Kevin refused to leave his car on the street, so they had to walk eight blocks from a parking garage to the dock where Captain Jack’s tug was moored. On the way they passed two men, both drunk, apparently trying to kill each other. One was wielding an empty bottle as a weapon.
“Watch out for the bottle,” Callie said and broke into a trot. The sound of shattering glass reached her ears.
Kevin was right behind her. “God, I hate this place.”
They reached the end of the dock; Captain Jack’s tug bobbed in the water ten feet below. Kevin started down the ladder.
“Wait,” Callie said. “We need permission to board.” Kevin stopped on the ladder, halfway down.
Captain Jack stepped out of the pilot house onto the narrow strip of deck. Dark, bearded, nondescript. “Thousand,” he said tonelessly.
It took Kevin a beat, but he held onto the ladder with one hand while he fished out an envelope and handed it down to the skipper of the tug. Captain Jack opened the envelope to count the money, grunted, and then went back into the pilot house.
“That’s permission to board,” Callie said. “Go ahead.” The tug started moving the minute her feet touched the deck. Neither by word nor glance had Captain Jack indicated that he’d ever seen Callie before in his life.
Between the two of them, Captain Jack McNulty and Bette Wylie made enough that they could be living in one of the choice riverside homes out toward the western city limits. But they stayed in the waterfront district, both of them wearing clothes that looked as if they came from the Salvation Army. Captain Jack and Bette squeezed the eagle until it screamed.
The one exception to their tight-fistedness was Captain Jack’s tug. The Mary Sue was not one of the new larger tugs, but she always looked as if she’d come straight from the showroom. A shiny yellow and white craft without a spot of rust on her, she blended in well with the larger ships in the harbor. Kevin was crouched down, holding onto the deck rail with both hands. “I didn’t know there’d be so much motion,” he complained.
Pitiful. Callie said, “Have you figured out yet how we’re going to search the crew’s quarters while the crew are sleeping in them?” She was counting on Kevin’s turning back once he came face-to-face with the enormity of the job he’d planned.
But he just set his jaw. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Callie sighed. And pointed: “There she is.” The Sofia lay dead ahead.
Suddenly the Mary Sue veered to starboard on a new course that would take them out to sea. “What’s happening?” Kevin asked, alarmed. “Where’s he taking us?”
“I imagine he’s going out to catch the tide. So we can drift in without the engines roaring.”
The tug made an easy turn and headed back toward the Sofia. When the freighter appeared about the size of a football in the distance, Captain Jack cut the engines and the running lights. They drifted silently through the darkness, their only illumination the glow of the instrument panel inside the pilot house. Then they felt the slightest of jars as the tug’s side bumpers touched against the Sofia’s hull. Captain Jack knew his stuff.
He went to the foredeck, to what looked like an oversized harpoon gun. It shot out a rope ladder that hooked neatly over the freighter’s deck rail. “Three short, one long,” said Captain Jack.
“Got it,” Callie said.
“What?” Kevin asked.
“Flashlight signal. For him to come back for us.”
Ever the gentleman, Kevin allowed Callie to go up the wobbly rope ladder first. When they were both on board, the ladder’s hooks snapped out straight and the ladder retracted. Below, Captain Jack pushed off and drifted away.
Callie crouched down low, listening. There’d be a watch fore and aft, but maybe this crew wasn’t too conscientious about patrolling the decks amidships.
“Where are the crew quarters?” Kevin hissed in her ear.
“I don’t know.”
“Damn it, Callie, the night’s half gone! Where?”
“Listen carefully, Kevin. I. Don’t. Know.”
He swore.
Wherever the crew quarters were, they sure as hell weren’t up here on deck. The only thing to do was go below and start looking. “Come on,” she said.
They went down the first hatchway they came to, into a poorly lighted area that seemed to consist mostly of tunnels of pipes running off in all directions. Callie picked one and they moved forward.
It took them half an hour, but finally they found the crew quarters. The ship seemed dead; only once did they have to duck out of sight when they heard someone coming. The place certainly wasn’t bristling with armed guards, protecting something precious. That convinced Callie that only one man on board was involved in smuggling computer chips to Germany. The Sofia herself was concerned only with her cargo of good old Bulgarian farm machinery. They discovered one crewman snoring away, dead to the world, but the rest of the quarters were empty — leading to an inexcusable amount of smirking on Kevin’s part. Seamen lived in incredibly cramped quarters, so the searching didn’t take long. The snoring crewman didn’t wake up even when Kevin dropped his flashlight.
One hatchway led to a little cul-de-sac with two tiny cabins facing each other. The first was the captain’s cabin. He had a Middle-European name and he kept his log in a language Callie couldn’t even recognize. But no computer chip was to be found. The other cabin belonged to the mate. Kevin searched the arrow locker and the bunk, still thinking a little box holding the chip was lying around somewhere waiting to be found.
Callie looked through what papers she could find. The mate’s name was Heinrich Eisler, a German mate on a Swiss-Turkish-Greek-Togolese freighter with cargo from Bulgaria. After a moment she said, “What’s the name of the German company that ripped off Memotek’s earlier chip?”
“Berendsohn. Why?”
Silently she handed him a sheet of paper. It was a Berendsohn memo to Eisler.
Kevin crowed when he saw the name Berendsohn at the top, but then complained, T can’t read German.”
“Neither can I, but what it says isn’t important. That’s a memo, Kevin... not a regular letter. See — no full address or fax number or anything else you find on letterhead stationery. A memo.”
He got it. “The mate... er, Heinrich Eisler — he’s a Berendsohn employee. A plant on this ship?”
“Looks like it. And what do you want to bet Hal Stanwyck wasn’t the only string on his banjo? Eisler’s the key man. Nail him and the rest of the smuggling ring collapses.” She tucked the memo into her backpack. “Time to go, Kevin.”
“But we haven’t found the—”
“And we’re not going to find it. We’ve looked in all the logical places and it’s not there. But we have got evidence linking Eisler to Stanwyck.”
He looked dubious. “Illegally-obtained evidence.”
“Not evidence for court, but evidence for Memotek. Now that we know who Eisler is, it should be easy to—” She broke off in midsentence. “Listen!”
They both heard it: the sound of footsteps on the hatchway steps leading to their cul-de-sac.
Kevin looked around the cramped cabin with an air of panic.
“There’s no place to hide!”
“Stay here!” Callie hissed, and darted across to the captain’s cabin. One of them was going to get caught, but the other would be free to go for help. Who was coming, the mate or the captain?
It was the mate. Callie could hear Eisler’s surprised roar when he found the interloper in his cabin. Then there was some shouting in German, and then in English, and then a cry of pain from Kevin. Aw, jeez.