"I… see. It all seems rather comprehensive."
"It's also low-key and off the record, David. I can show you a letter from my boss authorizing me to see your system. If you'd rather not go that route, I'll let him know and SOCA can make a more… formal request of Royal Sky's board of directors."
Howorth could almost see the wheels turning in Llewellyn's mind. If he turned down her informal request, he might soon be dealing with a formal order — and questions from his own boss as to why he'd not been more cooperative with the government.
"If I say no," Llewellyn said, "do we have to send you home?"
She grinned. "Technically," she said, "I'm on vacation.
This is informal."
"And if I say yes.. will you let me buy you dinner first?"
"Plying me with food? I think I could manage that."
"Then let me see what I can do," he told her.
Pyramid Club Casino, Atlantis Queen English Channel 49deg 21' N, 8deg 13' W Friday, 1935 hours GMT
Rosie, bless her little Intel chip of a heart, was an unqualified success.
Jerry Esterhausen leaned against the bar, turned on his stool so he could watch the activity at the blackjack table. On the bar in front of him, his laptop was open, the screen showing the feed from Rosie's camera as she dealt out another hand.
The Atlantis Queen's onboard casino was doing a fair business this evening. Men in formal black and women in colorful gowns and plunging decolletage mingled with men and women in more casual attire, feeding coins to electronic slot machines, sitting around green-felt tables studying fans of playing cards, or hanging out at the bar. By far the largest group, though, had clustered around Rosie at her station in front of the broad, glass doors leading out to the after pool deck. Only three were playing; the rest kibitzed with raucous good humor. But when one human player decided he or she had had enough and stood up, another would slip into the vacated seat.
Esterhausen was flanked at the bar by Sharon Reilly, the Queen's CD, or Cruise Director, and by William Paulson, the Hotel Manager — or "hotman," in cruise ship parlance. The CD was in charge of the staff devoted to the care and entertainment of the ship's passengers — hostesses, entertainers, stage managers, fitness instructors, teen counselors, and all the rest who provided recreation for the guests. The hotman, in turn, was a ship's officer and the CD's boss, reporting directly to the staff captain, who was the ship's second in command. The hotman ran the immense floating hotel that was the Atlantis Queen.
"That," Paulson said, leaning over to peer at Esterhausen's screen, "is impressive."
The screen showed a Rosie's-eye view of her hands as she shuffled a deck of cards, jointed fingers coated in a thin vinyl skin that stretched and grabbed and manipulated as skillfully as the fingers of any human dealer. The earlier programming glitch appeared to have cleared up completely.
"So, can you operate the robot from your computer?" Reilly asked him.
"Sort of," Esterhausen said. "I can type in code to make changes to the programming, and I can control some of the gross motor movements with this " He tapped the tiny, rubber-capped controller in the center of his keyboard, a miniature joystick. "I can make her turn, make her move her arms, that sort of thing. But to do that I would have to use the t-gloves."
On the screen the cards were almost magically scooting off the deck in Rosie's hand as her thumb flicked back and forth.
"T-gloves?" Paulson asked.
"Teleoperational gloves. They look like thin rubber gloves. You put them on, plug them into a USB port, and they sense your hand positions and finger movements, transmitting them to the robot hands. That's how we trained them to do stuff like shuffle, cut, and deal in the first place. That's just for emergencies, though." He shook his head. "I can't deal as slick as Rosie's doing there. We actually had a professional gambler come into our labs to train her with the gloves. Those are his hand movements she's using, stored in her hard drive."
"Hey, Rosie!" a young man in the audience called out. "I think I'm in love with you!"
The robot's monitor turned to face the speaker, the female face appearing to look him up and down. "If I weren't bolted to the floor," she said in her provocatively sultry voice, "I'd take you up to your stateroom and let you prove it!"
The audience laughed, and a few clapped their hands. They seemed as entranced by Rosie's banter as by her manual dexterity.
"Fascinating," Reilly said. "But that means, if something went wrong, you could kind of take over for her? Work her like an electronic puppet?"
"Pretty much, yeah. Of course, what we'd probably have to do is hook up a black-box shuffler."
"I've seen those," Paulson said, frowning. "You put a deck in the top, it shuffles them inside and spits cards out one at a time. Not nearly as impressive as that"
"But we have one along as backup," Esterhausen told him. "Just in case there's a glitch."
"Hey, Rosie!" another young man called out. "Are those hooters of yours real, or is that where you keep your batteries?"
"Please, sir," Rosie replied. "You're making me blush!"
"Rowdy crowd tonight," Reilly said.
"I've seen worse," Paulson said, sliding off his bar stool. "Mr. Esterhausen? An impressive show. I think I can promise that Royal Sky Line will be doing more business with CyberAge in future."
"That's good to hear, sir."
Paulson walked off through the crowd.
"The house wins," Rosie announced as the blackjack hands were revealed. Rosie held a 19; one player had a 17, while the others all were over 21.
"I think I've just been screwed by a machine," one of the players said, laughing as he stood up.
Rosie held up one mechanical arm, the fingers working back and forth. "I'm sorry, sir. All I can manage tonight is a hand job."
That one brought down the house.
Ship's Security Office, Atlantis Queen English Channel 49deg 2V N, 8deg 13' W Friday, 2148 hours GMT
David Llewellyn led Carolyn Howorth up the steps and into a passageway on the Eleventh Deck, one level up from Kleito's Temple.
He'd fed her lobster bisque and shrimp scampi as the last of the sunset colors faded from the sky ahead, and talked about his job as head of shipboard security. After a phone call to clear things with someone — she suspected that the call was to Vandergrift, the staff captain — Llewellyn told her that he'd obtained clearance to take her to the Security Office. A handprint scanner mounted on the bulkhead next to the door admitted them. "You have these throughout the ship?" she asked.
"Only the most secure compartments," he said. "Security. The bridge. Engineering. The Purser's Office. Places like that. And only a few key personnel have handprint records on file." He pointed up at a familiar glassy black hemisphere mounted on the ceiling. "Smile," he said. "Big Brother is watching."
Inside, the Security Office consisted of a long room with security monitors lined up along one bulkhead. Four men and two women sat at the monitors, watching them as, occasionally, the view shifted to a different camera. Most of the monitors, Howorth saw, looked down onto passageways. A few showed decks outside, or places like the restaurant they'd just left. One of the men was watching an alcove beneath a ship's ladder, somewhere outside. The light was poor, but there was enough to see a man in a jacket and a woman in a blue gown in close embrace, kissing. The man's hand was roving at the base of her spine.
Llewellyn cleared his throat. "I don't think we have any terrorists there, Jenkins."
"Yes, sir!" the man said, starting. "No, sir! Sorry, sir!" He typed an entry on his keyboard, and the scene changed to the Atlantean Grotto Restaurant on the Eleventh Deck.
"The computer cycles from camera to camera every thirty seconds," Llewellyn explained. "Or the operators can deliberately override the system and look at what they want."
"Privacy issues?" Howorth asked.
"No security cams inside staterooms, crew's quarters, dressing rooms, or public toilets, of course," Llewellyn told her.
"But everything else is pretty well covered twenty-four hours a day. Yes, there are privacy issues. But it's a tradeoff. If we see drunks in a stateroom passageway, or someone locked out of their room, or an ugly confrontation, we can have security people there in a minute or two."
"How many security personnel do you have?"
"Enough," he said.
"Computer network security," she said. "You use Netguardz?"
His eyebrows rose. "Yes, we do. And how did you know that?"
"SOCA has its ways, David." She nodded toward a closed door at the end of the compartment. "What's back there?"
"Computers, and our magnetic keying machines."
"Where you create key cards for passenger's staterooms?"
"And every other door on the ship. Just like in a hotel."
She'd seen and heard enough. "Thank you, David. This has been most enlightening."
"So what will your report say?"
"Report?"
"You didn't con me into giving you this tour just because you like security cams," Llewellyn told her. "You intimated that SOCA wants to know about how we handle security on board."
"At some point, SOCA will want to establish a single security computer network, something embracing MI5 and 6, Scotland Yard, and a number of other agencies. It looks as if they could add you to the network with a minimum of fuss." She saw the look on his face and smiled. "Don't worry. It won't happen for years… not with funding at the levels it's been lately!"
She allowed him to take her for an evening stroll on deck, carefully avoiding the spot where the two lovers were kissing.
And in the locked IT room at the back of the Ship's Security Office, Mohamed Ghailiani pulled the last of a stack of plastic key cards from the magnetic imprinting machine and then typed in a keyboard command that erased the log record of his having made these copies. He'd gotten the password for that access from a friend in IT, Danny Smith, claiming he needed an extra master key for a rendezvous in a secure area with a very special lady friend who wanted to see how the ship really worked. Smith had only grinned and given Ghailani his personal password; the computer tech was known to have a weak spot for willing women, too.
There would be a record of Ghailani's computer access kept in permanent storage, and he could do nothing about that, not now. When this was all over, an investigation would note that Danny Smith had printed out twenty-five unauthorized master keys and Smith would point the investigators to Ghailiani. Khalid had promised him that the hard drive could be destroyed once he and his friends took over the ship, and that would ensure Ghailiani's anonymity.
The stack contained thirty-one master keys, key cards that gained admission to every locked room, every secure area, every stateroom, on the ship. With these, Khalid and the people he'd snuck on board the ship would have access to every compartment on the Queen. And he'd made the operation possible for them. Ghailiani scarcely cared anymore. All he could think of was Zahra and Nouzha, and whether he would ever see them alive again.
Chapter 8
Pacific Sandpiper North Atlantic Ocean 49deg 21' N, 8deg 13' W Saturday, 0805 hours GMT
"Good morning, everyone," Captain Jorgenson said as he walked onto the bridge, pipe in his teeth, a heavy mug of strong coffee in his hand. As long as he'd lived in Great Britain, he'd never gotten the hang of their mimsy preference for tea. Jorgenson had been drinking coffee, good strong coffee, since he was twelve. "What's our status?"
"Good morning, Captain," Dunsmore replied, rising from the high captain's seat behind the helm and stepping aside. "We lost the Campbeltown four hours ago. It's just us and the Is She now."
Jorgenson quirked an eyebrow at Dunsmore's use of the IshikarVs popular nickname. Most of the English speakers in the crew, Jorgenson knew, had taken to calling the Japanese vessel the Is She or, more formally, the Is She? Ain't She? It was a harmless and typical bit of merchant marine humor. Jorgenson preferred a higher standard of propriety on his bridge, however.
Perhaps Dunsmore caught a taste of Jorgenson's displeasure. Standing with his hands stiffly at his back, he cleared his throat. "Sir. The Ishikari is currently eight hundred yards off our starboard bow. We are on course, on time, on a heading of two-three-five degrees true, speed twelve knots. Winds are blowing a fresh breeze from the southwest at twenty knots."
"Very well, Number One." Jorgenson walked over to the radar console, where a seaman stood watch at the large, round screen. Like an air traffic control radar, it showed the targets within range each accompanied by a six-character alphanumeric code returned by transponders on board the targets. The display currently was set to show radar contacts out to a range of twenty miles. Ishikari, C7D34K, was the only other target.
"Let's see out to two hundred," he said.
The radar operator touched a control, and the display changed, suddenly crowded with returns representing ships, aircraft, marker buoys, and the cluttered noise of coastlines. Jorgenson recognized the Scilly Isles eighty-five miles due east and, beyond that, the tip of Cornwall, Land's End. At this point, the Sandpiper wasn't seeing with her own radar, which had an effective horizon of only about forty to forty-five miles. Instead, she was tapped into an international satellite navigation system, relying on radar plots relayed from NAVSTAR satellites in orbit. At this scale, the Campbeltown, M4F99D, was now visible, seventy miles out, and apparently heading back toward the Bristol Channel.
A second strong return was showing thirty-six nautical miles southeast of the Sandpiper's position, about a third of the way from the Piper to the tip of Brittany. The target showed the IFF code V5K34R.
"Who's that?" Jorgenson asked, pointing.
The radar operator didn't need to check the traffic code. "RMS Atlantis Queen, sir. Cruise ship out of Southampton."
"Very well." His eyes shifted to another target, one showing an ID code of XXXXXX. "Who the bloody hell is that? No IFF."
The unidentified target was eighty-five miles to the southeast, at the mouth of the English Channel, roughly between Brest and Cornwall and some forty-five miles east of the Atlantis Queen's position.
"No, sir. We've already queried them. They're ALAT."
"Bloody frogs," Dunsmore said with a dismissive snort. "If there's a way to screw things up, they'll find it."
ALAT was Aviation Legere de l'Armee de Terre — French Army aviation.
"Cougar, sir," the radar operator added. "They're on maneuvers."
Cougar was the name of the military version of the Eurocopter helicopter. "Did you tell them they were flying without IFF?" Jorgenson asked.
"Yes, sir. They told us to mind our own business, sir."
"Well, screw 'em, then," Jorgenson said. Straightening, he scanned the horizon ahead. Except for the Ishikari a half mile off, they had the ocean to themselves.
"Very well, gentlemen," he said. He paused to take another sip of steaming coffee. "Next stop, Rokkasho, Japan, by way of the Panama Canal! Let's open her up, shall we?" He looked about the bridge, at the men standing at their stations. "Ahead full, Mr. Dunsmore. And have Sparks inform the Ishikari we are going to eighteen knots."
And the Pacific Sandpiper began increasing her speed.
Munitions storage locker, Ishikari 49deg 2V N, 8deg 13' W Saturday, 0807 hours GMT
Taii Ichiro Inui was methodical and he was well trained. A lieutenant in the Kaiso Jeitai, the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, he'd worked with the American Harpoon antiship missiles for almost ten years and knew the deadly machines as well as anyone in his service. Working with the special tools quietly and with precision, he went from missile to missile where they lay strapped into their launch pods, removing the locks, pulling the yellow keys, and arming each warhead in turn.
Five done. Three to go.
Behind him, Kogyo Yano worked at the second part of the mission task, applying a fist-sized lump of C-4 explosives to four of the warheads, inserting a detonator, and attaching det cord to each, tying all of the charges together to a single battery and tim
er. The Harpoon antiship missile, with its 227-kilogram warhead, was equipped with a safe-arm fuse that prevented detonation of the warhead until after it was in flight, but Inui knew exactly how to bypass the safeties. When the C-4 charges went off, the missiles would go off in sympathetic detonation, all of them at once, over eighteen hundred kilos of high explosive in a single, spectacular blossom of flame and destruction.
A few meters away, a young seaman, Ryoichi Ikikaga, lay motionless in a growing pool of his own blood. Yano had dragged him to the spot after shooting him in the passageway outside, where he'd been standing guard. He would be missed soon. The two men would have to complete their mission within the next few minutes.
Six done.
The ship was pitching heavily in the chop, her speed increasing. Now that the small convoy was past the Cornwall Peninsula and out into the Atlantic proper, the two ships could increase speed to eighteen knots or so. It made Inui's job more difficult, but the deadly missiles were strapped to their pallets, immobile.
He hoped. An armed Harpoon breaking free of its straps and striking the deck just now would have unfortunate consequences.
Seven done. One to go.
The two men worked in silence. They'd planned this operation carefully, and there was no need for words. Last week, when the Ishikari had been in port at Barrow and most of her crew had been ashore, they'd even managed a walk-through, step-by-step, to check the timing.
Ichiro Inui had been an officer in the Japanese self-defense force for eight years, but his primary personal duty, his omi, lay elsewhere. He was shishon no Nihon Sekigun, a phrase translating roughly as "offspring of the Japanese Red Army."
He would observe that duty no matter what, even if it meant that he would die within the next few minutes.
Inui pulled the last key and turned to face Yano, silently holding up the bundle of yellow tags he'd removed from the warheads. Yano nodded, completed the preparation of his last charge of C-4, then said, "Isoge!"
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