by Jon Evans
“Do you still have it?” she whispers. She wonders for a moment about bugs, but her voice is so soft that it will surely be lost in the ambient noise of the sea.
“Yes. I practiced. I can pick those cuffs in five seconds.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know exactly. But do you remember our last visit here?” Keiran asks.
“I guess.”
“You remember what’s at the very back of the boat?”
After a moment Danielle stiffens with excitement. “That’s right. Those JetSki things. And scuba gear.”
Keiran nods. “Standard issue on all superyachts.”
The personal watercraft are probably useless, Danielle doesn’t know how to drive them and they have neither the time nor the circumstances to learn, but the dive gear is very much another story; Danielle is an experienced divemaster. “Do you dive?” she asks.
“No. Never.”
“Shit.” She considers, and her hopes sag again. “And even if we get out somehow, it takes a while to get scuba gear ready. There’s no way we’d have that much time.”
“Unless there were some kind of distraction.”
“Like what?”
Keiran quirks a little smile. “I think we can expect something interesting to happen tomorrow.”
“What? How?”
“When you look into the Internet, the Internet looks into you. This ship is online, there’s a pair of VSAT dishes up top. I had to connect to Shazam to show our little friend the ropes. She doesn’t know yet that Mulligan can track that. He knows where we are.”
Danielle frowns. “So? What can he do?”
“Don’t underestimate Mulligan,” Keiran says. “If he throws caution to to the wind, which I hope he will, then … actually I have no idea what he might do. But knowing him, probably something drastic.”
Chapter 39
Keiran goes alone to today’s hacker-training session. He supposes that now his apparent cooperation has been established, they don’t need Danielle around to remind him to be helpful. Laurent does not stay with him and Sophia either; only one of the bodybuilder guards.
“I need to talk to Shadbold,” Keiran says to Sophia, as she boots up her laptop.
“You can’t.”
“It’s something I need to tell him personally,” he lies. In fact he is hoping that Mulligan’s distraction happens to arrive while Keiran is in Shadbold’s chamber, and he will be able to somehow take the chief monster hostage. It’s a slim chance, but anything that increases his miniscule odds of survival is worth trying for.
“I didn’t say we won’t, I said you can’t,” Sophia says archly. “He’s not on board. He’s in his private hospital in Switzerland. His condition’s worsened.”
Keiran shrugs, disappointed. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer fellow. But surely you could fly me up there for a couple hours?”
She gives him a nice-try look. He was hoping for a hint about where they are. They couldn’t have been drugged for more than a day or two. But that is plenty long enough to fly them from Vegas to anywhere on the planet. There is still no land in sight, no seabirds, and the air is warm by day but cold by night, so his guess is somewhere in a northern ocean, but they could well be off Cape Town or Tasmania.
Not knowing where in the world he is, or even the date, makes Keiran feel strangely disconnected, as if in a parallel universe, or dreaming. As if whatever happens on this boat is not part of real life, cannot truly affect him. The feeling would make it easier to deal with the horrible certainty – barring some miraculous intervention – of his impending death, but Keiran makes a point of rejecting it utterly. He has devoted his life to rational thought. He won’t let irrational comfort ease his death.
“Get on with it,” the guard growls. His accent is South African. “I’ve been advised I need to keep your head and your fingers intact. Everything else is optional.”
Keiran looks at Sophia.
“You think I won’t let him?” she asks.
“All right,” he says. “Where were we?”
“ExxonMobil’s corporate intranet.”
“Right. Let me drive a moment. I’ll show you how to own an oil tanker.”
* * *
Lost in the intricate details of ExxonMobil’s virtual private network, it takes Keiran a few moments to realize that some new sensory input is tickling his brain, somewhere on the edge of awareness. A kind of low buzzing sound, coming from the east, the direction of the bow. Sophia and the South African look at one another uncertainly. The strange noise intensifies, clarifies into a recognizable auditory signature: a helicopter, approaching.
“Are we expecting a visitor?” the South African asks.
“No,” Sophia says. She taps at her laptop, and a window called WHEELHOUSE materializes on it, above a diagnostic diagram of a ship. Keiran starts paying very close attention. She opens a new window, a radar screen with a ship in the middle and a red dot approaching from the east, and studies the ancillary data scrolling on the margins of the screen for a moment. “It’s not Coast Guard, no transponder. We’re outside the 200-mile limit anyhow. I’m going to raise anchor and start the engines, just in case.”
She closes the window, returns to WHEELHOUSE and types a few commands. Beneath them, the Lazarus begins to hum with power. Then she opens up four camera windows and tiles them across the screen. The inrushing helicopter is barely visible in the bow camera, the size of a gnat on a windscreen.
Keiran watches, partly from fascination, partly because he is memorizing the layout of the vessel as shown on screen. His guess when he first visited this vessel was correct; the Lazarus, like dot-com billionare Jim Clark’s yachts Hyperion and Athena, is almost entirely automated, run by this WHEELHOUSE software, via a ship-wide wireless network. This explains why he has seen so few people on board; Laurent, Sophia, the several burly thugs like the South African, and the five Filipinos Keiran saw this morning in the galley, one cooking breakfast, two dressed like chambermaids, two dressed in overalls. Cooks, servants, and a couple of mechanics in case something physical goes wrong, that’s all the crew the Lazarus needs. He is impressed.
The helicopter noise crescendos, and then holds at a level sufficiently loud that Keiran cannot hear Sophia’s keystrokes as she re-opens the radar screen. The red dot is circling the Lazarus, maintaining a constant distance. She opens four camera windows and tiles them across the screen. The helicopter passes through each in turn, circling around the ship. It does not say US NAVY on it, as Keiran had hoped. It is painted plain black. It seems bigger than police or news helicopters, but doesn’t look military. There are at least a half-dozen people inside. Most of them carry assault rifles.
The door to the library opens, and the helicopter noise becomes thunderous. Laurent is there. “Gunther!” he calls. “Secure him and get down to the weapons room!”
The door closes. Gunther, the South African, is already on his feet, pulling Keiran’s arms behind his back, cuffing his wrists and lacing the handcuff chain through a metal bar at the base of the chair, unaware of the paperclip concealed between two of Keiran’s fingers.
“I’ll come with you,” Sophia says, and Keiran sags, dejected.
“No,” Gunther says. “He ordered me to come. Not you.”
“If there’s a situation, you need me there.”
Gunther gives her a patronizing look. “Girl, this is a security situation. You do what you’re told. Stay where you are.”
He closes the door behind him. Keiran has already opened the handcuffs.
“Fucking asshole,” Sophia says furiously. She stands up and picks up her laptop, obviously about to follow him. “Don’t go anywhere.”
“Same to you,” Keiran says, standing up, holding the metal cuffs looped around his clenched right fist, ready to beat her unconscious if he has to.
It takes Sophia only a moment to internalize the suddenly changed situation.
“I’ll do what you want,” she says quietly.
“Sit down. Stay quiet.”
She does. He grabs her arms, pulls them roughly behind her, and handcuffs her in the same way he was just restrained. Then he takes a piece of paper, rips off a corner, chews it into a tiny wet ball, and shoves that into the handcuff keyhole. It will be difficult to remove before it dries. Finally he stands and looks down at her for a long moment.
“What?” she asks, scornfully.
“I’m deciding whether to strangle you to death.”
Sophia’s eyes widen.
“I should, you know,” he says. “It’s the logical thing to do.”
Then he picks up her laptop, opens the door and walks out of the library. He emerges from the galley onto the deck and starts towards the aft of the boat, towards the brig where Danielle is imprisoned.
* * *
“Come on,” Keiran commands, as he opens the door to the cabin that holds Danielle prison. “To the stern. Hurry.” He doesn’t know where exactly the weapons room is that Laurent and Gunther and the other thugs have disappeared to, it isn’t marked on the WHEELHOUSE ship schematic, but he doesn’t like the sound of it, and he is sure they don’t have much time.
The aft superstructure is like an apartment building in the middle of the deck. A narrow walkway fenced by waist-high metal bars goes around it on either side, to an aft space about ten feet deep, across the width of the ship, which terminates at the very end of the boat. Most of this space is taken up by two touching giant metal plates, which Keiran guesses fold upwards like basement-access panels on New York streets. The two WaveRunners are parked at the back corners of the ship. There are more doors into the superstructure; one of them he remembers as the door to the scuba room.
The helicopter’s earsplitting din is returning. He sees it sweep back along the ship’s port side, only a hundred feet up, approaching close enough that the yacht’s mainsail billows as it passes, and Keiran and Danielle have to grab the fence to keep their footing in the rotor wash. Keiran isn’t sure what Mulligan intends with the helicopter. Hopefully some kind of daring rescue. One obvious problem: the helipad above the aft superstructure is already occupied by Shadbold’s private helicopter, and Keiran doubts the newcomer can land anywhere else on the deck.
Then he sees a rope ladder fall over the black helicopter’s side, and dangle down thirty feet, as the helicopter begins to descend towards them.
“Drop the laptop,” Danielle warns Keiran.
Keiran hesitates. He doesn’t want to, Sophia’s laptop might yet be insanely useful, but he can tell Danielle is right, it will be all they can manage to grab the ladder as it swoops past and hang on long enough to make it into the helicopter –
– and then sudden brightness shines from the bow of the ship. Something burning streaks across the sky, smashes into the side of the black helicopter, and explodes with a loud crrump and a burst of light so bright it clouds Keiran’s eyes for a moment. Something hot tears at his left arm. He is surrounded by the maddening rattle of metal raining on metal. As he watches, dazed, the helicopter’s rotor flies free of the shredded hulk that was once a vehicle, gliding away from the ship like a Frisbee. The wreck of the cabin plunges unceremoniously into the sea and vanishes with an anticlimactically small splash. The rotor, still spinning, hits the ocean at a narrow angle and actually skips off the surface three times, like a thrown stone, before disappearing.
“Holy shit,” Danielle whispers.
Keiran looks down at his upper arm, and the shallow line of newly traced blood on it. The deck around them is pockmarked and furrowed with a dozen scars, some of them inches deep. If the shrapnel that grazed his arm had been six inches to the right it would have gone right through his heart. Their avenue of escape has been closed by a rocket launcher. And their would-be rescuers are dead.
“Come on,” Keiran says, recovering, they have no time to be stunned, speed is the only thing that might save them. “We need to buy some time.”
Danielle looks at him, dazed and despairing. “What? What for?”
“There’s still a chance. Follow me.”
At the absolute back of the ship, a pair of ladders lead down the exterior hull, towards the engines, to three-foot-square platforms which jut out slightly. Doorways lead from these platforms into the interior of the ship. According to the WHEELHOUSE schematic, these doors lead to the ship’s engineering rooms. One-handed, Keiran starts to climb down the nearest ladder. He keeps Sophia’s laptop clamped tightly under his arm. It is now their only hope.
Danielle follows Keiran down the ladder, to the platform above the engines, where a door leads into the aft of the ship. It opens into a dimly lit tunnel that smells of grease and oil. Keiran looks up before entering – and sees Laurent’s face appear over the edge of the aft deck, above Danielle’s descending form. He looks amused. Keiran advances into the tunnel, hoping to soon wipe that smirk off Laurent’s face.
He hears Laurent’s boots on the rungs as Danielle shuts and locks the watertight door behind them. Laurent looks in through the door’s porthole as Danielle and Keiran flee down the tunnel, which opens into a wider room full of gleaming machinery, lit by fluorescent light.
“Stop this nonsense now,” Laurent threatens. He is shouting, but only a dull, warped echo of his voice makes it to them. “Or neither of you is going home.” He lifts his hand to the porthole. Sunlight gleams from the gun he carries.
Keiran looks at Danielle.
“Is this going to do us any good?” she whispers.
“I don’t know. If we can buy some time here, it might. If it works, I’ll need your help.” He swallows. “But, truth be told, it probably won’t work.”
“But it might.”
“It might.”
“That’s good enough for me,” Danielle decides.
Keiran nods. “We have to block off all the other doors.”
This room appears to be some kind of mechanical workshop. Small industrial machines, lathes, bandsaws, and less identifiable equipment, are spaced out around its perimeter, beneath shelves that hold racks of tools, safety and welding glasses, gloves, coveralls, rubber boots, propane tanks, lengths of wood, clamps, metal and plastic tubes, various types of wire and cable, and other assorted mechanical debris. In the middle are two large work tables and a few chairs. There are two other doors, on the bow end of each side of the room. Unlike the aft door, these ones open out and cannot be locked from this side. The first thing Keiran and Danielle do is tie the handles of each door to the base of a nearby machine with lengths of steel cable, so that they too will open an inch or two but no further.
“Wish we’d hit the electrical room instead,” Keiran muttered. “But this ought to do.” He drags one of the worktables to an aft corner of the room, where it will not be visible from any partly-opened door, plugs the laptop into a power outlet beneath the lathe, and sits at the work table.
“What are you doing?” Danielle asks.
“Basically,” Keiran says, typing furiously, “this is a mutiny.”
“What?”
“We’re taking over the boat.”
Danielle looks at him. “Looks to me like we’ve locked ourselves into a room with no hope of escape.”
“That’s because you’re not a hacker. This ship is fully automated, and it’s one big wireless hotspot. Stupid bastards brought me into a totally computer-controlled environment. And now they will pay.”
“You’re not the only hacker on board,” Danielle says. She starts as one of the other doors rattles, somebody trying to open it, but the steel cable holds.
Keiran smiles. His furiously flying fingers do not cease or even slow as he speaks; he is resetting all the system passwords. “No. But by the time they get her loose, I’ll have locked her and everyone else out of the system.”
“Then what?”
“That depends on where we are. But with luck I sail us home.”
“And without luck? Those doors won’t hold forever. And they have guns.”
“Without luck
I even the odds,” Keiran says.
“How?”
“Sink the ship.”
Danielle opens her mouth, then closes it again, before saying, “And how exactly do we get out of here then?”
“Look, I never said I’d thought through all the ramifications,” Keiran snaps. “But at least now we’ve got some leverage. Now please be quiet for a moment. I’ve never hacked my way into a ship before. It’s going to take some figuring out.”
* * *
WHEELHOUSE is an elegant and powerful piece of software that gives Keiran full control over every electrical, mechanical, and hydraulic system on board the Lazarus. But he doubts that will be enough to save them. The more he thinks about it, the less he likes their chances. Laurent could fill the room with oil and drop in a match. Their enemies are armed with rocket launchers; they must have other weapons too, grenades, explosives. He and Danielle are easy to kill. Laurent still wants them alive, and the ship undamaged, but if any real risk becomes apparent, he won’t hesitate to destroy them.
Maybe they can summon more help? The small-scale radar map reports their position: the Pacific Ocean, off the Oregon coast, ten miles outside the 200-mile limit that demarcates America’s sovereignty. A sensible location, from Laurent’s point of view – international waters, but close enough for helicopter commutes to and from the all but undefended Oregon coast.
“We’re off Portland, Oregon,” Keiran says, “but that’s an eight-hour sail. At least an hour for any help to get here.”
“We’ll never make it,” Danielle says.
