Without warning

by John Birmingham

  ‘You think so?’ Jules deadpanned, as they stood by a large swimming pool inlaid with a stylised shark motif. She was holding a solid gold putter in one hand and a white straw hat in the other, both items sporting the same cartoon outline of a great white.

  ‘Greg who?’ asked Fifi.

  Pete shook his head despairingly. ‘If it ain’t Nascar it just ain’t real for you, is it, sweetheart?’

  ‘What’s up with Nascar?’

  Before Pete could answer, Jules cut him off, clicking her fingers in an effort to bring the others back to reality. ‘Excuse me, people – end of the world over here. Greg Norman’s yacht getting all Mary Celeste on us? Let’s maintain our focus, shall we?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Pete. ‘It’s just, you know, it’s the Shark, baby!’

  ‘Stupid fucking game anyway,’ muttered Fifi. ‘Buncha fat-ass white guys in ugly pants, driving around in those faggy little carts…’

  ‘Fifi.’ Jules’s voice took on a warning edge. She was fond of her white-trash friend, but managing the bimbo eruptions was a full-time job.

  ‘Got it, got it. Maintaining focus.’

  ‘Come on, let’s have a little look-see,’ said Jules.

  She slipped her carbine over one shoulder and took out a handgun, a Beretta Px4, even though she wasn’t expecting to find anyone on board. They’d been calling out since boarding, but it had the same feeling as knocking on the door of an empty house. She knew they were alone. The ever-suspicious Fifi, however, kept a sawn-off shotgun to hand with a shell racked in the tube. Her thumb stroked the safety, ready to flick it off at the slightest provocation.

  The three of them walked around the pool, located on the second of four upper decks, the sun glinting fiercely off the water as it slowly sloshed around with the gentle motion of the boat. The tip of the Diamantina’s main mast rolled through a small arc a few metres away. By leaning over the polished rail, Jules could see the top of Mr Lee’s bald head a long way below. The pool looked to be about ten metres long, with four round, black stools peeping above the waterline at the far end, where they abutted a full bar with its own beer taps and all the fixings for a high-end cocktail party. A large plate of fruit salad, wilted in the heat, lay untouched in the centre of the polished hardwood bar-top. White padded cushions lay along both sides of the pool, with pillows scattered here and there. She could read Pete like a cheap novel and knew that it was all he could do to resist diving in and asking the girls to set him up a margarita. To move things along, she strode forward, taking the port-side companionway.

  ‘Hello,’ she called out once more. ‘Is anyone on board? Do you need help?’

  ‘Oh fuck… Oh, gross me out!’

  Jules spun around at the sound of Fifi’s distress, reaching for her weapon again, but no obvious threat had emerged from anywhere. Rather, Fifi was dancing about as if she’d trodden in something nasty. Which she had.

  ‘Oh goddamn!’ Fifi cursed again. ‘This is worse than rendered hog fat.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Jules, as she hurried over, just one step behind Pete.

  ‘Gawd, that is nasty,’ he said, suddenly pulling up.

  Before them on the deck was a pile of burnt clothes, out of which leaked a couple of gallons of the vilest-looking greenish black substance Jules had ever seen.

  ‘What is it?’ shrieked Fifi. She was losing it, badly.

  ‘I think it might have been the Shark.’ Pete rubbed at his face and gingerly toed another straw hat away from the mess. ‘Ugh… Hey darlin’, I really think you ought to throw those shoes of yours over the side.’

  Fifi shook her head, disgust acid-etched into her features. ‘Man, I don’t wanna touch that gunk. What the fuck is it?’

  Jules leaned over and peered at the toxic ooze. ‘I think Pete’s right,’ she said. ‘I think it used to be a person.’

  ‘So w-what happened to them?’

  Fifi lit up a calming Marlboro with shaking hands. The only answer to her question was the hiss of the Pacific sliding past the hull a long way below them.

  ‘How many of those things are there, do you think?’ she asked, tiptoeing over to the gunwale and using a pistol to ease off her deck shoes.

  ‘Careful you don’t shoot yourself in the foot,’ warned Pete.

  She shuddered. ‘Couldn’t be no worse than getting this crap on me. What if it’s like the Blob? What if I turn into that… stuff?’

  Jules could hear clearly the approaching edge of hysteria in her friend’s voice. She strode over, put a steadying hand on the other girl’s shoulder, reached down and pulled off the shoe Fifi had been trying to dislodge, before tossing it into the sea. Some of the oozing substance ended up on her hand, but she wiped that off on her shirt.

  ‘It’s gross, Fi, but it’s not the Blob,’ Jules assured her. ‘We’ll need to have a good clean-up if they’re all like this. It’ll be a devilish health hazard otherwise. What do you think, Pete? How many people would have been on board?’

  The Australian shrugged. ‘Dunno, sweetheart. At a guess, a boat this size, well over a dozen, maybe even twenty, but some of them would have been cooks, bartenders, cleaners, and so on. Perhaps even a caddy. There’ll be a crew manifest somewhere.’

  ‘Do you think he was on it, you know, when they got zapped?’ she asked, indicating the straw hat with a nod.

  Pete stared at the obscene mess on the polished deck. He looked very grim. ‘The Shark? I dunno, could’ve been. Unless he lent it out to someone, or ran charters. I don’t think he did, though. I read somewhere he kept this baby very much to himself.’

  It did raise other, more pressing questions in Jules’s mind. If it was the golfer’s yacht and the mess in front of them wasn’t him, then he was definitely going to want it back. But if it was Norman and they had to make a run Down Under, to put some serious distance between themselves and whatever had happened to the US, there’d be no hiding this yacht anywhere. It would be noticed.

  ‘Well, let’s just be careful where we tread from now on, I suppose,’ she said. ‘Fifi, maybe you could find a pair of shoes somewhere.’

  Fifi nodded, looking sickly, as they moved further up towards the bow. Another pile of clothes, a uniform belonging to a crew member, lay at the bottom of the steps up to the next deck, oozing the same putrescent substance.

  ‘Man, I am so not looking forward to swabbing that up,’ muttered Pete.

  ‘Maybe we should blow this off,’ Fifi suggested. ‘It’s freaking me out, guys. You know, this is the bit in the movie where you’re sitting there yelling at the screen, “Get off the boat, you fucking dumbasses!’”

  Jules and Pete both ignored her and stepped through the doorway ahead. A cool curtain of chilled air washed over them. The yacht’s climate control system was obviously unaffected by the loss of the crew. It kept the interior of the boat at a perfect twenty-one degrees Celsius. A small readout just inside the hatch confirmed the fact.

  Jules stopped in her tracks and whistled in appreciation. It wasn’t the shock of cold air that had pulled her up short, but the full-blown opulence of the interior fit-out. Unlike the Diamantina, where you could never forget that you were on a small boat, Norman’s yacht seemed designed to provide the experience of stepping into a grand European hotel at sea. Polished wood panelling glowed with a soft red warmth. Brass gleamed. Thick woollen carpets covered the floor. As she got over the surprise and moved on, Jules briefly caught sight of huge staterooms, lavishly furnished with antique tables and cabinets and massive, overstuffed armchairs. Oil paintings hung from the walls wherever they turned. Here a bush scene – from Australia, she presumed – there, an enormous portrait of four white dogs. A grand staircase connected the decks above and below this one, again looking as though it would not have been out of place in a French palace or a grand Italian villa.

  She counted another seven piles of clothes and organic matter as they explored.

  The surroundings seemed to overwhelm Fifi, who momentarily forgot her fear and
disgust. ‘Man, this is like a hotel or something,’ she cooed. ‘A real fancy hotel too, not just a Motel 6. This is more like a Holiday Inn.’

  ‘In here,’ said Jules, leading them into a private cinema where two rows of plush, royal-blue lounges faced a giant wide-screen TV. She thanked God there were no nausea-inducing rag piles in here. ‘Pete, do you think you could work some video magic?’

  ‘Mate, there’s gotta be more than five hundred channels on this thing,’ he replied, waving a black plastic remote control at the screen. Immediately, the sound came booming up, making them all jump.

  ‘News would be good, Pete.’

  ‘Okay, don’t rush me.’

  After some fiddling about, he brought up a news service. BBC World, according to the electronic watermark in the corner of the screen.

  ‘… broke out between riot police and residents of the largely Muslim suburb after a man was arrested for allegedly stopping cars and demanding that the occupants join in the celebrations.’

  ‘What the hell’s that about?’ said Fifi.

  Jules took the control from Pete and thumbed off the sound as she searched for a program guide. ‘It happened last time too.’

  ‘Last time?’

  ‘Nine/eleven.’

  ‘That’s great,’ said Pete as the big flat Sony filled with images of burning cars and shops. ‘But we need to move our arses before someone else tries to grab this boat out from under them.’

  Fifi, now fully recovered from her earlier fright, shrugged and hefted her sawn-off shotty. ‘Let ‘em try.’

  ‘Someone with more guns,’ he added.

  * * * *

  Mr Lee looked over the main controls in the bridge one last time, shaking his head. ‘Yes, we can do this,’ he said, somewhat paradoxically. ‘But not for long. We will need engineering johnnies, for begin.’

  Pete nodded. They’d just come from inspecting the lower decks, specifically the engine room, which – save for three more puddles of dark green sludge on the floor and their accompanying uniforms – had gleamed whiter and cleaner than any human space he’d ever seen before. It was like the photos you sometimes saw of microchip plants in Taiwan. Not a speck of dust or grease anywhere. The boat was running perfectly for the moment, following a computer-controlled track to the south, but it was such a huge, complicated piece of machinery that there was no guarantee they’d be able to cope if anything went wrong.

  He allowed himself a little Captain Kirk moment, swivelling in the main command chair as Fifi and Jules reclined on a padded bench at the rear of the cabin. Late afternoon light flooded in through the huge windows, bathing them all in a deepening golden glow. All in all, it felt more like they were kicking back at the Bellagio in Vegas than scoping out a hijack at sea.

  ‘We could get crew,’ suggested Pete. ‘I know some guys in Acapulco, and down Panama way. German Willy still runs out of the Canal zone. And there’s Stan Lusevic, and Shoeless Dan.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Pete!’ protested Jules. ‘Are we putting together a crew or a sheltered workshop for retired drunks and dick pullers?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lee agreed. ‘German Willy, too much drinking, too much willy. Other two – morons. Without shoes. No good, Mr Pete. No good.’

  ‘Okay,’ he conceded. ‘I take your point. But, Mr Lee, you’re also right about us needing crew if we’re going to be doing anything other than selling this boat off at the first safe port we can find.’

  Jules smiled wryly at him from deep inside the luxurious royal-blue padding of the bench, which occupied the entire rear bulkhead. ‘Pete, I thought we were just minding this old tub for the Shark.’

  The Aussie gave a sad smile in return and shook his head. ‘The Shark’s gone, baby.’ He spared a glance at the viscous stains on the non-slip floor where Mr Lee had cleaned up another two pools of human ooze; true to form, it hadn’t seemed to bother his first mate. ‘Almost everyone north of here is gone for good,’ Pete continued. ‘You’ve seen the news. If we’re lucky, this’ll be some kind of space-monkey invasion, because at least then we’ll have someone to maintain order.’

  ‘Like in Planet of the Apes,’ said Fifi, in all seriousness.

  ‘Sure, sweetheart, if you like. But me, I reckon the universe, or merciful Allah or the Great Pumpkin or whatever, sneezed and blew the good ol’ US of A right out of its arse – which, as we’ve seen, a lot of people think of as A Good Deal. But me, I reckon it means we’re about three days away from a Hobbesian fucking meltdown.’

  Fifi’s blank look spoke volumes for a formal education that had ended when she was only thirteen years old.

  ‘Thomas Hobbes, darling,’ explained Jules. ‘A Brit. He invented the idea of the violent clusterfuck, with everyone fighting each other. Like a Jackie Chan movie. Or a cage-wrestling free-for-all on the telly. You know, Smackdown or Spankdown, or whatever it’s called.’

  ‘Right,’ Pete agreed, before waving his hand in the general direction of the energy wave. ‘That thing out there, most people won’t realise it yet, but that thing has thrown us into a state of fucking nature, a war of all against all. And I’ve been wondering whether the safest option might be to ride it out in the south Pacific for a couple of years. Island-hop, trade a bit. Stay one step ahead of the chaos – because it’s coming, believe me.’

  ‘Already here,’ said Lee.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Pete, spinning in his captain’s chair.

  Mr Lee was standing a few feet away, splitting his attention between a radar screen and an enormous pair of Zeiss binoculars, mounted on a pivot stand, through which he’d been watching the southern horizon. He’d peer through the glasses, check the screen, and peer through the glasses again, finally grunting once, emphatically.

  ‘Twelve miles sou’-sou’-east, Mr Peter. Three go-fast boats I see. They making over sixty knots.’

  ‘Heading?’ quizzed Jules before Pete could open his mouth.

  ‘Straight for us, I’ll bet,’ said Pete in a flat, fatalistic voice.

  Mr Lee nodded. ‘Straight for us.’

  ‘They packin’?’ asked Fifi, suddenly on her feet, shotgun in hand. ‘You think I should go get the worm?’

  ‘Too far away, cannot see.’

  ‘They’re packin’,’ sighed Pete. ‘Come on,’ he said, pushing himself up out of the chair, ‘it’s started. And yeah, Fifi – go break out the worm. And get your cannon too.’

  ‘Awesome.’

  * * * *

  10

  PITIЙ-SALPКTRIИRE HOSPITAL, PARIS

  ‘Non!’

  The French girl’s shriek was a raw, animal sound. Within it roiled pain, violation, horror and outrage. Her face, a mask of dark, primal emotions, raged at Caitlin over the unwavering muzzle of the Glock 23. The assassin had long ago stopped counting the number of men and women whose last seconds she’d seen through crosshairs or iron gun sights, and she knew from that face that Monique’s cry was not a plea for life. It was a scream of protest at what had already been taken from her. Trust and intimacy and a whole world in which Caitlin (or Cathy, as Monique knew her) was a friend, not a liar and a murderer.

  A hot flush washed over the Echelon agent, dizzying, unexpected. She let her gun hand fall to her side, tired of it all. And she might still use Monique to get to al Banna. If that still mattered.

  ‘If you stay here you will die,’ she said. ‘Come with me right now, and you might live.’

  The emergency room remained a still life by Goya. The first cries of staff and patients had been silenced by the shots she’d fired into the heads of her would-be killers – or captors. As Caitlin turned for the exit, a spasm of movement passed through the onlookers, as each flinched away from the line of her gaze. One man in a white coat, a doctor most likely, took a few hesitant steps in her direction, but a shake of her head and a casual wave of the pistol in his direction arrested any further advance. Caitlin did not check to see whether Monique was following her as she exited the ER. She knew the girl would.


  Walking quickly but calmly towards a set of sliding doors, she stripped off her bloodied chambray shirt. The white vest underneath was stained pink but she hid the worst of it with a black leather motorcycle jacket, lifted from the corner of a litter on which a man with a heavily bandaged head lay unconscious. It was too big for her but would have to do for now. The guns, identical models, went into a couple of zippered pockets and she plucked the last of the sensor leads from her filthy hair. A roll of thick surgical tape from a nurse’s trolley went into another pocket. In the last few steps she turned and walked backwards, scanning the room quickly for any more pursuers. Monique was glaring at her with unalloyed loathing, but she was following just a few feet behind, victim of a type of Stockholm syndrome that Caitlin had seen and exploited many times before.