The Vessel

by Taylor Stevens

  Munroe nodded and forced a reciprocal smile because it was the situationally appropriate thing to do and because the blood of retaliation at having been touched still rushed in her ears, drowning out all else.

  She followed Dmytro down the stairs. She had a job. A way to eat.

  A way to the yacht yard’s secrets and the Dog Man’s tracks.

  CHAPTER 6

  Subterfuge was a tradition as old as the human race, yet few people had the mental ability to transform fully into someone they weren’t. Even fewer could maintain the masquerade indefinitely.

  Sure, a ruse here, a disguise there, and a con followed by a scam, but more often than not, credit for success was owed not to the authenticity of the pretext but to how easily human nature and innate weakness could be manipulated. In a long-term subterfuge that required changing habits, personality, and preferences, the impostor’s psyche often cracked and the truth seeped out, allowing simple mistakes to undo years of exacting performance.

  To succeed without risk of exposure or retaliation required immersion, required becoming the man beyond suspicion.

  One had to become the illusion.

  And yet.

  And yet here she was after so much time and effort to become that man: holding a mop and cleaning the floors of the yacht yard’s offices.

  This was a job that took her far, far away from beyond suspicion.

  Munroe sloshed water on the floor and pushed the mop head forward, backward, side to side; around desks and filing cabinets and computer terminals, bringing the sting of bleach with her, casing the layout as she went.

  She hadn’t had a choice in the work assigned—had created the immigrant persona with the intent of securing menial and unwanted labor down in the manufacturing zone—couldn’t have predicted this turn of events where she’d been gifted with simple access that would make her quest easier, but not without requiring additional time to create a deeper illusion.

  JANITOR SHIFT HOURS brought Munroe into the yard in the late afternoon, when most of the personnel were ending work. She spent time staring, jaw loose, into nothing, and she spoke slowly, simply, and moved at that same pace.

  She cleaned well, and that was what she’d been hired for, but the act of the simpleton—to never be caught observing or showing spark or intelligence—was more exhausting than the backbreaking work she’d done as a stevedore in the dockyards of Valencia.

  That had been that other life, when strength, agility, and patience had been the only demands of the job, and the freshest scars from the near nightly fight for life were pink and barely healed. She’d slept among dust and cobwebs on a pallet of broken-down cardboard that she’d found in an abandoned storage unit; had shadowboxed deep into the night, afraid of losing the speed that had kept her sharp and had eventually brought her freedom. And, because the attack that would trigger her first instinctual kill was still a month away, she’d been blithely unaware of how the marks of the sadist’s knife would shape the rest of her life.

  She’d run from Cameroon, the country of her birth, bribing her way onto a Spanish freighter, young and naïve—not quite eighteen—animal smart and civility stupid. She’d yet to set foot in the country that laid claim to her by missionary parentage, had yet to encounter fellow citizens on their own soil, and had been wholly unprepared for the excess—the width and breadth and largeness of a nation that, while dominating the globe through might and size, was populated with inhabitants woefully ignorant of what went on outside its borders, and sometimes what went on within.

  She’d entered a society she was ill equipped to understand, and interacted with people even less equipped to understand her. She hadn’t adjusted well, and eventually learned to become invisible through observation and then mimicry.

  Trauma, it seemed, had, in its several forms, prepared her well for a life on the edge, a life where she was everyone and no one.

  HOURS PASSED INTO days, and days congealed into a week. Munroe dusted ledges and washed windows, pushed buckets, carried brooms, and emptied trash, while the office ladies tittered in whispers about the simple boy, and favored her with pitying glances.

  Men went out of their way to avoid conversation, and the few workers Munroe encountered on the yard turned their heads and avoided contact and conversation when they passed by. She would have spent another week or two, biding her time, if that was what the role had required, but she had already become invisible, blameless if caught.

  In the evening, after the office emptied and the overhead lights went out, and the shipyard went quiet but for the welding that continued in the dry dock, Munroe rifled through files and drawers and cabinets.

  She worked in spurts between cleaning until the filing system made sense, and on the fourth day of searching she tracked down the blueprints, schematics, and paperwork for the Omicron II.

  Stealing them was out of the question: should they turn up missing, the theft would alert her prey; should they turn up missing and suspicion eventually focus on her, Dmytro would suffer. She’d slept in the streets, gone hungry, knew the life of the downtrodden and unemployed, and preferred to avoid rewarding his kindness with the loss of his own job.

  Copies were the alternative—meticulous overlapping photographs that she would eventually enlarge and print—and she carried the camera beneath her shirt, hidden together with passports and credit cards in the same binds that wrapped and protected her gender.

  She’d entered Monaco with a face, had left Monaco with the yacht’s name and flag state. Now she had the designs, the schematics, the corporation to which the yacht had been sold, and the name and business address of the man who’d signed as agent on behalf of the buyer.

  Munroe scanned the contract one last time, committing the details to memory on the chance that her digitized copies became lost or destroyed, then returned the papers to their file. She had a name, but it wasn’t her target’s name—this she knew without the need for verification. Discovering her target’s identity here on these legal documents would have been too easy, would have been incongruent with the requisites for tax shelter, privacy, and mitigating liability.

  The more highly valued the asset, the more complicated the structure shielding it would be—how much more so for a ship whose bowels hosted a sadist’s chamber where young women went in and never came out. She’d check, but chances were the corporation on the sales contract was also a dead end—likely a subsidiary of a shell of a shelter of something that would lead nowhere; and tracking the agent of a ghost business wasn’t even worth a last-ditch effort should everything else fail.

  But she hadn’t come for these details.

  Munroe carried the supplies out of the upstairs office and deposited them in the janitorial room just as she had on every other night. She found the crew foreman and collected her day’s wages, then trudged out the gate with the camera and its trove of stolen data secured to her chest.

  No one, not the bosses or the guards, or the workers, questioned. She belonged here. She was one of them. She was a nameless, faceless shadow whose existence would be forgotten within a week.

  She exited the yard as if exiting a theater: act over, take a bow.

  Munroe walked the lane into town and took the two-kilometer stretch to her rented room as slowly and purposefully as always. She collected her bag, returned the key to the room to the nonna who’d given her access to the small annex, then continued to the station and purchased a ticket for the first departure to Florence.

  She waited until she’d boarded and the wheels were rolling before shedding the disguise. The train’s toilet, with its tiny sink, acted as changing room and shower. With the washcloth she scrubbed the most visible grime off her face and arms and hands and neck, then swapped the worn and dirty shirt for one clean and new. She replaced the rope that belted her jeans with leather and buckle. A small stiff-bristle brush along her jeans removed obvious grime and, when plied against the boots, loosened years of caked dirt. When they were as clean as she could get them
, she rubbed in a polish paste to revive the leather.

  She washed her hair under the trickle of water and followed this with hair wax so that the shag of the streets took on the look of deliberate mess, then strode three cars down to find a seat. In Florence she would visit a bank and access her accounts. By midmorning the immigrant persona would die and she would become again: an insect crawling out of its carapace, one role traded for another.

  Like a modern-day Apostle Paul, she was made all things to all men.

  She was everyone and no one.

  She would find him, kill him, and he would never see her coming.

  CHAPTER 7

  The line between revenge and justice was a fine one. A line blurred so thoroughly and so often that even the civilized, who touted law and order and fairness, turned a complacent eye when the courts warped into a mockery of impartiality and, perverting justice, became a cudgel to achieve the same end.

  Different name, identical deed.

  Murder, by law.

  Torture, by law.

  A daily trampling of human rights, by law.

  All in the name of justice.

  Sweet, sweet justice, and a soft clean conscience.

  Illusions were for cowards.

  Munroe knew vengeance, had tasted its bitter astringent: a poison best left to fantasy, where the imagination masked reality’s aftertaste. But it was justice that drove her forward, chasing and haunting her while the image of the Dog Man and the blood he’d shed for pleasure needled her on in predatorial patience night after night.

  There was a thin, fine, very blurred line between the two.

  She would find revenge in killing him, but no smug satisfaction in the deed. She was the hangman’s noose, the guillotine blade, the executioner’s ax.

  She was the prosecutor, and the hand that injected the needle.

  But she refused to lie to herself. She was a killer, just as he was a killer.

  HOLDING THE OVERSIZE hat to her head, Munroe walked the tarmac, leaving behind the rolling stairs and the American Airlines jet for the shade of the entryway into the Owen Roberts International Airport.

  High heels clacking, sea breeze billowing the summer dress into her legs, she drew in the verdant surroundings through bug-eyed sunglasses.

  More than a dozen private and charter planes dotted the edge of the runway. Passengers trailed down the stairs behind her, mostly tourists with their visitor status worn on expectant faces and pale white legs like a badge of honor.

  She breathed in the island air, moisture-rich and, at the moment, octane-fume-filled—a fragrance mixture so similar to the streets of Douala that she choked back a pang of longing and want.

  She didn’t really miss equatorial Africa. Felt no more attachment to the nation of her birth than she did to the homeland of her missionary parents, or any of the dozens of countries she’d lived and worked in since leaving both continents. But homesickness, that strange and multifaceted creature, sometimes triggered emotional connections to things that didn’t exist.

  Things like home, and belonging, and patriotism.

  Things most people took for granted as a normal part of life.

  Munroe passed through customs and immigration without undue questions. A driver waited on the other side, flashing arriving passengers with a card printed with a name that wasn’t hers but that matched her documents. She nodded and walked toward him.

  He took her suitcase, guided her to the vehicle, and, when he’d stowed her belongings in the back and they were on their way, played tour guide in an island-rhythmic voice that wound like music inside her head, adding sound track to the passing buildings, the streets and greenery and smiling faces.

  The trip out of Italy had routed her from Florence to Paris, through Miami, and finally to George Town, capital of the Cayman Islands.

  Thirty-plus hours in transit had been made tolerable by first-class service—a world of soft scents and subtle tastes, of transit lounges and nutrition and comfort—if airports could ever provide comfort—that belied the existence of the rats and roaches, the ripened alcohol and unwashed bodies with which she’d spent her last month and a half.

  Outside the hotel the driver retrieved her suitcase, and she tipped him well. When he smiled in thanks, she smiled back.

  “I need a maritime lawyer,” she said. “A good one—maybe the best—but one who doesn’t work with a large firm.”

  “I know several,” the driver said, and he reached for a wallet and pulled out his card. He handed it to her, and she glanced at it. “You want to register a boat, maybe? A yacht?” he said.

  “I want to find one,” she said, and she smiled again, a rich, generous smile.

  “To purchase?”

  “A game of hide-and-seek.”

  “Aah,” he said. “So you could use a few special skills. I’ll ask around, but we can find what you need, no problem. How soon are you looking for?”

  “I’m in something of a hurry,” she said. “I can wait if I have to, but the sooner I can make arrangements, the bigger the finder’s fee will be.”

  “Call me in the morning,” he said. He opened his door and set a foot inside the vehicle. “I’ll have news for you, guaranteed.”

  FINALLY IN HER room, with a bed and the ability to rest, Munroe stripped out of the costume of money, showered off the femininity and the journey, and wrapped herself in the hotel-provided robe. Clean sheets, clean smells, and quiet nights were the bonus of a completed segment, though these tokens wouldn’t last long.

  She drank down the bottled water left out as a welcome gift and stared through the window and fronting palm fronds to where the water kissed the sand and sunbathers and boaters alike dotted the seascape.

  It was no surprise that the Omicron II had led her here.

  Nearly half of the world’s superyachts flagged in this tourist and banking paradise. As a British overseas territory, the Cayman Islands afforded the ships that flew its flag the full might of the United Kingdom and its navies while adding the tax advantages and confidentiality of Cayman law.

  Confidentiality was the issue she’d come to bend.

  Munroe opened her suitcase, thumbed through the few clothes she’d had time to purchase before catching her flight, pulled out the pieces that would be her costume for tomorrow, then shut the curtains and darkened the room.

  A paradise of warm water, sand, and sun waited outside, and she’d touch none of it. She’d had enough water to last a lifetime and, going against the jet lag, she desperately needed sleep.

  OPERATIONS IN CORRUPTION-STEEPED developing nations could rely on poverty and bribery, the grease that kept the government wheels turning, to acquire what one had no legal right to take. But the Cayman Islands had a per capita GDP on par with Switzerland.

  Here, offering payment to induce low-level bureaucrats and office workers to break confidentiality laws would be expensive. Worse, it would be time-consuming, because, unless she picked her targets wisely, there was a high potential for blowback.

  Far safer was to pull anything that could be obtained through public records, to move from there to source documents that may or may not have been accidentally copied or misfiled, and then to draw on word-of-mouth, and other people’s memories and personal connections for the rest.

  The oceans might be vast, but the world of superyachts was small and incestuous. Someone within this country of tiny islands knew someone who knew what she wanted.

  Munroe found her man in the guise of Robert Bodden, counsel and attorney-at-law. Bodden was one step distant from the major legal players on the island, familiar with them all and hungry enough for business that he accepted her retainer. With that, she’d purchased confidentiality of her own.

  The yacht and the legal entity that owned the yacht were easy enough to find in ship registry records; she’d known this before she left Monaco. What Bodden brought her was invisible to the public, had come to her written out in blue ballpoint on a paper napkin that still smelled of cigar
smoke and scotch: the ownership percentages of the legal entities that owned the Cayman corporation that registered the Omicron II.

  As an aside, thrown in for free, he’d saved Munroe the time of hunting down the name and address of the woman who’d signed the documents.

  Teresa Yates, the signer, the registered agent, was the person who knew.

  She was an attorney in one of the prestigious firms that specialized in foreign ship registration and facilitated the process of establishing Cayman companies to satisfy the legal requirements of local ownership.

  Munroe trailed her: hours of inaction interspersed with moments of movement, hours spent in a rental car while her mind jumped continents, laying down strategy in anticipation of the steps to come while she studied the patterns that took Yates from work to home to friends to food to home to work and round again until the basic routine was clear enough.

  Cultures differed. Landscape differed. Languages and climates and expectations all differed country to country, but ultimately people were the same: at the core, humans were creatures of habit, so desperate for the comfort of what was familiar that they clung to harmful ideologies and routines rather than face the mental dissonance of change.

  In the patterns Munroe learned her mark and found the opening when Teresa Yates left work, bypassing home for a seaside restaurant outside the city, away from most of foreign throng, and joined a girlfriend at a patio table that would fit several more people.

  Munroe waited until drinks and finger food had arrived and relaxation seeped deeper into their posture. Eventually a third face joined their party.

  Others would come and the tables would fill and the evening would lead on into the night, just as it had on this same day last week.

  Munroe stepped from the car and strode slow and casual toward the low-slung patio lights. Shirt and pants—business clothes done island style—and musky cologne replaced the makeup, the dresses and perfume, and she’d swapped out heels and bug-eyed sunglasses for wraparounds, a bulky chronograph watch, and deck shoes.