“My wife is missing,” Evered said, the heavy Texas accent not surprising LeSeur.


“For how long?”


“She didn’t come back to the cabin last night. I want the ship searched.”


LeSeur quickly arranged his face into its most sympathetic expression. “I’m very sorry to hear that, Mr. Evered. We’ll do all we can. May I ask a few questions?”


Evered shook his head. “No time for questions. I’ve waited too long as it is. You need to organize a search!”


“Mr. Evered, it’ll help immeasurably if I could just gather a little information first. Please sit down.”


Evered hesitated a moment. Then he took a seat on the edge of the bed, drumming his fingers on his knees.


LeSeur sat down in a nearby armchair and removed a notebook. He had always found it helped if he took notes—it seemed to calm people. “Your wife’s name?”


“Charlene.” “When did you last see her?”


“About ten-thirty last night. Maybe eleven.”


“Where?”


“Here, in our cabin.”


“Did she go out?”


“Yes.” A hesitation.


“Where was she heading?”


“I can’t rightly say.”


“She didn’t mention that she wanted to go shopping, or to the casino, something like that?”


Another hesitation. “Well, see, we had a bit of an argument.”


LeSeur nodded. So that’s how it was.

“Has this ever happened before, Mr. Evered?”


“Has what ever happened before?”


“Your wife leaving after an argument.”


The man laughed bitterly. “Hell yes. Doesn’t it happen to everybody?”


It had never happened to LeSeur, but the first officer chose not to mention this. “Has she stayed away overnight before?”


“No, never. She always comes back eventually, tail between her legs. That’s why I called.” He swiped his brow with a handkerchief. “And now I think you better get going with that search.”

LeSeur knew he had to delicately get the passenger’s thoughts away from a search. Fact was, the Britannia was too large to be searched completely. And even if they wanted to, they didn’t have the manpower to undertake one: passengers had no idea just how small the security staff really was on an ocean liner.

“Pardon my asking, Mr. Evered,” he said as gently as he could, “but are you and your wife . . . generally on good terms?”


“What the hell’s that got to do with my wife missing?” the man flared up, almost rising off the bed.


“We have to consider all the possibilities, Mr. Evered. She might be sitting in a lounge somewhere, still angry.”


“That’s what I’m talking about—go find her!”

“We’ll do that. We’ll start by paging her on the public address system.” LeSeur already had a pretty good idea of how things stood. The couple had hit middle age, were having trouble in their marriage, and took the crossing to try to put some magic back into life. Maybe the husband been caught boning someone at the office, or she herself had been tempted by a little afternoon delight with a neighbor. So they went on a romantic ocean voyage to patch things up, and instead of finding the magic ended up fighting their way across the Atlantic.

Evered frowned again. “It was just an argument, nothing serious. She’s never stayed out all night. Damn it, you need to get your people together and start a—”


“Mr. Evered,” LeSeur interrupted smoothly, “I wonder if you’d mind my saying something? To reassure you.”


“What?”

“I’ve been working aboard passenger ships for many years now. I see this kind of thing all the time. A couple quarrels, one steps out. It isn’t like your wife just walked out of your house, Mr. Evered. This is theBritannia , the largest passenger ship afloat. There are hundreds, thousands of things on board that could have distracted your wife. Perhaps she’s in one of the casinos—they’re open all night, you know. Maybe she’s in the spa. Or shopping. Perhaps she stopped someplace to rest her feet, then fell asleep—there are two dozen lounges on board. Or perhaps she ran into somebody she knew; a woman, perhaps, or . . .”

LeSeur let his voice trail off decorously, but he knew the meaning was clear.


“Or what? Are you implying that my wife might’ve met another man?” Evered rose from the bed in a sad, middle-aged fury.

LeSeur stood as well and smiled disarmingly. “Mr. Evered, you misunderstood me. I certainly didn’t mean to imply anything of the sort. It’s just that I’ve seen this happen a hundred times before, and it always works out in the end. Always. Your wife is just out enjoying herself. We’ll make a few announcements over the PA system and ask her to contact us or you. I guarantee you she’ll be back. Tell you what: why don’t you order breakfast for two, served en suite? I’ll bet you anything she’ll be here before it arrives. I’ll send up a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, on the house.”

Evered was breathing heavily, making an effort to control himself.

“In the meantime, have you got a picture of your wife I could borrow? We have your ID photos from embarkation, of course, but it always helps to have more than one image. I’ll circulate them among our security staff, so they can keep an eye out.”

Evered turned away, walked into the bathroom. LeSeur heard a zipper opening, the sound of shuffling and rummaging. A minute later Evered emerged again, a photo in his hand.


“There’s nothing to worry about, Mr. Evered. The

Britannia

is probably one of the safest environments in the world.”


The man glared back at him. “You better damn well be right.”

LeSeur forced a smile. “Now, order that breakfast for two. And have a good day.” He let himself out of the stateroom.


In the hall, he paused to examine the photo. To his surprise, he found that Ms. Evered was something of a babe. Not outrageously stunning, of course, but he wouldn’t throw her out of bed: a dozen years younger than her husband, thin and blonde and stacked and wearing a two-piece swimsuit. Now he was more certain what had happened: the missus, pissed off, had met someone and was shacked up with him. He shook his head. These luxury liners were like one big floating orgy. Something happened to people when they got away from land—they started acting like a bunch of sybarites. If Mr. Evered knew what was good for him, he’d go out and do the same: there were plenty of rich widows aboard . . .

LeSeur chuckled quietly at the thought. Then he pocketed the picture. He’d be sure to send it down to security: after all, Kemper and his boys were connoisseurs of hot-looking women, and no doubt they’d appreciate an eyeful of the curvaceous Ms. Evered.

19

THE CHIEF OF SECURITY’S OFFICE WAS IN THE CENTRAL SECURITY complex, a tangle of low-ceilinged rooms on Deck A, at theBritannia ’s waterline. Asking directions, Pendergast passed first a manned checkpoint, then a series of holding cells, a locker room and showers, and then a large circular room filled with dozens of closed-circuit televisions cycling through hundreds, maybe thousands, of surveillance cameras sprinkled about the ship. Three bored security officers kept a listless eye on the walls of flat-panel screens. Beyond that stood a closed, faux-wood door markedKemper . The ship’s legendary brightwork, Pendergast noticed, did not extend belowdecks.

He knocked.


“Enter,” came a voice.

Pendergast stepped inside, closing the door behind him. Patrick Kemper was behind his desk, ear to a telephone. He was a short, burly man with a large, heavy head, thick knotty ears, a brown hairpiece, and a perpetual put-upon expression stamped on his features. His office was remarkably bare: other than a framed picture of theBritannia and some internal North Star promotional posters, there were hardly any furnishings or decoration. The clock on the wall behind Kemper read twelve noon exactly.

Kemper put down the phone. “Have a seat.”


“Thank you.” Pendergast sat in one of the two unpadded seats facing the desk. “You asked to see me?”


Kemper’s put-upon expression deepened. “Not exactly. Hentoff requested it.”


Pendergast winced at the accent. “So the casino manager has agreed to my little proposal? Excellent. I’ll be most happy to return the favor tonight, when the card counters turn out for their evening’s work.”


“You work out those details with Hentoff.”


“How kind.”


Kemper sighed. “I have a lot on my plate at the moment. So I hope we can keep this brief. What, exactly, do you need?”


“Access to the ship’s central safe.” Abruptly, the security chief’s weary attitude evaporated. “No frigging way.”


“Ah—and here I was under the misapprehension we had an agreement.”


Kemper’s look changed to disbelief. “Passengers are not authorized to enter the vault, much less snoop around in it.”

Pendergast’s reply, when it came, was mild. “It’s not hard to imagine what might happen to a security director who presided over a million-pound loss in the casinos on a mere seven-day crossing. Hentoff may be in charge of the casinos, but when it comes to security, the, ah,chip stops with you.”

Several moments passed in which the two men looked at each other. Then Kemper licked his lips. “Only the first officer, the staff captain, and the commodore have access to the vault,” he said in a low voice.


“Then I suggest you phone the officer of your choice.”

Kemper continued to stare at Pendergast for another minute. At last—without taking his eyes off him—he picked up the phone and dialed. A brief, murmured conversation ensued. When Kemper put down the phone, the expression on his face had not quite cleared. “The first officer will meet us there now.”

It was the work of five minutes to make their way to the vault, located one level below on Deck B, in a heavily reinforced section of the ship that also housed the master guidance control system and the server farms controlling theBritannia ’s internal network. Here, below the waterline, the vibration of the diesels was more pronounced. The first officer was already waiting at the security station, looking every inch a ship’s commander with his silver hair and smart uniform.

“This is Mr. Pendergast,” Kemper said, a distinct lack of grace in his voice.


LeSeur nodded. “We met last night. At Roger Mayles’s table.”

Pendergast smiled thinly. “My reputation precedes me, thanks to the good Mr. Mayles. This is the situation, gentlemen: a client has engaged me to find an object that was stolen from him. I know three things about this object: it is a unique Tibetan artifact; it is somewhere on this ship; and its current owner—who, by the way, is also on the ship—murdered a man to obtain it.”

He patted the breast pocket of his suit jacket. “My list of suspects contains three names of passengers who, according to Mr. Mayles, consigned items to the ship’s vault. I would like to give those items a cursory inspection, if you please.”

“Why?” Kemper asked. “Each suite is equipped with its own safe. If what you say is really true, the thief wouldn’t stash the thing there.”


“The object is over four feet long. That makes it too large for in-room safes, other than the ones in the very largest suites.”


LeSeur frowned. “Let’s make this brief. Mr. Pendergast: you can look, but you are not to touch. Mr. Kemper, get one of your men in here, please. I’d like three pairs of eyes to witness this.”

They passed the security station and went down a short corridor, which dead-ended in an unmarked door. The first officer reached into his pocket, pulled out a key on a steel chain, and unlocked the door. Kemper swung it open and they entered.

Although the room beyond was small, the rear wall was completely taken up by a massive circular vault door of polished steel. LeSeur waited while one of the guards from the security station entered the room. Then, extracting another key from his pocket, he inserted it into a lock in the vault door. This was followed by an identity card slipped into a card reader to one side of the safe. Next, LeSeur pressed his palm into a hand geometry scanner beside the card slot. There was a metallicthunk and a red light above the door went on.

LeSeur walked to a large combination dial set into the far side of the vault door. Shielding the dial from the other occupants of the room, he spun it left and right several times. The light above the door turned green; the first officer turned a wheel set in its center, then pulled it toward him, and the massive door swung open.

The interior was illuminated in a watery green light. Beyond the door lay a chamber about twelve feet square. The rear part of the vault was secured by a steel curtain, behind which lay numerous metal boxes, racked in sliding frames, shoulder high. The two facing walls were covered in safe doors, some quite large, their flush front panels gleaming dully in the pale light. Each had a key slot in its center, with a number etched into the steel directly above.

“A safe of safes,” said Pendergast. “Most impressive.”


“Right,” said LeSeur. “Who are we looking for?”

Pendergast pulled the sheet out of his pocket. “The first is Edward Robert Smecker, Lord Cliveburgh.” He paused for a second, reading. “It seems that once his ancestral fortune was exhausted, he resorted to creative ways to make ends meet. Hangs out with the jet set, makes the rounds of Monaco, St. Tropez, Capri, and the Costa Smeralda. Jewelry tends to disappear when he’s around. None of the jewelry he supposedly stole was ever recovered, and he’s beaten every rap. It is assumed he recuts the gems and melts down the metal for bullion.”

The first officer turned to a terminal in the near wall, typed briefly on its keyboard. “That would be number 236.” He walked over to a small safe. “This isn’t big enough for the object you mention.”


“Perhaps the object’s profile can be reduced in size by cutting or folding. If you’d be so good as to open it?”


With an almost imperceptible tightening of the lips, LeSeur inserted a key and turned it. The door swung open to reveal a large aluminum suitcase with a dial lock.

“Interesting,” Pendergast said. He prowled around the open door for a moment, rather catlike himself. Then he reached out and, with utmost delicacy, began turning the dials, one after the other, with a long, spidery finger.

“Just a minute!” Kemper cried. “I told you, touch

nothing

—”


“Ah!” Pendergast raised the lid on the suitcase. Inside were many bricks of aluminum foil and cellophane wrap, each coated with a thick layer of wax.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Kemper. “I hope this isn’t what it looks like.” He slipped a penknife out of his pocket, stabbed it through the layers of wax and foil, and drew it down, revealing a crusty white powder. He reached in, dabbed a fingertip into the powder, took a taste.

“Cocaine,” he said.


“It would appear,” Pendergast murmured, “our good Lord Cliveburgh has started a new and even more lucrative business venture.”


“What do we do?” said LeSeur, staring at the white powder.

“Nothing, for now,” said Kemper, shutting the suitcase and spinning the dial. “Believe me, this isn’t going anywhere. We’ll radio ahead to U.S. Customs. When we come into port, Cliveburgh will collect his trunk and they’ll nail him quayside with the stuff—offthe ship.”

“Very well,” said LeSeur. “But how will we explain that we opened—?”


“We don’t need to,” said Kemper grimly. “Leave the details me.”


“What a stroke of luck,” said Pendergast cheerfully, as the gloom deepened in the room. “It seems rather fortunate I came along!”


No one else seemed to share his view in this matter.


“Next on my list is the movie star, Claude Dallas.”


LeSeur noticed that Kemper had begun to sweat. If this ever got out . . . He turned to the terminal without bringing the thought to completion. “Number 822.”


They approached a larger vault. “Promising,” murmured Pendergast.


LeSeur opened it with his key. Inside were several old steamer trunks, covered with stickers for such destinations as Rio de Janeiro, Phuket, and Goa. The hasps were protected by fist-sized padlocks.


“Hmm,” Pendergast said. He bent before the trunk, massaging his chin curiously.


“Mr. Pendergast,” the security chief said in a warning tone.


Pendergast reached out two lean hands, one of which held a tiny, gleaming tool; he massaged the lock, turning it between his fingers. It sprang open with a click.


“Mr. Dallas should have this lock replaced,” he said. And before Kemper or LeSeur could object, he swung it away, opened the hasp, and raised the lid.


A rubber suit lay on top, along with some braided horsehair whips, chains, manacles, ropes, and various leather and iron devices of an obscure nature.

“How curious,” said Pendergast, reaching in. This time LeSeur said nothing as Pendergast pulled out a Lycra Superman cape and suit, with the crotch cut out. He examined it carefully, plucked something from the shoulder, placed it in a test tube that seemed to appear from nowhere and disappear into nowhere, and then gently laid the garment back down. “I’m not sure it’s necessary to check Mr. Dallas’s other boxes.”


“It is certainlynot necessary,” said LeSeur dryly.

“And last,” Pendergast said, “is Felix Strage, chairman of the Greek and Roman department at the Met. He is returning from a rather unpleasant trip to Italy, where he was questioned by the Italian authorities over some purchases his museum made back in the 1980s of illegally acquired antiquities.”

LeSeur gave Pendergast a long, hard look. Then he turned back to the keyboard. “Number 597,” he said. “Before I open the safe, let’s get one thing straight. Keep your hands off. Mr. Wadle here will do the handling.” He nodded to the guard. “If you open any of the contents, this fact-finding mission of yours will end abruptly and prematurely. Understood?”

“Perfectly,” the agent replied good-naturedly.

LeSeur moved to a safe on the lowest tier of the right wall, one of the largest in the entire vault. He paused, fishing for a different key. Then he knelt, unlocked the steel door, and pulled it open. Inside were three massive, squat wooden crates. The safe was quite deep, and the light was too dim to make the objects out with any success.

Pendergast stared at the crates a moment, motionless. He turned and slipped a screwdriver out of his pocket. “Mr. Wadle?”


The security guard looked with uncertainty at Kemper, who nodded curtly.

Wadle took the screwdriver and unscrewed the side of the crate—eight screws in all—and then removed it. Inside was bubble wrap and foam-in-place. He eased aside the bubble wrap and removed two blocks of foam to reveal the side of a Greek vase.

Pendergast slipped a penlight from his pocket and shined it into the open crate. “Hmm. We seem to have a calyx-crater. Undoubtedly genuine. It seems our Dr. Strage is up to his old tricks, smuggling more antiquities for his museum.” He straightened up, replacing the penlight in his pocket. He stepped back from the wall of safes. “Thank you for your time and patience, gentlemen.”

LeSeur nodded. Kemper said nothing.


“And now, forgive me if I leave in haste.” And with that he bowed, turned, and stepped out of the vault.


In the elevator, ascending to Deck 12, Pendergast paused to remove the list from his pocket. He drew a line through Lord Cliveburgh and another through Dallas. He did not draw a line through Strage.


20


CONSTANCE GREENE WALKED DOWN THE ELEGANT CORRIDOR, Marya Kazulin at her side. She felt an unaccustomed thrill—the thrill of mystery, deceit, and investigation.


“The uniform fits you perfectly,” Kazulin whispered in her thick accent.


“Thank you for bringing it to my suite.” “Is nothing. Uniforms are the only thing we have in plenty. Except for dirty laundry maybe.”


“I’m unfamiliar with this type of shoe.”


“Work shoes. The kind that nurses wear. They have a soft sole, like sneakers.”


“Sneakers?”

“Is that not the word?” Marya frowned. “Now remember, as cabin steward you are not to speak to passengers except when in their cabins on business. Do not make eye contact with anyone we pass. Step to one side and look down.”

“Understood.”

Marya led the way around a corner, then through an unmarked hatchway. Beyond lay a linen room and a bank of two service elevators. Marya walked up to the elevators, pressed the down button. “Who is it you wish to speak to?”

“The people who clean the large suites, the duplexes and triplexes.”


“They are the ones who speak better English. Like me.”


The elevator doors slid open and they entered. “Some of the workers don’t speak English?” Constance asked.


Marya pressed the button for Deck C and the elevator began to descend. “Most of the crew speak no English. The company likes it better that way.”


“Cheaper labor?”


“Yes. Also, if we cannot speak to each other, we cannot form union. Cannot protest work conditions.”


“What’s wrong with the work conditions?”

“You shall see for yourself, Ms. Greene. Now, you must be very careful. If you are caught, I will be fired and put off ship in New York. You must pretend to be foreign, speak broken English. We must find you a language nobody else speaks so you will not be questioned. Do you have any language other than English?”

“Yes. Italian, French, Latin, Greek, German—”


Marya laughed, genuinely this time. “Stop. I think no Germans in crew. You will be German.”

The doors slipped open onto Deck C and they stepped out. The difference between the passenger decks and the service decks was apparent immediately. There was no carpeting on the floor, artwork on the walls, or brightwork trim. It looked more like a hospital corridor, a claustrophobic landscape of metal and linoleum. Fluorescent tubes, hidden behind recessed ceiling panels, threw a harsh light over the scene. The air was stuffy and uncomfortably warm, freighted with numerous scents: cooked fish, fabric softener, machine oil. The deep thrum of the diesel engines was far more pronounced here. Crew members, some in uniform, some in T-shirts or dirty sweats, bustled past, intent on their duties. Marya led the way down the narrow corridor. Numbered, windowless doors of imitation wood grain lined both sides. “This is dormitory deck,” Marya explained in a low voice. “Women in my bunk do some large cabins, you speak with them. We say you are friend I met in laundry. Remember, you are German and your English is not good.”

“I’ll remember.”


“We need reason why you ask questions.”


Constance thought a moment. “What if I say I do the smaller rooms and want to better my position?”


“Okay. But do not be too eager—people here will stab you in back for a job with better tips.”


“Understood.”


Marya turned down another corridor, then stopped before a door. “This my room,” she said. “Ready?”


Constance nodded. Marya took a deep breath, then opened the door.

The room beyond was as small as a prison cell, perhaps fourteen feet by ten. Six narrow lockers were set into the far wall. There were no chairs or tables, no adjoining bath. The walls to the left and right were occupied entirely by spartan bunks, set three high. At the head of each bunk was a small shelf, topped by a light. As Constance looked around, she noticed that each of these shelves was filled with books, photos of loved ones, dried flowers, magazines—a small, sad imprint of the individual who occupied the bunk.

“There are

six

of you in here?” she asked incredulously.


Marya nodded.


“I had no idea conditions were so cramped.”


“This nothing. You should see Deck E, where the NPC staff sleep.”


“NPC?”

“No Passenger Contact. Crew who do laundry, wash engine rooms, prepare food.” Marya shook her head. “Like prison. They no see daylight, no breathe fresh air, for three, four months maybe. Work six days week, ten hours a day. Pay is twenty to forty dollars a day.”

“But that’s less than minimum wage!”


“Minimum wage where? We are nowhere—in middle of sea. No wage law here. Ship registered in Liberia.” She looked around. “My bunkmates in mess already. We find them there.”

She traced a circuitous path through the narrow, sweat-fragrant corridors, Constance close behind. The crew dining area was located amidships, a large, low-ceilinged room. Crew members, all in uniform, sat at long cafeteria-style tables, heads bent over their plates. As they took their places in the buffet line, Constance looked around, shocked at the plainness of the room—so very different from the opulent dining rooms and grand salons the passengers enjoyed.


“It’s so quiet,” she said. “Why aren’t people talking?”

“Everyone tired. Also, everyone upset about Juanita. Maid who went crazy.”


“Crazy? What happened?”


She shook her head. “Is not uncommon, except it usually happen at end of long tour. Juanita go crazy . . . rip out own eyes.”


“Good God. Did you know her?”


“A little.”


“Did she seem to have any problems?”


“We all of us have problems,” Marya said, quite seriously. “Otherwise not take this job.”

They made their lunch choices from an unappetizing variety—fatty slices of boiled corned beef, waterlogged cabbage, mushy rice, gluey shepherd’s pie, anemic-looking squares of yellow sheet cake—and Marya led the way to a nearby table, where two of her bunkmates picked listlessly at their plates. Marya made the introductions: a young, dark-haired Greek woman named Nika, and Lourdes, a middle-aged Filipina.

“I have not seen you before,” Nika said in a thick accent.


“I’m assigned to cabins on Deck 8,” Constance replied, careful to add a German accent of her own.

The woman nodded. “You must be careful. This isn’t your mess. Don’t let her see you.” She nodded toward a short, hirsute, thickset woman with frizzy bottle-blonde hair, standing in a far corner and surveying the room with a scowl.

The women made small talk in a strange mixture of languages with a lot of English words thrown in, apparently the lingua franca of theBritannia ’s service decks. Most of it focused on the maid who had gone crazy and mutilated herself.

“Where is she now?” Constance asked. “Did they medevac her off the ship?”

“Too far from land for a helicopter,” said Nika. “They lock her in infirmary. And now I have to do half her rooms.” She scowled. “Juanita, I knew she was heading for trouble. She is always talking about what she see in the passengers’ rooms, poking her nose where it not belong. A good maid sees nothing, remembers nothing, just does her job and keeps her mouth shut.”

Constance wondered if Nika ever took her own advice on the latter point.

Nika went on. “Yesterday, how she talk at lunch! All about that stateroom with the leather straps on bed and vibrator in drawer. What is she doing looking in drawer? Curiosity killed the cat. And now I have to clean half her rooms. This Jonah ship.”

Her mouth set firmly into an expression of disapproval and she sat back and crossed her arms, point made.


There were murmurs and nods of agreement.


Nika, encouraged, uncrossed her arms and opened her mouth again. “Passenger disappear too on ship. You hear that? Maybe she is a jumper. This Jonah ship, I tell you!”


Constance spoke quickly to stem the flow of words. “Marya tells me you work in the larger cabins,” she said. “You’re lucky—I just have the standard suites.”


“Lucky?” Nika looked at her incredulously. “For me is twice as much work.”


“But the tips are better, right?”


Nika scoffed. “The rich ones give you smallest tips of all. They always complain, want everything just so. That ryparóç in the triplex, he make me come back three times today to remake his bed.”


This was a piece of luck. One of the people on Pendergast’s list—Scott Blackburn, the dot-com billionaire—had taken one of only two triplex suites. “Do you mean Mr. Blackburn?” she asked.


Nika shook her head. “No. Blackburn even worse! Has own maid, she get linens herself. Maid treat me like dirt, like I

her

maid. I have to take that triplex also, thanks to Juanita.”


“He brought his own maid along?” Constance asked. “Why?”


“He bring

everything

along! Own bed, own rugs, own statues, own paintings, own piano even.” Nika shook her head. “Bah! Ugly things, too: ugly and ryparóç.”


“I’m sorry?” Constance feigned ignorance of the word.


“Rich people crazy.” Nika cursed again in Greek.


“How about his friend, Terrence Calderón, next door?”


“Him! He okay. Give me okay tip.”


“You clean his stateroom, as well? Did he bring his own things?”


She nodded. “Some. Lot of antiques. French. Very nice.”


“The richer they are, the worse they are,” said Lourdes. She spoke excellent English with only a faint accent. “Last night, I was in the suite of—”


“Hey!” a voice boomed right behind them. Constance turned to see the supervisor standing behind her, hands on copious hips, glaring.


“On your feet!” the woman said.


“Are you speaking to me?” Constance replied.


“I said, on your

feet

!”


Calmly, Constance rose. “I haven’t seen you before,” the woman said in a surly tone. “What’s your name?”


“Rülke,” Constance said. “Leni Rülke.”


“What’s your station?”


“The Deck 8 cabins.”


A look of bitter triumph came over the woman’s fat features. “I thought as much. You know better than to eat here. Get back down to the Deck D cafeteria where you belong.”


“What’s the difference?” Constance asked in a mild tone. “The food’s no better here.”


Disbelief took the place of triumph on the supervisor’s face. “Why, you impudent bitch—” And she slapped Constance hard across her right cheek.

Constance had never in her life been slapped before. She stiffened for a moment. Then she took an instinctive step forward, hand closing tightly over her fork. Something in her movement made the supervisor’s eyes widen. The woman stepped back.

Slowly, Constance laid the fork back on the table. She thought of Marya and the pledge of secrecy she owed her. She glanced down. Marya was staring at them, her face white. The other two women were looking studiously at their plates.

Around them, the low murmur of apathetic conversation, which had stopped for the altercation, resumed. She looked back at the supervisor, committing her face to memory. Then—cheek burning—she stepped away from the table and left the cafeteria.

21

FIRST OFFICER GORDON LESEUR FELT A RISING SENSE OF CONCERN as he stepped into Kemper’s monastic office. The missing passenger had not shown up, and the husband had demanded to meet with all the senior officers. Commodore Cutter had been cloistered in his cabin for the last eight hours, in one of his black moods, and LeSeur wasn’t about to disturb him for Evered or anybody else. Instead, he’d assigned the watch to the second officer and rounded up the staff captain, Carol Mason, for the meeting.

Evered was pacing back and forth in the cramped confines, his face red, his voice shaking. He looked like he was teetering on the brink of hysteria. “It’s past four in the afternoon,” he was saying to Kemper. “It’s been eight goddamn hours since I alerted you to my wife’s disappearance. ”

“Mr. Evered,” Kemper, the chief of security, began. “It’s a big ship, there’s a lot of places she could be—”

“That’s what you all said before,” Evered said, his voice rising. “ She’s not back yet.I heard the PA announcements like everyone else, I saw the little picture you posted on the TVs. This isn’t like her, she would never stay away this long without contacting me. I want this ship searched!”


“Let me assure you—”

“To hell with your assurances! She could have fallen somewhere, be hurt, unable to call out or get to a phone. She could have . . .” He stopped, breathing heavily, savagely brushed away a tear with the back of his hand. “You need to contact the Coast Guard, contact the police, get them here.”

“Mr. Evered,” Staff Captain Mason said, quietly taking charge, much to LeSeur’s relief. “We’re in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Even if the police or the Coast Guard had jurisdiction—which they don’t—they could never reach us. Now, you must believe me when I say we have time-tested procedures for dealing with this kind of situation. The chances are almost one hundred percent that, for some reason, she’s unwilling to be found. We have to consider the possibility that she may be in somebody else’s company.”

Evered jabbed a trembling finger at LeSeur. “I told him this morning, my wife’s not like that. And I won’t take that kind of insinuation, not from you or anybody else.”

“I’m not insinuating anything, Mr. Evered,” said Mason, her voice firm and quiet. “I’m simply saying there’s no reason to get upset. Believe me, statistically you’re safer on board this ship than even in your own home. Having said that, we take security seriously, and given the nature of the problem, wewill institute a search of the ship. Immediately. I’ll supervise it myself.”

The staff captain’s low, competent voice and her soothing words had the intended effect. Evered was still flushed and breathing heavily, but after a moment he swallowed and nodded. “That’s what I’ve been asking from the beginning.”

After Evered had left, the three stood in silence. Finally, the security chief fetched a deep sigh and turned to Mason. “Well, Captain?”


The staff captain was staring thoughtfully at the empty doorway. “Is there any way we could get a psychiatric background report on Mrs. Evered?”


A silence. “You don’t think—?” Kemper asked.


“It’s always a possibility.”

“Legally we’d have to go through her husband,” Kemper said. “That’s a step I’d be most reluctant to take until we’re really sure she’s . . . no longer on the ship. Son of abitch . We’ve already got a problem with crew morale over that crazy housekeeper—I hope to God we find her.”

Mason nodded. “Me too. Mr. Kemper, please organize a level-two search.” She glanced at LeSeur. “Gordon, I’d like you to work with Mr. Kemper personally.”

“Certainly, sir,” LeSeur said. Inwardly, he cringed. A level-two search meant every public space, all the crews’ quarters, and the entire belowdecks section of the ship—everything, in fact, but the staterooms. Even with the entire security staff mobilized, it would take a full day, at least. And there were some spaces deep in the bowels of the ship that simply couldn’t be searched successfully.

“I’m sorry, Gordon,” she said, reading the look on his face. “But it’s a step we have to take. Standing orders.”

Standing orders, he thought a little morosely. And that’s all it was, really: an exercise in formality. Passenger cabins could only be examined in a level-three search, and Commodore Cutter would have to authorize that personally. No such search had ever been conducted on a ship LeSeur had worked on, not even when there had been a jumper. And that’s what LeSeur privately figured Mrs. Evered was: a jumper. Suicide at sea was more common than the passengers ever realized. Especially on high-profile maiden voyages, where some people wanted to go out in style. That was a huge irony, because it was the way of the cruise industry to sweep them under the rug and do everything to keep the news from the rest of the passengers. Instead of going out in style, Mrs. Evered might simply be five hundred miles behind them and a thousand fathoms deep—

LeSeur’s thoughts were interrupted by a knock. He turned to see a security officer standing in the doorway. “Mr. Kemper, sir?”


“Yes?” Kemper asked.


“Sir,” the man said nervously, “two things.” He shifted, waiting.


“Well?” Kemper snapped. “Can’t you see I’m in a meeting?”


“The maid who went crazy—she, ah, just killed herself.”


“How?”


“Managed to get free of her restraints and . . .” He faltered.


“And what?”


“Pried a sharp piece of wood free from her bedframe and jammed it into her eye socket. Went up into her brain.”


There was a short silence as this bit of information was digested. Kemper shook his head.

“Mr. Kemper,” LeSeur said, “I think you might want to have a word with the passenger in the last suite she cleaned before she went off the deep end. There might have been some kind of unpleasant encounter, an accident, perhaps . . . I was on a cruise ship once where a passenger brutally raped the maid that came in to clean.”

“I’ll do that, sir.”


“Be circumspect.”


“Of course.”


There was a silence. Then Kemper turned back to the nervous security officer. “You mentioned a second thing?”


“Yes, sir.”


“Well? What is it?” Kemper asked brusquely.


“There’s something you should see.” “What?”


The man hesitated. “I’d rather you saw it directly, sir. It might pertain to the missing passenger.”


“Where is it?” Mason interrupted, her voice sharp.


“The weather deck aft of the St. James’s shopping arcade.”


“Lead the way,” said Mason crisply. “We’ll all go together.”


Kemper headed toward the door, then glanced back at LeSeur. “You coming, sir?”


“Yes.” LeSeur said reluctantly, with a sinking feeling.

The deck was raw and damp. There were no passengers—the few hardy souls who ventured out into the open air usually sought out the unbroken circuit of the promenade on Deck 7, directly above. There was a buffeting wind that tore froth from the ship’s bow far into the air, and within moments LeSeur’s jacket was soaked.

The security officer led the way to the railing. “It’s down there,” he said, pointing over the side.


LeSeur joined Kemper and Carol Mason at the rail. He glanced over, staring down at the water seven decks below. It boiled angrily along the smooth flank of the ship.


“What are we looking at?” Kemper asked.


“There, sir. I just noticed it as I did a visual inspection of the hull. Do you see the damage to the brightwork below the toe-rail there, just to the left of that scupper?”


Keeping a tight grip on the railing, LeSeur leaned farther over, peering carefully. Then he saw it: a six-inch scrape along the teak brightwork that hid the deck joint.


“Sir, if that damage was there before we sailed yesterday, I would have noticed it. I’m sure of it.”

“He’s right,” the staff captain said. “This vessel is much too new to be dinged up like that.” She peered more closely. “And if I’m not mistaken, there’s something clinging to that splintered section, almost the same color as the wood.”

LeSeur squinted. The starboard hull was deep in afternoon shadow, but he thought he saw it, too.


Mason turned to the security officer. “See if you can retrieve it.”

The man nodded, then lay flat on the deck. While LeSeur and Kemper held his feet, the man ducked his head under the railing, then reached over the edge with his hand. He moved his arm around, grunting. Just when LeSeur thought he couldn’t get any wetter, the man cried out. “Got it!” he said.

They pulled him back from the edge of the deck and he got to his feet, something balled protectively in his hand. As the three crowded around, he slowly uncurled his fist.

Lying in his palm was a small cluster of fine threads, matted and soaked with spray. LeSeur heard Mason catch her breath. As she did so, he realized that the threads were all connected at one end to what looked like a small patch of skin. With a thrill of dismay he realized these were not threads at all, but hair—human hair, by the look of it, and platinum blonde.

“Mr. Kemper,” Mason said in a low, even voice. “Do you have that photograph of the missing woman?”


He removed a small portfolio from his pocket, opened it, drew out the photo, and handed it to the staff captain. She held it up, looked at it carefully, then looked back at the hair in the officer’s cupped palm.


“Oh, shit,” she murmured.


22

SPECIAL AGENT PENDERGAST STEPPED OUT OF HIS STATEROOM, closed the door, and started down the corridor. He was smartly dressed in a black tuxedo, and that, along with his purposeful stride and the eight o’clock hour, gave the distinct impression he was on his way to dinner.

But Pendergast would not be having dinner this evening. Rather, he would use the dinner hour to accomplish some business of his own.

Reaching a bank of elevators, he pressed the up button. When the doors slid open, he stepped in and pressed the button for Deck 13. In less than thirty seconds he was walking briskly down another corridor, headed forward.

Most of the passengers were at dinner or in the casinos, or taking in a show. Pendergast passed only two people, a maid and a cabin steward. At last the passage doglegged first right, then left, ending in the forward transverse corridor. This corridor was much shorter, and there were only two doors to his left: each led to one of the ship’s royal suites.

Pendergast stepped up to the first door, labeled Richard II Suite , and knocked. When there was no answer, he slipped an electromagnetic card out of his bag. The card was attached by a coiled wire to a palmtop computer concealed within the bag. He inserted the card into the door’s passkey slot, examined a readout on the unit’s tiny screen, then punched a series of numbers into the keypad. There was an electronic chirp and the LED on the doorlock went from red to green. With one more glance down the corridor he slipped inside and, closing the door behind him, paused to listen intently. He had already confirmed that Lionel Brock was at dinner; the suite appeared empty, silent and dark.

Pulling a small flashlight from his jacket, he made his way into the cabin. The four royal suites were not as large as the duplex or triplex apartments, but each was quite broad, occupying half of the forward superstructure of Deck 12 or 13 and overlooking the forecastle. According to the deck plan Pendergast had examined, the suites consisted of a large living room, dining room, kitchenette, lavatory, and two bedrooms with a connecting bath.

He stepped through the living room, shining his light over the surfaces. The room looked barely used; the maid had been in recently. The wastebasket was empty. The only thing even remotely curious about the room was that a freshly changed pillow lay at one side of the leather couch. On the passenger manifest, Brock was occupying the room by himself. Perhaps the man suffered from piles.

The only sign of occupancy was an unopened bottle of Taittinger sitting in a pedestal champagne bucket, the ice half melted.


Slipping on a pair of latex gloves, he went through the drawers of the side tables and the desk, finding only ship’s literature and remote controls for the television and DVD player. He lifted the wall paintings, peered behind each in turn, finding nothing. Stepping to the forward picture window, he quietly drew back the curtain. Far, far below, theBritannia ’s bow sliced through the spume-tossed waves. The weather had steadily grown worse and the ship’s slow roll was now more pronounced.

Stepping back from the window, Pendergast moved to the kitchenette. It too looked unused: Brock was clearly taking his meals in the many ship’s restaurants. The refrigerator held only two more bottles of champagne. Quickly, Pendergast searched the drawers, finding nothing but cutlery and glassware. Then he moved to the dining room, then lavatory, giving them a quick examination. Next, the coat closet. None held anything of interest.

He stepped back out into the living room and paused to listen. All was silent. He glanced at his watch: quarter after eight. Brock had been scheduled for the eight o’clock seating at the King’s Arms and would not be back for at least ninety minutes.

The bedrooms lay to starboard. One door was closed, the other open. Pendergast stepped over to the open door, listened once again, then stepped inside. The bedroom was rather similar to his own: a king-sized bed with an extravagant canopy, two side tables, an armoire, writing desk and chair, a closet, and a door that no doubt led to the connecting bathroom. The room was clearly Brock’s.

It was the work of fifteen minutes to give the room a thorough search. More quickly now, he moved into the shared bathroom and gave the toiletries a brief inspection. Once again, he discovered little other than a confirmation of what he had already suspected: Brock’s cologne of choice was Floris Elite.

At the far end of the bathroom was a small dressing room with a door that connected to the second bedroom. Pendergast reached for the knob, intending to give the room only a cursory search—it seemed more and more likely that, if Brock was guilty of anything, the evidence would be found elsewhere than on theBritannia .

The door was locked.


Pendergast frowned. Returning to the living room, he tried the other door to the second bedroom. It, too, was locked.


Most intriguing.

He kneeled, examining the mechanism with his flashlight. It was a simple tumbler lock that would offer little resistance. He reached into his pocket and drew out a lockpick that resembled a small wire toothbrush. He inserted it into the lock, and in a moment the soft click of a tumbler signified success. Grasping the doorknob, he eased the door open into the dark room.

“Move and you’re dead,” came a harsh voice out of the blackness.


Pendergast went motionless.


A man stepped into view from behind the door, gun in hand. A woman’s sleepy voice came from the darkness of the bedroom: “What is it, Curt?”

Instead of answering, the man gestured at Pendergast with the gun, stepped through the door, shut and locked it behind him. He was a dark-haired man with acne scars and olive skin, handsome in a gangsterish way, very muscular. He carried himself like a prizefighter, but for a big man he could clearly move with consummate stealth. He was not a steward: he wore a dark suit rather than a uniform, and the material barely managed to stretch across his broad shoulders.

“All right, pal, who are you and what are you doing here?” Curt asked.


Pendergast smiled, nodded to a sofa chair. “May I? I’ve been on my feet all day.”


The man stood there, scowling, while Pendergast sat down and made himself comfortable, crossing one knee daintily over the other.


“I asked you a question, motherfucker.”

Pendergast pulled the bottle of champagne out of the melting ice, let the excess water drain off the outside, and with a deft twist unseated the cork. Two empty flutes stood to one side. He filled them both to the brim.

“Care to join me?” he asked.


The man raised the gun. “I’m just about out of patience. You got a problem, and it’s getting worse.”


Pendergast took a sip. “That makes two of us with a problem. If you would sit down, we could discuss them in comfort.”


“I don’t got a problem. You do. You got a

big

fucking problem.”

“I’m well aware of my problem. You are my problem. You’re standing in front of me with a gun pointed at my head, and you seem to be losing your temper. Yes, a definite problem.” Pendergast took a sip, sighed. “Excellent.”

“You got one more chance to tell me who you are before I plaster your brains on the wall.”


“Before you do that, I might just point out that you have a far more serious problem than I.”


“Yeah? And what the hell’s that?”


Pendergast nodded toward the bedroom door. “Does Mr. Brock know you are entertaining a lady in his suite?”


An uneasy hesitation. “Mr. Brock’s got no problem with me entertaining ladies.”

Pendergast raised his eyebrows. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. But on top of that, if you attempt to ‘plaster’ anything on the wall, you’ll find yourself the unfortunate center of attention on this ship. If you’re lucky, you’ll end up with a murder charge. If you’re not, it will beyour brains decorating the wallpaper. I’m also armed, you see.”

Another hesitation. “I’m calling ship’s security.”


Pendergast took another sip. “You’re not thinking this through, Mr. Curt.” The man jabbed the gun at him. “It’s Johnson. Curtis Johnson. Not ‘Mr. Curt.’”

“Excuse me. Mr. Johnson. Even if it’s true Mr. Brock doesn’t mind you entertaining ladies while on duty, if you call security there may be questions raised about the cargo Mr. Brock has stored in that bedroom you are using as a love nest. On top of that, you don’t know who I am or why I’m here. For all you know I mightbe ship’s security. And so, as I said, Mr. Johnson, we both have problems. I’m hoping there’s a way we can solve our respective problems intelligently, and to our mutual advantage.” He slowly inserted two fingers inside his tuxedo pocket.

“Keep your hands in view.”


Pendergast removed the fingers, which were now holding a small sheaf of crisp hundred-dollar bills.


The man stood, meaty hand clutching the gun, his face flushed and confused.


Pendergast dangled the money. “Lower the gun.”


The man lowered the gun.


“Go ahead, take it.”


The man reached out, snatched the money, shoved it in his pocket.


“We have to work quickly, Mr. Johnson, so that I’m gone by the time Mr. Brock returns.”


“You get the hell outta here. Now.”


“You take my money and still kick me out? How unsporting.”

Pendergast rose with a loud sigh, turned as if to leave, but the motion accelerated with mercurial quickness into the tossing of the glass of champagne in Johnson’s face while, with a simultaneous, lightning-fast motion, he brought his left fist down on Johnson’s wrist. The gun bounced on the rug and skidded halfway across the room. As Johnson let out a shout and dove for it, Pendergast tripped him up, then shoved his own Les Baer 1911 in the man’s ear, putting one knee at the base of his spine.

Doucement

, Mr. Johnson.

Doucement

.”


After a long moment, Pendergast stood up. “You may rise.”


The man sat up, rubbed his ear, and then stood. His face was a dark mass.


Pendergast stuck his own weapon back inside his jacket, walked across the room, picked up Johnson’s gun, hefted it.


“A Walther PPK. You’re a James Bond fan, I imagine. Perhaps we have less in common than I imagined.” He tossed it back to Johnson, who caught it, surprised. He held it, uncertain what to do.


“Be a smart fellow and put it away.”

Johnson holstered the weapon. “Now,” said Pendergast pleasantly, “here’s the choice, Mr. Johnson. You could be my friend, do me the tiniest of favors, and earn another thousand. Or you could continue to act out of misplaced loyalty to a contemptuous jackass of a man who underpays you and who will fire you the very minute he learns of your indiscretion and never think about you again. So—which is it, Mr. Johnson?”

The man stared at Pendergast for a long time, then nodded curtly.


“Splendid. Open the back bedroom, my newfound friend. There’s no time to waste.”


Johnson turned and went to the bedroom door, unlocked it. Pendergast followed inside.


“Curt, what the hell’s going on?” A woman with huge hair lay on the bed, the bedclothes pulled up to her chin.


“Get dressed and get out.”


“But my clothes are on the other side of the room,” she said. “I don’t have anything on.”


“Nobody gives a shit,” said Johnson roughly. “Get going.”


“You’re an asshole, you know that?”


He waved the gun. “Move it!”


The woman jumped out of bed, heavy breasts flopping, snagged her clothes, and retreated into the bathroom. “Asshole!” came a second muffled insult.


Pendergast looked around. The bedroom, as he noted earlier, had been intended for storage: half a dozen large wooden crates were in view, all stamped

Fragile

and taking up much of the room.


“Do you know what is in these crates?”


“No idea,” said Johnson.


“But you were hired to keep an eye on them?”


“You got it.”


Pendergast walked back and forth in front of the crates for a moment. Then he kneeled before the nearest and removed a screwdriver from his bag.


“Hey, what are you doing?”

“Just taking a peek. We’re going to leave everything just as we found it. Nobody will know.” In a moment he had the end of the crate off, exposing green felt and padding. With a knife, he made a careful incision across several layers of padding, felt, and custom-cut pieces of Styrofoam, exposing a rack of what looked like oil paintings. Judging from the fact that the other five crates were of exactly the same dimensions, Pendergast deduced they were full of paintings as well.

He thrust his flashlight into the incision in the padding, moving it this way and that. There were eight paintings in all, unframed. From what he could see, they seemed to be all by second-tier impressionist artists—Charles Théophile Angrand, Gustave Caillebotte. There were also two German expressionist works, apparently by Jawlensky and the other, Pendergast guessed, by Pechstein. Obviously, the paintings were destined for Brock’s gallery on 57th Street.

While Pendergast immediately recognized the styles of the various painters, he recognized not one of the actual paintings themselves, at least what he could see of them. They were, at best, obscure examples of their artists’ oeuvre.

Reaching into his bag again, he pulled out a small leather case, which he unzipped and laid flat on the floor. He extracted several tools from the case—a jeweler’s loupe, a pair of forceps, a scalpel—and set them on the nearest crate. These were followed by stoppered test tubes.

Johnson shifted his weight uneasily from foot to foot. “Whatever the hell you’re doing, man, you’d better hurry it up.”


“Calm yourself, Mr. Johnson. Your employer won’t be back from dinner for some time yet. I’m almost finished.”

Kneeling before the nearest crate, Pendergast turned his attention to the Jawlensky painting. Picking up the tweezers, he plucked off a few threads of canvas from the back of the work, where the cut canvas was nailed to the frame. Next, using both the forceps and scalpel, he shaved away a small, built-up fragment of yellow paint from the very edge of the painting and placed it in the test tube. He moved on to the Pechstein and several of the others and did the same.

He checked his watch. Eight forty-five.


He rearranged the packing to disguise the cut he had made, screwed the end of the crate back in place, then rose with a smile. “Mr. Johnson,” he said, “my apologies for interrupting your evening.”


“Yeah, well, you still haven’t told me who you are or what you’re doing.”


“Nor will I, Mr. Johnson.”

They went into the living room and Pendergast turned to his host. “We have just enough time to enjoy another glass.” He refilled their glasses. Johnson drank his off in a shot, then set it down. Pendergast sipped his more slowly, then pulled another sheaf of bills from his pocket.

“As promised,” he said.


Johnson took them silently.


“You did well.” Pendergast smiled, gave a half bow, and departed quickly.


23

BACK IN THE SUITE, CONSTANCE FOUND PENDERGAST HUNCHED over a chemistry set. She watched as he dipped a cotton swab into a vial of a clear liquid and applied it to a paint chip in a test tube. Immediately, the fragment turned black.


He moved to another test tube and another, applying the same test. Finally he looked up. “Good evening, Constance.”

“Any results?”

He nodded to the tests. “Indeed. These paint samples all show unacceptable levels of lead. Our Mr. Lionel Brock has six crates of impressionist paintings in his spare bedroom, and if the rest are like these, they’re all forgeries. Brock must be employing a European art forger—a man of considerable talent—to imitate the work of minor artists, which he no doubt salts among his genuine paintings by major artists. Quite a clever scheme, really: nobody would question the authenticity of thesecond-tier paintings carried by a dealer known to sell the finest, most scrupulously provenancedfirst-tier works.”

“Clever indeed,” said Constance. “But it seems to me a man like that wouldn’t risk all this on a Tibetan artifact.”


“Exactly. We can strike him.” With a rustle, Pendergast produced his list. “I have also crossed off Lambe—the man’s as soft as risen dough.”


“How did you manage that? Impersonate a doctor?”

“Ugh. Let us not speak of it. I have also struck Claude Dallas from the list, as well as Lord Cliveburgh, who is busy smuggling cocaine. Strage is illegally exporting several extremely valuable and quite genuine Greek vases, and while this might lessen the chances that he’s also smuggling the Agozyen, we can’t quite rule him out. Which leaves us with three: Blackburn, Calderón, and Strage.” He turned his silver eyes on her. “How did your adventure belowdecks go?”

“I met the woman assigned to clean Blackburn’s triplex. Luckily—for us, anyway—she took over from another worker who apparently suffered a psychotic break shortly after departure and killed herself.”


“Indeed?” said Pendergast with sudden interest. “There’s been a suicide on board?”


“That’s what they say. She just stopped working in the middle of her shift, returned to her cabin, and had a breakdown. Later, she stabbed herself in the eye with a piece of wood and died.”


“How odd. And the woman who’s cleaning Blackburn’s triplex—what does she say?”


“He brought his own maid, and she lords it over the ship’s maid. Blackburn also had his suite redecorated for the crossing with his own furniture and artwork.”


“That would include his Asian art collection.”

“Yes. The same housekeeper I met also cleans Calderón’s stateroom, which is next door. It seems he picked up a lot of French antiques. Apparently, he’s as pleasant as Blackburn is obnoxious: he gave her a nice tip.”

“Excellent.” For a time, Pendergast’s eyes seemed to go far away. Slowly, they came back into focus.

“Blackburn is a strong number one on our list.” He reached in his pocket, withdrew yet another sheaf of crisp bills. “You are to temporarily switch places with the ship’s housekeeper assigned to Blackburn and Calderón’s rooms. Get in there when the suite is empty.”


“But Blackburn won’t let the ship’s maid in without his maid being there.”

“No matter—if you’re caught you can always chalk it up to bureaucratic error. You know what to look for. I would suggest going late this evening—Blackburn, I’ve noticed, is partial to baccarat and will probably be in the casino.”

“Very well, Aloysius.”


“Oh—and bring me his trash, please.”


Constance raised her eyebrows briefly. Then she nodded and turned toward the staircase, preparing to change for dinner.


“Constance?”


She turned back.


“Please be careful. Blackburn is one of our prime suspects—and that means he could well be a ruthless, perhaps psychopathic, killer.”


24

SCOTT BLACKBURN PAUSED AT THE ENTRANCE TO OSCAR’S TO BUTTON his Gieves & Hawkes bespoke suit, adjust his mauve tie, and survey the room. It was eight forty-five and the second seating was well under way: a horde of slim, elegant foreign waiters rushing in with the main courses under silver domes, which they brought to each table, laid down, and then—all at once, a waiter standing behind each diner—whipped off to reveal the dish underneath.

With a sardonic crook to his lip, Blackburn strolled over to his table. His two companions had already seated themselves and they rose obsequiously as he arrived. As well they should—Blackburn had invested several hundred million in their respective companies and sat on their boards’ compensation committees. Two bottles of burgundy already stood empty on the table, among the scattered remains of hors d’oevures, antipasti, and a first course of a smallish bird that might have been squab or pheasant. As he sat down he took one bottle into his hand and examined the label.

“Richebourg Domaine de la Romanée-Conti ’78,” he said. “You fellows are breaking out the good stuff.” He turned and poured out the heel into his own glass. “And you’ve left me with nothing but sediment!”

Lambe and Calderón laughed reverentially, and Lambe gestured for a waiter. “Bring out another of these from our private cellar,” he said. “One of the ones already opened.”


“Right away, sir.” The waiter glided off as silently as a bat.


“What’s the occasion?” Blackburn asked.

“We just thought we’d indulge ourselves,” Lambe said, rocking his soft, slumpy shoulders. Blackburn noticed that the man was less green about the gills than before. The weenie was, apparently, growing accustomed to the ocean.


“Why not?” Blackburn said. “This voyage is proving to be even more interesting than I anticipated. Among other things, I ran into an old girlfriend last night, and found her obliging—veryobliging. At first, anyway.”

This was greeted with a roar of laughter from his two listeners.


“And then what?” Lambe asked, eagerly leaning forward.


Blackburn shook his hand and laughed. “I don’t know which was more exciting—the fucking or the fight afterward. Whew, what a wildcat.”


More toadying laughter.

The waiter glided back with the bottle and a fresh glass, and Lambe indicated for him to pour Blackburn a taste. Blackburn swirled the liquid around in the glass, took a quick whiff, swirled again, then stuck his nose in and inhaled the bouquet. Then he sat back, his eyes half closed, appreciating the aroma. After a moment, he lifted the glass to his lips, drew in a small amount, rolled it around on his tongue, then drew in some air through his lips, bubbling it through the wine before swallowing. Ritual complete, he placed the glass down and waved the waiter away.

“What do you think?” Lambe asked eagerly.


“Magnificent.”


They relaxed.


Blackburn raised his glass again. “And, it so happens, I have something to announce.”


Both friends turned to him eagerly.


“Fill your glasses.”


They did so with alacrity.


“As you know, since selling Gramnet for two billion, I’ve been knocking around, looking for some new little thing to mess around with. I believe I’ve found that thing.”


“Can you talk about it?” asked Calderón.


Blackburn enjoyed the long pause.

“It has to do with scanning and searching visual databases on the web.” He smiled. “When I sold Gramnet, I retained the rights to my proprietary image-compression algorithms. I’ll push image content onto everybody’s desktop, and it’ll be content that looks a hundred times better than anything else out there.”

“But Google’s been working on image-matching technology for years,” said Lambe. “They can’t seem to get it right.”

“I’m going to use a different technology: old-fashioned elbow grease. I’ve got thousands of programmers and researchers I can put to work on it, 24/7. I’m going to build the largest online multimedia database on the web.”

“How?”

“Images can be linked just like web pages. People searching images go from one similar image to the next. Don’t analyze the metadata or the images: analyze thelinks . Once they’re in your own database, you can build on billions, trillions, of user-generated links. Then I’ll grab the images themselves, super-high-res, and use algorithms and mathematical signatures to compress them. I’ve got a dozen server farms, idling, just waiting to be filled with data like this.”

“But the copyrights to the images—how will you deal with that?”


“Screw copyright. Copyright’s dead. This is the web. Information should be free for the taking. Everybody else is doing it—why not me?”


A reverent hush fell on the group.


“And to kick it off, I’ve got an ace in the hole.” He raised his glass and gave a deep-throated chortle. “

And what an ace it is

.”


Then he took a three-hundred-dollar swallow of wine, closing his eyes with sheer orgiastic pleasure.


“Mr. Blackburn?” a low, deferential voice sounded at his elbow.


Blackburn turned, annoyed at having his enjoyment interrupted. A man in a rather indifferent suit stood there. He was short and ugly and had a Boston accent.


Blackburn frowned. “Who are you?”


“Pat Kemper’s the name. I’m chief security officer of the

Britannia

. May I have a few words with you privately?”


“Security? What’s this about?”


“Don’t be alarmed, it’s routine.”


“My friends can hear anything you have to tell me.”


Kemper hesitated a moment. “Very well. Mind if I take a seat?” And glancing quickly around the dining salon, he took a chair at Blackburn’s right.

“My deep apologies for interrupting your dinner,” Kemper said, his Boston accent already grating on Blackburn’s nerves. The guy looked and talked like a cop. “But protocol requires that I ask you a few questions. It’s about the staff member who was first assigned to clean your suite. Juanita Santamaria.”

“The maid?” Blackburn frowned. “I have my own private maid, and she’s supposed to supervise your people.”

“Santamaria cleaned your room twice. The second time was on the first night of the voyage, around eight-thirty P.M., when she went in to turn down your beds. Do you recall her coming to your suite?” “Eight-thirty last night?” Blackburn leaned back in his chair, took another sip of wine. “Nobody was there. My own maid was in medical, seasick and puking her guts out. I was at dinner. And on top of that, I gave strict instructions that no one was to enter my suite unsupervised.”

“I apologize for that, sir. But you don’t know of anything that might have happened in the suite that evening? An incident, someone she might have interacted with? Or perhaps she might have broken something, or . . . perhaps stolen something?”

“What, did something happen to her afterward?”

The security officer hesitated. “As a matter of fact, yes. Ms. Santamaria had a breakdown shortly after leaving your suite. She subsequently took her own life. Yet those who knew her, bunkmates and the like, saw no sign of impending trouble. She was, they say, a well-adjusted, religious person.”

“That’s what they always say about a mass murderer or suicide,” Blackburn said, with a scoff.


“They also mentioned that, when Ms. Santamaria left for work that day, she was in good spirits.”


“I can’t help you,” Blackburn said, swirling his wine and raising his glass to his nose again, inhaling. “Nobody was there. Nothing was broken or stolen. Believe me, I would know: I keep track of my stuff.”


“Anything she might have seen or touched? Something that might have frightened her?”


Blackburn suddenly paused in the middle of the oenophilic ritual, the glass arrested halfway to his mouth. After a long moment he set it down without having sipped from it.


“Mr. Blackburn?” Kemper prodded.

Blackburn turned to look at him. “Absolutely not,” he said in a thin, emotionless voice. “There was nothing. As I said, no one was there. My maid was in the infirmary. I was at dinner. What happened to this woman had nothing to do with me or my suite. She wasn’t even supposed to be there.”

“Very good,” said Kemper, rising. “I assumed as much, but you know, protocol and everything. North Star would have my hide if I didn’t go through the motions.” He smiled. “Gentlemen, we’ll speak no more about this subject. Thank you for your patience, and have a pleasant evening.” He nodded at each man in turn, then quickly walked away.

Lambe watched the security chief thread his way among the tables. Then he turned to Blackburn. “Well, what do you make of that, Scott old boy? Strange doings belowdecks!” And he struck a melodramatic pose.

Blackburn did not reply.


The waiter glided up to their table. “May I recite the chef’s specials for the evening, gentlemen?”


“Please. I’ve got two days of eating to catch up on.” And Lambe rubbed his hands together.


Abruptly, Blackburn stood up, his chair tilting backward violently.


“Scott?” Calderón said, looking at him with concern. “Not hungry,” Blackburn said. His face had gone pale.


“Hey, Scotty—” Lambe began. “Hey, wait! Where are you going?”


“Stateroom.” And without another word, Blackburn turned and exited the restaurant.


25


THAT SOUNDS JUST AWFUL,” SAID THE KIND, ATTRACTIVE STRANGER. “Would it help if I spoke to the old lady?”


“Oh, no,” Inge replied, horrified at the suggestion. “No, please don’t. It isn’t that bad, really. I’ve gotten used to it.”


“As you wish. If you change your mind, just let me know.”


“You’re very kind. It just helps to have somebody to talk to.” And then she paused, blushing furiously.

Nothing like this had ever happened to Inge Larssen before. She’d always lived a cloistered existence, been painfully shy. And here she was, pouring her heart out to someone she’d just met half an hour before.

The large, gilt-edged clock on the wallpapered wall of the Chats-worth Salon read five minutes to ten. A string quartet was playing quietly in a far corner, and couples strolled by at infrequent intervals, arm in arm or holding hands. The lounge was lit by a thousand tapered candles, and they freighted the evening air with a mellow golden glow. Inge didn’t think she’d ever been in a place quite so beautiful.

Perhaps it was the magical atmosphere of this place and this night that had helped her let down her guard. Or maybe it was simply the nature of her new friend: tall, self-assured, radiating confidence.


At the far end of the sofa, the stranger languidly crossed one leg over the other. “So you’ve lived in convents all your life?”


“Almost. Ever since I was six. That was when my parents died in an automobile accident.”


“And you have no other family? No siblings?”

Inge shook her head. “None. Except my great-uncle, who was the one who put me in the convent school at Evedal instead of one of the state schools. But he’s gone now. I have some friends from school. They’re almost like family, in a way. And then there’s my employer.”My employer , she thought.Why couldn’t I work for somebody like this? She began to speak, then stopped, feeling herself blushing again.

“You were about to say something.”


Inge laughed self-consciously. “No, it’s nothing.”

“Please tell me. I’d love to hear it.” “It’s just . . .” She hesitated again. “Well, you’re such an important person. So successful, so . . . You’ve heard all about me, now—I was hoping to hear your story.”

“It’s nothing, no big deal,” came the somewhat tart reply.


“No, really. I’d love to hear how you accomplished the impossible and got to be where you are. Because . . . well, someday I’d like . . .” Her voice trailed off as she lost the words.


There was a brief silence.

“I’m sorry,” Inge said hastily. “I had no right to ask. I’m sorry.” She felt a sudden awkwardness. “It’s late—I should really get back to bed. The lady I take care of—if she wakes up, she’ll be frightened if I’m not there.”

“Nonsense,” the stranger said, voice suddenly warm again. “I’d be happy to tell you my story. Let’s take a turn on deck—it’s stuffy in here.”

Inge didn’t think it was especially stuffy, but she said nothing and they made their way to the elevator and rode it four flights up, to Deck 7. “I’ll show you something I’ll bet you’ve never seen,” her new friend said, leading the way down the corridor, past the Hyde Park restaurant—quiet at this late hour—and to a heavy hatchway. “We can step out here.”

It was the first time that Inge had actually been on deck. It was quite chilly, and a wind moaned about the ship, while drifting spray misted her hair and shoulders. The scene could not have been more dramatic. Angry clouds scudded past a pale lemon moon. The huge ship ploughed its way through heavy waves. Above and below them, lights from countless windows and portholes turned the sea spume to molten gold. It was impossibly romantic.

“Where are we?” she breathed.

“The promenade deck. Here, I want to show you something.” And her companion led the way to the aft rail at the very rear of the ship. “On a dark night like this you can see the plankton glowing in the wake. Take a look—it’s unbelievable.”

Holding tightly to the railing, Inge leaned over. It was a straight drop to the sea below, which creamed and boiled around the stern. Sure enough: a billion lights winked in the creamy wake, the ocean alive with phosphorescence, a separate universe of pearlescent life brought temporarily into being by the thrust of the ship.

“It’s gorgeous,” she whispered, shivering in the cold air.


In response, a gentle hand curled around her shoulder, drawing her near.

Inge resisted only a moment. Then she allowed herself to be pulled in close, glad of the warmth. As she stared down at the otherworldly glow in the ship’s wake, she felt another hand slide up and grasp her other shoulder. The grip grew tighter.

And then—with a single, brutal tug—she felt herself lifted into the air and swung bodily over the railing.

A long, confused rush of air, and then, suddenly, a dreadful shock as she hit the icy water. She tumbled and twisted, disoriented by the water, dazed and battered by the impact. Then she fought her way upward, her clothes and shoes like dead weight, and broke the surface, sputtering, clawing into the air as if trying to climb up into the sky.

For a moment, her mind a confused whirl, she wondered how she had fallen—if the railing had given way somehow—but then her head cleared.


I didn’t fall. I was thrown.

The mere fact of it stupefied her. This couldn’t be real. She looked around wildly, instinctively treading water. The great stern of the ship, like a glowing tower, was already receding into the night. She opened her mouth to scream but it was immediately filled with the churning wake. She flailed, trying to remain on the surface, coughing. The water was paralyzingly frigid.

“Help!” she cried, her voice so feeble and choked that she could hardly hear it herself above the rush of the wind, the throbbing engines, the loud hiss of rising bubbles in the wake. Above her, she heard the faint cries of the gulls that followed the ship day and night.

It was a dream. It had to be. And yet the water was so cold, so very cold. She thrashed, her bruised limbs turning to lead.


She had been thrown off the ship.

She stared in horror at the diminishing cluster of lights. She could even see, through the stern windows of the huge King George II ballroom on Deck 1, black moving dots silhouetted against the blaze of light—people.

“Help!” She tried to wave her arm and went under, clawing her way back to the surface.


Kick off the shoes. Swim.

It took but a moment to scrape off her shoes, the stupid, low-heeled pumps her employer made her wear. But it did no good. She couldn’t even feel her feet anymore. She made a few feeble strokes, but swimming was hopeless; it took all her strength now just to keep her head above water.

The Britannia was starting to fade into the night mists that lay low on the surface of the water. The lights were getting dimmer. The cry of the gulls disappeared. The hiss of rising bubbles and the green color of the wake slowly dissipated. The water turned black, as black as it was deep.

The lights vanished. A moment later, the faint throb of the engines faded to silence.

She stared in horror at the place where the lights and sound had been. All was blackness. She kept her eyes fixed to the spot, terrified to glance away and lose the place, as if somehow that was her last hope. The sea around her was dark, heaving. The moon peeked from a bank of scudding clouds. The mist lay on the sea, momentarily silvery in the moonlight, then it darkened again as the moon slid back into cloud. She felt herself rise on a wave, top it, sink, rise again.

As she strained to see into the misty darkness, a comber broke over her with a hiss, forcing her down. She flailed and clawed. All around her there was nothing—nothing at all; just pitch black and a terrible, implacable cold.


But even as she struggled, the fierce chill seemed to ease slightly, replaced by inexplicable warmth. Her limbs disappeared. As the seconds passed, her movements grew slower, until it took an effort of immense will just to move. She made a ferocious effort to stay afloat, but her whole body had turned into a sack of useless weight. She began to realize she wasn’t in the sea at all, but asleep in her bed. It had all been a nightmare. She felt flooded by relief and gratitude. The bed was warm, soft, pillowy, and she turned over and felt herself sinking into the black warmth. She sighed—and as she did so, she felt something solid and heavy on her chest, like a huge weight. A glimmer of understanding forced its way back into her consciousness: she was not in her bed after all; this was not a dream; she was truly sinking into the black bottomless depths of the North Atlantic, her lungs at their last extremity.

I was murdered , was the last thought that went through her mind as she drifted down, and then she sighed once again, the last of her air escaping her mouth in an eruption of silent horror more intense than the wildest cry.

26

IT WAS ELEVEN-FIFTEEN WHEN KEMPER WALKED INTO THE SHIP’S central security station. The door was half open, and he could hear boisterous chatter and what sounded like a low cheer from within central monitoring. He put his hand on the door and eased it open.

Hundreds of video screens lined the walls of the circular room, each showing a closed-circuit feed of some place on the ship. The security officers of the watch were all crowded around a single screen, laughing and talking, so engrossed they were unaware of his entrance. They were bathed in a bluish light from the many flickering monitors. The room smelled of old pizza from a stack of greasy boxes shoved in one corner.

“Oh, yeah, grandma, take it

all

!” one cried.


“To the

root

!”


“It’s the little old lady from Pasadena!”


A

Whoo-eeeh!

came from the group, mingled with catcalls and laughter. One officer swayed his hips lasciviously. “Attaboy! Ride ’em, cowboy!”


Kemper strode over. “What the hell’s going on?”


The men jumped away from the closed-circuit security screen, revealing two overweight passengers in a dim, remote hallway having vigorous sex.


“Jesus Christ.” Kemper turned. “Mr. Wadle, aren’t you supposed to be the supervisor this shift?” He looked around at all the officers, standing ridiculously at attention.


“Yes, sir.”


“We’ve got a missing passenger, a suicide on the crew, we’re losing thousands in the casino, and you’re busy watching the Viagra Show. You think that’s funny?”


“No, sir.”


Kemper shook his head.


“Shall I—?” And Wadle indicated the switch to turn off the monitor.


“No. Anytime a camera is shut off it’s logged, and that’ll raise questions. Just . . .

avert

your eyes.”


At this, someone stifled a laugh, and Kemper, despite himself, couldn’t help but join in. “All right, all right. You’ve had your fun. Now get back to your stations.”


He walked through the monitoring station to his tiny back office. A moment later his intercom buzzed.


“A Mr. Pendergast here to see you.”


Kemper felt his mood sour. A moment later the private investigator entered.


“You here for the show, too?” Kemper asked.


“The gentleman in question has studied the Kama Sutra. I believe that position is called ‘the Churning of the Cream.’ ”


“We don’t have a lot of time,” Kemper replied. “We’re down another two hundred thousand in Covent Garden so far tonight. I thought you were going to help us.”


Pendergast took a seat, throwing one leg over the other. “And that is why I’m here. May I have photographs of tonight’s winners?”


Kemper handed him a sheaf of blurry photographs. Pendergast flipped through them. “Interesting—a different group from last night. Just as I thought.”


“And what’s that?”


“This is a large, sophisticated team. The players change every night. The spotters are the key.”


“Spotters?”


“Mr. Kemper, your naïveté surprises me. While the system is complex, the principles are simple. The spotters mingle in the crowd, keeping track of the play at the high-stakes tables.”


“Who the hell are these spotters?”

“They could be anyone: an elderly woman at a strategically placed slot machine, a tipsy businessman talking loudly on a cell phone, even a pimply teenager gaping at the action. The spotters are highly trained and quite often masters of creating an artificial persona to cover their activities. They count the cards—they don’t play.”

“And the players?”

“One spotter might have two to four players in his string. The spotters keep track of all the cards played at a table and ‘count’ them, which usually involves assigning negative numbers to low cards and positive numbers to tens and aces. All they have to remember is a single number—the running count. When the ratio of high cards to low cards remaining in the deck grows beyond a certain point, the odds shift temporarily in favor of the players; high cards in blackjack disfavor the dealer. A spotter who sees a table shift in this way sends a prearranged signal to one of his players, who then sits down at that table and starts betting heavily. Or, if the player is already at the table, he will suddenly up his bets. When the ratio slips back to normal or below, another signal from the spotter tells the player it’s time to leave, or to drop back to smaller bets.”

Kemper shifted uneasily. “How can we stop it?”


“The only foolproof countermeasure is to identify the spotters and give them the, ah, bum’s rush.”


“Can’t do that.”


“No doubt that’s why they’re here and not Las Vegas.”


“What else?”


“Combine the cards into eight-deck shoes and then deal only a third of the shoe before reshuffling.”


“We deal out of a four-deck shoe.”


“Another reason you’ve attracted counters. You could stop them cold by instructing your dealers to shuffle up every time a new player sits down or when a player suddenly ups his wager.”


“No way. That would slow play and reduce profits. Besides, the more experienced players would object.”


“No doubt.” Pendergast shrugged. “Of course, none of these countermeasures solve the problem of how to get

back

your money.”


Kemper looked at him, eyes red-rimmed. “There’s a way to get back the money?”


“Perhaps.”


“We can’t do anything that would involve cheating.”


You

can’t.”


“We can’t allow you to cheat either, Mr. Pendergast.”


“Why, Mr. Kemper,” Pendergast responded, his voice full of hurt, “did I say I was going to

cheat

?”


Kemper said nothing.

“A characteristic of card counters is that they stick by their system. A normal player will quit if he’s losing heavily—but not a professional card counter. He knows the odds will eventually come around. That’s to our advantage.” Pendergast looked at his watch. “Eleven-thirty. That leaves three hours of prime play ahead. Mr. Kemper, be so kind as to extend me a half-million line of credit.”

“Did you say half a

million

?” “I’d hate to find myself short just when things got going.”


Kemper thought hard for a minute. “Are you going to get back our money?”


Pendergast smiled. “I shall try.”


Kemper swallowed. “All right.”

“You’ll need to have Mr. Hentoff warn your pit bosses and dealers that my play might be eccentric, even suspicious—although it will always remain within legal bounds. I’ll take my seat at first base—on the dealer’s left—and I’ll be sitting out about fifty percent of the hands played, so please tell your peoplenot to move me if I’m not playing. Hentoff should instruct his dealers to give me the cut at every normal opportunity, particularly when I first sit down. I’ll appear to be drinking heavily, so make sure when I order a gin and tonic I’m brought only tonic water.”

“All right.”


“Would it be possible to lift the maximum wager at one of the high-stakes tables?”


“You mean, no upper limit to a bet?”


“Yes. It will ensure the counters mark that table, and it will make taking the money back much more efficient.”


Kemper felt a bead of sweat trickling down his brow. “We can do that.”


“And finally, please have Mr. Hentoff staff that table with a dealer with small hands and thin fingers. The less experienced, the better. Have him or her place the end-of-play card high up in the shoe.”


“Do I dare ask why?” said Kemper.


“You dare not.”


“Mr. Pendergast, if we catch you cheating, it’s going to be extremely awkward for both of us.”


“I will not cheat—you have my word.”


“How can you possibly influence play when none of the players ever touch the cards?”

Pendergast smiled enigmatically. “There are ways, Mr. Kemper. Oh, and I shall need an assistant, one of your cocktail waitresses, someone invisible, discreet, and intelligent, who will bring me my drinks and be on call for some—how shall it put it?—unusualassignments I may suddenly give her. They are to be performed unquestionably and without hesitation.”

“This had better work.”


Pendergast paused. “Naturally, if successful, I shall expect another favor in return.”

“Naturally,” said Kemper. Pendergast rose, turned, then glided through the office door into the central monitoring room beyond. Just before the door closed, Kemper could hear his honeyed southern voice raised. “My word, now it’s the apadravyas position. And at their age!”

27


THE ELDERLY WOMAN IN STATEROOM 1039 TURNED SLIGHTLY IN HER bed, mumbling in her sleep.


A moment later, she turned again, the mumbling growing fretful. Something was interfering with her slumber: a rapping sound, loud, insistent.


Her eyes opened. “Inge?” she croaked.


The only reply was another rap.

The woman raised one gnarled hand, grasping a steel bar that ran across the length of the headboard. Slowly, painfully, she raised herself to a sitting position. She had been dreaming; a rather lovely dream involving Monty Hall, door number 2, and petroleum jelly. She licked her desiccated lips, trying to recall the details, but they were already fading into a fog of elusive memories.

“Where is that girl?” she mumbled, feeling a twinge of fear.


The rapping continued. It came from somewhere beyond the bedroom.

From beneath countless layers of satin and sea-island cotton, a withered hand emerged. It plucked dentures from a dish on the bedside table, seated them over anemic gums. Then it reached out—flexing, grasping—until it closed over the handle of a cane. With a series of groans and imprecations, she raised herself to her feet. The ship was rolling noticeably and she kept one hand against the wall as she moved toward the bedroom door.

“Inge!” she called.

She felt another wash of fear. She hated being dependent, truly hated it, and she was scared and embarrassed by her frailty. All her life she had been independent, and now this rotten old age, this horrible dependency on others.

She turned on the light and looked around, trying to master her fright. Where was that damn girl? It was outrageous, leaving her alone. What if she fell? Or had a heart attack? Take pity on a girl, bring her into your service, and how did she repay you? With disrespect, disloyalty, disobedience. Inge was probably out carousing with some low element of the ship’s staff. Well, this was the last straw: as soon as the ship was docked in New York, she’d send the vixen packing. No notice, no recommendations. She could use her charms—the tramp—to work her way back to Sweden.

Gaining the doorway, the old woman stopped to rest, leaning heavily on the frame. The rapping was louder here—it came from the main door of the suite: and now she could hear a voice as well.


“Petey! Hey, Pete!” The voice was muffled, coming from the corridor beyond. “What?” the woman cried. “Who is that? What do you want?”


The rapping stopped. “Pete, come

on

!” the slurred voice replied. “We aren’t going to wait all night.”

“Hey, Petey-boy, get your ass out here!” said another drunken voice from beyond the door. “Remember those babes we met in Trafalgar’s tonight? Well, after you left, they came back to the club. And we’ve been sucking down champagne ever since. Now they’re back in my room, shit-faced. Come on, bud, it’s your chance to get laid. And the tall blonde one’s got a rack that—”

The old woman began to tremble with rage and indignation. She took a fresh hold on the doorframe. “Leave me alone!” she cried at the top of her lungs. “Get out of here!”


“What?” came the first voice, a little bewildered now.


“I said, go away!”


A pause. Then a giggle. “Oh,

shit

!” came the second voice. “Rog, we fucked up!”


“No, man, I’m sure he said 1039.”


“I’m calling security!” shrilled the old woman.


From the corridor beyond the door there came an explosion of mirth, then the sound of retreating footsteps.

Breathing heavily, the woman pushed herself away from the doorframe and surveyed the room beyond, leaning on her cane. Sure enough: the couch hadn’t been slept in. The clock above the couch read half past eleven. She had been abandoned. She was alone.

Turning slowly, she made her painful way back into the bedroom, her heart pounding. She eased herself onto the bed, laid the cane carefully beside her. Then, turning to the nightstand, she picked up the phone and dialed zero.

“Ship’s operator,” came the pleasant voice. “How may I help you?”


“Get me security,” the old woman croaked.


28

ANH MINH SAW THE HIGH ROLLER IMMEDIATELY UPON HIS ARRIVAL at the blackjack tables of the Mayfair Casino. Mr. Pendergast, that was the name Mr. Hentoff had given her. He looked like an undertaker in his black tuxedo, and she felt a little shiver as he stopped in the doorway and cast his pale eyes about the dim, elegantly appointed room. He must be a very high roller indeed for Mr. Hentoff to assign her solely to him as a cocktail waitress, and she wondered about the odd instructions that went along with the assignment.

“Would you like a drink, sir?” she asked, approaching him.

“Gin and tonic, please.” When she returned with the drink—tonic water only, as instructed—she found the strange-looking man over by the high-stakes tables in conversation with a very nicely groomed young blond gentleman in a dark suit. She went over and waited patiently with the drink on her tray.

“. . . And so,” the high roller was saying—in a completely different accent now—“I gave the guy twenty-two thousand six hundred and ten dollars, cash on the barrelhead, counting it out by hundreds, one bill at a time—one, two, three, four, and when I hit five, up came a twenty, and that’s when I realized I’d been cheated. The brick of hundreds had been plugged in the middle with twenties! Hell, was I pissed. Twenties, along with tens and even some fives and ones.”

“Excuse me,” said the young man, suddenly angry, “I couldn’t care less about your hundreds or twenties or whatever the hell it is you’re talking about.” He moved off quickly, scowling, his lips moving as if thinking furiously to himself.

Pendergast turned to Anh with a smile. “Thank you.” He lifted off the drink, dropped a fifty on the tray, his eyes roving the room once more.


“Can I get you anything else, sir?”

“Yes, you can.” He gestured faintly with his eyes, his voice now low. “Do you see that woman over there? The overweight one in the muumuu drifting among the high-stakes tables? There’s a little experiment I’d like to conduct. Change this fifty and bring her a mess of bills and coins on your tray, telling her it’s change from the drink she requested. She will protest that she did not buy a drink, but you will pretend you don’t understand and start counting out the money. Just keep counting, recitingas many numbers as possible . If she is what I think she is, she may become angry like that young man I was just speaking to—so keep your cool.”

“Yes, sir.”


“Thank you.”


Anh went to the cashier and exchanged the fifty for a miscellany of bills and coins. Placing them on the tray, she walked over to the woman in the muumuu.


“Your change, ma’am.”


“What?” the woman glanced at her, distracted.


“Your change. Ten pound, five pound, two one pound—”


“I didn’t order a drink.” The woman quickly tried to move off.


Anh followed her. “Your change. Ten pound, three one pound, make thirteen pound, twenty-five pence—”


A hiss of exasperation came from the woman. “Didn’t you

hear

? I didn’t order a drink!”

She pursued the woman. “Drink cost six pound, seventy-five pence, change come to thirteen pound, twenty-five pence—”


“You incompetent bitch!” the woman exploded, turning on her with a great swirl of color and advancing, face bright red.

“So sorry.” Anh Minh retreated with the trayful of money, the woman glaring after her. She returned to the bar, poured tonic water over ice, and added a slice of lemon. She found Pendergast strolling through the crowd, gazing this way and that.

“Drink, sir?”

He looked at her, and she fancied she could now see amusement dancing in his eyes. He spoke low and rapidly. “You’re a quick study. Now, do you see that man sitting at first base at the table to your right? Go spill this drink on him. I need his seat. Quick, now.”

Bracing herself, Anh walked over to the specified table. “Your drink, sir?”


“Thanks, but I didn’t—”


She joggled the tray and the drink fell upside down in his crotch.


The man leapt up. “Oh for God’s sake—!”


“So sorry, sir!”


“My new tuxedo!”


“Sorry! So sorry!”


The man plucked a handkerchief from his breast pocket and used it to brush away the ice cubes and liquid. Pendergast glided over, ready to move in.


“So sorry!” Anh repeated.


“Just forget it!” He turned to the dealer. “Color me up, I’m outta here.”

He scooped up his chips and stormed off, and as he did so Pendergast quickly slid into his seat. The dealer shuffled, laid down the deck, and handed the cut-card to Pendergast. He inserted it in the deck, and the dealer cut and loaded the shoe, inserting the end-of-play card unusually deep.

Ahn Minh hovered nearby, wondering what crazy thing Pendergast would ask her to do next.

Aloysius Pendergast looked around the table with a big grin. “How we all doing tonight? Getting lucky?” The Chinese man at third base—his mark—did not acknowledge. The two middle-aged women in between, who looked like sisters, nodded wary greetings.

“Dealing good cards tonight?” he asked the dealer.


“Doing my best,” the petite woman replied evenly.

Pendergast shot a glance across the room and noticed that the lady in the muumuu, who pretended to be chatting on a cell phone, was now spotting their table. Excellent.


“I’m feeling lucky.” Pendergast put a ten-thousand-pound chip into the betting circle, then dropped another in front, as a toke for the dealer.

The two women stared at his bet for a moment, and then advanced their own more modest thousand-pound wagers. The Chinese man pushed a chip into the betting circle—also a thousand.


The dealer pitched out the cards.


Pendergast stood on two eights. The two women played, and his mark drew a twelve and busted on a face card. The dealer drew a twenty in three cards and collected all their money.


The waitress came back with another drink and Pendergast took a good slug. “Rotten luck,” he said, laying the drink down on a coaster and advancing his next bet.


Several more hands were played, and then Pendergast failed to bet.


“Your bet, sir?”


“Going to sit this one out,” Pendergast said. He swiveled around and spoke to Anh Minh. “Gimme another gin and tonic,” he slurred. “Make it dry.”


The cocktail waitress scurried off.


The Chinese man bet again, five thousand this time. The look on his tired, middle-aged face had not changed at all. This time he stayed on fifteen with the dealer showing six, and the dealer busted.

The play moved deeper into the shoe. Out of the corner of his eye, Pendergast could see that another marked player, being spotted by the young blond man, was winning at the next table. The trick would be to force this one to lose bigger, to compensate. The slug of cards that he had tracked through the shuffle wasn’t far off, and it promised to provide some fireworks.

The spotter in the muumuu had evidently also tracked the shuffle. Now, as the play worked up toward the beginning of the slug, Pendergast’s running count was already a good plus eleven. The mark slid a pile of chips into the betting circle: fifty thousand.

A murmur rose.


“Hell, if he’s doing it, I’ll do it too,” Pendergast said, pushing in fifty. He winked at the mark and lifted his drink. “Here’s to us, friend.”


The ladies each bet a thousand, and the cards were dealt.


Pendergast stood on eighteen.


The mark drew, asked to be hit on a twelve with the dealer showing a five—a violation of basic strategy—then drew an eight card.


An

oooh!

came from the crowd.

The ladies drew a series of low cards, one eventually busting. The dealer then completed her own hand: three, five, six, five: nineteen—a win for the mark.


A few more hands were played, most of the cards coming low out of the shoe. Pendergast’s running count kept climbing. Many of the tens and most of the aces were still undealt. On top of that, they were now just into the slug that he had meticulously tracked in the shuffle, using his acute eyesight and prodigious memory. That—and the peek he’d gotten during the shuffle and cut—alerted him to the precise location of seven cards in that slug, along with an educated guess on the location of many others. His side count of aces stood at three—thirteen more were in the pack, and he knew the location of two of them. This would be his opportunity if he could get it right. It all depended on controlling the downstream flow of cards.

This deal he would have to bust, and do it in four cards.


He bet a thousand.


The mark put in a hundred thousand.


Another

oooh!

from the crowd.


Pendergast was dealt a fourteen.


The mark was dealt fifteen, with the dealer’s upcard a ten.


Pendergast took a hit. A five: nineteen. The dealer was about to move on when Pendergast said, “Hit me again.”


Bust.


There were snickers in the crowd, whispers, a derisive laugh. Pendergast took a swig from his drink. He glanced over at the mark and saw the man looking at him, a sudden faint look of contempt in his eyes.


The mark took a hit and was dealt an eight: bust. The dealer raked in his hundred thousand.

A quick mental calculation told Pendergast the running count was now twenty, the true count going even higher. Almost unheard of. The dealer was seventy-five percent through the shoe and still only three aces had been played, the rest concentrated in the remaining slug of cards. This was a combination no card counter could resist. If the mark followed the Kelly criterion—which he would if he had any brains—he would bet big. Very big. The key to controlling play, Pendergast knew, would now be to stop the good cards while sending the bad ones downstream. The problem was the two ladies between him and the mark: the cards they would get, how they would play them, and all the complications that might entail.

“Ladies and gentlemen?” asked the dealer, gesturing for the bets to be placed.


Pendergast bet a hundred thousand. The Chinese man pushed out a pile of chips: two hundred and fifty thousand. The two ladies bet their thousand each, looked at each other, and giggled.


Pendergast held up his hand. “Don’t deal yet. I can’t do this without another drink.”


The dealer looked alarmed. “You want to pause the play?”


“I’ve got to have a drink. What if I lose?” The mark did not look pleased.


The dealer cast a quizzical glance at the floorman hovering nearby, who nodded his approval.


“All right. We’ll take a short pause.”


“Waitress!” Pendergast snapped his fingers.


Anh Minh bustled over. “Yes, sir?”


“A drink!” he cried, handing her a fifty, which he dropped. As she bent down to pick it up Pendergast leapt up. “No, no, I’ll get it!”


When their heads were close, Pendergast said, “Get those two ladies off the table. Now.”


“Yes, sir.”


Pendergast rose with the bill in his hand. “There it is! Keep the change, but don’t you dare come back without that drink!”


“Yes, sir.” Anh bustled off.

A minute passed, then two. Word about the size of the bets had circulated and a sizable crowd was developing around the table. The impatience of the crowd—not to mention the mark—was growing. All eyes were on the tottering stacks of chips sitting on the green felt.

“Make way!” came a cry, and Hentoff, the casino manager, stepped through the crowd. He paused before the two women at Pendergast’s table, flashed them a broad smile, and opened his arms. “Josie and Helen Roberts? Today is your lucky day!”

They looked at each other. “Oh, really?”


He put an arm around each and drew them up. “Once a day, we have a little lottery—all the room numbers are automatically entered. You won!”


“What did we win?”

“Ninety-minute massages with Raul and Jorge, deluxe spa treatment, a gift basket of cosmetics, and a free case of Veuve Clicquot!” He glanced at his watch. “Oh, no! If we don’t hurry, we’ll miss Raul and Jorge! We’ve been looking all over for you two!”

“But we were just—”


“We’ve got to hurry. The prize is good for today only. You can

always

come back.” He gestured to the dealer. “Color them up.”


“With the bets on the table, sir?”


“I

said

, color them up.”


The dealer exchanged their chips and Hentoff, arm around each sister, led them away through the crowd. A moment later Anh Minh arrived with the drink.


Pendergast drained it, banged it down. He looked around the table with a grin. “Okay. I’m fortified.”

The dealer swept her hand over the table, calling for final bets, then she pitched out the cards. Pendergast was dealt two aces, and split. The mark got two sevens, which he also split. The dealer’s upcard was a queen.

The mark advanced a new stack of chips against the split hand. Now there was five hundred thousand on the table. Pendergast added his second bet, bringing his stake to two hundred thousand.


The dealer dealt Pendergast his two cards: a king and a jack. Two blackjacks.


The crowd erupted in applause, then quickly fell into a hush as the dealer turned to the mark and dealt a card on each seven.


Two more sevens, just as Pendergast had expected. “Too bad we’re not playing poker!” he brayed.


The mark split the sevens again—he had little choice—and reluctantly advanced two more piles of chips. A million pounds were now in front of him on the table.


The dealer dealt out four cards: jack, ten, queen, ace.


The crowd waited. The silence was extraordinary.


The dealer turned over her hole card—to reveal a ten.

A collective sigh rose from the crowd as it sank in: they had just witnessed a man lose a million pounds. There was no applause this time, only a high, excited murmuring, the air so thick with schadenfreude one could almost taste it.

Pendergast rose from the table, collected his own winnings, and winked again at the Chinese man, who seemed frozen as he watched his million pounds being raked away, counted, and stacked. “Win some, lose some,” he said, giving his chips a jaunty rattle.

As he exited the casino, he caught a glimpse of Hentoff, staring at him, mouth hanging open.


29

WHEN FIRST OFFICER LESEUR ENTERED THE BRIDGE JUST BEFORE midnight, he immediately sensed tension in the air. Commodore Cutter was back on the bridge again, thick arms crossed over his barrel chest, pink fleshy face impassive and unreadable. The rest of the bridge complement stood at their stations, silent and on edge.

But it wasn’t just Cutter’s presence that created the air of tension. LeSeur was acutely aware that the level-two search had failed to turn up the Evered woman. Her husband had become unmanageable, tearing up and down, making scenes, insisting that his wife would never have jumped, that she’d been murdered or was being held hostage. His behavior was beginning to alarm the other passengers, and rumors were spreading. On top of that, the gruesome and unaccountable suicide of the housekeeper had badly spooked the crew. LeSeur had quietly checked Blackburn’s alibi and found it held up; the billionaire really had been at dinner and his private maid in medical.

LeSeur was pondering these problems when the new officer of the watch arrived on the bridge and relieved the outgoing watch. While the two men discussed the change of watch in low voices, LeSeur strolled over to the bridge workstation, where Staff Captain Mason was checking the electronics. She turned, nodded, and went back to her work.

“Course, speed, and conditions?” Cutter asked the new officer of the watch. It was a pro forma question: not only was LeSeur sure that Cutter knew the answers, but even if he didn’t, a glance at the ECDIS chartplotters and weather panels would have told him all he needed to know.

“Position four nine degrees 50.36 minutes north latitude and zero one two degrees 43.08 minutes west longitude, heading two four one true, speed twenty-nine knots,” the officer of the watch answered. “Sea state 4, wind twenty to thirty knots on the starboard stern, seas running eight to twelve feet. Barometric pressure 29.96, dropping.”

“Give me a printout of our position.”

“Yes, sir.” The officer of the watch tapped a few keys and a thin sheet of paper began scrolling out of a miniprinter slot in the side of the console. Cutter ripped it free, glanced at it, then tucked it into a pocket of his immaculately pressed uniform. LeSeur knew what he would do with the printout: once back in his quarters, he’d be quick to compare it to the relative position of theOlympia on her record- breaking crossing the year before.

Beyond the vast bank of windows that covered the forward face of the bridge, the front was getting closer and the sea was growing dramatic. It was a large, slow-moving system, which meant it would be with them for most of the crossing. TheBritannia ’s knifelike bows tore through the waves, throwing up huge frothy sprays that soared to heights of fifty feet before raining back down on the lower aft weather decks. The ship had developed a pronounced deep-ocean roll.

LeSeur’s eyes roamed over the ship’s system panels. He noted that the stabilizers were deployed at half position, sacrificing passenger comfort for greater speed, and he guessed it must be at Cutter’s orders.


“Captain Mason?” Cutter’s voice cut across the bridge.


“He’ll be here any moment, sir.”


Cutter did not respond.


“Under the circumstances, I suggest we give serious consideration to—”


“I’ll hear his report first,” Cutter interrupted.


Mason fell silent again. It was clear to LeSeur that he’d walked into the middle of an ongoing disagreement of some kind.


The door to the bridge opened again and Kemper, chief of security, stepped inside.

“There you are, Mr. Kemper, finally,” Cutter said, not looking at him. “Your report, please.” “We got the call about forty minutes ago, sir,” Kemper said. “An elderly woman in suite 1039, reporting that her companion is missing.”

“And who is the companion?”

“A young Swedish woman named Inge Larssen. She put the old woman to bed about nine o’clock, then supposedly went to bed herself. But when some inebriated passengers mistakenly knocked on the old woman’s door, she woke to find Ms. Larssen missing. We’ve been looking for her since, with no results.”

Slowly, Commodore Cutter swiveled toward the security chief. “Is that all, Mr. Kemper? Captain Mason led me to believe it was something serious.”


“We thought that this being a second disappearance, sir—”


“Have I not made it clear that the vicissitudes of the passengers are not my concern?”


“I wouldn’t have troubled you, sir, except that, as I mentioned, we put out a call on the PA system, did a thorough check of the public areas. Nothing.”


“She’s obviously with some man.” Cutter wheeled his solid form back toward the windows.


“As Mr. Kemper said, this is a second disappearance,” said Mason. “I think that makes it appropriate that we bring it to your attention, sir.”


Still, Cutter said nothing.


“And as Mr. Kemper reported to you on an earlier occasion, when we investigated the first disappearance, we found hair and skin samples on the port weather-deck brightwork that matched—”

“That proves nothing, it could have come from anywhere.” Cutter waved an arm in a gesture that was part irritation, part dismissal. “And even if she jumped—so what? You know as well as I do that a ship in midocean is a floating suicide palace.”

While LeSeur knew it was true that disappearances at sea weren’t uncommon—and were always zealously covered up by the crew—this coarse reply seemed to take even Mason by surprise. The staff captain was quiet for thirty seconds or so before clearing her throat and beginning again.

“Sir,” she said, taking a deep breath, “we have to consider the slim possibility that two disappearances might indicate there’s a maniac on board.”


“So what do you want me to do about it?”


“I would respectfully recommend we consider diverting to the nearest port.”

Cutter stared at her for the first time, his eyes like coals in his pink, vein-burst flesh. He spoke slowly, voice ice-cold. “I find that recommendation ill-considered and utterly without merit, Captain Mason. This is theBritannia .”

The pronouncement of the ship’s name hung in the air as if it explained everything. When Mason responded, her voice was low and even. “Yes, sir.” Without another word, she walked past him and exited the bridge.

“Damned female fuss,” Cutter muttered half under his breath. He plucked the printout from his pocket and examined it again. His scowl deepened. Even without comparing it to theOlympia ’s navigational data, it seemed he was unhappy with their position. Ignoring the officer of the watch, he turned directly to the helmsman. “Increase speed to full ahead.”

“Full ahead, aye, sir.”


LeSeur didn’t even think to open his mouth to object. He knew it would do no good; no good at all.


30

AT PRECISELY TWENTY MINUTES PAST TWELVE, CONSTANCE Greene emerged from the aft starboard maid station on Deck 9 and wheeled her housekeeping trolley over the plush rug toward the Penshurst Triplex. She had been loitering in the maid’s station for the better part of two hours, pretending to look busy, folding and refolding linens, arranging the mouthwash and shampoo bottles in their complimentary laundry tubs, all the while waiting for Scott Blackburn to leave his suite for the casino. But the door had remained stubbornly closed all evening. Finally, just moments before, Blackburn had emerged and, with a quick glance at his watch, hurried down the corridor to the waiting elevator.

Now she stopped the trolley outside the suite; paused a moment to smooth down her maid’s outfit and compose herself; then plucked out the passcard Pendergast had given her and slid it into the waiting keyslot. The lock sprang ajar and she pushed the door open, wheeling the trolley into the suite behind her as quietly as possible.

Closing the door softly, she paused in the entryway to reconnoiter. The Penshurst was one of two Grand Triplex Suites on theBritannia , at 2,700 square feet remarkably large and well appointed. The bedrooms were on the upper floors, while the salon, dining room, and maid’s kitchen lay before her.

Bring me his trash

, Pendergast had said. Constance narrowed her eyes.

She didn’t know how long Blackburn planned to spend in the casino—if that was indeed where he was going—but she had to assume there wasn’t much time. She glanced at her watch: twelve-thirty. She would allow herself fifteen minutes.

She wheeled her trolley across the parquet floor of the entryway, looking curiously about her. While the suite sported the same rich wood paneling as the one she shared with Pendergast, in other ways it couldn’t possibly have appeared more different. Blackburn had decorated almost every surface with items from his collection. Tibetan rugs of silk and yak wool lay strewn across the floor; cubist and impressionist paintings in heavy frames hung on the walls above. Ahead, in the salon, a Bösendorfer piano in rich mahogany sat in one corner. Prayer wheels, ritual weapons, decorative boxes of gold and silver, and a profusion of sculptures were arrayed across various tables and on the bookshelves that lined one wall. A large and intricate mandala hung over a gas fireplace. Beside it, a heavy armoire of mellow teak glowed in the subdued light.

Leaving her trolley, she walked across the salon to the armoire. She stroked the polished wood thoughtfully for a moment, then pulled the door open. Inside sat a massive steel safe, its bulk taking up almost the entire interior of the cabinet. She stepped back, looking at the safe appraisingly. Was it large enough to hold the Agozyen?

Yes, she decided: it was large enough. She closed the door to the armoire and, taking a cloth from the pocket of her apron, polished the edges where she had touched it. One objective accomplished. She glanced around a second time and made a mental note of everything in Blackburn’s extensive and wildly eclectic collections.

As she walked back toward her cart, she paused at the base of the stairway. There had been a sound—faint, but distinct—from above. She waited motionless, listening. There it was again: a muffled snore, issuing from the open door of a bedroom at the next landing.

So somebody was still in the suite. Blackburn’s private maid, most likely. That would complicate things.

Grasping the handle of the trolley, she pushed it across the entryway, careful to make sure the broom and mop did not rattle in their holder. She parked it in the middle of the salon and quickly made the rounds, emptying the trash baskets and ashtrays into the fresh garbage bag she’d hung from the trolley. Leaving the trolley where it was, she darted into the dining room and kitchen in turn, repeating the process. There was precious little refuse to empty: clearly, Blackburn’s own maid had done a thorough job.

Returning to the salon, she paused to consider. She did not dare go upstairs for the rest of the garbage; that would awaken the maid and precipitate an unpleasant scene. She had the most important information already: the location and size of Blackburn’s safe and a quick inventory of his collection. Perhaps she should leave now.

But as she hesitated, thinking, she noticed a curious thing. While the surfaces of the tables and the objets d’art were spotless and gleaming, and the wastebaskets had held only a few scraps, there was a surprising amount of dust on the floor, especially around the moldings along the edges of the room. It appeared that the talents of Blackburn’s maid did not extend to vacuuming. She knelt and ran her finger along the base of the mahogany molding. It wasn’t just dust—it was sawdust.

She lifted her gaze to the vacuum that hung from her housekeeping trolley. If she turned it on, she would wake the maid for sure. So be it. She walked over to the trolley, plucked the vacuum from its hook, pulled out the old bag and attached a fresh one. Walking to the nearest wall of the salon, she knelt, turned on the vacuum, and made several quick passes along the edge of the floor, getting as much dust as possible.

Almost immediately, there was a muffled thud from upstairs. “Hello?” came a sleepy feminine voice. “Who’s there?”

Pretending not to hear over the noise, Constance crossed to the center of the room, knelt again, and made several more passes with the vacuum along the tops of the moldings, then across the rug in the entryway, checking for hair and fiber.

A minute later, the voice sounded again, much louder this time. “Hey! What are you doing?”

Constance rose, turned off the vacuum, and turned around. A short, melon-shaped woman of about thirty stood on the bottom step of the staircase, her face red, clad only in a huge terrycloth towel, which she pressed against herself with one flabby forearm. “What are you doing here?” she demanded again. Constance curtseyed. “Sorry to wake you, mum,” she said, putting on her German accent. “The maid who normally does this suite has had an accident. I’ve taken over her duties.”

“It’s after midnight!” the woman shrilled.


“I’m sorry, mum, but I was told to clean the suite as soon as it was unoccupied.”


“Mr. Blackburn gave specific orders that there was to be no more maid service in this suite!”

At that moment, there was a noise from outside: the sound of a passcard being inserted into a slot, the click of a lock disengaging. The maid gasped, colored, and dashed back up the steps in the direction of her room. A moment later, the front door opened and Blackburn entered, a roll of newspapers under his arm.

Constance watched him, motionless, portable vacuum in one hand.


He stopped and stared at her, his eyes narrowing. Then he coolly turned and double-locked the door, walked across the entryway, and dropped his papers on a side table.


“Who are you?” he asked, his back still turned.


“Begging your pardon, sir, I’m your housekeeper,” she said.


“Housekeeper?”


“Your new housekeeper,” she went on. “Juanita—that is, the girl who cleaned your suite—she had an accident. Now I’ve been assigned—”

Blackburn turned and stared at her. The words died in her throat. There was something in his expression, in his eyes, that shocked her: an intensity of purpose as hard and clean as polished steel, shot through with something like fear, or perhaps even desperation.

She tried again. “I’m sorry about the late hour. I’ve been doing her staterooms as well as my own, and it’s been hard to catch up. I thought nobody was home, or I’d never have—”


Suddenly, a hand shot out, grasping her wrist. He squeezed it cruelly and dragged her toward him. Constance gasped with the pain.


“Bullshit,” he said in a low, ugly voice, his face inches from hers. “I gave clear orders just this evening that nobody was to clean my suite but my private help.” And he squeezed harder.


Constance fought back a groan. “Please, sir. Nobody told me. If you don’t wish your rooms cleaned, I’ll leave.”


He stared at her, and she averted her eyes. He squeezed still harder, until she thought he would crush her wrist. Then he shoved her brutally away. She fell to the floor, vacuum clattering across the carpet.


“Get the fuck out of here,” he growled.

Constance rose to her feet, scooping up the vacuum and smoothing her apron as she did so. She moved past him, hanging the vacuum on its hook and wheeling the trolley across the salon to the entryway of the suite. She unlocked the front door, pushed the trolley out ahead of her, and—with a single, hooded glance back at the man who was already mounting the stairs, yelling up at his own maid for admitting a stranger into the suite—stepped into the corridor.

31

THE POLISHED CHERRYWOOD TABLE IN THE DINING AREA OF THE Tudor Suite was covered with an incongruous clutter—a large garbage bag of clear plastic, dribbling out a host of scraps: crumpled paper, wadded tissue, cigar ash. Pendergast circled the table like a restless cat, arms behind his back, now and then bending close to examine something but never extending a hand to touch or probe. Constance sat on a nearby sofa, dressed now in one of the elegant gowns they had purchased on board ship, watching him.

“And he threw you to the ground, you say?” Pendergast murmured over his shoulder.


“Yes.”


“He’s an ill-mannered cur.” He circled the table again, then stopped to look at her. “This is all?”


“I wasn’t able to do the upstairs of the suite. Not with the maid in residence. I’m sorry, Aloysius.”

“Don’t be. It was an afterthought anyway. The important thing is that we know the size and location of his safe. And you’ve given me an excellent précis of his collections. Too bad the Agozyen doesn’t seem to be among them.” He dipped one hand into his pocket, pulled out a pair of latex gloves, snapped them on, then began to examine the trash. He picked up an empty seltzer bottle from the table, examined it, put it aside. This was followed by several dry-cleaning tags; a cigar butt and accumulated ash; a crumpled business card; a soiled cocktail napkin; a champagne cork; a broken compact disk case; a ship’s brochure, torn in half; a swizzle stick; an empty Swan Vesta box and half a dozen spent wooden matches. Pendergast sorted through it all with great care. Once he had put the last item aside, he again circled the table, hands behind his back, pausing to examine various items with a loupe. Then, with a quiet sigh, he straightened up.

“Let’s put this away where housekeeping won’t take it,” he said. “Just in case we want to examine anything again.” He pulled off the gloves, dropped them on the table.


“What next?” Constance asked.


“Next we find a way to take a look inside that safe. Preferably when Blackburn has absented himself.”


“That might be difficult. Something seems to have spooked him—he seems reluctant to leave his suite for any length of time, and he won’t let anybody in.”

“If it were anybody else, I’d say the two disappearances you informed me of have spooked him. But not Mr. Blackburn. Too bad we didn’t narrow down my list more quickly; I could have examined his chambers with relative ease yesterday.” He glanced at Constance. “And we mustn’t forget that, though Blackburn may be the prime suspect, we also need to examine the rooms of Calderón and Strage, if only to rule them out.”


He walked to the sideboard and poured himself a snifter of calvados, then came over to the couch and took a seat. He rolled the amber liquid gently, brought it to his nose, took a small sip, and gave a sigh that was half contentment, half regret. “Well, thank you, my dear,” he said. “I’m sorry you were assaulted. In the fullness of time, I shall make sure Blackburn regrets it.”

“I’m only sorry that—” Then, abruptly, Constance fell silent.


“What is it?”


“I almost forgot. I retrieved something else from his suite. I used the vacuum to pick up some odd dust samples.”


“Why odd?”


“Considering the man has a live-in maid, and he’s clearly a petty tyrant, I thought it was strange the room was so dusty.”


“Dusty?” Pendergast repeated.


Constance nodded. “Most of it was along the walls, under the wainscoting. It looked like sawdust, actually.”


Pendergast was on his feet. “Where’s the vacuum bag, Constance?” He spoke quietly, but his silver eyes glittered with excitement.


“There, by the door—”

But almost before the words were out, Pendergast had flitted to the front door, scooped up the bag, plucked a clean plate from a kitchen cabinet, and returned to the table. Now his movements grew excessively careful. Taking a switchblade from his pocket, he carefully slit the vacuum bag and slowly emptied the contents onto the plate. Fixing a jeweler’s loupe to his eye, he began separating the debris with the blade of his knife, scrape by tiny scrape, as if he were examining the individual grains.

“Do you know, Constance,” he murmured as he bent over the table, face just inches from the surface of the wood. “I believe you’re right. This is sawdust.”


“Left over from construction?”


“No.

Fresh

sawdust. And if

this

is what I think it is”—here he jabbed at something with a pair of tiny forceps, then straightened up—“then we won’t have to bother ourselves with Calderón or Strage.”


Constance looked at Pendergast’s pale, eager face. She couldn’t even begin to imagine how sawdust could fit in.

As she stood up and drew near, he rummaged for an ashtray and a match. Then he motioned her to move closer. As he held the forceps over the ashtray, she could just make out, in the steel jaws, the glittering of a tiny brownish crystal.

“Pay attention,” he said quietly. “This won’t last long.” And then he lit the match; waited a moment while the initial bloom of sulfur faded from the air; then applied the flame to the crystal.


As they watched, it flared and smoked in the forceps. And then, very briefly, Constance caught a faint scent, borne on the air of the stateroom: a rich, musky, exotic whiff of myrrh, strange, faintly intoxicating—and unmistakable.

“I know that smell,” she breathed.


Pendergast nodded. “The smell of the inner monastery of Gsalrig Chongg. A special kind of incense, made only by them, used to keep a uniquely voracious species of woodworms at bay.”


“Woodworms?” Constance repeated.


“Yes.”


She turned to the small mound on the table. “You mean that sawdust . . . ?”

“Exactly. Some of those same woodworms must have come on board in the box that housed the Agozyen. Blackburn has done the North Star line no favors by introducing them to theBritannia .” He turned to face her, his eyes still glittering with excitement. “We have our man. Now all that remains is to lure him from his lair and get inside his safe.”

32

SCOTT BLACKBURN WALKED TO THE FRONT DOOR OF HIS SUITE, placed a Do Not Disturb card on the outside knob, then bolted it from the inside. Climbing two flights of stairs to his dressing room, he yanked off his tie, removed his suit jacket and shirt, tossed them into a corner for his maid to hang up, and slipped out of his pants. For a moment he stood in front of the full-length mirror, rippling his muscles, absently admiring his torso. Then, from a locked drawer, he drew out a set of saffron-colored Toray silk robes. He slowly dressed himself in them, first the inner robe, then the upper robe, and finally the outer robe, the fine silk slipping across his skin like quicksilver. He arranged the pleats, folding the robe over and leaving one chiseled shoulder and arm bare.

He stepped into his private sitting room, shut the doors, and stood in its center, surrounded by his Asian art collection, deep in thought. It was necessary, he knew, to calm his mind, which had been greatly disturbed by what he had heard at the dinner table that evening. So a maid had been in his room yesterday. And she had subsequently gone crazy, killed herself. The chief of security had questioned him—all allegedly routine. And then again, just now, he’d caught another ship’s maid in his suite, despite his strictest orders to the hotel manager and the head of the housekeeping staff. Was it a coincidence?

Or was he, in fact, under scrutiny? Had his movements, his activities, his

acquisitions

, been tracked?

In his fierce climb to the top of the Silicon Valley hierarchy, Blackburn had long ago learned to trust his sense of paranoia. He had learned that, if his instincts told him somebody was out to get him, then somebody generally was. And here, trapped on this ship, without recourse to his usual layers of security, he was in an unusually vulnerable position. He’d heard rumors there was some kind of private investigator on board, an eccentric passenger by the name of Pendergast, looking for a thief and murderer.

Was the bastard investigating him ? There was no way to be certain, but the more he thought about it, the more it seemed likely. He couldn’t afford to take a chance; the stakes were too high. His adversary—for, if his instincts were right, there could be no other term for him—would have to be dealt with in a special way.

A very special way.

He turned off all the lights in the room and stood in the dark, sharpening his senses. First he listened intently, teasing out every little sound—from the faint thrumming of the engines deep within the riveted steel, to the moaning of wind and sea; the splatter of rain against the glass; the sobbing of his private maid in her bedroom; the muffled footfalls in the corridor outside. He tuned in to the sensations of his own body, his bare feet on the plush nap, the scent of sandalwood and beeswax in the cabin, the sensation caused by the deep, ponderous rolling of the ship.

He inhaled, exhaled. The three enemies—hate, desire, and confusion—had to be temporarily banished. All must be calm. Of these three, hate was the most powerful of the enemies, and now it almost suffocated Blackburn in its triumphant embrace.

With iron self-control, he moved to an easel standing beside the far wall, on which something was propped up, covered by a tied shroud of the finest silk. It had been a foolish mistake not to keep it in the safe from the very beginning; but he had hated the idea of locking it away when he needed it so frequently. His own private maid had been given strict instructions never to lift the silk and look upon it. And he knew she wouldn’t—it had taken him years to find someone as reliable, unimaginative, and incurious as her. But the first ship’s maid—the one who killed herself—must have lifted the veil. Now, if his suspicions were true and this Pendergast was after it, even the safe wouldn’t be secure enough. Hotel safes were notoriously easy to break into, and ship’s safes, even a big one, were probably no different. They were designed to keep out petty thieves, and no more.

He would have to find a better hiding place.

Scrupulously avoiding looking at it, he gingerly lifted the silk covering from the object and placed it in the center of the room. With ceremonial care, he arranged thirty-six butter candles on a large silver tray, lit them, then placed them in front of the object to better illuminate it—all the while keeping his eyes averted. He placed bundles of joss sticks into two elaborately chased gold thuribles, arranging them on either side of the object.

The butter candles flickered, filling the room with their peculiar, dancing, golden light. Next, he laid out a quilted silk mat before the candles and seated himself, lotus-style, upon it. Closing his eyes, he began to chant: a strange, low, humming that the careful listener would hear as a braid of the same strange sounds linked together, without beginning or end. The warm, animal smell of the butter candles filled the air as his humming rose and fell, creating the bizarre Tibetan polyphonic effect known assygyt: that of sounding two notes at once with the same voice, made famous by the Tengyo monks, among whom he had studied.

After thirty minutes of closed-eye chanting, the three enemies were gone, vanquished. Blackburn’s mind was empty of all hatred and desire, and receptive toit . He opened his eyes suddenly, very wide, and stared at the object in the candlelight.

It was as if he’d received an electric current. His body stiffened, his muscles bulged, the cords in his neck tightened, his carotid artery pulsed. But his chanting never wavered, growing more rapid, moving into the higher registers, reaching an intensity of sound that was nothing at all like the normal tones of the human voice.


He stared, and stared, and stared. A peculiar smell began filtering into the room, a nauseating, earthy smell, like rotting toadstools. The air seemed to thicken, as if filling with smoke, which drew together in a place about four feet in front of him, clotting like dark, viscous cream into something dense, almost solid. And then . . .

It began to move.


33

IT HAD BEEN A VOYAGE FULL OF FIRSTS, THOUGHT BETTY JONDROW of Paradise Hills, Arizona, as she waited in the gilded lobby of the Belgravia Theatre, clutching a program book. Yesterday, she and her twin sister Willa had gone to the Sedona SunSpa® and gotten matching tattoos on their butts: hers of a butterfly, Willa’s of a bumblebee. Both had bought ankle bracelets of real diamonds in Regent Street, one of the ship’s two upscale shopping arcades, and they wore them every night. Who would have believed, Betty thought, that between them she and her sister had borne eight nine-pound babies and boasted eleven bouncing grandchildren? Thank God they had never let themselves go like so many of their high school classmates. She took great pride in the fact that, at sixty-three, she could still fit into her high school prom dress—an experiment she repeated religiously each year on the anniversary of the prom.

She looked around again and checked her watch. Almost one o’clock in the morning. Where in heck was Willa? She had gone off to buy batteries for her camera at least half an hour ago. Maybe even longer.

It was Willa who had been so anxious to meet Braddock Wiley, the movie star. One of the highlights of the cruise—and one of the reasons they had signed up—was the promise of a mid-atlantic premiere of Wiley’s latest horror movie. It was supposed to happen at ten, but Braddock Wiley, or so rumor had it, was suffering a bit from seasickness due to the rough weather.

She scanned the crowd again, but still no Willa. Well, if she didn’t get there soon, Betty would just have to meet Wiley for both of them. She slipped a makeup mirror out of her bag, examined her face, touched up the corners of her lips with a hankie, snapped it shut, and slid it back.

A sudden stir at the fringes of the group told her the wait had not been in vain. There was Braddock Wiley himself—dashing in nautical blue blazer, ascot, and cream-colored pants—striding into the lobby with several ship’s officers. He didn’t look sick at all.

As soon as he saw the group of women he beamed and came over. “Good evening, ladies!” he said, reaching inside his blazer for a pen as the women, giggling and blushing, pushed their movie programs toward him. Wiley worked his way through the crowd, chatting with everyone, signing programs and posing for photographs. He was even more handsome in person than on the silver screen. Betty hung back, hoping for a last-minute appearance of her sister—but then, finally, there was Wiley, in front of her.

“Last but not least,” he said with a wink, enveloping her hand in both of his and holding it warmly. “They told me there were going to be some fine-looking ladies on board. I didn’t believe them—until now.”

“Come now, Mr. Wiley,” said Betty, with a sassy smile. “You can’t be serious. I have six grandchildren, you know.”


His eyes widened in surprise. “Six grandchildren? Who could have guessed?” The movie star winked again.

Betty Jondrow could find no words in response. Flushing to the roots of her hair, for the first time in half a century she felt that delicious sensation of being a blushing, virginal, confused schoolgirl once again, holding the hand of the captain of the football team.

“Let me sign that for you,” said Wiley, slipping the program from her hand, signing it with a flourish, and then moving on with a final wave to the group.


Betty raised the program and saw he had written, “To my favorite smokin’ grandma—Love and French kisses, Brad Wiley.”


She held the program in trembling hands. This was destined to be one of the high moments of her life. Wait until Willa saw

this

.

Wiley was gone and now the theater lobby was starting to fill with dolled-up cinemagoers. Betty came to her senses; she had better claim two good seats, and fast. Willa may have missed Braddock, but she still had time to see the premiere.

She showed her reserved ticket to the usher, went inside and found the perfect seat, right up front, and then claimed the next seat with her purse. The Belgravia Theatre was an extremely impressive space that took up much of the bow of Decks 2 through 5, very dark, trimmed in tasteful blue and amber neon, sporting plush, comfortable seats, a wide stage, and a deep balcony. Soon, despite its five-hundred-seat capacity and the late hour, the theater had filled. Within moments the lights dimmed and Braddock Wiley made another appearance, strolling out on the proscenium before the curtain, smiling in the glare of a spotlight. He spoke a few words about the film; told some amusing stories about the New York City production; thanked various producers, actors, writers, the director, and the special effects master; blew a kiss to the audience; and walked off. As applause filled the room, the 20th Century Fox logo appeared projected onto the curtains, and at that cue the curtains opened.

The audience gasped. Betty Jondrow put her hand over her mouth. There, hanging directly in front of the screen, was a brilliant bit of stagecraft—a remarkably realistic dummy of a dead woman, dripping blood, illuminated by the projector. The audience broke into excited murmurs at this unexpected piece of drama, which must have been specially arranged to spice up the premiere. The dummy had been hidden behind the curtain to shock the audience. It was amazingly realistic—almosttoo realistic.

The movie title came on, THE VIVISECTOR, the letters grotesquely illuminated across the body, with the word “VIVISECTOR” right on the chest, which indeed looked like it was the product of a botched operation. There were gasps of admiration from the audience at the clever, if revolting, juxtaposition.

Betty suddenly leaned forward. There was something familiar about the way the dummy was dressed—that sequined silk dress streaked with blood, the black pumps, the short blonde hair . . .


She grasped the seat in front of her, pulling herself to her feet.

“Willa!” she cried, pointing. “Oh my God! It’s Willa! That’s my sister! Somebody’s murdered her!” She uttered a piercing shriek that cut through the very air of the theater, then fell back in her seat in a dead faint. The image on the screen faltered, then went dark; and with that the audience boiled to its feet and began a screaming, hollering, helter-skelter stampede for the rear exits.

34

IT WAS APPROACHING NOON, AND PATRICK KEMPER WAITED IN THE medical officer’s quarters and tried to steady himself for what was to come. As a cruise ship security officer with thirty years of service, he thought he’d seen everything. Everything, including murder. But this went way beyond murder. Five hundred passengers had witnessed something savagely brutal. There was incipient panic aboard, not just among the passengers, but also among the belowdecks service staff, already spooked by the suicide.

Now he was faced with a hideously obvious fact: there was a homicidal maniac on board the Britannia , and he didn’t even begin to have the resources to deal with it. Back in Boston in his cop days, they had whole teams that dealt with evidence gathering; they had the hair and fiber boys, the toxicologists, the fingerprint guys and ballistics people and the DNA teams. Here, he had no resources. Nada. And the only other ex-cop on his security team had been an MP at an airbase in Germany.

To his left stood Staff Captain Carol Mason, a blessedly steady presence. LeSeur, more obviously rattled, stood on the other side. The ship’s chief medical officer—a capable but retiring internist from Johns Hopkins who relished the low-intensity, light-caseload attributes of shipboard medicine—looked the most rattled of all.

Commodore Cutter stepped briskly into the room, immaculate as usual, his face a mask of granite. Kemper glanced covertly at his watch: noon exactly.


Cutter wasted no time. “Mr. Kemper? Your report.”

Kemper cleared his throat. “The victim is Willa Berkshire of Tempe, Arizona. Recently widowed, traveling with her sister, Betty Jondrow. It appears she was killed with a single blow from a machete, a stage prop kept in some locked cabinets behind the stage.”

Cutter frowned. “A stage prop?”

“Yes. We don’t yet know if the murderer sharpened it or simply found it that way—nobody seems to remember what condition the machete was in to begin with. She was killed just backstage—there was a large amount of blood at the scene. It appears the time of death was about half an hour to twenty minutes before curtain time; at least, that was the last time Mrs. Berkshire was seen alive. After committing the killing, the murderer used some stage pulleys and hooks to raise the body. It appears—and this is moving into speculation—the victim was lured backstage, killed with a single blow, and quickly hoisted. The entire process may have taken as little as a few minutes.”

“Lured backstage?”


“It’s a locked, off-limits area. The killer had a key. And I say ‘lured’ because it is hard to imagine a passenger going back there without some good reason.”


“Any suspects?”

“Not yet. We’ve questioned the sister, who said only that she was to meet her sister at the theater ahead of time, hoping to get an autograph from Braddock Wiley. They knew no one else on board and hadn’t made any acquaintances—their goal, she says, was to be together, not meet men or socialize. She said they have no enemies, haven’t had any incidents or altercations on board. In short, Berkshire seems to have been a random victim.”

“Any sign of rape or a sexual assault?”


“I’m not a doctor, Captain.”


Cutter turned to the chief medical officer. “Dr. Grandine?”


The doctor cleared his throat. “Captain, this is really terrible, a shock to us all—”


“Any sign of rape or sexual assault?” came the crisp repetition.

“You must understand we have no facilities on board to do an autopsy, and in any case I’m not qualified. My training in forensic medicine is minimal and many years out of date. We’ve refrigerated the body for medical examination once we reach port. I haven’t examined the body in detail—and any effort to do so on my part would only create a problem for the M.E. later.”

Cutter stared at the doctor, his eyes glittering with his obvious low opinion of the man. “Show me the body.”


This demand was met with disbelieving silence.


“Very well, but I warn you it isn’t pretty—”


“Doctor, you will confine your comments to factual matters.”

“Yes, of course.” Very unwillingly the doctor unlocked a door at the back of the office and they filed into a cramped room that—among other things—functioned as the ship’s morgue. It smelt strongly of chemicals. Along the far wall were nine stainless steel drawers for holding cadavers. Nine seemed like a lot, but Kemper knew well that plenty of people died aboard ship, especially given the average age of the cruise ship passenger and their propensity, once on board, to overindulge in the food, drink, and sexual departments.

The doctor unlocked one of the middle compartments and slid out a drawer beyond, revealing a semi-transparent plastic body bag. Kemper could see a vague, pink thing inside. A queasy feeling formed in the pit of his stomach.

“Open it.”


Kemper had already examined the body, hardly knowing what to look for. The last thing he wanted was to see it again.

Hesitantly, the doctor unzipped the bag. The commodore reached over and spread the zipper apart, exposing the naked body. A huge, cleaved wound, splitting the chest and penetrating the heart, stared back at them. The smell of formalin rose up.

Kemper swallowed.


A cultivated voice sounded behind them. “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen?” Kemper turned to see, in utter disbelief, Pendergast standing in the door.


“Who the devil is this?” demanded the commodore.


Kemper rushed over. “Mr. Pendergast, this is a

very

private meeting, and you must leave here immediately!”


“Must I?” Pendergast drawled.


Kemper’s queasiness was replaced with irritation. This was the last straw. “Pendergast, I’m not going to warn you again—”


He paused in midsentence, mouth open: Pendergast had removed his wallet and flipped it open, revealing a gold FBI shield. Kemper stared at it in disbelief.


“Why aren’t you escorting that man out of here?” the commodore asked.


Kemper couldn’t quite find the words. Any words.

“I had hoped to complete this voyage incognito, as it were,” Pendergast said. “But it seems the time has come to offer you my assistance, Mr. Kemper; my professional assistance this time around. The sad truth is, Ispecialize in this sort of thing.” He glided past Kemper and strolled up to the body.

“Mr. Kemper, I told you to get this man

out

!”


“Commodore, I’m sorry, it seems he’s a federal agent . . .” Again words failed Kemper.


Pendergast showed his shield to each person in turn, then went back to examining the body.


“He has no jurisdiction here,” the commodore snapped. “We’re in international waters on a British ship registered in Liberia.”

Pendergast straightened up. “Quite true. I realize I have no authority here, and remain at your sufferance alone. But I should be surprised if you refused my help, seeing as how none of you appear to have the faintest idea what to do aboutthis .” He nodded to the body. “How would things look if it were later revealed that the ship’s officers refused the help of a special agent of the FBI who was highly trained in evidence gathering and forensic work?” He smiled coldly. “At least, if you accept my help, you’ll have someone to blame later—no?”

He cast a pale glance around the room.


Nobody spoke.


Pendergast clasped his hands behind his back. “Doctor? You should take vaginal, anal, and oral swabs from the victim and check for the presence of sperm.”


“Swabs,” the doctor repeated in a low murmur.

“I assume you have Q-tips and a microscope handy, yes? I thought as much. And surely you know what a sperm cell looks like? A drop of Eosin Y will bring up the highlights. Second, a careful visual examination of the vaginal and anal areas should reveal any telltale swelling, redness, or injury. It is essential to know as soon as possible if this is a sexual crime or . . . something else. Also, draw blood and do a blood alcohol reading.”

He turned. “Mr. Kemper? I would immediately place plastic bags over the victim’s hands, securing them tightly at the wrist with rubber bands. If the victim fought her attacker, the fingernails might contain traces of skin or hair.”

Kemper nodded. “I’ll do that.”


“You’ve saved the victim’s clothes?”


“Yes. Sealed in plastic bags.”

“Excellent.” Pendergast turned to address the group as a whole. “There are some unpleasant truths that need to be said. Two people have disappeared, and now this. I believe the disappearances are connected to this killing. In point of fact, I am on board this vessel to locate a stolen object whose theft also resulted in murder. I would not be at all surprised if the same person was responsible forall four atrocities. In short, the evidence, so far, points to a serial killer on board.”

“Mr. Pendergast—” Kemper began to object.

Pendergast held up his hand. “Let me finish, if you please. A serial killer on board—who is escalating . He was content to toss the first two overboard. But this one—no. This was much more dramatic—much more in keeping, in fact, with the earlier murder I’m investigating. Why? That remains to be seen.”

More silence.


“As you point out, the killer had a key to the backstage door. But do not be fooled into assuming the killer is a crew member.”


“Who said it was a

crew

member—?” Kemper began.

Pendergast waved his hand. “Mr. Kemper, relax. If I am correct, the killer is in fact not a member of the crew. However, he may have disguised himself as one, and managed to get a passcard to off-limits areas. As a working hypothesis, I would suggest Willa Berkshire was lured backstage with the promise of meeting Braddock Wiley. Which implies that her killer was dressed as someone in authority.”

He turned to the commodore. “Where are we, if I may be forgiven the question?”


The commodore stared back, then turned to Kemper. “Are you going to let this . . .

passenger

take over ship’s security?” His voice was hard as steel.


“No, sir. But I would respectfully advise that we accept his help. He’s . . . assisted us before.”


“You’re

acquainted

with this man and have used his services?”


“Yes, sir.”

“In what capacity?” “In the casino,” said Kemper. “He assisted us in dealing with the card counters.” He didn’t add that Pendergast had walked off with more than a quarter of a million pounds extra in the process—money that had yet to be recovered.

The commodore waved his hand disgustedly, as if to abruptly distance himself from the subject at hand. “Very well, Mr. Kemper. You know as master of this ship I do not involve myself in non-nautical matters.” He strode to the door, glanced back. “I warn you, Kemper: it’s on your shoulders now.All of it.” Then he turned and disappeared.

Pendergast looked at Mason. “May I ask what the

Britannia

’s present location is? Vis-à-vis the nearest body of land.”


“We’re about twelve hundred kilometers east of the Flemish Cap, eighteen hundred kilometers northeast of St. John’s, Newfoundland.”


“St. John’s is the closest harbor?”


“It is now,” Mason replied. “A few hours ago it would have been Galway Harbour, Ireland. We’re in midcrossing.”


“A pity,” Pendergast murmured.


“Why is that?” the staff captain asked.


“Because it is my conviction that this killer is going to strike again. Soon.”


35

AS MANAGING DIRECTOR OF ABERDEEN BANK AND TRUST LTD, Gavin Bruce considered—rather grimly—that he’d had a great deal of experience taking control of impossible situations and setting things firmly in order. In the course of his career, he had taken over no fewer than four failing banks, whipped them into shape, and turned their fortunes around. Prior to that he had served as an officer in Her Majesty’s Navy, seeing action in the Falklands, and the experience had served him well. But he had never faced a challenge quite as bizarre, or as frightening, as this one.

Bruce had been traveling with two other representatives of Aberdeen Bank and Trust—Niles Welch and Quentin Sharp—both ex-navy like himself, now impeccably dressed bankers of the City mold. He’d worked with them for years and he knew them both to be good, solid people. They’d been presented with this crossing by a client of his, Emily Dahlberg, as a reward for services rendered. These days, most rich clients seemed to feel that a banker owed them, but Emily understood the importance of fostering an old-fashioned relationship of mutual trust. And Bruce had repaid that trust by helping her navigate through two tricky divorces and a complex inheritance case. A widower himself, he was very appreciative of her attention and her gift.

Too bad it all seemed to be going sour.

After the discovery in the Belgravia Theatre the night before— which he had witnessed—it was immediately clear to him that the ship’s personnel were in over their heads on this matter. Not only had they no idea how to investigate the killing or track down the murderer, but they seemed incapable of responding to the fear and panic that were beginning to spread through the ship, not just among the passengers but—Bruce had noticed with dismay—among the service staff as well. He’d been on enough ships to know that seafaring workers were often possessed of peculiar and superstitious maritime notions. TheBritannia had become a fragile shell, and he was convinced that just one more shock would plunge everything into chaos.

So he had sat down after lunch with Welch, Sharp, and Ms. Dahlberg—she had insisted on being involved—and, true to form, they had come up with a plan. And now, as they strode down the plush corridors, Bruce in the lead, he took some measure of comfort in knowing they were putting that plan into action.

The small group made their way up through the decks until they reached a forward passageway leading to the bridge. There they were stopped by a nervous-looking security guard with watery eyes and a whiffle cut.

“We are here to see Commodore Cutter,” said Bruce, producing his card.


The man took the card, glanced at it. “May I ask what it is in reference to, sir?”

“In reference to the recent murder. Tell him we are a group of concerned passengers and that we wish to see him immediately.” After a moment’s hesitation, he added, somewhat embarrassed, “Ex-captain, RN.”

“Yes, sir. Just a moment, sir.”


The security guard hustled away, shutting and locking the door behind him. Bruce waited impatiently, arms folded across his chest. Five minutes passed before the guard returned.


“If you’ll please come this way, sir?”

Bruce and his people followed the guard through the hatch into a much more functional area of the ship, with linoleum floors and gray-painted walls framed in fake wood, illuminated with strips of fluorescent lighting. A moment later they were ushered into a spartan conference room, a single row of windows looking starboard across a stormy, endless ocean.

“Please be seated. Staff Captain Mason will be here shortly.”


“We asked to see the ship’s master,” Bruce replied. “That would be Commodore Cutter.”


The guard ran an anxious hand over his whiffle. “The commodore is not available. I’m sorry. Staff Captain Mason is second in command.”


Bruce cast an inquisitive eye on his little group. “Shall we insist?”


“I’m afraid that would do no good, sir,” said the guard.


“Well then, the staff captain it is.”

They did not seat themselves. A moment later a woman appeared in the door, in an immaculate uniform, her hair tucked under her hat. As soon as he was over his surprise at seeing a woman, Bruce was immediately impressed by her calm, serious demeanor.


“Please sit down,” she said, taking as a matter of course the seat at the head of the table—another small detail that did not escape Bruce’s approval.

The banker got to the point immediately. “Captain Mason, we are clients of and representatives from one of the largest banks in the United Kingdom—a fact I mention only to impress on you our bona fides. I myself am ex–Royal Navy, former captain, HMMSussex . We are here because we feel the ship is facing an emergency that may be beyond the ability of the crew to contain.”

Mason listened.


“There is great anxiety among the passengers. As you probably know, some people have begun locking themselves in their rooms. There’s talk of a Jack the Ripper–style killer aboard.”


“I’m well aware of that.”


“The crew, in case you haven’t noticed, is spooked as well,” Emily Dahlberg interjected.


“Again, we’re aware of these problems and are taking steps to handle the situation.”


“Is that so?” asked Bruce. “Well, then, Captain Mason, may I ask where the ship’s security is? So far, they’ve been practically invisible.”

Mason paused, looking at each of them in turn. “I’m going to be straight with you. The reason you see so little security is that thereis very little security—at least, relative to the size of theBritannia . We’re doing all we can, but this is a very, very large ship and there are four thousand three hundred people on board. All our security staff are working around the clock.”

“You say you’re doing all you can, but then why hasn’t the ship turned around? We see absolutely no choice but to head back to port as quickly as possible.”


At this, Captain Mason looked troubled. “The closest port is St. John’s, Newfoundland, so if we were to divert, that’s where we’d go. However, we’re not going to divert. We’re continuing to New York.”


Bruce was aghast. “Why?”


“These were the commodore’s orders. He has his . . . well-considered reasons.”


“Which are?”

“Right now we’re skirting the edge of a large nor’easter sitting on the Grand Banks. Diverting to St. John’s will take us into its heart. Secondly, diverting to St. John’s will also take us straight across the Labrador Current during the July iceberg season, which, while not dangerous, will require us to slow our speed. Finally, the diversion will only save us a single day. The commodore feels that docking in New York City would be more appropriate, given—well, given the law enforcement resources we may require.”

“There’s a maniac on board,” said Emily Dahlberg. “Another person could be murdered in that ‘single day.’ ”


“Nevertheless, those are the commodore’s orders.” Bruce stood. “Then we insist on speaking directly with him.”

Captain Mason also stood, and as she did so the mask of professionalism slipped away for a moment and Bruce glimpsed a face that was drawn, weary, and unhappy. “The commodore can’t be disturbed right now. I’m very sorry.”

Bruce glared back at her. “We’re sorry, too. You can be assured that this refusal of the commodore to meet with us will not be without repercussions. Now

and

later. We are not people to be trifled with.”

Mason extended her hand. “I’m not unsympathetic to your point of view, Mr. Bruce, and I’ll do all I can to convey to the commodore what you’ve said. But this is a ship at sea, we have a ship’s master, and that master has made his decision. As a former captain yourself you’ll surely understand what that means.”

Bruce ignored the hand. “You’re forgetting something. We’re not only your passengers—and your customers—but we’re your responsibility as well. Something can be done, and we plan to do it.” And, motioning his group to follow, he turned on his heel and left the room.

36

PAUL BITTERMAN STEPPED OUT OF THE ELEVATOR, SWAYED, AND steadied himself on the polished chrome railing. TheBritannia was in heavy swell, but that was only part of the problem; Bitterman was struggling with the combination of an exceedingly heavy dinner and nine glasses of vintage champagne.

Still gripping the railing, he looked up and down the elegant Deck 9 corridor, blinking, trying to orient himself. Raising a hand to his lips, he eased up a belch that tasted—revoltingly—of caviar, truffled pâté, crème brulée, and dry champagne. He scratched himself idly. Something didn’t look right here.

After a minute or so, he figured it out. Instead of taking the port elevator, as he usually did, in the champagne fog he had somehow taken the starboard, and it had gotten him turned around. Well, it was easily fixed. Humming tunelessly, he fumbled in his pocket for the passcard to suite 961. Letting go of the railing, he struck out a little gingerly in what he thought was the right direction, only to find the room numbers moving in the wrong direction.

He stopped; turned around; belched again without bothering to raise a covering hand this time; then headed back the other way. His head really was remarkably fuzzy, and to clear it he tried to reconstruct the series of events that had brought him—for the first time in his fifty-three years—to a state approaching intoxication.

It had all started earlier that afternoon. He had been seasick ever since waking up—hadn’t been able to eat a bite—and none of the over-the-counter medicines offered in the ship’s pharmacy seemed to help in the least. Finally, he’d gone to the ship’s infirmary, where a doctor had prescribed a scopolamine patch. Placing it behind one ear, as directed, he’d gone back to his stateroom for a nap.

Whether it was the miserable night he’d passed, or whether the patch itself had made him drowsy, Paul Bitterman didn’t know. But he had awoken at nine-fifteen in the evening, blessedly free of seasickness and possessed of both a dry mouth and a superhuman hunger. He had slept right through his normal eight o’clock dinner, but a quick call to the concierge had secured a reservation at the final seating for the night—at ten-thirty—in Kensington Gardens.

As it turned out, Kensington Gardens appealed greatly to Bitterman. It was more trendy, youthful, and hip than the rather stuffy restaurant he’d been eating in, there were some truly delicious women to look at, and the food was excellent. Surprisingly, the restaurant wasn’t full—in fact, it was almost half empty. Ravenous, he proceeded to order chateaubriand for two and then consume the entire portion. An entire bottle of champagne had been insufficient to slake his thirst, but the attentive wine steward had been only too happy to supply him with a second.

There had been some strange talk at the table next to him: a worried- looking couple, discussing some corpse that had apparently turned up. It seemed he might have slept through some serious event. As he made his slow and careful way down the Deck 9 corridor, he decided the first order of business tomorrow would be to get to the bottom of it.

But there was another problem. The room numbers were now headed in the right direction—954, 956—but they were all even numbers.

He paused, gripping the hallway railing again, trying to think. He’d never find 961 at this rate. Then he laughed out loud.Paul, old buddy, you’re not using your noodle . He had come out on the starboard side, and the odd-numbered staterooms, like his, were all on the port side. How could he have forgotten? He’d need to find a transverse corridor. He set out again, weaving ever so slightly, the fog in his brain offset by a delightful floating sensation in his limbs. He decided that, deacon or not, he’d have to drink champagne more often. Domestic stuff, of course—he’d won this trip in the YMCA raffle and could never afford bottles of vintage French on his teacher’s salary.

Ahead and to the left he could see a break in the line of doors: the entrance to one of the midships lobbies. This would lead to the port corridor and his suite. He stumbled through the door.

The lobby consisted of a brace of elevators opposite a cozy lounge with oak bookcases and wing chairs. At this late hour, the place was deserted. Bitterman hesitated, sniffing. There was a smell in the air here—a smell like smoke. For a moment, his sense of lazy euphoria receded: he’d attended enough safety drills to know that fire was a ship’s worst danger. But this scent was unusual. It was like incense, or, more precisely, the joss sticks he had once smelled in a Nepalese restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

More slowly now, he walked through the lobby to the port corridor that lay beyond. It was very quiet, and he could both hear and feel the deep thrum of the ship’s diesels far below his feet. The smell was stronger here—much stronger. The strange, musky perfume was combined with other, deeper, far less pleasant scents—moldy fungus, maybe, along with something he couldn’t identify. He paused, frowning. Then, taking one look back at the lobby, he turned into the port corridor.

And stopped abruptly, inebriation vanishing in an instant.

Up ahead lay the source of the odor: a dark cloud of smoke that blocked his path down the corridor. Yet it was like no smoke he had ever seen, strangely opaque, with a dense, dark grayish color and a rib-like outer surface that reminded him—in some bizarre and unpleasant way—oflinen .

Paul Bitterman drew in his breath with an audible rasp. Something was wrong here—very wrong.

Smoke was supposed to drift through the air, curling, and shifting, attenuating to faint wisps at the edges. But this cloud just sat there, man-sized, strangely malignant, motionless, as if confronting him. It was so regular and even that it looked solid, an organic entity. The reek was so strong he could barely breathe. It was impossible, alien.

He felt his heart suddenly accelerate with fear. Was it his imagination, or did the thick cloud have the form of a man, too? There were tendrils that looked like arms; a barrel-like head with a face, strange legs that were moving, as if dancing . . . Oh, God, it looked not like a man, but ademon . . .

And it was then the thing slowly stretched out its ragged arms and—with a horrible, undulant purpose—began to move slowly toward him.


“No!” he shouted. “NO! Keep away!

Keep away!”

The desperate shouts that followed quickly opened stateroom doors up and down the port-side corridor of Deck 9. There was a brief, electric moment of silence. And then, the sound of gasps; shrieks; the thud of a fainting body collapsing on the carpet; the frantic slamming of doors. Bitterman heard none of it. All his attention, every fiber of his being, was riveted to the monstrous thing that glided closer, ever closer . . .

And then it was past.


37

LESEUR STARED FROM HENTOFF TO KEMPER AND BACK AGAIN. He was already feeling aggrieved that the commodore had shoved this problem onto his plate—he was a ship’s officer, after all, not some casino employee. Not only that, but this problem wouldn’t go away—it just kept getting worse. With at least one murder, and perhaps as many as three, he had more dangerous and alarming things to deal with than this. He shifted his stare from Hentoff to Kemper and back again.

“Let me make sure I’ve gotten this right,” he said. “You’re telling me this Pendergast fellow contrived for the card counters to lose a million pounds at the blackjack tables, in the process raking in almost three hundred thousand for himself.”

Hentoff nodded. “That’s about it, sir.”


“It seems to me that you just got fleeced, Mr. Hentoff.”


“No, sir,” said Hentoff, a frosty note in his voice. “Pendergast had to win in order to make them lose.”


“Explain.”

“Pendergast started off by tracking the shuffle—a technique in which you observe a full shoe of play, memorizing the positions of certain critical cards or groupings, called slugs, and then follow them through the shuffle, visually. He also managed to get a glimpse of the bottom card, and since he was offered the cut, he was able to place that card inside the deck exactly where he wanted it.”

“Doesn’t sound possible.”


“These are well-known, if exceedingly difficult, techniques. This Pendergast seems to have mastered them better than most.”


“That still doesn’t explain why Pendergast needed to win to make them lose.”

“By knowing where certain cards were, and combining that with a counting system, he was able to control the cards going ‘downstream’ to the rest of the players by either jumping into a game or sitting it out—as well as by taking unnecessary hits.”

LeSeur nodded slowly, taking this in.


“He

had

to shortstop the good cards in order to let bad ones go downstream. To make the others lose, he had to win.”


“I get it,” said LeSeur sourly. “And so you want to know what to do about this man’s winnings?”


“That’s right.”

LeSeur thought for a moment. It all came down to how Commodore Cutter would react when he heard about this—which, of course, he would eventually have to. The answer was not good. And when Corporate heard about it, they would be even less sympathetic. One way or another, they had to get the money back.

He sighed. “For the sake of all of our futures with the company, you need to get that money back.”


“How?”


LeSeur turned his weary face away. “Just do it.”


Thirty minutes later, Kemper walked down the plush corridor of Deck 12, Hentoff in tow, feeling a clammy sweat building inside his dark suit. He stopped before the door of the Tudor Suite.


“You sure this is the right time for this?” Hentoff asked. “It’s eleven P.M.”


“I didn’t get the sense LeSeur wanted us to wait,” Kemper replied. “Did you?” Then he turned to the door and knocked.


“Come in,” came a distant voice.

They entered to see Pendergast and the young woman voyaging with him—Constance Greene, his niece or something—in the salon, lights low, sitting around the private dining table with the remains of an elegant repast before them.

“Ah, Mr. Kemper,” said Pendergast, rising and pushing aside his watercress salad. “And Mr. Hentoff. I’ve been expecting you.”


“You have?”


“Naturally. Our business is not complete. Please sit down.”


Kemper arranged himself with some awkwardness on the nearby sofa. Hentoff took a chair, looking from Agent Pendergast to Constance Greene and back again, as if trying to sort out their real relationship. “May I offer you a glass of port?” Pendergast asked.


“No, thank you,” said Kemper. An awkward silence developed before he continued: “I wanted to thank you again for taking care of those card counters.”


“You’re most welcome. Are you following my advice about how to keep them from re-winning?”


“We are, thank you.”


“Is it working?”

“Absolutely,” said Hentoff. “Whenever a spotter enters the casino, we send over a cocktail waitress to engage him in trivial conversation—always involving numbers. It’s driving them crazy, but there’s nothing they can do about it.”

“Excellent.” Pendergast turned a quizzical eye on Mr. Kemper. “Was there anything else?”


Kemper rubbed his temple. “Well, there’s the question of . . . the money.”


“Are you referring to

that

money?” And Pendergast nodded to the bureau, where Kemper noticed, for the first time, a stack of fat envelopes wrapped in thick rubber bands.


“If those are your casino winnings, yes.”


“And there’s a

question

about the money?”


“You were working for us,” said Kemper, feeling the lameness of his argument even before he had made it. “The winnings rightfully belong to your employer.”


“I’m nobody’s employee,” said Pendergast with an icy smile. “Except, of course, the federal government’s.”


Kemper felt excruciatingly uncomfortable under the silvery stare.

“Mr. Kemper,” Pendergast continued, “you realize, of course, that I arrived at those winnings legally. Card counting, shuffle-tracking, and the other techniques I used are all legal. Ask Mr. Hentoff here. I didn’t even need to draw on the line of credit you offered me.”

Kemper cast a glance at Hentoff, who nodded unhappily.


Another smile. “Well then: does that answer your question?”


Kemper thought of reporting all this back to Cutter, and that helped stiffen his spine. “No, Mr. Pendergast. We consider those winnings to be house money.”

Pendergast went to the bureau. He picked up one of the envelopes, slid out a thick wad of pound notes, and lazily riffled through them. “Mr. Kemper,” he said, speaking with his back turned, “normally I would never even think of helping a casino recover money against gamblers who are beating the house. My sympathies would lie in the other direction. Do you know why I helped you?”


“To get us to help you.”

“Only partly true. It’s because I believed there was a dangerous killer on board, and for the safety of the ship I needed to identify him—with your assistance—before he could kill again. Unfortunately, he appears to still be one step ahead of me.”

Kemper’s depression deepened. He would never get the money back, the crossing was a disaster on every front, and he would be blamed.


Pendergast turned, riffled the money again. “Cheer up, Mr. Kemper! You two may yet get your money back. I am ready to call in my little favor.”


Somehow, this did not make Kemper cheer up at all.


“I wish to search the stateroom and safe of Mr. Scott Blackburn. To that end, I will need a passcard to the room’s safe and thirty minutes in which to operate.”


A pause. “I think we can manage that.”


“There’s a wrinkle. Blackburn is currently holed up in his room and won’t come out.”


“Why? Is he worried about the murderer?”


Pendergast smiled again: a small, ironic smile. “Hardly, Mr. Kemper. He’s hiding something, and I need to find it. So he will need to be coaxed out.”


“You can’t ask me to manhandle a passenger.”


“Manhandle? How crude. A more elegant way to effect his removal would be to set off the fire alarms for the starboard stern side of Deck 9.”


Kemper frowned. “You want me to set off a false fire alarm? No way.”


“But you must.”


Kemper thought for a moment. “I suppose we could have a fire drill.”


“He won’t leave if it’s just a drill. Only a mandatory evacuation will dislodge him.”


Kemper ran his hands through his damp hair. God, he was sweating. “Maybe I could pull a fire alarm in that corridor.”

This time, it was Constance Greene who spoke. “No, Mr. Kemper,” she said in a strange antique accent. “We’ve researched the matter carefully. You need to trigger a central alert. A broken firebox would be too quickly discovered. We’ll need a full thirty minutes in Blackburn’s suite. And you’ll have to temporarily disable the sprinkler system, which can only be done from the central fire control system.”

Kemper stood up, Hentoff quickly following. “Impossible. This is a crazy thing to ask. Fire is the most dangerous thing that can happen aboard a ship, aside from sinking. A ship’s officer, deliberately triggering a false alert . . . I’d be committing a criminal offense, maybe a felony. Jesus, Mr. Pendergast, you’re an FBI agent, you know I can’t do that! There must be some other way!”

Pendergast smiled, almost sadly this time. “There is no other way.”


“I won’t do it.”


Pendergast riffled the fat packet of notes. Kemper could actually smell the money—it was like rusty iron.


Kemper stared at the money. “I just can’t do it.”

There was a moment of silence. Then Pendergast stood, went over to the bureau, opened the top drawer, placed the wad of notes inside, and then raked the rest of the envelopes off the bureau into the drawer. He shut the drawer with slow deliberation and turned to Hentoff and nodded. “See you in the casino, Mr. Hentoff.”

There was another silence, longer this time.


“You’re going to . . . gamble?” Hentoff asked slowly.


“Why not?” Pendergast spread his hands. “We’re on holiday, after all. And you know how I adore blackjack. I was thinking of teaching it to Constance as well.”


Hentoff looked at Kemper in alarm.


“I’ve been told I’m a quick study,” Constance said.


Kemper ran his hand through his damp hair again. He could feel the wetness creeping down from his armpits. It just got worse and worse.


The atmosphere in the room grew strained. At last, Kemper finally let his breath out with a rush. “It’s going to take some time to prepare.”


“I understand.”


“I’ll aim for a general fire alarm on Deck 9 at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. It’s the best I can do.”


Pendergast nodded curtly. “In that case, we’ll just have to wait until then. Let us hope things are still, ah, under control by that time.”


“Under control? What do you mean by that?”


But Pendergast simply bowed to each of them in turn, then sat down once again and returned to his dinner.


38

IT WAS MIDNIGHT WHEN MADDIE EDMONDSON SLOUCHED DOWN the central corridor of Deck 3, bored out of her mind. Her grandparents had brought her on the voyage as a present for her sixteenth birthday, and it had seemed like a good idea at the time. But nobody had told her what to expect—that the ship would be a floating hell. All the really fun places—the discotheques and the clubs where the twentysomethings hung out, the casinos—were off-limits to a girl her age. And the shows she could get into seemed to appeal to those over the age of a hundred. Antonio’s Magic Revue, the Blue Man Group, and Michael Bublé doing Frank Sinatra—it was like a joke. She’d seen all the movies, the swimming pools had been closed due to rough weather. The food in the restaurants was too fancy, and she felt too seasick to enjoy the pizza parlors or hamburger spots. There was nothing for her to do besides sit through lounge acts, surrounded by octogenarians fiddling with their hearing aids.

The only interesting thing that had happened was that weird hanging in the Belgravia Theatre. Now that had been something: all the old biddies leaning on their canes and squawking, the grandpas harrumphing and contracting their bushy eyebrows, the officers and deckhands running around like headless chickens. She didn’t care what anybody said, ithad to be a gag, a stage prop, some publicity stunt for the new movie. People just didn’t die like that in real life, only in movies.

She passed the gold-lamé-and-green-glass entrance to Trafalgar’s, the ship’s hottest club. Loud, thumping house music droned from its dark interior. She paused to look in. Slender figures—college types and young professionals—were gyrating in a miasma of smoke and flickering light. Outside the door stood the requisite bouncer: thin and handsome and wearing a tux, but a bouncer no less, eager to keep underage people like Maddie from going inside to enjoy herself.

She continued morosely down the corridor. Although the clubs and casinos were hopping, some of the blue-rinse crowd that normally thronged the passageways and shops had disappeared. They were probably in their cabins, hiding under their beds. What a joke. She hoped to hell they weren’t really going to institute the curfew she had heard rumored about. That would be the end. After all, it had been just a gag—hadn’t it?

She rode an escalator down one level, wandered past the shops of Regent Street, the upscale shopping arcade, climbed some stairs. Her grandparents had already gone to bed but she wasn’t the slightest bit tired. She’d been wandering aimlessly around the ship like this for the past hour, dragging her feet on the carpet. With a sigh, she slipped a pair of earbuds out of her pocket, stuffed them into place, and dialed up Justin Timberlake on her iPod.

She came to an elevator, stepped in, and—closing her eyes—punched a button at random. The elevator descended briefly, stopped, and she got out—another of the ship’s endless corridors, this one a little more cramped than she was used to. Turning up the volume on her music player, she dragged her way down the hall, took a turn, kicked open a door bearing a sign she didn’t bother to read, skipped down a set of stairs, and wandered on. The corridor took another turn, and as she went around it, she had the sudden feeling she was being followed.

She paused, turning to see who it was, but the corridor was empty. She took a few steps back and looked around the corner. Nothing.


Must have been some random ship noise: down here, the damn thing thrummed and vibrated like some monster treadmill.

She wandered on, letting herself slide along one wall, pushing away with her elbow, then tacking over to the other side to slide again. Four more days to New York City. She couldn’t wait to get home and see her friends.

There it was again: that feeling she was being followed. She stopped abruptly, this time pulling out the earbuds. She looked around but, once again, there was nobody. Where was she, anyway? It was just one more carpeted corridor with what looked like private meeting rooms or something on either side. It was unusually deserted.

She tossed back her hair with an impatient gesture: jeez, now she was getting as spooked as the old-timers. She glanced through an interior window into one of the rooms and saw a long table lined with computers—an Internet room. She considered stepping inside and going online, but decided against it—all the good sites would certainly be blocked.

As she turned from the window, she saw a movement out of the corner of her eye and caught sight of someone just ducking around the corner behind her. No question about it this time.


“Hey!” she called. “Who’s that?”


No answer.

Probably just some maid—the ship was crawling with them. She moved on, but more quickly now, keeping the earbuds in her hand. This was a depressing part of the ship anyway; she should get back up to where the shops were. As she walked, she kept an eye out for one of the diagrams posted about that told your current location. But as she did so, she could swear she heard, over the hum of the ship, the brush of feet on the carpet.

This was bullshit. She walked faster still, taking another turn, then another, still without coming to a map or an area she recognized—just more endless corridors. Except that now she noticed the carpet underfoot had given way to linoleum.

She realized she’d entered one of the off-limits areas of the ship, having missed the Do Not Enter sign. Maybe it had been the door she’d kicked open. But she didn’t want to retrace her steps and go back: no way.

There were definite footfalls behind her, bolder now, that quickened and slowed with her pace. Was some pervert following her? Maybe she should run—she could outrun an old pervert any day. She came to a side door, ducked through, and descended a metal staircase, coming into another long corridor. She heard the clatter of footsteps on the staircase behind her.

That was when she broke into a run.


The corridor made a dogleg, then ended in a door with a label stenciled in red:


ENGINEERING ONLY

She grasped the handle. Locked. She turned in a panic, holding her breath. She could hear, echoing down the corridor, running footfalls. She frantically tried the door again, shaking it and crying out. Her iPod slipped out of her pocket and skidded across the floor, unheeded.

She turned again, looking around wildly for another door, a fire exit, anything.

The running footsteps got closer, and still closer—and then, suddenly, a figure came around the corner. Maddie jerked violently, a scream rising in her throat—but then, looking more closely at the figure, she broke down, sobbing with relief. “Thank God it’s you,” she said. “I thought . . . someone was following me. I don’t know. I’m lost. Totally. I’m so glad it’s you—”

The knife came out so fast she didn’t even have time to scream.


39

LESEUR STOOD IN THE REAR OF THE BRIDGE, MASON AT HIS SIDE. He watched Commodore Cutter, hands clasped behind his back, pace back and forth in front of the bridge workstation, alongside the array of flat-panel screens, one foot placed carefully in front of the other, moving with slow deliberation. As he strode the length of the middle bridge, his silhouetted form passed before each screen, one after another. But his eyes remained straight ahead, neither looking at the screens nor at the officer of the watch, who stood to one side, displaced and unhappy.

LeSeur glanced across the radar and weather system displays. The ship was skirting the southern flank of a large, unusual clockwise storm system. The good news was they were traveling with the wind at their backs; the bad news was this meant moving in a following sea. The stabilizers had been fully extended hours ago, but even so the ship had a slow, queasy rotational yaw that guaranteed additional discomfort for the passengers. He glanced over the displays again. Seas were running thirty feet, winds at forty knots, the radar showing a lot of scatter. Nevertheless, the ship was doing beautifully. LeSeur couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pride.

Kemper appeared soundlessly at his elbow, his face a ghastly blue in the artificial light from the displays. He looked like a man with a lot on his mind.


“A word, sir,” he murmured.

LeSeur glanced at Mason and gestured with his eyes. The two of them followed Kemper out to one of the covered bridge wings. Rain hammered against the windows, running down in heavy sheets. Outside, all was blackness.

Wordlessly, Kemper handed LeSeur a sheet of paper. The first officer glanced over it in the dim light. “Good Lord. Eighteen more people reported missing?”

“Yes, sir. But you’ll see at the bottom that sixteen have already turned up. Someone steps out of a cabin for ten minutes and their spouse calls security. The point is, the situation on the ship is deteriorating. The passengers are getting more and more panicky. And my staff is just about paralyzed.”

“What about these two that haven’t been found?”


“One is a sixteen-year-old girl—her grandparents reported it. The other is a woman with a mild case of Alzheimer’s.”


“How long have they been missing?”


“The girl for three hours. The old lady for about an hour.”

“Do you consider this a cause for serious concern?” Kemper hesitated. “Not the old lady—I think she’s probably gotten confused, maybe fallen asleep somewhere. But the girl . . . yeah, I’m concerned. We’ve paged her regularly, we’ve searched the public spaces. And then, there’sthis .” He gave LeSeur a second sheet.

The first officer read it with growing disbelief. “Bloody hell, is this true?” He stabbed his finger at the sheet. “A

monster

roaming the ship?”


“Six people on Deck 9 reported seeing it. Some kind of . . . I don’t know what. A thing, covered with smoke, or made of dense smoke. Accounts vary. There’s a lot of confusion.”


LeSeur handed the sheets back to Kemper. “This is absurd.”

“Just shows the level of hysteria. And to me, that’s a troubling development— verytroubling. Mass hysteria, on an ocean liner in the middle of the Atlantic? As it is, I don’t have the staff to deal with all this. We’re overwhelmed.”

“Is there any way to transfer other ship’s staff to temporary security duty? Pull some capable junior engineers off their usual jobs?”


“Forbidden by standing orders,” said Staff Captain Mason, speaking for the first time. “Commodore Cutter’s the only one who could override that.”


“Can we make the request?” Kemper asked.


Mason glanced coolly toward the middle bridge where Cutter was pacing. “This is not a good time to ask the commodore anything, Mr. Kemper,” she said crisply.


“What about closing the casinos and assigning Hentoff’s staff to security?”

“Corporate would string us up. Forty percent of the profit margin comes from the casinos. And besides, those people are dealers and croupiers and pit bosses—they aren’t trained in anything else. We might as well reassign the waitstaff.”

Another long silence.


“Thank you, Mr. Kemper, for your report,” said Mason. “That will be all.”


Kemper nodded and left, leaving LeSeur and Mason on the bridge wing, alone.


“Captain Mason?” LeSeur finally asked.


“Yes, Mr. LeSeur?” The staff captain turned to him, the hard lines of her face dimly illuminated in the low light.

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