by Sharp, Zoe
“Well, I kinda thought trying to regain control of the ship might be a good place to start,” Tom O’Day said cautiously.
I shook my head. “I’ve already been up to take a look at the bridge,” I said. “The skipper’s tied to his chair and they have a guy with a gun to the helmsman’s head. Without a weapon there’s no way you’re going to get a foot inside the door before somebody gets killed—probably one of us.”
Damn. I meant to say “you”. Not “us”—“you”. . .
I saw by the glint in Tom O’Day’s eye that the slip had not gone unnoticed.
“So, ma’am, what do you suggest?” he asked.
I shook my head again. “Oh, no,” I said. “You’re not putting me in charge. I was never an officer back in the army and I don’t intend to become one now.”
“Would you settle for a non-commissioned rank?” Tom O’Day asked. “I seem to recall a Marine Gunnery Sergeant who had your kind of attitude. He was pretty good at not letting a certain wet-behind-the-ears young lieutenant trip over his own bootlaces too often.”
He was good, I’d give him that. But then he’d made a fortune in business by recognising when to push, when to plead, and when to downright flatter someone into getting what he wanted. I just didn’t like being manipulated in any direction.
But how could I leave them to their own devices? Two men who might be in good shape but were still not in the first flush of youth. And both who’d had things go their own way for far longer than was good for them.
This is a bad idea, Fox. Quite possibly the worst you’ve had in a long time. But still . . .
After all, what else was I going to do? Hide behind someone else’s skirts in the corner of a cabin while two old men went out and fought my battles for me?
No way.
Was I going to go my own path, try to find out what had happened to Sean, to the others, and possibly have those same two old men get in my way while I was doing so?
Again, not happening.
I exhaled, long and slow.
“Are you happy to accept that this is an extremely risky enterprise, however you go about it?” I demanded.
“Yes ma’am,” Tom O’Day said.
“Of course,” Blake Dyer said at the same time.
“Good. In that case you won’t mind putting it in writing for me. I reached for the pad of paper on the tabletop, and the pen I’d picked up previously to use as a weapon against Sullivan, offered it to Blake Dyer.
He took it slightly dumbly. “What do you want me to write?”
“For a start you can make my dismissal as your bodyguard official,” I said. Just in case you don’t make it. I didn’t say the words out loud but from the hollow look on Dyer’s face I didn’t need to.
He wrote in a beautifully legible hand, a few quick sentences that were brief and to the point. He even added that my dismissal was nothing to do with my competence and that professionally he held me in the highest esteem. It was more like a eulogy than a legal document. He ended it with a note that I was in no way responsible for anything that might happen to him, then signed and dated it with a flourish.
Tom O’Day had been reading over his shoulder as he wrote. He took the pad from Blake Dyer when he was done and added his own signature, then handed it back to me.
“What now?” he asked.
I read through the note, folded it carefully into an inside pocket.
“We arm ourselves,” I said, “and then we go and see how much trouble two old geezers and a girl can cause these bastards.”
Forty
At first I thought the clicking through my comms earpiece was random static—maybe some kind of interference from the jamming signal that still rendered my cellphone a useless lump of pretty plastic. It took a moment before I realised there was a rhythm to the fast-and-slow staccato beat that I recognised.
Morse code.
Sean!
I jerked upright, startling the two men.
“Charlie, what—?”
“Shush.” I cocked my head, concentrating. It was a short repeating pattern, and gradually I was able to make out two letters, over and over:
— · — · — — · —
C.Q.
Not a message as such, nor a military call sign, but two letters sent out over the airwaves by amateur radio enthusiasts around the world, a question expressed in the most economical terms.
It meant not simply the letters C and Q, but phonetically Seek You.
I seek you.
I keyed my own mic. “Sean? Can you hear me?”
Y.E.S.
“He’s OK?” Blake Dyer demanded. I silenced him again with a quick hand swipe, then turned it into a “maybe/maybe not” gesture.
I thought furiously for a moment. During the time we’d been working for Parker Armstrong, we had developed plenty of code-words and test phrases. Words to check the presence of threat, of stress or duress. Besides anything else, Sean and I had once had no problem communicating without words. He’d always seemed to have very little difficulty reading my mind.
Before.
The problem was that I had no idea which—if any—Sean would remember. And without knowing who we could trust, I couldn’t ask him questions about before—about our time in the army together—and expect an answer that would tell me anything one way or another.
Supposing Vic Morton was the inside man? Supposing he was standing over Sean right now, with a gun to his head, to get him to talk us into an ambush? If I asked him the name of our commanding officer back then, for example, Morton would know if Sean tried to twist the truth. And anything that had happened since—since we got back together four years after my court martial—was hit-and-miss hazy in his mind.
Shit! Have to be much more recent then.
“Sean. You came to my room last night,” I said, ignoring the way Tom O’Day’s bushy eyebrows shot up, crinkling his forehead. “What did we do?”
There was a long pause. I tried not to hold my breath, felt the beat of my own pulse in my ears.
D.R.A.N.K. W.H.I.S.K.Y. came the reply, slow enough for me to translate it even with my rusty Morse.
Clever, too. He could have added an “e” into whisky without arousing suspicion from an American eavesdropper. The very fact that he did not suggested he was a free agent—for the moment anyway.
“Wait one,” I murmured into the mic, and closed the channel. “Sean at least is alive,” I told the two men, trying to keep my voice calm and matter-of-fact but unable to keep the relief out of it entirely.
“That’s good news, Charlie,” Blake Dyer said, putting a hand on my shoulder. The smile I gave him in return was more weary than I’d intended.
“Is he OK?” Tom O’Day wanted to know, galloping on before I could answer. “And what about the others?”
I relayed the questions, to which I received the answers Y.E.S. and O.K.
“Thank the Lord,” Tom O’Day said when I told them, and somehow I knew he was thinking of Autumn rather than his son. “Can he get them out of there?”
That was one question I didn’t need to pass on. “If it was possible, he would have done it by now,” I said. “You’ll just have to settle for him being our eyes and ears on the inside.”
Tom O’Day nodded, then started frowning. “‘Eyes and ears . . .?’ I thought Hobson said everyone had agreed not to come aboard wired?” He glanced at his old friend. “You were planning on cheating me at the casino tables, huh?”
“Whatever Charlie and Sean were planning, I wasn’t in on it,” he said, rather more quickly than I would have liked.
“There was nothing sinister, I assure you,” I said with a touch of bite. “We held onto our comms because we’re trained to plan for every eventuality—like a hijacking for instance.”
“You make a fine point,” Blake Dyer agreed at last.
“So, let’s use it to our best advantage,” I said, and keyed my mic again. “Sean, have these people said what they want? Is it ransom? Or robb
ery?”
I got two clicks to the second suggestion. The jewellery alone must have amounted to a decent haul. Still something didn’t gel for me. Was it really worth all this effort?
“How many attackers do you see?”
He came back with an answer of four.
With machine pistols against an unarmed crowd. I swore under my breath. Plus the man holding the skipper hostage and a couple of roving two-man patrols that made nine or ten minimum. A lot—especially when the only troops we could muster against them were contained in this very small cabin, without a weapon between us. If you didn’t count the pen I had slipped into my pocket.
“Have they kept everyone together or split you up?” I asked. Again Tom O’Day made an anxious gesture.
S.P.L.I.T. came the response from Sean.
Damn. “Split how?”
B.G. C.I.V.
OK, I could work out that one. The hijackers had split the group up into bodyguards and their civilian principals. On the face of it, not a bad idea to cut the possible troublemakers out from the herd so they could be watched more closely.
In reality it was both a sensible move and a bad one. Putting a group of highly trained professionals into a tight knot might have made them easier to cover, but it also gave them a chance to plan, to subtly shift into positions of maximum effectiveness. Four men covering the whole room was cutting it fine. At least one had to be watching the guests, which left only three on the bodyguards.
If they had any sense the hijackers would mostly stay at a distance to give themselves the greatest response time to any threat. That also meant they’d miss minor communications, plans being formed, signs of readiness. Most of these guys were ex-military. They all thought along the same lines.
It was almost a certainty that, sooner or later the captive close-protection personnel were going to try something. They had to—their reputations were at stake.
But if they did, this was going to turn into a bloodbath.
Forty-one
Communication by Morse code when neither party has used it for real since the army does not make for free-flowing conversation. I knew Sean wasn’t trying to be cryptic, just as I wasn’t trying to be slow on the uptake.
“Is Morton in with them?” I asked him.
N.O. came the immediate reply.
I frowned. “They must have had an inside man or they would never have managed to get aboard in the first place,” I pointed out. “Somebody had to nobble—or turn—the outriders in the Z-boats.”
H.O.B.S.O.N. G.O.N.E.
I pondered on that one for a moment—“gone” as in “not here”? Or “gone” as in “dead”?
Not dead, I realised, or Sean would have said so—same number of letters. So, “gone” simply meant not among the hostages, nor among the hostage-takers either. Hobson was simply not there.
“Well,” I muttered, “that would make sense, I suppose.”
“What would?” Tom O’Day wanted to know.
“Hobson’s disappeared,” I said. “If he was their inside man, either he’s taken his money and run, or he’s making sure nobody sees him colluding with the bad guys.”
Tom O’Day shook his head firmly. “Rick Hobson’s been with me for ten years,” he said. “I can’t believe he’d . . . do something like this.”
I didn’t say anything to that. Nobody ever expected someone they trusted to betray them. That had always been our advantage, coming in as outsiders. We didn’t trust anybody.
“Sean, when—?”
W.A.I.T. 1.
The interruption was messy, sharp. I could hear the tension in his fingers on the mic key.
“What—what is it?”
Nothing.
I swore quietly under my breath. Not quietly enough if the raised eyebrow Tom O’Day gave me was anything to go by. The guy had the most expressive eyebrows I’ve seen in a long time.
“How clever is your equipment, Charlie?” Tom O’Day demanded.
“State-of-the-art,” I said shortly, still trying to listen for the faintest click of Sean’s mic through my earpiece. “Good enough to escape your guy’s scanner anyway.”
He looked only slightly pained at that. “And where’s the mic?”
There was something focused enough about the question to be more than idle curiosity. I flipped down my shirt collar to reveal the mic on a thin neck loop underneath. With a little more work they could have disguised it as a piece of jewellery, although considering ninety per cent of the users were male, it probably wasn’t worth the company’s effort.
“It’s all wireless,” I said. “The mic’s either voice-operated or works from a pocket key—it looks like a key ring.” I fished my wallet out of my back pocket and opened it up. The main transmitter was the thickness of two credit cards and sat neatly inside.
Blake Dyer glanced at his old friend. “And here was me thinking your specialty was cryptography—codes and such,” he said.
Tom O’Day smiled. “Still had to know how to get a hold of the intel before we could set about decoding it,” he said. He peered at the device. “Things have come on a pace since my day,” he admitted, “but I would guess that thing has some kind of volume or sensitivity setting, if Sean can wind his mic up full you should be able to hear what’s going on at his end, save him having to translate everything for us.”
“If we leave the channel open, there’s more chance of it being picked up,” I argued. “And it will whack through the battery. You get about eight hours of talk time, but up to a hundred-and-fifty on standby.” I gave a twitch of my shoulders, tried to work out why I was being awkward and added grudgingly, “Still, I don’t expect these guys are in for the long haul.”
Tom O’Day nodded, accepting my acquiescence. “He only has to open the mic when there’s something you need to hear,” he pointed out reasonably. “At which moment in time I’d guess those people will have other things on their mind.”
My turn to nod. I forwarded the information to Sean, aware that he’d already caused the men holding him trouble. If they had any sense, they would have bound his hands, but they had not—or if they had, they’d done so in such a position he could still reach his mic key. Getting his wallet out of his pocket to fiddle with the sensitivity settings on the transmitter, however, was a whole different ball game. One that was likely to get him shot.
Maybe it was a good thing the hijackers were likely to be standing well back after all.
G.O.T. I.T. he sent back when I was done. W.A.I.T.
There was silence for a few long, agonising minutes, then suddenly Sean keyed his mic and held it open. Everything that was happening inside the Miss Francis’s casino came flooding through my earpiece and directly into my head.
Forty-two
“—Leave him alone, you bastards. Leave him alone!”
The voice that came buzzing through my earpiece had a Brit accent and, to my utter surprise, I recognised it as belonging to Vic Morton. I’d never heard him so intense.
Who the hell was he talking about?
The shouts were quickly followed by the thud of blows landing, someone hitting the deck hard. Then more scuffling terminated with groans and muttered swearing.
“There’s no point in fighting them, Vic, mate,” came Sean’s voice with a taut calm, but so loud it was distorted from being closest to the mic. “Trust me, cowards like this lot never play fair.”
“You can shut up, too. What is it about you fucking limeys—you just love to hear the sound of your own voices, huh?” A new voice, American, from somewhere like New Jersey if my ear for the accent was correct.
“Yeah, it must be a real novelty for you to hear someone not talking out their arse,” Sean shot back.
I sucked in a breath. Sean was letting his temper get the better of him. Not his usual reaction—whatever that was now. Either way it was unwise.
“You don’t shut up, you can take his place next time,” warned the man from New Jersey. And louder, to someone else off in a sli
ghtly different direction, he added, “Get him out of here.”
Did he mean Sean? I held my breath, listening to sounds of a renewed scuffle. Then Sean said, “What’s the matter? You don’t have the guts to kill him in front of witnesses? He’s the kid’s bodyguard—he’s just doing his job.”
Was Morton really getting himself worked over for Jimmy?
“Unless you want to join him, can it.” The threatening voice suddenly grew louder, lowered to a growl. Was that what Sean was doing—tempting the guy in close for the kill?
