The Journalist's Prince

by Merry Farmer

  “Not exactly the Ritz,” Tracy said, glancing around.

  “I think that’s why working on an oil rig is considered one of the toughest jobs out there,” Johan said.

  There wasn’t much more to see, so they moved on. They found one other bunk room before stumbling across what looked like a galley and dining room, also empty and abandoned.

  “Do you think someone deliberately set out to make it look like this place was abandoned a long time ago?” Tracy asked as they edged their way to the last door on the second level.

  “Probably.” Johan nodded. “Especially since that would be the perfect way to cover their asses in case the authorities got involved.”

  “Which they will in….” She pulled her cell phone out of her back pocket, then said, “Two hours.”

  Knowing the time sent Johan’s adrenaline soaring. He picked up his pace, reaching for the handle of the last door and easing it open.

  The second they stepped into the room and turned on the lights, he knew they’d hit pay dirt. They were in an office. It was small, square, and crowded with desks and filing cabinets, but unlike the rest of the rig, it wasn’t empty. Far from it.

  Tracy blew out a breath and raced to one of the desks. “Would you look at this.”

  The computer was on. It showed an entire desktop filled with files. Tracy slid into the desk chair, grabbing the mouse and sliding it across the screen. As she clicked through a few things, Johan turned in a circle, studying the room. It was undecorated and businesslike, but the filing cabinets were still stuffed, and reports on the rig’s output and shipments were tacked to a corkboard. He stepped over to get a closer look, and was rewarded with proof that not only had the rig been recently operational, until a few days ago, it’d had a tremendous output.

  “Johan. Oh my gosh, look at this.”

  The urgency in Tracy’s voice had Johan rushing to Tracy’s side. He leaned over her shoulder to look at what she had up on the screen. He didn’t need to wait for an explanation. The truth was glaringly obvious at one glance.

  Tracy had pulled up a program with a complete record of financial transactions involving oil sales and payments under the guise of a handful of trading and oil companies. Several African nations were mentioned, but by the looks of things, a company in Côte D’Ivoire was the broker for those transactions. More damning still, Marina’s name was all over everything. She was listed as CEO for several of the smaller companies.

  “Marina Magnusson,” Tracy said, clicking through a few more files. Bank statements, trade contracts, financial records. All of them were for Storm Holdings, Ltd., and all of them had Marina’s name on them.

  “Not Lindqvist,” Johan said with a sigh. Any hope he’d had that his aunt had been dragged along out of a sense of love or duty toward her boyfriend vanished.

  He peeled away from the computer and pulled open one of the filing cabinets to see if they confirmed what was on the computer. Sure enough, the records that filled the cabinets showed the same thing—statements and contracts dating back almost a decade, all of which had Marina’s name and signature on them.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said, letting out a painful, disappointed breath. “Aunt Marina is behind all of this. She’s been running whatever kind of company this is for years.”

  “It’s a holding company.” Marina’s voice sounded from the office’s open door. Johan whipped to face her, and Tracy nearly fell out of her chair. Marina stood in the door with her arms crossed, Lindqvist hovering behind her. “It’s a company that owns other companies.”

  Johan forced himself to recover fast. “Aunt Marina, you can’t do this. It’s illegal.” He took a step toward her.

  Marina laughed. “Of course I can do it. I’ve been doing it for years, as I assume you’ve just found out.”

  “But why?” Johan asked, heart racing and aching. He’d known Marina his whole life. A huge part of his mind didn’t want to accept that she could be an unrepentant crook.

  “Why?” She blinked at him as though he were simple. “Why else? Do you think I can afford the things I want in life on the salary of a royal lackey?”

  “But you’re a princess,” Tracy said, jumping to her feet and scooting closer to Johan’s side.

  Marina stared at her, mouth twisted in a smirk. “Being a princess, seventh in line to the throne, gets you nothing these days. And now that you boys are grown up and on the verge of starting families of your own,” she went on, turning to Johan, “I stand to get an even smaller piece of the pie. I knew a long time ago I had to take things into my own hands or else I’d end up as some pathetic old has-been living on royal charity.”

  “But you could have used your talents and intelligence legitimately,” Johan argued. He wanted to step forward and plead with her, as a nephew pleading with his aunt, but the coldness in Marina’s eyes made him feel like he didn’t know her at all. “You were in a position to do so much good.”

  “I was in a position to steer things so that I could get exactly what I wanted,” she said.

  “So what Dr. Hayes said was true,” Tracy gasped. “You were using your position as Queen Viktoria’s advisor to manipulate things to your advantage.”

  “What self-respecting royal wouldn’t use all her advantages to get what she wanted?” Marina said with an arrogant shrug.

  “A self-respecting royal would put their country and their family first,” Johan said. Every last bit of affection he’d had for his aunt was dying a quick and spectacular death. “Mother understands that. She raised her sons to understand it too.”

  “And look where it got her?” Marina sniffed. “Married to a bumbling fool of an American who has no respect for tradition and power.”

  “Dr. Hayes had more respect in his little finger than you have in your entire body,” Tracy growled. “You’ll go to prison for this.”

  “Will I?” Marina glanced at Tracy as though she were dirt. “I sincerely doubt it.”

  “As soon as the authorities get one look at this room, you’ll be done, Aunt Marina,” Johan said. He reached for his phone to check the time and to call for the police to come immediately. It would take them less than half an hour to get there by air.

  “I’ll take that.” Marina swiped the cell phone from his hand before he could think to defend it. “Herman, get her phone before she does anything stupid.”

  Lindqvist shot forward, surprising Tracy, who had also thought to take out her phone. Johan jerked toward Lindqvist as he manhandled Tracy, who was too stunned to fight back once Lindqvist had her at a disadvantage. But before Johan could land so much as a single blow, Lindqvist wrenched Tracy’s phone away and dashed to the deck outside, like the coward he was.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse us,” Marina said, blocking Johan from going after Lindqvist. Johan’s instinct was to shove past her to wring Lindqvist’s neck, but even after everything he’d just learned, he still couldn’t bring himself to raise a hand to his aunt. “Herman and I have a much bigger boat to catch. And I’m afraid there’s about to be a fire on this rig. Sad that so much equipment will be lost, but it will destroy other evidence.” She turned to go. “Oh, and thank Mack for lending us his boat. If you ever see him again.”

  She turned and stepped out of the room with a nasty smirk. A second later, before Johan could get over his disbelief that his aunt would do what she was doing, the door slammed and a lock clicked. They were trapped.

  10

  Tracy charged at the door the moment it slammed shut and locked. A growl of frustration ripped from her lungs as she tried the door. It locked from the outside.

  “They can’t do this,” she shouted at the door, banging it with her fist. “They can’t get away with this.”

  “They won’t,” Johan assured her, stone-faced.

  Tracy glanced at him over her shoulder, a painful sort of sympathy gripping her gut. She knew the look he wore. She’d worn it once herself when everything her dad had done came to light. “I’m sorry,” she said
. “This sucks.”

  “Yeah.” He marched up to her side, rattling the door handle.

  There wasn’t time for them to wallow in the suckiness of the situation. “Do you think they’re really going to set the rig on fire?” she asked. A surprise twist of fear hit her gut.

  Johan let out a tight breath as he scanned the door. “It wouldn’t surprise me,” he said, clearly upset by everything. “Which means we have to find a way to get out of here now.”

  Truer words had never been spoken. Tracy whipped around, surveying the office for anything that would help them break through the door. Her gaze fell on a small phone on the corner of the desk. She leapt toward it, lifting the receiver and dialing 999 without thinking. But the phone was dead.

  “I should have known,” she sighed, slamming it down.

  “There has to be a way out,” Johan said, joining her in the middle of the office and searching for something, anything beside her. “In spite of everything, I can’t believe that Aunt Marina would kill any of us.”

  Tracy could believe it. She sent him a sympathetic smile all the same before wracking her brain for any way to get out of the locked room. “If only there were a window,” she said. “I’m good at crawling through windows.”

  To her surprise, Johan laughed. “Except when there are dogs.”

  “Hey, I made it out without a scratch,” she said. “Well, a few scratches, but not from the dogs.”

  “It could have—” Johan’s words drifted off as he glanced up. For a moment, he was silent, his mouth hanging open. Then he said, “Forget windows. Do you think you could climb through an air duct?”

  “Air duct?” Tracy pivoted to see what he was looking at—a fair-sized vent at the top of the wall. Instantly, images from a dozen or more spy movies where lithe heroines in cat-suits had crawled through metal air ducts to steal diamonds or something flashed through her head. “That looks like a tight squeeze.”

  “Do you think you could do it, though?”

  Tracy took a deep, steadying breath. “I can give it a try.”

  They set into motion, shifting furniture around and clearing off the desk immediately under the vent. Tracy was dying to make some sort of joke about the risk they were taking by shoving her into an unknown air vent, but it wasn’t the right time. She’d tease him about it later, when they made it home and were safe and sound.

  “It unscrews,” she said once she was standing on a chair placed on top of the desk. “Do you have something we can unscrew it with?”

  “Yeah, there has to be something.” He searched his pockets first, and within seconds, his brow shot up and a faint grin tugged at his lips.

  “What?” she asked.

  Johan pulled out a key ring with two keys and a tiny buoy attached.

  “I don’t think the keys are going to be thin enough for the screws,” Tracy said.

  “They’re the keys to Mack’s boat,” Johan told her.

  Tracy’s eyes went wide. “Which means Marina and Lindqvist won’t be able to take that boat to wherever they think they’re going next.”

  “Which means they might be back here at any second,” Johan finished.

  A gnawing sense of dread filled Tracy’s stomach. It wasn’t likely they’d come back with tea and apologies. “We have to get moving.”

  Johan nodded, shoving the keys back in his pocket. He searched the room. Lucky for them, a small, dusty toolbox sat in the corner of the office. Johan slammed it open and searched through, bringing out a screwdriver that he handed up to Tracy. Tracy’s hands shook slightly as she worked the screws loose. It took more time and effort than she wanted it to, but at last, she was able to get the vent cover off.

  “Okay, I think I can do this,” she said, peering into the duct. “And it looks like there’s some kind of opening just a few feet down that way.”

  “Is it a juncture with another duct or an opening into another room?” Johan asked, climbing onto the desk to give her a hand up.

  “We won’t know until I get there.”

  The good news was that she was thin enough to wiggle her way through the vent into the wider duct. It took a lot of awkward shoving and sweat, and she was pretty sure her hips would bear the bruises of trying to squeeze a round peg through a square hole for days to come, but at least she made it. The bad news was that, unlike in the movies, the duct was disgusting. The dust and muck of untold years covered her as she shimmied down to the opening. It was too dark for her to see if she was crawling through bugs—dead or alive—as well, but she figured it was likely. The air had a salty, dirty taste to it.

  By the time she reached the opening and discovered it was indeed a vent that let out in the next room over, she was so grateful for a way out that she didn’t mind having to twist around so she could pound on the vent cover with her feet. For a few seconds, she thought it wasn’t going to come loose, but after a good dozen hard kicks, first one screw popped out, then the others.

  “I can get through to the next room over,” she called back to Johan. “It looks like another office.”

  “Good.” His voice echoed from what sounded like miles away. “Be careful.”

  She let out an ironic laugh, then wriggled, feet-first, through the vent. It was a whole different kettle of fish to drop out of a vent without any desks or support under it than it’d been to climb into the duct with Johan’s help. The second she lost her center of gravity, she went spilling out into nothing, slamming onto the floor with a force that knocked the air from her lungs.

  “Tracy! Tracy!” she heard Johan call distantly. “What happened? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” she croaked.

  Muscles aching and body bruised, she pulled herself to stand and lurched toward the door. She was covered in thick, grey dirt, but there wasn’t time to worry about it. She pushed open the unlocked door and stumbled out onto the deck.

  Before she could get her bearings, the crack of a gun and the sharp ting of a bullet ricocheting off the metal wall several feet in front of her shocked the sunshine out of her. She saw a flash of movement as Lindqvist disappeared on the deck below her. Judging by the sound of metallic footsteps ringing out below, he and Marina were dashing toward the nearest staircase.

  Tracy swore under her breath and sprinted to the locked office door where Johan was still trapped. “Was that a gunshot I heard?” Johan shouted, clearly just on the other side of the door.

  Tracy ignored him. The truth would just cause more panic. She tried the door handle, but nothing happened. “I don’t know how Marina locked it,” she called through the door. “There’s a keyhole, but she must still have the key.”

  “She must have wanted a place where she could keep people out and trap them exactly the way she trapped us if she needed to,” Johan called back.

  It made a little too much sense. The fact that the office had been open and all the evidence had been lying around in plain sight reeked of bait in a trap. That didn’t solve anything though, and the clank of footsteps was coming nearer.

  “Lindqvist has a gun,” Tracy shouted through the door. “They’re almost here. I have to run or he’ll shoot me.”

  “Go!” Johan hollered.

  Tracy didn’t need to be told twice. She bolted away from the door, skidding around the corner just as she caught sight of Lindqvist and Marina rounding the other side of the deck. Another gunshot sounded, but she had no idea where the bullet went.

  She raced on, charging down the stairs without a clear idea of where she could go to get away from Lindqvist if he was determined to kill her. She had the advantage of being faster than Lindqvist—something she discovered when he turned the corner of the deck one floor above her and she was able to make it around the next corner before he fired again. But the decks weren’t solid, which meant he could fire down on her. Like fish in a barrel, she thought to herself.

  Her mind continued to fail to formulate a plan other than running as she circled around the rig to the stairs Lindqvist and Marina had
used moments before. Since being shot from above wasn’t her cup of tea, she charged back up the stairs, then paused to listen. The sea slapped against the pylons under the rig, and the wind whistled through the structure. Footsteps clanged on the deck below, hinting that Lindqvist had gone down one level in search of her. But she could hear that he was alone. Which meant Marina was somewhere else.

  On a hunch, she pushed herself into motion again, rushing around the corner and back onto the stretch of deck where the office Johan was trapped in stood. Her hunch was proved right when she spotted the office door ajar and heard voices arguing inside. She raced on, lungs burning, desperate to help Johan in any way she could.

  “…don’t have to do this,” Johan was in the middle of saying to Marina as Tracy burst into the doorway, using the doorjamb to stop herself. “We can work through this together, as a family.”

  Rather than responding to him, Marina whipped around to face Tracy. Before Tracy could react, Marina charged at her. She slammed her shoulder into Tracy’s chest and pushed her backwards until the small of her back smashed against the deck railing. Tracy was too startled by the sudden impact to do anything but gasp as she teetered off-balance.

  “Give me the keys or I’ll push her to her death,” Marina snarled. The sound was so unlike the poised, sophisticated princess Tracy had always thought her to be that it threw her reactions off even more. Worse still, Lindqvist charged around the corner, gun drawn, and closed in on them.

  “I’ve got her,” he said, taking over from Marina. Instead of letting Tracy get her feet under her, he tipped her back over the railing even more, shoving his gun under her jaw.

  “Give me the keys to the boat or she’s dead,” Marina hissed, whirling back to Johan.

  “Let her go!” Johan shouted. There was far more panic in his voice than Tracy wanted to hear. Panic meant impulsive actions, and acting impulsively in dangerous situations was the worst risk anyone could take. “I’ll give you the keys, just let her go!”