She shook her head, angry with herself. She did not believe in ghosts. Robert would have laughed hysterically at the mere thought. He would have come up with half a dozen bad jokes to tease her.
But Robert was not there, and fear is an invasive species not easy to eradicate. The more she tried not to think about the idea, the more difficult it became to avoid it.
She climbed up toward the bridge, her heart racing. Captain Harper was there, dressed in his peculiar style: dress pants and a floral shirt. She was not surprised. Someone had mentioned at dinner the night before that Harper, after twelve years of wearing an impeccable uniform on each and every cruise, had developed a visceral hatred for the outfit. To him, his voyage aboard the Valkyrie was to be an experience of liberation.
“Hello, Miss Kilroy,” he greeted her matter-of-factly. He had a glass of water in one hand and was about to take two tablets held in the other. He flicked both pills in his mouth, took a long drink of water, and then set the glass on the navigation table beside the Valkyrie’s original logbook.
“I need to contact Mr. Feldman and Dr. Cherenkov,” Kate said as she tried to control her breath. “I need to speak with them. It’s very important.”
Harper massaged his temples and looked irritated. He seemed to be afflicted with a severe headache.
“I don’t like to bother passengers in first class unless it’s warranted,” he answered after a slight pause. “I trust that your reasons are such?”
Kate stared at him as if she had sand in her ears. Passengers in first class?
“It has to do with what’s happening on this ship. So, yes, I suppose my reasons are indeed warranted,” she replied a little more roughly than she wanted.
“In that case you should direct it to me, first.” Harper fell back in the captain’s chair, stretched his hand out over the navigation table, and began gently stroking the ship’s logbook. “Company policy is very clear in that respect. I am the captain, after all.”
Kate had to make a considerable effort not to strangle Harper. Nothing was turning out how she had envisioned.
“I beg of you, please, Captain,” she implored, placing special emphasis on the word captain. She hated the tone of her voice when she had to beg. “It’s very important I see Mr. Feldman and Dr. Cherenkov. It is directly related to their project and has nothing to do with the ship’s security or that of the crew. I promise. I don’t know where they are, and if you could call them over the loudspeaker that would save me having to run all around the ship looking for them.”
Harper coughed and continued to massage his temples vigorously. His headache must be one of colossal proportions. Exhausted, he nodded.
“All right. Hanisch, page passengers Feldman and Cherenkov to the command bridge.” He turned to Kate and pointed to the door. “Wait there, next to the radio room. Passengers are not allowed to be on the bridge while we are at sea.”
Kate opened her mouth to snap back at him but immediately shut it. Either Harper was a greasy bastard, or she was losing her mind. She hoped it was the former, but she would gain nothing by confronting him.
She turned around and went into the radio room. The radio operator was sitting in front of the monitors as before, but this time, even though another basketball game was on and in its final minutes, he paid no attention. The Knicks were crushing another team in blue uniforms that Kate couldn’t identify. Static clouded the reception, blinking in and out.
Perhaps that was why the operator had his headphones on and appeared to be focused on transcribing what he was hearing over the radio. As Kate entered, the man gave her no more than a quick glance and arched his eyebrows in recognition of her arrival.
Kate waited for fifteen long minutes and chewed on her nails to pass the time. Finally, the door opened, and Cherenkov and Feldman walked in one after the other.
The rings under Feldman’s eyes had grown darker. It had barely been two days, and he looked like he had aged ten years. Cherenkov, in turn, just looked angry.
“This had better be important,” he barked in his Slavic accent as soon as he walked in. “I have tons to do, and my team is very limited. We can hardly keep up.”
“I won’t take much of your time,” Kate said as she motioned them toward a corner of the bridge where they would not be heard. There, she began telling them the story of Schweizer and his straw hat.
She had taken her time to closely consider how to relate the story. In the end she decided to present the facts in a cold, methodical way like an informant would, without hunches or conclusions. Let the two of them decide for themselves.
By the end, Feldman and Cherenkov were hanging on her every word. Each seemed intrigued by the story for different reasons judging from their expressions. Feldman looked on the verge of collapse while Cherenkov’s eyes lit up with excitement.
“Did you say you have that hat, Kate?” Feldman asked feebly. “Do you really have it?”
“It’s in my cabin, on my bed,” Kate said. “We can go get it right now.”
“Yes, I’d like that,” Cherenkov said. “I’m very much looking forward to seeing it with my own eyes. May I take a sample from it?”
“I’ll give you the whole damn thing, Professor,” Kate laughed, relieved, “if you’ll promise to take it right away.”
They headed for the cabins. As they came into the main lobby, Kate could hear upbeat music coming from the stage. She would have liked to see who was playing, but time was short.
They came to Kate’s cabin door, and she unlocked it. Her confident expression became an open gape of confusion.
The straw hat had disappeared.
“So?” asked Feldman. “Where’s the straw hat?”
“I don’t know,” Kate stuttered in shock. “I left it right here.”
Cherenkov snorted in exasperation.
“Are you sure, Kate?” asked Feldman. “Maybe you put it somewhere else?”
“I am absolutely certain.”
“The hat must have grown legs,” Cherenkov chided, visibly angry. “Or maybe its owner from seventy years ago took it on a little stroll down the hallway. Or, more likely, you dreamed it up, honey.”
“I did not dream it up. It was real. I had it in my hands. It had a blue sash with a stain on the edge.” Tears welled up in her eyes, and she had to make a tremendous effort not to cry. “I swear.”
“Kate, the hat is not here,” Feldman said.
A knot twisted in Kate’s neck, and she didn’t know what to say.
“I know the last forty-eight hours have been very emotional, Kate.” Feldman squeezed her shoulder affectionately, looking at her with sympathy. “I imagine this is too much for everyone. It’s natural to think we’ve seen something or to mix up our facts. It can happen to anyone. It happens to us all.”
“It wasn’t a dream.” Her voice was at its breaking point. “It wasn’t a dream.”
“Kate, let me give you a piece of advice,” Feldman said. “Get some rest. Sleep it off. If you can’t, Dr. Scott in the infirmary can prescribe something to help you do so. You’ll see things more clearly in the morning. This awful fog will be gone, and the sun will sweep your doubts away. Don’t worry.”
Kate shook her head, on the verge of weeping. She was telling the truth, and they did not believe her. Cherenkov grumbled something in Russian as he took long strides down the hallway. Feldman gave Kate one last look and left with feet dragging and a hunched back.
When Kate was alone in her room, she scoured every corner in search of the hat, possessed by an energy that was charged with fury. By the end, it looked as though a rock band had trashed the room, but she did not find the hat. It was as though it had never existed.
Feeling completely hopeless, she fell back into a pile of blankets that had been tossed to the floor. She tried to calm down and control her breathing, but a single tear rolled down her cheek.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!
It was a feminine laugh, cruel and derisive. It came from within the cab
in despite the fact that Kate was alone. The laughter reverberated off the walls, generating diabolical echoes. It stopped as quickly as it had begun and left an ominous silence in its wake.
Wrenched by an icy grip on her heart, Kate curled up in a corner and began to sob out loud. This was terror in its purest form.
Whatever had laughed had been laughing at her, feeding off her suffering and fear.
Even worse, the malevolent laughter made it clear that its fun was only just beginning.
XXVIII
Two hours prior
At first it was subtle. A nearly imperceptible odor beneath the aroma wafting up from her dish of goulash. Senka looked up and thought it was coming off the redhead sitting across from her, but if it was, Kate had no idea. She was lost in her own world.
Senka felt a twinge of excitement pulse through her body, but she managed to pull herself together. She had been completely abstinent for four months. To her, completely meant that not even a date with the showerhead was allowed, and it was getting harder and harder to clear her head, especially now that a woman as gorgeous as Kate sat so close to her. Their knees brushed below the table, and with each touch, Senka fell victim to waves of desire that nearly choked her. But Kate did not seem tempted to dip into the pleasures of Sappho. At least not yet.
Senka took a deep breath and smiled, hiding her true feelings. It was something she had done very well since she was a little girl.
She had grown up in a small town, primarily Serbian, in Bosnia. One day, the Bosnian brigades launched an attack against Mladić’s paramilitary Serbian forces, which had besieged Sarajevo. Nobody guessed that the Bosnians, battered and on the brink of defeat, would be capable of organizing such a powerful incursion. But they did, and it was the reason why the Serbs were not able to defend Senka’s hometown. During the twelve hours in which her small town was in Bosnian hands, her village morphed into a microcosm of all the horrors of war. The darkest sides of the human soul had risen to the surface, unfettered and unchecked. A desire for revenge coupled with anger invaded the souls of those men.
Little Senka watched them line up and shoot her father and twelve other men from the village. Later, the Bosnians chucked the villagers’ bodies down a well. Senka would never forget her father’s blank expression when his body toppled over the edge. Only minutes beforehand, her father had been telling her a story.
Next, she watched a handful of soldiers systematically rape her mother and three other women on the hood of their truck as the rest of the platoon cheered them on and hooted. Only after they had gotten their fill did they slit the women’s throats and toss them down the same well. By then, Senka’s tears had stopped flowing.
Finally, four militants who were jacked up on booze and cocaine grabbed seven-year-old Senka and slammed her down on the hood of the car. They ripped off her pink bunny rabbit pajamas and brutally had their way with her for two hours as the village burned to the ground.
She never understood why they hadn’t killed her. Maybe they had felt a shred of compassion for the little girl. But in all likelihood the Serbian counterattack had more to do with it. What is certain is that when they found her there alone in the middle of the square, blood running down her naked legs, she was the only person left alive in a place once teeming with life. No different from dozens of towns and villages on both sides of the war. Hell on earth.
She spent the next ten years in an orphanage. She became a quiet child with a broken soul who felt terrified whenever she met a man. Her anger at the world slowly transformed into ferocity, and that was how she wound up getting arrested when she was seventeen and was offered an ultimatum: the Serbian army or a cell block.
So Senka continued to fight. She soon discovered she had a real talent for inflicting pain on other human beings, and in doing so, she managed to eradicate some of the pain that had built up within her. After a little more than a year, she entered the intelligence division and from there a special counterespionage unit. She had developed into a stunning woman, the kind of idealized Slavic woman men fantasize about. Still, her pain lingered on, incessant, and bored a hole inside of her that seemed to have emptied her.
One evening she found herself in a hotel in Vienna. A woman she hardly knew was lying in her bed after a particularly wild fuck. Senka was holding a bottle of whiskey and looking down the barrel of her gun, wondering why she did not simply pull the trigger and end the pain once and for all.
But then Feldman entered her life. Her unit, by request of Interpol, had been investigating Feldman’s investments in Belgrade and his contacts with the Russian mafia. When she first found herself face-to-face with him, his magnetic eyes captivated Senka in a way she was unable to understand. Each of them was like a mirror of the other. They were two tortured souls who were searching for answers to unanswerable questions.
So Senka left the military and began working for Feldman. He was always able to guess her heart’s desires. He was, to Senka, like a surrogate father. For Feldman, Senka’s profound sorrow and self-destructive tendencies, along with her uncanny ability to ascertain information and procure results no one else could, constituted an important asset. He felt all the tenderness a grandfather might feel for a particularly gifted granddaughter.
She had been working for him for five years. It was enough time to have allayed her grief. It finally looked as if one of them would be able to confront the fears and doubts that had been lurking for so long. Feldman had found the cure to his anguish in the Valkyrie. As for Senka, she knew she could never escape from atop the hood of that truck.
Kate got up and bid her a hasty good-bye, pulling Senka back to the present. The reporter seemed nervous, as if she needed to get somewhere urgently. As she left she knocked over a glass of water. Senka hardly noticed. She was too busy watching Kate with curiosity and lust. She could not help it.
Senka finished her meal and headed for Feldman’s cabin. The old man had not looked well after finding the body. That was no surprise. Even she had been affected. And then there was Moore. What the hell had happened to him? She thought it would be best to check on Feldman to see if he needed anything.
Walking down the hall, the sweet scent she had detected earlier returned stronger than before. She sniffed in all directions like a hound searching for a trail. Just then, a sharp, stabbing pain attacked her temples. It was as if someone had stuck a red-hot needle into her head just above the ears and decided to slowly push it deeper and deeper. The pain came in mounting waves that made her so nauseated she had to lean against a wall to keep from stumbling over.
I should go to the infirmary, she told herself. This is the second time today.
She turned around and tried to remember how to get to the ship’s clinic. Her mind was heavy as if jammed with ten thoughts at once. Attempting to shake off the pain, she managed to focus on the hallway, and remember where to go. She needed to turn right, pass three doors, go down the stairs, and find the second door. Infirmary.
She began walking there, but then a gust of rain struck her face, causing her eyes to open wide. Dazed, she blinked several times. Her entire body was soaked. To wipe the water out of her eyes, she would first have to put the screwdriver in her pocket.
Screwdriver?
She was unable to move. She clutched it tighter in her hand and reflected. The run-of-the-mill screwdriver was made of steel, and its handle was red plastic. The bottom had some marks on it like it had been pressed against something hot.
She had never seen this tool before, and she had no idea where it had come from.
She glanced up and could not choke back her panic. Senka dropped the screwdriver, and it rolled on the floor slowly before coming to a stop at the toe of her boots.
She was on the upper deck, above the command bridge. Less than five feet from her was one of the Valkyrie’s enormous smokestacks belching smoke into the air. A little farther, a forest of antennas stood out in the fog, the radar whirling to no end.
What am I doing here?
She took a couple of shaky steps forward before noticing the fistful of different colored copper wires in her other hand. The plastic insulation was frayed at the ends as if the wires had been torn out of something.
How did I get here? What’s happening?
She dropped the wires like they were nettles. She wiped her hands on her shirt and looked around anxiously. No one was in sight. The yellowish fog was still thick. The only difference was that it was now raining. She was soaked as if she had been in the rain for an hour.
She walked a little farther, like a disoriented sleepwalker. Her stomach lurched, and she vomited her lunch across an air vent. She spent a long time heaving until all that came out were strings of spittle. When she righted herself she was shaking uncontrollably.
I must be going insane.
Her head was buzzing, incapable of taking in everything that was happening to her. She felt dizzy, lost, and above all, frightened. Her eyes fell upon a ladder leading down to the crew’s quarters near the bridge. To have reached this point, she would have had to climb up from that way, but she had no recollection of scaling that ladder.
She went down carefully. The descent was complex because, apart from her tremors, every rung was slicked with something slippery like oil. When she finally made it down to the bridge, she sneaked about discreetly. She was not sure what she would say if she encountered someone. They would see her soaked, pale as a corpse, and shaking out of control.
She needed to get to her cabin to change. Then, she could think over what had happened. She tiptoed across the cigar lounge in first class, leaving a trail of droplets behind on the rugs and teak tables with their fitted bronze ashtrays.
Senka.
She stopped cold like a deer caught in headlights when she heard the voice.
Senka, I’m right here. Look at me.
Senka closed her eyes tight, unable to move a muscle.
This is not happening, this is not happening, this is not . . .
Senka!
The voice was louder, and as if controlled by an invisible hand, Senka turned around.
The Last Passenger Page 17
