She took more than an hour to cover a distance she could have walked in less than two minutes under happier circumstances. Nevertheless, she had done it. She now lay atop a stack of shipping containers three tall, directly behind the crane she had been watching. Teams of loaders shouldered lighter cargo up and down gangplanks, while cranes lifted nets high above the open holds. It was like something out of an old black-and-white movie, she thought, before catching herself. The “old” movies she was thinking of were not old, not for her, not for this time. Charlotte François might present as an exemplar of ass-kickin’ uptime grrl-power, but she was far too young to have arrived with Admiral Kolhammer’s fleet. She might have been taken in by them—specifically by her adopted mother, Dr Margie François—she might have been thoroughly assimilated to their culture and worldview, but she was not one of them. She had not come from a future that would now never happen.
She would have been old, possibly even dead by the time the Transition delivered the ships of the Multinational Force into the middle of the Pacific War. But none of that lay ahead of her now. Too much had changed. And more was about to change if she had her way. She holstered her weapon and memorized the sight of the cargo loading area around the crane.
She could see two armed men, Europeans, and so probably Russian, or at least Eastern Bloc. They stood smoking and talking, watching the loading process with apparent detachment. She assumed their main task was to secure the gangway which led up from that part of the dock to the weather deck amidships. While she observed them, they stopped and checked three crewmen who disembarked to help load an unbalanced pallet. The seamen cursed at half-a-dozen local dock workers who had been fussing around with the thick netting that had become entangled with some piece of machinery on the pallet, tipping the load off balance.
An argument broke out, and escalated to a point where the security men felt obliged to wander over and offer their two kopeks’ worth. For a moment it looked as though the muscular back and forth might even escalate to a fist fight, and Charlotte prepared to take her chance. But the guards were not just thugs, and rather than escalating the situation, it appeared they were talking everyone down from the edge. It was still a distraction, and she decided to take advantage of it. Swinging down off the top of the container, out of the line of sight from the loading area, Charlotte descended as rapidly as stealth allowed.
She had already chosen the load she would use—a wooden pallet stacked chest-high with hessian sacks full of coffee beans. There was a small depression in the center of the pile, small enough for her to lie in if she curled her knees up to her chest. As the sounds of the argument began to ebb, she moved quickly, using whatever cover she could take. The pallet was netted, which caused her a moment’s delay as she wormed her way through. With her fighting knife she opened up three of the sacks, carefully spilling at least half of their contents, allowing her to burrow in under the bags. It afforded her some cover from the view of the crane operator. She kept her pistol and knife in her hands, and waited.
An hour later she heard the voice of a dock worker as he scrambled up the netting to secure the cargo hook. She consciously relaxed herself against the surge of anxiety that wanted to stiffen her muscles and slow her down. She had the pistol ready to fire if needed, but the little Arab man knew his job. He secured the hook and moved onto his next task without fuss.
She felt a jolt as the pallet lifted off the ground and the crane carried her toward the main hold of the Mikhail Bulgakov.
CHAPTER TWO
“Sorry,” Harry said. “Not much of a date night.”
Julia Duffy tested her restraints, plastic flexicuffs which held her fast to the leg of a cot which was itself bolted to the deck-plating of the ship. She was sitting on the deck, the cuffs fastened behind her.
“A little bondage. A little rough-housing,” she said, trying for flippancy, but failing. “Any other time…”
She shrugged, trailing off.
Harry was fastened in the same manner as her at the other end of the cot. He was rubbing the flexicuffs up and down against the steel leg, hoping to wear through them with the friction. Julia had already tried that and got nothing for her effort beyond painful cuts on her wrists.
Harry was deeply distressed. She knew without having to ask. Viv was a friend, a mate as the Brits said, and they’d watched the Russian—Skarov—murder him. The others were dead too—headshots to make sure. She didn’t know why she and Harry had been spared but it might simply have been because they hadn’t been carrying weapons in hand like the others.
The others.
Poor old al Nouri, of whom she’d become quite fond in the few hours she’d known him. A villain, of that there could be no doubt. But one allied with their interests. And he had saved her back at the Hilton when those goons had tried to put a bag on her. Harry’s other mate, the strangely youthful-looking Angus Fontaine, wasn’t looking so Peter Pan like anymore, not with two rounds in his head. And the others, she didn’t really know their names, but Harry did and he’d had to watch their execution. Mixed in with the shock and violation would be a healthy dollop of survivor guilt.
Julia Duffy knew all about that.
“So, any idea why we’re still alive?” she asked Harry, more to distract him from brooding than anything.
Harry kept working at the plastic ties, his shoulders bulging with the effort.
“Dunno,” he admitted. “Prisoner swap? That’d be a happy ending. More likely interrogation, though. That Skarov munter, he gave us all sorts of trouble in Rome. He’s the Russians’ chief fixer, they reckon. I was hoping to put a bag on him.”
He half-grimaced, half-smiled at that.
“They reckon?” Duffy said, shifting on the deck-plating to try and work some blood flow back into her legs. One foot had fallen asleep.
Harry seemed to debate the question with himself.
He sighed.
“Six,” he said. Then, “MI6. British Secret Service.”
“I know who they are, Harry,” Julia said, with more impatience than she had intended. “I know you work for them now. Or I assumed as much.”
He looked pained, but not with her. The prince from another world frowned as he looked about their surroundings. They were being held in a small cabin with a solid hatch. There were no personal belongings on the small set of shelves fixed to the bulkhead over the cot. No porthole offered any view of the outside world. A small wooden stool sat in front of another, slightly larger shelf, hanging from hinges on the bulkhead across the cabin. A fold-out table, for meals or work, she presumed. Harry stared for a second or two at a grill over an air vent directly above them and frowned.
“Oh, they’re undoubtedly listening,” Julia confirmed. “But I think they already knew you were up to no good, Harry.”
He stopped rubbing at the flexicuffs and seemed to deflate.
“Yeah, you’re right. Still, best we don’t give them anything to work with, eh?”
“How about giving me something then? I’d like to think we have some chance of getting out of here. And we must, right? Otherwise they’d have capped us like the others back on the dock.”
She regretted how harsh that sounded. Harry’s face crumpled until he regained control of his feelings. He began working at the restraints again.
“You’re right,” he agreed. “They’ll have their reasons, but keeping us alive shortens the odds they’ll let us live through this. London will already know things have gone sideways. They could access the drone cover from Viv’s feed. They’ll know we’re on this ship. You can’t just top a bloke, not a prince of the realm anyway… and not his girlfriend,” he added with a weary smile, a genuine one this time. “You can’t do that and expect to get away with it. That sort of thing is a two-way street. If they deep six you and me now they’ll have to factor in London retaliating over the next few months. Everybody in the Politburo, up to and including Beria, would be under
a death warrant. It would simply be a matter of waiting to see who bought it and at what point Six would consider the ledger was back in balance.”
It seemed to Julia that Harry was speaking more for the benefit of anyone listening than for her. But she couldn’t help taking some reassurance from his words. She contented herself with that for now. There was no point pressing him for any details of whatever it was he’d been up to in Cairo. The Smedlovs would be after that information themselves. She tried to glean what she could from the sounds of the ship, but that wasn’t much. The deck lay still beneath her. No sense of the engines turning over. Occasionally she felt the hint of a shudder run through the plating, always after a muffled noise, a deep clanging or a thud, probably signaling a heavy load being dropped into the cargo holds. She did not hear voices, not even whispers outside their door.
Harry shifted his position, apparently suffering the same discomfort from loss of blood flow as her.
“When we get back—”
“When?” she interrupted, raising an eyebrow.
“Yes. When,” he nodded, making an effort to keep his tone light. “When we get back I would like us to look for an apartment together.”
She could not keep the surprise off her face or out of her voice.
“And after we’ve looked for this apartment, and presumably found it, you’d like to live in it together?”
“Yes, yes I would. I’d hope you would too.”
A couple of days ago she’d have been all over that like a cheap suit. They had been seeing each other for nearly two years now, first hooking up in the Australian sector of Allied Tokyo where Harry had been fulfilling some obligation to the Commonwealth as a glorified greeter at a regional gabfest. She’d been there for work too, which is to say on a tax-deductible junket: the beaches of Thailand via a 2000-word feature article for the New York Times on the reconstruction of free Japan. Their relationship had gone from Jägerbombs and jungle sex to something approaching an actual relationship over the following weeks. As a reporter she had coped a lot better with media coverage of their connection than any of Harry’s previous girlfriends. She had also hoped it would pass, or at least diminish, as people came to accept he was no longer part of the line of succession. She had come to love him. But now… Now she wasn’t sure what she wanted other than to get off this boat and away from Cairo and the people who wanted to kill her—which seemed to be pretty much everyone she met.
She hesitated before answering, just a moment too long.
“I’m sorry,” Harry offered, assuming from her silence that a rupture had opened between them and that she had no interest in a future with him, assuming they even had a future.
“I shouldn’t have brought you here,” he said, redoubling his efforts to shear through the flexicuffs with friction alone.
“No, I’m sorry, Harry,” she hurried to reply. “I didn’t mean to leave you hanging like that. It’s just…” She gestured at their surroundings, a difficult thing to do when tied to the leg of a steel cot as she was. The rhythm of Harry’s relentless scraping away at his restraints slowed a little. Julia adjusted her position again. The cuffs bit painfully into the wounds at her wrist. The bruising and the injuries she had taken in the fight back at the Hilton throbbed woefully.
“It’s just, you know, do you really think we’ll be house-hunting this weekend?”
“I do.”
“But Viv and the others?”
Harry’s face set in hard lines she rarely saw, and never directed at her.
“Viv was a soldier,” he said. He spoke clearly and slowly, and again she was left with the impression that he was not speaking to her but for the benefit of anybody who might be listening. “Soldiers die. Their lives are spent like old coins. You know that. We’re not coins, we’re bargaining chips. So yes, maybe we won’t be checking the property listings in Kensington this weekend, but we will get there.”
There was much he didn’t say. He didn’t mention the German rocket scientist, of course. He didn’t say anything about that young woman St. Clair had ordered to find Bremmer and, presumably, to kill him if extracting the man proved impossible. She had disappeared into the darkness at least a minute before Skarov had sprung his trap. Maybe she was dead too. In fact, she almost certainly was. She might even have sprung the ambush. But if she was still on the loose she could be in contact with London now, leading an extraction team of gunned-up SBS or SAS killers right to them.
But mostly what Harry didn’t say was that there was no point in hopelessness, no sense in giving up. If they were fated to die in this squalid little room, they would die. There was nothing they could do about that. But if they were not, there had to be a path they could walk, things they could do, to deliver them from their current circumstances. Why not choose to walk that path? Making the choice, any choice, would be the first step.
Julia steeled her will against the pain, adjusted her hands to expose a short strip of the nylon cuffs to the dull steel edge of the cot leg holding her in place, and she began to rub. Together they worked away at their restraints, choosing to fight back rather than to succumb to the hopelessness of their plight.
CHAPTER THREE
Slim Jim Davidson wanted a blow job. He’d happily take it, right here, under the table of this fancy French restaurant. And on any given day Slim Jim Davidson would have no trouble getting that blow job. He was a rich man, possibly the richest man in the world. It was hard to be certain because, as the old joke went, so much of his money was tied up in wealth; the sort of wealth that hid itself away where the taxman could not fuck with it. The sort of wealth that meant when guys like Slim Jim wanted a blow job, then blow jobs droppeth like the motherfuckin’ gentle rain from heaven, if you wanted to get all Shakespearean about it.
These days, Slim Jim knew heaps about that Shakespeare guy. There was a time The Three Stooges had been his idea of top-shelf theatrical entertainment. (And just quietly, they still were). But when you were the richest man in the world, you had to aspire to something more than Larry, Moe and Curly. Especially if you were eager to score the occasional blow job from your top-shelf lady actress types. You had to take them to restaurants like this, with its own violin band, and a dozen fags for waiters, all of them in their dickey little penguin suits, and you pretended to like the theater and the opera and shit.
Hell, Slim Jim had funded a whole theater company somewhere in England simply to score a hummer from an actress named Felicity Gooding. One of his film studios—he owned three—had turned Felicity into the next Diana Dors before Diana Dors had done the same thing for herself.
He had been after a hummer from Ms Dors too, but she’d taken herself off to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts instead of hanging around to give Slim Jim his sugar. And when it turned out he couldn’t buy the academy to continue his pursuit of Diana Dors and her undoubtedly first-class knob-gobbling skills, he’d cut his losses and moved on. In Slim Jim’s opinion, Slim Jim was a great investor, which was not a thousand miles away from being a half-decent card player. He knew when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em. He knew when to walk away and right now he was pondering whether it might even be time to run. Time to just get up out of his chair and book it through the door of this snooty Paris diner, out on to the rain-slick pavement and into his stretch limo for a fast getaway.
The evening was pleasant enough. The Frenchies did know how to put on a feed, and they didn’t even turn their noses up at him when he insisted on beer instead of wine. Probably knew he could buy the restaurant and sack them all if he wanted. He’d done it before. Was famous for it, in fact. His companion, this Karen Halabi broad, wasn’t too shabby neither, if you had a taste for the dark meat, and Slim Jim did not discriminate. He was famous for that too. He’d read the uptimers like a porno mag, soon as they’d arrived. You didn’t get anywhere with these assholes by letting your true feelings about women and minorities show through. He had to hide a smirk then by
scarfing down a bread roll, slathered in truffle butter.
He’d actually thought the words “women and minorities”.
Not what you’d a called them once upon a time, Jimbo.
Because your uptimers, they were wrapped about as tight as could be on such things. So tight their eyes would pop right the fuck outta their skulls if a guy forgot himself and dropped a lousy little n-bomb in the course of conversation one day. So best a guy did not. Not if he wanted to do business with them.
And Davidson Enterprises had done a shit ton of business with the 21st century, but there was always room for some more. If Slim Jim had a coat of arms, that’s what it would read.
There’s always room for some more.
He pushed back a little from the table. It was kinda cramped, in spite of how much they were paying for this feed. So it seemed there was something the French could learn from his hamburger chain, Hungry Jim’s, which boasted big tables that folks could spread all the way out on, so long as they kept buying burgers and fries.
He was coming to terms with the fact that this Halabi chick wasn’t going to gobble his knob just to get the satellite launch deal she wanted. It was possible, however, that she’d bully him into giving her the deal anyway, because that was how this bitch rolled. She’d been some sorta Royal Navy commander back up when. Drove that weird-ass British trimaran that came through the wormhole in the Transition.
“Mister Davidson,” she said, talking to him as though he was the dumbest kid in class—a tone of voice Slim Jim had been awfully familiar with earlier in life. “You know it makes sense, both short and long term. You just don’t want to admit it. You took the early mover advantage in launch platforms, and you did very well out of that, but you’re not the only player anymore. The European Space Agency, NASA, your American competitors, they all have their own launch programs running now. Even the Russians are on the open market and they’re offering great terms.”
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