The Emissary

by Patricia Cori

  All she knew was that she had to follow her heart, trust her gut, and reach for the stars, and that is how Jamie Hastings lived her life, from as far back as she could remember.

  Children never came—not that she didn’t try. Like unfinished tattoos, three tragic miscarriages were etched in black on her heart, and complications with the last one had closed the doors to the possibility of motherhood and family. It took time, but she eventually resigned herself to it, knowing that she was destined for other things, and yielding to the wisdom of forces beyond her control. Oh, but how she would have loved to share her life with a child … a daughter she could have showered with love, as she had always known from her own mother.

  It just wasn’t meant to be. Those were long ago sand castles that had been snatched by the waves and tossed back into the sea.

  Jamie forced her mind to shift from the weightiness of thoughts of the past to the excitement of what lay ahead. To be out on the ocean for any reason always thrilled her, but now—working to protect the whales from the oilers? This was one of the greatest challenges she had ever faced and yet, it held within its potential one of the greatest opportunities. Her true motivation for taking this on was what it could mean for the whales, the dolphins, and all the ocean beings. She promised herself that she would give Mat Anderson and his oil-hungry conglomerate enough to work with, so that, hopefully, they could take what they wanted from the ocean floor without destroying everything in their wake.

  In exchange for that effort, what she would bring back with her, Mat’s promise, would be the strength of his political influence, which would enable her to speak with a far greater voice for the whales and all the rightful citizens of Planet Ocean. PICC would serve as the vessel for finding that voice, and making sure the message was heard.

  Jamie promised herself that, after this trip, her travel years were coming to an end, so that she could dedicate more of herself to the foundation, and really make a difference. Even if it absolutely killed her, she would learn how to say “no,” and spend more time at home, maybe even sneaking in some fun between causes—maybe even falling in love again.

  The call to duty came later than expected—precisely Tuesday, March 12—when finally the worst of winter had passed, and The Deepwater could sail. Mat called personally to ask that she be ready to depart that Thursday to sail the day after, as the ship was in port, being readied for their expedition.

  “That’s the Ides of March,” she told Mat. “Interesting sail date.”

  “The what?”

  “‘Beware the Ides of March’—Shakespeare wrote it into the play Julius Caesar. He was referring to March 15th, when Caesar was betrayed and murdered in the Senate.”

  “Sorry, Miss Jamie, but I am unfamiliar with that little piece of culture. Is it supposed to mean something to me?”

  “Only if you’re superstitious,” she said, making light of it. She sensed Mat’s embarrassment over his inability to reference the greatest literary master in all of history.

  Louise tapped on the door and walked into Mat’s office. “I have everything set up and ready to go,” she said, handing him Jamie’s itinerary. He winked. She really took care of business for him and he forgot, sometimes, to take care of her back. He placed his hand over the mouthpiece on the phone. “Why don’t you free yourself up for lunch?” he said, lasciviously.

  “Can do,” she replied, feeling Mat’s eyes caressing her backside when she exited.

  “Sorry, Jamie … I had Louise here with all your transportation information. She’ll be sending it to you now in an email. We’ll have a private plane for you out there—timing’s all spelled out in detail for you. My staff and crew have been briefed. You just need to be ready.”

  She thanked Mat and told him she was all set to go.

  “Anything you need out there—anything at all—you just let me know,” he said, and hung up, feeling very satisfied with himself.

  The limousine arrived that Thursday morning to escort Jamie to the airport. How generous of Mat, she thought, to arrange to fly her by private jet, in the style to which all the corporate hierarchy had become accustomed. It surely was overspend, considering it was only about a two-hour flight, but she wasn’t complaining.

  The driver was a big, cheerful man who looked more like a bodyguard than a chauffeur. He came up to the apartment, carried Jamie’s bags down to the car without even losing his breath, and settled her into the passenger’s seat with a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice, served chilled, from the bar. He drove her right onto the tarmac, to the door of the plane, where she was greeted like nobility by a private airport security official and the crew, and accommodated in style. No pain, no strain, no security harassment … and no long, empty hours at the airport.

  Ever since she had been dealing with the oil industry, Jamie had experienced the ease with which the rich and privileged live their lives, a world to which mere mortals are not entitled. To an outsider looking in, or even to the occasional visitor, tasting it now and then as she did, it is a lifestyle one can only imagine—if even that. But it comes with a high price for the planet, and it eats away at the soul of man, and Jamie felt uncomfortable with it. She decided then and there that it would be the last time she accepted such material enticements from Mat Anderson or anyone else, as they were all manifestations of a polarized, greedy world that needed to change.

  After a gourmet vegetarian lunch in flight, they landed in Vancouver—ahead of schedule—and once again, the car was waiting for her right there, as she exited the plane. Forty minutes later, she arrived at the entrance to the main harbor, where The Deepwater, USOIL’s magnificent ship, was moored. Jamie hadn’t really given much thought to the ship itself and really didn’t know what to expect, but what little her mind had conjured up was certainly nothing like this. In utter disbelief, she stared out the limousine window at the incredibly sleek mega yacht, wondering if the driver had taken a wrong turn. This was no research vessel. It looked more like a luxury liner—one unimaginably expensive man toy—designed for the likes of some eccentric billionaire, like the sultan of Brunei … not for scouring the ocean floor.

  The guards waved them past the security gate and into the VIP parking area, close up to the ship. Sunlight bounced off the letters, written in gold on the stern: The Deepwater. As the chauffeur was opening the door for Jamie, a couple walked up the path from the ship, approaching her. They looked as if they had just stepped off the cover of Vogue: he, a too-tanned rich boy in khakis and Louis Vuitton designer sunglasses; she, a statuesque, leggy blonde with the scrubbed, innocent beauty of a college co-ed. Jamie found them oddly out of character for what she had visualized as “crew members” on a research ship, trawling for oil in the deep ocean. Then again, here she was—a psychic trying to glean coordinates for a drill site, twenty thousand leagues under the sea. Surely, she was no less out of place than they.

  As the driver helped Jamie out of the passenger’s seat and then proceeded to get the bags from the trunk, the young man came right up to her.

  “Miss Hastings,” he said, crisply, “my name is Sam Kemmeries, chief technician of The Deepwater, and this is Liz Bartholomew, our new intern from the London office. We’re your official greeters.”

  Liz reached her hand out to Jamie and, in a perfect Oxford English accent, said, “It is such a pleasure to welcome you! We are so delighted to have you.”

  Jamie looked them both deep in the eyes before shaking hands. This fellow, Sam, looked anything but delighted to be welcoming Jamie aboard. Her gut reaction had already been triggered: something didn’t feel quite right about the two of them. Mat had promised her a top-notch crew, but here she was, standing before a couple of beautiful people who looked more like Ken and Barbie dolls than they did technical engineers.

  Sam ordered the driver to bring the bags down to the ship, and Jamie noted the tension between the two men. He was aggressive and superior, and she took an instant dislike to him. This was the chief technician? She hoped tha
t meant he would be holed up in a room somewhere for the next month, where she would have as little exposure to him as possible.

  Jamie had been around all sorts of people, even nobility, and none of them fazed her. This Sam Kemmeries person, though … he had a smugness about him that was completely off-putting. He had more than “rich kid” written all over him—he had some kind of power trip on steroids going on, and he wanted the world to know it. Jamie always trusted her visceral, gut-level reactions, but still, she promised herself to give him a chance and stay away from judgment—for the time being.

  As the driver walked down the walkway, dragging Jamie’s luggage, the three of them stood for a moment gazing at the ship.

  “I didn’t expect anything as monumental as this,” Jamie uttered, facing Liz. “This is how they’re designing research ships these days?”

  Liz leaned closer to Jamie. “The company bought it from the sultan of Brunei.”

  Jamie laughed out loud, but they weren’t privy to her psychic moment. It was a little cosmic present for her to savor on her own: a private joke.

  “Ladies?” Sam gestured towards the ship and they made their way down to the pier. “USOIL adapted the ship to include the most sophisticated technology available,” he said, pointing to the upper deck. “You can see we’ve got elaborate sonar and radar equipment. She’s fitted with the ultimate intruder-detection alarm network and, just in case, we are also equipped with an advanced missile defense system.”

  Jamie’s jaw literally dropped when she heard that. “My word!” she retorted. “Sounds like I’m boarding a warship!”

  “We’re prepared for any inconvenience. You never know who we’re carrying aboard.”

  How odd this all was. Jamie had never imagined she would be signing up for weeks out at sea on a high-security luxury yacht—fitted for a war zone. As they got up close, Jamie saw there was not one but two heliports, a small submarine in its own launch platform, and endless portholes, which she thought were most likely staterooms—in which case the ship was big enough to house a whole football team.

  “Big ship,” Jamie uttered, under her breath.

  “Wait until you see inside. It’s just beautiful,” Liz remarked. “There are eleven staterooms, some of them are just luscious suites, and over six thousand square feet of public living space.”

  “That’s big.”

  “And that’s not including crew, of course. There’s another whole layer down below.”

  As they approached the ramp onto the ship, Jamie gazed uncomfortably at the ship’s complex radar equipment, with all its strange and unrecognizable antennae, and several huge satellite disks. Granted, she was no technician, but it seemed so utterly foreign to her, as if the world had leaped ahead thirty years and no one had remembered to tell her.

  The driver walked past them, on his way back up to the car. Jamie reached out to tip him, but here again, it was politely refused. She thanked him. He tipped his hat, and walked on.

  Sam smirked. “We don’t tip staff,” he said, snidely. He had a condescending edge to every word he spoke and he grated on her, like fingernails on a chalkboard. He walked ahead of them onto the ramp and extended a hand out to Jamie, only out of a sense of duty, to help her, and then Liz, aboard. “I’ll show you to your stateroom.”

  For whatever reason he had decided to dislike her, Mat’s choice as The Deepwater’s official greeter was doing his very best to make sure Jamie felt as if she were crashing a party to which she would never have been invited, had it been up to him.

  Liz looked awkward, and almost apologetic for Sam’s behavior. “I’ll be right back,” she whispered, and then she disappeared through a main door.

  They walked down the long corridor to the very end, where Jamie’s cabin was situated. It was the master suite—she’d seen it as they were boarding: this big room opening on to a private pool on the main deck. Sam opened the unlocked door and instantly the hallway was flooded with light, pouring in from three porthole windows in the dining room area of the luxury cabin.

  Jamie stepped into the room, so impressed with its impeccable design and style, and amazed at the sheer size of the suite—it was bigger than her own living room back home. “Nice digs,” she uttered.

  Once again, as in Houston, there to greet her was a bouquet of her favorite spring flowers: irises, baby pink roses, and daffodils. She pulled out the card she found nestled in the bouquet. In that inimitable style that she had come to know as Mat’s, it read: “Welcome to the Dream Team.” Jamie smiled, genuinely pleased, and tucked the card back in between the roses, wondering when the “dream” part of the team was going to arrive.

  Sam didn’t enter the room. He stood at the doorway, preparing a quick exit. “Liz will be down in a second—you can ask her to walk you through all the gadgets and answer any questions for you.”

  Jamie’s patience was wearing thin. Sam’s rudeness and unfriendliness were at the very best inappropriate and she had done nothing to merit it. Soon, she would have to pull rank on him and establish some boundaries that he would not be allowed to cross. “I’d like my bags, please,” she said.

  He rapped his fingers against the wall, draping himself against the doorframe like a poor imitation of James Dean. “I’ll get one of the guys to bring your bags down later.”

  “How about sooner?”

  “Yeah, well … I’m not sure who’s around right now. There’s a lot of ship to take care of.”

  “Where’s the captain?” She couldn’t believe Mat would have left such a gap between the royal treatment he had always shown her and this offensive little man. Who was he, anyway?

  “Jimbo? Last time I saw him he was up at the Crow’s Nest.”

  Jamie bristled, and stepped into her authority. “Okay, here’s where we start over. You go get the captain, wherever you have to go to find him, and tell him that I’ve boarded the ship. It’s role reversal time, Mr. Kemmeries. I want a meeting with the staff and the captain in an hour.”

  In a gesture of total disregard, Sam turned and started walking away back down the hall. “Sure thing,” he said, his voice trailing behind him. Nobody told the captain what to do or when to report to his own ship. It would be interesting to see his reaction when he got wind of her command.

  Jamie closed the door firmly. “And don’t worry about the bags, you little preppy bastard. I’ll get them myself.” It was so unlike her to get so angry and aggressive—completely out of character. She reminded herself to keep her emotional reactions in check, and not let this first obstacle disrupt what she had come to do.

  With Sam’s negative energy out of her space, she relaxed into appreciation of the amazing stateroom where she would be spending the next month out at sea. It was spacious, so beautifully furnished, and filled with light. To the right, off the entry, was a full dining room and bar, fully stocked of course; to the left, down a hallway, was the master bedroom and a presidential bathroom area with a floor-to-ceiling window that looked straight out on the ocean. Pure luxury. She pulled open the sliding doors that led out to the private swimming pool, complete with Jacuzzi on the far end, and there she found another doorway, which opened upon a Swedish rock sauna and a fully fitted gym. Everything was designed with elegance, flair, and the utmost attention to detail. Most likely, she realized, this actually had been the sultan’s personal suite.

  Jamie fell down onto the rich, creamy-white leather sofa and kicked off her shoes. She was suddenly overcome with a fit of the giggles, recalling her commitment, just hours before, to never again be enticed by the trappings of Mat Anderson’s world and deciding that, just this one last time, she would let herself be. Why not enjoy it? After all is said and done, it isn’t every day that a girl finds herself aboard the former yacht of a sultan, right?

  There was a knock at the door. “It’s me, Liz.”

  Jamie called out to her to come in. She stood up and slipped her shoes back on.

  “You like?”

  “I like!” Jamie rep
lied, emphatically.

  Liz dragged one of Jamie’s bags into the room, after struggling to get it over the safety frame of the doorway. “I’m sorry about Sam—he’s got a bit of an attitude sometimes,” she said. “Don’t mind him.”

  “A ‘bit’ of an attitude? You’re generous.” Jamie walked over and helped Liz lift the bag into the room.

  “His father’s a bigwig in Congress. He’s a Republican, for what that’s worth.”

  Jamie smiled. So that’s what the power trip was about. “Not sure what that’s worth these days, to be honest, but I’m not bound to be impressed anytime soon.”

  Liz brought the room key to the suite, which she placed on the entry table.

  “Nice of you to drag this here for me.”

  “No problem at all. I chose the lighter of the two.”

  “I never learned how to travel light.” Jamie’s wetsuit alone filled half of one of the suitcases, along with her fins and underwater mask.

  “As for Sam—he really is a sweetie, once you get to know him.”

  “Sweetie? That’s an interesting way to describe him.”

  “When you get to know him.”

  “Yes, well, I guess that is something I have to look forward to, then.”

  “He definitely knows he’s gorgeous,” Liz added, as an afterthought. Jamie noticed the little gleam in her eye on that one.

  “Yes, there is that,” Jamie thought to herself. The congressman’s son was a perfect combination of Hollywood good looks: he was a tall, blue-eyed blond, thirty-something, with a great physique and plenty of style—and very white teeth. Obviously moneyed. If you could get past the obnoxious personality, he could very well be considered a good catch for a girl like Liz. That is, if you could get past the attitude.