Wired Kingdom

by Rick Chesler

  “What the—” Pineapple muttered to himself as he peered from a salon window, watching the melee unfold around them. It was pure chaos. The cabin cruiser had become a wayward fireball, still drifting in the easy breeze after being abandoned by all hands. Vessels lying in its path cleared the way, fishing the fated crew from the sea. Others showered it with their own fire extinguishers to little effect.

  And then there was the drone boat, which had taken on a passenger as it went back to circling the Blue. Pineapple watched in amazement as his crewmember—a shirtless guy with long hair in his twenties, whose name he couldn’t recall—stood on the drone’s deck, attempting to rip off one of its myriad antennae. Pineapple winced as he saw a wire aerial, bent all the way down to the deck, suddenly whip loose, striking the man across his back and head. The young activist went down and rolled off the deck, but caught himself on a support strut and struggled back up.

  Pineapple feared it wouldn’t be long before the FBI came to protect their autonomous investment. He switched on the marine radio, hoping to intercept some useful chatter. He was encouraged to hear that the FBI’s underwater unit was still fully engaged in the submarine rescue. As best Pineapple could tell there had been some sort of struggle in the sub’s control room, and the underwater craft now lay motionless on the bottom in ninety feet of water.

  Stein and his gunners on the bow no longer needed Pineapple to confirm the whale’s position. They were the same distance away that a recreational whale-watching vessel might maintain. What surprised Stein the most was that after all the commotion the Blue still remained in the same place on the surface, seemingly without a care in the world. Maybe whales weren’t as intelligent as people made them out to be, he mused.

  The man loading the harpoon stepped aside, making certain his feet were well clear of the coil of rope which would soon be unraveling at breakneck pace.

  The explosive charge was prepped.

  “Aiming . . .” his colleague said.

  “Whale is holding position,” Stein said for confirmation. “Anytime you’re ready.”

  Stein was afraid to take his eyes off the whale to look and see if anyone might be approaching them. He would have to leave their defense to Pineapple and the two other crewmen.

  “. . . and firing. Stay clear!”

  The discharge of the explosive grenade was but a mere champagne cork pop compared to the concussive blast that rocked the water at the same moment.

  The blaze on the stricken boat had reached its main fuel tank, causing a fiery detonation whose explosive force launched would-be rescuers from their decks. A nearby sailboat that had sustained a hit to its hull from a piece of debris began to sink. Flaming shrapnel rained from the sky.

  For the Blue, the shockwave meant one thing: dive. And that she did, moving in time to evade the harpoon’s grenade-tipped lance as it passed scant inches over her back. In seconds she had reached a depth of fifty feet.

  ABOARD KETCH ME IF YOU CAN

  “It looks like a . . . harpoon gun!” Tara said from behind her binoculars.

  “Impossible,” Anastasia said, scanning the fiery seascape from the ketch’s helm. “Where would somebody get one of those in the Western world today, unless it’s an antique?”

  “Doesn’t look old. Whatever it is,” Tara added, “they’re working fast to reload it.”

  “Where’s the Blue?” Anastasia asked.

  Tara turned her head with the binoculars, covering a swath of water between their boat and Pandora’s Box. Where their quarry had been seconds before there was now only a smooth patch of water with an oil-slick appearance known as a whale’s “footprint.”

  “I think it got tired of the surprise party and left.”

  “I’m afraid what those psychos might do if we try to get any closer to our whale,” Anastasia said.

  “Anastasia, Stein was once your boyfriend. Can’t you talk to him?”

  “You heard him the other day. He’s become too radicalized over the years. Probably piss him off even more to hear from me right now.”

  Tara took a deep breath. “If you can get me close to the schooner, I can try and neutralize the shooters,” she said, barely believing the words coming out of her mouth. Even if OLF had no other weapons besides the harpoon, she was on the wrong end of that firepower contest. Her best weapon would be the element of surprise. OLF would be on the lookout for law enforcement vessels and aircraft, not slow-moving pleasure boats. Tara wondered if the Hercules could do a high-precision strafing run, but she knew it was busy searching for the hijacked sub.

  “I can try,” Anastasia said, gauging the distance to the OLF gunship before turning the wheel.

  Tara trained her binoculars on the schooner. She could see the gunners on the bow, although she couldn’t make out their faces. They were searching the water, no doubt looking for the Blue. How close would the ketch be able to get to them before they took action?

  Tara flipped on her FBI-issue radio. Its stream of chatter told her that the underwater team was still very much involved with the sub rescue. They were preparing to put a dive team in the water to swim down and visually evaluate the situation on board the sub. Coast Guard vessels had also been dispatched to deal with the explosions and boat fires reported by dozens of terrified boaters. Tara’s eyes swept the area but saw no sign of the Coasties or any other assistance.

  It’s just me and this whale again.

  Suddenly the Blue reared her head above the surface halfway between the ketch and the schooner. Instinctively, Tara turned to look at the whaling ship, but her view of the eco-terrorists was obscured by the whale’s blow as it exhaled.

  “We’re in their line of fire! Get out from behind the Blue!” Tara shouted. Anastasia throttled the ketch’s motor into high and brought her boat toward the Blue’s tail so that they were no longer behind the dorsal area. By that time the mist from the Blue’s breath had cleared. Tara aimed her binoculars at the gunship’s bow.

  “Harpoon’s loaded,” she said to Anastasia, keeping her eyes behind the binoculars. She struggled to keep her voice steady. “They’re—they’re going to fire!”

  Tara took a quick look around. No support of any kind in sight. The Blue lay exposed on the surface. The schooner had drifted even closer to the pleasure boaters, ruling out any thought of firing on the gunners.

  Anastasia picked up her marine transmitter. Probably to call OLF, Tara thought somewhere in the back of her mind. A last-ditch effort at reasoning with Stein.

  There’s a chance.

  It took several moments, perhaps not until Anastasia said the words Pandora’s Box, for Tara to realize that the marine scientist was speaking in Spanish. Tara could not understand what was being said—the words were spoken too rapidly—but she could pick out a word or two that she recognized. Many numbers were spoken. They sounded to Tara like they might be an ID number of some kind, judging by the careful and deliberate way Anastasia spoke them.

  Tara’s mind reeled, trying to figure out why Anastasia would speak in Spanish to OLF, or why she would speak Spanish at all, for that matter, when Eric Stein’s voice broke through the speaker in English.

  “Wait a minute. I can see you. In the ketch.”

  Tara could see Stein peering back at them through binoculars of his own. His bewildered voice continued to pour out of the radio. “Anastasia? Juan and Fernando told me the code words, but I was expecting them to come from the seaplane pilot. They said he might call back.”

  “What happened to my men?” Anastasia asked. Then the scientist cast a quick glance at Tara, as if to see if she’d noticed her slip back into English.

  Tara’s blood ran colder than the ocean swirling beneath their boat. My men? At the same time, she was very aware that the harpoon had not yet been fired.

  OLF was waiting on the conversation, their Jolly Roger fluttering in a light breeze. It gave Tara the creeps, this modern-day pirate-whaling ship indiscriminately killing people in the waters of L.A.’s favorite marine
recreational area. And meanwhile, her sanctuary was the private sailboat of a woman she plainly did not understand half as well as she thought she had.

  “Like I said,” Stein continued, “the pilot left in the seaplane, and nobody knows where he went. One of his divers hijacked the tourist sub, which I’m sure you heard about by now. We had nothing to do with that.”

  “Juan y Fernando?”

  “They got spooked by the cross cut into the whale’s back and went ashore. Left about thirty minutes ago.”

  Anastasia continued speaking in Spanish to Stein. Tara noted the urgency in her voice. What doesn’t she want me to hear?

  Tara was forcing her mind to accept the fact that she had vastly mischaracterized the scientist when the conversation with Stein demanded her attention.

  “It’s my harpoon now,” Stein responded. “And you can speak in English now, Dr. Reed, I’m sure Special Agent Shores would like to hear this little chat. That is her on deck, isn’t it?”

  Tara gave Stein a wave. If the moron had a single viable brain cell left in his head, she thought, he would never fire on a ship.

  The scowl on Anastasia’s face didn’t escape Tara’s notice. “Fine, Eric, you can have it,” Anastasia said. “Just don’t use it anymore, okay?”

  She’s given up all pretense, Tara thought. Something is sure as hell going on here. For the first time since the exchange began, Tara’s mind went to the details of using her sidearm: the angle her body should assume to best shield the weapon from view . . . the simple but practiced motion of drawing it . . .

  “It’s already mine,” Stein said. “Your divers gave me all of their gear, including the harpoon, in exchange for saving their lives. Your pilot left them for dead, you know.”

  “Eric, I’ll remove the tag from the whale. Just don’t destroy it. Please. I need it to prove my father’s innocence.”

  “Yeah, you’ll remove it all right,” Stein said, voice dripping with sarcasm. “And then you’ll use it to enslave some other innocent sea creature for your own personal gain, so you can buy more luxury yachts.”

  “I don’t need any more yachts, Eric.”

  “You might if you don’t move that one out of the way. Prep the harpoon, soldiers!”

  “Eric, no!”

  “I’m telling you now to get out of the way. Agent Shores, you are a witness to that instruction. Move your boat or risk being hit. That is all. Over and out.”

  “Eric! You already hurt me once before. Wasn’t that enough? Eric!”

  Radio silence.

  The Blue was moving slowly on the surface now. Tara could see the gunners swiveling the harpoon on its base, tracking the beast.

  Anastasia had taken the ketch around the whale. They now motored straight for the black schooner. Tara could hear Stein shouting commands to his gunners. She watched through binoculars as one of the harpoonists gave the other a nod.

  Here it comes, Tara thought. She thought about taking a shot, just out of effective range, but were she to miss, there were scores of innocent bystanders just beyond her intended target. Not to mention that once they realized where the shots were coming from, it wouldn’t be long before that harpoon gun was trained on their little ketch. They were defenseless against such an attack. The risk was too high.

  “Can you shoot them?” Anastasia shouted, as if reading her mind.

  Tara was about to reply when she was interrupted by the shriek of an outboard motor being accelerated far beyond its ability to respond. Here come the vigilantes, she thought. They watched a small speedboat carrying four sunburned recreational boaters—all of them yelling with fists raised in the air—ram into the schooner’s bow.

  The collision didn’t do any serious damage to the much larger ship, nor did it stop the harpoon from firing, but the impact did distract the gunners enough to throw off their aim. The grenade-tipped harpoon splashed into the water just short of the Blue, slicing into the deep without detonating.

  Anastasia stopped the ketch dead in the water, unsure of what to do next. Tara didn’t need binoculars to see that all hell was breaking loose on OLF’s flagship. The rec boaters had stirred a nest of angry hornets. With the help of one of his men, Eric Stein dropped Pandora’s anchor onto the deck of the tiny runabout ten feet below. Tara winced as she heard a man scream.

  The vigilantes had had enough. Two of them tossed the anchor over the side while the man on the out-board put them in high-speed reverse, away from the schooner. Tara heard them shouting, heard the word “hospital,” as they retreated into the throng of spectator boats.

  And that was when the Blue surfaced alongside the ketch, not more than one foot away.

  CHAPTER 45

  ABOARD KETCH ME IF YOU CAN

  Tara forced herself to take a deep breath and exhale slowly. OLF’s gunners were reloading the harpoon again. The enormous whale had just surfaced at the side of the ketch facing away from Pandora’s Box, perhaps seeking shelter from the hunters. But even with so much happening, Tara’s brain continued to process details of the case. The sound, for example. She didn’t mean to listen for it, but as the ketch lay still in the water, its sails luffing in the light breeze, she recalled the unknown sound from the murder video, her mind matching the two.

  Sails. It was sails flapping in the wind, when Crystal died.

  That didn’t mean it had to be Anastasia’s boat, but because of her interaction in Spanish with Stein and the fact that she’d thought the Mexicans were on his boat, she was certain that if she looked into Dr. Reed’s past research trips to Baja California, she would find that she had hired Mexican pilots in the past. And that, in conjunction with the fact that she owned a sailboat, and that a sailboat could be heard on the murder video, was enough to put the detective on extreme edge.

  Tara watched Anastasia walk away from her, slowly and deliberately, to the ketch’s port side, where the Blue was. Tara’s hand was on her Glock, but the scientist made no threatening moves.

  Tara stole a glance at Pandora’s Box. The whaling crew was at the ready, but straining to find their target. Stein was gazing intently through binoculars. The animal was a good fifty feet longer than the sailboat, but its head and dorsal were blocked by the craft while the rear portion of its body hung down into the water. OLF had no shot.

  Anastasia leaned over the ketch’s rail and extended her right hand, which now held a small, rectangular piece of metal. She swiped it across the base of the Blue’s dorsal fin, extended her left hand over, and then stood upright again in the ketch . . .

  Holding the tag.

  Tara struggled to accept what had just happened. After all they’d been through—the helicopters, the boats, all of the professional divers who had been killed—Anastasia had simply walked over to the whale and plucked the web-cam from the giant without even getting wet. The small metal cylinder held in Anastasia’s hand dripped seawater onto the deck. For a moment there was no sound save for the splatter of the drops. For millions watching the scene unfold live on the web, the view the whale’s camera now afforded was bizarre, for they were looking not at water, but at the deck of a boat.

  Then at an attractive woman wearing a cap with the letters FBI, pointing the barrel of a Glock directly at the camera’s lens.

  “Hold it right there, Dr. Reed,” Tara said, her words picked up clearly by the tag’s microphone. Those watching online could both see and hear the action unfold. Tara was also aware that the device may well be capturing the details of her arrest procedure, and so she was hyper-conscious of the fact that she would need to do everything by the book.

  Anastasia froze. “It was me. It wasn’t my father. I’ll give you the tag.”

  “What was you?”

  “I wanted to get the tag because it proves that my father had nothing to do with it. Yes, he had an affair with Crystal, but he didn’t kill her.” Tara nearly winced at Anastasia’s use of the victim’s name.

  “Who did?” She had to coax it out of her. All the while, she braced herself
for the possible impact of a grenade she prayed would never come. Out of her peripheral vision, Tara saw the Blue still floating near the ketch. “If it wasn’t your father, then who was it?” Tara prompted.

  “We should get out of the harpoon’s range,” Anastasia suggested.

  She’s getting evasive.

  Tara knew she had to act. “Dr. Reed, you are under arrest for the murder of Crystal Wilkinson. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. . . .” When Tara read the part about an attorney being provided if one cannot be afforded she thought, Yeah, right, this lady will have the finest legal team money can buy. “Do you understand these rights?”

  “Yes.”

  Tara reached back and produced a pair of handcuffs. She dangled them from the hand not holding the gun. “I need you to turn around and place your hands behind your head.”

  Anastasia just stood there, looking like she wanted to say something.

  “Do it now, Dr. Reed. Nice and easy.”

  “I didn’t want to do it, you know.”

  “Do what, Dr. Reed?” Tara continued to address her formally, to remind her of the seriousness of the situation.

  “For years, I had no contact with my father.”

  “I know that.”

  “We had no respect for each other. I was a scientist and he was a producer of trashy Hollywood TV shows. And my mother and my father wanted to disown me ever since . . . ever since college.”

  “Your parents told me all that,” Tara lied.

  The Blue made short, breathy gasping sounds as it rested behind the shelter of the ketch.

  “But Wired Kingdom changed all that,” Anastasia continued, remaining still. “It brought us together again as a family.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Crystal was an actress on one of my Dad’s shows. I saw her on TV. I thought she was gorgeous and vibrant and captivating. I went down to the studio on a day I knew my father wouldn’t be there so I could meet her. I introduced myself as George Reed’s daughter and took her out for drinks. We hit it off and I dated her for a few months . . . until I found out she was also having an affair with my father, which she had kept a secret from everyone, including me. My mother began to suspect, but she never said anything to me about it. I think she was also happy we were finally a family again.”