by Cindy Dees
“Is there any chance you could show me how to get topside? I get lost in these big ships. And—” she leaned in close to confess as the guy’s pupils dilated “—I’m a little claustrophobic. Sometimes I get kinda freaked out in ships’ passageways. I don’t know how you do it.”
On cue, the sailor puffed up. “Oh, you get used to it. You just tough it out at first, ya know.”
He turned and headed down the narrow, dimly lit passage behind him. “C’mon. I’ll walk you up top. Main stairwell’s this way.”
She refrained from glancing over her shoulder into the shadows. Somewhere very close behind her, Jagger and Laura were waiting to dart aboard the Veronique in the absence of the man on watch. If all went well, they’d take another stairwell and meet her on deck in a few minutes.
Her helpful sailor led her out into a towering jungle of stacked containers, looming so high overhead they cut off all but the tiniest sliver of night sky.
“Need some help?”
Emily looked around with a sigh. “Nah. I’ll give a holler up to the bridge if I need any help. I’ve got the phone number.”
“Right, then. I’d better get back to the hatch. I’ll see ya when you’re finished.”
Emily smiled warmly. “See you in a little while.”
Thankfully, he didn’t stick around to flirt any longer and left her to herself. She moved farther into the containers. The one she sought would be in the aft half of the ship, near the centerline of the vessel. Jagger was concerned that it would be visible from the bridge. He and Laura had some sort of diversion planned just in case.
There it was. A rusty brown, temperature-controlled unit that wasn’t the slightest bit remarkable. Was it possible that a human being was caged up in there? The container was about fifteen feet up, in the third layer of containers. This time, no rolling staircase was nearby to make access easy. She moved to the end of the row of containers and stepped close to the rail to look overboard. Oily black water swirled nearly a hundred feet below. She gulped and took a quick step back.
She leaped violently when a male voice came from the shadows directly behind her. “Hey, baby, wanna get naked with me?”
“Jagger!” she snapped under her breath. “You scared me to death.”
“Work your way down this outside row of containers, and pretend to compare lading numbers to your sheets of paper. A guy on the bridge has binoculars on you.”
Holy smokes. Someone was watching her? The back of her neck crawled. She hastily flipped a few pages of her fake notes and then pretended to study the packing documents pasted in a clear plastic pouch on the side of the nearest container.
Jagger murmured from the shadows again, “Laura’s gonna watch the other end of the aisle while I enter the unit. Drop your clipboard and cry out like you startled yourself if you see anyone coming this way.”
And then he was gone. She was alone and exposed. She moved on to the next container and repeated her paperwork charade.
She’d been at it maybe three minutes and had made her way back to near the narrow aisle between stacks of containers when she heard Jagger’s voice call out low, “Em. Come here.”
What on earth? That wasn’t part of the plan. She strolled unconcernedly into the aisle in case the man on the bridge was still watching her. The bulk of the bridge tower disappeared from view. She sprinted to where the container door was barely cracked open.
“What’s up?” she murmured as loud as she dared.
“I need your help. There’s a guy in here, but he’s in pretty bad shape. I’m sending him down on a rope, but he may need your help.”
They’d done it! They’d found another prisoner. Now, if they could get him off the ship, they’d have all the proof they needed to sink AbaCo and clear their names!
Her pulse leaped in trepidation as the door opened wider and a shadowed form backed out of the box on his hands and knees. It turned out Jagger had rigged a loop in the rope for the prisoner to step into with his foot. Jagger lowered the man by letting the rope slide slowly down to the deck.
The man was tall with a heavy black beard, but so emaciated he looked hollow. He staggered as he stepped out of the rope and Emily wedged a shoulder under his armpit to steady him.
“Problem, Jagger,” Laura called out low from somewhere out of sight nearby. “A couple of AbaCo guys are headed this way with purpose. They don’t look like grunts.”
“Armed?” Jagger asked quickly.
“Not visibly,” was the low response. “We’ve got to go. Now.”
Jagger slithered down the rope fast and joined Emily and the tall man. “Em, any chance you can head those AbaCo guys off while we get our friend out of sight? He’s not in any condition to run. We’re gonna have to hide him until the goons leave.”
She blinked fast. “Uh, I’ll try.” Crap. She was terrible at improvising.
Laura rounded the corner and skidded to a stop in front of them. “Let’s go with the zip lines over the port rail—” She broke off, staring at the prisoner. “Nick?” she whispered.
The man’s head jerked up. His dull eyes grew slightly less dead. “Laura?” he croaked.
“Oh, my God,” Laura cried softly. She took a step forward as if to embrace the fellow, but Jagger spoke in a sharp whisper. “Save it. We’ve got to go. Our friend can’t handle anything strenuous like climbing ropes. We’ve got to hide him until we can sneak him outta here.”
Laura nodded and batted at the tears streaming down her face. The man, Nick, looped his arm possessively around the woman’s shoulders and the two of them shuffled slowly toward the port side of the ship.
Jagger muttered to Emily, “Keep your story simple.” And then he whirled and caught up in a few strides with the couple’s painfully slow progress.
Emily headed out fast to intercept the incoming AbaCo men. When she heard their footsteps about to round the corner, she stopped and commenced examining the bill of lading on the nearest container.
“Oh!” She cried out as three men came into sight and all but slammed into her. “Goodness, you startled me!”
“I’m Robert Schmeckler, ma’am. Ship’s security officer. Forgive me for being blunt, but who are you? And please explain exactly what it is you’re doing here.”
She remembered hearing somewhere that the best defense was a good offense. A vision of Laura in tears over that starving man fresh in her mind’s eye, Emily scowled and put on her best indignant tone. “I work for Hans Schroder in the Special Cargo Division. I’m supposed to be on vacation in Washington, D.C., right now, but he called me up from the Rock and insisted I come down here to check out an irregularity with the Veronique’s load plan. Is one of you gentlemen responsible for it? He’s going to want to speak to you tomorrow.”
The three men reacted to Schroder’s name and the mention of the Rock. None of them took credit, or blame as the case might be, for being in charge of the ship’s load plan. Which was a relief. A true load planner would know immediately that she was blowing smoke.
She went on in tones of disgust. “Frankly, I don’t know what he’s talking about. Everything looks perfectly in order to me. I think the paperwork got screwed up on his end, and I’m going to tell him that as soon as I get back from my interrupted vacation.”
“May I see your credentials?” Schmeckler asked in his deadpan German accent.
There was no help for it. She handed her ID badge over to him. He studied it closely for a minute. “This badge is expired, Miss Grainger.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m fully aware of that. I told Hans I hadn’t had time to renew it before I left Hawaii, but he insisted I come down here anyway. Go ahead and throw me off the ship. It would serve him right. I swear, I’m gonna make him give me an extra week of vacation after this fiasco.”
“I’ll have to keep this badge.”
Emily snorted. “Be my guest.”
“I also have to ask you to come with me.”
Ohgodohgodohgod. Michelle! If these guys ar
rested her, how would her daughter grow up without her?
She mumbled, “Uh, of course. Lead on.” What else could she do? She couldn’t possibly outrun these guys, and she’d die, literally, if she jumped overboard and splatted herself on the pier below.
The security officer turned and led the way while the other two men pointedly fell in behind her. They stepped through a hatchway and into the main superstructure of the ship. It was a short walk to a cramped office, and Schmeckler waved her to one of two chairs in front of his desk.
She jammed her hands in the pockets of her jacket and sat down where he indicated. She was so busted. Was she the next victim they’d throw into a container and forget? Or wouldn’t she be that lucky? No way could she hold out against the kind of torture Jagger had endured. And what about Michelle? Her baby needed a mother! What on earth had she been thinking to go along with Jagger on this wild escapade?
She wasn’t Danger Girl. She never had been. She’d always been that cautious little mouse who overdressed for bad weather in case she had car trouble. All her efforts to change—to become the kind of woman a man like Jagger Holtz might love—had been in vain. And stupid. Extremely stupid. He’d chosen the mission over her—he hadn’t changed one bit. He would breeze back out of her life as quickly as he’d breezed into it.
Except in the meantime, she’d gotten into a mess way over her head, and her daughter was going to be the one to pay. This was absurd. She just wanted to go home, live a quiet life and watch her daughter grow up in peace. To heck with all this action and adventure. Jagger could have it.
“I’ll need to call Schroder and verify your identity, Miss Grainger.”
She nodded stiffly, and was vaguely surprised that her neck didn’t shatter with the strain of that small movement. In desperation, she blurted, “It’s the wee hours of the morning on the Rock. He may not answer his phone. He’s prone to turning it off at some point in the night so he can get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. But he usually comes into the office around 8:00 a.m. Hawaii time. That’s just a couple of hours from now. We can wait till then to call him if we have to.”
As she spoke, she groped in her right pocket for her new cell phone. She counted number pads with her fingertips and dialed Schroder’s cell phone. She covered the entire phone with her palm and pressed its face tightly against her thigh, praying it would sufficiently mute the sound of her call ringing at the other end. Not to mention, she didn’t want Schroder to hear any of what was going on at this end.
Schmeckler dialed his desk phone and waited impatiently.
Please, God, let my call go through first and block the line.
The security guy frowned. “I’m getting a busy signal.”
She nodded knowingly. “Ah. The lines to the Rock are either all busy or down temporarily. We have to rely on satellites, and when sun spots flare up, phone service out there gets iffy. Especially the personal phone lines. If you wait a few minutes and try again, they may come back up.”
Schmeckler asked one of the men hovering behind her. “Where’s Zook?”
“Ashore with your conting—”
With a sudden, alarmed glance in her direction, Schmeckler made a sharp hand gesture that cut the first man off, midsyllable.
Emily frowned. Schmeckler’s contingent of what? Men? What would an AbaCo security officer send a contingent of sailors ashore to do? The way the first man said it, she didn’t get the impression the sailors had been sent ashore to get drunk and pick up women. And who was Zook, anyway? Assuming that was the name of an actual person?
Schmeckler looked over at her and explained from behind a falsely saccharine smile, “He’s the ship’s load master.”
Thank God he was off the ship. Yet a little more time she’d bought for her partners in crime to find a way off the vessel. Meanwhile, she had to occupy Schmeckler so he wouldn’t think up some creative way around Schroder’s busy cell phone.
She leaned forward. “While we’re waiting, if you’ll pull up the ship’s load plan, I’ll show you the anomalies in the weight and balance that we’re concerned about.” She lowered her voice. “As you well know, the company occasionally carries cargo for clients that is best left…discreetly accounted for.”
Schmeckler’s eyebrows shot straight up. He obviously knew exactly what she was talking about, but seemed startled that she knew about it, too.
She shrugged. “I’m in charge of burying the money trail. Of course I know where everything—” she paused before adding significantly “—and everyone is.”
Schmeckler typed on his computer and then gestured her to come around his desk.
She thought fast, and only one idea came to her. It was wildly risky, but what other choice did she have? She’d do whatever it took at this point to get out of here and get back to Michelle. And she’d never, ever, leave her daughter’s side again.
“May I?” she asked, reaching for the keyboard.
The man at her elbow nodded.
“Take, for example, the temperature-controlled unit in this position.” She scrolled down to the container from which they’d just rescued Nick. “As you know, its cargo has a significantly lower weight than live plants.”
The guy beside her looked thunderstruck that she was aware of that particular container. Some of the suspicion around his eyes seemed to ease as she proved that she was an extreme insider into AbaCo’s extracurricular activities.
She continued pleasantly. “The weight correction for our passenger unit should have been made to this container over here.” She randomly pointed at a container that was shown as loaded on the opposite side of the Veronique. She said a quick mental prayer that Schmeckler wasn’t any great expert at load planning and continued. “But there’s no notation of a load correction. That’s what Hans Schroder is freaking out over. If something were to happen to this ship, the paperwork would get examined with a fine-tooth comb and then people would starting opening up containers to have a look.”
She had no idea what people would open which containers, but it seemed to scare the heck out of Schmeckler.
Just then, a walkie-talkie sitting on his desk blared, and Emily jumped about a foot in the air. A voice crackled across it, “Sir, we may have an intruder on board. We just got a hit on a motion detector on deck four, and we show no personnel in that area.”
Schmeckler cursed. Her German was good enough to pick out him complaining to himself about being short-handed tonight and not needing this with one of Schroder’s people sitting in front of him.
Emily moved smoothly back over to the chair in front of his desk. “I’ll wait here if that’s something you need to go check out. Lock me in, if you want to. That way you can take your men with you.”
Schmeckler frowned at her for a second, then nodded tersely. All three men stepped out, and a lock clicked shut on the other side of the door.
Now what was she supposed to do?
She thought fast. Jagger, Laura and Nick were stuck aboard the Veronique, too. And if she knew AbaCo procedures, a detailed security sweep of the entire ship was commencing right about now. A diversion. She’d bet Jagger and company needed a diversion. But what? She eyed Schmeckler’s computer. She moved around the desk to check it. Ha. Not only was it powered up, but it was still signed into the ship’s internal computer network. What could she do with a computer to mess up a ship?
She recalled an argument she’d overheard some months back between Schroder and another man about a hole in the company’s shipboard security having to do with shipboard weight and balance systems. Schroder had wanted it fixed and the other man had said it was too obscure to worry about, since only a few senior ship’s officers had access to it. And this computer was already signed in to the very system that Schroder had been upset about.
Perfect.
Now, what was it Schroder had said? The volumes of air and water in a ship’s massive ballast tanks—the bladders of air or water used to balance a ship laterally and keep it from rolling over on
its side—could be changed by anyone with access to the ship’s onboard load planning system. He’d been concerned that someone might hit the wrong button and accidentally empty a ballast tank.
She had to hunt around a bit in the load planning system, but then she found it. An innocuous little button that said Enter Ballast Corrections. She set all of the starboard ballast tanks on the Veronique to fill with air and all of the port-side tanks to flood with water. She suspected some sort of warning would go off on the bridge, too, and they’d try to override the command. To that end, she quickly typed up a logic loop that would keep her manual ballast commands active in spite of any overrides attempted from the bridge. She sent the mini-program to the Veronique’s mainframe.
When she got back a message that her program had been successfully installed, she hit the activation button to empty and fill the ballast tanks.
How long it would take for anything to happen—if anything happened at all—she had no idea. She checked her cell phone to verify that the line was still connected to Schroder’s cell phone. It seemed to be. She stuffed it back in her pocket.
Diversion hopefully complete, she went to work on escaping from Schmeckler’s office. She hunted around in his desk until she found a pair of scissors, and then went to work on the door’s hinges. It took her several minutes and resorting to using a heavy-duty stapler as a hammer, but she finally managed to wedge the bolt out of the top hinge. She crouched and went to work on the lower hinge. The bolt burst free, and she pressed her ear to the door to listen for movement outside. Nothing.
She pried the door back enough to slip through the gap and stepped out into the hall. If she wasn’t mistaken, the floor wasn’t entirely level beneath her feet. She raced down the hall until she found a stairwell, and she ran down the stairs as fast as she could. A placard said she was on deck eleven. Nine decks to go to reach the one with the hatch to the pier.
By the time she got about halfway down the stairs, the tilt beneath her feet was becoming more noticeable. She heard sounds of shouting from somewhere overhead, but the voices didn’t sound as though they were headed her way.
