Singularity

by Bill DeSmedt

  For, though its main line charted the dates of key events in a deep, glowing blue, this was no simple linear chronology. Instead, from each of history’s hinge-points there sprouted one or more offshoots in hues ranging from somber red to pulsating green. These branches, forking further even as he watched, gave the construct as a whole the aspect of a magical tree—the World Tree of ancient proto-Slavic mythology, each of its brachiating limbs another might-have-been, another alternative path into the future. He knew each node, the root of each subtree, by heart: Lenin’s cerebral hemorrhage in 1924, Stalin’s murder of Kirov a decade later, Beriya’s arrest following Stalin’s death, Chairman Andropov’s premature demise in 1984, the failed 1991 coup attempt. So many, many places where things might have gone just a little bit differently.

  Grishin rose to face the globe-girdling serpent of the GEI logo filling most of the opposite wall. He lifted his glass.

  “To the glorious past,” he said, his voice a whisper. “The past, and the even more glorious future . . .”

  He took a single sip, then raised the glass again to finish the toast. “And to the place where they meet.”

  14 | Hull Number Forty-Seven

  AT A HUNDRED thirty-three meters from stem to stern, Rusalka was more boat than any berthing facility on the Potomac could handle. Instead, she was anchored off GEI’s private pier in Baltimore, a good hour and a half drive up from D.C. through Friday morning rush-hour traffic.

  Or not. Knox looked down on the vehicular snarl radiating outward from the construction site at the Beltway/1-270 merge, and gave thanks for friends in high places. Several hundred feet high. He caught Sasha’s eye through the door separating the cabin of the Grishin Enterprises helicopter from its cockpit. Sasha swiveled in the copilot’s chair and grinned down at the bumper-to-bumper traffic. He mimed a “Whew!” of relief. Better them than us!

  In the seat to Knox’s right, Marianna was sipping at a latte, and idly tracing the veins in his hand with her index finger. The tiny tingle made him shiver. Pretending to be a couple with Marianna felt so natural that Knox found himself wishing they’d gone for something a little hotter than the prim and proper lawyers-in-love look for their cover story.

  Too late to switch now. Deferred gratification was the order of the day as they wended their way north to Baltimore on the morning after the gala.

  Twenty minutes’ flight time brought them over the rooftops and esplanades of the city’s renovated harbor district. The waterfront was directly ahead now, all but empty at this hour, too early for the tourists, too late for the Bay fishermen.

  The chopper angled out over the water. Only then did they see her.

  Knox was prepared for large. Rusalka was enormous. Out of scale. One hundred and thirty-three meters was just another number, another insubstantial abstraction. Rusalka made the abstract concrete—she was one-and-a-half times the length of a football field. Her gleaming white shape dwarfed the lesser yachts riding at anchor in the Inner Harbor, and transformed the shops and restaurants of the nearby marina into mere model-railroad accessories. She looked for all the world like a cabin cruiser that had somehow found its way into a backyard swimming pool.

  Sasha tapped the pilot’s shoulder and made a circle in the air. The pilot obliged by coming in low and orbiting the gargantuan craft.

  Close up, Rusalka was an improbable multi-layered wedding cake. Her streamlined superstructure rose five decks high to a flying bridge ninety feet above the waterline. Half the top deck was given over to silvered skylight. Expanses of the same one-way glass fronted the bridge, and what looked like a observation lounge one deck below it.

  The vessel just went on and on, yet there was grace in the gigantism too. The whole ensemble was sculpted into such sleek, backswept lines as to give Rusalka the look of cutting through the waves even as she rode at anchor.

  “Seventy-five crew,” Sasha shouted to Knox over the roar of their descent, “and ninety staff, counting administration and research.”

  Some of that headcount was coming into view as the copter circled. At white-linened tables scattered across the aft deck below them, a couple dozen senior management types and attendant one-rung-downers were breakfasting alfresco, preparing for another day of directing the fortunes of Grishin Enterprises from this, its self-contained floating headquarters.

  One last, lingering look, then they touched down on a helipad just forward of the superstructure.

  Marianna and Knox followed Sasha across a sunwashed arrival deck and into the cool and comparative dark of a vestibule hung with medieval tapestries and lit here and there with the glowing golds and rich browns of miniature Orthodox icons.

  A heavy glass portal hissed shut behind them, sealing them all inside. Point of no return.

  “Passports, please.” Sasha held out his hand. “Must get you checked in.” He walked the documents over to a guard stationed inside the entranceway.

  Knox turned his head for a last wistful glance at the helicopter, their sole remaining link with dry land. It was gone. Could it have lifted off again once they’d disembarked? No, they would have heard the racket, even through those inch-thick tempered glass doors. Where . . .?

  Then he saw where: it was disappearing below decks. The helipad they’d landed on must ride on an elevator-platform. The whole structure, with the copter still sitting on it, was descending into the hold below, allowing the two halves of a second, previously-retracted deck to slide out and close over it. Wow!

  “Coming, Dzhon?” Sasha had finished his transaction with the guard. He saw what Knox was staring at, and grinned. “Best not to leave our chopper sitting out in the sun all day.”

  Sasha ushered his guests across an expanse of black marble flooring inlaid with the Grishin Enterprises logo—the Ourobouros fashioned of laser-cut jade this time, girdling a globe of lapis lazuli oceans and bottochino continents—and into an elevator at the rear of the welcome lobby.

  The lift compartment’s walls, ceiling, and floor were a medley of chrome and backlit Tiffany glass, the overall effect resembling a ride inside an art-deco jukebox. A ride so smooth that Knox was still waiting for them to start moving when muted chimes announced their arrival at accommodations deck, one flight up.

  As to accommodations, Sasha knew his friend’s reticence in affairs of the heart well enough not to bother inquiring as to the precise developmental stage of the Knox/Marianna relationship. Instead, he had elected to cover all bases: he showed his guests to two adjoining staterooms with a connecting door.

  Their luggage having arrived ahead of them, Knox and Marianna were left to settle in. Sasha’s special guided tour of Rusalka wouldn’t begin for another twenty minutes.

  Knox checked out his new digs. Outsized portholes, illuminated shoji screens taking up the top half of the inboard wall, and that king-sized platform bed sure looked inviting. He was tempted to slide under the matte gold comforter and make up for the sleep he’d lost to the late-night briefing at CROM Central. Rather than give in, he walked over to where his suitcase rested on a luggage stand at the foot of the bed.

  Marianna had told Knox not to bother packing: CROM would put something together for him. Knox had gone along on the general principle that the client is always right, especially when they’re volunteering to do the work. What that left him with, though, was a suitcase full of unfamiliar paraphernalia. Thank God he’d thought to bring his own toothbrush.

  “Marianna? What’s this all about?” he called through the open connecting door.

  She came to the doorway and looked. “Oh, that.” Then she motioned him out of the room and down a corridor to the outside. With the crew preparing for departure and most of the GEI headquarters staff already at their desks, they had the deck nearly to themselves.

  “It’s not safe to talk in there till I’ve deployed countermeasures,” Marianna said, sotto voce. She leaned against the rail, morning breezes toyed with her hair. “Now, you were saying?”

  “What am I doing with a w
etsuit in my valise?”

  “That’s just standard emergency kit for any blue-water operation.”

  “Aristos isn’t seriously expecting Rusalka to go under, is he?”

  “Jon, the thing about covert operations is, nine-tenths is just contingency planning. Don’t let it get to you.”

  “Okay, sure. SOP, if you say so.” Did she actually believe this no-big-deal bullshit she was feeding him? That was scary. “Even so, what if they’d gone through our luggage and asked what we were doing with all that stuff?”

  “We’d have said it’s for scuba diving when we call in at the Azores. But they wouldn’t ask, Jon. That’s what makes you such perfect cover for this mission. Everyone’s convinced we’re just a systems analyst and his girlfriend.”

  “What do you mean, just a systems analyst?”

  Rusalka’s observation lounge sparkled with chromed surfaces and Susan Puleo metallic fabrics. It reminded Knox of something. The vast technoesque space looked almost like—

  Yes, there in the middle of the scalloped ceiling hung the mirrored sphere emblematic of an upscale discotheque. It lacked only the strains of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” blaring from the B&W sound system to complete the ambience. The post-Soviet Russians were making up for lost time, but to date they’d only gotten as far as the seventies.

  Beyond the mirror-ball, the lounge was fronted by a wall of tinted glass giving out on a panorama of Baltimore Harbor. Between inpouring and reflected dazzle, it took Knox a moment to realize there was someone else in the room with them, seated on one of the L-shaped settees.

  “Marianna, Dzhon,” Sasha said, “I have the pleasure to introduce Ms. Naomi Cutler, senior editor for MegaCraft International magazine, who joins us on our tour today. Naomi, please to meet Marianna Peterson and Dzhonathan Knox, friends sailing to Europe with us.”

  “Are you along for the ride too, Ms. Cutler?” Knox asked the tall, athletic-looking brunette who had risen to shake hands with them.

  “Naomi, please. No, just passing through. Not that I don’t envy you the voyage.”

  “Perhaps you know of MegaCraft, Dzhon, Marianna. One of only two magazines in the world devoted exclusively to megayachts. Naomi is here researching a possible article.”

  They took seats, then waited while a white-liveried steward filled coffee and juice orders from an espresso machine cum minibar on wheels.

  “Spasibo,” Knox thanked the steward for his espresso doppio, then turned to Naomi. “An article? Is Rusalka news, then?”

  She thought a moment before replying. “Could be. This is just a preliminary walk-through. If I like what I see, I’ll come back with a photo crew next month and give her the full treatment.”

  “You mean all this . . .” Marianna’s gesture took in the lounge and beyond “. . . might not measure up to your editorial standards?”

  “Not that, exactly,” Naomi said. “It’s just we need to be convinced this boat has, well, lived down her past.”

  “Naomi . . .” Sasha began.

  “Come on, Sasha. You know it’s true.”

  “Have you been holding out on us, Sasha?” Knox asked, adding in his most melodramatic, what-evil-lurks-in-the-hearts-of-men baritone, “Could this big, bright boat of yours be harboring some deep, dark secret?”

  He’d meant it as a joke, so it was kind of surprising how flustered Sasha got. “What? No, no, Dzhon, nothing of the sort. Naomi merely refers to certain, ah, unfortunate episodes in Rusalka’s history, prior to her acquisition by Grishin Enterprises.”

  “ ‘Unfortunate’ ?” Naomi laughed. “That’s cute, considering how she went from princess to pariah in the space of two years.”

  She turned to Knox and Marianna. “You’ve got to understand, from the moment Oskarshams laid the keel in 1987, Sharifa here was destined to be one of the crown jewels: third biggest private yacht in the world, ever. Add to that the mystery surrounding her owner . . .”

  “What did you call her? Sharifa?” asked Knox.

  “Uh-huh, Shaika Sharifa—Queen Sharifa. That was the rumor, anyway. As far as the yard was concerned, she was just Hull Number Forty-Seven. Those Swedes can be silent as the grave even when the owner hasn’t insisted on total anonymity . . . and he had.”

  “But MegaCraft had a theory as to the owner’s identity?”

  “Well, the name alone was a pretty strong circumstantial,” Naomi said, “if you know your Middle Eastern royals. But the clincher was when the yard stopped work on her as of August 5th 1990.”

  Knox got it then. “Not the Amir of Kuwait? What a bummer! Losing a boat like this and a kingdom, all in the same week.” Oskarshams had suspended work the same week Saddam Hussein’s tanks had come rumbling across the Kuwaiti border.

  “Actually,” Naomi lowered her voice, “losing this boat might have helped save the kingdom. The Amir needed all the in-area friends he could get at that point, and scuttling the Sharifa newbuilding went a long way toward mending fences with the Saudi royal family.”

  Knox furrowed his brow but said nothing.

  “Too big,” she elaborated. “At four hundred thirty feet length overall, Sharifa was large enough to rival the Abdul Aziz, King Fahd’s four hundred eighty-two-footer.”

  Knox chuckled. “No sense sticking a finger in your new best friend’s eye, eh? So, what then? Grishin stepped in and bought her at fire-sale prices?—No, wait, the timing’s all wrong for that. Wrong for any kind of sale, I’d guess, with half the world’s potential buyers hunkered down dodging SCUD missiles.”

  “Uh-huh. When all was said and done, there was only one deal on the table.” A look of distaste crossed Naomi’s face. “Though I’d like to think the Amir never would’ve gone for it if he hadn’t needed the cash for, uh, public relations.”

  “Of course!” Knox snapped his fingers. “The anti-Saddam PR campaign that brought Congress onboard with the military option.” He looked about him. This vessel was a living link in the chain of events that had led to Operation Desert Storm. “What was wrong with the money?”

  “Sad story. The only taker was a US junk-bond king with a scheme to convert Sharifa into a floating casino. He rechristened her the Buona Fortuna and steamed her across the Baltic into Gdansk for the interior work. All done on the cheap. A real schlock job, too: mirrors and red velvet galore.”

  “Your basic French Provincial bordello effect,” Knox supplied.

  Naomi sighed, as if taking Sharif as fall from grace as an affront to the megayachting community at large. “MegaCraft wouldn’t touch her after that. To think we’d been holding our Spring ’92 cover for her at one point.”

  “I must commend your, ah, journalistic diligence, Naomi,” Sasha said. “Is it permissible to ask how much of such speculation you will include in your final article?”

  “I look forward to talking with you about that, Sasha,” she said smoothly, “Anyway, the story gets better from there on out. By early ’92 the deal had fallen through and the boat was back on the block. And this time the high bidder was none other than Arkady Grigoriyevich—yes?”

  Sasha nodded.

  “The price would have been right,” Naomi went on. “Grishin Enterprises might have shelled out thirty-five million, tops. Add another twenty for this latest refit, and it’s still bargain basement—less than half what she’s worth.”

  She glanced at Sasha for confirmation again, but none was forthcoming.

  “Anyway, after the sale, she disappeared off everybody’s radarscope. All we knew was the new owner had renamed her one more time, ordered up a minimal makeover—mostly just ripping out the gaming tables and installing office sets and labware—and put her to sea in late 1993. Where she pretty much stayed till the start of the new millennium.”

  “Well,” Knox said, “even billionaires need a hobby, and oceanography’s as good as any.”

  “I suppose.” Naomi gave a noncommittal shrug. “Be that as it may, it’s only over the past three years that they’ve finally gotten around to
doing a proper rehab.”

  “Restoring the soul of a Queen, so to speak,” Knox mused.

  Naomi Cutler looked into the middle distance. Thinking, perhaps, about how that line would look emblazoned across the cover of MegaCraft International magazine.

  After an hour of traipsing through one gilded chamber after another, Knox was suffering from opulence overload. It was like nothing so much as a very high-end pub crawl, without even the consolation of liquid refreshments.

  As to that, the spirits were willing, but the schedule was taut: Rusalka was making ready to catch the morning tide, while MegaCraft Lady was booked on the noon flight out of BWI to Orlando. The helicopter that ferried Naomi out to the airport would have to rendezvous with Rusalka again as the vessel passed Annapolis.

  The logistics were just tricky enough that they were getting tight on time. And with both salon deck and the oceanographic laboratory still to go.

  “It is impermissible not to see the banquet hall before you leave us, Naomi,” Sasha told her. “It is the centerpiece of our new Rusalka!”

  “But you, Dzhon and Marianna,” he turned to them, “will have an opportunity to attend a dinner party there in three days. Why not save it as surprise? I will show you our lab instead.”

  So it was that the group split up. A few whispered words into Sasha’s lapel communicator summoned up Igor Savchenko, Rusalka’s lean, graying first officer. Savchenko was deputized to escort Naomi up for a look at the salon deck, and then on to Arkady Grishin’s offices; the owner had expressed interest in meeting the MegaCraft editor and would personally see her off.

  “Looks like this is goodbye, then,” Naomi said, glancing at the time, “I’ll have to airlift out as soon as I’m done up top. Sasha, we’ll talk; I think there’s a story here. Marianna, Jon, it’s been nice meeting you. I wish you all a bon voyage.” She shook each of their hands in turn, then she was gone up the broad spiral staircase.