Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

One of the skills we learned in training was how to shorthand a situation. I briefed them in a few sentences.

“Brad and I worked together in Nairobi,” I finished. “If he’s here, dressed as a member of the crew, he’s on a job.”

Helen nodded. “He moved into munitions after Nairobi. He’s done well there. He and I did a job in Bucharest and his work was impressive. He managed to bring down an entire wing of the embassy with minimal collateral damage to the rest of the building.”

I wasn’t surprised she remembered him. Helen made notes in a Tiffany address book in her meticulous penmanship, tiny entries for every person she’d ever met, written with a Mark Cross pencil engraved with her initials. Pencil because Helen didn’t like scratch-outs. She would carefully erase anyone who died or fell out of her orbit. No matter how many times Helen and I scrapped, I always knew she’d never be really done with me unless she erased me from her book.

Mary Alice’s reaction was succinct. “Shit.”

Natalie reached for her shirt, buttoning it over her bikini top. “It doesn’t mean he is here for one of us.”

“Jesus, Natalie, you still don’t know how to face a fact,” I said. She reared back as if I’d slapped her, and I almost apologized. But I don’t believe in saying sorry when you’re not.

“There are ninety-six other passengers on this boat and as many crew,” Natalie replied coldly. “Any one of them could be his mark.”

“Natalie is right,” Helen put in. “We shouldn’t jump to conclusions until we know more.”

Mary Alice purled a few times—or whatever it is knitters do. When she reached the end of the row, she stabbed the needles into the ball of yarn and put it aside. “Alright. So we find out more. One of us will have to discreetly make contact and give him an opportunity to explain.”

“I’ll do it,” I said, reaching for my mimosa. “But if one of us is the mark, approaching him openly is as good as inviting him to take a shot. I’ll have a look around his cabin and see if I can get a handle on what he’s doing. If he shows up, I’ll give him a chance to explain.”

Mary Alice nodded thoughtfully. “You need backup. Besides, it will look less suspicious if two of us are found wandering around together. I’ll go.”

I slid my glance over to Helen. “I think I’d rather have Helen, if it’s all the same,” I said easily.

Helen looked up, startled, then took a gulp of her Bloody Mary.

“Of course.” But her knuckles were bone-white on her glass and I wondered if she was really up for it.

“I could come,” Natalie offered.

“No,” Helen said. “I’ll go.” She sounded more certain, but I noticed she finished her Bloody Mary with grim determination and poured a second one like it was her job.

But the Bloody Mary seemed to settle her down and for the rest of the day we stayed by the pool, swimming and sunning ourselves. We might have looked like carefree travelers, but we knew there was safety in numbers and without even talking about it we stuck together, even going to the bathroom in pairs. After lunch we went to our cabins to shower and rest. All of the crew were expected to work the dinner shift, so we decided that was the best time to nose around. While collecting a round of drinks, Natalie had managed to extract the location of the crew cabins from Hector, and I made a mental note of it on the map I slipped in my pocket as we headed down to dinner.

We ate our fill of the starter—“delicate avocado foam on a fire-roasted sea scallop”—and Helen and I eased out of the dining room when the main course was passed. We left our bags on our chairs to make it look like we’d just stepped out to use the powder room. I spotted Executive Guest Services Coordinator Heather Fanning table-hopping with a smile fixed to her mouth as she made sure everyone was having a wonderful time on this wonderful ship and was “hashtag blessed.” I gave Helen an almost imperceptible nod. Fanning was senior staff and her key card would be a master.

As we passed her, Helen snaked out a slender arm and retrieved Heather’s key card from her pocket. I shot Helen a wink. Her hands might shake a little, but she still had the talented fingers that made her the best pickpocket of all of us. She slid the key card into my hand and I palmed it as we headed downstairs.

I’d dressed for ease of movement in a black jersey jumpsuit and flats. Helen was wearing a linen shift the color of lemon drops and a pashmina a few shades darker. She’d finished the outfit with a twist of rough-cut amber beads at her throat. They rattled slightly in the hushed stillness of the crew’s quarters, just loud enough to attract attention we didn’t want. I put out my hand and motioned for her to take them off.

She plucked the seams at her hips. “No pockets,” she mouthed silently. I pointed to mine and she handed the beads over.

We found the crew cabins quickly. I had planned to break into the housekeeping closet to find the roster listing the cabin assignments, but there was no need. In college, we had papered the doors of our dorm rooms with brown paper grocery bags cut open and laid flat. Those were the days before answering machines, when people left messages on your door in grease pencil or felt-tip pen, and when the door was too full of notes or too many people had drawn dicks, you tore it off and started over. Here the doors were each fitted with tidy little whiteboards, but they served the same purpose. A dry-erase marker was neatly tethered to each one, and at the top, the name of the crew member assigned to the cabin had been printed in turquoise, the i’s dotted with starfish—a Heather Fanning signature touch.

We passed down the corridor, scanning the whiteboards until we came to Cabin 24. Kevin C.

I swiped the key card. There was a brief second of nothing and then a green light blinked; the mechanism clicked. I pushed open the door and we slipped inside, pulling the door closed behind us.

Helen’s eyes were round with horror. “Cams?” she whispered.

I looked around the cabin, answering her almost as an afterthought. “I didn’t see any.”

“But they might have them,” she persisted.

“Jesus, Helen, calm down. If they do, we’ll just say we’re elderly kleptomaniacs looking for something to steal. The worst they would do is slap us on the wrist and send us to bed without any dessert.”

She wasn’t happy about my flippancy, but she didn’t fight me. I turned to search the room, wondering if I’d made a mistake in bringing her. She had lifted the key card well enough, but her nerve was fading and the one thing you couldn’t afford to lose in our line of work was your composure.

I motioned for her to check the drawers, but I didn’t think we’d find anything there. Or underneath the mattress, though I slid my hands down the length of it anyway. The wardrobe was impersonal, hung with spare uniforms and one set of shore clothes.

Helen made her way methodically through the drawers, feeling her way through neat stacks of underwear—tighty-whities, I was sad to note—and T-shirts.

“There’s nothing,” she said as she shut the drawer with an expression of disapproval. “Maybe we should just give him the benefit of the doubt and wait to see what he has to say for himself.”

I ignored her and moved on. In the bottom of the wardrobe, there was a canvas bag with a printed name tag that said kevin cochran.

“Sloppy,” I said. In the old days, we always chose our own initials for an alias. It made it easier to cover slips of the tongue. Plus, if you had anything monogrammed, you could still wear it on a job. We had been trained with an old-fashioned attention to detail, but times had changed. Now the training was about gunsights and blast radius, and I hated it. I hated it even more for making me feel like a dinosaur in my own job, and I yanked open the bag irritably.

A book fell out, a worn paperback written by a man who was in love with guns and his own penis and probably not in that order. There was nothing else inside, and I realized it was a very big bag—much too big for the few personal items Fogerty had brought on board. I had just put the bag back when Helen called my name softly.

She pointed under the cabinet screwed to the wall. It was a combination entertainment center, desk, and chest of drawers, everything neat and compact. It was pale wood and reached nearly to the floor. Just below it, pushed right out of sight, was a sleek leather attaché case.

“You always did have good eyes,” I said as I bent to retrieve it. My back protested a little and I ignored it, stretching further to get my fingers around it. It was heavy, quality stuff. Nothing like the cheap canvas bag his alter ego had carried; this was custom-made by a specialist firm in Sweden to exact specifications. I knew the bag because I’d carried a few myself when the job called for it. The locks, six-digit combinations, were always set to the date assigned to the job.

I flicked the tumblers to tomorrow’s date and tried. No luck.

Helen was watching closely. “The day after?”

I tried it, and the following two dates, but the lock stayed tight. A truly shitty possibility occurred to me and I flipped the numbers to that day’s date. As soon as I hit the button, the metal tabs flew open.

“Today,” I said. I glanced at the digital clock on the bedside shelf. “And today is over with in about six hours.”

I looked at Helen and I swear to god something like relief flickered across her face. I would deal with Helen’s death wish later, I decided. I lifted the lid on the case. I wasn’t surprised to find a load of explosives and a cheerful little digital display showing five hours and thirty-two minutes. “It’s on a timer,” I told her. “We’ve got five and a half hours to figure this out.”

If Helen had been slightly tempted to let herself get blown up, she knew the rest of us might object. Besides, there were about two hundred innocent people on that boat who’d go with her, and that was never okay. She pulled herself up. “Then we’ll just have to throw it overboard,” she said, reaching for the case.

I put out a hand to take her wrist. I could feel the bones, slim and brittle.

“We can’t. It’s a speedball.” I pointed to the explosive. I didn’t have to say more. Helen knew as well as I did that speedballs were the special brainchild of the Museum’s munitions department. The recipe had been created to be as foolproof as possible, including lavish amounts of ammonium nitrate, ensuring the speedballs would explode even underwater. If we flung the case overboard, it would detonate anyway, regardless of the timer. I glanced at the speedball again. That big of a device would shear off the side of the Amphitrite, opening up the vessel like the cross-section of a boat in a kids’ picture book. And then it would fill with water and sink, way too fast for anyone to muster the lifeboats.

“So, we have to get everyone off,” she said.

“Unless you know how to disarm it,” I said. We had all had munitions training. Anyone with an aptitude for blowing things up got moved to Temporary Installations, the Museum’s idea of wit. The rest of us knew just enough to stay out of the way when they were working. And we knew that each device was set with a timer that had an override code known only to the operator. Any attempt to dismantle or disarm it prematurely would cause it to blow up, a sort of defense mechanism.

“We could just get the override from Fogerty,” I suggested.

“And then what?” Helen asked.

I shrugged. “Hell if I know. I’m making this up as I go along, Helen. But at least we know what we’re dealing with now. Let’s get out of here and tell the others.”

I was half turned away from the door or I would have seen him. In the time it took for me to look up, Fogerty was inside and shoving Helen out of the way with a clothesline arm. She flew back, hitting her head on the wall and crumpling to the floor in a slow slide, her legs straight out in front of her like a discarded doll.

The extra second he took to deal with Helen was enough for me to get my hand around the chair. I didn’t have time to swing it and get any proper momentum, so I held it in front of me like a lion tamer and the bastard smiled.

“Nice try, Granny,” he said, lifting the chair as easily as if it were made of balsa wood.

I kept my hold on the chair and as he raised it over my head, I lifted my legs, driving the heels of both feet into his kneecaps. He grunted and bent forward at the waist, bringing the chair down hard. But I’d seen it coming and flipped over, taking the hit squarely on my back. I let it push me down, onto all fours, diffusing the energy of the blow. He tossed the chair aside and reached down, his face set and purposeful. I grabbed his hand and twisted the thumb back, causing him to open his stance, exposing his groin. I took a breath and donkey kicked, my heel connecting squarely with his balls. I didn’t stop. I followed through, pushing as hard as I could until he choked and fell to his knees.

He would have fallen on top of me but I rolled out of the way and rebounded off the bunk to land on his back. I wrapped one leg around his waist and bent the other, driving the knee into his lower spine. I grabbed the beads out of my pocket and whipped them around his neck, taking a wrap around each palm to hold them tight.

And then I pulled. I pulled like I was trying to stop a runaway horse, fists tight against my shoulders while my knee pushed him into a backbend that made his spine crack. His hands scrabbled at his throat, tearing at the necklace.

“Don’t you dare break, goddammit,” I muttered to the beads. I tightened my hold and pulled up again and his hand came up, slapping blindly. He caught me on the temple, hard enough to blur my vision for a second, but I held on.

After several seconds, he sagged, but I didn’t let up. Helen was moving a little, and by the time she opened her eyes properly, it was over. I was still coiled around him, beads biting into my hands as he jerked one last time and then gave way, relaxing into a huddle on the floor.

Helen knew better than to question whether it was necessary. She eased herself up and came to look, pulling back his eyelid. After a second, she nodded. “Clear.”

“Good,” I said, easing my grip. Deep red marks streaked across my palms and the backs of my hands. “What the hell kind of jewelry is this, Helen?”

She shrugged. “It was made for the Helsinki job and I liked how it looked with this dress, so I kept it.” She pushed a bead aside to show me how it was strung. “Piano wire. I used it on the head of the Finnish national bank.”

She fastened the necklace around her neck and looked down at the slumped remains of Brad Fogerty.

“Still want to give him the benefit of the doubt?” I asked.

She pursed her lips. “Billie, far be it from me to criticize, but shouldn’t we have kept him alive to get the override?”

I looked at the timer, still ticking away relentlessly.

“Shit.”