The Killing Ship

by Simon Beaufort

  ‘But Andrew and Geoff,’ said Sarah miserably. ‘They …’

  ‘Over there,’ said Noddy, pointing. ‘Making sure the captain has all the information he needs to put out a general alert. They were rescued shortly after you.’

  Sarah whipped around and saw Berrister and Mortimer sitting at a table with two men in uniform, one of whom was listening intently, while the other typed their statements on a laptop. A third officer was standing nearby, carefully peeling apart the printed emails that Yablokov had given Mortimer, sodden with seawater but still perfectly legible. She felt her jaw drop. Abandoning Noddy, she raced towards them.

  ‘I thought you were dead!’ she sobbed, grabbing Berrister and holding him tightly.

  ‘Did you?’ he asked in surprise. ‘Why? I told you I’d swim to the nearest boat. It wasn’t too bad, once I’d got the life jacket inflated, and I was fished out of the water very quickly, thanks to Geoff.’

  ‘It was the overloaded one,’ explained Mortimer. ‘And its occupants were loath to let anyone else on, lest it capsized. So I threatened to throw a couple of them overboard to make space for him, and miraculously a spare corner appeared.’

  Sarah felt almost sick with relief. ‘You might have told me,’ she mumbled, embarrassed by her display of emotion. ‘I was worried.’

  ‘We assumed you knew,’ said Berrister with an apologetic shrug. ‘And we needed to get the story out as soon as possible. When you didn’t come to help, we just thought you needed a bit of time to yourself.’

  Sarah sniffed. It was the last thing she wanted.

  ‘I’ve just told Joshi that it’s all over.’ She gazed up into Berrister’s face. ‘Please tell me it’s true.’

  ‘It is,’ he assured her. ‘The story’s all over the internet, and the Southern Exploring Company’s days are numbered. According to South Star’s radar, they’re already running north.’

  ‘You mean they’re escaping?’

  ‘They’re being tracked, and the navies of a dozen countries are ready to intercept them, no matter which way they turn.’

  Sarah heaved a slow sigh of relief. ‘We won, then,’ she whispered. ‘We won.’

  EPILOGUE

  England, four weeks later

  ‘I just had a call from Noddy,’ said Berrister, standing at the door to Sarah’s office.

  She was sitting on the floor, surrounded by the specimen jars and notepads that represented the meagre remnants of the data she had managed to salvage. It wasn’t much for three months of hard work, but it was better than nothing.

  ‘And?’ she asked, shaking a bottle and holding it up to the light.

  Berrister sat on the desk, pushing his hands in his pockets. ‘Volga tried to offload her cargo in Japan, to sell on the black market there. So, that’s it: all six ships have now been caught.’

  He went to stare out of the window. Spring was in the air, although the remains of a late snowfall still lay on the ground in slushy, frozen heaps. A group of high-spirited students were lobbing snowballs at each other in the dim light of an early dusk.

  ‘Was Volga’s whale meat contaminated, too?’ asked Sarah, coming to stand next to him. ‘Like it was in the holds of the other five?’

  ‘Noddy said it virtually glowed in the dark.’

  ‘And the scum who killed the whales and poisoned the sea? How are they?’

  ‘Not good. Even Orlando is sick, and he knew exactly what was in the cargo, so kept his distance. Apparently they scrimped on the sealing process this year, to cut costs. He can’t believe they didn’t tell him, and is avenging himself by turning informer.’

  ‘Informer against whom, exactly? Who runs the Southern Exploring Company?’

  ‘According to Noddy, a group of criminals who supply rogue regimes and terrorist organisations with dirty weapons – not just nuclear technology, but chemical and biological as well. Weapons of mass destruction.’

  ‘Bastards! But Orlando’s grassing them up?’

  Berrister nodded. ‘To a joint task force including Interpol, MI6, the CIA, and a number of other parties interested in combatting that kind of threat.’

  ‘That’s good, I suppose, but so much damage has already been done – it won’t be easy to retrieve the leaking barrels, while the whales are dead. And all in the name of profit. I’m glad the crews are getting what they deserve.’

  ‘Most of the sailors did it to support their families – the cod industry’s collapsing in the Arctic, so they were easy prey. Others were mercenaries, who knew to avoid the holds, but even they’re showing a degree of contamination. Incidentally, Lena’s crew insist that Yablokov was going to help you escape.’

  Sarah looked disgusted. ‘Only when he found out that the Southern Exploring Company had poisoned him.’

  ‘They say he decided before that.’

  Sarah tried to feel empathy for the people who had almost killed her, but found she could not do it. ‘They murdered our friends, Andrew. That’s unforgivable. Lisa, Dan, Graham and that nice Drecki who died trying to rescue us … none of them deserved that.’

  They were silent for a while, both thinking about the people who had failed to come home. Outside, the students shrieked with laughter as their snowball fight escalated.

  ‘We owe Vince a good deal,’ said Berrister eventually. ‘Without him, we’d be dead for certain – and so would a lot of people who would have eaten contaminated whale meat.’

  ‘It would have served them right,’ said Sarah harshly. ‘It’s their taste for the stuff that keeps these criminals in business. Part of me wishes they had stuffed it down their unscrupulous throats.’

  A snowball hit the window, and the guilty student gazed up in alarm. Berrister smiled at him, although Sarah would have given him a piece of her mind, had she been alone. She went to her desk and pulled out a bottle. It was almost six o’clock, and time to stop work for the day.

  ‘The whole world knows about the Southern Exploring Company and what it’s done,’ she said. ‘Conservation groups are lobbying governments everywhere about the dead blues, and the Antarctic is being proclaimed as a place that must be protected. Perhaps something good has come out of it all.’

  ‘It won’t last,’ predicted Berrister. ‘Some other scandal will come along and people will forget about the far south. And when they do, other unscrupulous sods will be down there to see how they can exploit it for personal gain.’

  ‘Then we have to make sure they don’t forget it,’ said Sarah, handing him a glass. ‘Joshi’s got himself a job with Greenpeace, Geoff writes a weekly blog with a growing number of followers, and you and me – well, we’re university lecturers, responsible for shaping young minds.’

  At that moment, her phone rang. While she answered it, he gazed out at the fading day, thinking about Dan Wells and how much he had learned from him. They had been unable to retrieve his body, but Berrister thought he wouldn’t have minded. Wells would have been quite happy with a glacier as his final resting place.

  Then something in the tone of Sarah’s voice made him look at her sharply. She sat down suddenly, clutching the phone so hard that her knuckles were white. Eventually, she disconnected the call and looked at Berrister with shocked eyes.

  ‘That was Noddy. Apparently Orlando wasn’t as sick as he led everyone to believe, because he got out of bed, killed his guards and calmly walked out of the hospital. And according to his interrogators, he holds us responsible for his capture. They think he might pay us a visit.’

  ‘I doubt he’ll make it,’ said Berrister. ‘Too many people will be looking for him – not just half the world’s police forces, but the Southern Exploring Company, which he betrayed.’

  ‘But that’s just it, Andrew – he didn’t betray them. It transpires that nothing he shared held up, and now so many of his underlings are dead or dying … well, there’s no one left to tell the truth.’

  Berrister stared at her. ‘So we were wrong. It isn’t over.’

  ‘Worse,’ said Sarah. ‘I
have a bad feeling that it’s only just beginning.’