The optimum time for detonating it would have been when Parks and I stormed into the lounge. The blast could have put an end to us, easy. Surely Glenroy had been watching on the ship’s monitors. Why hadn’t he done it then?

  I looked at the red cylinders, duct tape wrapped around their middle portions. Dynamite, TNT, whatever it was. The metal contacts, the wires connecting them. More wires leading to the walkie-talkie in the middle of Jebailey’s chest.

  Was it just a matter of yanking off the wires? Would that defuse the thing? Or would that set it off? A better question: Did I have the balls to try it?

  “Please,” Jebailey said. “If you don’t mind . . .”

  “What is it?”

  “My nose,” he said. “It itches.”

  “What? You want me to scratch it?”

  “Yes, please. I’m afraid to raise my hand.”

  Nose scratcher to a billionaire. A money-smuggling billionaire. Ah, at last I’d found my true calling.

  I stood.

  “Where on your nose?”

  “Near the tip.”

  I scratched.

  “Farther down.”

  I scratched farther down.

  “Little to the right.”

  I scratched to the right.

  “Yes, there.”

  I scratched there.

  I was looking down on the cylinders now. I hadn’t seen them from this angle. I didn’t know what a stick of dynamite or TNT looked like. But what I was looking at, I’d seen somewhere before.

  “Thanks,” Jebailey said.

  I just couldn’t place it. The ends of the cylinders were covered with red paper that had been drawn together, given a little twist and tucked back inside the cylinder, gave it a kind of puckered-up look.

  “OK,” Jebailey said. “That’s good.”

  Like a Roman candle. Only it wasn’t a Roman candle. It was a . . .

  “Enough,” Jebailey said. “You can stop now. Please stop.”

  “Sorry.”

  I knelt in front of Jebailey again. I looked at the cylinders, all twelve of them. In making the contraption, Glenroy had gone to great lengths to cover a precise portion of each cylinder with duct tape. An inch from the bottom, an inch from the top. About three widths of the tape. He could have gotten by with a single wrapping. That would have easily held each cylinder in place and connected it to the adjacent cylinder. Or he could have wrapped the entire cylinder. But no. He had meticulously gone about covering up a specific section of each cylinder. Why?

  On one of the cylinders, a corner of the tape had peeled up. I reached out and took hold of it.

  Jebailey said, “What are you doing?”

  “Just taking a little peek,” I said. “Keep still.”

  I peeled back the tape, just enough to reveal the letter “D.” I peeled some more, got a “Y.” Then an “N.”

  Would a stick of dynamite actually have the word “DYNAMITE” printed on it? Maybe. Life does, after all, imitate “Roadrunner” cartoons.

  But I had a pretty good idea where this was going now.

  I peeled a little more and got “-,” a hyphen. That was followed by an “O,” another hyphen, then an “F” and an “L.”

  Vanna, I’ll buy a vowel please.

  “A.”

  Yes, yes, yes. All those emergency kits missing from the lifeboats? Glenroy hadn’t taken them to get rid of the signaling devices.

  I ripped off the rest of the tape.

  “Dyn-o-flare,” I said. “A Boater’s Best Friend.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’ve never seen the commercials? Pretty girl in a boat. Boat breaks down. She whips out her handy-dandy Dyn-o-flare. Shoots it off. Handsome guy comes to the rescue. Girl smiles at the camera and says, ‘Dyn-o-flare. A boater’s best friend.’ You’ve never seen that?”

  Jebailey just looked at me.

  “You really need to spend more time watching the Outdoor Channel,” I said. “You ask me, the whole thing’s kinda phallic. The girl. The stick. The guy.”

  “So that’s not . . . ?”

  “Not a bomb. A fake bomb. And a pretty good one, I might add,” I said. “Dyn-o-flares. Damn. I keep those on my boats. I knew I’d seen them somewhere.”

  I unwrapped the rest of the duct tape, yanked off the flares. I helped Jebailey to his feet.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.

  83

  With the ship moving and the hatch open, water was shin-deep in the marina by the time Jebailey and I got there.

  The tender was launched and ready to go. But there was no sign of the Whaler or Carl Parks. Fair enough. He’d manned-up when I’d needed him. And now he was gone. With a boatload of Halliburtons.

  The tender was jam-packed with passengers and crew. Some of the crew were busy launching the second Whaler so more people could get on it. I got a couple of them to help me wrap the provisions master’s body in a tarp and load it on the boat. I owed him that at least.

  The ship’s wake tossed the tender around and the passengers with it. They’d made room in the stern for Barbara to stretch out. Marie and Dr. Louttit were at her side. Barbara looked to be in pain, in the middle of another contraction.

  I ran to the side of the tender. I had to yell to be heard over the roar of the ship’s engines, the thrashing of the sea.

  “Barbara!”

  She opened her eyes, saw me. She held out a hand.

  Behind me, the dockmaster, a deeply tanned guy with sun-bleached hair, was facing off with an older woman. Her long silver hair was pulled back in a loose bun. She was crying, refusing to climb aboard the tender.

  I said, “What’s the problem?”

  “Says her husband’s still on board somewhere,” the dockmaster said. “Says she won’t leave the ship until we find him. I sent some guys down to look already, but . . .” He shook his head. “Have to get the tender out of here. Can’t take the pounding much longer.”

  I turned to the woman.

  “Who’s your husband?”

  “Linblom,” she said. “Hurku Linblom. We must find him, please . . .”

  The dockmaster said, “We checked all the cabins down on Deck Two. Nothing.”

  “I’ll go back down, give it another look. I’ll find him,” I told the woman. “But right now, you have to get off the ship.”

  She gave in. She thanked me. She took the dockmaster’s hand and let him help her onto the tender. It was bouncing around like crazy. The dockmaster reached into a pocket, pulled out a card key, and handed it to me.

  He said, “This’ll get you in the cabins down there.”

  I stuffed it away.

  I looked around. Where was Jebailey? I hadn’t kept an eye on him after we reached the marina. Now I spotted him in the storage area, struggling to drag a pair of big boxes our way. Computers. The provisions master hadn’t tossed all of them overboard. A couple dozen were still stacked atop a pallet.

  I ran to get him.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “The computers,” he said. “We have to . . .”

  “Screw the computers.”

  I grabbed him, pulled him away. He fought to get loose.

  “No! Please . . .”

  I hooked an elbow under his neck and hauled him to the tender and shoveled him on board. The dockmaster got on behind him.

  The second Whaler was loaded now. It was pulling away. Beyond it, I spotted two of the lifeboats bobbing on the waves.

  I was the last one left in the marina.

  “I can’t hang around to wait for you. Too risky,” the dockmaster said. He pointed to the boat bay. “Jet Skis. You’ll have to use one of them. Keys are in ’em.”

  I looked at Barbara. Again, she reached out for me. She started to say something, then stopped, her face contorting in pain.

  “I’ll be there!” I shouted. “I promise. I’ll be there!”

  I kept watching her as the tender pulled away and disappeared into the night.

  Then I ran off to find Hurku Linblom.

  84

  I ran straight to the cabin where we’d been held the first night, jammed the card key in the door, and pushed it open. No one inside. I yelled anyway.

  “Linblom! Linblom, where are you?”

  I looked in the closet, looked in the head. Nothing.

  I went up and down the hall, checking all the other cabins. No sign of him.

  The ship was surging now, moving faster, much faster, than it had at any time since we’d left port. And this close to the engine room, the turbines were louder than ever.

  Linblom hadn’t been in good shape when I’d last seen him. He was on medication. And he’d mentioned something about his heart, about recovering from surgery. For all I knew, his ticker had finally conked out on him.

  But why would he have left the cabin?

  I went back there. I stood in the doorway. I looked the cabin up and down.

  “Linblom! Linblom, can you hear me?”

  Ridiculous. Of course he couldn’t hear me. He wasn’t in there. He was dead. I’d tried to find him. But it was time to call off the hunt. I had to get off the ship.

  I turned to leave. And that’s when I heard it—a tap-tap-tapping. Metal against metal. Then something pounding. On the ceiling.

  I looked above the bed, the hole up there, where we’d removed the ceiling tiles. I stepped across the cabin, hopped on the bed, stuck my head in the hole. It was dark. I couldn’t see a thing. I squeezed my eyes tight, opened them.

  “Linblom?”

  A voice, weak, barely a whisper.

  “Here, over here.”

  I could just barely see him. Maybe ten feet away in the narrow crawl space.

  “Are you OK?”

  “Stuck,” he said. “I’m stuck.”

  I tried to squeeze up through the hole to reach him. Too big for it.

  “Hold on,” I said.

  I dropped down onto the bed. I stood on it, ripping out more of the ceiling tiles. I tried again. This time I made it up, got my shoulders and chest through. I grabbed some sort of conduit, pulled myself up a little farther.

  The new holes cast more light into the crawl space. I could see Linblom better now. It looked like he had somehow wedged himself under an AC duct.

  But what was he doing up here?

  I reached for him.

  “Grab my hand.”

  I felt his fingertips brush against mine. He was struggling. I squeezed farther into the hole. But I could only go so far. Eighteen inches of crawl space. Is that what Linblom had said? And I was filling every bit of it.

  I leaned, I stretched. I grabbed a finger, then another, grabbed his hand, got a good grip. I pulled. He groaned.

  “You OK?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Again.”

  I pulled, gained an inch or two, grabbed his wrist. Pulled again, got his elbow. Pulled again, and he was out from under the duct and crawling toward me. I backed out of the hole, helping him down, onto the bed.

  Linblom didn’t give me time to ask him why he’d gone up into the crawl space.

  He said, “We have to stop him!”

  “Stop who?”

  “Him, the one in the engine room. He’s going to blow it up!”

  “Yeah, blow up the Royal Star. That’s why we need to get off. Now.”

  “No, he wants to blow up both of them.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Yes, this ship. And the other one.”

  “What other one?”

  “I am not certain,” Linblom said. “But I think it is the King of the Seas.”

  85

  We left the cabin, Linblom explaining things as we headed for the stairs. He seemed to be OK, moving along fairly well.

  After the shooting broke out on Deck Two, he heard Pango and the waiters in the hall, heard them rounding up the male passengers and taking them away, going through all the cabins to make sure they had gotten everyone. Linblom hid in the crawl space and he had stayed up there the whole time, except for a few brief minutes when he’d returned to the cabin to retrieve his medicine. Then he’d gone back up to the crawl space and fallen asleep.

  “The pills,” he said, “they make me drowsy. But when I woke up, I was feeling better, much better.”

  And so he decided to explore. Having designed the ship, Linblom knew how the crawl space connected to other passageways where he could move about undetected. Eventually he found himself just above the engine control room. He saw Glenroy mixing the chemicals.

  “He was being very, very careful,” Linblom said. “So I knew whatever he was making was very, very dangerous.”

  The explosion in the galley sent so much smoke into the ceiling passageways that Linblom had to stay put until it cleared. He could see the monitors in the engine control room and follow some of what was going on around the ship. Not an hour earlier, he had watched as Glenroy punched in a new course. And he had seen the outline of another ship light up on the monitor.

  “Do you have any idea where we are?” he asked.

  “Just a few miles off the northwest coast of Haiti.”

  “Isla Paradiso. Always the last stop on the itinerary for the King of the Seas.”

  He told me about the ship. He knew all its stats, right down to its tonnage.

  “He’s going to blow it up,” Linblom said.

  And judging by the speed at which the Royal Star was moving, it could happen very soon.

  Limblom said we had no chance of directly confronting Glenroy and trying to wrest away control of the ship. He kept his rifle close at hand.

  “And there are long catwalks leading to the control room,” he said. “You cannot approach it without being seen.”

  “Can we get back up in the crawl space, above the engine control room?” I was thinking maybe we could drop down on him from there.

  “Me, yes. You, no. And it is doubtful that I alone could do much to stop him. Besides, that will take too long. It is a very long way to crawl,” he said. “We must go to the bridge.”

  86

  FRIDAY, 10:15 P.M.

  How good it felt to know that he was now all alone on the ship. Nothing to get in his way, no one who could possibly stop him from carrying out his mission.

  Glenroy had watched the man rip the fuses off Jebailey. A brave man. A man to be reckoned with. A man, Glenroy was relieved to know, who had fled the ship with all the others.

  The exterior cameras had shown the boats leaving the Royal Star, each of them loaded to the max. And since then, the other cameras—the ones that were still working anyway—had shown no signs of anyone. The boats were far behind now. Nothing they could do. Nothing anyone could do.

  Glenroy looked at the course monitor, the King of the Seas glowing bright at its center. Less than five miles away. Fifteen minutes and counting . . .

  87

  Leaving Deck Two I grabbed a steel bar, one of the discarded weapons left behind by the male passengers, and I carried it with me as we headed for the bridge. Whenever I passed a camera, I gave it a good whack. I probably decommissioned a dozen of them on the way up to Deck Six. Not quite as good as poking Glenroy in the eye with a sharp stick, but for the time being, the next best thing.

  Linblom seemed to think we had at least a slim chance of gaining entry to the bridge.

  “The main door, that is impossible,” he said. “But the bridge wing doors, they are vulnerable.”

  “What do you mean vulnerable?”

  “I mean, maybe with that bar you can make something break.”

  We headed onto the promenade deck and up the steps to the starboard bridge wing. The sight ahead of us stopped me dead in my tracks. Linblom had told me how big the King of the Seas was—the biggest cruise ship in the world—but I was unprepared for just how big that really was. We were still a few miles away from it. Yet it was as if I could reach out and grab it. The fact that we were seeing it broadside made it look even more immense.

  And the Royal Star was aimed directly at its midsection.

  Linblom stepped to the bridge wing door, put his hand on the window, tapped it.

  “Ah, we may be in luck,” he said. “My specifications called for triple-insulated Plexiglas. But Jebailey cut some corners here and there. This is only double-insulated. I suggest you strike it directly in the middle.”

  And so I struck. And struck again. I struck that window every possible way there was to strike it. Using the steel bar like a hammer, like a battering ram. Three minutes of bashing it and I got nowhere.

  I looked off our bow. The King of the Seas kept getting bigger.

  88

  FRIDAY, 10:20 P.M.

  Aboard the King of the Seas

  It was Captain Palmano who spotted it first. He had just bummed another cigarette from Perlini, his third one, and was lighting it when he happened to glance at the primary radar panel. A green blip on the screen, vectoring in on them.

  “Perlini!”

  Palmano pointed at the radar.

  All attention on the bridge had been directed to the pilot boats and the maneuvers close at hand. Now every eye was on the green blip.

  And in that moment of stunned silence came an instant and profound understanding—something was going bad, bad wrong.

  Palmano looked out the bridge window, tried to locate the ship. Couldn’t see a thing.

  He shot another glance at the radar. It gave the distance—3.2 miles. Closing at twenty plus knots. But no gadget on the console could tell Palmano what he didn’t already know: If the other ship kept coming, collision was imminent. The King of the Seas couldn’t get out of its way. The best Palmano could hope for was to lessen the blow.

  Palmano shouted: “Full on the stern thrusters!”

  Had to make the King of the Seas turn faster, avoid getting hit broadside, let the other ship strike the bow.

  The dozen men on the bridge leaped into action.

  “Get that fucking ship on the radio!” Palmano yelled. “Tell them to avert course at once!”

  He ran out to the portside bridge wing. The line of sight was better here.

  And yet he still had to strain before he found the oncoming ship—a black shadow above the water, heading straight at them.

 

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