Laura felt the world tilt subtly beneath •her feet. A river rush of ballast tanks and the distant whir of motors. The sub was diving. Then a startling junkyard chorus of pops, harsh creaks, glass-bottle clinking, as pressure began to bite into the hull.
Through the chamber into another room flooded with clean white light. Supersharp fluorescents overhead, that strange laserish light of three-peak spectrum radiance, casting everything into edgy superrealism. Some kind of control room, with a Christmas-tree profusion of machinery. Vast tilted consoles loomed, with banks of switches, flickering readouts, needle-twitching glassy dials. Sailors with short, neat haircuts sat before them in sumptuous padded swivel chairs.
The room was full of crewmen-she kept noticing more and more of them, their heads peeking out through dense clusters of piping and monitors. The room was jammed floor to ceiling with equipment and she couldn't find the walls. There were men in it elbow to elbow, crammed into arcane little ergonomic nooks. People sockets.
Acceleration hit them; Laura staggered a little. Somewhere, a faint high-pitched whine and a liquid trembling as the great steel mass picked up speed.
Just before her was a sunken area about the size of a bathtub. A man sat in it, wearing bulging padded headphones and clutching a knobbed steering wheel. He was like a child's doll surrounded by pricey stereo equipment. Just above his head was a gray gasketed lump with the stenciled legend
ANTI-COLLISION LIGHT-SWITCH TO FLASH. He was staring fixedly at half a dozen round glass gauges.
This was the pilot, Laura thought. No way to look outside a submarine. Just dials.
Footsteps on a curved stairway at the back of the room- someone coming down from the upper deck. "Hesseltine?"
"Yo!" said Henderson cheerfully. He tugged Laura along by the wrist, and she slammed her elbow jarringly into a vertical column. "Come on," he insisted, dragging her.
They threaded the maze, to meet their interrogator. The new man was portly, with black curled hair, pouting lips, his eyes heavy-lidded and solemn. He wore shoulder tabs, elabo- rate sleeve insignia, and a round black-brimmed sailor's cap with gold lettering. REPUBLIQUE DE MALI. He shook Henderson
Hesseltine's hand. Maddeningly, the two of them began speaking fluent French.
They climbed the spiral stairs, walked down a long dim stifling corridor. Hesseltine's shoes squelched loudly. They chattered in French, with enthusiasm.
The officer showed them into a set of narrow shower stalls.
"Great," said Hesseltine, stepping in and pulling Laura after him. For the first time, he let go of her wrist. "You up to taking your own shower, girl? Or do I have to help?"
Laura stared at him mutely.
"Relax," Hesseltine said. He zipped out of his utility vest.
"You're with the good guys now. They're gonna bring us something new to wear. Later we'll eat." He smiled at her, saw it wasn't working, and glowered. "Look. What were you doing on that ship? You didn't turn data banker, did you?
Some kind of double-agent scam?"
"No, of course not!"
"You got some special reason to regret those criminals?"
The moral vacuity in it stunned her. They were human beings. "No... " she blurted, almost involuntarily.
Hesseltine pulled off his shirt, revealing a narrow suntanned chest densely packed with muscle.
She stole a sidelong glance at his utility vest. She knew he had a gun in it somewhere.
He caught her looking and his face hardened. "Look.
We'll make this simple. Get in the shower stall and don't come out till I say. Or else."
She got into the shower and shut its door and turned it on.
She stayed in it for ten minutes, while it squeezed out maybe a quart of buzzing ultrasonic mist. She rinsed salt from what was left of her clothes and ran some thin acrid soap through her hair.
"Okay," Hesseltine shouted at her. She stepped out,-wear- ing .the raincoat again. Hesseltine was neatly groomed. He wore a midnight-blue naval uniform and was lacing his deck shoes. Someone had laid out a gray terry-cloth sweatsuit for her: drawstring pants, a hooded pullover.
She stepped into the pants, turned her back on him, threw off the raincoat, and tunneled quickly into the pullover. She turned back, saw that he had been watching her in the mirror.
Not with lust or even appreciation-there was a chill, vacant look on his face, like an evil child methodically killing a bug.
As she turned back, the look vanished like a card trick.
He'd never sneaked a glimpse at all. Hesseltine was a gentleman. This was an embarrassing but necessary situation that the two of them were working through like adults. Somehow
Hesseltine was managing to say all this to her, while bent over and tying his shoes. The lie was radiating out of him. Out of his pores, like sweat.
A sailor waited for them outside, a wiry little veteran with a gray mustache and faraway eyes. He led them aft to a tiny cabin, where the hull formed a rounded, sloping roof. The place was about the size of a garden tool shed. Four deathly pale sailors, with their sleeves rolled up and collars open, were sitting at a tiny cafe table, silently playing a checker game.
The French-speaking officer was there. "Sit down," he said in English. Laura sat on a cramped wall bench, close enough to one of the four sailors that she smelled his floral deodorant.
Across the cabin, stuck to the curved ceiling, were idealized portrait posters of men in elaborate uniforms. She had a quick look at two of the names: DE GAULLE, JARUZELSKI.
Meaningless.
"My name is Baptiste," said the sailor. "Political Officer aboard this vessel. We are to have a discussion." Pause, for two beats. "Would you like some tea?"
"Yes," Laura said. The mist-shower hadn't offered enough for drinking. Her throat felt leathery with seawater and shock.
She felt a sudden trembling shoot through her.
She didn't delude herself that this was a situation she could handle. She was in the hands of murderers. It surprised her that they would pretend to consult her about her own fate.
They must want something from her, though. Hesseltine's lean, weasely face had a look on it like something she would have scraped from a boot. She wondered how badly she wanted to live. What she was willing to do for it.
Hesseltine laughed at her: "Don't look that way, uh, Laura.
Stop worrying. You're safe now." Baptiste shot him a cyni- cal look from beneath heavy eyelids. A sudden sharp cascade of metallic pressure pops rang from the wall. Laura started like an antelope. One of the four sailors nearby languidly moved a checker piece with one forefinger.
She stared at Hesseltine, then took a cup from Baptiste and drank: It was tepid and sweet. Were they poisoning her? It didn't matter. She could die at their whim.
"My name is Laura Day Webster," she told them. "I'm an associate of Rizome Industries Group. I live in Galveston,
Texas." It all sounded so pathetically brittle and faraway.
"You're shivering," Baptiste observed. He leaned back- ward and turned up a thermostat on the bulkhead. Even here, in some sort of rec room, the bulkhead was grotesquely cluttered: a speaker grille, an air ionizer, an eight-socketed surge-protected power plug, a wall clock reading 12:17 Green- wich Mean Time.
"Welcome aboard the SSBN Thermopylae," Baptiste said.
Laura said nothing.
"Cat got your tongue?" Hesseltine said. Baptiste laughed."Come on," Hesseltine said. "You were chattering away like a magpie when you thought I was a goddamn data pirate."
"We are not pirates, Mrs. Webster," Baptiste soothed.
"We are the world police."
"You're not Vienna," Laura said.
"He means the real police," Hesseltine said impatiently.