The second officer was confused and a little irritated; it showed on his face. But by midnight the only look on his face would be one of death.
He would wait for the reply, which should come immediately.
“I’ll get out of your hair now,” Graham said, and he left the bridge.
The short alleyway to his cabin was empty, as was the starboard stairwell, which he took all the way down to the gallery one level up from the main deck, which housed the turbines and control panel in its separate space behind a plate-glass window. The noise was deafening.
Two men, including First Engineering Officer Peter Weizenegger, were seated in the control room, their backs to the main floor. One engineering AB, next to a tool cart pulled up to an electrical distribution panel directly below where Graham stood, was taking a measurement with a multimeter. He wore sound-suppression earmuffs.
Graham moved along the gallery catwalk to the center ladder, which he took down to the main deck between the two turbines. From here he could not be seen by anyone in the control room.
He stepped around the end of the turbine where it angled down through the deck. He was a couple of meters behind the AB.
Bang. The AB would fall. He was number four out of nineteen.
Keeping a neutral expression on his face, he walked across to the control room, and went inside.
Weizenegger and the AB looked up, startled. “Captain,” the engineering officer said.
“Is there something wrong with our electrical system?” Graham asked. Bang, the officer was dead. Number five.
Weizenegger glanced toward the AB on the main deck. “No, sir. Chiang is doing a scheduled P.M. routine.”
“Very well,” Graham said. He looked at the AB. Bang, the man fell. Number six. “Carry on.”
“Yes, sir,” Weizenegger said.
Graham headed topside toward the officers’ quarters, but he heard the music again coming from the galley. At midnight the cook might not be in the galley, but it was likely that his assistant and perhaps some of the crew coming off duty might be in the mess.
This morning it was Rassmussen, the cook, mixing pancake batter and frying bacon. He looked up when Graham appeared at the doorway. “Ah, Captain, can’t sleep? Son of a bitch I know how it is. Coffee?”
“No, I’m on my way to bed,” Graham said. Bang, the cook or whoever was in the galley would be down. Number seven. “Everything okay down here?”
The cook nodded effusively. “In my son of a bitch kitchen, it’s always okay.”
“Very well,” Graham said. He went back into the mess.
Four steel tables with six stainless steel stools were bolted to the deck. No one was here at this hour, but he had to count on at least some crewmen eating a midnight meal. Say three of them? Bang, the crewman at the coffee urn fell. Number eight. The two at their table were rising in alarm. Bang, number nine. Bang, number ten of nineteen.
Graham hurried up to the officers’ deck where he stopped at the chief engineer’s door. Bang, number eleven. He moved to Vasquez’s cabin where he and his girlfriend would be in each other’s arms. Twelve and thirteen.
Down one deck, he stopped at the doors of the remaining six crew members. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.
The Apurto Devlán had become a ghost ship.
Graham headed topside to his quarters. He took the stopwatch from his pocket and clicked the Stop button. Nine minutes and fifty-eight seconds had elapsed, and the ship was his.
SEVEN
Kirk Cullough McGarvey raised the air horn and blew one long and one short, the signal requesting the tender to stop traffic and open the New Pass Bridge. It was a few minutes after noon, the spring Saturday beautiful. Although traffic was heavy the bridge tender immediately sent back the long and short, that the bridge would be opened as requested.
A part of him was reluctant to return to the real world after fourteen days of vacation, while another part of him was resigned. Something was out there. Someone was coming for him.
Four days ago at the Faro Blanco Marina in the Keys, the dockmaster had come out to where the Island Packet 31 sloop, which McGarvey and his wife Katy had chartered, was tied up. He said that he’d forgotten to get the Florida registration number on the bow. But that was a lie.
McGarvey had followed him back to the office, and watched from a window as the man tossed the slip of paper on which he’d jotted down the registration number into a trash can, then made a telephone call. It was a pre-coms; someone was sniffing along his trail.
Yesterday, anchored just outside the Intracoastal Waterway channel near Cabbage Key, they’d been overflown twice around dusk by a civilian helicopter. He was certain that the passenger had looked them over through a pair of binoculars.
He’d said nothing to Katy about his suspicions, but that evening while she was having a drink in the cockpit, he’d gone below for his 9mm Walther PPK that had been safely tucked away since the start of the cruise. He checked the action, and loaded a magazine of ammunition into the handle, racking a round into the firing chamber.
When he turned around, Katy had been looking at him from the cockpit hatch. “Gremlins?” she’d asked.
“I’m not sure,” McGarvey said. “But somebody seems to be interested in us.”
Katy shook her head, disappointment on her pretty face. “I thought it was over.”
“Me too.”
McGarvey was a tall man, fiftyish, with a sturdy build and a good wind because of a daily regimen of exercise that he had not abandoned last year after he’d resigned his position as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Although there was no longer anyone to oversee his workouts, he went out to the Company’s training facility near Williamsburg as often as he could to run the confidence course and spend an hour or two on the firing range. Just to keep his hand in, and to see how his daughter Elizabeth and her husband, Todd, were doing. They were instructors.
He had quit the CIA after twenty-five years of service — first as a field officer, and then for a number of years as a freelancer, working black operations, before he came back to Langley to run the Directorate of Operations, and finally the entire Agency — because he was tired of the stress.
Good times, some of them. Good people. Friends. But more bad times than he cared to remember, although he could not forget the people he’d killed in the line of duty. All of them necessary, or at least he had to tell himself that. But all of them human beings, whatever their crimes. Their deaths were on his conscience, especially in the middle of the night when he often awoke in a cold sweat.
Because of his profession his family had been put in harm’s way more than once. It was another reason he’d quit.
Kathleen came up on deck, shading her blue eyes against the bright sun. “Are we there yet?” she asked, a slight Virginia softness to her voice. She was a slender woman, a few inches shorter than her husband, with short blond hair and a pretty oval face with a small nose and full lips.
“We will be if they open the bridge for us,” McGarvey told her. There were several other sloops, their sails also furled, and a couple of powerboats whose antennae or outriggers were too tall to pass beneath the bridge when it was closed.
“Then what?” Kathleen asked.
“I’ll give Otto a call and see if he’s heard anything.”
Traffic up on the bridge was coming to a halt as the road barriers were lowered.