by Sharp, Zoe
As for the armed chase boats Jimmy O’Day had promised us, I couldn’t hear or see anything out there on the grainy black waters. I would have hoped for a glimpse of them in the reflected lights from New Orleans glowing through the fog, or the buzz of a high-power outboard motor. Over the throb of the paddle steamer’s own engines I could hear nothing.
“I don’t like it,” I murmured to Sean. He’d just done another circuit of the bar area where the partygoers were being served an array of complimentary cocktails to get them into a generous frame of mind. I reckoned that was probably going to be their last freebie of the evening.
“Hmm, that’s weird,” Sean said, “because I don’t like it much either.”
I glanced across at him. He was looking tight and wired, something tense about the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head.
“What is it?”
He shook his head, frustrated, rubbed distractedly at the scar on his temple. “Damned if I know.”
Blake Dyer was engaged in conversation with the banker from Boston and his stick-thin wife—the ones who’d decided to pass on the helicopter ride where Gabe Baptiste’s bodyguard has lost his life. They did not look sorry to have missed out on the excitement.
Baptiste himself, meanwhile, was taking centre stage near the O’Day party. He was being fawned over by a number of young women. I assumed their ego-stroking was sufficient for his boredom threshold to remain unbreached so far.
O’Day’s PR guru, Autumn, left Baptiste to cope unaided tonight. She was staying close to O’Day himself, with Jimmy in attendance. And bloody Morton, of course. He caught my eye and gave another of those mocking salutes. I kept my face deliberately stony, let my gaze drift away as though there was absolutely nothing of interest to hold it there.
But watching the dynamics of that little group several things finally struck me. The fact that Morton was quietly contemptuous of his charge and didn’t mind who gleaned that from his face or his body language. That Jimmy O’Day both admired and resented his father in equal measure. And that regardless of Tom O’Day’s relationship with Autumn—professional or personal—Jimmy was ever so slightly in love—or at least in lust—with on her.
The lady herself was such a consummate professional in the way she schooled her face into polite attentiveness towards anybody who was speaking to her that it was hard to tell what she was thinking. It wasn’t so hard to tell what all the guys in the room were thinking when they looked at her, though.
Autumn was wearing a sparkly gold floor-length dress that moulded itself to her hourglass figure and flared out from her knees like a mermaid’s tail. I wouldn’t have dared wear something that covered and revealed so much both at the same time. Besides, there was nowhere to conceal a weapon.
Sadly, tonight that was not an issue for any of us. The only things I carried in the small bag hanging from my shoulder were my mobile phone, an emergency field dressing, painkillers and a couple of usual standbys—two tampons and some safety pins. You never know when something like that would come in handy, and I’d previously been asked for both at one time or another by clients who’d suddenly developed an urgent need for them in the middle of a job.
Not that I thought Blake Dyer was going to have any cause to ask for sanitary protection during the course of an evening, but you never knew.
Thirty-five
“Monday, August twenty-ninth two-thousand-five, at six-ten in the morning, Hurricane Katrina came ashore in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, about sixty miles south-east of New Orleans,” Tom O’Day announced.
He was speaking to the assembled guests down in the main casino area on the lower deck, his voice slow and solemn. They might all be standing around in their finery, clutching glasses of champagne, but he was not about to allow them to forget why they were here.
“By the time she hit land the weather people reckon the wind speed was between a hundred-thirty and a hundred-fifty-five miles an hour. That’s right on the nose of a full-blown Cat Five. At those kinds of levels the official Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale summary states that ‘catastrophic damage will occur’. Well, my friends, it surely did. If you’ll forgive me quoting statistics, more than ninety thousand square miles of the Gulf Coast was affected.”
He paused, not embellishing the story. Everybody had seen the news reports at the time. This was little more than a gentle reminder.
“But what has happened in the months—the years—since Katrina is a tragedy and a disgrace,” he continued. “Eighteen hundred and thirty-six people lost their lives during the hurricane itself. Seven hundred and five are still missing. Two hundred and fifteen thousand homes were devastated and today the population of New Orleans has fallen by more than half. Over fifty thousand souls are still living in trailers provided by the FEMA emergency management folk because less than forty thousand homes have been approved for renovation. Almost a hundred thousand derelict cars are still waiting to be towed. There is a genuine feeling here that the rest of America has abandoned this city. With your help, I aim to show these people that we have not forgotten Hurricane Katrina and we have not forgotten New Orleans.”
A smattering of applause broke out, was taken up. It grew in volume and vigour. Like everyone else, I found it hard not to be affected by Tom O’Day’s passion for the city and its people, but I tuned out the words, let my gaze trail over the crowd.
The only ones with their eyes not on O’Day were the security people and the wait-staff weaving among the guests with refilled champagne flutes. A cluster of empty bottles already stood on a table near the doorway. I did a quick count and reckoned it was probably best that the speeches were made now, before the consumption rose much higher.
O’Day had moved on to the subject of the Miss Francis, how she’d survived the hurricane unscathed by steaming up the Mississippi River as fast as her paddlewheel would propel her, her decks loaded with evacuees. And then how she’d returned at similar speed a few days later, this time carrying medical supplies, clothing, and bottled water.
When the rest of the speeches started I took another turn around one of the upper decks while Sean stayed with Blake Dyer in the main casino area. The visibility had not improved. In the distance, the lights of New Orleans faded to an orange blur off the starboard side.
I peered into the gloom, looking for the Zodiacs that were supposed to be shadowing us. If they didn’t stay close in this weather, they would lose us. Having said that, losing several hundred feet of brightly lit paddle steamer would be pretty hard, even in these conditions.
But however much I shaded my eyes and leaned out into the night, I couldn’t see anyone escorting us. I climbed to the top deck, looked again. Nothing.
I jogged towards the wheelhouse and put out my hand to knock on the door. I don’t know what made me hesitate, what made me stop and check through the reinforced glass porthole set into it before I announced my presence.
The rotund skipper was sitting slumped in his captain’s chair. His hands were bound through the frame at the back and he was obviously not happy about it. I could take a pretty good guess at the cursing, even without being able to hear the words.
One of the crew members was at the wheel. Behind him was a man dressed in SWAT black, including webbing and gloves. A balaclava covered his features. In his arms was cradled a stubby Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun. The man’s trigger finger rested casually inside the guard. He looked both willing to use it and able to keep order without. I had no illusions that he was there in any kind of official capacity.
Shit!
I slipped away from the porthole and flattened against the wall of the wheelhouse. My heart rate stepped up, bounding, and my senses suddenly went into overload, stiffening the hairs on my arms and neck.
Almost in reflex my hand reached for the SIG, only to remember that my sidearm, still in its Kramer paddle-rig holster, was tucked away in the hotel safe. Never had I wanted it more.
The realisation that I’d been had—we’d all been ha
d—flipped through my mind. Either that or this was the unluckiest of unlucky coincidences. And I didn’t believe that for a moment.
I blinked, saw again the Miss Francis’s skipper, wrists bound tight enough to bleed through the cuffs of his shirt. I’d found that the Americans were not big on irony, but I wondered if it had gone through his mind that here he was in the middle of a situation on a boat filled with hard-cases whose hands, in a way, were now just as firmly tied behind their backs. At his instigation.
I retraced my steps, moving fast. No point in creeping when the whole of the superstructure was lit up like a fireworks party and it was pretty obvious I didn’t have an invite.
Shouting somewhere below made me dodge to the railing and lean out cautiously. From there I could see one of the Zodiac chase boats coming alongside, the four men aboard bristling with armament—M16 assault rifles, mainly, one with a Mossberg pump-action shotgun for close-quarter work. All had holstered sidearms, too. Thank Christ for that. I could only assume that the skipper must have managed to put a call out before they grabbed him.
I leaned out a little further, preparing to shout down to them, let them know I was a friendly and, if necessary, guide them in. Timing was crucial. But just as I opened my mouth, one of the guys in the bow of the Zodiac stood up, legs braced against the backwash slapping into the rigid-hulled inflatable from the Miss Francis, and threw a line up towards the deck.
A black-clad figure leaned out from the lower deck a little further forward of my position. He was dressed exactly the same as the man holding the skipper hostage in the wheelhouse. As I watched, he stretched out and the rope was caught, held, made fast.
It took me a moment to realise the full implications. The men I’d thought were coming to rescue us were, it seemed, here for very different reasons.
A bad situation had just got a hell of a lot worse.
I slid back out of sight, took a breath. Coordinating an attack on a moving target, at night, in fog, took planning and manpower. There was money behind this, and with it came determination to pull the job off—whatever that might be. I thought of the casino deck full of multimillionaires. Robbery seemed highest on the list.
I put a hand into my pocket and pressed the transmit button on my comms gear.
“Sean, do you read me?”
Nothing.
“Sean! Are you there, over?”
This time, all I received in reply was a double-click through my earpiece. He could hear me but clearly did not want to respond, which meant he must be with people he didn’t want to alert to the fact he was wired. I reached for the transmit button and nearly pressed it so I could give him a bit of a mouthful about how we had bigger problems right now. Then I bit back my anger. He didn’t have all the facts, and staying covert might well prove to be our best course of action.
“Sean, we are being boarded by a shitload of armed hostiles. Control of the ship’s been lost. I repeat—armed hostiles have taken control of the ship,” I said in an urgent whisper. “Get Dyer—right now. And if he’s not with you, find him and get him out of there. Move, Sergeant!”
There was a pause, then another double-click through my earpiece. I just had to hope it wasn’t some glitch on the network giving me a false positive.
I checked around me, stepped around the corner of a bulkhead and flattened against the superstructure again. The way it was vibrating suggested that the Miss Francis was moving fast, picking up speed. Her shallow draught made her seem to skip over the darkened water rather than punch through it.
I pulled out my cellphone, started to dial a number.
No service.
The phones Parker issued to all his personnel were top of the line with the latest bandwidth technology. They’d been chosen specifically because they could pick up a signal where other, older models wouldn’t get a sniff of a line out.
Not this time.
I held the phone up, stepped a little further out from the superstructure as if that might be shielding it in some way.
Nothing.
Of course there isn’t, said a cynical voice inside my head. You think they would have left you with your cellphones if they hadn’t already jammed them?
The small handheld jammers only had an operating radius of around eight or nine metres—not big enough to cover the entire ship. The more simple devices blocked either incoming or outgoing signals, which were on different frequencies. But to combat sophisticated cellphones—the ones that hopped networks looking for an open line—they’d have to be blocking all cell frequencies at once.
The cops used jammers powerful enough to blank out everything within a one-mile radius. The Mississippi was wide enough so that if a unit of that type was on board somewhere it would cover us as we moved but not black out great chunks of New Orleans as well. That would attract entirely the wrong kind of attention.
I set the volume control down to vibrate only, just in case, and shoved the useless cellphone back in my pocket.
OK, time to improvise.
Thirty-six
Getting back to the casino deck meant dodging armed figures on the way there. I ran on the balls of my feet, grateful I’d worn soft-soled shoes. I’d thought I’d be protecting the deck, not my own life.
Half of me was convinced they would have secured the crowd already. But the other half knew that wasn’t what I would have done. Making sure the rest of the boat was fully under control would have been my priority, rounding up the crew and any stragglers first, and leaving the bulk of my would-be hostages contained and unaware in the casino. Why bother guarding them when they could be left to their own devices until I was ready to take them down?
Shit—why did you have to go thinking in those terms, Fox?
The most straightforward route to the casino deck was down the main stairwell, but as I headed for that I heard voices, booted feet. It seemed that not everyone was bothered about damaging the Miss Francis’s plank decking.
I dived for the nearest doorway and grabbed at the handle. It turned. I shoved through, found myself in what looked like a crew cabin, a tiny space with a bunk and a one-place table, and hanging space between them. A spatter of photographs was tacked to the bulkhead above the table—a woman and a couple of small children, a long-legged shaggy dog who seemed keener than any of them to be in front of the camera.
I heard the boots approaching, moved back away from the windows as they slowed outside. Some people just had the hunter instinct, were able to sense prey on an almost subconscious level. I stepped back again, silently, and burrowed my way into the clothes hanging between table and bunk. If he took a cursory glance he would miss me. Anything more I’d deal with when I had to.
Inside my head I was still cursing the fact I didn’t have a weapon. It had become so second-nature to carry the SIG that I realised the lack of it was distracting me. My reliance had become a handicap instead of a freedom.
I shook it off, tried to concentrate instead on what I did have. On the table was a pen and pad with an almost unintelligible To Do list scrawled across it. I reached out, plucked the pen off the pad.
The cabin door opened—a crack that widened very slowly. I shifted my grip on the pen, readying it so that it both reinforced my fist and protruded from my clenched fingers as a kubotan. I found that although my body was revving, my mind was suddenly cold and calm.
Come on, I found myself willing him. Come on in. Come closer.
Close enough for me to strike.
Close enough to kill.
The man took a step forwards. I had one foot braced against the base of the wall behind me as a springboard now, poised, tense. I could feel his wariness, his caution. Could almost smell it. As if his own instincts were warning him of danger but he could not quite identify the source.
Through a gap between a pair of old jeans and a work shirt, I could see the man standing just inside the cabin door, one hand still on the open handle and the other wrapped around his MP5K. His head was tilted as if he tasted the air f
or trace of me. But like the man in the wheelhouse he wore a balaclava which prevented me gauging anything from his features.
For maybe ten seconds we stayed like that, frozen. Then the man took another step and reached to nudge aside the clothing on the rack in front of my face with the muzzle of the gun. He let go of the door handle and the door began to swing shut behind him.
As soon as it closes, you’re mine . . .
The door never closed.
A moment before it would have latched, a booted foot was stuck inside the frame.
“You looking to lie down on the job, huh, Sullivan?” demanded the newcomer. “Get on with it for Chrissakes, or we’ll be running behind schedule.”
