Without warning

by John Birmingham

  She had gathered a small group of potential customers around a table, sipping cocktails at hyper-inflated prices, and eating macadamias that weren’t quite worth their weight in gold. The bar filled up as the day waned, mostly with displaced Americans and wealthy vacationers from Mexico City. Her grandfather, Lord Rupert, had been in Singapore just before the Japanese took it in ‘42 and Jules wondered idly if Raffles had felt like this. A genteel outpost surrounded by a gathering darkness. It was hard to tell which group was more desperate: the Americans, who filled up the room with booming voices and sheer physical presence; or the Mexican elite, whose anxiety was quieter and, if possible, much more extreme. For her purposes, however, only the gringos held any interest.

  Jules had been following enough of the news to know that she could get the displaced Yanks into port legitimately at a number of places around the Pacific as part of some deal called Operation Uplift. She could even hit up the remains of the American Government for her fuel and supply costs if she felt really cheeky – and could be arsed filling out the appropriate forms for lodgement at the nearest consulate or embassy. The wealthy Mexicans, however, had nothing even resembling the wreckage of a government to lobby foreign capitals on their behalf, and Jules wasn’t willing to take the risk of running them all the way to Sydney only to have some little immigration Nazi with a clipboard tell her they couldn’t land. Miguel and his family, she’d get in somewhere by other means, but that marked the outer limits of her largesse.

  So they’d been sitting at a table in the coolest, darkest corner of the bar, a small band of super-rich refugees, negotiating payment for passage, when the background buzz in the place suddenly spiked upwards and drowned out all conversation. Somebody screamed ‘No!’ and Jules tensed up, instinctively reaching for the pistol hidden in her small carry-all, but staying her hand once she realised nothing was going down. A small crowd had gathered under a television fixed high in another corner of the bar and something had set them off. Briefly she fought down a surge of panic, like a rat twisting in her mind, terrified that the Wave had expanded again.

  A barman turned up the volume as people argued and shushed each other, and Jules recognised the voice of the BBC World presenter Mishal Husain. Poor old Pete’d had the hots for her. Jules smiled sadly at the memory of him drunk on Jamaican rum, stoned on hash and growling at the TV about exactly what he’d like to be doing to Ms Husain while she burbled on about some EU trade meeting. She missed him terribly.

  ‘In Tehran alone,’ read Husain, ‘it is estimated that three million died in the initial blast and firestorm, which extended more than a dozen miles from ground zero. Many more died quickly from radiation exposure, and experts say that the final toll in that city alone may reach six million. Other Iranian cities destroyed in the attack include Qom, Isfahan…’

  Pieraro crossed himself as the news silenced the entire bar for a second. Her Gurkhas, Shah and Thapa, standing a few feet away, providing a formidable barrier to anybody wanting to approach them, did not visibly react. Their eyes continued to sweep the room like cameras.

  ‘That’s it. I’m not going to Hawaii,’ said the construction magnate.

  ‘What?’ asked Jules, still straining to hear the television.

  ‘Pearl Harbor. That’s in Hawaii. If there’s gonna be a nuclear war, it’ll get hit for sure. I’m not paying you everything I have left just to get my family turned into fucking shadows on a wall by some Chinese A-bomb.’

  Cesky was his name. Henry Cesky. A squat, powerful-looking man with coarse black hair and a nose that had obviously been broken more than once. He owned a hundred-plus building cranes towering over twelve North American cities. Within half an hour of hearing about the Disappearance, he’d transferred as much available cash as he could from his US accounts to a series of shelf companies registered in Vanuatu, using that money to buy gold and diamonds in Acapulco. Cesky was travelling with his second wife and four children, all girls, and as soon as he and Jules had met, the construction king had demanded passage to Hawaii for them and then Seattle for himself.

  ‘I still got an office in Seattle,’ he’d said in a deep, rasping voice that was just barely inflected with a trace of Eastern Europe under his harsh Brooklyn accent. ‘My girls, they can’t go to Seattle – too close to that fucking wave, it is. But I don’t mind that. I don’t think that fucking thing is going nowhere. So you take me there. Lotta fucking work to be done in the Northwest now. Lotta money too be made, to make up what I lost and what you fucking pirates are stealing from me. But my girls, they go somewhere I know they’re safe. Hawaii.’

  That had been half an hour ago. Now Cesky’s tune was entirely different.

  ‘No fucking way do they set foot on those islands! No fucking way do they get within a hundred thousand miles. You take them as far away from this bullshit as you can.’ He was pointing at the TV screen. ‘New Zealand – they filmed that Lord of the Rings there. Got some great fucking six-star lodges built for the movie stars. End of the fucking earth, it is. Went fishing there once. That’d be good. Or Tasmania – where they got that devil in the cartoon – that’s even further away. But no fucking Pearl Harbor. Not now.’

  Jules felt like her head was going to spin off. Cesky wasn’t the worst of them, not by a long shot. That’d be the porn king, Larry Zood. He didn’t look like a porn king, possibly because he was an internet porn king, and so looked more like a crooked real-estate broker. But he oozed a sort of pre-emptive creepiness that assured her he would one day weigh three hundred pounds, wear a bad hairpiece, and still insist on bouncing hotties on his knee.

  Having arrived at the table an hour ago with a small imitation Faberge egg, Zood had tossed it to Jules like a golf ball, demanding to know upfront how many of his ‘bitches’ he could take with him. ‘I’ll give you one egg per bitch,’ he’d offered. ‘They’re fakes, from Thailand, but the jewels are real. I can leave a few bitches behind. They know that. Makes ‘em extra keen to please, if you know what I mean. But I will need some with me. I don’t like the water – I don’t even like the hot tub they got by the pool over there – so a fucking sea voyage? Shit, if you don’t mind I’m just gonna bomb myself with crystal meth and stay in my suite getting blown. That’s why I need some bitches with me.’

  The Brit was tempted to shoot him right there and then, and she wasn’t the only one.

  He’d been trying to get Fifi to climb on board since finding out that her mother had been one of the original Hustler babes. ‘Larry Flynt was a great American hero,’ Zood announced now in all earnestness, before grabbing one of Fifi’s boobs and squeezing experimentally. When she peeled his hand away with a painful jujitsu technique he simply laughed. ‘Ow! What a fucking rack. That was totally worth it.’

  ‘Jules,’ said Fifi, between thinly pressed lips, ‘if this fucking nimrod gets on the boat, he pays twice the going rate.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ she agreed.

  ‘Hey!’ protested the porn king.

  Jules leaned forward and fixed him with a glare like a pin pushed into a butterfly’s back. ‘Understand this, Mr Zood. We are not your bitches, we are people smugglers. Criminals. If you touch any of my crew, or any other passenger, like that again, I will have Mr Shah take out his pistol and shoot you in the head. And, yes, you will now pay double the asking rate if you wish to leave this city with us.’

  Zood held her glare for a few seconds before breaking into an oily grin. ‘Money schmoney,’ he mugged. ‘I still got plenty to blow. I didn’t even have my dough stashed in the US – legally I don’t exist there. For tax purposes, you know. Legally I got disappeared years ago.’

  He was drinking heavily and very much amused by his own wit, but Jules could detect a slightly anxious edge to his demeanour.

  ‘If you don’t mind, Jules,’ said Fifi, ‘I’ve got crew to interview back at the marina. I’ll see you back there. Better company if you ask me.’

  ‘Sure, baby, you go. Thapa can escort you to town. Sergeant Shah a
nd I will catch a ride with Miguel.’

  Fifi left the table without a backward glance. An uncomfortable silence ensued for a moment as Julianne regarded Zood with cold contempt.

  Not that her other candidates were much less odious. A property developer and his wife-no kids. Some guy whose family owned a health fund; he had his third wife and one small child with him. A merchant banker, with his very own bank, based in Basel, Switzerland; plus his mistress. An oil broker. And a couple of trust-fund delinquents, a brother and sister, who seemed not at all put out that their entire family back in Boston were gone. The siblings, like everyone else at the table, had distinguished themselves by striking like rattlers as soon as they knew the score. Cashing up and converting to exactly the sort of high-end trade goods Jules had known would hold or even increase their value, at least in the short term.

  She had trouble keeping their names straight, and was seriously thinking of a cull. Maybe dumping the porn king and his posse of bitches, and possibly Cesky, who struck her as trouble. They were all very demanding people. The trust-fund duo, Phoebe and Jason, had an especially noxious sense of entitlement, one she recalled from the useless rich kids of her own childhood.

  ‘Will there be staff?’ Phoebe had asked, before nodding towards the two Gurkhas. ‘Other than them.’

  ‘We could bring our own, I suppose,’ her brother had mused, not even bothering to run it by Jules. ‘Hire them here, perhaps, from the resort?’

  But Cesky, he was the real quandary. Although she knew nothing about the construction industry, she figured it had to be a tough game. Wasn’t it rotten with mafia money and crooked unions? To make a fortune in it, you’d have to be as hard as tungsten, which wouldn’t necessarily count him out as a prospective passenger. But she just had a feeling with this bastard that if he got off the leash, you’d suddenly have something like a 300-pound bull mastiff with amphetamine psychosis tearing at your throat.

  Then again, she supposed, she could always have Shah just throw him over the side.

  ‘Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has warned other regional powers that they will have to disarm immediately, if they do not wish to be attacked in a second round of strikes. The Saudi government has already agreed to immediate talks with Tel Aviv and has stood down its military, which had been on high alert since the outbreak of hostilities with Iraq and Iran.’

  ‘Man’s a fucking genius,’ said Cesky. ‘A fucking devil, but a genius.’

  ‘You think he’s a genius?’ Zood arced up without warning. ‘A fucking Hitler is more like it. He’s a fucking war criminal, Cesky. A mass murderer. He should be fucking stoned to death for the rest of his life.’

  Cesky laughed in the pornographer’s face. ‘With a name like Zood, you would think that, wouldn’t you? Where’d your family come from again? No, lemme guess – they were ass-fucking goats in the Bekaa Valley for the last three thousand years, right?’

  ‘You fucking Jewish pig!’

  Jules caught Pieraro’s eye for half a second, just long enough for an unspoken question. Where the hell did you find these idiots?

  And then the two men were on each other, punching and clawing. Their chairs tipped over and drinks crashed to the floor. The banker’s mistress screamed, knocked down in the sudden eruption. The trust-fund brats simply pushed themselves back to a safe distance and smiled, enjoying the entertainment. Shah moved like a pouncing tiger but Miguel beat him into the fray. A flurry of blows from the Mexican cowboy, a blur of short, vicious punches, laid both of the tourists out flat.

  Without consulting anyone, he stood over the prone figures and announced, ‘You will not be travelling on Ms Julianne’s boat. You will need to make your own arrangements. Do not attempt to answer me back or get to your feet.’

  Zood opened his mouth to speak and Pieraro suddenly pistoned out one booted foot and kicked him in the face. The man’s head flew back with a nasty click and he flipped over, landing on his back. The vaquero turned a stone face on Cesky, who was glaring at him murderously, reminding Jules of an enraged bull. Pieraro absorbed the full force of the man’s enmity, never breaking eye contact. Eventually Cesky folded, crabbing away from the table on all fours until he felt he was at a safe enough distance to stand up.

  A couple of security guards appeared, pushing their way through the throng, which had momentarily turned away from the television. The two Fairmont employees stopped in their tracks, however, at a single glance from the Mexican.

  ‘Man,’ said Phoebe, a little breathlessly. ‘That was so fucking hot.’

  ‘Do you wish to come on the boat, seсorita, to escape?’ Pieraro asked her.

  She flushed noticeably at his attention. Jules recognised it as a purely sexual response. ‘Yes,’ she replied.

  ‘Then you will shut the fuck up!’ he barked. ‘And do what you are told when you are told. All of you! Comprende?’

  The girl flinched, but nodded. The others all muttered and mumbled their assent. Back at the bar, with the prospect of personal violence abated, the crowd reluctantly turned back to the TV.

  Jules saw Shah acknowledge the vaquero’s handling of the situation with the slightest dip of his head. She had to admit, it was pretty fucking cool. None of these rich bastards would give them another moment’s trouble, she was sure of it.

  But she was wrong.

  * * * *

  ACAPULCO BAY

  Fifi was never comfortable around mucky-mucks, as she referred to anyone wealthier than a gas-station attendant. Except for Jules, of course – her fall from societal grace and favour meant that she very much met with Fifi’s approval. ‘You’re like Paris or Britney,’ she often told the English exile. ‘Rich but cool.’

  The Oregonian was pleased to be away from that crowd up at Acapulco Diamante and back at the marina.

  And she liked Mr Lee. He reminded her of old Lenny Wah, the man who rescued her after she’d fled her stepfather’s dream of a family threesome and cable TV fame via the agency of Jerry Springer. Lenny ran a super-cheap Chinese take-out in San Francisco’s East Bay, where she’d fetched up looking for a cheap meal after running out of money. The meal she got, a confronting fried rice/chow mein combo with a rock-hard spring roll, for $3.50. She also got a job offer, washing dishes in a huge clawfoot tub that stood out of view of the customers, in a weed-choked yard behind the cafe. The last dish-monkey had quit two days earlier and Lenny had let the pile of washing-up grow under a layer of cold, grey, fat-caked water.

  ‘But Lenny was kinda nice,’ she told Lee. ‘He had real soft skin and he smelled of jasmine rice.’

  ‘Lenny sounds like a bum, Miss Fifi. He try to make jiggy-jig for dishwashing?’

  She snickered. ‘Only every fucking day. But he was real nice about it. He didn’t get upset when I said no.’

  ‘You always said no?’ he asked protectively.

  ‘Not always.’

  The old Chinese sea dog rolled his eyes as Thapa showed the next man through to see them. They sat behind a folding card table on the dock of the marina where Jules had berthed the sport fisher while the Rules lay well offshore, guarded by the remainder of Shah’s men. The hasty patch-up work occasioned by the gunfight with Shoeless Dan stood out on the fibreglass hull, and more than a few of their potential recruits spent their interviews nervously eyeing the damage.

  The next guy through – an older, pot-bellied American, with a dense map of broken blood vessels colouring his swollen nose, and a fat cigar perched in one corner of his mouth – snorted when he saw it. ‘Hot damn! I guess I wouldn’t want to see the other guy, eh?’

  Fifi glanced over her shoulder briefly at the scorch marks and bullet holes. She tried to find the man’s name on the list Thapa had provided, but the piece of paper seemed to have blown away, leaving her with nothing but a cup of flat ginger beer and a bowl of pretzels in front of her.

  ‘The other guy is dead,’ she replied. ‘And who’re you, Salty Sam?’

  The man grinned, showing off uneven yellow tee
th, but his smile seemed warm enough and contained none of the leering suggestion in Larry Zood’s eyes. ‘Rhino Ross, young lady. Chief petty officer, United States Coast Guard, once upon a time. These days, I’ve been running a fishing charter round these parts. And whom might I have the pleasure of addressing?’

  ‘“Fifi” will do. And this is Mr Lee, who’s our chief… petty… guy. So we already got one a them. What else can you do for us, Rhino?’ She paused and regarded him through narrowed eyes. ‘And did your parents really call you that, or something really gay that you just changed to Rhino?’

  Ross smiled again and blew a perfect smoke ring. ‘Rhino A. Ross. It’s on my passport and birth certificate. Makes me kinda unique, don’t you think?’ He leaned forward. ‘And lest you have any doubt whatsoever, it is good to be the Rhino. Now, let’s get down to brass tacks. A little birdie told me you were looking to crew an oceangoing vessel. Bridge crew in particular, am I right?’

  ‘A little birdie?’

  ‘Yup. Ran his mouth right up to the point I ran a stick through his ass, and toasted him up medium rare over some hickory coals. A little scrawny, but good eatin’ – beak was a little crunchy, though.’ Another smoke ring punctuated the comment.