudi Arabia. Over the last nine years, ever since he had received the call, he had spent very little time with his own people.

But that was as it should be, insha’allah. Progress was being made, though even if it weren’t he would still move forward if for no other reason than the thrill of the hunt. Osama’s fatwah was as crystal clear as the Qur’an. If the unbelievers cannot be made to see the error of their ways, if they cannot be converted, then either treat them as slaves by taking away their liberties and their properties, or kill them. All the world was to be converted to Dar el Islam, even if it took one thousand years. The hunt was on. It was the grandest game in the universe, and Isherwood was one of its most successful practitioners. He was alive as never before. He had been born for this. From the desert tents of the Bedouin to the towers of Babel in New York, he was in his element.

It was a little late for the normal tourist season, so the reception area in the Flights Over Alaska Air Charters Operations Building was deserted except for the square-shouldered woman who looked up and smiled when Isherwood walked in.

“May I help you, sir?”

“The name is Thomas Isherwood. I believe you were expecting me.” He handed her his passport. Payment for the hundred-mile flight down to Kuiu Island on the Inside Passage had been made with a credit card two weeks earlier.

The woman glanced at the clock. It was coming up on noon. “We weren’t expecting you until later this afternoon.”

“I caught an earlier flight,” Isherwood said. He made it a point to change his schedules whenever it was possible. “Are there an airplane and pilot for me?”

“Of course, sir,” the woman said. She glanced at the passport, then handed it back. She picked up the phone and dialed a three-digit number. “Your three o’clock is here. Can you fly now?” She gave Isherwood a reassuring smile, and nodded. “Thanks, Frank. I’ll bring Mr. Isherwood right over.” She hung up, and came around the counter. “The rain won’t bother you none. Should be a smooth flight.”

“I appreciate it. I’d like to get down there, have a couple of drinks, and then maybe get a couple hours of fishing in before dark.”

“Name’s Mary,” she said. Outside she tossed his heavy bags in the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser as if they were filled with air, then drove him a half mile across the bumpy concrete apron to a large hangar where several Otters, Beavers, and one DeHavilland floatplane were parked. “I have to tell you that I fell in love with your accent when you called to make the reservation.”

Isherwood gave her a warm smile, thinking that killing her would give him a certain pleasure. “I hope my appearance fits your expectations.”

She glanced at him to see if he was going along with her good-natured ribbing; then she nodded, the corners of her eyes crinkled in laughter. “Oh, I guess I was expecting someone older.” She shook her head. “But don’t get me wrong, you’ll do just fine—”

Isherwood threw back his head and laughed from the bottom of his feet. He would crush her windpipe with one blow, and then watch her eyes as her life drained away. He especially enjoyed the moment when the person knew that they were going to die and knew with equal certainty that there was nothing they could do about it.

He patted her hand on the steering wheel. “You’re a gem, Mary. An absolute jewel.”

She blushed openly as no Arab woman would ever dare, but then she didn’t know how close to death she was.

The pilot, Frank Sterling, a gray-haired but rugged-looking outdoors type in his early sixties, was finishing his walk-around as Mary tossed Isherwood’s bags in the back cargo area of the beefy-looking Otter wheeled floatplane. This, the Beaver, and the DeHavilland were Alaska’s workhorses, delivering people, mail, food, and supplies, and doctors to just about every inaccessible spot in the state. And there were a lot of them. The pilots were among the best in the world. They had to be, often operating out of extremely short, muddy fields, or lakes still half-choked with ice, in every weather condition including all-out blizzards. They were generally no-nonsense people who would just as soon haul cargo, or passengers who had the good sense and manners to keep their mouths shut, tourists.

“How long a flight?” Isherwood asked him.

Sterling gave him an appraising look. Not many Caribbean blacks got this far north, and Sterling inspected his passenger as if he were studying a circus oddity. “About an hour, if we can start anytime soon, Mr. Isherwood.”

Isherwood’s muscles bunched. It would take less than two seconds to remove his belt buckle, slide the razor-sharp lower half open on its hinge pin, and slit the man’s throat. Maybe he would see an apology in the eyes. Maybe not. But there would be copious amounts of infidel blood. He forced a faint smile. “Anytime that you’re ready, captain.”

Mary was obviously embarrassed by an exchange between the two men that she didn’t understand. “I hope you have a good week of fishing, Mr. Isherwood. This time of year it should be great.”

“Ah, thank you, Mary, my love,” Isherwood said, laughing. “You’re a terrible flirt, but thank you for the transport over.”

He stepped up on the starboard float, climbed in the front right seat, and strapped himself in. Sterling said something to the woman, then got aboard, strapped in, flipped a few switches, and hit the starter switch. The big Pratt & Whitney radial engine roared into life, and once the gauges were all in their nominal ranges, Sterling set the altimeter, released the brake, and eased the throttle forward, sending them trundling out of the hangar and down the sloping apron into the chilly black waters of Stephens Passage, doing his run-up to check the magnetos on the move.

Without a glance at his passenger, Sterling said something into the mike of his headset, then firewalled the throttle as he turned the big plane into the wind. They were airborne within a thousand feet, water streaming off the floats, and almost immediately the thick overcast ceiling was just above them. Sterling leveled off, and turned just east of due south to follow the pass all the way down to Entrance Island, where he would swing west to pass Cape Baranof, and then on to Karsten’s Fishin’ Mission on the northwest bay of Kuiu Island.

Isherwood had studied the air and sea charts of the region, so he knew the area almost as if he had lived there all his life. He prepared for every mission in the same way, with a professional thoroughness that left little or nothing to chance. He was a man who did not like surprises. In his business the unknown could be deadly.

In fact, Isherwood was not his real name. According to Western intelligence agencies, he was the international terrorist, possibly Osama bin Laden’s operations chief, known only as Khalil. According to the CIA, he was thought to be an Egyptian with a wife and children hidden somewhere in Cairo under assumed identities. Supposedly he was a medical doctor who had served with bin Laden in Afghanistan in the eighties fighting Russians, whom he hated almost as deeply as he hated Jews and Americans. No clear photographs of him existed in any Western intel file, nor was there any DNA or fingerprint evidence available that could positively identify him. He was as elusive as the night mists, and as cruel as is possible for a human being to be. In the past fifteen years no one who had come up against him had survived. Rumors were that even bin Laden was respectful — if not frightened — of the depth of the man’s savagery.

As the town of Juneau fell away from them, one spot of civilization in the middle of a vast rugged wilderness, Khalil realized how perfect an area this was for the operation he had so meticulously planned. Heavily forested, craggy islands separated the limitless expanse of the Pacific Ocean to the west from the snow and glacier-covered, forbidding mountains to the east. Except for fishing boats heading to or from the passes to the open ocean, cruise ships that traveled the Inside Passage, and the occasional sailboat or recreational trawler, there was nothing below them for as far as the eye could see.

“Empty, isn’t it?” Sterling shouted over the roar of the engine.

“No,” Khalil replied, mesmerized by the bleak landscape below. “It’s filled with opportunities down there.” He glanced at the pilot, who was looking at him. “Lots of fish to catch. And I will catch them.”

The small fishing resort was invisible from the air until the last moment, when Sterling set down in the long bay as lightly as a feather on a woman’s cheek and taxied to the end of the long dock on the south side. Then, except for the dock and two small fishing boats and three canoes, all that could be seen was a gravel footpath that led to a scattering of cabins all but hidden in the dense forest that ran right down to the water’s edge.

It was raining harder here than up in Juneau, and it had gotten dark. Sterling held up at the dock, the Otter’s engine idling, as Khalil got out and unloaded his own bags.

“I’ll be back the same time next week, unless you want to get out sooner,” Sterling said. Without waiting for a reply, he reached over and closed the passenger door, then gunned the engine and turned left, the broad wing sweeping over the dock so that Khalil had to step back to avoid getting hit.

There were seven sets of eyes watching from the woods and from the cabins. Khalil could feel them studying him, evaluating his behavior. Some of his soldiers had been here for as long as three days, waiting for their leader to show up. Waiting for the operation to finally begin. Only Zahir al Majid, his second-in-command, had ever worked with him on an operation. The others had heard of him, of course. Kahlil was a living legend, and they would be curious to see how he handled what was obviously an insult.

He gave a thumbs-up to the departing airplane, then walked up to the main lodge completely hidden in the forest, leaving his bags on the dock for someone to fetch.

Zahir, a short squat man with a thick mustache, but nearly bald on top, met Khalil in the rustic lobby. They warmly embraced. A fire burned on the stone hearth. The log walls were adorned with mounted fish, presumably caught by former patrons of the fishing camp.

“I’m glad you have finally arrived safely,” Zahir said. “Will you have something to eat? Our people would like to sit with you.”

“Soon. Is the equipment we need here?”

“Yes.”

“Our other soldiers are in place?”

Zahir checked his watch. “I spoke with Abdul in Juneau this morning. All is as it should be. The vessel will depart in a few hours and begin its southbound cruise.”

“The resort staff?”

“The maintenance man, two guides, and the owner are dead, as you ordered. Their bodies were placed in the generator building, safe from the wildlife. The owner’s wife and their daughter are being held upstairs, in case a radiotelephone call needs to be answered.”

“Cell phones are out of range?”

“Yes.”

Khalil nodded in satisfaction. “Give the daughter to the men. When they are finished with her, kill her. The mother can answer the telephone if need be.”

“They will like that.”

“Now we will go fishing,” Khalil said. “Do you know how, Zahir?”

“There is no fishing in the desert.”

Khalil laughed. “Then we will learn together.”

“In the meantime I will send someone to the dock for your bags.”

TWO

Kirk McGarvey got out of the cab into the cold drizzle at the cruise ship dock, and paused for a moment to unlimber his tall, husky body and look up at the bulk of the 192-foot pocket cruise ship Spirit of ’98 that would be his and Katy’s home for the next seven days.

He was a man of about fifty, in superb physical condition because of a daily regimen of hard physical exercise overseen by Jim Grassinger, his bodyguard, and the physical trainers and docs at the Central Intelligence Agency. It didn’t do to allow the director to get flabby, especially not this director. He wasn’t overly handsome, but his face was pleasant, his gray-green eyes honest and direct, and he exuded the quiet self-confidence of a man who was supremely capable of taking care of himself no matter what the situation was. People who got close to him, and who were perceptive enough to understand who he was, felt protected, as if they were under an umbrella where the rain could never reach them.

He had more than twenty-five years’ experience working for the government, first in the Air Force as an intelligence and Special Ops officer; next with the CIA as a case officer with assignments everywhere from Vietnam to Berlin and back; then as a freelance working what in those days were called “black operations,” which more often than not resulted in the death of one or more bad guys; and finally, reluctantly, back to Langley as the Company’s director.

Whenever he had a choice, he opted for a field assignment over a desk job, which was a curious contradiction to his main passion, besides his family: the study of Voltaire, the eighteenth-century French philosopher whose thoughts on everything from religion to government to science he found fascinating.

Otto Rencke, the best friend he’d ever had, who worked for him as special projects director, was fond of telling anyone who’d listen that Voltaire was okay for a Frog, except that he’d never known when to keep his opinions to himself. Which was the same criticism usually thrown at McGarvey. Common sense is not so common, Voltaire wrote in 1764, and as far as Mac was concerned, nothing had changed in the intervening two and a half centuries.

The sign on Truman’s desk had read that the buck stopped there, but the sign on McGarvey’s desk should have warned The Bullshit Stops Here. He hated nothing worse than liars, cheats, and bullies. Tell it like it is, or keep your mouth shut. Don’t blow smoke up my ass. Lead, follow, or get out of the way, but don’t whine about it. Anything but that.

A knight in shining armor, his wife Katy called him, but almost never to his face, and certainly not in public. He would have been embarrassed.

“Hey, how long are you going to keep me locked up?” Kathleen asked from inside the cab.

McGarvey, realizing he had been wool gathering, took her hand and helped her out. “Sorry about that,” he said.

She laughed, the sound light, almost musical. It was her happy, if not contented, noise, a mood he was finally beginning to recognize and understand without having to ask. She was tall for a woman, and slender, with short blond hair that framed a perfectly oval face, high cheekbones, full lips, finely formed nose, and a Nefertiti neck. She was fifty, but it was impossible to tell her age by looking at her, because her complexion was nearly flawless, and she was in almost as good physical shape as her husband, and for some of the same reasons — a lot of exercise and a strict attention to diet. In addition, though she would never admit it, she’d had a couple of brief, but expensive sessions with a plastic surgeon. Katy wasn’t denying her age, but she wasn’t letting it get the better of her. Not just yet.

“What a beautiful boat,” she said with pleasure.

“Ship,” McGarvey corrected, automatically. They weren’t the first of the ninety-six passengers aboard, but they were not the last, and the dock was busy with cabs, a couple of Cruise West courtesy buses, and people pushing carts with their luggage. No one seemed to mind that it was dark, raining, and in the low forties. The scenery on Alaska’s Inside Passage — hundreds if not thousands of islands, mountains, glaciers, and dense, almost primeval, forests — and the wildlife, including whales, would make the holiday worth just about any discomfort. The Spirit of ’98, a magnificent four-deck cruise ship built in the style of a turn-of-the-century steamer, had actually been used in the Kevin Costner movie Wyatt Earp. She had all the modern amenities including diesel engines, a full suite of electronics, lifeboats, a first-class gourmet kitchen and staff, plush upholstery, carved wooden cabinetry, and a player piano in the Grand Salon, but she looked like a gold rush ship. She had a single funnel just aft of the sweeping bridge, sharply vertical bows complete with pennant staff, and fine, old-fashioned lines.

McGarvey paid the cabby for the lift from Juneau’s airport as his bodyguard Jim Grassinger took the bags from the trunk. Needing a bodyguard was one of the downsides of the job as DCI. He had been used to taking care of himself for most of his life. But having a bodyguard was in his charter, and he’d already had one killed out from under him, proving the necessity. But he still didn’t like it, though he had developed a great deal of respect and trust in Grassinger over the past year.

“I hope it stops raining sometime this week, Jim,” McGarvey said. “I’d like to see you work on your tan.”

“We’re in the wrong part of the world for that, boss,” Grassinger replied. He was not a very large man, and almost no one would take a second look at him. He had a round face, pale blue eyes, thinning, sand-colored hair — his mother was Swedish — and in a suit, the jacket always cut large to accommodate his hardware, he could easily pass for the manager of the appliance section at Sears. But behind his bland, pleasant demeanor was a body of hard bar steel and the determination to match. First in hand-to-hand combat at the CIA’s training facility in Virginia; first in marksmanship with a whole host of weapons including handguns, foreign and domestic, assault rifles, riot guns, submachineguns, RPGs, and handheld missile launchers such as the Stinger, the Russian Grail, and the LAW; and first in surveillance and countersurveillance methods, he repeatedly turned down offers from the Secret Service to protect the president. He liked working for the CIA. And as far as bosses went, McGarvey was the best in his book.

He never stopped scanning the dock, and his jacket, beneath which he carried a 9mm Glock 17 with a nineteen-round box magazine, was loose as usual. He was doing a job that he would not quit until he was fired, retired, or killed, none of which he figured was going to happen anytime soon.

McGarvey and Katy each took a bag and walked across the covered boarding ramp into the ship. It had begun this cruise last week in Fairbanks, and would head down to Seattle in a few hours.

Normally, Grassinger would have gone ahead to check out the ship, but this time the crew and all the passengers had been vetted by the CIA and by the DoD because the former secretary of defense Donald Shaw and his wife, Karen, were also on board. Both he and McGarvey were significant targets for groups such as Osama bin Laden’s al-Quaida, but they both traveled with bodyguards, the Coast Guard was nearby, the ship would be under almost constant satellite surveillance, and Shaw’s and McGarvey’s names had not been made public. Even their travel arrangements from Washington had been kept strictly under wraps.

Both couples needed the time off, the Shaws because of the continuing strife in Iraq, for which the former SecDef was working in an advisory capacity for State, and the McGarveys because of the horrible ordeal they had gone through less than a year ago in which Katy had been brainwashed into actually attempting to assassinate her husband.

Their only daughter, Elizabeth, who worked for the CIA as a field officer and instructor, had suffered too. She’d been four months pregnant but had lost the baby in an arranged accident. Now she and her husband, CIA combat instructor Todd Van Buren, could not have children. They were in their twenties, head over heels in love with each other, and Elizabeth’s hysterectomy had devastated them.

The Shaws and McGarveys were greeted in a receiving line by four ship’s officers, including the captain, the purser, the concierge, and the chief steward, who assigned them their accommodations and dinner seatings.

“Mr. and Mrs. James Garwood,” the concierge announced.

“Welcome aboard the Spirit,” Captain Bruce Darling said, shaking hands. “If there’s anything I can personally do to make your trip more enjoyable, please, don’t stand on ceremony. Just ask.”

“Good scenery, good food, and good weather, Captain,” Kathleen said, smiling.

Darling chuckled. “How about two out of three, ma’am?”

“Fair enough,” she told him, and she and Kirk moved off with a steward’s assistant to their first-class cabin, as Grassinger went through the same routine. He would be bunking in a cabin adjacent to the McGarveys’.

The cabins were relatively Spartan compared to those aboard larger cruise ships. But the McGarveys’ cabin was equipped with a television, a reasonably sized bathroom, a queen bed, and a killer view from a very large window.

“Just leave the bags,” McGarvey told the steward.

“Yes, sir. We sail at five, and there will be a welcoming cocktail party in the Grand Salon at six.”

Katy went to the window and looked across the channel at the docks and the processing buildings for the fishing fleet.

“Should we dress?” McGarvey asked.

“No, sir. Casual will be fine,” the steward said. He was a slight man with an olive complexion and a ready smile. “There will be a lifeboat drill first.”

“Fine,” McGarvey said. When the steward was gone, he took off his jacket and tossed it on the bed, revealing a quick-draw holster at the small of his back that contained the 9mm version of the Walther PPK. He seldom went anywhere without the pistol. The German handgun was an old friend that had saved his life on more than one occasion.

“Well, we finally made it,” Kathleen said, as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

McGarvey went to her and took her in his arms. She leaned her head back against his shoulder. “How do you feel, Katy?”

She chuckled at the back of her throat. “Pregnant, happy as hell, content, frightened out of my wits, fat, hungry, thirsty.” She turned her face up to his.

He kissed her for a long time. “A penny for the laugh.”

“You said Katy. I almost corrected you.”

“Kathleen. Old habits die hard,” McGarvey said.

They watched out the window, in each other’s arms, for a few minutes content with the peace and quiet after an extremely contentious year. Of all the places in the world they could have picked for a week’s vacation — the Caribbean, Greece, Wales to look up her relatives, Ireland to look up his — they had chosen an Alaskan cruise because of the isolation. They were both peopled out. If truth were to be told, they would almost have preferred a desert island somewhere.

She snuggled a little closer to him, pressing her breasts against his chest. “Hmm.”

“Tender?” he asked.

“A little,” she answered.

McGarvey felt a sudden surge of doubt. “We’re doing the right thing, aren’t we?”

She chuckled again. Her everything’s-really-okay sound. “If you mean being fifty and getting pregnant, no, we’re being reckless. But if you mean getting pregnant with our daughter and son-in-law’s fertilized egg because they can no longer have children, we’re being foolish, but loving.” She looked up at him again, her face open and vulnerable. “Is my knight a little frightened?”

“Yup.”

Her eyes filled. “It’s okay, because it’s you and me, darling. Nothing else counts.”

Someone knocked at the door. Kathleen stiffened for a moment, but then settled back. Life went on.

McGarvey gave her a brief kiss, then went to the door. It was Grassinger. McGarvey let him in.

“What’s the drill tonight, boss?”

“We’re going to the cocktail party, then dinner, and we’ll be turning in early,” McGarvey said.

“And sleeping in,” Katy added.

“What about Shaw’s bodyguard?” McGarvey asked.

Grassinger nodded. “Tony Battaglia. He’s good man. Ex-Army Special Ops. He’s up on the bridge deck in the captain’s sea cabin.” The Shaws occupied the owner’s suite, the only accommodation on that deck, except for the captain’s on-duty quarters, which he used only in an emergency when his presence on the bridge was required 24/7.

“I’ll talk to him, see if we can coordinate our activities so that you and Battaglia can have a little slack time,” McGarvey promised, but he gave Grassinger a stern look. “Let’s get something straight from the get-go. I’m here on vacation, which means I’m not going to jump through a lot of security hoops. The ship is secure, the passengers and crew have been vetted — twice — and I’d just as soon not see you until we get to Seattle.”

“The passengers and crew have been cleared, but I don’t trust anybody, boss.”

“Neither do I. But we’re here to relax.”

“Maybe you are, but I’m not,” Grassinger mumbled.

“None of the passengers are going to relax either,” Katy said. “Not unless both of you keep your jackets on all the time to cover up your arsenals. Guns make most people twitchy.”

McGarvey grinned. “You’re right, Katy,” he said. He took off his holster and stuffed it and a spare magazine in a side pocket of one of his bags.

“Do you think that’s wise?” Grassinger asked, skeptically.

“I’m a tourist on vacation,” McGarvey said, though he did feel somewhat naked.

“No, sir, you’re the director of Central Intelligence, and fair game for a good number of people who would like to see you become a permanent resident of Arlington National,” Grassinger said bluntly. He glanced at Katy. “Sorry, Mrs. M., I didn’t mean any offense, just doing my job.”

“None taken, Jim,” Katy said graciously. “And I would like it very much if you continued to do you job.”

McGarvey had been staring intently at his bodyguard. “What’s up, Jim, rats in the attic?” Every intelligence officer who survived long enough understood that it was wise to listen to hunches, gut feelings.

Grassinger took a moment to answer. “Not really. It’s just that we’ll be fairly well isolated for the next few days.”

“We’ll keep our eyes open,” McGarvey said. “What else is new?”

“Part of the business, boss.”

THREE

Twenty-nine hours later, a few minutes after eight, the forty-foot flybridge sportfisherman Nancy N. under the command of Khalil’s number two, Zahir al Majid, came out of the lee of Kuiu Island’s north bay into the teeth of a strong northwest wind that funneled between Admiralty and Entrance islands. The rain clouds had cleared, and the distant mountains and stark blacks and whites of the glaciers toward Mount Burkett on the mainland stood out in a beauty that was as harsh as the open deserts of the Saudi Arabian peninsula. This time of year, this far north, night came late, but it was twilight, and combined with the fantastic scenery, accurate depth perception beyond a couple of hundred yards was difficult at best. Almost nothing seemed to be in proportion out here.

Khalil’s seven soldiers were excited to finally be going into battle. They had been anxious all day. But Khalil appeared indifferent. He had been in battle before, and he expected that he would be in other battles in the coming months and years. He would continue the holy struggle until he was dead, a thought about which he was totally philosophical. His death would be of no more consequence than the death of a common soldier or a president or even an imam. Each man would either get to Paradise or not, according to the earthly life he had led.

Frankly, he was indifferent about any thoughts of an afterlife. His time was here and now. He made meticulous plans for the future, but he lived for the present. Whatever money and worldly goods he could possibly want were his merely for the asking. On the rare occasions he found that he desired female companionship, or a male friend, or even the services of a young boy, he had those pleasures as well.

His only real interest was in the game, what Western intelligence analysts called the jihad, which Muslims took to mean holy war, or the struggle, and in the fatwahs, or decrees, issued by religious leaders or scholars, who for years had been telling the faithful to kill all Christians and Jews — men, women, and children — whenever and wherever they were found. He had visions of swimming in rivers of blood wider than the Tigris or Euphrates, wider even than the Jordan or the Mississippi.

Kidnapping the war criminal Donald Shaw, whisking him to a cargo ship one hundred miles offshore, and transporting him eventually to Pakistan, where he would stand trial for crimes against Islam, would be the perfect counterpoint to the supremely arrogant religious war in Iraq.

It would be doubly satisfying to the jihad, because Shaw had repeatedly made public his disdain for the cause, calling al-Quaida’s soldiers of God “criminals.” The former secretary of defense had been a combat pilot in Vietnam, flying more than one hundred missions before his plane was shot down. He spent the next two and a half years as a POW at the Hanoi Hilton. But the enemy never broke him. He was a genuine American hero. But all that would change when he stood trial and his crimes against humanity were exposed to the world.

No important westerner would ever consider himself safe after this mission, Khalil reflected. Presidents, prime ministers, even kings and queens would not be immune from accounting for their transgressions. Ultimately the effect of such kidnappings and trials would make every leader in the West think twice about supporting Israel or continuing the war against Dar el Islam. The world would become a safer place in which to live.

He braced himself against the control console and raised the motiondamping Steiner mil specs binoculars to study the green-and-white rotating beacon of the small airport at Kake on the big island of Kupreanof a few miles to the northeast. There was no activity over there at this time of the evening, nor would there be any scheduled flights in or out until morning, except for the twin Otter, parked at this moment in the Air West hangar on the south end of the field; it would leave and fly west sometime after midnight tonight. No one at the field would know about the unauthorized flight until it was too late. Nor would the tower be manned, so there would be no one to track the flight on radar out into the ocean where the airplane would be scuttled in water that was a half-mile deep.

Khalil had gone over the details dozens of times, from the initial planning stages three months earlier, when it was first learned that Shaw might be taking an Alaskan Inside Passage cruise, until last night when he had gone over each step of the operation with Zahir and the other six operators. In addition to the eight men already aboard Spirit—four in engineering and four on the steward’s staff — they would present an overwhelming force, with superior weapons and the element of surprise.

Shaw traveled with a bodyguard, who would be armed, but his would be the only operational weapon aboard the ship. The one Ruger Mini-14 folding stock rifle and the few Colt .45 pistols in the ship’s weapons locker had been disabled, their firing pins removed. Meanwhile Khalil and his people were armed with the suppressed Polish-made 9mm RAK PM-63 machine-pistols, Austrian Steyr GB self-loading pistols modified to take the same Makarov round as the RAKs, several Haley and Weller E182 stun grenades, and a total of forty kilos of Semtex plastic explosive and acid fuses.

The crew and passengers would present no insurmountable problems. Those who did not instantly cooperate would be killed. Nor would communications be a problem once the ship’s SSB and VHF radios were disabled, and the comm center’s satellite phone rendered inoperative. In this stretch of the Inside Passage between Juneau to the north and Ketchikan to the south, cell phones were out of range. A cross-match of the crew and passenger lists with the FCC’s roster of amateur radio operators, to see who might be carrying portable radios or handie-talkies, came up with no hits. And the only other people aboard who might carry a satellite phone would be Shaw or his bodyguard.

Those two men were the primary targets. They would be brought under control so fast that neither of them would have time to react.

He checked the chart again, against what he was viewing through the windshield, and rechecked his weapons. Although he was supremely confident in his own preparations, he wanted the men to see that even he took special care with his equipment. Image had a lot to do with success, and he was a master at presenting the face that he wanted the world to see.

One hour later they finally came abeam of Kake settlement, a town of about seven hundred people, the wind screaming at a full force of at least thirty knots, with viciously steep, two-meter waves that slammed into the bows of the Nancy N. Anything or anyone not tied down or holding on for dear life would be in trouble.

“I have a target,” Zahir called out over the shrieking wind.

Khalil turned the binoculars across the pass toward Entrance Island, where he picked up the many lights of the small cruise ship. “I see it,” he shouted.

The Spirit was turning southeast into Frederick Sound at about ten or twelve knots, taking the seas in stride at her stern. She was a little early by Khalil’s reckoning, but he saw no obstacles to coming around the tip of the big island and catching up with her in the next half hour while most of the passengers would be finishing dinner and awaiting a show in the Grand Salon. He motioned for Zahir to increase their speed, despite the pounding they were taking, until they were practically flying off the tops of the waves.

“As soon as we clear the island, head directly for the ship,” Khalil shouted.

“We could broach if we take a big enough wave on our stern,” Zahir warned.

Khalil fixed him with a baleful stare. “In that case we would all perish out here. See that you do not allow a broach to happen.”

Zahir didn’t bother to respond, turning his entire attention back to controlling the boat. Khalil was a man who was not to be disappointed.

Khalil made his way below to where his operators were grimly hanging on. The cabin reeked of vomit, but he was satisfied that not one of them seemed like he was ready to give up. They were competent, if unimaginative, men. “Ten minutes,” he told them.

No one had a question.

In the pilothouse Zahir was getting set to turn downwind. He was braced against the console, one hand fighting the wheel, the other trying to feather the engines each time they came off the top of a wave. Water flew from every direction as if they had gotten themselves caught at the base of Niagara Falls.

They were clear of the tip of the big island but not quite abeam of the cruise ship. It took Khalil a moment or two to sort out the situation from the picture being painted on the radar screen. He saw immediately that Zahir was correct not to make the downwind turn until they crossed the cruise ship’s track. If they turned now they would almost certainly broach, but if they waited they could steer a zigzag path toward the ship, keeping the waves on their quarters, not square to their stern.

He braced himself next to Zahir. “You steer,” he shouted. “I’ll take the throttles.”

The boat, the seas, and the wind were three separate living things that had to be balanced against each other to avert disaster. Ten seconds after he’d taken over the throttles, his respect for his chief lieutenant soared. But then, he thought, fear was the most powerful of all motivators. Without it Zahir would have turned back by now.

In every operation Khalil made certain that the men feared him more than they feared the mission itself. He had worked with Zahir on previous operations, but for the other men he’d instilled that fear on the very first day of their training by selecting the most battle-hardened of the recruits and challenging him to a hand-to-hand combat exercise. With the same indifferent cruelty that a cat shows for its prey, or that a Bedouin father shows for a physically flawed daughter, Khalil took the man apart piece by piece, until in the end he was reduced to a sobbing, bleeding hulk, begging for mercy.

“I do not reward failure by anyone,” Khalil, speaking in a calm, reasonable tone of voice, told the recruits assembled at the desert camp. He grabbed a handful of the man’s hair, pulled his head back, and in several deft moves, the cuts so swift and the knife so razor sharp that the man had no time to react, Khalil removed his nose and his lips, and then peeled the skin from his face as if he were skinning a dead animal.

The man reared back suddenly, screaming in abject horror at what was being done to him. Blood flowed from a dozen wounds in his body.

“Go into the desert now and die,” Khalil told the man, and he turned to the recruits. “Now we will have a meal together, and you will tell me why you think that you could be loyal soldiers in Allah’s struggle for justice.”

The wounded man, having nothing left to lose, his eyesight obscured by blood, reared up, stumbled into Khalil’s back, pulled a pistol from the holster at the hip of his tormentor, and then stepped back.

Khalil calmly turned to face the man, and looked directly into the muzzle of the gun. “You have two choices now, Achmed. Either shoot me, thus putting an end to our just and godly mission, or turn the pistol to your own head and pull the trigger.” Khalil shrugged indifferently. “Of course, no matter what you decide, you will die tonight.”

The soldier turned to his comrades, but no one raised a hand to help him. He looked again at Khalil, then stepped back another pace, not at all certain what he should or could do.

As the man hesitated, Khalil pulled a pistol out of his tunic and shot him in the head at point-blank range.

“Never trust in chance,” Khalil told his men, and from that moment they were his, body and soul.

That was eleven weeks ago. They would not let him down tonight.

The cruise ship was well aft of their beam now. Zahir glanced at the radar image, then at Khalil, and nodded. He was very frightened, but he looked determined.

“Now,” Khalil shouted over the wind. He feathered the props as Zahir hauled the boat into a tight turn to starboard. For several breathless seconds it seemed as if they would be caught with the seas on their beam. The Nancy N. heeled sharply to the right, practically burying her gunwales in the black water of Frederick Sound, but at the last moment Khalil gunned the starboard engine. The prop on the low side bit, and the boat spun around as if it were on a pivot, came upright, and suddenly shot downwind as if it were a lemon pit squeezed out between a thumb and forefinger.

The motion was still lively but they were no longer taking a pounding, and the Spirit of ’98’s bright stern lights were suddenly very close.

“Good work,” Khalil shouted.

“We were lucky,” Zahir replied, without breaking his concentration, though the water was getting much calmer in the lee of the island.

The answer was irritating, and Khalil was instantly enraged. But he gently patted his lieutenant on the shoulder of his uniform blouse. “I disagree my old friend; it was not luck, it was your skill. Now take us the rest of the way.”

He took a walkie-talkie out of a pocket, and hit the push-to-talk switch. “Charlie, any luck catching fish tonight?”

“I’m checking the bait now,” Abdul Adani radioed from where he waited at the stern of the ship. They spoke in English in case the frequency was monitored.

Khalil switched on the Nancy N.’s navigation lights for just a moment, then shut them off. “Try the back spinner on about two hundred yards of line.”

“Good suggestion. I’ll drop the hook in the water now.”

Khalil pocketed the walkie-talkie, and as they closed on the cruise ship he could see a boarding ladder being lowered over the stern. He ducked below. “Take your positions,” he told his operators.

The six men, all dressed in ship’s uniforms, packs and weapons slung over their shoulders, scrambled up on deck. One of them took over the helm for Zahir.

The new man matched the speed of the cruise ship, then nudged the Nancy N. to within reach of the boarding ladder and the thick towrope and bridle that had been lowered with it.

Khalil went out on deck, Zahir right behind him. Abdul was looking down at them from the cruise ship’s rail fifteen feet above. He gave the all-clear sign, and Khalil clambered up the boarding ladder.

Abdul stepped aside for him, and once Khalil was on deck, six of his operators started up.

“Have you or your men come under any suspicion?” Khalil asked.

“None,” Abdul said. He was a slight man, and was dressed in the white jacket and dark trousers of a steward’s mate. But he was a fearless and deadly knife fighter from Cairo. “They are all in position, awaiting your signal.”

Khalil hesitated a moment as the remainder of his operators came aboard. He could hear music coming from the salon, and the sounds of laughter. All of that was about to come to a very abrupt end.

The last man up the ladder had secured the towrope to a heavy cleat amidships just forward of the pilothouse. The man at the helm would stay with the small boat. He reduced the engines to idle speed and shifted the transmission to neutral. The Nancy N. bucked and heaved as if she were a wild horse suddenly put to the bridle, but then she settled in a reasonably docile fashion to be towed by the cruise ship.

Everything was set. Khalil turned back to Abdul. “Now,” he said.

FOUR

A fine mist rose over Lake Lucerne in the predawn darkness, as if a fire had been lit beneath the bedrock and the expanse of water was coming to a slow simmer. The midnight-blue Mercedes CLK320 cabriolet, its top snuggly up against the chilly morning air, made its way smoothly along the lake road south of the city, Mount Pilatus rising more than two thousand meters from the Swiss plateau off to the west.

An attractive blond woman in her early thirties, with a finely defined face, high narrow cheekbones, and wide, pale blue eyes, was at the wheel, her small shoulders thrown back defiantly. She wore sandals, a short khaki skirt, and a light pullover. Her 7.65mm Walther PPK and her Swiss Federal Police wallet, which identified her as Sergeant Liese Bernadette Fuelm, were in the black leather purse on the seat along with several fat file folders. Her position on the force as a watch officer was hard won because of her sex, something she had been reminded of the previous evening during drinks with her boss, Captain Ernst Gertner, the Kanton Nidwalden Polizei commander. Because of their conversation she had spent a sleepless night, memories piling on memories coming back at her, some of them hurtful, a few of them erotic, but all of them filling her with a crushing sense of loneliness.

“So, Liebchen, I’m hearing that you are dissatisfied with your little assignment.” Gertner had come directly to the point as if he had read her mind. He was a slick career officer, very nearly a politician in his outlook, and she hated it when he talked to her with his annoying diminutives.

“It’s nothing but a simple surveillance operation, captain,” she said. “I have more experience than that. Almost twelve years, as a matter of fact.”

“For God’s sake, we’re off duty; you can call me by my Christian name,” Gertner blustered. “But you’re wrong about your assignment. The good prince is much more than a simple man. In an offhand way, you have a connection with him. It’s one of the reasons you were selected, though it’s a surprise to all of us at District that your woman’s intuition didn’t ferret out the clue off the bat.”

Liese was confused. “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never met Prince Salman. He’s a very rich man. We don’t run in the same circles, I can assure you.”

Gertner chuckled at her little joke. He waggled a finger at her. “But you do have a connection nonetheless, which you might have divined had you done the same homework as I did. I read your file. Your complete file.” He rolled his eyes, as if he were a schoolmaster exasperated by the antics of a naughty student. “I’m surprised.”

In Liese’s estimation Gertner was a smarmy, sexist bastard; many Swiss males were, but at least he was a capable administrator even if he had forgotten what it was like to be in the field. He had four brutish children and a fat wife who worshipped the ground he walked on, giving him the confidence to actually think that he was dashing with the ladies. “Then I’ve evidently missed something; please fill me in.”

So far as Liese knew, the assignment she’d been handed — to conduct an in-detail and in situ surveillance of Prince Abdul Hasim ibn Salman, a Saudi Arabian national — had to do with politics and Swiss banking laws. The man was a multibillionaire playboy who as often as not left his wife and staff at their palatial lakeside compound while he jetted off to London, Paris, Monaco, even Las Vegas to play games with his royal-family oil money and with his many mistresses, all supposedly forbidden by the Saudi adherence to the Muslim fundamentalist sect of Wahhabism.

Her initial brief, which had been handed to her along with the order of personnel and equipment and her budget lines, suggested the possibility of a financial connection between the prince and Osama bin Laden’s al-Quaida. Normally a blind eye would have been turned to such financial dealings, as long as no banking laws were being violated. But since 9/11, and the second Gulf War waged by the U.S. and Britain against Iraq, and the “New World Order,” many formerly aloof countries such as Switzerland had taken a more cautious attitude about doing business with organizations and individuals who might have terrorist ambitions.

The prince had been born in the tiny settlement of Bi’r Fardan in the vast Ar Rub’ al-Khali desert south of Riyadh, and had been educated primarily at King Abdul Aziz University in the Saudi coastal city of jeddah. Since he was a member of the royal family, he’d gotten his start in business the easy way, with a great deal of money and all the right connections. But he was a brilliant and ruthless businessman and a savvy politician, so as soon as his education was completed he’d been sent to Saudi embassies, first in London, then Mexico City, Moscow, Beijing, and finally Washington.

Suddenly, ten years ago, he had all but dropped out of active Saudi politics and turned his talents to deal-making. Like the legendary Adnan Khashoggi before him, Prince Salman seemed to be in the middle of every hundred-million-dollar-plus deal between the Saudis and the rest of the world. He’d been a frequent guest at the White House, at 10 Downing Street, at the most palatial estates, and aboard the yachts of every influential, wealthy player in the world, and he seemed to be connected with nearly every beautiful woman at the height of her desirability.

“The prince was involved with Kirk McGarvey eleven years ago when you were beginning your career with the service,” Gertner said, and his words hit her like a ton of bricks. “Fascinating reading, I must say.”

She was floating a couple of centimeters off her seat in the Gasthaus, the sounds of the conversations around her fading as if she were hearing them from the end of a long tunnel.

“We thought perhaps McGarvey might have mentioned the name to you at the time. Or perhaps later,” Gertner said.

His words flowed over and around Liese. But she was brought back so completely that she could see every line on Kirk’s face, hear his laugh, smell his clean, masculine, American odors. Verdammt. Had it been all that long since she had first fallen in love with him?

“Or might Marta have said something to you?” Gertner was asking. “Just anything at all, some little phrase, or little word that might give us a clue?”

Kirk, who had been a CIA assassin, had suddenly quit the agency under a cloud of some sort that was never adequately explained to the Swiss police. But he had been allowed to settle in Lucerne providing he never went active. As long as he never picked up his gun and never made contact with anyone in the business, he was welcome in Switzerland. Marta Fredericks had been sent to his bed to keep a close watch on him. And Liese Fuelm and a few other Swiss police officers were also assigned to keep an eye on him. No one ever considered that first Marta and then Liese would fall in love with him.

But they had. And Liese could still remember some of the erotic dreams she had about Kirk: tasting him, feeling his body on top of hers, inside of her, kissing her breasts, her thighs.

But then Kirk had gone for his gun, and he had left Switzerland for good. A year or so later Marta quit the force and chased him to Paris, where she was killed in the destruction of a Swiss Air flight, leaving Liese with nothing other than her bitter memories. She and Marta had not only been rivals; they had been close friends.

But Prince Salman’s name had never come up, and Liese told Gertner as much. “I think I would have remembered.”

“It’s been a long time, and you were young and impressionable.” Gertner let the comment hang.

Liese shook her head, still off balance.

“Well, for goodness sake, you were in love with the man. Certainly you must have talked.”

Gertner had nothing; he was on a fishing expedition, but Liese resigned herself to stick out the assignment. There was no way she would be pulled off. “I was in love with Mr. McGarvey, as was Marta, but if you will look at the record you will see that he wasn’t in love with either of us.”

“It must have hurt,” Gertner observed mildly, almost fatherly. “Does it still, Liese? Hurt, I mean? Carrying any old torches, are we? Perhaps even a grudge or two? Just the tiniest bit of resentment? It could have been you, the wife of the director of Central Intelligence.”

“Fond memories, no grudges,” Liese said. “What was the connection between the prince and Kirk — Mr. McGarvey?”

“It was a tenuous one, but we have to consider all the aspects, don’t we?” Gertner said. He fiddled with his glass of wine, a characteristic gesture of his when he felt he was skating on thin ice. He smoked a pipe, and when he was unsure of himself he cleaned it, or filled it to draw attention away from what he was saying. “The prince, as a young man, was one of Darby Yarnell’s hangers-on. The same Yarnell who had an affair with McGarvey’s then ex-wife, and the same Yarnell whom your Mr. McGarvey shot to death in the CIA director’s driveway.” Gertner couldn’t contain himself. “They’re all cowboys over there. The lot of them are raving lunatics, in my book.”

“This is the first I’ve heard of the prince’s involvement,” Liese said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know how much help I can be.”

Gertner dismissed her objections with a wave of his hand. “The point quite simply is that you know more about Kirk McGarvey than does anyone else in Switzerland. We would very much like to know if there continues to be a connection between Mr. McGarvey and the prince and therefore the Saudi royal family.”

“I can’t imagine such an alliance.”

Gertner threw up his hands in exasperation. “Goodness gracious, are all women, even Swiss women, so thickheaded that they cannot see the mountains for the glare of the glaciers?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Have you thought about who was behind the attacks in New York and Washington?”

“You’re talking about September eleventh? The World Trade Center and the Pentagon?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Al-Quaida,” Liese said. “What are you driving at?”

“Indulge me. What was the purpose of those attacks?”

“Terrorism,” Liese replied offhandedly. “Militant Islamics striking at the infidel as they have been doing for a lot of years now.”

“Splendid. And the result, in practical terms? Have the Muslims won their war?”

“No, so far it’s backfired,” Liese said. But then it dawned on her what Gertner was getting at. She’d heard the view mentioned in roundabout terms, but she thought it was a minority opinion. Now she wasn’t so sure. “You think that the Israelis engineered the attacks. Mossad, to focus America’s attention on the Muslims.”

“It makes sense to me,” Gertner said. “And I am not alone in this thinking.” He gave Liese a shrewd look. “But the current point, so far as you’re concerned, is learning if there is any connection, no matter how slight, between Prince Salman and Kirk McGarvey, and therefore the American intelligence establishment.”

“You’re crazy,” Liese said. “Salman is a Saudi not an Israeli.”

“Perhaps he is, but then Mossad is devilishly clever with its cover stories. We Swiss have been victim to more than one of their operations. I expect you’ll do your best with this assignment, especially now that you and I have come to a clear understanding that this is not a simple job of surveillance.”

“I’ll tell you this, Ernst: I’ll do everything within my power to prove that Kirk is not in some sort of collusion with the prince, and that the attacks were just as they seemed, engineered and carried out by al-Quaida.”

“Good,” Gertner said. “I merely ask that your prejudices do not blind you to the truth, even if the truth should fall unfavorably on Mr. McGarvey.”

Liese reached the narrow gravel road, where she switched off her headlights and went the rest of the way to the small chalet in starlight. The simple A-frame lodge was owned by a Bern businessman who sometimes cheated on his taxes, and was very cooperative when the Federal Police asked for his help. The lodge was perched on the hill of a finger directly across a small bay from the five-hectare palatial compound of Prince Salman.

There were only a few security lights on over there at this hour of the morning. She telephoned the chalet as she came up the long driveway. “It’s me.”

“We have you,” Claude LeFevre, answered. He was one of two men who had pulled the morning shift.

Liese had been given a total of eight men, which was a luxury for this kind of operation. Everybody was getting plenty of sleep, and their thinking was still sharp. No one had gotten bored yet, though boredom would come. Most cops hated surveillance, no matter how important the subject. Unless, of course, it was a beautiful woman who liked to take off her clothes in front of windows. Then the pigs would line up as if at the trough.

And most Swiss cops hated being bossed by a woman. But that was just too bad, Liese thought, getting out of her car as the sky in the east began to lighten. They had a job to do, and they were going to do it right. Marta would have expected nothing less for Kirk.

The chalet was dark except for the fire on the hearth in the middle of the great room, and the soft green glow of the communications and surveillance equipment set up on a low table a couple of meters back from the main windows that opened toward the bay.

LeFevre was finishing breakfast, a sausage and black-bread sandwich, and Detective Tomas Ziegler was looking at the compound through a set of powerful Zeiss image-intensifying binoculars set on a sturdy tripod.

Liese laid her purse on the table. “Are they up and about at this hour?”

“I saw a light, but it was in the staff wing,” Ziegler said.

“One of them had to take a pee then,” LeFevre suggested. They were both very young and very superior, though Ziegler had already tried to hit on her.

“Any telephone calls overnight?” Liese asked, heading into the tiny kitchen to heat the pot for some tea.

“Just the school,” LeFevre said. “About nine.”

“One of the kids sick?” The prince had a wife and four children — three girls and a boy, all away at boarding school outside Zurich.

“The school didn’t call; the Prince’s wife called them,” LeFevre said.

Liese stopped what she was doing and went back into the great room. “That was late for her to call the school. Who did she talk to? What did she want?”

“The headmaster. She wants her kiddies back home with her. And she sounded as if she was in a great hurry—”

“Verdammt,” Liese said, going for her phone. “The prince is coming home — either that, or something is about to go bad for them, and they’re circling the wagons. Either way we’re going to need some intercept people up here.”

LeFevre was confused. “What do you mean?”

“It’s the start of term, you idiot. They were supposed to stay there until December break. If she’s called them home, it means she’s talked to her husband.” The operations officer at Nidwalden came on the line, and Liese began issuing her instructions.

FIVE

On the bridge of the Spirit of ’98 First Officer Matt LaBlanc studied the overhead multifunction monitor, his pale blue eyes narrowed with puzzlement. He was an excellent, if unimaginative officer, who did everything strictly by the book.

He picked up the ship’s phone and called engineering. “We’re losing speed over the bottom; is there a problem?”

Sterling Granger, the engineering officer on duty, came to the phone. “RPMs are steady at seven hundred. We might have picked up something on one of the props. Stand by.”

Besides LeBlanc, the only other crew on the bridge were Officer-in-Training Scott Abfalter and the helmsperson, Able-Bodied Seaman Nina Lane, who was so tiny she was barely able to see over the top of the ship’s wheel. The weather tonight wasn’t much different than it normally was at this time of year. The Spirit was taking the seas in her stride; she was built for these waters, but a couple of minutes earlier she had suddenly lost a half knot of speed over the bottom as registered by their bottomsounding sonar. The present weather was a known, as were the tidal and wind-driven currents, but none of those factors could explain the loss in speed. It was almost as if they were towing a sea anchor.

Granger, whose real name was Babrak Pahlawan, came back. “I’m showing the same thing here. We may have picked up some debris on one of the props.”

“Wouldn’t we be able to feel the vibration if the shafts were out of balance?” LeBlanc asked. This was the first trip he’d made with Granger, and he didn’t have a measure of the man yet.

“Not necessarily. It depends on what we’ve picked up and how it’s streaming, if that’s the problem,” Granger said. “Stand by.”

Something wasn’t right to LeBlanc, who’d been with the company for ten years. He had the hours for the Master of the Oceans certificate, and he would be taking the test in a couple of months. Granger’s explanation didn’t make any sense to him. “How’s the helm feel?” he asked Lane. “Have you noticed any change in the past few minutes?”

The young woman hesitated a moment. “I’m not sure, sir.”

“You have the wheel; you’re the only one who can tell me,” LeBlanc said, trying to be as reassuring as he could be.

“It feels sluggish,” she said, diffidently, “like there’s something wrong with the steering gear, or the rudder or something.”

Granger came back to the phone. “The shafts are balanced.”

“Could one of our rudders be out of alignment, somehow, or maybe bent?”

“It’s possible,” Granger said, “but there’ve been no collision reports. Give me a couple of minutes and I’ll check on it.”

“Right,” LeBlanc said. He hung up the phone and stood for several long moments staring at the multifunction display. The numbers he was reading and what Granger told him simply did not add up.

The sweeping view from the bridge was nothing short of magnificent during the day, but at night very little could be seen beyond the reflections of the various instruments in the windows and the cast of the ship’s running lights on the waters. They had passed the small settlement of Kake to their starboard several minutes ago. Its airfield beacon was very prominent. Forty minutes earlier they had left the lights of the even smaller settlement of Fanshaw to their port. Out ahead there was nothing except for the occasional blinking green or red channel marker, and the village and airfield of Petersburg fifty miles to the south where they would put in tonight. On moonlit nights the glaciers glowed with an eerie violet cast, and on some special evenings in the fall the aurora borealis flashed and wavered from horizon to horizon as if the entire world were on fire. But tonight all was flat twilight outside the windows of the bridge, and First Officer LeBlanc was concerned, though he couldn’t put his finger on exactly why.

The intercom phone buzzed. It was Granger in engineering. “There may be a slight drag on the starboard rudder post. But it’s nothing serious, and certainly there’s nothing we can do about it until we get to Seattle.”

LeBlanc glanced at the multifunction display. Their speed had increased slightly, but the RPMs had climbed by ten revolutions. That wasn’t right. “Keep an eye on it,” he told the engineering officer. “If there’s any change let me know.”

“Roger.”

LeBlanc stepped over to the helm. “Excuse me,” he told the young AB. He took the wheel, and slowly moved it a quarter turn to starboard. The ship’s head came right, but sluggishly. He turned the wheel back to port until the ship swung to its original course, and then he neutralized the helm.

Something was definitely amiss. “The helm is yours,” he told Lane and she took the wheel from him.

The captain’s strict rule was that if something appeared to be out of order, he was to be called, no matter the time of day or night, no matter what he was doing. LeBlanc called the chief steward’s alcove adjacent to the Grand Salon.

“With my compliments, ask the captain to come to the bridge.”

“Is there a problem, Mr. LeBlanc?” Chief Steward Tony Bianco asked. LeBlanc had shipped with the man for the past five years. Bianco was a dynamo of an officer whose proudest achievement was serving as number four on the steward’s staff of the Queen Elizabeth II.

“No. And it wouldn’t do to alarm the passengers.”

“Yes, sir.”

LeBlanc hung up the intercom phone and glanced up at the multifunction display. Their speed had crept up a little higher, but so had the RPMs.

“Is something wrong, sir?” Abfalter asked. He had come to the Spirit right out of the Merchant Marine Academy.

“If it’s anything at all, it’s just a minor problem in engineering that somebody doesn’t want to answer for,” LeBlanc said. But that didn’t seem right to him.

Captain Bruce Darling, all six feet six of him, arrived a couple of minutes later, his summer white uniform incredibly crisp. He was an even greater stickler for details than his first officer. He took in his bridge crew and the ship’s instruments in one sweep, his gaze lingering for just an extra moment on the multifunction monitor.

“What’s the problem?”

LeBlanc explained his misgivings and the steps he had taken to isolate the problem. Darling took the helm, moving the wheel to starboard and then back to port exactly as his first officer had done. “We’re towing something,” he said. “Maybe one of the life rafts came adrift, or the stern anchor. Go aft and check it out.”

LeBlanc felt foolish that he had not suggested it. He resolved not to forget the feel of the helm. “Just be a minute, sir,” he said.

He left the bridge, hurried past the owner’s suite, which was occupied by former secretary of defense Shaw and his wife, and took the elevator down three levels to the main deck just forward of the galley. Out on the promenade deck he hurried past the Klondike Dining Room, empty now that dinner was over except for the cleanup crew. The passengers had moved to the Grand Salon forward and up one deck for the evening’s entertainment, but even this far aft, LeBlanc could hear the music and laughing. The beasts, as passengers were called, though never to their faces, were having a good time. But then for the money they paid for these cruises they ought to be having a good time.

The blinds were drawn on Soapy’s Parlor, the farthest aft passenger space, where on nights like these there was usually a poker game going that would last well into the wee hours of the morning. Technically, gambling was not allowed within three miles of the shoreline, but even though the stakes were usually high — often in the thousands of dollars — the ship’s officers were encouraged by the company to turn a blind eye, though that bothered LeBlanc. It would be different once he had his own ship.

As soon as he came around the curve of the aft bulkhead, he knew there was a problem. A one-inch line, leading overboard beneath the lowest rung of the rail, was secured to a port cleat. They were indeed towing something. He crossed the afterdeck and peered over the stern. A fairly large sportfisherman, but with a low-slung bridge deck, its VHF whips laid flat, wallowed in Spirit’s wake. It was no wonder their speed had dropped and steering was sluggish. Whatever fool had set up the towing rig had not used a proper three-point bridle, nor had he given the towline enough scope. Though what the boat was doing attached to them was anyone’s guess, at this point LeBlanc was more curious than alarmed.

He turned to call the bridge from one of the deck intercom phones when a dark figure, clad in the dress uniform of a cruise ship captain, stepped out of the deeper shadows. “Who are you—”

A thunderclap burst in LeBlanc’s head, and he did not feel his body fall into the water because he was already dead.

Khalil stood at the open doorway to the darkened Soapy’s Parlor. The five elderly gentlemen who had been playing poker had been shot to death, their bodies hidden out of sight in storage lockers just minutes ago. Two of his operators had just tossed the officer’s body overboard.

“Who was he?” Khalil asked.

“LeBlanc, the first officer,” Adani said. “We’re well rid of him; he could have caused trouble.”

“Who else will be trouble?”

“The captain and the chief engineer. But both of them will be in the Grand Salon—” Adani hesitated. He stared at the stern rail, as if something had just occurred to him. “We might have a slight problem,” he said, turning to Khalil.

“What is it?”

“LeBlanc was on the bridge tonight. The only thing that would bring him back here is if he suspected there was a problem. They might have detected the tow. But before he left the bridge, he would have called Captain Darling.”

“Where’s the problem?”

“The captain carries a satphone wherever he goes.”

Khalil had considered the problem of the satellite phone in the communications shack, and the likelihood that Shaw or his bodyguard would be carrying one. The comm center and the bodyguard were the main preliminary targets. They never guessed that the captain would have a satphone. They figured that they would catch him in the Grand Salon. Once they had control of him, the psychological effect on the crew and passengers would make their jobs much easier. But that was no longer likely.

“We will kill him,” Khalil said, the decision easy. Automatic weapons in the hands of a determined force were all the psychological effect they would need. He glanced at his watch. It was 10:10 P.M. They were dead on schedule.

“Shall I give the word?” Adani asked.

“No, I’ll do it,” Khalil said. “Go back to your station in the Grand Salon, and prepare your people. We strike in five minutes.”

Adani’s eyes were bright with excitement. He nodded to Khalil and the others. “Insha’allah,” he said, God’s will, and he headed forward.

One man would make his way to the communications shack and disable the radio gear; three would make a quick but thorough sweep of the crew’s quarters and kill any crewmen still in their bunks; and the last man would go with Khalil and Zahir to the bridge, where they would kill all the crew except for the helmsman and disable the captain’s satphone.

When the ship was secure, which Khalil estimated should take no more than four or five minutes, one man would remain on the bridge, one in the communications center, and two in engineering. Everyone else would converge on the Grand Salon and their final objective.

Khalil keyed his walkie-talkie. “Granger, phase one, five minutes.”

Pahlawan, in the engine room, came back at once: “Roger.”

Khalil pocketed his walkie-talkie, checked the load on his Steyr pistol, and looked up at his men, his dark eyes narrowed malevolently. “I want to be off this boat with our prisoner in H-plus-thirty minutes. Do not fail me.”

“Insha’allah,” they muttered and melted into the darkness.

Khalil led the way forward, past the Klondike Room where two of his operators had already gunned down the four steward’s assistants who’d been cleaning up after dinner. He held up just a moment at the door to the thwartships corridor adjacent to the galley. A man dressed in a steward’s uniform emerged from the intersecting corridor and went into the galley. He was one of Adani’s people. He carried a RAK machine pistol with a large suppressor attached to the end of the short barrel.

Already crewmen all over the ship were dying in their bunks or at their duty stations, while none of the passengers had any idea that the Spirit was under attack. Long before any alarm could be raised, it would be too late. Within a few minutes the ship would no longer be under Cruise West’s control, and Khalil was certain that no power on earth could change the inevitable outcome that was already set in motion.

The only sounds were those of the ship’s engines, the wind in the rigging, and the music and laughter coming from the Grand Salon.

Khalil and his two operators, their machine pistols at the ready, slipped into the corridor, hurried noiselessly to the stairway next to the elevator, and went up three flights to the bridge deck.

The covered area and the sundeck aft were empty, as were the passageways. Zahir quickly checked the owner’s suite to make sure that Shaw hadn’t come back to his cabin for some reason. He came out, shaking his head, and they proceeded down the starboard passageway and up the stairs to the bridge.

Khalil was first. He threw open the door, went inside, and stepped left to allow Zahir and Hasan to come in right behind him.

Captain Darling turned around, and seeing the weapons realized in a split instant that something was drastically wrong. He held a cup of hot coffee in his left hand. He tossed it at the intruders, hoping for a moment’s distraction, and sprang for the weapons locker.

Khalil easily sidestepped the cup and fired three shots, the first two hitting the captain in the shoulder, but the third plowing into the side of his head, killing him instantly.

Zahir put three shots into Abfalter’s chest, knocking the officer-intraining off his feet; he struggled to breathe for almost three seconds before he too died.

The young woman at the helm released the wheel and stepped back, her hands going to her face. She was shaking, and she appeared ready to faint. Khalil lowered his weapon and went to her. He took her arm and guided her back to the wheel.

“Someone has to steer the boat, my dear,” he said pleasantly. “It wouldn’t do to run us aground. Might upset the passengers.”

She was frightened out of her mind, but she did as she was told, bringing the Spirit, which had drifted only a few degrees to starboard, back on course.

“The captain’s satphone,” Khalil reminded Zahir. He keyed his walkie-talkie. “One is secure,” he radioed.

SIX

Shortly after ten Katy realized that she’d lost an earring, and she leaned over to her husband. “Could you fetch something for me from our cabin, like a good boy?” They were having after-dinner drinks at one of the tables at the edge of the dance floor. It was the second night out, and most of the ninety-six passengers were enjoying themselves in the Gay Nineties, plush, floral-upholstered, and hand-carved-wood ambiance of the Spirit’s Grand Salon.

They were tablemates with Don Shaw and his wife, Karen. The two couples had agreed at the boarding cocktail reception not to talk shop, and the ship’s crew had been instructed not to recognize the former secretary. He and his wife were to be treated as ordinary passengers.

“I hope it’s nothing heavy,” McGarvey told his wife under his breath. “It’s been a long day and I’m tired.”

“Would you believe an earring?”

McGarvey gave her a smile. “I don’t suppose it would do me any good to say that you look beautiful without it.”

“You’d earn points, but other than that—” She gave him a contented, warm smile. “Small, blue velvet, zippered pouch in one of the pockets of my brown leather hanging bag.”

Their drink order arrived, and their steward seemed a bit nervous. He spilled some of Shaw’s martini on the napkin and clumsily started to wipe it up, but the former SecDef waved him off. “It’s all right.”

Captain Darling had been seated with them, but he’d been called away by the chief steward a few minutes ago. “What happened to the captain?” Karen Shaw asked, pleasantly. Darling had been regaling them with hilarious stories about some of the gaffes he had committed with passengers when he was a young, inexperienced officer just out of the Merchant Marine Academy.

The steward, a young, dark-complexioned man with long, delicate fingers glanced across the dance floor toward the door. “He was called to the bridge, ma’am, though I’m sure I don’t know why.”

“Will he be long?”

“I don’t know, ma’am,” the steward said, and he turned abruptly and hurried across to the service alcove, where he disappeared behind the screen.

The hairs at the base of McGarvey’s neck prickled, and his eyes narrowed. He resisted the urge to follow the steward and ask what was bothering him. This was supposed to be a vacation. It was the first one he and Katy had taken since the trouble, and they needed the time away from Washington. Jim Grassinger was seated at a table by the door with Shaw’s bodyguard, Tony Battaglia. Both of them sipped soda water. Their heads were on swivels, but turning slowly, as if they were nonchalantly people watching. Nothing could have been further from the truth. McGarvey caught Grassinger’s eye and nodded toward the door. Grassinger got to his feet, said something to Battaglia who surreptitiously glanced over at his boss’s table, and then Grassinger stepped out into the passageway.

“Duty calls,” McGarvey told the Shaws, and he got up.

The former SecDef looked up, questioningly, but McGarvey gave him a reassuring nod.

“Be just a minute,” he said, and he left the Grand Salon. Grassinger was waiting out in the passageway, very alert.

“What’s up, boss?”

“Mission of mercy. Katy lost an earring.” They headed to the starboard stairs one deck up and forward to the McGarveys’ inside-corridor deluxe stateroom. The wind was screaming outside now, but they were sailing in protected waters and the cruise liner rode easily.

This part of the ship seemed very quiet. They could hear music from downstairs, but nothing else in the inside passageway. There were no stewards, no crewmen, no engineers doing maintenance. But then perhaps nothing was broken and needed fixing.

McGarvey forced his dire feelings to the back of his mind. Pretty soon he would be looking for bogeymen under his bed. It was just a case of overwrought nerves brought on by the constant pressures of the seventh floor at Langley and the events of the past year. He smiled, and chuckled to himself. Hell, considering the life he had led, the people he’d killed, and the ones who had made very serious efforts to kill him, it was a wonder he wasn’t a basket case.

“Something I said?” Grassinger asked.

“I’m going to give it another half hour or so, and then I’m going to pull the pin,” McGarvey said, stifling a yawn. “I’m so tired I’m starting to imagine all sorts of stuff.”

Grassinger reacted as if he had just sucked on a lemon. “Jeez, don’t say that, Mac; I’m already spooked as it is.”

“You too?”

“Yeah.”

McGarvey had to laugh. “It’s one of the perks of the business. Things will look up tomorrow.”

Khalil’s people finished their sweep of the upper deck, silently killing two crewmen — one on steward’s duty and one repairing a jammed door lock — and three passengers who had the misfortune to miss the night’s entertainment and retire early.

They assembled in the port stairwell that led down to the lounge deck, six operators plus Khalil, who keyed his walkie-talkie. “Engine room.”

“Secure,” Granger reported.

“Bridge.”

“Secure,” Karin replied.

“Communications.”

“Secure,” Muhamed came back.

“Abdul,” Khalil radioed.

For several seconds there was no reply, but then Adani finally came back. “Two of the male passengers left about three minutes ago. They took the stairs to the upper deck. Did you run into them?”

“No. Who are they?”

“I haven’t had time to check. But they must have cabins on that deck; there’s nothing else up there.”

“We just took care of three passengers up there,” Khalil said. “It must have been them.” He considered sending two of his people back to make sure, but in another four or five minutes they would have Shaw in custody and would be off this ship. “Is our target still there?”

“Yes.”

“What about the rest of our people?” Khalil asked. Besides Adani and two others on the steward’s staff in the Grand Salon, there were three from engineering.

“They’re in place on the bow viewing area, ready to strike on your command,” Adani said, and it was clear from his voice that he was excited.

“We’re coming down. The time is now T-minus-thirty seconds.”

“Insha’allah,” Adani radioed.

Yes, insha’allah, Khalil thought, and he led his people downstairs to the lounge deck, in the corridor just aft of the Grand Salon. The combo was doing a good job with “In the Mood,” and he could hear people talking and laughing, having a good time. After the events of this evening, however, the handful of passengers and crew who might survive, if they were lucky, would forever have second thoughts about the true meaning of happiness.

Of the sixteen operators, Khalil’s was the only face not in the photographic files of any intelligence or law enforcement agency somewhere in the world. One of his strengths was his anonymity. He pulled a black nylon mesh balaclava over his head, checked his RAK machine pistol’s silencer, and motioned for his people to do the same. They had made little or no noise to this point, and he wanted to keep it that way. There were still crewmen on duty in various parts of the ship. Alerting them at this stage would merely complicate things. They all would die in due course, but for the moment Khalil wanted to maintain his tight schedule. In approximately sixty minutes, the Spirit would be in range of one of the cell-phone towers that served the Ketchikan area. They had to be well away long before that time, because there was no possibility of finding all the cell phones that might be aboard.

Khalil watched the numerals of his digital watch count down the last five seconds to 22:15. He keyed his walkie-talkie, and spoke one word: “Now.”

The four men from engineering who waited on the bow were first inside the Grand Salon. Without warning they opened fire on the tiny stage, killing the four musicians. They quickly took positions along the starboard wall.

Adani and his two stewards snatched their weapons, hidden under towels on serving trolleys, and opened fire on the eight officers seated at various tables throughout the salon, moving in from the pantry and serving stations along the port wall.

Even before the first woman let out an ear-piercing scream, Khalil and his six operators stormed in from the aft corridor, and closed the watertight double doors, cutting off sounds from the rest of the ship.

The passengers reacted in stunned disbelief. Some of them ducked under their tables, while others shouted for the crew, for anyone, to do something.

Khalil’s men took up positions across the back wall, completing the encirclement of the Grand Salon. As the noise slowly began to subside, Khalil nonchalantly walked toward the front of the room, stopping next to the woman who was still crying and screaming, her eyes wide, her hands to her mouth. She was in her late sixties or early seventies, and frightened beyond control. Nothing like this had ever happened to her or any of her friends in Waterloo, Iowa.

She looked up into his eyes, suddenly rearing back as if she’d looked into the eyes of a hooded cobra ready to strike. “My God—”

Khalil raised his machine pistol and put one round in the middle of her forehead. She was shoved backward, onto the deck. An older man, probably her husband, dressed in a tuxedo, started to get to his feet, when Khalil calmly switched aim and fired one shot into his face at point-blank range, killing him instantly.

“The next person who utters a sound, any sound, will suffer the same fate,” Khalil told the passengers and those of the crew who were still alive.

A deathly silence descended upon the big room, as if someone had dropped a funeral shroud from the ceiling.

“Appreciate the gravity of the situation that you now find yourselves in,” Khalil told them. “You have my word as a gentleman that once we have accomplished our task this evening, we will leave the ship, and no further harm will come to any of you.”

“Just go away!” a teenaged girl seated with her parents cried, and her mother tried to hush her.

Khalil reached their table on three strides. “Which of your parents do you want me to kill, little girl?” he demanded.

The teenager looked up at him and shook her head, unable to speak.

“Make another sound, and I shall kill them both.” Khalil held her eye for several long moments, until the mother pulled her daughter away and protectively cradled her.

He looked at them with contempt. If it had been a defiant son who had made the challenge, he would have enjoyed the killing. But a daughter was not worth the effort of pulling the trigger.

Only five minutes had elapsed since they had come aboard, but already the cruise ship was under their control.

Khalil stepped back, then turned and walked to the tables in the front of the room at the edge of the dance floor. Shaw and his wife, plus another, very attractive, woman sat together. The seat next to the attractive woman was empty, as was the one at the head of the table.

“Mr. Secretary of Defense, what a pleasure to see you this evening,” Khalil said.

Shaw looked up over his glasses at Khalil, but said nothing.

Khalil motioned toward the empty chairs. “Where are the individuals who were seated with you?”

“They’re gone,” Kathleen answered quickly.

Khalil turned his bland, almost dreamy eyes to her. “One of them was your husband?”

“No. It was Captain Darling and one of his officers. The chief steward called them away a few minutes ago.”

Khalil considered her answer. The captain had come to the bridge, but he’d been alone. “Where is your husband?”

“I’m a widow.”

Khalil resisted the urge to tell her that she would soon be joining her husband. Instead he turned back to Shaw. “On your feet, Mr. Secretary, you are coming with us. Someone wishes to speak to you.”

Karen Shaw was clutching her husband’s arm. “Who?” the former SecDef asked.

“Why, Osama bin Laden, of course—”

An unsilenced pistol shot rang out at the back of the salon, immediately followed by the rapid putt-putting of at least two machine pistols. Khalil spun around in time to see that one of his operators was down, as was one of the male passengers. Blood was splattered all over the paneled wall, and was pooling under the two bodies.

“He had a gun,” one of the operators said.

Khalil turned again to Shaw. “Was he your bodyguard?”

The former SecDef nodded tightly. “However long it takes, we will hunt you down; you and the scum bastards you work with. Make no mistake.”

“It is you who have made a mistake by coming on this trip,” Khalil said, calming himself. “Get to your feet now, or I will kill your wife.”

Shaw stood up, disengaging himself from his wife’s grasp. “First Afghanistan, then Iraq. You and al-Quaida are next.”

“You will have plenty of time to practice your speech,” Khalil said. “Where we are going there will be many people most interested in your words.” He laughed. “Very interested indeed.”

He turned to his operators at the door. “The man has a satphone. Destroy it,” he ordered. Without warning, he slashed the machine pistol’s heavy butt across the side of Shaw’s head, nearly knocking the former SecDef off his feet, a six-inch gash opening from his cheek to the hairline above his ear.

SEVEN

McGarvey and Grassinger reached the inside corridor cabin assigned to Mr. and Mrs. James Garwood without seeing any other passenger or crewman. Once again the hairs at the back of McGarvey’s neck prickled, though he couldn’t say why. It was some inner sense, some inner earlywarning system kicking in. But like an overused smoke detector, he sometimes got false alarms.

He unlocked the door with his key, and eased it open with the toe of his shoe. They’d left one of the lights over the bed on, and it provided enough illumination for him to see that nothing had been disturbed.

Grassinger pulled his pistol, glanced both ways up the corridor, and then eased McGarvey to one side, and looked inside the cabin. “Okay, boss, what’s going on?”

“Probably nothing,” McGarvey said. He went to the closet, where he found Katy’s blue velvet zippered pouch in one of the side pockets.

“I don’t like that word probably,” Grassinger said. He looked inside the tiny bathroom tucked in the forward corner, then checked under the bed and took a look out the big window. But there was nothing to be seen except for the reflection of the ship’s running lights in the water rushing past.

“Like I said, I’m tired,” McGarvey answered absently. His mind was elsewhere. There was something he was missing. Something at some unconscious level of his awareness. Something he was hearing, or feeling, or even smelling that wasn’t registering. Yet it was there.

He found the gold hoop earrings Katy wanted, and slipped them into his jacket pocket.

Grassinger went to the door and looked out into the corridor. “It’s too quiet,” he said softly, as if he didn’t want to disturb the silence by raising his voice.

“Everybody’s in the Grand Salon.”

“Most of the crew aren’t,” Grassinger said.

“That’s right. They’re on the bridge, in the radio room, down in the galley, or in engineering doing their jobs. The ones off duty are either in their bunks or in whatever common room they have aboard, not up here wandering around in the corridors.”

“Let’s stop by the bridge and see what’s holding up the captain.”

“He’s probably already back in the Grand Salon wondering what’s taking me so long,” McGarvey said. He opened one of the side pockets in his hanging bag where he’d stuffed his gun, holster, and spare magazines. He debated rearming himself, but then he had to ask why. He was supposed to be on vacation. He had an armed guard with him, and the CIA and DoD had vetted the crew and passengers.

“I can call and ask,” Grassinger suggested.

McGarvey zippered the side pocket, and shut the closet door. “This is only the second night out, Jim. And if we keep going like this, we’ll probably end up shooting each other.” He forced a grin. “We’re going to start having a good time around here, and that’s an order.”

Grassinger reluctantly put his gun away. “You’re right. But it doesn’t mean I’m going to stop doing my job.”

McGarvey looked at him. “I don’t expect that you will. But we have to ease up a little. And that goes for me as well as for you.”

Grassinger chuckled. “It’s a deal, boss, as long as you don’t use the word probably again. Gives me the creeps.”

“Right. Katy and I are going to have a last dance, and then we’re coming up to bed. It’s been a long day.”

“That it has,” Grassinger said.

Getting out of Washington unnoticed yesterday had been an exercise in subterfuge. Ever since McGarvey’s contentious Senate subcommittee hearings to confirm his appointment as director of Central Intelligence, the media had practically camped on the CIA’s doorstep, and down the block from his house in Chevy Chase when he was in residence. Every time his limousine made a move, the press was on his tail. It was almost as bad as being chased by the paparazzi. One of the security people drove Katy and their bags out to an Air Force VIP Gulfstream at Andrews, while McGarvey was taken to FBI headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. He transferred to an unmarked, windowless surveillance van and was finally driven out to Andrews, where he was given immediate clearance to take off.

The flight was bumpy all the way out to Ellsworth Air Force Base in Rapid City, South Dakota, where they were forced to land in a blinding rainstorm with high winds because one of the control system’s trouble lights indicated they were losing hydraulic fluid. It turned out to be a false alarm, but they refueled and then took off again during a brief break in the weather. An hour out of Ellsworth, Katy got airsick, but refused to let them set down or turn back.

After that, the weather improved a little until they finally landed at Juneau in a cold drizzle, and Katy immediately perked up. She had looked forward to this trip for several months, and absolutely nothing was going to stop her from having a good time; once they got back to Washington, her obstetrician promised to be on her back 24/7, and she would have to start behaving herself.

Katy and Kirk would have to get a good night’s sleep, because they would be busy again the next day, hiking on glaciers, kayaking to chase whales, otter spotting, maybe salmon fishing or oyster hunting, whitewater rafting, and even hiking through the Sitka forests to see elaborately carved totem poles. They wanted to see and do as much as they possibly could while Katy was still in the earliest stages of her pregnancy. The toughest part would be complying with the strict order her doctor had given to Mac: “Slow her down, Mr. Director; she’s not a twenty-five-year-old girl.”

“Did you tell her that?” McGarvey asked.

Her doctor had smiled faintly. “All except the part about not being twenty-five. But she’ll be just fine as long as you don’t let her overdo it.”

McGarvey followed his bodyguard back down to the lounge deck. The doors to the Grand Salon were closed, but the corridor was ice cold, as if a hatch or something was open to the outside.

Grassinger shoved open the door and stepped inside, McGarvey right behind him. Almost immediately, Grassinger pivoted, danced to the left, and went for his gun.

McGarvey caught a snapshot glimpse of the passengers seated at their tables, a lot of bodies lying in pools of blood on the floor and up on the stage, and eight or ten men armed with what looked like compact submachine guns, big silencers on the ends of the barrels, positioned along the walls. Katy and Karen Shaw were seated at their table, but the former SecDef stood next to a man dressed in what could have been a ship’s officer’s white jacket, a black balaclava over his head.

Grassinger only just got his gun hand inside his jacket when he was violently cast sideways off his feet by a hail of gunfire from a silenced submachine gun, which stitched a half dozen or more wounds from the side of his head to his hip.

The man in the black balaclava next to Shaw started to turn toward the commotion, as did the other terrorists.

The passengers were slower to react, but already several of them had jumped up and were attempting to escape, while a few others were diving for the floor to get out of the line of fire.

Within the next few seconds the situation would get completely out of hand unless the terrorists were too busy dealing with an immediate threat to their own safety to take their rage out on the helpless passengers. It was obvious that they were here to take the former secretary of defense hostage. It meant that they might be open to some form of negotiation, especially if they weren’t sure that they were in total control.

All that went through McGarvey’s head at the speed of light, and to an observer it seemed as if he reacted the instant Grassinger reached for his pistol.

The shooter, just behind the door to the right, moved forward toward his target as he fired, as most shooters do. The silencer and muzzle of the RAK submachine pistol poked around the edge of the door. Mindless of the hot metal, McGarvey grabbed the barrel with his bare hand, and twisting it sharply to the left as he deflected it upward and away from himself as well as the passengers, he pulled the gunman half out into the corridor.

McGarvey’s instant impression was that the shooter was a young kid, maybe in his early twenties, most likely a Saudi or perhaps an Iranian or an Iraqi. He forced the muzzle of the silencer under the terrorist’s chin, and then yanked the gun upward, causing it to fire. The one round took the top of the shooter’s head off. His grip slackened as he went down. McGarvey snatched the RAK, and fired one controlled burst of three rounds over the heads of the panicking passengers.

The terrorists dove for cover, and before they could react Mac stepped back into the corridor and out of sight. He didn’t want to further endanger the passengers by drawing fire.

He could have taken out several of the terrorists, but they not only had the firepower advantage over him, they also had the passengers as shields. Katy was at the Shaws’ table, and although it didn’t appear as if the terrorists knew who she was, that might not last.

It was likely that the terrorists had already taken control of the ship. It’s why he and Grassinger had not bumped into anyone on the upper deck when they’d gone back for Katy’s earrings. The rest of the crew was probably dead, or incapacitated.

Grassinger’s blood was spreading through the doors out into the corridor, a shocking red against the pale green carpeting.

The entire Grand Salon could very well become a killing field soon unless McGarvey did something. Katy had turned toward the door when the firing started. She’d had just a split second to see what was going on, and to see who was there, before he ducked out of sight. She knew that he would not leave her there.

Hang on, Katy, he said to himself, as he turned and sprinted down the corridor to the starboard stairs, and took them two at a time up to the bridge deck.

First he would see if the radio room could be salvaged so that an SOS could be sent. Next he would check the bridge to see if the terrorists had put someone at the helm. And then he would start isolating them and taking them down, one or two at a time. Keep them so busy and so much on the defensive that they would be forced to forget about their primary mission.

They would pay, not only for killing Jim Grassinger and for placing the passengers in such great danger, but for putting Katy in harm’s way. After this night they would rue the day they ever heard of the Spirit of ’98.

EIGHT

Ernst Gertner’s call to the chalet did not come as a surprise.

Detective Ziegler held his hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s the captain, and he doesn’t sound happy.” He handed the phone to Liese.This was supposed to be a stealthy surveillance, which in Swiss parlance meant that no one was to know anything about it; neither the prince’s family nor anyone official at Nidwalden HQ. When she’d called the Kanton operations officer for telephone records of the Thalwil Boarding School near Zurich, the ball had been sent up. Questions of an official nature were raised because they had to be raised. Wealthy, powerful men such as the prince were to be treated with extreme care. So long as they broke no Swiss laws, they were not to be interfered with under any circumstance. Now that was the official policy. In actuality men such as the prince simply could not be left entirely to their own devices. They had to be monitored. Especially in this day and age. But quietly, unofficially.

A lot of eyes at headquarters in Bern were looking at Liese as if under a microscope. If she continued to do her job with intelligence and self-control, she would be considered for promotion to lieutenant. She would be the first woman in the history of the Swiss Federal Police to hold such a lofty position. But if she made a mistake, any mistake, it would be blamed on her sex, and she would remain a sergeant until she finally got disgusted enough to resign, which is exactly what half of the force wanted to happen.

“Goodness gracious, why didn’t you call me first?” Gertner demanded angrily. “I could have made quiet inquiries.”

Liese bit her tongue to hold back a sharp retort. She had merely been doing her job. “It was five in the morning, captain. I didn’t think you wished to be disturbed at that hour.”

“I was disturbed twenty minutes later, from Bern.”

“I don’t see the point—”

“Bad news travels fast,” Gertner replied brusquely. “The president is scheduled to meet with the Saudi ambassador this noon. What would happen at that meeting if word got out of what you were doing down here?”

“What, spying on a member of the royal family?” Liese asked sharply. Who were they trying to kid? This assignment had not been her idea.

Gertner did not catch her sarcasm. “Exactly.”

“We’re to watch the prince, without appearing to watch him. Is that correct, captain?”

This time he did catch it. “That’s exactly what is required, Sergeant Fuelm,” Gertner said. He lowered his voice, his tone guarded. “Are you within earshot of your men?”

She looked at Ziegler, who was sitting at the equipment table an arm’s length away. “No,” she lied. Her father had called her his little vixen, and Kirk had called her a spoiled brat. Nobody had ever faulted her intelligence, however.

“Considering the importance of this operation, we are prepared to give you a certain amount of, shall we say, latitude.”

“I’m grateful for that, sir,” Liese said.

“I have the transcript of the brief telephone conversation that occurred between Princess Sofia Salman and Dr. Junger, the headmaster at Thalwil. I have also listened to the digital recording. You were absolutely correct to assume that the woman, for whatever reason, was in a great hurry to have her children prepared to leave the school this very morning.”

For as long as she could remember, Liese had a great deal of impatience with people who took a long time to get to the point. She wanted to jump in and finish their sentences for them. Hurry them along. It was one of her least charming attributes. Sometimes she came across as arrogant.

“Did she give the headmaster a reason?”

“A family matter of some importance, though she was not specific. Nor was she precise about when the children would be returning to school.”

“They’ve done it at least once before,” Liese said. She had the Thalwil file open. The four Salman children had attended the private school for three years. This was the start of their fourth.

The line was suddenly very quiet, until Gertner came back. “Yes, we know that.”

“The prince was gone almost three months that time. And his wife took the children out of school on the third of September. For ten days. 2001.”

“The prince was at the Saudi UN Delegation office in New York.”

Law enforcement in Switzerland was much the same as anywhere else in the world. It was departmentalized. Division chiefs tended to guard their own turfs, sometimes to the detriment of ongoing investigations. In this case what Liese had not been told about the prince constituted a greater volume than what she had been told.

“Have there been other incidences—”

“A few,” Gertner answered too quickly.

“I meant other times when the prince’s absences matched other al-Quaida attacks?”

“On the surface there could have been other incidences.”

“What does that mean?” Liese shouted angrily. The thing she hated worst, even worse than being discriminated against because she was a woman, was being lied to.

“It means the timing was there, but his absences could have been coincidental.”

“Come on, Ernst.”

“No, you come on, as you put it. There were many, many incidences when the prince was gone during which there were no terrorist attacks anywhere that could be attributed to al-Quaida. He was simply conducting business, or gone on one of his gambling jaunts. Can we say with equal authority in those cases that he was ensuring the peace?”

“No, of course not,” Liese conceded. “But I would not have been handed this assignment unless you thought there might be a connection.”

“Continue,” Gertner said.

“Assuming that there is a financial connection between the prince — and therefore the Saudi royal family — and assuming that it wasn’t simply a coincidence that he ordered his wife and children to hunker down before 9/11, then something is about to happen again, and the prince knows about it because he’s the moneyman.”

“Those are very large and, I must say, dangerous assumptions.”

“Especially if it were to come out that Switzerland harbored such a criminal, and Switzerland’s banks were the conduit.”

“He may have heard rumors — men in his position are often privy to such information. In such a case he would not be guilty of violating any Swiss laws.”

“He has a house staff across the lake.”

“Cooks, gardeners, drivers.”

“Them too, Ernst. But also some very large men.” The sun was up, forming a bright halo over the Salman compound. “Supply me with a search warrant, and I can almost guarantee that we will find weapons over there.”

“If that was the only crime the prince or his staff was guilty of — considering his position — we would take no issue.”

“If he was merely a man who listened to rumors, an international playboy and multimillionaire, why would he need armed guards?” Liese asked. “Only men who are hiding something, or are afraid of something, hire bodyguards.”

“Or men protecting something. Their families.”

God, she hated this roundabout way of getting to a point. “I want to see the prince’s file. The complete file. You can e-mail it to me.”

“I’ll send it by courier. The computer is too dangerous.”

“Fine, I’ll wait here then until it arrives,” Liese promised. “But tell me, Ernst, what am I going to find out? What is it you saw fit not to tell me yesterday?”

“I’ll include my notes in the file.”

“What is the problem, Ernst?” Liese demanded, her voice rising. “I’m trying to do a job down here, and you see fit to play your silly little bureaucratic games with me. If you believe that Prince Salman is funding terrorists, and you believe that somehow he might have a connection to Kirk McGarvey that I might be able to unravel for you because of my brief encounter years ago, then so be it. But give me a chance to succeed. Don’t tie my hands behind my back.”

Gertner took a moment to reply, and when he did it was clear that he too was angry. “Don’t push us on this, Liese,” he said. “There are very good reasons for our caution that have nothing to do with you or your investigation. But do let me give you a word of fatherly advice. For the moment we need you, and as I said, we are willing to give you a certain amount of latitude. But that need will not last forever.”

Liese felt cold. She walked to the tiny kitchen, her back to her surveillance team who were undoubtedly eating this up. “If you’re threatening me, then you will have my resignation on your desk before your courier arrives. I am an experienced Federal Police officer, and I demand the same treatment as any male officer is given.”

“But, my dear, you aren’t a male officer; you are a female who needs to attend to the business of following orders. And something else. You are bright and capable, but you are not a genius for whom we would be willing to make exceptions.”

Gertner tapped his pipe on an ashtray to empty the bowl. Liese could hear it. He was stalling as he tried to marshal his thoughts.

“I’ll do my best, as I always do,” Liese said. Her mother told her that her beauty would attract any man she looked at, but her big mouth would drive away any man she wanted.

“We have good intelligence that Prince Salman was in Washington as of two days ago. But then he disappeared. The problem for us is that since yesterday Kirk McGarvey has also dropped out of sight. One coincidence is acceptable; two are not.”

“You thought that the prince might be back by now?” Liese asked.

“Yes.”

“But combined with the call to Thalwil there may be something,” Liese went on. She did have a big mouth, but beyond that she was carrying a feminist grudge that was getting her absolutely nowhere. “I’m sorry, captain; I was out of line. But I was merely trying to do my job.”

“I appreciate that,” Gertner said, and he sounded smug, as if once again he had stepped into the breach and solved a difficult personnel problem. He fancied himself to be a brilliant administrator.

“We will continue our surveillance operation here, of course, but what else is it that you would like me to do?” Liese asked. She knew what he was going to tell her, but she didn’t care. She did not want to be pulled off this assignment so long as it involved Kirk.

“I would like you to place a telephone call to Mr. McGarvey. You are an old friend who is somewhat nostalgic for the old days. Maybe you called simply to chat. You are lonely, and have been handed a very troubling assignment.”

You bastard, Liese thought. To them she was nothing but a pain-in-the-ass woman, a thing to be tolerated, no more. But they were afraid of Kirk. And as they had done with Marta, they wanted to provide him with another Swiss whore. A man would say anything when he was in bed with his lover, or nearly anything if the prospect of going to bed with a young woman was dangled in front of his nose.

But they didn’t know Kirk. Nor did they know her.

“It’s midnight in Washington,” she pointed out.

“If he’s not out and about somewhere, he’s sure to be at home and not at his office.”

“I’ll make that call now, sir,” Liese said.

“Liese?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Record the call, please,” Gertner instructed. “All of it.” He hung up the phone.

Liese was seething. Never in her life had she been treated this way, though she’d been expecting something like this to happen. But now that they had used her sex as a lever against her, she had no idea how to fight back. She looked up at the ceiling for a moment and closed her eyes. God help her, but after all these years she was still in love with Kirk McGarvey. There never was another man like him, nor could there ever be. The thought that somehow he was involved in the 9/11 attacks and was in collusion with Prince Salman was ludicrous. But if Gertner thought such a thing were possible, then others would think so too. It was up to her to prove them wrong.

She dialed Kirk’s home number in Chevy Chase from memory, though it was the first time she’d ever let it go through. It rang twice before it was rolled over to what Liese thought would be an answering machine. She was about to hang up when a man with an oddly pitched voice, as if he were lifting something very heavy, answered.

“Oh, boy, what could the Swiss police be wanting at this hour? Especially calling from Lake Lucerne. Are you in a house or on a boat?”

“I’m sorry; I must have the wrong number,” Liese said, and she tried to break the connection, but could not; the line had been seized.

“I don’t think you have a wrong number, so don’t leave. And you have a pretty voice.”

“Who are you?”

“Otto Rencke. Does that name tinkle any little bells in your head? I’ll bet you’re pretty too. Odd for a Swiss cop.”

Liese checked the number showing on her phone’s display. It was Kirk’s home phone, which meant her call had been rolled over, probably to an operations officer at Langley who had the CIA’s computer system at his fingertips.

“No, your name isn’t familiar to me. I’m trying to reach Kirk McGarvey. He’s an old friend. I thought I might catch him at home.”

The line was dead for a moment. “Oh, boy, you’re Liese Fuelm,” Rencke said. “Am I right or what?”

A fist clutched at her heart, but she recovered fast. “If that makes you happy, sure,” Liese said. “Can you tell me how I could reach Mr. McGarvey?”

“Oh, don’t get mad. I’m an old friend, just like you,” Rencke said, apologetically. He sounded like a big kid. “But Mac is out of town right now; it’s why his number showed up here.”

It’s not what she wanted to hear. She closed her eyes again. Everything seemed so screwed up. “Can I get a message to him?”

“Nope, he’s on vacation, and I wouldn’t bother him even if it was the second coming, ya know,” Rencke told her. “But listen, is there something you need? Maybe I can help. I’m Mac’s special assistant, ya know. I can find out things.”

Talking to Rencke was like dealing with an overgrown, exuberant puppy. It had to be an act, but the number she’d called was correct, and only an organization such as the CIA could trace and seize her line so quickly, and then come up with her name. “Just say hello when he gets back.”

“Who are you surveilling?”

“I have to go now. Release my line, please.”

“I can find out, you know. You’re at the lake house owned by Heide Rothberg. I’ve got that much; though his name doesn’t come up in any of my serious databases, I’m sure I can get something on him. And I can take some good angle satellite shots of your location within twenty minutes that should give me some line-of-sights. That’d probably eliminate all but a few nearby locations. Somebody in one of those spots is of interest not only to the Swiss Federal Police, but maybe to the director of Central Intelligence. A blast from the past. Is that it?”

“Look, Mr. Rencke, I can’t tell you that—”

“Otto,” Rencke said. “Please. We’re practically family. He still wonders about Marta Fredericks from time to time, ya know.”

“How are you coming up with this information? It’s nobody’s business.”

“I won’t say anything to anybody, nohow, never, except Mac. Honest Injun!”

“Prince Abdul Salman, he’s a—”

“I know who he is,” Rencke said, his aw-shucks manner suddenly gone. “What do you have on him?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Why did you call the director of Central Intelligence to ask about him?”

“I didn’t call the DCI; I called an old friend,” Liese shouted. She was frustrated and frightened now. She was getting in over her head. “Release my line.”

“Give me what you have, and I’ll pass it along to Mac,” Rencke said, gently. “Look, if it’s any comfort to you, we’re interested in the man too. Mac will probably want to share intel on this one.”

“The prince spent some time in Washington about ten years ago. He was one of Darby Yarnell’s crowd.”

“I see,” Rencke said after a beat, and he seemed almost sad. “I’ll have Mac call you. And in the meantime I’ll take a quick peek at what we have. I might be able to come up with something.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t let them get to you, Liese. They can be bastards, sometimes, but mostly we’re all on the same side.”

There was no need to ask who they were, or what he was talking about. He had figured out who had suggested she make the call and why. “Just say hello,” Liese said, “and give him a hug.”

“Sure,” Rencke said, and he released her line.

Liese realized that she had not pushed the Record button, but she didn’t care. “Hell,” she said, softly, and she began to cry.

NINE

The expression on Kirk’s face was caught like a photographic flash image in Katy’s head.

She got up and helped Karen Shaw get her husband seated. He was nearly out on his feet, and for the moment, at least, he didn’t seem to know what was going on around him. The terrorists had all dived for cover, except for the one wearing the balaclava who’d struck Donald Shaw in the head. He seemed to be the leader, but he apparently hadn’t counted on meeting any resistance because he was exhorting his men to get to their feet. Or at least that’s what it sounded like to Katy. She thought he was speaking Arabic, which was no surprise. But how they had gotten aboard the cruise ship without detection was a mystery. According to Kirk, the ship’s crew and passengers had passed complete background checks.

Shaw’s bodyguard was down, as was poor Jim Grassinger, both of them presumably dead; but Kirk was alive, he was armed, he was free, and he knew the situation. She’d never approved of his profession, of the spying and especially the killing, although she understood that such things were necessary in the real world. But at this moment, aside from her love and respect for him, she wouldn’t have traded him for all the bank presidents, artists, CEOs, or scientists in the world.

She was frightened out of her wits. Already there were bodies all over the Grand Salon. Most of them were crewmen or entertainers, but two of the passengers had been brutally murdered in cold blood, and she thought that some of the people remaining would not survive the night. Yet she had to suppress a bitter smile of satisfaction. The bad guys had no idea what they had gotten themselves into. If she hadn’t lost an earring, they would have caught Kirk, seated here, unarmed, and she didn’t know how that could have turned out for the good. But now, she thought, anything was possible. She had seen her husband in action, and he was a sight to behold.

The former SecDef sat with his head hanging, his eyes fluttering as he tried to catch his breath and regain his balance. Blood oozed from a long gash at his temple, and it was obvious that he would need medical help soon. At the very least he had probably suffered a concussion. For a man of his age the blow could well be fatal.

“My God, Don, are you all right?” Karen Shaw whispered to her husband. She had her arms around his shoulders, trying to protect him and hold him up.

Katy scooped the ice from her water glass and wrapped it in her linen napkin. “Try this,” she offered. She placed the cold pack on Don Shaw’s head. He reared back, but his wife held him still.

“Easy, darling, this should help.”

The terrorist with the balaclava had gone to the back of the Grand Sa-Ion and positioned himself to the left of the door. One of his men, his weapon up and at the ready, was on the right. On a signal he yanked open the door, and the leader poked his machine pistol out into the corridor and fired off two quick bursts, then ducked back.

There was no return fire.

Shaw jerked as if he’d been hit, and he looked up out of his daze, his eyes finally coming back into focus. He looked at his wife. “Where’s Tony?”

“They shot him,” Karen said. “But he got one of them.”

Shaw glanced at Katy and the vacant seat next to her, then surreptitiously made a quick survey of the carnage around the Grand Salon. The passengers were completely subdued. No one dared to move so much as a muscle for fear of getting shot. “What happened to Kirk and his bodyguard?” he asked softly.

Katy looked over at the terrorist leader and two of his men at the door. For the moment their attention was directed toward the corridor. “Jim is dead, but Kirk managed to kill one of the terrorists and grab his gun.”

“Has he got a cell phone?”

“Yes, but I don’t think they work out here,” Katy said, careful to keep her voice low and her eye on the terrorist leader. “He’ll think of something. They won’t get away with this.”

“But he’s only one man,” Karen said. She was a brave woman, but amidst all this carnage and with her husband as the terrorists’ target, she was just hanging on by her fingernails.

“That’s true,” Katy said. “But just hold on; he’ll come back.”

“The radio room,” the former SecDef mumbled. “Kirk can get a message out. The Coast Guard is listening.”

“I’m sure he’s already thought of that,” Katy said. She was watching the terrorists at the door.

The leader stationed two of his people to guard the corridor, then turned, looked down at his two dead operators as if they were nothing more than pieces of trash cluttering up the floor, then looked up and surveyed the room. He was obviously in a hurry, but he was being methodical.

A deathly silence fell over the Grand Salon. The air was hazy with gun smoke and the metallic odor of fresh blood. Every passenger thought about 9/11 with a sense of total helplessness. There were just too many terrorists with guns. Any sort of resistance was less than futile. It was dangerous.

“One brave, but foolish man among you,” Khalil said. He took a few steps away from the door, and stopped. “I don’t believe that he was a member of the ship’s crew. He wasn’t dressed in a uniform. So he was a passenger. Who was he?”

No one answered, and Katy held her silence. Kirk should have reached the radio room by now, and unless the terrorists had destroyed the equipment, he would be sending out the SOS. Help would be arriving soon. They just had to hang on until then.

“Who knows where the purser’s office is?”

One of the terrorists who’d masqueraded as a steward stepped forward. “It’s on the main deck below us.”

“Go there now and get the passenger list,” Khalil ordered. “But watch out for our mystery man; he’s armed. If you see him, kill him.”

The man nodded and went to the door at the rear of the Grand Salon. He stopped for just a moment to make sure the corridor was clear and then left.

The terrorists had come to kidnap Shaw, but Katy had no idea how they were going to pull it off. The Spirit was too big to hide for very long, even in the thousands of backwaters and fjords along the Inside Passage. And unless there were a lot more of them, defending a ship this size from an assault by a team of Special Forces would be impossible. Which left an escape by air — perhaps a helicopter or a floatplane — or a pickup from a boat standing by off their stern. Either way they would have to be concerned with a loose cannon, such as Kirk, running around the ship armed with a submachine gun, who could spoil everything with one well-placed shot. And time could not be on the side of the terrorists.

Khalil walked over to a young couple seated at one of the tables located next to a serving station. The woman held a baby, perhaps eight or nine months old, in her arms. Coming into the Grand Salon earlier, Katy had been surprised to see that the couple had brought their child, not only on the cruise, but also to this evening’s entertainment. But then when Elizabeth was a child, Katy hadn’t trusted babysitters either. An older man and woman seated with them seemed to be the grandparents.

“Does anyone here know who that man was?” Khalil asked, reasonably.

“No, we don’t. What do you want?” the older man asked.

“We’ve come to arrest Secretary Shaw,” Khalil replied matter-of-factly. He could have been discussing the weather.

“Then take him and go,” the older man ordered. “Leave us alone. We’ve done nothing to you or your cause, whatever that might be this time.”

“Shut your stupid mouth,” Katy muttered under her breath. She wanted to go over and strangle the man. There were bodies lying in pools of blood all over the Grand Salon, and this guy was probably grandstanding for his wife, and maybe his son-in-law.

“Where were you on 9/11?” Khalil asked, conversationally. But the question was bizarre, like the warning rumble of a volcano on the verge of erupting.

“Minding my own business,” the man shot back. “Which I suggest that you do if you want to survive. You know what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

“Mind my own business?” Khalil asked. “Very well.” He smashed the butt of his machine pistol into the head of the young father, sending him crashing to the floor.

“Johnathan,” the woman with the baby screamed. She lunged for her husband, but the older woman grabbed her arm.

“You bastard—” the older man shouted, and he started to get up.

The young man, dazed, reached a hand to the bloody wound in his head, and looked up as Khalil calmly fired one shot into his forehead at point-blank range, killing him instantly.

The young mother opened her mouth but made no sound, completely unable to comprehend what had just happened in front of her. She shook her head, and held her baby close to her breast. The older man’s jaw dropped, and he slowly sat down, the color draining from his face.

“I need to know the identity of the man who attacked us,” Khalil said.

“We don’t know who he is,” the older woman cried. “Please, can’t you have mercy on us?”

Shaw, realizing what would happen next if someone didn’t intervene, started to get to his feet, but his wife held him back, a look of terror on her face. Katy could not take her eyes away from the unfolding scene. The terrorist was going to kill the young woman and her child next. Katy could see it coming. Everyone in the room knew it was about to happen. But there was nothing any of them could do. If they moved, they would be shot down like the others.

Khalil pointed his machine pistol at the back of the baby’s head. If he fired, the shot would certainly kill the infant and most likely the mother as well. The young woman held her breath and closed her eyes.

“Who is the man who attacked us?” Khalil asked, patiently.

Katy got to her feet. She did not take her eyes off the terrorist pointing the gun at the mother and child, but she was aware that some of the others had swung their guns in her direction.

“He’s my husband,” she said, in a loud, clear voice. Karen Shaw reached over and gave Katy’s hand a squeeze.

Khalil turned toward her, hesitated just a moment, and then walked over to her. “Your husband?”

“Yes,” Katy said. She could see his eyes behind the mask. They were coal black and inhumanly emotionless, like those of a wild animal, a jungle animal.

“Who might you be?”

“I’m Kathleen McGarvey.”

For a brief instant the terrorist seemed to be taken aback, almost rocked on his heels. But he recovered immediately. “Your husband is Kirk McGarvey? The director of the Central Intelligence Agency?”

“That’s correct,” Katy said. She let that sink in for several seconds, and then she looked at the other terrorists positioned around the room. “If you want to live, I suggest that you get off this ship while you can,” she said in a loud, perfectly steady voice. “Otherwise my husband will kill you.” She turned back to the terrorist behind the balaclava. “Count on it,” she told him.

TEN

Moments after one of the terrorists had fired the short burst down the corridor, McGarvey had made his way up to the bridge deck taking the stairs two at a time. Except for the faint sounds of the powerful diesel engines in the distance, the ship was deathly quiet. Normally there would be passengers in the corridors, or stewards delivering room-service orders. But the Spirit seemed to be deserted.

It was out of the ordinary. He had picked up on it earlier, but he had put it off as nothing more than a combination of fatigue and the paranoia that accompanied his kind of work. He always listened to his inner voices. But this time he had ignored his instincts. He was supposed to be on vacation.

The ship was unnaturally quiet because the crew and passengers not in the Grand Salon were probably already dead. The terrorists had to be well organized. They’d probably masqueraded as crewmen, which meant they had a professional organization behind them; otherwise they couldn’t have passed the extensive background checks the DoD and CIA had carried out. Either that or they had transferred aboard from a smaller boat following in the Spirit’s wake. But even then it would have been necessary to have someone aboard to make sure the way was clear.

If they were professionals and not fanatics, it would make defeating them much more difficult, but on the plus side a professional understood logic. He would recognize when it was time to cut his losses and run, whereas a fanatic would rather die, taking everyone with him, than give up.

McGarvey was used to dealing with professionals. He had been in the business for more than twenty-five years, starting with the Office of Special Investigations in the Air Force before signing on with the CIA as a field officer. Most of his early career had been spent in black operations. He had been a killer. An assassin. It was a job that had very nearly destroyed him, and had caused the deaths of a number of people who had been very close to him.

His job had even destroyed his marriage, until he and Katy had both finally come to their senses and realized that they loved each other, and could deal with whatever was separating them. He’d risen quickly then from assistant deputy director of operations all the way up to his present appointment as director of the CIA. It was a position he’d promised the president that he would stick with for three years. But 9/11 had put everything on hold for him. And this attack now, which was directed at the former secretary of defense, was probably just the next step for bin Laden, a man McGarvey knew better than anyone in the West. If this were a bin Laden-directed operation, then it would have been exquisitely planned. And it would be ruthless.

He held up at the head of the stairs. The owner’s suite, which the Shaws had occupied, was directly across the corridor from him. Just aft was the funnel, and beyond it the open sundeck. Forward of the suite were the bridge, radio room, and captain’s sea quarters.

The weapon he’d taken from the terrorist was a Polish-made RAK PM-63 machine pistol that fired a 9mm Makarov cartridge at six hundred rounds per minute. A long suppressor was screwed to the end of the barrel, but even with the degradation of accuracy that most silencers caused, the Wz-63, in its Polish designation, was a deadly weapon. The trouble was its suppressor got very hot when the weapon was fired, and McGarvey’s right palm had a waffle-pattern burn from grabbing the gun out of the terrorist’s hands.

The RAK was the weapon of choice for many Eastern European terrorists, so it was taught to field officers at the Farm, the CIA’s training facility outside Williamsburg, and McGarvey knew it well. He released the catch at the bottom of the pistol grip, popping out the twenty-five-round magazine. Only six bullets remained.

Three-fourths of the bullets in the magazine had been fired. The kid had probably murdered one or more crewmen or passengers before he had gunned down Grassinger, and he would have almost certainly done more killing tonight unless he and the others were stopped.

There wasn’t time for McGarvey to return to his cabin for his pistol and spare magazines, so six rounds would have to be enough for now.

He drove the magazine home with the heel of his hand, then stepped out of the stairwell, ducked across to the owner’s suite, and sprinted down the corridor to the radio room.

The bridge itself was raised a few feet above the level of the main part of the uppermost deck. Access was gained up a short flight of stairs on each side of the ship. There was no other way up. From where he stood, poised next to the radio room door, he could not see up into the bridge. Nor could anyone up there see him unless they came out onto one of the lookout wings and peered through a window.

He felt guilty about leaving Katy in the hands of the terrorists and for allowing Jim Gassinger to be shot to death. In the old days he would have blamed himself for allowing people to get so close to him that their lives would be placed in danger. But now he felt bad because he wasn’t fast enough, not quick enough on the uptake to thwart the determined gunman. But this time the terrorists had made a mistake. They had failed to make a complete sweep of the ship before they took over the Grand Salon. They had missed him, and he was determined to bring the fight back to them in an up close and very personal way.

The radio-room door was ajar. Each time the ship yawed when a wave hit the starboard quarter, the door would swing open a few inches, then swing back almost but not quite hard enough to latch.

From where he stood, McGarvey could see a young man with short cropped black hair and narrow shoulders, his back to the door, seated in front of a rack of radio equipment, most of which had been shot up or smashed beyond repair. The man was dressed as a ship’s officer, but an RAK machine pistol was at his elbow on the desk. He was listening to a portable VHF transceiver of the kind used for ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore communications. Probably the U.S. Coast Guard channel to make sure that no one from the Spirit had managed to send a distress signal.

McGarvey waited until the door started to swing out, then yanked it all the way open and stepped inside. “I’d like to send a message, if you don’t mind.”

The terrorist was startled. He looked over his shoulder, his eyes going wide at the sight of one of the passengers standing there with a weapon in hand. He shouted something in Arabic, wildly flung the VHF radio, and snatched his gun.

McGarvey reached for the radio with one hand, but missed it. The transceiver smashed against the steel door frame as the terrorist brought his gun up over his shoulder and started to fire even before he was on target, spraying the overhead with bullets, deadly shrapnel flying all over the place.

The terrorist had left him no choice. McGarvey brought his weapon up and squeezed off two shots, one catching the young man in his left shoulder and the second in the side of his head just behind his ear, sending him sprawling across the desk in a bloody heap.

McGarvey ducked back out into the corridor to make sure no one had heard the commotion and was coming to investigate; then he stooped down and picked up the VHF radio. A big piece of the plastic case had cracked open and fell off, exposing the main circuit board, which had also broken in two. The radio was as useless as the ship’s communications equipment. Whatever happened aboard now was up to him.

The terrorist carried no wallet or identification or anything else in his pockets except for a 9mm Steyr GB self-loading pistol, with one eighteen-round magazine, plus two extra twenty-five-round magazines for the RAK. A digital watch was strapped to his right wrist, but he wore no rings or other jewelry.

McGarvey took off his dinner jacket and tossed it aside, then stuffed the pistol in his belt, ejected the nearly spent magazine from his RAK, replacing it with one of the spares. Then he pocketed the second, all the while listening for someone to come up the corridor.

The bridge crew was probably dead, but the ship was still moving, which meant that someone had to be at the helm because running on autopilot in these confined waters would be a dicey business. The same was likely true down in the engine room. The regular crew was probably dead, and one or more of the terrorists were taking care of business.

He cycled the RAK’s slide to cock the weapon and turned to go, but then stopped. Something bothered him. Something about the terrorist’s wristwatch. He went back to the body and lifted the kid’s lifeless arm. The watch was in countdown mode with a few seconds more than seventeen minutes left. But seventeen minutes until what? Until they got off the ship? Or was it something else? McGarvey had a very bad feeling that he was missing something important. He took the watch.

The wind was screaming when McGarvey stepped outside and quickly made his way forward and mounted the port stairs up to the bridge. He flattened himself against the upright and cautiously took a brief peek in the window. A slightly built young woman was at the big wheel. Captain Darling lay on his side by the starboard door in a pool of blood, his eyes open and sightless. Two other officers were down and presumably dead, one at the radar and navigation position to the left of the helm and the other in a crumpled heap beside the chart table aft of the helm.

The woman was frightened. That was obvious from the grimace on her face and the stiff way she stood. But there was no one on the bridge to threaten her, to force her to remain at her post. Unless she was one of the terrorists. For some reason he didn’t think that was the case. The terrorists were almost certainly Muslims, and most Islamic fundamentalist operational cells did not send women out on missions. The major exception was the military wing of Hamas, which sometimes sent women as suicide bombers to Israeli-occupied areas. But this was not a Hamas operation; it wasn’t the organization’s style.

McGarvey looked through the window again. Nothing had changed, and there was no place for anyone to hide. Even if the girl was one of the terrorists, she didn’t appear to be armed. And time was running short. Every second Katy was under the terrorists’ control in the Grand Salon increased her chances of getting shot to death.

He yanked the door open and stepped onto the bridge. The girl at the helm practically jumped out of her skin.

“I’m a friend,” McGarvey said. “Are you okay?”

The girl urgently looked over her shoulder toward the officer lying next to the chart table, at the same time a walkie-talkie lying on a shelf beneath one of the forward windows hissed.

“Achmed, keyf heh’lik?”

McGarvey turned toward the sound, and almost immediately he realized he’d been set up, and that the young helmsman had tried to warn him. He dove for the deck as he swiveled in his tracks and brought his gun to bear on the man dressed as a ship’s officer lying in a heap beside the chart table. The terrorist opened fire with his Steyr GB, the heavy 9mm Makarov rounds starring the forward windows, smashing one of the digital radar displays, striking the already destroyed SSB radio, and plowing into the overhead before McGarvey got three shots off, all of them hitting the man in the back below his left shoulder blade, knocking him down.

McGarvey picked himself up, keeping his weapon trained on the terrorist, but the man was dead. And so was the young woman at the helm, the back of her head a bloody mess where she’d taken one round.

He went to her, but there was nothing he could do. She was gone, and no power on earth could bring her back. He wanted to go over to the bastard he’d just shot and kick his body down the stairs to the Grand Salon and dump it at the feet of whoever was leading this attack.

If it was death they wanted, he was going to give it to them in a very large, and very personal, way.

ELEVEN

With fifteen minutes remaining to zero hour, Khalil was forced to consider his options. Although he had never come face-to-face with Kirk McGarvey, the man was a legend in the intelligence business. No one on the outside would ever know the full extent of the former CIA assassin’s entire career, but there were so many stories about him that if even onetenth of them were true, McGarvey would have to be a superman.

The one story that was absolutely true was his encounter with Osama bin Laden. Khalil knew it was a fact because he got it from bin Laden himself, and Osama never lied. McGarvey had actually come to Afghanistan to seek out bin Laden a couple of years before 9/11. Al-Quaida had managed to purchase a one-kiloton nuclear suitcase demolitions device that was to be used in a strike on the U.S. McGarvey had come to make a trade: the bomb for American concessions in the region, especially on the Saudi Arabian peninsula.

Khalil had met with bin Laden one month before 9/11 to discuss the probable reaction from the U.S., and Mac’s name had come up.

“I looked into his eyes, and what I saw made me wish that he was a friend and not an enemy,” bin Laden said.

“An infidel?” Khalil suggested, testing bin Laden’s depth of respect for the American.

McGarvey had stopped the nuclear attack two years earlier, and there was some concern among bin Laden’s advisers that he might somehow get wind of the plans for the attacks on the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and White House.

Bin Laden nodded. “Kirk McGarvey is a man among men. If you ever come up against him, kill him immediately. Doing so will be your only chance of survival.”

Khalil stared at Kathleen McGarvey as if he could see through her skin and bone right into her brain, and into her soul. He wanted to have a real measure of her before he ended her life. One bullet into her head, or one quick slash of his knife across her throat, severing not only her windpipe, but both of her carotid arteries, and he would see whatever that measure was.

It wasn’t the mechanical act of killing that enticed Khalil; he’d had his fill of those kinds of thrills, and he was no longer satisfied by simple body counts. Now he had the insane idea that if he were quick enough, his perceptions agile enough, he would be able to catch the exact moment when a person’s soul actually left the body.

It would be just like the green flash on the horizon at sunset, a sight never to be forgotten.

But that pleasure would have to wait. Kirk McGarvey was loose aboard the ship, and he could interfere with their plans if he was allowed to continue unabated. Shaw would come back with them to Pakistan, but so would Kathleen McGarvey.

He stepped back and took the walkie-talkie from his pocket. Everyone in the lounge was looking at him — the passengers waiting for him to make a mistake, his operators waiting for his next order. Everyone wanted to get off the ship, and he was going to accommodate all of them.

There were fourteen minutes left.

He keyed the walkie-talkie. “Bridge, report.” The ship had not altered its course, so far as Khalil could tell, so whatever else McGarvey had tried he’d not gotten there.

But there was no answer.

“Bridge, what is your situation? Report now.”

A slight smile came to Kathleen McGarvey’s lips. Kahlil resisted the nearly overpowering urge to shoot her.

“Radio room, what is your situation?”

Some woman across the lounge started to cry, a moist snuffling that grated Khalil’s nerves, raising his gorge. If McGarvey had already taken out his operators on the bridge and in the radio room, he would still be up there. There wouldn’t have been enough time to reach the third vital point on the ship — the engine room — yet, but that’s where he was probably heading.

“Purser’s office, report.”

“Here,” the operator radioed back immediately. “The passenger manifest was on the desk. But there’s no listing for Kirk McGarvey.”

“Never mind the list,” Khalil ordered, relieved that at least one of his people was answering. “He’s taken out the bridge and radio room, so he’ll probably try for the engine room next, which means he’ll have to come past you. “If you see him, kill him.”

“Yes, sir.”

The woman’s sobs were getting louder. Khalil was having trouble hearing much of anything else. He keyed the walkie-talkie, and called the engine room. “Granger, what is your situation?”

“The crew has been neutralized, and we’re just about set here. Give me five minutes.”

Khalil breathed a silent thanks to Allah. “You may have some trouble coming your way. One of the passengers is on the loose, and he’s armed.”

Pahlawan chuckled. “We’ll give him a warm reception if he pokes his nose down here.”

“Listen, you idiot,” Khalil practically shouted. “This one is a professional. He is dangerous, so don’t take any chances. Post a lookout.”

“Very well,” Pahlawan said. He was a veteran of numerous terrorist operations in Afghanistan and India. He was a fearless mujahideen.

“You’re forgetting something,” Kathleen interjected, softly.

Khalil turned his gaze to her. He was fascinated despite himself. She was an extraordinary woman of very great courage. “What is that?” he asked, mildly, though he wanted to lash out at something, at anyone. At the stupid woman making all the noise on the other side of the lounge.

“My husband has already killed your men in the radio room and on the bridge. At the very least it means that he has already taken partial control of this ship.”

“Make your point.”

Kathleen’s smile turned vicious, as if she were a shark coming in for the kill. “He has one of the walkie-talkies. He’s heard everything that you told your men.”

Khalil’s rage spiked, but he caught himself before he raised his pistol and put a round into her face. He wanted to take her back to Pakistan, to personally teach her the true meaning of humility. But more importantly for the moment, there was a very good chance that he would need her as an additional hostage.

He keyed the walkie-talkie. “Mr. McGarvey, I would like to propose a truce.”

There was no answer. The sobbing woman was getting louder.

“I know that you can hear me, Mr. McGarvey. We don’t want to hurt anyone else aboard this ship. Our operation is a political one. We have come to arrest Mr. Shaw and take him to the World Court at The Hague, where he will be put on trial for crimes against humanity. You know that there have been calls for just such a trial. We are merely acting as the policemen.”

Khalil figured that there were two possibilities: Either McGarvey was not listening, or he was ignoring them.

They were running out of time.

“Your bodyguard is dead, as is the secretary’s bodyguard. They were brave men, but their only chance would have been to lay down their weapons. It’s your only chance. You are outnumbered and outgunned. Come down to the passageway aft of the lounge, unarmed and with your hands in plain sight. Once you have been secured, we will leave with Shaw.”

There was no answer.

Khalil stuffed his pistol in his jacket, walked over to Kathleen, grabbed her by the arm, keyed the walkie-talkie, and shoved it in her face. “Tell your husband to give himself up or we will kill you.”

Kathleen did not hesitate. “There are at least seven here, all armed with submachine guns—”

Khalil shoved Kathleen aside. He yanked out his pistol, strode across the room, and fired five shots into the head of the woman who was crying, driving her backward off her chair and onto the deck in a spray of blood.

TWELVE

Up on the bridge McGarvey heard the sounds of gunfire transmitted over the terrorist’s walkie-talkie, and then the transmission stopped.

There wasn’t another word from Katy, which could have meant that the terrorist had simply cut her off in midsentence when he realized she was shouting a warning. But the gunfire could also mean that the terrorist had murdered her in cold blood as he warned he would.

McGarvey stood flat-footed for two seconds, the walkie-talkie in one hand, the RAK machine pistol in the other, a feeling of utter despair threatening to consume him. The thought of his wife lying dead in a pool of her own blood was more than he could bear.

The terrorist had allowed him to hear the gunshots. The bastard was sending a sick message. We have your wife down here, and we may — or may not — have murdered her in cold blood. Why don’t you come down and see with your own eyes?

They were stalling for time. Because they’re not ready to get off this ship yet, McGarvey thought. The watch from the wrist of the terrorist in the radio room was in countdown mode, with less than seventeen minutes to go. Seventeen minutes for what?

He raised the walkie-talkie and started to depress the Push-to-Talk switch but then held up. Somehow the terrorists knew who he was. They had to know what he was capable of doing. That being the case, they would need Katy as a hostage.

Katy was alive.

Nothing else mattered except freeing her. But in order to do that, he would have to kill or disable a significant number of the hijackers. Now, before they got off the ship. There wasn’t enough time to find a radio, call for help, then wait for the cavalry to arrive.

He looked up out of his daze and surveyed the blood and gore in the confines of the relatively small bridge. Blood was pooled in several spots on the deck, splashed up on the bulkheads and overhead, on the windows, and on the faces of the dials and electronic equipment. This place had become a killing field.

The entire ship was a killing field.

A flashing red light directly ahead of the ship caught his eye. It was one of the buoys that marked the channel. With no one at the helm, the ship was slowly drifting off course to the left. If they went aground on the rocks at this speed, there was a very good chance they would punch a hole in the bottom and sink. The water was very near freezing. If somebody went overboard, they wouldn’t survive more than a few minutes.

He laid the walkie-talkie and machine pistol aside, and turned the wheel to starboard. It took several seconds for the ship to respond before the bows slowly came right, bringing them back into the navigation channel, the red buoy on their port side where it belonged.

All the communications and navigation equipment had been smashed beyond repair, but McGarvey was able to tighten the wheel lock, so at least for the moment the Spirit would continue on its present heading. That would be good only as long as the channel was straight, and didn’t take a jog to the left or right, but for now he didn’t have any other choice.

The engine telegraph lever was mounted on a console to the right of the wheel. It was in the All Ahead Full position. McGarvey disengaged the lock, and shoved it up to the All Ahead Stop position.

He waited for a few moments, but so far as he could tell nothing happened. The ship was not slowing down. The terrorists had also taken over the engine room and its functions which didn’t come as a surprise. Except for steering, the controls on the bridge were useless.

He couldn’t stop the ship’s engines, nor could he lock the wheel hard over to port or starboard, for fear that the channel was too narrow and he would end up ripping the bottom out of the ship after all.

Time was running out for him. He couldn’t leave the bridge for fear of sinking the ship, nor could he leave Katy or the other passengers under the guns of the terrorists. They’d already shown their utter lack of regard for human life. They’d already murdered in cold blood more than just crew members and his and Shaw’s bodyguards. He had spotted at least one of the passengers, a woman, lying in a pool of blood in the Grand Salon.

His eyes lit on another control panel. Two sets of buttons marked Up and Down — one for starboard, the other for port — controlled the ship’s anchors. If he couldn’t stop the engines, perhaps he could stop the ship.

He hit both Down buttons, then braced himself against the helm’s binnacle rail. Immediately a tremendous, deep-throated metallic clatter came from low in the bows as the two massive anchors dropped into the icy waters, dragging with them the heavy chains.

The din seemed to go on forever, until the Spirit gave a tentative lurch to starboard, and a high-pitched squeal of metal-on-metal rose from somewhere below.

The ship straightened her head, hesitated for a second or two, and then both anchors caught at the same time. The bows came sharply around to starboard, the ship listed about fifteen degrees, and then the stern followed.

At first McGarvey thought that the engines driving the ship forward would sail the boat around her anchors and break free, but it didn’t happen. Instead the Spirit came to a new heading, nearly back the way they had come, and then shuddered as she balanced between the anchors dug into port and starboard somewhere aft.

McGarvey pocketed the walkie-talkie, grabbed the machine pistol, and then started for the door. But he stopped. The bridge communications and navigation equipment had been destroyed, but a telephone-type handset hanging from a clip above the helm seemed to be intact. The panel beside it contained a small digital display with a selection switch beside it. The display showed Grand Salon. The phone was the ship’s intercom.

He went back and dialed through the selections to Public Address, pulled the phone down from the hook, and pressed the Push-to-Talk switch. He wanted everybody aboard the ship to hear him.

“I’m coming,” he said. He could hear his amplified voice somewhere aft. “I’m coming right now, and no one will help you. Not bin Laden, not even Allah.”

McGarvey put the phone back, then raised his gun to the anchor control panel and fired two short bursts, totally destroying the mechanism. The anchors were down, and they would stay down long enough for him to do his job.

THIRTEEN

People throughout the Grand Salon were still picking themselves up after the ship suddenly lurched and heeled to starboard when McGarvey’s warning came over the public address system.

The instant he’d heard the anchors dropping, Khalil braced himself in anticipation that people and things would get tossed around when the ship came to an abrupt stop, her engines still producing full power. He glanced over at where Kathleen McGarvey had also braced herself, helping Shaw and his wife to hold on as well. Khalil’s eyes met Katy’s, and she offered him another grim smile, as if to say she had warned them.

Khalil’s rage threatened to rise up and blot out all sanity, but he returned her smile instead, the almost inhuman effort causing sweat to pop out on his forehead. He had been raised to accept the Muslim fundamentalist philosophy that although women were not second-class citizens as they were portrayed to be by the West, they occupied a different place in Allah’s scheme for the world. Women organized and ran the home, while men organized and ran the world. It was a simple division of labor set down more than ten centuries ago by Allah’s prophet Muhammad.

Men were strong, and women were silent. Sons were of inestimable value, while daughters were a burden upon a family. Especially if they grew up not knowing or understanding their place.

Like Western women. Especially American women. Especially this woman.

Khalil raised his pistol and pointed it directly at Katy’s face. She didn’t flinch, nor did she avert her eyes. It was as if she was almost daring him to fire.

Taunting him with failure in front of his men.

Khalil lowered his pistol, turned, threw his head back, and laughed out loud as if he had heard the most amusing thing in his life. “One man,” he said in English for the benefit of the passengers. “Apparently he has delusions of grandeur.” He shook his head. “Well, I for one can scarcely wait until he shows up here. If he has the courage. Although we’ve already seen what his real mettle is. After he killed young Ismal, he did not stay to fight. Instead, he turned and ran away like a mouse.”

Some of Khalil’s operators laughed uncertainly, but their eyes kept darting to the door as if they expected McGarvey to burst into the Grand Salon spraying the room with gunfire.

Khalil looked at his watch. There were less than thirteen minutes remaining. He used his walkie-talkie to call the engine room. “The anchors have been released. Can you raise them from there?”

“I don’t think so,” Pahlawan came back. “The motors are forward behind the chain lockers. What happened?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Khalil said. “Never mind the anchors; we are leaving on schedule. Is everything in readiness down there?”

“We’ll shut down the engines and set the switches.”

“Be quick about it,” Khalil said. “When you’re finished, we’ll meet on the aft deck But keep alert. Our uninvited troublemaker is armed.”

Pahlawan laughed. “He is just one man. If you do not want to shoot him, I will.”

Khalil’s rage rose up again like a tidal wave. One of his operators, a worried look on his young, narrow face, came across the salon, passing the Shaws’ table.

“Get back to your position,” Khalil told him.

“We need to leave now, Khalil,” the young man said. He was frightened. Kathleen McGarvey heard the exchange; though she tried to hide it, Khalil could see her sudden understanding. She knew his name.

He raised his pistol and shot the operator in the forehead at point-blank range. The young man’s head snapped back, and he crumpled dead to the floor.

“Coward,” Khalil said in Arabic, loudly enough for his operators to hear, but he looked at Kathleen. Still she didn’t avert her eyes.

He keyed his walkie-talkie and called the purser’s office. “McGarvey is on the bridge. Go up there and kill him. You have twelve minutes to do that and get back of the aft deck.”

“Insha’allah,” the operator said.

“McGarvey can listen to my orders because he has one of our walkie-talkies,” Khalil told his people genially, as if nothing had happened. He made a hand motion to a pair of his men. “But he cannot hear what is being said in this room as I speak now. He knows that someone is coming up from the purser’s office to kill him, and he will set a trap. What he cannot know is that Said and Achmed will be waiting for him in the starboard and port stairwells just below the sundeck. When he shows himself, he will die.”

The two men Khalil named went to the salon doors, held up for just a moment to make sure that the corridor was clear, and then slipped out.

“Do not fail,” Khalil called after them.

He turned again to face Kathleen and the others. An ominous silence had fallen over the Grand Salon. There wasn’t a person in the room who believed that the terrorist was sane, but everyone had a great deal of fear of him. He could see it in their eyes, and in the way they held themselves in postures of respect and deference.

Except for McGarvey’s wife, who continued to defy him. But once she was safely aboard the cargo vessel steaming away from the West Coast, she would begin to learn a very bitter lesson: Even the high and mighty were vulnerable.

Khalil’s plan, which had been worked out in detail over the past nine months, was perfect. It even took into account a whole host of unpredictable factors, such as the weather, mechanical breakdowns, accidents, even the heroics of a crew-member or passenger as they were faced with now. McGarvey was a dangerous man, but he was only one man after all.

“You’re getting a little low on troops, aren’t you?” Kathleen said.

Khalil couldn’t figure her out. Was she actually trying to goad him into shooting her? Or did his promise that he was taking her with Shaw make her feel so safe that she thought she was invulnerable? Was she trying to make him angry so that he would start making stupid, spur-of-the-moment decisions?

There had been many women in his life: mother, sisters, aunts, cousins, lovers. But none like this singular female. In truth he might be doing McGarvey a favor by killing her.

He glanced around the salon. He had five men left up here. Thin, but not dangerously so.

“Be thankful that I do not agree with you. If I did, I would order my men to kill some of the passengers to even the odds.”

Kathleen’s lips started to form a word, but then she shook her head, finally turning away.

Khalil turned on his heel, strode across to the table where the older couple and their daughter with the infant were seated. He dragged the younger woman, who was still clutching her child, to her feet.

“All passengers will be taken belowdecks, where you will be locked up. If you cooperate, no one else will get hurt. Within an hour or so the Coast Guard will come around to see why this ship has stopped in midchannel, and you will be rescued.”

“What about our daughter and granddaughter?” the old man asked with none of his earlier arrogance.

“She and the child will be killed if you and the others do not cooperate,” Khalil replied with cold indifference, and he led the unresisting woman back to the Shaws’ table. “On your feet,” he told them. Kathleen took the young mother and child in hand, as Karen Shaw helped her husband get up.

Khalil motioned for Zahir Majiid and Abdul Adani, who came to him. “Zahir and I will take these four and the infant to the aft deck. As soon as we’re out of here, Abdul will take the passengers below. If anyone resists, kill them. But be quick about it.”

Adani nodded. This was part of the carefully rehearsed plan.

Zahir went first to the doors and checked the corridor. He turned back and gave the all-clear sign, and Khalil herded the former SecDef, Kathleen, and the others across the Grand Salon and out into the corridor; it was frigidly cold because the port and starboard doors out to the deck had been left open.

“Unless you mean to freeze us to death, we’ll need coats or at least blankets,” Kathleen said.

Khalil ignored her.

Zahir checked the starboard door, and again gave the all-clear sign. Khalil prodded Kathleen in her back with the muzzle of his machine pistol. “Move.”

Kathleen turned on her heel and glared up at him. “Do not poke me with that thing again,” she warned through clenched teeth.

“I would like to use you as a hostage, but believe me, you are not necessary to my plans,” Khalil told her. “Move, or I will shoot you.”

She was stalling, of course, to give her husband time to come to her rescue. But it wouldn’t work.

Behind them in the Grand Salon, Adani or one of the other terrorists fired a short burst. Several people screamed or shouted in fear, and there was a great deal of commotion as one of the terrorists stepped out into the corridor and the seventy-plus passengers began jostling out after him.

Kathleen wanted to go back to help comfort them, especially some of the elderly passengers for whom this was a horrible nightmare that they simply could not comprehend. But the baby in the young mother’s arms began to cry, and Khalil shoved the woman toward the open door to the starboard passageway where the wind was howling fiercely.

Suddenly Kathleen was no longer sure how this was going to turn out. Her husband was very good, but he was only one man.

She slowly turned away from the unfolding drama behind her, and allowed herself to be herded out on deck into the gale, and then aft toward the back of the ship and whatever awaited them there.

Like animals to the slaughter.

FOURTEEN

McGarvey waited around the corner from the starboard stairwell on the bridge deck just aft of the Shaws’ stateroom.

One man was coming up from the purser’s office to take him out. But the terrorist leader had given the order via walkie-talkie, which he knew McGarvey was monitoring. It was crude, but obviously they were trying to set a trap for him.

If he took out the lone terrorist, at least two others would be waiting somewhere between here and the Grand Salon for him to show up. They meant to catch him in a crossfire.

But he kept thinking about the elapsing time on the terrorist’s watch. The countdown to whatever was about to happen was under twelve minutes now.

And he kept thinking about Katy.

Time was on nobody’s side. Especially not his.

On top of that the terrorists had several other advantages: their superior numbers and weaponry, and the passengers as shields and hostages.

But they had targeted Katy, and that was a very large mistake.

He crossed the corridor to the stairwell where he held up. Someone was coming up the steps in a big hurry, his footfalls heavy. The man from the purser’s office. The one who was supposed to die so that the trap could be sprung.

McGarvey flattened against the bulkhead behind the door and waited until the terrorist reached the landing and stopped. He could imagine the man peering through the window in the door to make sure the corridor was empty. The terrorist might not want to go up against an armed man; unarmed passengers were much easier to deal with. But he had his orders.

The door slowly came open, and the terrorist stepped out into the corridor, sweeping his machine pistol to the left, when McGarvey took one step forward and popped the young man at the base of his skull with the butt of the RAK. The terrorist dropped to the floor like a felled ox.

For just a second McGarvey could feel hatred rise up from his gut, like bitter bile at the back of his throat. It would be so easy to fire one round into the back of the young man’s head and end his miserable life here and now. If the terrorist wanted to reach Paradise as a martyr, why not help him along?

Who would know what really happened up here? And who would care?

McGarvey hurriedly dragged the unconscious man around the corner, out of sight from anyone emerging from the stairwell. Then he took the terrorist’s weapons and walkie-talkie, and turned and sprinted back down the corridor, where he let himself out onto the open deck, closing and latching the door behind him with as little noise as possible.

It would take the hijackers only a minute or two to figure out that the terrorist from the purser’s office was taking too long to report back. But by the time someone realized that McGarvey had made an end run, it would be too late.

He slung his RAK muzzle down by its strap over his shoulder so that it was centered on his back, then went to the starboard rail and tossed the terrorist’s weapons and walkie-talkie overboard. Although it had mercifully stopped raining, the wind was on their starboard quarter, blowing at least twenty-five knots and bitterly cold. The sky was cloud-covered, and there was almost nothing to see except for the flashing red buoy bouncing around about a hundred yards ahead.

The Spirit, whose motion was lively as it balanced under full power between the two anchors, suddenly steadied out, as if it had broken free. Almost immediately McGarvey realized that the engines had been shut down. He could no longer feel the deep, low-frequency vibration on the soles of his feet.

The terrorists were getting set to abandon ship. Some of them might have already been aboard when the Spirit left Juneau but some of them must have come aboard earlier this evening. Probably from a chase boat that had been waiting in some cove along the Inside Passage; an approaching floatplane or helicopter would have made too much noise. Somebody would have heard it. Boarding a moving ship in this kind of weather would have been dicey. Getting off would be no worse, even though the ship was bucking and heaving against her anchors.

He leaned well out over the rail, but he couldn’t see anything aft. If there was a chase boat, it was either standing off in the darkness, or it was hidden by the bulk of the hull at the stern.

But they were taking Shaw with them and he was precious cargo, so they had shut down the engines to steady out the motion. They didn’t want to lose him.

The problem was, who else were they taking off the ship?

And the other problem was his nearly uncontrollable anger. He could see the expression in bin Laden’s eyes, hear the tone of his voice saying that every non-Muslim — men, women, children — were fair game for murder.

McGarvey climbed over the rail, dangled there for just a moment, then swung himself inward and dropped down to the upper deck, landing off-balance with more noise than he’d wanted to make.

He pulled out the Steyr pistol he’d taken from the terrorist in the radio room and scrambled into the deeper shadows to see if someone would come to investigate. He almost wished that someone would come.

Except for the wind there were no noises.

He eased around the corner and made his way to the forward extremity of the upper deck. Directly above was the bridge; below were the Grand Salon and the open-bow viewing area where on good days passengers gathered to watch the passing scenery and wildlife.

Big windows in the Grand Salon’s forward bulkhead opened onto the viewing area. Anyone jumping from the deck above would be visible for just a moment as they dropped. But the bow area was in darkness, and the terrorists’ attention would be directed toward the passengers.

In any event there was no time to consider any other alternative.

McGarvey climbed over the rail and jumped. This time he landed solidly, but without making a sound. He ducked below the level of the windows, unslung the RAK, switched the safety lever to off, and crabwalked the five feet to the starboard door. He rose up, intending only to take a quick peek through the window and to then duck down. But he stopped.

The Grand Salon was apparently empty of any living thing. The room had become a killing ground, as he feared it would.

He yanked open the door and rushed in, sweeping his weapon left to right in case any of the hijackers had anticipated his arrival, but stopped again. There was nothing here except for corpses and blood — blood in pools under the dozen or more bodies, splashed across tables, some of which had been overturned, up against the bulkheads, and along the buffet serving line and service bar.

Katy wasn’t among the bodies, nor were the Shaws, but there was some blood on the tablecloth at the former SecDef’s place.

McGarvey almost turned to go when he spotted a tiny pencil with a gold cap lying beside Katy’s napkin. He went back and picked it up. It was her eyebrow pencil. She had left it on the table for some reason.

She’d been trying to tell him something.

He lifted the napkin. Beneath it, written on the tablecloth was one word: KHALIL.

Like Carlos the Jackal in the sixties and seventies, Khalil was just a work name. He was a man who the Western intelligence agencies considered to be the real brains behind most of the successful Islamic fundamentalist attacks against the West. No photographs of him existed in the West, nor were the CIA, FBI, or British SIS even sure of his nationality.

What everyone did agree upon, however, was that Khalil was as deadly and merciless as he was elusive. No one who had ever come up against him lived to tell about the encounter. The attacks of 9/11 were probably his doing, but they were only the most recent and most infamous of his operations, which stretched back at least twenty years.

Currently the U.S. was offering a twenty-five-million-dollar reward for his capture dead or alive. In the two years since the reward had been posted, there had been no takers; in fact, there hadn’t even been one inquiry.

Except for Katy’s earring this operation would probably have gone off exactly the way Khalil had planned it. No one knew that the director of Central Intelligence would be aboard, nor could anyone have predicted the business with one passenger’s earring. It was nothing but pure, dumb luck.

And McGarvey planned on telling Khalil that his luck had run out. Nothing would give him more pleasure.

Where were the passengers?

McGarvey went to the back of the room and checked Grassinger’s pulse. His bodyguard was dead, as was Shaw’s. They had tried to do their jobs, but they’d simply been outnumbered.

Their deaths he could understand. And Shaw’s kidnapping made sense from the terrorists’ viewpoint. But why kill passengers? Innocent men and women?

Osama bin Laden had tried to explain that reasoning to him in a cave in Afghanistan before 9/11. But what he said about no one being innocent made no more sense now than it did then. In McGarvey’s estimation, Islamic fundamentalists by very definition were little more than rabid animals snapping at anything that moved, trying to tear down anything that didn’t square with their own brand of radicalism, their own horribly misguided take on a fine religion.

He stood up and took a quick look into the corridor. There was no one there, but the starboard door to the outside passageway was open.

He ducked back for a second. Khalil had taken Shaw and possibly Katy as hostages and was holding them in the stern of the ship. There were outside stairs down to the main deck, where a small boat was probably waiting to take them off. In the meantime the passengers had most likely been led below and locked in the galley, or possibly the dry-storage pantries, to keep them out of the way. For the moment then Khalil’s forces were divided.

But it was the countdown that bothered him. There were less than ten minutes remaining. For what? He had a lot of ideas, but none of them were very comforting.

McGarvey checked the load on his RAK and stepped out of the Grand Salon, intending to cross the corridor and take the inside stairs down to the main deck, when someone fired from the door to the men’s bathroom ten feet to the right, spraying the deck and bulkheads.

Instinctively, McGarvey fell back while firing a short burst down the corridor in the general direction of the shooter. The terrorists were a lot smarter than he thought they were. They’d expected him to return to the Grand Salon, and they’d simply waited for him to show up.

All that went through his brain in a flash. Dropping to the deck as he spun around, he fired toward the front of the room as one of Khalil’s men came through the portside door from the bow viewing area, where he had apparently been waiting to catch McGarvey in a crossfire.

The man shouted something in Arabic and fired another long burst toward the back of the room, the bullets smacking into the bulkhead.

McGarvey rose up on one knee and fired two single shots, both catching the man squarely in the chest, knocking him backward into the piano.

The RAK was out of ammunition. McGarvey ejected the spent magazine, pulled the spare out of his belt, and was about to shove it into the pistol grip when the terrorist who’d fired down the corridor rushed into the Grand Salon.

He didn’t see McGarvey crouched against the bulkhead to his right. His attention was directed toward his dead comrade at the front of the room.

It was all the opening that McGarvey needed. He dove forward, catching the younger man at hip level, bowling the hijacker over, the man’s head bouncing off the carpeted deck. McGarvey had dropped his RAK, and he pulled the Steyr pistol out of his belt, cocked the hammer, and jammed the muzzle into the man’s neck just below his chin.

“What happens in ten minutes?” McGarvey demanded.

The terrorist’s eyes were bulging. He shook his head.

“Ten minutes. There’s a countdown. What’s going to happen—”

The terrorist got one hand free. He grasped for the pistol, and McGarvey fired one shot, the bullet spiraling up from beneath the man’s chin and plowing into his brain.

There was no time. The single thought crystallized in McGarvey’s head as he got to his feet, crossed the corridor, and started downstairs to the stern observation area on the main deck.

FIFTEEN

At the stern rail, Khalil cocked an ear to listen to what he thought sounded like gunfire from somewhere forward and above. But he wasn’t sure. Although the ship’s engines were silent, the wind howling around the superstructure was almost as loud as a jet engine.

A full gale was developing, and he was beginning to worry about getting back to the island airport, and about the ability of their bush pilot to lift off.

He peered over the rail. Mohamed had eased the Nancy N. close enough so that the boarding ladder reached the foredeck. She rode fairly easily in the lee of the Spirit.

But time was running out.

Shaw and his wife were huddled together, and Kathleen McGarvey was holding the young woman and infant closely to conserve body heat in the sharp cold.

Pahlawan and his assistant had come up from the engine room without spotting McGarvey. Abdul Adani and his three people came up the aft stairs a minute later.

“The passengers are securely locked below,” Adani reported. “They were as so many sheep,” he added in Arabic, which drew a few chuckles from the men.

“What will happen to them?” Katy demanded.

“Why nothing at all, if your husband does not interfere with our orderly departure,” Khalil told her. He thought of the things that he would teach her once they were away from here. She would not be happy, but she would be amazed.

In addition to the one man who’d been standing lookout in Soapy’s Parlor with the dead poker players, Khalil had a force of eight operators back here, plus Mohamed aboard the Nancy N., out of the fifteen he’d started with. But every mission had its casualties. It was to be expected. And in the end, McGarvey was just one man, for whom time had just about expired.

Khalil could not remember the name of the boy he’d sent to the purser’s office and then to the bridge deck to intercept McGarvey. But there was a much better than even chance he was already dead.

He had served his purpose, as all of Allah’s soldiers of God must.

He keyed the walkie-talkie. “Achmed, it is time.”

With the boy from the purser’s office to draw him off, McGarvey would have walked into a trap in the vicinity of the Grand Salon. Khalil almost wished he could have been up there to participate in the killing. But there were other more interesting pleasures to contemplate.

Impatiently he keyed the walkie-talkie again. “Achmed, report. It is time to leave the ship.”

There was no answer.

He and Said should have dealt with McGarvey by now. The first glimmerings of doubt began to enter Khalil’s mind. He worked out in his head what McGarvey could have deduced given the information at hand and the man’s experience.

“Have you misplaced even more of your toy soldiers?” Katy asked, sweetly. “I did warn you.” She turned to the other hijackers. “Release us, and then get out of here while you still can.”

Khalil resisted the nearly overpowering urge to smash a fist into her face, to wipe away the smug Western expression he’d seen on so many other faces, especially on those of intelligence officers who thought they were coming in for the arrest when in fact they were coming to their deaths.

McGarvey knew that a trap had been set for him. He knew they would expect him to return to the Grand Salon, where he had last seen his wife.

Khalil suddenly knew. McGarvey was right here, probably within a couple of meters.

He drew his Steyr pistol, grabbed Katy away from the young woman and child, and placed the muzzle of his pistol against Katy’s temple. “Mr. McGarvey, won’t you come out and join us?” he called out over the shriek of the wind.

“Kirk, no!” Katy shouted.

“I can’t miss from here,” McGarvey said from the darkness somewhere above.

Pahlawan spotted him first, on the stern viewing area one deck up. He raised his RAK, but Khalil stopped him with a head gesture.

“Neither can I miss at this distance,” Khalil said, pulling Katy closer.

“Frankly, what do we have to lose?” McGarvey asked. “If I lay down my weapon and surrender, you will kill me and my wife. My way, we have a chance.”

“What if I give you my word that no harm will come to either of you?” Khalil countered. “We only took your wife as hostage to neutralize you. All we want is Shaw.”

“Get on your boat, just you and your men; get away from here, and I will let you live. For now. There has been enough killing tonight. These are innocent people—”

“There are no innocents,” Khalil said. “Toss the woman and child overboard,” he told Pahlawan.

“You bastard, no!” Katy cried. She tried to pull away from him, but he was much stronger than she was, and he held her very close, the muzzle of the pistol jammed into her temple.

“Don’t you do it!” McGarvey admonished.

“Watch me,” Khalil shot back.

Pahlawan pulled the young woman and child to the rail. Shaw tried to break away from his wife to go to their aid, but one of the terrorists butted him in the gut with a RAK, knocking him back.

The young woman had no idea what was going on, but she was very frightened and she tried to pull away from the bull-like hijacker. But it was no use. Pahlawan scooped her and the infant up in his arms, lifted them over the rail, and dropped them the seven or eight feet into the freezing black water.

“No!” Katy screamed.

“Next will be Mrs. Shaw,” Khalil called up to McGarvey. “Then, if need be, your wife will go into the water. After that we will hunt you down.” Khalil shrugged, as if he were merely discussing tomorrow’s weather. “It is your choice. But we will prevail.”

SIXTEEN

McGarvey raced forward along the starboard walkway out of sight of Khalil and his people, kicked off his shoes, laid the RAK on the deck, climbed over the rail, and jumped.

The water was unbelievably cold. The shock took his breath away as he plunged several feet under the surface, and he came back up sputtering. Within a few minutes anyone in the water would start to lose their ability to kick or move their arms so that they could keep afloat. A few minutes after that, hypothermia would be so advanced that the swimmer would lose consciousness. And finally their heart would stop.

The effects came much faster for someone with a small body mass, such as a young, slender woman or, worse yet, an infant.

Staying within reach of the hull, McGarvey set out for the stern of the ship, where the mother and child had gone overboard. The angle of the ship’s hard chine offered him some protection from a shooter on deck, but not from someone on the bow of the smaller boat that was attached to the Spirit’s stern by a towing bridle.

If the cruise ship had not been resting at anchor, any rescue attempt would have been futile. As it was, a fairly fast tidal current was running, only slightly counteracted by the strong northerly wind, and a vicious two-foot chop marched whitecaps down the narrow Frederick Sound.

A woman’s weak voice cried out in the darkness ten yards or so off to McGarvey’s right. It was the young mother. She had drifted away from the stern and away from the protection of the flaring hull.

He could not see her, but he struck out in the direction of her cries.

Someone shouted something in Arabic from above on the starboard lounge deck where McGarvey had left his shoes and the RAK.

Now they knew that he was in the water.

The ship still showed all her running lights, so Khalil and his men on the stern platform were at a disadvantage for seeing anyone in the water. They were lit as if onstage. McGarvey looked back over his shoulder. There were a lot of people up there. He spotted Shaw and his wife, and Katy, who had gone to them. The tallest of the terrorists was Khalil. He was giving orders to his people, some of whom were starting down the ladder that dangled onto the bow of the small fishing boat.

McGarvey considered using the Steyr pistol stuck in his belt to try for a headshot on Khalil. If he could take out the terrorist leader, perhaps the others would fold their tents and get the hell out.

But considering his precarious position, there was the very real possibility that he would miss, and the further possibility that no matter what happened, Katy, Shaw, and the former SecDef’s wife would be gunned down in retaliation for a mission spoiled by the director of Central Intelligence.

The young mother’s screams were already becoming weaker as the cold water affected her. She was crying a name, “Brian” or perhaps “baby”; it was very difficult to understand her.

One of the hijackers from the ship suddenly opened fire in the general direction of the woman’s feeble cries. The bullets peppered the water a few yards ahead and to the left of McGarvey. The poor woman did not realize that the terrorists could not see her; they were shooting in the blind. If she stopped crying, they would have no idea where she was.

They had thrown the woman and child overboard, and now they were shooting at them. What manner of animals were they?

The cold was beginning to seep into McGarvey’s bones. He could feel that his coordination was falling apart, and already he was having trouble thinking straight. He would not last long in the water.

The woman was suddenly there to his right. He could see her blond hair floating on the water. She was splashing with her hands, as if she were shooing away flies, but slowly, aimlessly.

McGarvey had nearly reached her when the yellow beam of a powerful small light slashed across the water from aft of the bow of the small fishing boat. Whoever was aboard had switched on a handheld halogen spotlight and was searching the water.

The woman looked up, desperately hoping that someone was coming to her rescue. She managed to raise her right hand in the air when the spotlight found her and stopped.

“Brian,” she cried, her voice so low as to be nothing more than a whisper.

McGarvey could see that she no longer had the infant with her. She’d probably lost her hold on the child when she’d first hit the water. At this point there was absolutely no hope for the baby.

The bastards. This fight had become personal the moment they’d manhandled Katy. But now, seeing what depths they were capable of sinking to, his resolve to hit back rose ten thousand percent.

“There she is, Mr. McGarvey,” Khalil’s voice came across the water.

The stern was in the lee of the waves, the bulk of the cruise liner creating a wind shadow of relative calm.

McGarvey was within a few strokes of the woman as she began to flail weakly, her head sinking beneath the surface. She popped back up, but just for a moment. She was on the verge of drowning.

“Come to her rescue, Mr. McGarvey,” Khalil called.

“Kirk,” Katy screamed.

One of the terrorists opened fire on the young woman.

McGarvey dove beneath the surface, and in a couple of powerful strokes came up behind the young mother, bullets splashing the water all around them. He clamped his left hand over her nose and mouth, dragged her beneath the surface, and swam directly toward the stern of the boat.

For the first few feet she fought against him, but then her body went slack. He couldn’t tell if she had lost consciousness or had simply given up the fight, given up the will to live. But with bullets smacking into the water above, he could not risk surfacing. Not until they had come under the flare of the ship’s hull.

After that he had only a vague idea about getting the woman back aboard the ship and stashing her someplace out of the wind and out of harm’s way so that he could continue his fight to save his wife.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to keep on track.

The ship’s hull loomed up in front of him like a huge black wall, and McGarvey surfaced, willing himself to stay focused. He took his hand away from the woman’s mouth and nose. She took a deep, blubbering breath and then another and another.

He held her head above water by the collar of her sodden blouse, while he tried to figure out where they’d come up. They were about thirty feet forward of the stern. He could just make out the starboard anchor chain angling away from the bow, an impossibly long way forward against the wind-driven chop. But at this point it was the only way aboard.

The woman slipped away from his grasp. He turned but she was gone. At first he thought she had lost consciousness and slipped under the water, and he dove for her. But when he came up, he heard her feeble voice already fifteen or twenty yards back the way they had come.

“Brian,” she cried. She was going back for her baby.

The hijackers at the stern heard her cries the same moment McGarvey did. The beam of the halogen spotlight from the small fishing boat stabbed the water to her left. It swept right and had her almost immediately.

She stopped and looked up into the light. “Brian?” she cried.

Someone on the stern of the cruise ship opened fire. At least half a dozen bullets slammed into the poor woman, killing her instantly, driving her riddled body beneath the whitecaps.

Even before the beam of the spotlight started a grid pattern search, centered on where the young woman went down, McGarvey had turned and headed forward toward the starboard anchor chain.

Revenge, pure, sweet, and simple, like the bright flame of a blast furnace, flared deep within his soul. Only Khalil’s death would quench the fire.

SEVENTEEN

“Is there any sign of him?” Kahlil called down to the bow of the Nancy N.

“No, just the woman. But he’s out there, I can feel it,” Zahir warned. “It’s time to leave.”

Khalil glanced at his wristwatch.

It was past their time to leave. In less than four minutes the explosives that Pahlawan and his people had placed in strategic locations deep in the ship’s bilges would automatically arm themselves. From that moment the Spirit would be a gigantic bomb waiting for a hair trigger to send her to the bottom.

According to his chief engineer almost anything could set the charges off: a stray electrical current, a radio signal from a nearby ship or an airplane passing overhead. There were safeties on the triggers. But nothing was perfect.

The moment the explosives were armed, anyone left aboard the cruise ship would be in immediate danger.

All because of one man.

“No one could survive that long in this water,” Pahlawan said. “At the very least the motherless whore is incapacitated.”

“You’d better hope he’s dead or incapacitated,” Katy said softly. She was shivering violently, in part from the cold and in part because she’d witnessed the brutal murders of the young mother and her infant son.

Khalil looked at Katy. She was still defiant, against all odds, and he found that he could almost admire her mujahideen strength and courage. She was unlike any woman he’d ever known. Fascinating and dangerous.

The sooner she was dead and her body destroyed so that it would never be found, the sooner he would breathe easy.

“Very well. We’ll start them down now,” he told Pahlawan. “Mr. Shaw first.” He leaned over the rail to Zahir. “Keep a sharp watch. I want no further surprises.”

Katy was staring intently at him, as if something had just occurred to her. “You’re speaking in English.” She looked at the other terrorists. “Why?”

Shaw stopped at the rail and turned back, a look of defiance on his face. “They’re trying to prove they’re not as stupid as we know they are.”

Khalil raised his pistol to smash the former SecDef in the head, and Katy stepped away from Karen Shaw before any of the terrorists could stop her. She grabbed Khalil’s gun hand, and pulled him around.

“Try me, you bastard,” she shouted.

Khalil looked down at her like he might have been seeing a disagreeable bug at his feet.

“You like to beat up helpless people. Kill innocent women and children,” Katy said into his face. “Try me; why don’t you?”

He reached out with his free hand and took her throat. Before he could squeeze the life out of her, she drove her knee into his groin with every ounce of her strength.

All the air left him in an explosive gasp. He released his hold on her neck and stepped back a pace. His face was red in the dim illumination of the stern observation deck. All his men watched him. Looking for a sign of weakness. Looking for a lack of resolve.

Harden your heart if you wish to avenge the sacrilege. The gates of Paradise are not for the weak of spirit.

The sharp pain deep inside his body between his hips was not as unbearable as the thought of failure.

“Now, go ahead and do your thing if it makes you feel like a man,” Katy said. There was a great deal of fear in her eyes, but even more resolve in her voice.

Before Khalil could raise his pistol, the engineer Pahlawan shoved Shaw aside and came for Katy.

“Over the side with you—” he said, when a pistol shot came from the darkness one deck above. A small black hole appeared in his forehead, and he fell back dead.

Before anyone could react, another shot came from above, the bullet ricocheting off the deck inches from where Khalil stood.

“Everyone settle down,” McGarvey’s authoritative voice called out from one deck up.

One of the terrorists broke left, trying for the protection of the overhang.

“Yu’af,” stop, McGarvey shouted in Arabic.

The man started to raise his RAK when McGarvey fired one shot, catching him in the side of his head, knocking him to the deck.

Everyone on deck stopped in his tracks.

“No one else except for Khalil need die tonight,” McGarvey said. “But everyone else must leave right now.”

To every operation came the dénouement, as the French called it, the moment at which the operation’s success or failure was assured. Beyond that point it became fruitless to try to change the inevitable outcome. In the case of failure the only option was an orderly retreat, with covering fire if possible.

From his pocket Khalil took a small electronic device — what looked like a cell phone or a television remote control — and held it up for McGarvey to see. “I push the button, and the bottom of the ship blows out. All the passengers locked below will die.” His voice was strained because of the pain in his groin.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Katy said softly, “you’re nuts.”

“Dedicated,” Khalil corrected her. “What do you say, Mr. McGarvey: the lives of the passengers, including your wife, for the safe passage off this ship for myself, my operators, and Secretary Shaw?”

“No hostages. Get off this ship now.”

“You won’t risk the lives of the passengers—”

McGarvey fired two shots in rapid succession, one buzzing off the deck a few inches to Khalil’s left, the other to his right. “Don’t tempt me, because I sincerely want to meet you again. Soon.”

Khalil didn’t think the CIA director had it in him, but McGarvey had to play it up for the sake of his wife, who was an extraordinary woman. “Very well,” Khalil said, “it is a fair trade, for now. But you’re right; we will meet again, and I will kill you.”

“Go.”

Khalil turned to Katy and gave her a polite nod. “You will look good in black, madam.”

He turned and climbed down the boarding ladder to the bow of the Nancy N., where he brushed aside Zahir’s helping hand. “As soon as the rest of our people are aboard, get us out of here,” he said, and he made his way aft and below.

EIGHTEEN

McGarvey appeared on the aft observation platform at the same moment the small fishing boat peeled away from the Spirit, and Katy flew into his arms. She shivered almost uncontrollably from the cold, from the horror she had witnessed, and now from the sudden letdown.

“I thought they had killed you in the water,” she sobbed. “My God, I didn’t know how I could go on.”

For several long seconds McGarvey stared at the retreating fishing boat. He wouldn’t put it past them to circle around and attack again. They had come for Shaw, and they had not only left without him, but they had also lost a significant number of their people. But he felt as if he had failed here tonight, because a lot of the passengers and probably most of the crew had been gunned down in cold blood.

Worst of all was the young mother and her infant son. The woman’s screams would never leave that dark corner of his brain where his most terrible memories lived.

“Are you okay, Katy?” McGarvey asked, afraid to give voice to his worst fear. “Is the baby all right?”

“I think so,” she said, looking up at him in wide-eyed wonderment.

“You have to be strong for just a little while longer,” he told her. “I have to go below and get the passengers out.”

“What can we do?” Donald Shaw asked. He was too old for this, and his injuries were slowing him down, but he was tough and he hadn’t given up.

“Find the controls for the lifeboats, pull off as many of the covers as you can, and get ready to abandon ship.”

Shaw’s lips compressed to a thin line. “You think he’s going to push the button?”

“Yes,” McGarvey said. He gave his wife a last, reassuring look, then turned and headed belowdecks, not sure how much time remained. But the count on the terrorist’s wristwatch in the radio shack was at zero. Whatever was going to happen would happen at any moment.

Compromising with the terrorists, allowing them to leave the cruise ship alive, had gone against nearly every fiber of McGarvey’s being. He’d told himself that Khalil would push the button once he was in the clear, but in the delay perhaps some of the passengers’ lives could be saved. Had he put a bullet into Khalil’s brain there was a very good possibility the man would have pushed the button as his last dying act.

Time was all they needed. Just a few minutes … five minutes and he would have the passengers topside.

Provided he could find them.

McGarvey stood on the catwalk at the head of the stairs that led down to the engine room, the big diesels quiet now. Only the auxiliary generators one compartment forward were still operating, supplying electrical power to the ship.

But the engine room, where he thought the passengers might have been locked up, was empty except for the bodies of at least three of the legitimate crew.

Adding these to the passengers and crew the terrorists had killed in the Grand Salon, plus those on the bridge and in the radio room, and probably in the galley and crew’s quarters, there were about fifty corpses littering the ship. In addition, there were the mother and her infant son in the water.

That left at least one hundred passengers and crew members still unaccounted for, and there weren’t that many spaces aboard the Spirit that were large enough to accommodate them all. The Grand Salon, the Klondike Dining Room, here in the engine room. Or the crew’s mess, which was probably somewhere forward, most likely below the galley.

McGarvey turned. Standing on the catwalk above the engine room, he was two levels below the main deck. He raced back the way he had come, taking the stairs two at a time to the next deck up. Emerging from the stairwell, he found himself in a long, dimly lit, narrow corridor that ran forward at least one-third the length of the ship, ending at a T intersection. Doors along the length of the corridor indicated that it was probably the crew’s quarters.

Superconscious of the ticking clock, he raced past them to the intersection where the corridor split left and right. He hesitated for only a moment before he took the right passageway The bulkheads here were plain painted steel with firefighting equipment in alcoves, and the overhead was laced with tubing and electrical conduits, all marked with stenciled legends, much the same as aboard a naval vessel.

The corridor jogged left: then thirty feet farther, it opened to a broad intersection with stairs leading up, and corridors branching forward and port. Double steel doors marked Crew’s Mess were across from the stairs. A steel chain was looped around the door handles and secured with a stout padlock.

McGarvey banged on the door with the butt of his pistol. “Is anyone in there?”

He thought he heard a sound, as if someone were standing just on the other side of the door.

“The hijackers are gone. My name is McGarvey. I’m a friend.”

“We’re here,” a man called from within. “I’m Third Officer Mark Hansen. Both doors seemed to be jammed.”

“This one’s chained and padlocked. How many are you?”

“One hundred eighteen, passengers and crew. Some of them are in bad shape.”

“Hold on, Mr. Hansen, I’m going to get you out of there. But we have to get to the lifeboats as quickly as possible. Get your people organized. And see if you can find some flashlights, life jackets, anything else you can use.”

“Yes, sir.”

McGarvey had one bullet left in the Steyr, but even a 9mm round would have little or no effect on the padlock.

He stuffed the pistol in his belt, then turned and hurried back the way he had come, to the first fire-emergency alcove. He broke the glass with his elbow, grabbed the fire ax from its brackets, and rushed back to the crew’s mess.

A thump somewhere forward sounded as if the ship had bumped into something. But they were resting at anchor, and the engines were shut down.

Unless a log or some other bit of heavy flotsam had come down on the current and hit the hull.

McGarvey held his breath waiting. A second later another thump came from somewhere deep within the bowels of the ship, followed by a third and fourth. The bastard had triggered the explosives after all.

He swung the ax, sparks flying from the chain holding the doors. He swung again and again, trying to hit the same link.

Already the ship was beginning to sink by the bow, and settle slightly to port.

He swung again, and the ax handle shattered, the heavy steel blade flying off down the corridor. The chain, though damaged, was still intact.

“Hold on, Mr. Hansen, we’re almost there,” McGarvey shouted. He sprinted back down the corridor toward the engine room, the deck steadily canting forward and to the left.

The next fire-equipment alcove was nearly all the way aft. He busted the glass, this time cutting a good-sized gash in his elbow, grabbed the fire ax from its bracket, and headed back to the crew’s mess in a dead run. Downhill now.

He could hear a lot of water rushing into the ship one deck below, and even before he attacked the chain again, water appeared just a few feet down the stairwell.

This time the chain parted on the second blow. He tossed the ax aside, freed the latches, and yanked the doors open.

A young man in the uniform of a ship’s officer, his hair disheveled, dried blood on the side of his head, stood there, a grim but determined expression on his narrow features. The room was crammed with people, many of them on the verge of panic, but he and several other officers and crewmen had gotten things well in hand.

“We’re sinking,” the officer said.

“That’s right, Mr. Hansen. Get your people out of here to the starboard deck. Someone’s getting the lifeboats ready.”

“Somebody will have to stay behind to see to the stragglers.”

“I will,” McGarvey said. “Now get the hell out of here!”

Hansen handed him a big flashlight. “Someone has tampered with the emergency lights in here,” he said. “All right, folks, step smartly now,” he shouted to the passengers. “You remember your abandon ship drill. Tonight it’ll be the starboard boats.” He gave McGarvey a last glance. “Good luck, sir.”

“I’ll be right behind you,” McGarvey said.

The deck was down by the bow so steeply that many of the older passengers had to be helped, lest they lose their balance and fall. Third Officer Hansen had his remaining crew people well organized so that the evacuation out of the crew’s mess, across the corridor, and up the stairs to the starboard deck proceeded rapidly. No one protested, and best of all there was very little panic, even when water spilled out of the stairwell and began to cover the deck ankle deep.

A big crash somewhere aft was followed immediately by the loss of their electricity. All the lights went out, plunging them into total darkness.

A woman screamed in abject terror, and several people clutched at McGarvey until he got his flashlight on. There were emergency lights in the stairwell leading up, and two of the crewmen with flashlights were out in the corridor directing the passengers through what had rapidly become knee-deep water.

“Calm down!” McGarvey shouted sternly. “There’s plenty of time to get to the lifeboats. Just keep moving.”

He remained by the doors, herding the people out of the crew’s mess and into the waiting hands of the crewmen in the corridor, who handed them off in turn to men on the stairs, like a bucket brigade, only with humans instead of water.

The ship seemed to come back upright on her keel as the downward angle on her bow increased. There hadn’t been time to manually close the watertight doors throughout the ship, and apparently the terrorists had sabotaged the automatic controls. In addition to kidnapping Shaw, they’d wanted to kill all the passengers because they could have acted as witnesses. The simplest, most economical way to do that was to lock them belowdecks and sink the ship.

Not this time, McGarvey told himself. This was not going to be another 9/11.

The water was chest deep by the time McGarvey handed the last passenger, a man in his early fifties, out to the waiting crewmen; they immediately hustled him upstairs.

A tremendous crash from somewhere aft, probably in the engine room, shook the entire ship as if she were ready to come apart at the seams.

The angle on the bow increased even faster.

“Come on!” the last crewman on the stairs called back, desperately. “She’s going.”

“Right behind you!” McGarvey shouted. He stopped long enough to sweep the beam of his flashlight around the almost completely submerged crew’s mess for any sign of life.

There was no one. He turned and started for the stairs when he heard a faint cry from behind, which was immediately cut off when the level of the water reached the top of the door frame, leaving less than two feet of airspace below the ceiling.

He had to fight his way back, duck under the water, and come up inside the crew’s mess.

“Who’s here?” he shouted, swinging the beam of his flashlight across the surface of the water, which was choked with floating debris.

“Help me,” an old woman cried off to the right.

McGarvey found her in the beam of his flashlight, clinging to a lifejacket, her white hair plastered to her head, her eyes wide with fright. He reached her in a couple of strokes, grabbed her roughly by the back of her dress, and hauled her back to the doorway as the last of the airspace above their heads disappeared.

There was no time to be kind or considerate. The ship was going down right now, and either she would survive the short swim across the corridor and up the stairs to the surface of the water or McGarvey figured he would probably drown with her.

He’d lost his flashlight, and the corridor was in total darkness until he started up the stairwell, when he saw several lights above.

He redoubled his efforts, and seconds later a pair of waiting crewmen dragged him and the old woman out on the starboard main deck, now awash.

They were helped across to the last lifeboat, which immediately backed away from the rapidly sinking cruise ship. Six men manning the oars pulled hard to get them away from the side of the ship that was threatening to roll.

Someone put a blanket over McGarvey’s shoulders, and Katy suddenly was there in his arms. “That’s twice tonight I thought I’d lost you.”

“Not a chance,” McGarvey said.

The old woman he’d pulled out of the crew’s mess at the last reached over, patted his hand, then gave Katy a weak smile. “Hold on to him, sweetie; otherwise I’ll grab him.”

Everyone within earshot chuckled.

“It’s a deal,” Kathleen said.

“She’s going,” someone said in awe.

Everyone watched in silence as the Spirit of ’98 slipped beneath the black surface of the water — everyone except McGarvey, whose gray-green eyes were turned toward the south, the direction in which the small fishing boat had disappeared into the night.

THE MISSION

Muhamed Abdallah’s first view of the wall of mountains rising up behind Denver came that night at sunset, and he pressed the fingers of his right hand against the window glass as if he could reach out and touch the snow-capped peaks that seemed so near and yet so distant.

His bus approached from the east on 1-70 after crossing the otherworldly, barren rolling hills of Kansas in the hot afternoon. He had dozed fitfully, waking often in a cold sweat, seeing the Israeli tank that killed his uncle Rafiq, seeing the blood erupting from his body as the heavy-caliber machine-gun bullets tore into his flesh.

On that day the fourteen-year-old Muhamed became a man in the family. Although he did not abandon his studies as his mother feared he would, he did leave her side. The tank attack had sealed his future with more finality than had his inability to secure a student visa to study abroad.

As a young man fighting the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Muhamed had dreamed of the mountains of Afghanistan where the mujahideen — the real soldiers of God — were trained by Osama bin Laden himself. He never got there. But seeing the American Rockies was almost as inspiring. In some ways they were even more inspiring than the Hindu Kush, because it was here that he would martyr himself for the greater glory of Allah.

It was a weekday and late, but traffic on the interstate was busy, especially the closer they got into the city, so it was midnight by the time they pulled into the large, modern Greyhound Bus depot on Nineteenth Street within blocks of the state capitol building.

Denver was different than Oklahoma City; the streets were narrower here, the air cooler and drier and the ever-present Front Range loomed like a wall on the horizon.

Muhamed carried only a small packsack with a change of socks and underwear, a clean shirt, and his toothbrush and tooth powder, plus the manila envelope with his papers and money. When he got off the bus, he did exactly as he had been instructed. He walked directly through the brightly lit terminal and out onto the street, where he turned left. One block later a dark blue Toyota SUV with tinted windows pulled up to the curb and the back door opened.

It was as if he were drifting through a dreamscape, not the nightmare of his uncle, but rather a waking dream in which the entire world seemed to be in soft focus. All the colors were pastels; all the sounds, even the bass thump of a stereo system in a passing car, were like sweet music; the air was perfume, the breeze a zephyr, the clouds streaming off the mountaintops like the flowing hair of angels.

Muhamed was a happy boy. He was a soldier of God, one among the truly blessed, and soon his would be the kingdom of Paradise. His father would be proud of him, and his mother would weep tears of joy for his passing.

He climbed in the backseat of the Toyota, and the man in the front passenger seat reached back, closed the door, and stared at him as if he was seeing a god. The driver immediately took off, but his eyes kept darting to Muhamed’s image in the rearview mirror, with the same look of respect as the man in the passenger seat.

When Muhamed didn’t speak, the passenger cleared his throat. “Welcome to America. We are proud to be of assistance.”

He spoke Egyptian Arabic, the most common dialect, and one understood by just about any Arabic speaker. It was flowery by Western standards, but there was a comfort in the rhythms of the ancient language.

“Thank you. How far must thou drive to reach Fort Collins?”

“About one hour,” the passenger said. He and the driver were members of the London-based Advice and Reformation Committee that had been created by Osama bin Laden to supposedly further al-Quaida’s goal of protecting the holy shrines at Mecca and Medina. The real reason for its existence was to raise money for al-Quaida operations worldwide.

These two men were the fund-raisers and bureaucrats of the organization, not the genuine article like Muhamed, who had actually done battle against the Zionists on the streets of Nablus and in Hell’s Bootcamp. And certainly they were not of the material that martyrs were made of.

Muhamed was boss as long as he was here. No matter want he wanted, his word was law. Their instructions were to obey his every command without a single question, without hesitation, no matter how young he was.

“We have a trailer in the hills above the town, near a place called the Horsetooth Reservoir—”

“I would first like to see the target, and then my equipment. Has it arrived?”

The passenger, Seyoum Noufal, like the driver, Mustafa Maghawri, was a man in his late thirties. He’d led a reasonably comfortable life in Cairo as a small-time electrical contractor until he began to feel guilty about the great jihad that was passing him by. Allah’s righteous work was being done in America. Besides, Seyoum’s wife was a shrew, his business was failing, and his twenty-year-old Chevrolet Citation was disintegrating.

The past three years in the United States, even during the post-9/11 paranoia, had been comfortable. Until now. What the young martyr was suggesting was dangerous. Police were profiling suspects even though they denied doing so. Three Arab males driving around Fort Collins, Colorado, in the middle of the night would generate some interest. If they were stopped, they would be hard-pressed to explain what they were doing.

But the young man’s orders were to be obeyed.

Seyoum nodded for Mustafa to do as they were told, and they headed for 1-25 North, the sky clearing of smog as they got out of Denver, horizon to horizon filled with stars that had been named millennia ago by Arab astronomers.

Muhamed tightly gripped his pack as the lights of the big city fell behind, and traffic on the highway thinned out. There was a darkness here that was frightening, and yet he knew that the light was waiting for him.

No more suffering. No more struggle or uncertainty. And best of all, his family would be taken care of.

He smiled, his young face that of an angel at peace, and he did not notice Seyoum watching from the front seat, his expression a mixture of fear and awe.