"Mommy?"
"Yes, dear."
"When is Daddy going to come back and be with us?"
She sighed. "I don't know if that's going to happen, Melissa. We talked about that, remember?"
"I know, but I want him to come back home."
"I don't want to talk about that right now."
"You never want to talk about that."
"That's enough, Melissa. Mommy's tired!"
She looked up into the gray overcast, watching the wheel and plunge of seabirds. She didn't want to talk about it. Maybe it was time for that last phone call to her lawyer. It was time to end this.
"Daddy!" Melissa shrilled, standing on tiptoes and waving wildly. "I see Daddy!"
Nina looked down and saw Andrew McKay emerging from the glass doors to the cruise ship terminal and security area.
She resisted the momentary urge to wave.
It didn't look like he'd seen them up here in any case.
Andrew McKay crossed the pier toward the banner-bedecked gangway leading up to the Atlantis Queen's quarterdeck, and wondered again what the hell he was doing here.
Well, of course he knew. Nina's mother had explained it all to him quite carefully, in words a three-year-old could understand. The woman could be incredibly forceful when she put her mind to it — the perfect image of the rich, southern matriarch.
Nina had left him four months ago, and taken Melissa with her. Eleven years of marriage, flushed down the pipes for no rational reason that he could see at all. Nina's mother apparently thought that a little Mediterranean cruise was all that he and Nina would need to rekindle the romance and find each other again.
Fuck that…
Seabirds darted and shrieked, drowning out all else. He stopped and looked up at the enormous ship.
According to the travel brochure, the Atlantis Queen was 964 feet long, 106 feet wide, and displaced some ninety thousand tons, making her the largest, as well as the newest, of the Royal Sky Line's fleet. She was a damned floating city, with a passenger complement of almost three thousand and a crew of nine hundred, with so much glitter and glitz that passengers could spend two weeks on board and never see the ocean, never even know they were at sea.
Rich people doing rich-people things. He shook his head and continued up the gangway.
At the top of the ramp, a uniformed ship's officer greeted him with a public-relations-perfect smile. "Good afternoon, Mr. McKay," he said. "May I see your ticket and your passkey, please?"
McKay handed them across, and the officer made a note on his electronic pad with a stylus. "You're in Four-one-one-four. That's fourth deck, on the port side. Your wife and daughter are in Four-one-one-six, the adjoining stateroom, as requested." If he thought the living arrangements were strange, he gave no sign of it. "They both checked in about an hour ago. Would you like for me to page them?"
"Uh… no. That won't be necessary."
"Very good, Mr. McKay." He began explaining the need to keep his key card on him and that he should wear the plastic bracelet if he wanted to use the pool, the spa, or some other ship's surface where he might not have a pocket handy. McKay listened to the spiel, thanked the man, and walked on past into the ship.
He wasn't sure he was ready to see Nina just yet. Perhaps a drink at one of the ship's several bars first…
For Adrian Bollinger, this cruise represented a chance at a whole new life.
Tabitha Sandberg clung to his arm. "Oh, look at her, Adrian! Isn't she gorgeous?"
"She's all of that," Bollinger replied. "Not as gorgeous as you, of course."
"Oh, you…" She gave him a playful slap on the arm. "You're just saying that."
"No, Tabby. I'm not. Not now. Not ever."
They stepped through the glass doors and started across the dock toward the gangway.
A new life.
Bollinger had to admit to himself that he'd pretty much wrecked his old one. Trading shares on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange had been a lucrative life but an ungodly high-stress life as well. Too much money, not enough sense… He'd made mistakes. Bad ones. And he'd ended up as a guest for three years at a state correctional institution. His wife had left him; his daughter refused to talk to him. And they hadn't wanted him back at Tarleton Financial, not a guy with a prison record.
Somehow, though, somehow he'd managed to fight his way back. A friend with another firm, one of Bollinger's old competitors, in fact, had gotten him back on the trading floor at 11 Wall Street. He was damned good at what he did… and this time he was determined not to let the adrenaline or the stress get to him.
One day at a time. He'd been clean and sober for almost ten years, now.
At the bottom of the gangway, he stopped and turned Tabby to face him. "Happy us," he told her. "Not happy birthday, not merry Christmas. Happy us"
"You're the best there is, Adrian," she said. "Happy us!"
She sounded as though she meant it completely. Sincerity, Bollinger realized, was a damned rare commodity these days.
He'd met Tabitha at a party in New York City just a year ago, and she'd become an incredibly important part of his life… a constant reminder that there was more out there than Wall Street, more than stock quotes, more than work. She'd agreed to move in with him two weeks ago, and as a kind of celebration he'd surprised her with tickets for a flight to England followed by a cruise on board the Atlantis Queen. Tabby was something of an armchair historian, and a two-week cruise through the Mediterranean, stopping in at ports rich with history from Marseilles to Alexandria, was just what the stockbroker had ordered.
And why not? He could afford it. He'd gone from well-off to impoverished and fought his way back to wealthy. Money, he'd learned, definitely was not everything.
And now that Tabby was in his life, he could use his money to celebrate that fact.
"Good afternoon, folks," the officer at the top of the gangway said. He gave them his spiel and handed them their keys. "Stateroom Five-oh-eight-seven," he said. "That's four decks up, starboard side and aft. Enjoy your cruise!"
"Thanks," Adrian Bollinger said, grinning as he gave Tabby a squeeze. "We certainly intend to!"
Rubens' office NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland Thursday, 0825 hours EDT
"Shit" Rubens exploded. He stared at the bright blue screen on his computer monitor for a long couple of seconds. "Not again!"
Of the sixteen agencies operating within the U. S. government, the National Security Agency arguably was the most technically advanced. From the mammoth machines of the Tordella Supercomputer Center, to the secure internal server networks within the agency itself, to the various shared networks and databases theoretically connecting all of the various government and law enforcement agencies and departments both in the United States and abroad, the NSA had long prided itself as having the very best IT systems, personnel, and equipment of them all.
So why the hell did they have to put up with these system crashes that were becoming more and more routine?
He touched an intercom button. "Pam? NCTC is offline again. Get me Lowell on the phone."
"Yes, sir."
Charles Lowell was the closest thing the National Counterterrorism Center had to an IT head; he was in charge of the complex tangle of databases, some classified, some not, that were intended as a resource to be shared among all government agencies taking part in the War on Terror.
And the project had been a nightmare from the start.
It wasn't Lowell's fault, of course. The problem was that the database project itself was simply so big, so complex, and involved so many different programmers and design tracks that it was almost impossible for any one person to see all the parts and how they had to work together at once.