Plague Ship (33 page)

Juan looked at his friend. Linc was dead serious. “If it comes down to that, I’ll put it to the crew.” He knew every member of the Corporation would risk everything to get Hanley back, even if they knew they would never get another contract from Overholt again, which the cagey CIA veteran had threatened if Thomas Severance or his wife so much as suggested they were under surveillance.

The executive water taxi pulled up alongside the ship. As sleek and beautiful as the boat was, it was nothing compared to its driver, a young blonde wearing a blouse that couldn’t be cut any lower and a skirt that couldn’t be raised any higher. With their chopper still in pieces down in the hangar, the harbor taxi was the fastest way to shore without calling undue attention to the
Oregon
.

“Capitaine Cabrillo, je suis Donatella,”
she called over the burble of the boat’s idling engine. Her accent sent a wolfish grin flashing across Linc’s face.

“Only in Monaco,” Juan whispered to Linc.

“You think some rich guy wants an ugly driver taking him out to his yacht after a night at the casino?”

The young woman kept her craft steady by holding the boarding ladder as the two men made their way down with leather duffels over their shoulders. At the end of the twenty-foot climb, Juan tossed his bag onto the rear bench seat and stepped over the gunwale.

“Thank you,” he said.

When Linc jumped into the boat, it bobbed as if it had been hit by a wave. Donatella gave them both a big smile, her eyes lingering on Linc much longer than Cabrillo, as she reached for the chrome throttle controls.

“Chairman! Hold up!” Eric Stone leaned far over the railing overhead to get his attention.

“What is it?”

“I found something.”

“Can it wait? They’re holding a chopper for us to take us to the airport in Nice.”

“Hold on a sec.” Eric climbed over the rail and awkwardly descended the ladder while clutching a laptop computer. He noticed Donatella for the first time when he reached the boat but barely gave her a first, let alone a second, glance. Obviously, he was distracted by whatever news he had.

Juan nodded to her and she eased forward on the throttles. He went aft to let Linc chat her up while he pushed aside their luggage so he and Eric could sit. They had to raise their voices over the rush of the wind and the throb of the powerful motor.

“What do you have?” Juan asked.

Eric opened his computer. “I’ve been checking for any unusual incidents that may have occurred on ships where the Responsivists were holding their Sea Retreats.”

“Did you find anything?”

“Did I? Oh yeah. Do you remember recently how there have been reports of viral outbreaks on cruise ships, usually a gastrointestinal norovirus?”

“Seems there have been a lot more in the past couple of years,” Juan remarked.

“It’s not a coincidence. At first, I was checking passenger manifests from the cruise companies.” Juan didn’t need to ask how Eric obtained such confidential information. “I cross-referenced those to Responsivist membership lists. When I started seeing a pattern, I switched my focus to cruise liners struck by unusual illnesses. That’s when I hit pay dirt. Of the seventeen outbreaks I’ve looked into in the past two years, sixteen of them occurred when Responsivists were on board. The seventeenth wasn’t a norovirus and was traced back to
E. coli
found on lettuce grown on one specific farm in California. That strain also hit people in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“It gets worse. Mind you, there’s no pattern to cruise lines or ports of call. But there is one definite pattern we could see. During the first incident, only a handful of passengers were sickened, and most of them were elderly. The second one saw forty people showing symptoms. But by the time we get to the seventeenth, which happened two months ago aboard a ship called
Destiny
, nearly every passenger and crewman was infected. The cruise line had to chopper in a medical team and a healthy group of officers to get the ship back to port.”

Juan leaned back in the soft leather seat, feeling the engine’s vibration trying to loosen the knotted muscles in his back. In the cockpit, Linc towered over their driver, and he could tell she was delighting in his company. Her laughter carried through the air. He suddenly leaned forward again. “They’re perfecting disbursal methods.”

“That’s what Mark and I think, too. They got better every time until they achieved a near one hundred percent infection rate.”

“How does the
Golden Dawn
fit into the pattern?”

“Once they worked out how to infect an entire shipful of people, they needed to test the lethality of their toxin.”

“On their own people?” Cabrillo was shocked.

“They could be the ones who developed the agent in the first place. Why take the risk of one of them having a change of heart?”

“Good God! Why?” The pieces of the puzzle were there before him, he just didn’t know how they fit together. What could the Responsivists possibly gain by killing people aboard cruise ships? And the answer that kept coming back to him was, absolutely nothing.

He could see other terrorist organizations jumping at such a chance, and he considered one of them had paid for such a weapon-and-delivery system, but the Responsivists were flush with money from their Hollywood believers.

They espoused population control. Did they think killing fifteen or twenty thousand retirees who were blowing the children’s inheritance on Caribbean cruises would make a difference to the world’s overcrowding? If they were that insane, they would go for something much bigger.

The puzzle hung tantalizingly close in the front of Juan’s mind, but he knew it was incomplete. “We’re missing something.”

The speedboat slowed as it entered the inner harbor and made its way to a pier next to an elegant restaurant. A waiter was hosing off the wooden jetty in anticipation of a breakfast crowd looking to lessen the effects of their hangovers.

“What are we missing?” Eric asked. “These whack jobs plan to infect people on cruise ships with a toxin that shows to be one hundred percent fatal.”

“It’s not one hundred percent. If they released it on the
Dawn
, Jannike shouldn’t be alive.”

“She was breathing supplemental oxygen,” Eric reminded him.

“Even with cannulas in her nostrils, she was still inhaling air pumped through the ship’s ventilation system.”

“Wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t airborne. It could have been in the water or food. Maybe she didn’t eat or drink.”

“Come on, Eric, you’re smarter than that. They had to hit everyone at the same time or someone would have radioed for help. You can’t control when someone takes a sip of water or eats, for that matter, which negates your earlier idea about food poisoning.”

Stone looked chagrinned. “Sorry. You’re right. Too much Red Bull and not enough sleep.”

“What if the attack on the
Golden Dawn
was an aberration and not part of their pattern of escalation?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. It’s just a thought. They had achieved nearly one hundred percent on that ship two months ago.”

“The
Destiny
.”

“Right. The
Destiny
. There wasn’t any reason to hit another ship. They knew they had their system.”

“So the people on the
Dawn
were wiped out to keep them quiet?”

Juan stood up as Donatella finished tying off the lines. “I don’t know,” Juan repeated. “Listen, we’ve got a charter jet waiting to take us to Manila. I’ll call Langston and pass this along. If he won’t go after Severance, at least he can get a warning out to the cruise lines about a potential terrorist threat.”

Overholt would pass on Cabrillo’s information, he was certain, but he doubted much would be done. In the years since 9/11, nonspecific threats came in all the time, and, like the boy who cried wolf, they were mostly ignored.

“Donatella?”

“Oui, Capitaine
.
”

“Would you mind returning my young friend here back to my ship. Charge it to the account I set up with your boss.”

“Of course, sir. It would be my pleasure.”

“His, too, I’m sure.” Juan turned back to Eric. “Keep on it and call me with anything new.”

“You got it, boss man.”

Linc and Cabrillo stepped off the boat and onto the dock, lugging their bags. “What was that she gave you?” Juan asked.

Linc pulled a business card from the pocket of his lightweight leather jacket. “What, this? Her home and cell number.”

“With everything going on, you can think about sex?”

“Chairman, I’ve learned that life is all about reproduction and evolution, and pretty soon she’s going to be missing Linc.”

“Reproduction and evolution, huh?” Juan just shook his head. “You’re as bad as Murph and Stoney.”

“Big difference, Juan, is I get dates, while those homeboys only fantasize about ’em.”

CHAPTER 21

MAX HANLEY AWOKE IN A SEA OF AGONY.

Pain radiated from his thigh and from his head. It came in alternating currents that crashed against the top of his skull like a hurricane storm surge. His first instinct was to rub his temples and determine why his leg was throbbing, but even in his barely conscious state he knew he had to remain motionless until more of his faculties returned. He wasn’t sure why, only that it was important. Time passed. It might have been five minutes, it could have been ten. He had no way to judge other than the rhythmic pounding in his head and the ache in his leg that grew and subsided in time with his heartbeat.

As he became more aware, he realized he was lying on a bed. There were no sheets or pillows, and the mattress was rough under his shoulders. Pretending he was still asleep, he shifted slightly. At least they had left him the dignity of his boxer shorts, although he could feel the cold caress of steel around his ankles and wrists.

It came back to him in a rush. Zelimir Kovac, Eddie’s escape, and the sickly sweet smell of the rag being clamped over his nose and mouth. The headache was a result of being drugged. And then the other horror hit him like a slap to the face, and he involuntarily gasped.

He was back in a van, driving away from their hotel. Kovac had given him only enough narcotic to make him compliant, like a drunk who needs to be led away from a party. In the van Max was laid out in the back. He was dimly aware of other figures. Kyle? Adam Jenner? He couldn’t tell.

Kovac had run a wand over his body, like an airport metal detector, and when it chimed over Max’s leg Kovac sliced open his pants with a boot knife. It took him only a second to find the scar, and he unceremoniously rammed the blade into Max’s flesh. Even under mild anesthesia, the pain had been a molten wire driven into his body. He screamed into the gag tied around his mouth, and tried to thrash away from the agony, but someone had pressed his shoulders to the van’s floor.

Kovac twisted the knife, opening the wound so when he withdrew the blade he could stick his fingers into Max’s flesh. Blood gushed from the cut. Max strained against the pain, fighting it as though he stood a chance. Kovac continued to probe the wound, uncaring that he wasn’t wearing gloves and that blood had soaked his shirtsleeve.

“Ah,” he said at last, and withdrew his hand.

The transdermal transponder was roughly the size and shape of a digital watch. Kovac held it up so that Max, staring goggle-eyed, could see it. The Serb then dropped it to the floor and smashed it repeatedly with the butt of his pistol until nothing remained but bits of plastic and ruined electronics.

He then slid a hypodermic needle into Max’s arm, whispering, “I could have waited for this drug to take effect, but where is the fun in that?”

It was the last thing Max remembered until just now, coming awake.

He had no idea where he was or how long he’d been held captive. He wanted to move, to massage his temples and check his leg, but he was sure he was being watched, and he doubted there would be that much play in his manacles. There wasn’t anyone in the room. He’d been awake long enough to hear or sense them, even with his eyes closed. That didn’t mean cameras weren’t mounted on walls and microphones planted nearby. He wanted to wait for as long as possible before alerting his captors to his consciousness and use that time to let more of the narcotics work their way out of his system. If he was going to withstand what he knew was coming, he needed to be as fresh as possible.

An hour passed—or it might have been ten minutes—Max wasn’t sure. He had lost all concept of time. He knew that time deprivation, the inability to set the body’s internal clock, was an essential tool in the interrogator’s arsenal, so he purposefully forced himself to lose all conscious awarness of its passage. A prisoner could be driven over the edge trying to determine if it was night or day, noon or midnight, and by willing away that natural need Max took away his captor’s ability to torture him with it.

That had never been a problem in Vietnam. The cages and boxes they kept him and his fellow prisoners in were rickety enough to always allow at least a sliver of light to enter. But Max kept apprised of interrogation techniques as part of his job, and he knew time deprivation was effective only if the captors let it remain a factor in their thinking.

As for whatever else they had in store, he would just have to wait and see.

A heavy lock was opened nearby. Max hadn’t heard anyone approach, so he knew the door had to be thick. The room, then, was most likely designed as a jail cell and not something temporary that had been converted to hold him. That the Responsivists had such a cell, ready and waiting, did not bode well.

The door creaked open with a screech of rusted metal. Either the hinges weren’t often used or the cell was located in a humid climate or possibly underground. He didn’t move a muscle, as he listened to the sound of two separate and distinct pairs of feet approaching the bed. One had a heavier tread than the other, but the latter was definitely male. Kovac and an accomplice?

“He should have come around by now,” Zelimir Kovac said.