bottle as entertainment.
“Bored, sir?” The voice was firm yet subservient, like a pit bull barking at its master.
Trevor didn’t turn around. He simply looked across the endless blue expanse stretched out before him. For a brief moment Trevor understood how humanity had once believed the world was flat. From his high perch, it certainly looked as though one could simply fall off the edge of the world. He shrugged and spun to meet Remus, his head of security, who was dressed as though he were on a pleasure cruise-khaki shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. “Bored doesn’t begin to do justice to the drudgery that has become my existence…nor to the lack of imagination implicit in your outfit. Good God, man.”
Remus smiled, ignoring the jab. “There is always Shanghai, sir.”
The thought brought a smile to Trevor’s face. The pleasures of Shanghai were always enticing, but Trevor was not in the mood for wine and women. “I crave an adventure, Remus.”
“A whale hunt perhaps?”
Trevor looked down to the deck, at a three-foot-wide, six-foot-long rectangular seam. Hidden below the two men was a powerful harpoon gun, containing a razor-sharp, titanium-tipped projectile capable of piercing solid steel. “The end is predictable. No creature in the ocean can outrun the Titan. ”
“Perhaps violence is not the way to satiate your earthly hungers?” A third, more melancholic voice added. The man approached, wearing a broad grin on his young face. He wore the garments of a priest, but walked with the cocksure gait of a movie star. His worldly gray eyes revealed he had been party to more sin than the average priest, and his wrinkled brow showed that he had yet to pass the burden on to God or anyone else.
“Ah, Father O’Shea, to what do we owe the pleasure? Mass isn’t until Saturday, and alas, today is but Monday. You absolved me of my past trespasses only two days ago,” Trevor said.
Remus snorted. “Come to thump your Bible early, O’Shea?”
“Hardly,” he replied.
“You going to reveal the answers to all of life’s problems?”
“That would take a long time for you, wouldn’t it?” Ignoring Remus’s glare, O’Shea approached Trevor. He held aloft a computer printout as though it was a long-sought-after prize. “The answer to your dilemma, Trevor.”
Father O’Shea was the only member of the Titan ’s crew who dared to call Trevor by his first name; and, for reasons unknown to the rest of the crew, he was the only man Trevor would allow to do so.
“The Pope is dead?” Remus quipped with a chuckle.
“Remus…” Trevor’s voice contained just a hint of rebuke, causing Remus to clamp his lips shut tight. “His Holiness is to be respected. He has the ability to clear the taint from a man’s soul, a service which you and I benefit from more than most.”
“Yes, sir,” Remus said.
Trevor took the paper from O’Shea. Placing his black-rimmed oval reading glasses on the tip of his nose, he scanned what appeared to be an article from that morning’s online edition of a small newspaper: The Portsmouth Herald. He read the headline with widening eyes, then virtually devoured the entire article.
RYE MAN’S DAUGHTER EATEN BY SEA MONSTER
Scuba diving at Jeffrey’s Ledge yesterday, Atticus Young and his daughter, Giona Young, both Rye residents, are believed to have been in search of whales. They found tragedy instead. Young’s daughter disappeared after what is being called an “animal attack” and is believed to be dead.
Young, 41, ex-Navy SEAL, prominent oceanographer, and author of Oceans in Peril, had first been seen earlier in the day after roughing up two men who had attacked his daughter. The men’s clothing had been cut to ribbons in an apparent attempt by Young to teach the two a lesson in humiliation. But it was later in the day when horror struck the man who had so well protected his daughter that morning.
At 3:45, a distress call was placed from a boat anchored at Jeffery’s Ledge, a shallow portion of the Gulf of Maine in which whales congregate to feed in the nutrient-rich waters, where Young and his daughter were diving. Here is the transcript of that distress call:
“Oh God. Someone help. God, please. It took my girl! It took her! So big…Like nothing I’ve seen before…no record of this thing…Someone…please, help. Help…”
The distress call, which was heard by more than one hundred individuals, including the Coast Guard, who later pulled Young from his boat, has set off rumors of a giant sea creature roaming the waters of the Gulf of Maine. Local fishermen…
The article continued for another page, but Trevor knew it was all speculation from that point on. He looked up, his green eyes wide above his low-perched glasses. “Remus, instruct the bridge to take us to New Hampshire. I want to be there before the night is through.”
Remus nodded.
“And get me every bit of information available on this Atticus Young of Rye, New Hampshire. I want to know the most intimate details, including his record with the Navy.”
A nervous twitch appeared at the corner of Remus’s lips. Then, with assurance, he said, “Consider it done,” and walked briskly toward the bridge.
Trevor turned to O’Shea and stuck out his hand. O’Shea took his hand and shook it. “You may be a man of God,” Trevor said, “and money may be of little use to you, but consider your bonus this year doubled. Even if this turns out to be a hoax, you have cured my sad reverie, if only for a few days, something the rest of this motley crew has rarely done without having to spend my money. How is that possible? Hmm?”
O’Shea smiled and answered the rhetorical question. “God works in mysterious ways.”
“Ha!” Trevor belched a laugh and slapped O’Shea hard on the back. “Indeed he does!”
11
Portsmouth Hospital
With the night came a quiet stillness that made it difficult for Atticus to ignore his surroundings. The slight apple scent in the air assaulted his memory. Maria lying in bed. Her last breath. The feeling of his insides shaking with fear as her body convulsed, then lay still. Her room had been nearby…perhaps on the floor above. He wasn’t sure, but this was where she had died; this was the last place on earth he wanted to be. In fact, there was only one place he wanted to be at all, and that was on the ocean, hunting that thing down.
He stuck his head out the window and took in the side of the hospital. The brick building rose straight and flat, but around the windows, grooved designs had been created with the brickwork. They’d make nice hand and footholds. Then there was the brick windowsills-only about five inches deep, but wide enough to stand on. Fifteen feet to his left, the hospital wall jutted out to the right for five feet and continued beyond his field of vision. His eyes scanned the outer corner, where a pattern of bricks, protruding two inches each in a staggered formation, ran toward the ground-a sorry excuse for architectural aesthetics but useful for scaling the side of the building. The brick pattern ended five feet above the bushes that rimmed the parking lot.
Atticus figured the bricks didn’t run all the way to the ground because some kid might get the idea to climb up the side of the building after seeing Spider-Man. But the hospital’s architect hadn’t considered anyone’s climbing out a window.
After climbing onto the sill, Atticus crouched in the window, judging the distance to the next sill over. There was one window between him and the brick ladder. He’d have to jump. His heart began to beat faster, his muscles burning with adrenaline. He looked down again at the five-story drop then back to the windowsill. It was a two-foot jump, not very far, but the narrow sill didn’t give him a margin for error. If he missed, he’d join his family in death. What that would look or feel like, he had no idea. He’d never considered it, not even after Maria died. But now… where were they? Atticus clenched his jaw, pushing such thoughts out of his mind. He could wrestle with death after he finished with the creature.
With that, he leapt.
He crossed the two-foot divide with ease, planting his left foot, then his right, onto the adjacent sill. He flattened his body against the window glass and caught his breath…then saw his reflection in the window and
