Plague Ship

by Clive Cussler

  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 w
aiting, 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.

  “He’s a big man, so he should have,” another man agreed. He had an American accent. “But everyone is different.”

  Kovac lightly slapped Max’s cheek. Max made a mewling sound, as if he were dimly aware of the contact but was too far under to care.

  “It has been twenty-four hours,” the Serbian killer said. “If he doesn’t wake in an hour, I will inject him with a stimulant.”

  “And risk cardiac arrest?”

  Max had slightly elevated blood pressure. He would make damned sure he’d be awake the next time they entered the room.

  “Mr. Severance will be here soon. We need to know what conversations took place between this man and his son. They kept him sedated the entire time they had him. Who knows what he could have told them under the influence of drugs?”

  They needed information quickly, Max thought. Contrary to popular belief, proper interrogation takes weeks and oftentimes months. The only remotely effective way to extract information quickly was the application of pain, tremendous amounts of pain. A victim in that circumstance will tell the interrogator anything he wants to hear. It was the interrogator’s job to not reveal his intentions so the prisoner had no choice but to tell the absolute truth.

  Max had one hour to figure out what Kovac wanted to hear, because there was no way in hell he would ever tell the bastard the truth.

  KEVIN NIXON FELT SICK to his stomach as he stepped past the barricade and onto the movie set. Being there, he was breaking a vow to his dead sister. He could only hope, given the circumstances, that she would forgive him. This part of Donna Sky’s new movie was being filmed in an old warehouse left to decay after German reunification. The building reminded Kevin a little of the Oregon, only here the rust was real. A half-dozen semitrailers, catering trucks, scaffolding, dolly cranes for cameras, and narrow-gauge railroad tracks for what were called tracking shots were spread across the acres of parking lot. Men and women buzzed around the set, moving at double time, because, in the movie business, time quite literally is money. Nixon judged by what he saw that the film’s producers were spending about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a day here.

  To him, the organized chaos of a big-budget motion picture was familiar but now, at the same time, utterly alien.

  A guard, wearing a uniform but without a weapon, was about to approach when a voice called out from across the lot, “I can’t believe it’s really you.”

  Gwen Russell breezed past the security officer and hugged Nixon tightly, burying her face in his thick beard after kissing both cheeks. Always a bundle of energy, she quickly broke the embrace and regarded him.

  “You look fantastic,” she said at last.

  “I finally admitted that no diet on earth was helping, so I had the stomach bypass surgery two years ago.” In his lifelong battle with his weight, it had been a desperation play that had paid off. Before the operation, Kevin hadn’t seen the underside of two hundred and twenty since college. Now he weighed a respectable one eighty-five, which he carried on a solid frame.

  The chefs aboard the Oregon prepared him special meals, in keeping with his postoperative diet, and, while he would never be a fan of exercise, he kept to his daily regimen religiously.

  “It worked awesome, buddy boy.”

  She spun him around and slipped her arm through his, so he could lead her back to a row of trailers parked along one side of the lot.

  Gwen’s hair was hot pink, and she wore brightly colored bicycle pants and a man’s oxford shirt. At least fifteen gold necklaces were hung around her throat, and each of her tiny ears had a half-dozen piercings. She had been Nixon’s assistant when he had been nominated for an Academy Award and was now a highly sought-after makeup artist in her own right.

  “You dropped off everyone’s radar some years ago. No one knew where you were or what you were doing,” she said in a rush of words. “So dish, and tell me everything you’ve got going on.”

  “Not much to tell, really.”

  She blew a raspberry. “Oh pooh. You vanish for, like, eight years and you say there’s nothing to tell? You didn’t find God or anything? Wait a minute, you said you wanted to talk to Donna. Did you join that group of hers, the Reactionaries?”

  “Responsivists,” Kevin corrected.

  “Whatever,” Gwen shot back, using her best Valley Girl accent. “Are you part of that?”

  “No, but I need to talk to her about it.”

  They reached the makeup trailer. Gwen swung open the door and glided up the retractable stairs. The waxy smell of cosmetics and potpourri was overwhelming. There were six chairs lined up under a long mirror in front of a counter littered with bottles and jars of every size and shape, as well as eyeliner pencils and enough makeup brushes to sweep a football stadium. Gwen pulled two bottled waters from a small fridge, tossed one to Kevin, and dropped into one of the chairs. The intense lights made her hair glow like cotton candy.

  “So, come on, it was just after the Oscars—which you should have won, by the way—and, poof, you’re gone. What gives?”

  “I had to get away from Hollywood. I couldn’t stand it anymore.” Obviously, Kevin wasn’t going tell her what he’d been doing since turning his back on the movie business, but she had been a good friend and deserved to know the truth.

  “You knew me,” he started. “I was a lefty, like everyone else. I voted Democrat across the board, hated everything to do with the Republican Party, donated to environmental groups, and drove a hybrid car. I was as much of the Hollywood establishment as anyone.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve become a conservative,” Gwen said in mock horror. She’d never shown the slightest interest in politics.

  “No. It’s not like that,” he said. “I’m just putting what happened into context. Everything changed on 9/11.” Just the mention of the date caused Gwen to blanch, as if she knew where the story was headed. “My sister was coming to see me from Boston.”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  “Hers was the plane that struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center.”

  She reached across to where he was sitting to grab his hand “Oh, I am so sorry. I had no idea.”

  “I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone.”

  “So that’s why you left. Because of your sister’s death.”

  “Not directly,” Kevin said. “Well, maybe. I don’t know. I went back to work three weeks after her memorial service, trying to get my life back to normal, you know? I was doing makeup for this period drama. I won’t tell you who the star was because she’s even bigger today than she was then. She was sitting in the chair, talking to her agent about the attacks. She said something like, ‘You know, I think what happened to those people was terrible, but this country deserves it. I mean, look at the way we treat the rest of the world. It’s no wonder they hate us.’

  “That wasn’t an uncommon thought,” Nixon added, “then or now. But then she said the people who died—my sister—were as much at fault for the attacks as the hijackers.

  “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My little sister was twenty-six years old and about to start her medical residency, and this overpaid bimbo says the attacks were my sister’s fault. It was the disconnect, Gwen. People in Hollywood are so disengaged from reality that I just couldn’t take it. This actress made millions parading around on screen in her underwear in an offense to Muslim sensibilities and she lays the blame for hatred on my sister.

  “I listened to what people in the industry were saying for another couple of months and knew everyone felt pr
etty much the same. I could take the ‘it’s America’s fault’ stuff. What I couldn’t stomach is that no one there believed they were also part of that America.”

  Kevin didn’t add that he had gone straight to the CIA to offer his unique abilities or that he’d been presented a much more challenging and lucrative job with the Corporation, most likely because Langston Overholt had passed his name on to Juan before the CIA even knew he was interested.

  Adjusting to the gung ho paramilitary nature of Cabrillo’s band of pirates had been remarkably easy, and, for the first time, Nixon had come to understand the lure of the military. It wasn’t the action and adventure, because most days were filled with tedium. It was the camaraderie, the sense of loyalty that the men and women shared for each other. They gave each other the ultimate responsibility, of keeping the other person from harm, which formed bonds far deeper than Kevin thought were possible.

  But his time with the Oregon hadn’t really changed him much. He still gave money to liberal causes, voted the Democratic ticket whenever he remembered to get an absentee ballot, and the hybrid car was garaged in a storage unit in L.A. He just valued the freedom to do those things all the more.

  “Wow, I am so sorry,” Gwen said into the lengthening silence. “I don’t really pay attention to that stuff much.”

  “I didn’t use to either, but now . . .” His voice trailed off, and he shrugged. He could sense that he made her uncomfortable. Maybe he had changed more than he’d thought.

  The trailer door was suddenly thrown open. On the interview circuit of morning talk shows or on the red carpet of a movie premiere, Donna Sky was a luminous presence that could fill any room. She was the epitome of style, poise, and elegance. Storming into the makeup trailer with her hair hidden by a baseball cap and no cosmetics to hide the fact she had acne, she looked like any harried twenty-something with a chip on her shoulder and a sense of entitlement. Her eyes were bloodshot and ringed by dark circles, and, from across the room, Kevin could smell last night’s alcohol binge.