Without Warning (51 page)

Everything had been going so well. Pieraro had spoken very quietly to a deputy manager at the Fairmont—the manager being a complete wanker— and between them they had quietly drawn up a short list of potential passengers for Julianne. The deputy manager did not seek transport, merely a cut of the shakedown. A sum was agreed upon. Discreet contacts were made. A meeting was arranged in one of the resort’s more expensive bars. It had all taken about four hours, but everything was going swimmingly. And then some fucker turned on the telly.

Even Julianne, who had an unnatural ability to maintain her focus under the worst of circumstances, was blindsided by the reports coming out of the Middle East. If there’d been any upside to recent events, it was the sudden collapse of the media’s obsession with that benighted shithole. Even the Iraqi war news still ran a poor second to the Disappearance. But sixty, maybe seventy million dead in a nuclear strike, that did get your attention.

She had gathered a small group of potential customers around a table, sipping cocktails at hyperinflated prices, eating macadamias that weren’t
quite
worth their weight in gold. The bar filled up as the day waned, mostly with displaced Americans and wealthy vacationers from Mexico City. Her grandfather
Lord Rupert had been in Singapore just before the Japanese took it, and Jules wondered idly if Raffles had felt like this: a genteel outpost surrounded by a gathering darkness. It was hard to tell which group was more desperate: the Americans who filled the room with booming voices and sheer physical presence, or the Mexican elite, whose anxiety was quieter and, if possible, much more extreme. For her purposes, however, only the gringos held any interest. She’d been following enough of the news to know that she could get them into port legitimately at a number of places around the Pacific as part of some deal called Operation Uplift. She could even hit up the remains of the American government for her fuel and supply costs if she felt really cheeky and could be bothered to fill out the appropriate forms for lodgement at the nearest consulate or embassy. The wealthy Mexicans, however, had nothing even resembling the wreckage of a government to lobby foreign capitals on their behalf, and Jules wasn’t willing to take the risk of running them all the way to Sydney, only to have some little migration nazi with a clipboard tell her they couldn’t land. Pieraro and his family she’d get in somewhere by other means. But that marked the outer limits of her largesse.

So they were sitting at the large table in the coolest, darkest corner of the bar, a small band of superrich refugees, negotiating payment for passage, when the background buzz in the place suddenly spiked upward and drowned out all conversation. Somebody screamed
“No!”
and Jules tensed up, instinctively reached for the pistol hidden in her small carryall, then stayed her hand as she realized that nothing was going down. A small crowd had gathered under a television fixed high in another corner of the bar, and something had set them off. Briefly she fought down a surge of panic, like a rat twisting in her mind, terrified that the Wave had expanded again.

A barman turned up the volume as people argued and shushed each other, and Jules recognized the voice of BBC World presenter Mishal Husain. Poor old Pete’d had the hots for her, and Jules smiled sadly at a memory of him drunk on Jamaican rum, stoned on hash, and growling at the TV exactly what he’d like to be doing to Husain while she burbled on about some EU trade meeting.

She missed him terribly.

“In Tehran alone,” read Husain, “it is estimated that three million died in the initial blast and firestorm, which extended more than a dozen miles from ground zero. Many more died quickly from radiation exposure, and experts say that the final toll in that city may reach six million. Other Iranian cities destroyed in the attack include Qom, Isfahan …”

Pieraro crossed himself as the news silenced the entire bar for a second.
Her Gurkhas, Shah and Thapa, standing a few feet away, providing a formidable barrier to anybody wanting to approach them, did not visibly react. Their eyes continued to sweep the room like cameras.

“That’s it. I’m not going to Hawaii,” said the construction magnate.

“What?” asked Jules, still straining to hear the telly.

“Pearl Harbor. That’s in Hawaii. If there’s gonna be a nuclear war it’ll get hit for sure. I’m not paying you everything I have left just to get my family turned into fucking shadows on a wall by some Chinese A-bomb.”

Cesky was his name. Henry Cesky. A squat, powerful-looking man with coarse black hair and a nose that had obviously been broken more than once. He owned more than a hundred building cranes towering over twelve North American cities. Within half an hour of hearing about the Disappearance he’d transferred as much available cash as he could from his U.S. accounts to a series of shelf companies registered in Vanuatu, using that money to buy gold and diamonds in Acapulco. He was traveling with his second wife and four children, all girls, and as soon as they’d met he’d demanded passage to Hawaii for them and then Seattle for himself.

“I still got an office in Seattle,” he’d initially said in a deep, rasping voice that was just barely inflected with the merest trace of eastern Europe under his harsh Brookyn accent. “My girls, they can’t go to Seattle. Too close to that fucking wave it is. But I don’t mind that. I can handle it. I don’t think that fucking thing is going nowhere. So you take me there. Lotta fucking work to be done in the Northwest now. Lotta money to be made. To make up what I lost and what you fucking pirates are stealing from me. But my girls. They go somewhere I know they’re safe. Hawaii.”

That had been half an hour ago.

Now Cesky’s tune was entirely different. “No fucking way do they set foot on those islands. No fucking way do they get within a hundred thousand miles. You take them as far away from this bullshit”—he pointed to the TV screen. —”as you can. New Zealand. They filmed that
Lord of the Rings
there. Got some great fucking six-star lodges built for the movie stars. Ends of the fucking earth it is. Went fishing there once. That’d be good. Or Tasmania. Where they got that devil in the cartoon. That’s even farther away. But no fucking Pearl Harbor. Not now.”

Jules felt like her head was going to spin off. Cesky wasn’t the worst of them, not by a long shot. That’d be the porn king, Larry Zood. He didn’t look like a porn king. Possibly because he was an Internet porn king, and so looked more like a crooked real-estate broker. But he oozed a sort of preemptive creepiness that assured Jules that he would one day weigh three hundred
pounds, wear a bad hairpiece, and still insist on bouncing hotties on his knee. He’d been trying to get Fifi to climb on board since finding out that her mother had been one of the original
Hustler
babes.

“Larry Flynt was a great American hero,” he said in all earnestness, before grabbing one of Fifi’s boobs and squeezing experimentally. When she peeled his hand away with a painful jujitsu technique, he simply laughed.

“Ow! What a fucking rack. That was totally worth it.”

“Jules,” said Fifi, between thinly pressed lips. “If this fucking nimrod gets on the boat, he pays twice the going rate.”

“Fine by me,” she agreed.

“Hey!” protested the porn king.

Jules leaned forward and fixed him with a glare like a pin pushed into a butterfly’s back.

“Understand this, Mr. Zood. We are not your bitches. We are people smugglers. Criminals. If you touch any of my crew or any other passenger like that again, I will have Mr. Shah take out his pistol and shoot you in the head. And, yes, you will now pay double the asking rate if you wish to leave this city with us.”

Zood held her glare for a few seconds before breaking into an oily grin.

“Money schmoney,” he mugged. “I still got plenty to blow. I didn’t even have my dough stashed in the U.S. Legally I don’t exist there. For tax purposes, you know. Legally I got
disappeared
years ago.”

He was drinking heavily and very much amused by his own wit, but Jules could detect a slightly anxious edge to his demeanor.

Having arrived at the table an hour ago with a small imitation Fabergé egg, he’d tossed it to Julianne like a golf ball, demanding to know up front how many of “my bitches” he could take with him.

“Give you one egg per bitch. They’re fakes, from Thailand, but the jewels are real. I can leave a few bitches behind. They know that,” he said. “Makes ‘em extra keen to please, if you know what I mean. But I
will
need some with me. I don’t like the water. I don’t even like the hot tub they got by the pool over there. So a fucking sea voyage, shit, if you don’t mind I’m just gonna bomb myself with crystal meth and stay in my suite getting blown. That’s why I need some bitches with me.”

She was tempted to shoot him right then and there.

“If you don’t mind, Jules, I’ve got crew to interview back at the marina. I’ll see you back there. Better company if you ask me.”

“Sure baby, you go. One of Shah’s men can escort you back.”

Fifi left the table without a backward glance. She was never comfortable around muckety-mucks as she referred to anyone wealthier than a gas station
attendant. Except for Jules, of course. Her fall from societal grace and favor meant that she very much met with Fifi’s approval.

“You’re like Paris or Britney,” she often told the English exile. “Rich but cool.”

An uncomfortable silence ensued for a moment as Julianne regarded Zood with cold contempt.

Not that her other candidates were much less odious. A property developer and his wife. No kids. Some guy whose family owned a health fund. He had his third wife and one kid with him. A merchant banker, with his very own bank, based in Basel, Switzerland. His mistress. An oil broker. And a couple of trust-fund delinquents, a brother and sister, who seemed not at all put out that their entire family back in Boston was gone. They, like everyone else at the table, had distinguished themselves by striking like rattlers as soon as they knew the score. Cashing out and converting to exactly the sort of high-end trade goods that Jules had known would hold or even increase their value, at least in the short term.

She had trouble keeping their names straight, and was seriously thinking of a cull. Dumping the porn king and his posse of bitches. And possibly Cesky, who struck her as trouble. They were all very demanding people. The trust-fund duo, Phoebe and Jason, had an especially odious sense of entitlement that she recalled from the useless rich kids of her own childhood.

“Will there be staff?” asked Phoebe. “Other than them.” She nodded at the Gurkhas.

“We could bring our own, I suppose,” her brother mused, not even bothering to refer to Jules. “Hire them here, perhaps? From the resort?”

But Cesky, he was the real quandary. She knew nothing of the construction industry but thought it had to be a tough game. Wasn’t it rotten with Mafia money and crooked unions? To make a fortune in it, you would have to be as hard as tungsten, which wouldn’t necessarily count him out as a prospect. But she just had a feeling with this bastard that if he got off the leash, you’d suddenly have something like a three-hundred-pound bull mastiff with amphetamine psychosis tearing at your throat.

Then again, she supposed, she could always just have Shah throw him over the side. Her attention wandered back to the television.

“Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon has warned other regional powers that they will have to disarm immediately, if they do not wish to be attacked in a second round of strikes. The Saudi government has already agreed to immediate talks with Tel Aviv and has stood down its military, which had been on high alert since the outbreak of hostilities with Iraq and Iran.”

“Man’s a fucking genius,” said Cesky. “A fucking devil, but a genius.”

“You think he’s a genius?” said Zood, arcing up without warning. “A fucking Hitler is more like it. He’s a fucking war criminal, Cesky. A mass murderer. He should be fucking stoned to death for the rest of his life.”

Cesky laughed in the pornographer’s face.

“A name like Zood, you would think that, wouldn’t you? Where’d your family come from again? No, lemme guess. They were ass-fucking goats in the Bekaa Valley for the last three thousand years?”

“You fucking Jewish pig!”

Jules caught Pieraro’s eye for a half a second, just long enough for an unspoken question.

Where the hell did you find these idiots?

And then the two men were on each other, punching and clawing. Their chairs tipped over and drinks crashed to the floor. The banker’s mistress screamed, knocked down in the sudden eruption. The trust-fund brats simply pushed themselves back to a safe distance and smiled, enjoying the entertainment. Shah and Thapa moved like pouncing tigers, but Pieraro beat them into the fray. A flurry of blows from the Mexican cowboy, a blur of short, vicious punches, laid both men out flat in less than two seconds.

Without consulting anyone, he stood over the prone figures and announced, “You will not be traveling on Ms. Julianne’s boat. You will need to make your own arrangements. Do not attempt to answer me back or get to your feet.”