by Mark Ellis
One of the bodyguards was at his shoulder. “We’ve got to hurry, Mr. Sharpe.”
The Northstar was not moving, but something about the ship was alive. Sharpe moved over on his seat as if making room for Lee Atwater in a golf cart and motioned for Melissa to step up. She climbed up next to him, and a second later the jeep lurched into gear.
He extended his hand. “Grant Sharpe.”
“Sue Ross, the Lewis & Clark Pioneer Log.”
Sharpe brightened. “Still in school, eh? Then there’s hope.”
The terminus of the jeep ride was a roped passageway and a last unhauled gangplank in the shadow of the ship. A cheer went up as Sharpe was recognized by the throng, and he waved as if his vow never to take the pay cut and run for elective office waited only on some prophetic countersign from God. As they ascended the inclined plank together and stepped aboard, Melissa felt a vast shift of celestial forces with her first footfall on the Northstar’s deck. It was greater than the impression created by a gigantic power plant thrumming somewhere below her. It was the simple act of leaving land. The harbor’s cool, deep waters buoyed her. On her way to what she’d feared was her summary termination, being fired and left alone to fend in a world made crueler than it was only months before, she had arrived at some point, some turning point, and from that moment on, from the moment the ship’s last gangplank was pulled ashore, her chance to prove herself in this new environment seemed suddenly in her hands.
Sharpe was gone suddenly, hustled off to his doubtlessly superior quarters. Melissa stood, feeling suddenly alone, her bags deposited at her feet. The effect of her transference to a floating state eclipsed the effect of the streamers’ tireless flutter and the joyous farewells of bon voyage. The crowd’s roar unsettled her as she leaned against a polished white rail. She felt a roll beneath her, a sense of true weightlessness. In counterpoint to that easy lightness was the subtle weight of the iPad in her purse’s outer flap and the unsubtle mini-Glock7 nestled heavily in a shoulder holster just to the left of her left breast.
It was effortless, the first slow sidling outward. She noticed for the first time the white-planked lifeboats tucked away in alcoves that rose above eye level along the deck. The faces left behind on shore dropped just infinitesimally, a ribbon of regret across every land-bound heart. Onboard was bittersweet too. Melissa waved, though no one stood to see her off.
She stopped waving then, thoughts turning to her mission: to explore the ways a person might die on a sea cruise. Perhaps find that one particular way.
There was a uniformed crew member suddenly at her side, female, a deck runner Melissa thought she recognized from the cruise brochure. “Sorry to startle you. May I assist you to your stateroom?”
“Yes, thank you,” Melissa replied skittishly.
The ship turned slowly and headed for the mouth of the harbor. Lovecraftian mountains waited in the distance, implacable in the midst of parting’s sweet sorrows.
Special Operative Stan Hundtruk’s farewell to solid ground was bid from the portal window in his innocuous stateroom, a coach-quality berth directly above the throb of the Northstar’s turbines. This mechanical noise would be incessant, even while Her Majesty idled in capitalist splendor in the various ports of call. Such accommodations were fine with Hundtruk—those gigantic bladed machines gave him proximity to what made his prey tick.
The Republican behemoths on the decks above him didn’t grasp the inevitability of their own demise. Funny, he thought, how conservatives still claimed that the predominant US political ideology was center-right. Historically, whatever gains the parties made were, in theory and practice, a result of playing to that centrist waistband that held the political fabric together. But there was another constituency now.
Numbers were catching up with the GOP. In time, with enough people of color, have-nots, single women, liberal urban men, and members of the LBGT bloc voting, the center-right paradigm would become center-left. The new calculation was 52–47 percent, advantage Left, assured liberaldom’s best and brightest. Since Gore had won the popular vote but not the 2000 election, the percentages had been circling around the magical 52–47 like gulls around a beached whale. There was a mechanism in place every bit as inexorable as the Northstar’s turbines.
This alter-electorate was prepared to exact not revenge but absorption. It was a swallowing of the conservative beast with a maw of injustice, disparity, and want. They were over, the white conservatives, this ghost ship notwithstanding, and it was Stan Hundtruk’s good fortune to have been stationed here by Obama’s czars. Here, close to the engines of the past, not to silence them, but to task them for the common good.
Out the same window through which Stan had watched Seattle’s waterfront recede, the pinnacles of Canada’s coastal range broadened on the horizon. Iced kingdoms on slopes unvisited, razorbacks rising to shear the clouds. As he reflected on those summits, Hundtruk’s eyes were drawn down to some odd activity on the invigorated whitecaps waiting at the Strait of Juan de Fuca, threshold of the open Pacific.
A sleek motorboat was fast approaching. Quite a few lengths behind it, a Coast Guard patrol boat hurried in pursuit. Hundtruk licked his lips, turning to catch a glimpse of himself in the galley mirror. He transmogrified the dogged operative he saw into a man about to be killed by terrorists. He remembered the USS Cole, how a skiff full of Muslims with liquid thunder had blown a hole in her steel-plate hull, killing sailors and opening the postmillennial round of America-directed terror. With a bit of Allah’s luck, they could have sunk her.
Such a launch was now approaching off starboard. From where Stan stood, below decks, near the engine room, it was probable that if the oncoming craft was terroristic and sufficiently armed, he would never make it out alive. The motorboat closed at full throttle and came near enough now so that Hundtruk could see that it was not a jihadist at the helm but a hippie long-hair with a handlebar mustache. He kept coming, Seated behind him his compatriots, more hippie types and some lawyerly suits, hunched into the tepid wind.
Enviros, thought Hundtruk with a broadening smile. Crazy bastards.
The environmental avengers weren’t slowing. It seemed as if the silver-beige boat might ram the Northstar’s wave-slicing hull. At the last second, the commander, who resembled no one so much as Crosby, Stills & Nash singer-guitarist David Crosby, swerved, pushing up water as if his puny wave might knock the leviathan off course. Having apparently had enough, conservative Captain Squier bellowed the ship’s horn across the deepening waters with an angry flair. Hundtruk reached for his Admiral Farragut telescope, purchased expressly for this trip, and brought it to his eye. He zeroed in on the boat. Amazingly, they were neither terrorists nor environmental whackos. Clearly visible over the foredeck was a dripping vinyl banner: Ron Paul 2012. He’d chuckled at the futility of the dinosaur cruise, but this—this was laugh-out-loud funny.
The Rainier Policy Institute cruisers had seen the Paulies too. Jeers, laughter, and a smattering of applause from the decks above were audible through Hundtruk’s open window.
The motorized Libertarians stayed close on the bow, their skipper impertinently swerving, but the initial effect was dwindling as the Coast Guard gained. As the first deep-sea waves of de Fuca shivered the Northstar’s iron timbers, the Paul pirates gave up the chase.
Only that spendy chopper for delayed luminaries could catch them now, and it didn’t appear that anyone had missed the boat.
Hundtruk turned from the window. A familiar shadow of loneliness came when a breeze from the open sea stirred the aquamarine curtains on his stateroom window. Not even his own mother knew he was on this ship. Aloneness was always part of a smooth operator’s work in the field, and despite the passing sense of emptiness that often accompanied the beginnings of any assignment, under the cover of his cover he felt the old Party passion, the abiding will to succeed. This cruise would end, and there would be an end to the mysteries both fiscal and fatal that shared the voyage with him. At the end would be a major coming out
party, his, an arrival in from the cold and into the visible part of the new progressive regime.
It was he and Investigator Melissa Blythe from here on out, and it was time to reach out, one false identity to another. His fingers were nimble over his laptop keyboard from decades of clandestine typing. The email’s origination point was formatted to display a no-reply send from Mr. Scrimshaw himself.
Ms. Blythe:
This note to inform you that I have assigned another agent to the Rainier Policy Institute cruise. I understand that you have made passing acquaintance with Investigator Jeff Griffin, who came aboard last week. Griffin comes to us with impeccable credentials and will augment your investigation into Lara Svenko’s death. He has been briefed about your role, as this serves to apprise you of his. You are to show no recognition of nor make any contact with him during the operation. He has similar orders with regard to you.
Cornelius J. Scrimshaw
Chapter Fourteen
Shit! Melissa could not escape the Charon men.
The inscrutable Jeff Griffin had not only been hired by Charon but he was also on the Northstar with her. The specialness of her assignment was wounded by the revelation that her boss apparently thought another investigator was needed on the case. It rankled, especially when she wondered if Griffin’s real mission was to keep an eye on her. Yet she understood the logic of the new hire as co-investigator, assuming one was needed. Any other Charon man, she’d know. Griffin would be reflected only as a blank slate in her eyes. That was probably the reason no formal introduction had ever been orchestrated.
By late afternoon, Seattle’s skyline was as distant as a lost civilization. All signs of infrastructure were stripped away as the Northstar plowed the waters. Only the tensile robots of the power lines marched now through valleys where none but the footfalls of linemen and backpackers ever fell. When outposts did appear, they were as opposite each other as dreaming is to living. Mansions, the constructs of families like the fallen Laszlos, graced the waterfront with private piers and views that would do a PBS miniseries proud. In contrast, every so often along the evergreen shore stood fishermen’s cabins clad in weathered shingles. Other watercraft occasionally crisscrossed the stretching Inside Passage waters, allowing for watery distances from the Northstar that Jules Verne might have filled with monsters.
Melissa watched the last emanations of sunlight drop sullenly into the gray maelstrom of the North Pacific, mulling sourly the wrinkle of having Jeff Griffin aboard. She felt the first stirrings of renewed resolve. If this was the way Scrimshaw wanted to play it, play it she would. Mother ship. She heard some of the onboard chat to that effect about the Northstar, and now the phrase formed unbidden out of the blue shoreline night. She thought of her own mother, Janine, maiden name Tomkins, a stay-at-home mother when such a thing was relatively common, at least in the cultural backwaters of Washington State. A woman who’d tried to adjust to the tides of feminism and would never have dreamed of openly quashing her daughter’s independent streak and willingness to put marriage and family on a backburner while seeking out the stuff of her life. But mom was wise in her ways, as her father Dennis was in his, and Melissa had worried from time to time, and a lot more lately, whether she might be missing her chance at a life more meaningfully fulfilled with family and home than whatever a life of professional accomplishments could offer.
Her first day with the conservative crew had opened her eyes in one regard. The men of Charon had orchestrated her vigil on the starboard deck, but all around her were women who held traditional values on life versus choice, marriage, and faith. While she’d focused since high school on making a career and making sure that marriage and family would always be a conscious choice, not a default position, it seemed to Melissa that the power and influence of women in politics had evolved to the point of near parity. She found herself mesmerized by the distaff energy bubbling throughout the ship. If the women aboard the Northstar were any indication, conservative men had some formidable allies.
As young marrieds, Melissa’s parents had defied easy categorization, like Eisenhower Democrats or Kennedy Republicans. Then it became all about Reagan, and Melissa guessed that her birth had a lot to do with that. Having kids makes pretty much everyone more conservative, even staunch liberals. When Melissa came of age, she let go of everything, neither carrying her parents’ values into community college nor adopting the radicalism she found there. She’d had her string of love affairs, had taken her share of exhilarations and woundings. She’d found what she thought would be a great career in investigations. Then, like some solipsistic dromedary, she’d pulled her head up and was thrust into the societal polarization that had festered in her absence. Awakened by the Meltdown’s dreary realities, she’d learned that the center had shifted.
While this dawning identification with the conservative maternal vessel placed the vitalized role of women into sharp relief, it also made compelling the men on the boat. One of the dreariest recessionary realities was the dearth of suitable men able to help a woman negotiate a decimated financial landscape. It seemed as if the men Melissa met in Seattle were always some shade of liberal, either connected to the government or living paycheck to paycheck. She often scolded herself inwardly for judging them too harshly or expecting too much. She forgave far too many male companions when all they had on offer was a quest for delayed maturity and sexual opportunism.
She knew that more traditionally-minded guys were out there; her Seattleite girlfriends always jokingly warned about them, that they wanted you “barefoot and pregnant.” Every now and then a certifiable old-school guy would come into her orbit, perhaps a bottled-water delivery man or couple of firefighters going door to door with tutorial about the importance of a working smoke alarm. But Melissa never acted on seeking out those kinds of men, never allowed herself to get out of the city limits where they could be found. Probably because up till now she didn’t really know what she wanted in a man, and so was not able to find it.
The Northstar angled closer to the brooding coastline. A fishing boat was chugging out from an inlet like a muskrat, gaining over the obsidian surface. Its padded bow was lit by the Northstar’s translucent glow, as if this muskrat were nearing a shoreline carnival. Melissa wondered if Captain Squier would sound the monstrous ship’s horn in the immemorially quiet abyss.
In addition to Scrimshaw’s email about Jeff Griffin, she had received notification from the ship’s communications center that her ticket had been drawn in the table lottery for the Captain’s Dinner on the third night at sea. She welcomed the proximity to power but was not for a moment fooled out of a healthy suspicion about the randomness of luck. It would be the work of Charon that put her there.
The muskrat boat ducked in for coast running—there would be no booming horn to cut the night.
A deck runner made his rounds among passengers thrilling along the rail that Cambrian summer night. He stopped here and there to speak in tones hushed by professionalism and shared wonder. He was handsome, Melissa noticed, as he approached her along the cool, steel rail. But for the signature uniform, he might well have been one of the straight-edge Rainier Policy Institute boys. As he moved closer, Melissa’s Seattle-tuned hetero radar picked up quickly that this dude’s orientation might better fit the Log Cabin crew.
“I’m deck runner Scott Miley. How are we doing tonight?” was his attentive opening line.
“Fabulous,” she answered, looking out on the everlasting darkness. After they gazed for awhile, she felt devilish. “So, are you a conservative?”
He laughed gently. “You must be from the press.”
Now she smiled. “Grant Sharpe said the same thing. I must be wearing it on my sleeve.” She extended her hand. “Sue Ross, the Lewis & Clark Pioneer Log.”
“We’re not supposed to discuss politics with our passengers,” he hedged, “but if there’s anything else I can do…”
“Were you aboard last year’s cruise?”
Grant Sharpe had
rolled the omen of the dead presswoman over his psyche like aged whiskey over rocks. In contrast, Miley’s silent reaction could only be described as unsubtle. Seconds passed, in which the prospect of getting a helpful answer evaporated.
“Yes, Ms. Ross,” he came back more formally. “I’ve been on the last six Rainier Policy Institute cruises.”
“Off the record,” she probed, “did you have occasion to meet Lara Svenko?”
“Pardon my saying, but one thing this crew learned last year was that speaking to the press is usually on the record, one way or another.”
Melissa gave him a knowing smile. “Of course.” Then, “I don’t want to dredge anything up unnecessarily.”
“Refresh my memory,” he said. “Did Ms. Svenko write for your paper?”
“No. But in addition to being an assignment reporter for the magazine Imbroglio, Lara was a college intern just like me. My interest is purely from the standpoint of compassion for a fellow journalist.”
The believability of this settled over the deck man.
“Though I’m here to report on the Republican Party,” Melissa went on, “my antenna is always out for anything that might help provide closure to her surviving family.”
The two of them were completely alone at the deck rail now, and Miley seemed to be considering, or remembering. Melissa looked down into the dark starboard water. Though the temperature had reached an almost subtropical 88 degrees that day, the ship’s safety guide made clear that even on the hottest days the water became hypothermic about six feet down.
“I did encounter Lara several times on my rounds,” said the shipman. “I spoke with her, mostly about shipboard matters, all very friendly. She seemed like a nice person.”
“Did you see her the night she vanished?”
“It is a busy ship, but no, to the best of my recollection, I did not. Of course, I told all this to the investigators.”