Without Warning Part 44

She looked across at Miguel. Deep hollows under his eyes gave him a ghoulish appearance in the dim light of the room. The ship plunged and rolled again, forcing him to grab the arms of his deep, padded chair with white knuckles that stood out starkly against the blue fabric.

"I have discussed this with my wife and the old ones," he said. "We have agreed that only the very youngest will go with Ana and one of the crew in the big launch if the worst happens. The others will carry ammunition and if they can hold a weapon, they may fire it, too."

It was hard to be certain in the half-light, but she thought he might have been on the verge of tears.

"My daughters, they will fight," he said. "They must. Better for them to die quickly than to live out their years as a slave to some stinking Peruvian cabron."

"Miguel," said Jules, as softly as she could and still be heard. "I promised you safe pa.s.sage for your family. The girls do not have to fight. If the Viarsa gets close enough we can put them in the sports fisher with Lars or Dietmar and Granna Ana. They would outrun any pursuit."

Miguel smiled sadly.

"And then what, Miss Julianne? How far are we from safe land? They would not survive a storm like this, and they would be heading into the weather. I told you I would hold you responsible for their safety, but I do not hold you responsible for this. You are not pursuing us. You did not bring the storm out of the skies."

Shah clapped his hands together, a thunderous sound.

"Enough of this talk! This will defeat us as surely as any man. How many of these monkeys have we seen off these last weeks? They are desperate, foolish fishermen playing at pirates. Let me tell you what will happen if they should come alongside us. We will cut them down and take their stores for our own."

"Hooah!" cried Fifi, grinning hugely. "That's the spirit, mountain man!"

Julianne braced her back against one arm of her chair and her feet against the other as the Rules began another tumbling ride down a foaming summit. She glanced at the screen to see if they'd lost radar contact with the Viarsa, but it wasn't onscreen. It must have been hidden in some shifting valley of water at that moment. The seas were large enough to tower over both vessels at times, hiding them from each other.

"Okay," sighed Jules. "Shah's right. If you'll all excuse me, I'd best get on with my King Henry routine."

"I am sorry, Miss Julianne?" said Miguel.

"A little Shakespeare, darling. Benefits of what cla.s.sical education I received before Daddy p.i.s.sed away his ill-gotten gains and all of the family silver. 'For forth he goes and visits all his host... Upon his royal face there is no note, how dread an army hath enrounded him.' "

The Mexican was an intelligent man, but she could see that she'd lost him.

"Don't bother none about her, Miguel," said Fifi with good humor. "She gets all thinky and stuff sometimes. Your girls, they'll be fine. I will personally take apart any motherf.u.c.ker who tries to interfere with them."

"You are kind, for one so fierce, Miss Fifi," said Miguel. "But in the last extremes I shall attend to my own family."

"Enough!" barked Shah, clapping his hands together again with a thunderous report.

"Yes," said Jules, "enough," and pushed herself up out of the chair with the momentum of the ship. "Try to get some sleep."

Her rounds of the ship took nearly an hour, a slow, difficult progression through all the decks, moving hand over hand along companionways that violently plunged and rolled and shifted as the storm tossed them about. Most of the pa.s.sengers were in their bunks, many of them strapped in against the violence of the night. Down in the engine room her grease monkeys, a Sri Lankan and two Dutch merchant mariners she'd picked up in Costa Rica, were tending to the Rules's gleaming white plant with the universally p.i.s.sed-off look of all engineering crews. The Sri Lankan, Pankesh, had one hand bandaged, the legacy of a fall against a steam conduit in the difficult conditions. She checked his burn, which seemed quite ghastly, but he insisted on remaining at his station.

In the main lounge, which looked very bare with most of the fittings stowed away, she found one half of the trust-fund brats, Phoebe, sitting with one of the village children. They'd wedged themselves into one of the heavily padded lounge chairs. Before Jules could ask them what the f.u.c.k they were doing, Phoebe spoke up.

"Maya was scared," she said. "She got lost looking for the little girls' room, didn't you sweetheart, and wandered into my cabin. I said I'd sit with her awhile."

Julianne wondered if Maya was the only one who'd been scared, but she let it go. The last thing she needed now was panic over a lost child.

"Thank you, Phoebe. Good show. But make sure you get her back to her bunk soon. I need everyone rested."

She had turned around and was about to claw her way back to her own sleeping quarters when Phoebe called after her, "Hey, Julianne."

"Yes?"

"Do you mind if I ask you something?"

There was a neediness in the girl's eyes that answered Jules's earlier, unspoken question.

"What's up?"

The little village girl, Maya, no more than five or six years old, snuggled in tight, burying her face in the young woman's chest.

"You used to be rich once, didn't you?"

Jules couldn't help but smirk.

"So did you."

"No," said Phoebe. "That's not what I mean. Before all of this. Before the Disappearance, before you found this yacht. Before whatever it was you were doing with Fifi and that Chinese man. You used to be rich. Like me. I can tell from your voice. From the way you run your crew. Like you were always meant to."

The ship dipped and plunged again, unbalancing Jules and propelling her forward. She let herself fall into another lounge, close to Phoebe, lest she get hurled out through the gla.s.s doors.

"Yes," she sighed. "My family had money. Old money. And my father stole a lot more. But never enough to fund his extravagant tastes, or to pay the upkeep on our estates."

"I knew it," said Phoebe with a note of triumph. "So you, like, grew up in a castle?"

"Something like that. It's not nearly as much fun as it sounds. We had to throw the place open to the public every other weekend just to pay for heating."

"And how did you end up doing, you know, whatever?"

Jules's smile was genuine now.

"Smuggling, Phoebe. I was a smuggler. I still am, I suppose. It's one of the few jobs still paying these days." Jules shrugged and settled deep into the safety and comfort of the chair. "I loved my father in spite of his faults. Because of them, in some ways. He was very different from the sort of people we mixed with. Or rather, he was just like them, but more honest about it."

"But you said he stole money."

Jules smiled, fondly. "He did. He was a terrible crook, but he only ever stole from the rich, and believe me, Phoebe, if your family has been rich for nine hundred years, somewhere some of that loot was stolen. Most of it, really."

Lightning and thunder flared and crashed so closely together that Jules was unaware of any lag between them. The flat white light illuminated a ghastly vision of the whole ocean in turmoil, of living waterborne mountain ranges boiling up around the ship.

"You didn't tell me how you became a smuggler," said Phoebe.

"No, I didn't," said Jules, who pushed herself up out of the chair and headed for the nearest grab bar. "Don't worry, Phoebe," she called back over her shoulder, "you'll be fine. The only reason you're on this boat is because you were quick enough and smart enough to react to the Disappearance. You got some of your old money out and turned it into new money, very quickly. Most people aren't like that. They'll sit and wait for the situation to bury them. You're a survivor. Plus, a family like yours, it would have had investments all over the world, wouldn't it? Not all of them would have tanked."

Phoebe said nothing to that, and Jules smiled again.

"Don't worry, sweetheart. You've paid for pa.s.sage. I'm not going to ask for any more. But tomorrow, or the day after when this storm clears and those Peruvians have a clear run at us, if we can't outpace them, you'll have to earn your pa.s.sage. So get some rest."

She pulled herself up the rising deck and out into the companionway. Her own cabin, the former owner's quarters, was a hand-over-hand trek that took another six minutes and came close to exhausting her.

"Maya? Maya?"

A woman's voice, Mexican, made her look up. Pieraro's wife, Mariella, was clawing her way along the corridor, a frantic look haunting her eyes.

"It's all right," Jules called out. "She's in the big lounge. With Phoebe."

The two women hauled themselves along, hand over hand, holding on to the safety rails that ran the length of the companionway. The look of animal panic disappeared from Mariella's face, but a deep, abiding fear remained. The storm, Jules supposed. Your first big storm at sea was always terrifying. How much more so must it be for a woman who had spent her life on the edge of a desert.

"Miss Julianne. I am ... sorry ... I ... not to find her ..."

The ship slipped sideways and Jules nearly lost her footing waving away the mother's concerns. Mariella didn't speak English with much confidence, although Jules did not know why. Her grasp of the language seemed fine, but after the scene at the Fairmont she and the other villagers had very much kept to themselves, doing everything asked of them, but trying to remain as un.o.btrusive as possible.

"Just down there a little way," Jules said. "Through the big doors. She went to the loo ... to the toilet, sorry. And got lost. She is fine, Mariella."

Pieraro's wife nodded gratefully.

"I worry. I cannot see them and I worry."

"She's fine," Jules repeated.

The woman grabbed at her arm as they pa.s.sed, a strong, almost viselike grip.

"You are a good person, yes? A good person to save my family. All of us. Thank you, thank you."

Embarra.s.sed, as any Englishwoman would be by flagrant neediness and raw emotion, Jules blushed slightly and tried to shrug it off.

"No," insisted Mariella. "You did not have to take us all, but you did. You helped when no one else would. You are a good person, Miss Julianne. Good person."

"It's fine," said Jules, not knowing what else to say. "She's in the lounge. Best go get her."

"Si. Si."

Mariella continued on her way, muttering "thank you" repeatedly as she receded. It was the longest conversation Julianne had had with her or any of Miguel's people, save for Pieraro himself, of course. Truth be known, she had avoided them, not wanting to grow attached to people she had promised herself she would cut loose at the first opportunity.

Putting the uncomfortable thought out of her head, she resumed the journey to her cabin, taking another few minutes to get there. She was sticky with salt and sweat, and filthy from the day's exertions, but the sea state was too rough to have a bath or shower. Instead Julianne stripped down to her underwear, crawled under the covers, and turned out the light.

There was nothing she could do about the storm or the men chasing them. The storm would pa.s.s. The men would not.

She fell asleep haunted by visions of the little girl called Maya being tortured by faceless ghouls.

Seattle, Washington

Jed Culver stood at the back of the auditorium, stirring a packet of Sweet 'n Low into his instant coffee, regarding the deteriorating fiasco of the convention with mute detachment.

Reggie Guertson had the call again. He'd firmed up as the point man for what Jed was calling the Beer Hall Putsch, the broad-based faction of neocon Democrats, national security fetishists, wing-nut Republicans, and a grab bag of survivalist nutters, chancers, urgers, and shameless self-aggrandizers who had all come together behind the banner of the so-called Reform Movement. They were his enemies. That was how he thought of them. His enemies, and the enemies of the old Republic.

And they were winning, at least on the floor of the convention.

Their crazy, fear-driven idea of a new Const.i.tution, enshrining military representation at the heart of a civilian government, was actually gaining traction. If he didn't have such a low opinion of human nature he'd have a hard time believing it. Didn't these fools understand that the U.S. military couldn't even sustain itself now, let alone run what remained of the country?

The hard truth didn't seem to matter to them, though.

It was as though they had joined hands and stepped through the looking gla.s.s.

Up onstage, Guertson was haranguing a section of the audience attempting to shout him down. Spittle was flying from his lips, and the public-address system distorted every time he banged the podium with his fist. For their part, the hecklers were giving back as good as they got, screeching and even throwing things at him.

"This is what we're fighting against!" railed Guertson. "This sort of anarchy and subversion is what will destroy us all. It has to be stopped."

"Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil," chanted his detractors.

"This is going well, then."

Culver wasn't surprised to find James Kipper at his elbow. He'd been expecting him here. He knew Kipper often cruised the buffet tables looking for treats to take home to his daughter. In fact, before Jed could speak, the engineer fessed up.

"Just came up looking for more army chocolate," he admitted sheepishly.

"Here. For your kid," said Culver, producing a carefully h.o.a.rded packet of Milk Duds. "I traded my cigarette ration for them."

Kipper blushed and began to shake his head but Culver waved off his objection.

"I don't smoke, Kip. And I'm diabetic. I just thought your little girl might like them."

"Well, she would," Kip admitted. "But it doesn't feel right. Things are so tight at the moment."

"What are you, a Catholic with all that guilt? Take the f.u.c.king Milk Duds. They'll kill me if I eat them. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get insulin at the moment?"

The engineer thanked him and pocketed the small treat.

"Suzie'll love them."

He had to raise his voice to be heard over the din.

"This is a first-cla.s.s shambles, isn't it?" said Culver.

Kipper nodded. He surveyed the scene as if discovering a bedroom left in chaos by a naughty child. The convention chair was on his feet now, pointing his little wooden hammer at Guertson, demanding that he give up the podium. The "Sieg Heil" crew was being pushed around at the edges by a group of men who looked like they'd just come in from a logging mill, and at least two fist-fights had broken out on the far side of the convention hall. Kipper muttered something, excused himself, and hurried away. A minute or so later, all power to the room was cut, plunging it into darkness.

The effect was nearly instant. A sudden change in tone from angry contention to confusion and surprise. After a short interval, the lights came up again, and when they did Kipper was standing at the podium, smiling at Mayor Guertson, asking nicely for the microphone. He got it and then spoke forcefully to the entire room.

"Sorry, folks. My bad. James Kipper, city engineer. We've had some trouble with relays from the power station, and this place is a major drain on the grid. The whole building is set to flip off when we get a spike. Perhaps a ten-minute break while my guys sort this out would be a good idea. It won't take long, I promise."

He flicked off the PA and waved a hand at a man in overalls, standing by a junction box at the rear of the hall. His technician dimmed the lights and cut power to the sound system with an audible pop. Kipper hopped down from the stage, holding both hands up, with his fingers splayed.

Ten minutes.