“Your rifle, Felix,” he said. “How many rounds in the clip?”

  “Just one,” Felix said.

  More crew members had come to the windows in the casino and the racket from inside was increasing. They couldn’t get out—the doors to both the casino and the library were locked from the atrium side. The only thing that prevented the crew from breaking out the windows was the two waiters standing watch with their rifles. Their empty, worthless rifles.

  Still, there was no getting around it. Pango would have to go into the casino. Yes, he could bluff it. Felix and Jati could put up a menacing front, maybe keep the rest of the crew at bay for the short time it would take Pango to remove the dockmaster from the casino and find out where he kept the keys to the boat bay.

  But what if someone decided to be a hero? That’s all it would take, just one person, rushing them. And when there was no burst of gunfire to stop that person, then others would follow. Forget how badly Benny had been beaten. If the crew got their hands on Pango and the waiters they wouldn’t stop until they had ripped them from limb to limb. Yap-Yap and his men would take particular pleasure in it.

  Pango stepped to the doorway of the Galaxy Lounge. He saw Tony sitting in a chair near the stage, his rifle on his lap. The other waiter, Marcos, stood just inside the door. Pango got his attention, drew him aside.

  “Your rifle,” Pango said.

  He took it from Marcos, checked the clip. A half-dozen rounds.

  “What about Tony, his rifle?”

  Marcos shrugged.

  “Two shots, maybe three,” Marcos said.

  Pango looked around the lounge. The passengers were watching him, wondering what was up. He was surprised to see Sam Jebailey, sitting by himself, off to one side of the room. So Todora and the other man who was with her, Diamond, they were cutting Jebailey out of whatever it was they were planning. Interesting.

  Pango heard someone moan, saw the pregnant woman on the stage. She was in pain, struggling. Her time was drawing near.

  Pango needed Marcos’s rifle. But he didn’t want to take it with all the passengers watching, didn’t want them to suspect anything. He handed the rifle back to Marcos.

  “Two minutes,” he told Marcos. “You join me outside.”

  Pango stepped back to the atrium. He walked over to where Dr. Louttit sat by Benny.

  “When I return we will take Benny away, to somewhere else,” Pango said. “What medicines will he need?”

  The doctor rummaged around in his bag, pulled out two vials of pills, a handful of small aluminum packets.

  “For pain and the swelling,” the doctor said. “And antiseptic to keep the wounds clean.”

  Pango stuck everything in one of his pockets. He nodded to the Galaxy Lounge.

  “There is a woman in there who is about to have a baby,” Pango said.

  “Yes, Ms. Pickering,” the doctor said. “I met her and her husband earlier. Is she OK?”

  “Go,” Pango said. “Take care of her.”

  Dr. Louttit grabbed his bag and hurried away as Marcos stepped into the atrium.

  Pango waved for Felix and Jati to join them. He explained that he needed to open the door of the casino and get the dockmaster. He told Marcos to stick by his side.

  “Shoot anyone who makes a move,” Pango said. “Jati, you and Felix, I want you to keep your rifles on Yap-Yap and his men. I am worried most about them. Make them think that you will kill them if they try anything. It should only take a moment. All we have to do is get the dockmaster.”

  “Why?” Jati asked.

  “I will explain everything later,” Pango said. “You will see.”

  52

  FRIDAY, 12:20 P.M.

  Mixing the last ingredient, creating the compound, that was the tricky part.

  Glenroy had been at it for more than an hour now, down on Deck One, working at a bench outside the engine control room, not far from the turbines and the fuel supply lines.

  Just three ingredients. The first two came in five-gallon jugs and Glenroy had poured them into the big container on top of the bench. No problem with the first two ingredients. They formed a stable solution. You could slosh it around all you wanted to and nothing would happen.

  But the last ingredient, that was the bitch. If Glenroy made a mistake with it—and a mistake would almost certainly result in an explosion—then at least it would ignite the supply lines and turn the Royal Star into a giant ball of fire. Glenroy had guaranteed that by cutting one of the auxiliary supply lines. Fuel had spread across the floor and puddled around his feet.

  He worked slowly, taking his time, confident that Sonny could handle everything on the bridge. There was little that Sonny needed to do, really. Just make sure the bridge remained secure, keep an eye out for other ships, listen for the alarm on the primary radar panel.

  Glenroy had considered leaving his SAR with Sonny, just in case. But he knew it would be useless in Sonny’s hands. So Glenroy had put a fresh clip in the rifle, his last one, and brought it with him. It was leaning against the door of the engine control room, just a step away if he needed it.

  Glenroy had a walkie-talkie, too. If anything happened, all Sonny had to do was call him.

  Sonny had checked in once already, before Glenroy had even started mixing the ingredients, wanting to know when Glenroy would return.

  “Soon,” Glenroy told him. “Just sit tight.”

  “What are you doing down there?”

  “I told you. I’m getting the money.”

  “How much?”

  “Lots of it,” Glenroy said. “Bags and bags of money.”

  “And then the boat will come to take us away?”

  “Yes, then the boat will come.”

  “What does the boat look like, Glenroy? What if I see it, how am I supposed to know?”

  “It will not come until after dark. Don’t worry.”

  “Yes, but what if it comes early? I don’t want for us to miss it. What does it look like?”

  “It is a red boat,” Glenroy told him. “A big red boat.”

  Because he had to tell Sonny something, get rid of him, focus on the work at hand.

  Now Glenroy concentrated on releasing hydrochloric acid drop by drop into the big container on the workbench. Inside the container was a mixture of acetone and hydrogen peroxide. Not the everyday hydrogen peroxide found in medicine cabinets. That was a weak, three percent solution. This was industrial hydrogen peroxide, the thirty-five percent stuff, hard to come by without proper permits.

  How fortunate that Sam Jebailey had decided to build a “green” ship. The Royal Star’s wastewater system, praised for its eco-friendliness, required industrial hydrogen peroxide by the vatful. As for the acetone and hydrochloric acid, they were common cleaning compounds, used throughout the ship. It had been a simple matter for Glenroy to get all he needed without drawing suspicion.

  How fortunate, too, that Jebailey had chosen to shrink his ship’s carbon footprint by forgoing the diesel engines used on most cruise ships in favor of turbines that ran on jet fuel. Much cleaner, jet fuel. Much more flammable, too.

  Yes, everything Glenroy needed to make a bomb, a giant bomb, right here on the Royal Star. Including the turkey baster that Glenroy had stolen from the galley and now used ever so carefully, squeezing its bulb to dribble the hydrochloric acid, watching as the acid mingled with the solution, sparkling, creating little white flakes that were already collecting at the bottom of the container.

  A pint of hydrochloric acid to ten gallons of solution. Enough to produce nearly five pounds of deadly explosive.

  The Mother of Satan.

  That’s what the men at the house in Hialeah had called it when Glenroy had visited them. They had told him its real name, too. Some chemical name. But he had long since forgotten it. The Mother of Satan. That said it all.

  The same substance that Richard Reid, the infamous shoe bomber, had tried to use to detonate plastic explosives in his boots aboard a flight from Paris to Miami. The same substance used with success on the Madrid trains in 2004 and the next year on the London subway.

  The men at the house in Hialeah had shown Glenroy what just a small amount of the white flakes could do. In the garage of the house, there was a freezer and that was where they kept a jar of the deadly compound.

  “After it is made, it must be stored at ten degrees Celsius or below,” one of them men told Glenroy. “Otherwise—kaboom!”

  The men had laughed. Glenroy didn’t know who they were or where they came from. Colombians, he suspected. He didn’t ask and they didn’t tell.

  The men had measured out less than a teaspoon of the compound and put it on a metal table in the garage. One of them hoisted a concrete block on a pulley above the table.

  “Stand back,” the man said.

  He released the pulley’s rope. The concrete block slammed down on the compound. And the explosion rocked the garage, sent Glenroy reeling against the wall, covering his head from the flying debris.

  Just that little bit, and it had ripped the metal table apart.

  “No fuse, no detonator,” said one of the men. “A beautiful thing, yes?”

  Yes, Glenroy agreed, a most beautiful thing.

  “Twenty-five thousand,” the man told Glenroy. “And we will show you how to make this Mother of Satan, all that you want.”

  Glenroy returned to the roti shop off Unity Boulevard. His contact, the man from Trinidad, gave him the money. And later, when Glenroy needed more money, money to buy the SARs, money to pay off Pango and the waiters, the man never asked questions. He just gave Glenroy all that he asked for.

  Glenroy finished squeezing out the last of the hydrochloric acid. He studied the container, marveled at how the solution inside had taken on a life of its own, a terrible beast about to be unleashed.

  He checked his watch. It would take about six hours to complete the process, for all the white flakes to settle to the bottom. Then Glenroy would pour off as much liquid as possible and use a small gas stove to boil away the rest until he was left with about five pounds of powder.

  Then came the truly dangerous part. Even at ten degrees Celsius, the compound was volatile, particularly if something slammed hard against it. But at room temperature, the least little thing could set it off.

  That’s why Glenroy had waited until now to make it. He didn’t want to risk an explosion until the last possible moment.

  In six hours, he would separate the powder into five portions, which he would put in plastic bags and place around the ship. Three bags distributed around the forward end of the ship—at the bowsprit, in the anchor well, deep in the bow storage hold. They would explode upon impact. The other two bags would remain in the engine room, placed under the turbines and the fuel supply.

  Then Glenroy would guide the ship to its final destination.

  And ka-boom.

  Glenroy had practiced making the compound several times at his apartment in Miami. It could be finicky. The proportions had to be just right. It had always worked in the past, but he had never made such a large quantity as this. He was confident of the measurements, and looking now at the container, he could see the white particulates drifting down through the solution, just like they had on smaller batches.

  But just in case this big batch didn’t turn out, Glenroy had some insurance. He left the engine control room to check on it now, taking the stairs three flights up to the galley.

  He headed straight to the big walk-in freezer, opened the door. A beaded chain dangled in front of him and Glenroy pulled it, turning on the freezer lights. He stepped to the back of the storage area, making his way past big tubs of ice cream, crates of frozen chickens, sides of beef. The condensing unit, an aluminum box about three feet tall, sat against the rear wall of the freezer, chugging away. Glenroy knelt down and reached behind the condenser, finding what he had hidden there three nights earlier, hanging from a hook on the wall.

  What an ordeal that had been, Glenroy wrapping it so carefully in his apartment, taping it to his chest under his uniform, and then sneaking it on board the Royal Star, fearing all the while that it would explode and him with it. Then waiting with it in his cabin, waiting until he was sure all the galley crew were gone. The freezer was the only place where he knew it might be safe.

  And now he gently removed it from behind the condenser—a heavy-duty freezer bag containing half a pound of white powder, the most he’d ever made before now. If the batch in the engine room didn’t turn out, then this could do plenty of damage on its own. Placed next to the fuel supply it could easily cause an explosion that would destroy the Royal Star.

  Glenroy wanted to leave the bag in the freezer, but he needed it to be easily accessible. He didn’t want to just set it on one of the shelves. The seas would be picking up as the ship approached the Windward Passage. Something might slide around and smack it.

  The light chain.

  Glenroy gathered the top of the plastic bag together and tied the beaded chain around it. Perfect. The bag could swing freely, safe no matter how turbulent the seas became. And if he needed it, all he had to do was reach inside the freezer.

  He shut the door and left the galley, heading for the bridge.

  53

  FRIDAY, 12:25 P.M.

  “Your water still hasn’t broken,” Dr. Louttit said. “That’s a good sign.”

  “What’s so good about it?” Barbara said. “I feel like I’m ready to burst.”

  Dr. Louttit opened his bag.

  “Would you like something to ease the pain?”

  Barbara shook her head.

  “No, I’m going to try and hold off as long as I can.”

  “Oh, honey, please. Don’t be such a brave soldier. No one is handing out purple hearts here. Take what the nice man is offering,” Marie Lutey said. “What you got in there anyway, Doc? A little Valium? Some Vicodin maybe? Enough to go around?”

  “Sorry,” the doctor said. “I need to keep what I have for extreme emergencies.”

  “Can’t blame a girl for asking,” Marie said. She sized him up. “You married?”

  “A widower,” Dr. Louttit said. “Two years now.”

  “Me, too,” Marie said. “A widow, I mean. Almost three years. Bernie was the dearest, dearest man. Then his heart conked out. Just like that. Went to sleep right beside me one night and when I woke up he was dead. Never made a sound. But that was Bernie. Dear, dear Bernie. What was your wife’s name, Doctor?”

  “Ruth.”

  “Ruth, such a nice, sweet name. Like in the Bible.”

  “Why, yes, I suppose so,” the doctor said.

  “I’m Marie.” Marie stuck out her hand. The doctor shook it. “And I can assure you, Doctor, there’s absolutely nothing biblical about me.”

  “Excuse me,” Barbara said. “But maybe the doctor can give me an idea exactly how long we’re looking at here?”

  Dr. Louttit asked Barbara to bend her legs. He draped a shawl over them, began probing around underneath.

  Barbara tried to focus on something else. She looked around the lounge. The men were politely averting their eyes, trying as best they could not to intrude on her privacy.

  One of the waiters who had been guarding them had stepped out of the lounge a few moments earlier. The other waiter, Tony, had moved away from the stage and was watching over them from the doorway. He was jittery and kept glancing out to the atrium, as if something was going on out there.

  Dr. Louttit finished his inspection down below.

  “You’re about five centimeters dilated,” he said. “Some discharge. How far apart did you say the contractions were?”

  Marie answered before Barbara could.

  “About six minutes,” she said, giving the doctor a big smile and adjusting her chest just so.

  “Well, then, I’d say you are definitely into second-stage labor.”

  “But I’m only at about thirty-one weeks,” Barbara said. “I thought I’d have at least another month or so.”

  “These things happen when they happen, Ms. Pickering, the calendar notwithstanding,” the doctor said. “And right now, I’d guess that you are anywhere from six to fifteen hours away from having yourself a baby.”

  54

  FRIDAY, 12:30 P.M.

  Pango lucked out. The bluff worked. At the sight of the three waiters marching into the casino with their rifles, the crew members had fallen back. No one had offered the least bit of resistance when Pango grabbed the dockmaster and hauled him out to the atrium.

  The dockmaster was no pushover. Pango asked him where to find the keys to the boat bay.

  “Go fuck yourself, mate,” the dockmaster said.

  Jati slammed a rifle butt against the side of his head, dropped him to his knees. That had gotten his mind right. He didn’t put up a fight when Pango went through his pockets and found a key chain. The dockmaster even showed him which key was for the boat bay and told him where to find the controls to open the marina hatch.

  Now Pango was in the marina, unfastening the U-lock, rolling back the gate to the boat bay. A pair of skiffs, seventeen-footers with twin 150 hp engines, sat near the gate. They would take one of them. Pango wouldn’t be able to roll it out by himself. He would need help from the waiters for that. But at least he could load the suitcases now and be ready to go. He wanted their exit to be a quick one. Tell the waiters to follow him, then get on the boat and go.

  Pango moved down an aisle lined high with boxes, occasionally stopping to look under pallets for the missing rifle. Not that he really needed it now. He had taken Felix’s rifle. Still, it would be nice to know what happened to it.

  He reached the end of the aisle and looked along the wall near the elevator, looked at the exact spot where, not an hour earlier, Todora and Diamond and Jebailey had stood inspecting the nine suitcases.

  Now the suitcases were gone. Not a sign of them anywhere.

  It was too much for Pango, too much. He gripped his rifle, spun around, and looked down the aisle from where he’d just come. Nothing there.

 

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