A handful of men were clustered around a set labeled "Swedish Embassy." Remo peeked over a shoulder to see what was going on. A man and a girl were fornicating in a bed. He used to like those things but when a person became one with his body, everything else became natural. It was no more interesting than watching a flower grow. On another television set, red lights blinked and everyone turned to it. Remo saw the man he had knocked out being helped up.
"He's faster than we thought," came the man's voice over the television screen.. "I didn't even see his hands."
"Didn't you get off a shot?" asked one of the men helping him up.
"I didn't see his hands. My gun was in his hands before I could pull the trigger. It's incredible. You don't see the hands."
"Number One won't like this."
"Fuck Number One. You don't see the hands."
Remo watched the man regain his breath and take a tentative step. The whole ship apparently was monitored. He left that room just as someone demanded to know who was responsible for the breach of security. "You've got to stop watching the bedrooms. This will not be tolerated," the man said. His accent was German.
"It wasn't my shift," said someone else. The accent was French.
"The area has been violated. Full alert."
Remo expected to hear sirens or gongs but only lights flashed. The groups seemed well organized because they rushed in silence and everyone knew where to go. It was this movement, this rapid taking of stations without a multitude of dramatic orders that for the first time made Remo suspicious.
He did not know about lights or concealed corridors or flooring that let clumsy people walk in silence. But he did know about how people moved, singly and together. These people had been training for more than a year. The ship had only just been launched and the group of security experts he had met in Washington would have been shooting each other by now. It wasn't any one big thing that told Remo this, just small things: the way people didn't bump going through doorways; the way they knew someone was coming past them without looking. It was simply normally clumsy people being unclumsy in a group. All their guns had silencers. Some carried long-bladed knives.
And there was something else Remo noticed. These people had been trained in separate groups and brought together on this ship just recently. No one recognized that Remo did not belong there, undoubtedly the result of two things: many faces were strange to each of them and their feelings of absolute security within the corridors negated any fear. He would be discovered soon, he knew, because he would be the only person in this warren who did not have a place.
Remo imitated the clumsy run of the others, plopping his feet down until he heard, "That's him," and on those words, he unleashed. Low and smooth, legs appearing slow but only as the vehicle upon which the body force moved. Bullets coming out of silencer barrels made clumping noises against the walls. Remo went into a threesome like a bullet through butter. He left one without a thorax. He snap-turned into a large room. A man sat with his back to Remo at a computer console that covered an entire wall. No exit.
They were setting up two rifles at the entrance when Remo came out through it. Going back to the elevator was out because he would never find it; in the twists and turns all the corridors looked alike.
He needed some help finding an exit. He closed on a young man with a fresh face and a long-bladed knife that he swung like a slow baseball bat. He rolled the young man onto the floor and his forefinger worked against the nerve routes leading to the skull.
"How do I get out of here?"
"No hablo inglés" said the young man.
Remo pressed harder.
"No hablo inglés!"
"Shit," said Remo and threw the man down the corridor. He ducked into a small room, empty except for a mop standing in a plastic bucket.
Behind the bucket was a panel, again of dull gray metal, soundproofed by soft rubber molding. Remo brushed his hands along the panel. It moved by pressing and forcing sideways. It moved almost silently. He smelled the fresh oil. All the moving parts apparently floated in grease.
The panel opened to a closet and over the sharp odors of detergents, Remo smelled the faint saline aroma of old blood. He was in a cleaning storage area. He slid the panel closed hehind him.
Outside, on the other end of the closet, he heard footsteps, clear and loud. He heard voices like people spitting.
He walked through the closet and opened the door and stepped out onto plush carpeting where the hallways were wide and exotic tapestries covered the walls and soft lights played up and down the ceilings. This was the ship he recognized.
He moved through crisscrossing corridors and then he was in familiar territory outside the Iranian Embassy. It was somewhat lucky since he would have had to spend at least two hours looking for the embassy if he hadn't bumped into it. There were guides and officers every few hundred yards, of course, but they were still learning their jobs.
Remo's pass was good for entrance and the bodyguard bowed as he allowed Remo in. The embassy rooms themselves were like a large floor of an apartment building and Remo quietly entered his room where Chiun was dictating to the young thing supplied by the Iranian government.
Chiun was dictating in Persian. Every once in a while the girl would laugh and look at Remo.
"What'd you say, Little Father?" Remo asked, after one such demonstration,
"It is a Persian joke. It cannot be translated into English," said Chiun. He was in a light pink evening kimono with strands of simple gold woven throughout.
"Try me," said Remo.
"It loses its flavor in English," Chiun said. "Let's see."
"He walks like he walks because he walks," said Chiun. The parchment face beamed joy. The girl giggled.
"Yeah?"
"That is the joke," Chiun said.
"What?"
"He walks like he walks because he walks," said Chiun.
"That's not funny."
"In Persian, it is most witty," Chiun said.
"Yeah, well, I have news for you. We're on television."
"Really?" said Chiun. His seated posture assumed a slightly more heroic tilt.
"Yeah. This isn't one ship, it's two. There's the ship everybody knows about, and then there's another one that's like built inside it."
"Network television?" asked Chiun.
"No. There's an internal circuit. There are people here watching every one of us. They can get in and out through closets and probably through the walls too. I guess that's how they killed all those Lebanese in their consulate. They're listening to us now."
"I don't televise well," said Chiun, who had once been shown through a studio and when he saw tapes of himself realized Western technology had a long way to go. It could reproduce recognizable images but not the grace and grandeur and benign magnificence of truly wondrous peoples. That Caucasians would still have to work on.
"The whole ship's a death trap, Little Father."
"In that respect, it is like the rest of the world," said Chiun. "We stay." And he waved to a small fixture on the ceiling that Remo recognized to be at the same angle that the TV sets were down below. The fixture was broken off. Chiun had known all along and had put the camera out of commission.
In Skaggerac, Norway where the giant ship had been built, Inspector Dawes, loaned to MI5 from Scotland Yard, laid out through precise analytical deduction the same principles Remo had discovered on board the United Nations ship.
He had isolated one contractor who had purchased "X" amount of materials to do "Y" and had "Z" amount left over.
"Sir," said Inspector Dawes, "the answer to this mystery is Z. I call it the Z component. Z represents materials that were left over because you didn't use them to build what you were supposed to build. Instead you built something else, a hidden network inside that ship, and you are therefore an accomplice in murder. Don't deny it." And Dawes laid out the subcontractor's travels, precise times isolating months of consultation in Greece.
"But sir," said Dawes, "you were
not consulting with Demosthenes Skouratis, the builder of the ship. You were consulting someone else. Someone who would stop at nothing. Someone to whom the slaughter of helpless people means nothing. Someone willing to invest millions of dollars and many years to bring about his own ends."
The builder listened stone faced. He sat in his living room of rough-hewn lumber and matched stone floors. A large bay window overlooked the clear silver fiord below. The builder had white-blonde hair and a face as impassive as a frozen pond. He sipped a sweet green liqueur.
Inspector Dawes stoked his Meerschaum. His ample belly pressed out the tweed vest so tight that returning his pipe tamper to its pocket required a snug push.
"And, sir, that is what stumps me," said Dawes. "I know there are two ships floating out of New York Harbor. I know this has been in the works for years. I know this takes a knowledge of shipbuilding and an awful lot of money. I also know this trap started in the conversion of the giant hull from a supertanker to a luxury liner. I also know that the Scytha were ancient horsemen and don't exist anymore. What I don't know, and this is what stumps me, sir, is who in the bloody blue blazes would bother?"
The builder finished his drink.
"You say a lot of people have been killed?" he asked.
"So far, many. I might add that just following orders to make a special structure is not a criminal offense. You have done nothing criminal."
The builder poured himself a full glass of the green liqueur. He drank it down and licked his lips clean.
"Nothing criminal?" asked the builder.
"Nothing," said Inspector Dawes.
"You have a logical mind, no?"
"I like to think so," Dawes said.
"If all these people have been killed, as you say, why would I be any different? And by that, I mean, why would someone stop at killing me? If I have done nothing criminal, then I don't have to talk to you."
"It could become verv criminal," said Dawes. "I'm sure your country of Norway has maritime and business laws that punish people who say they build one thing and then build another, yes?"
"Yes."
"I saw a room with charred and smoking bodies; burned to the bone, some were. I know a man like you would never want to build something that might be responsible for that, would you?"
The Norwegian finished his drink and then poured another.
"Would you?" Dawes asked again.
he Norwegian builder drank half the sweet warm minty liqueur.
"I said, would you?"
"Sure," said the builder.
"Sure what?" asked Dawes, harumphing his throat clear.
"Do something like that. I'd do that," said the builder, and he drove a fist into the ample tweed-vested belly of the inspector from Scotland Yard and watched the mound of pink flab collapse on the stone floor, retching. He went outside to a small tool shed he had built one summer and got a 1.2-meter beam of raw oak, smoothed a handle with a medium-grade wood file, took off any burrs with 020 production, sandpaper, decided against unwieldy flanges and returned to his living room overlooking the fiord where Inspector Dawes was attempting to recover from the hard body blow.
Inspector Dawes had one hand on an arm of a wooden chair. He groaned.
"You broke a rib," he gasped.
"Sure," said the builder, and beat in his head with the 1.2-meter beam, which worked infinitely better than one with flanges. The problem today, thought the builder, was that the world was flange happy. He weighted the body with lead stripping, careful to securely wrap Dawes and the lead weighting with three-centimeter nylon ribbon and dropped the body to the bottom of the very blue fiord.
Then he cleaned up his stone floor with an industrial-grade cleanser and warm water and hammered the 1.2-meter oak beam into the ceiling of the new attic room he was building. In the ceiling, he wondered if the beam did not indeed need flanges.
He drove into Oslo in his green Mercedes sports car and sent a telegram to a small shipbuilding firm in Saint Mary's Axe, London.
He had always wondered why Number One had wanted such an expensive network. Then, when he found out that the great ship would house the United Nations, he assumed that Number One represented some government spy apparatus.
But when the killings started and when everyone on television and in the papers said it was the work of a liberation front for a people who had not existed for hundreds of years, he too began to wonder what it was all about. There was too much money involved, however, to wonder too hard.
Also he did not have long to ponder the question. On the way back to his home, a car pulled him over to the side of the road. He assumed it was a police car and automatically offered out his license through the window. It came back very qnickly into his face, driven by a .45-caliber slog that enmeshed the paper fibers into his brain on its way out the back of his skull along with a nice piece of his occipital lobe.
CHAPTER SIX
Demosthenes Skouratis did not wish to see reporters. He did not wish to dine with the Prince of Monaco nor the designer, Saint Laurent. Nor did he wish to allow the tables at any number of gaming resorts to enjoy his presence. He did not answer any cablegrams from the beautiful women of his life. He did only what business was necessary to keep his empire from dissolving in its own fiscal complexity.
Otherwise, he kept his yacht, Tina, on the high seas and avoided port. He ate only what his personal physician said was the minimum to sustain life. He slept in twenty-minute gaps during the day. At night, he paced the teakwood decks. He did not converse with the captain about the seas as he normally did when he could not sleep. Every so often he would scream out at the black Atlantic. He walked until he was tired enough for a blessed twenty minutes of sleep and then he would return to the decks again. During the day, he spat at the sun.
It was a trained crew and part of their special training was to not think about what the great Demosthenes Skouratis did. Nor did they discuss it. One who worked for Mr. Skouratis did not idly talk about Mr. Skouratis, even though everyone knew he was going, day by salty day, as mad as a bee in a bottle.
Fifty miles outside of Morocco, in the Mediterranean, the yacht Tina picked up a passenger from the yacht Corning. The passenger wore a dark suit and white shirt with muted tie. He was bald, thin, and wore rimless spectacles. He was moderately seasick, his stomach kept settled only by his Swiss willpower. He was a banker. He was one of Mr. Skouratis' primary bankers.
The crew did not know it but Demosthenes Skouratis owned the bank, whose main purpose was to make him the cheapest loans possible with other peoples' money.
Skouratis met his banker in a stateroom. The Greek wore a towel around his gross hairy midsection. He had not shaved for three days and his face looked like furry tar paper with dark grape lips set in to the center to spew curses with.
The banker did not have to disguise his dismay at the sight of Skouratis drowning in despair before his eyes, because the banker did not feel dismay. It was not really a very Swiss emotion. It was the sort of thing one lived very well without. Arabs, Jews and Greeks lived with those emotions and it certainly hadn't done them any good, the banker thought. The Italians never settled down long enough for really good depression and the Swedes committed suicide, almost as a relief from boredom. The banker never understood why the world was not like Switzerland, but he also did not care very much. It was enough that Switzerland was Swiss.
First, he wished to convey the congratulations of the bank's board of directors to Mr. Skouratis. Mr. Skouratis had taken a financial disaster and, by his genius, had transformed it into a profit of 28.3 percent, devaluation of the dollar figured in.
For a minimum of gifts to Third World delegations, Skouratis had foisted the great hull on the United Nations. By his genius, he had devised the argument used—that America was too racist to house the United Nations—and had brilliantly maneuvered home the votes. Now, as its share of the ship cost, the United States was paying hundreds of millions to have itself castigated before the world as r
acist, which was fine because that money was now in Mr. Skouratis' hands. The last transfer of funds had been consummated and that was what he had come to report. Felicitations from the board of directors.
"You will always be comfortable," said Skouratis, "but you will never be really rich."
"Mr. Skouratis?" said the banker.
"You will never be very rich because you will never be very poor."
"Sir?"
"What I am saying, you dried-out cadaver," yelled Skouratis, "is that you know numbers. You do not know people. I know numbers and people. You do not know me, but I know you."
Skouratis hoisted his runted bulk from the silk pillow he sat on and crushed Maalox cubes into water until the substance became milky white. He swallowed the full glass of it.
"I know numbers as good as you, banker. Do you think I kept that massive hull afloat at seventy-two thousand dollars a week for a profit? It was the stupidest business venture north of Tangiers. Did you know I thought it was stupid? Did you know that I was aware it would make more sense to scrap the ship?"
"We had made reports to you that it was economically unfeasible," said the banker. He did not sweat on this hot Mediterranean day. Skouratis glistened like a sausage. He put down the empty glass of his stomach medicine that brought the cooling of his belly fires for a few minutes.
"The great ship—and if you really knew me, you would know this—was not a business venture."
"But we did make a profit," said the banker.
"Profit, profit. Of course we made a profit. We could have made a greater profit in other ventures. Why did I choose to build the biggest ship in the world in the first place? Did you ask yourself that?"
"Because you are a shipping man."
"I am also a metals man, a stocks man, a land man, a money man, I built that ship to be the biggest. To be the most important. I built it for pride. After the first hundred million dollars, banker, money is all ego. The interest alone on one hundred million, in a modest investment, is two hundred thousand a week. Do you not think I could live lavishly on that? Do you not think my needs are taken care of with that? Ego. Pride. Hubris, if you will. I built that ship because it was the biggest, not the most intelligent."
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