Without warning

That had been half an hour ago. Now Cesky’s tune was entirely different.

‘No fucking way do they set foot on those islands! No fucking way do they get within a hundred thousand miles. You take them as far away from this bullshit as you can.’ He was pointing at the TV screen. ‘New Zealand – they filmed that Lord of the Rings there. Got some great fucking six-star lodges built for the movie stars. End of the fucking earth, it is. Went fishing there once. That’d be good. Or Tasmania – where they got that devil in the cartoon – that’s even further away. But no fucking Pearl Harbor. Not now.’

Jules felt like her head was going to spin off. Cesky wasn’t the worst of them, not by a long shot. That’d be the porn king, Larry Zood. He didn’t look like a porn king, possibly because he was an internet porn king, and so looked more like a crooked real-estate broker. But he oozed a sort of pre-emptive creepiness that assured her he would one day weigh three hundred pounds, wear a bad hairpiece, and still insist on bouncing hotties on his knee.

Having arrived at the table an hour ago with a small imitation Faberge egg, Zood had tossed it to Jules like a golf ball, demanding to know upfront how many of his ‘bitches’ he could take with him. ‘I’ll give you one egg per bitch,’ he’d offered. ‘They’re fakes, from Thailand, but the jewels are real. I can leave a few bitches behind. They know that. Makes ‘em extra keen to please, if you know what I mean. But I will need some with me. I don’t like the water – I don’t even like the hot tub they got by the pool over there – so a fucking sea voyage? Shit, if you don’t mind I’m just gonna bomb myself with crystal meth and stay in my suite getting blown. That’s why I need some bitches with me.’

The Brit was tempted to shoot him right there and then, and she wasn’t the only one.

He’d been trying to get Fifi to climb on board since finding out that her mother had been one of the original Hustler babes. ‘Larry Flynt was a great American hero,’ Zood announced now in all earnestness, before grabbing one of Fifi’s boobs and squeezing experimentally. When she peeled his hand away with a painful jujitsu technique he simply laughed. ‘Ow! What a fucking rack. That was totally worth it.’

‘Jules,’ said Fifi, between thinly pressed lips, ‘if this fucking nimrod gets on the boat, he pays twice the going rate.’

‘Fine by me,’ she agreed.

‘Hey!’ protested the porn king.

Jules leaned forward and fixed him with a glare like a pin pushed into a butterfly’s back. ‘Understand this, Mr Zood. We are not your bitches, we are people smugglers. Criminals. If you touch any of my crew, or any other passenger, like that again, I will have Mr Shah take out his pistol and shoot you in the head. And, yes, you will now pay double the asking rate if you wish to leave this city with us.’

Zood held her glare for a few seconds before breaking into an oily grin. ‘Money schmoney,’ he mugged. ‘I still got plenty to blow. I didn’t even have my dough stashed in the US – legally I don’t exist there. For tax purposes, you know. Legally I got disappeared years ago.’

He was drinking heavily and very much amused by his own wit, but Jules could detect a slightly anxious edge to his demeanour.

‘If you don’t mind, Jules,’ said Fifi, ‘I’ve got crew to interview back at the marina. I’ll see you back there. Better company if you ask me.’

‘Sure, baby, you go. Thapa can escort you to town. Sergeant Shah and I will catch a ride with Miguel.’

Fifi left the table without a backward glance. An uncomfortable silence ensued for a moment as Julianne regarded Zood with cold contempt.

Not that her other candidates were much less odious. A property developer and his wife-no kids. Some guy whose family owned a health fund; he had his third wife and one small child with him. A merchant banker, with his very own bank, based in Basel, Switzerland; plus his mistress. An oil broker. And a couple of trust-fund delinquents, a brother and sister, who seemed not at all put out that their entire family back in Boston were gone. The siblings, like everyone else at the table, had distinguished themselves by striking like rattlers as soon as they knew the score. Cashing up and converting to exactly the sort of high-end trade goods Jules had known would hold or even increase their value, at least in the short term.

She had trouble keeping their names straight, and was seriously thinking of a cull. Maybe dumping the porn king and his posse of bitches, and possibly Cesky, who struck her as trouble. They were all very demanding people. The trust-fund duo, Phoebe and Jason, had an especially noxious sense of entitlement, one she recalled from the useless rich kids of her own childhood.

‘Will there be staff?’ Phoebe had asked, before nodding towards the two Gurkhas. ‘Other than them.’

‘We could bring our own, I suppose,’ her brother had mused, not even bothering to run it by Jules. ‘Hire them here, perhaps, from the resort?’

But Cesky, he was the real quandary. Although she knew nothing about the construction industry, she figured it had to be a tough game. Wasn’t it rotten with mafia money and crooked unions? To make a fortune in it, you’d have to be as hard as tungsten, which wouldn’t necessarily count him out as a prospective passenger. But she just had a feeling with this bastard that if he got off the leash, you’d suddenly have something like a 300-pound bull mastiff with amphetamine psychosis tearing at your throat.

Then again, she supposed, she could always have Shah just throw him over the side.

‘Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has warned other regional powers that they will have to disarm immediately, if they do not wish to be attacked in a second round of strikes. The Saudi government has already agreed to immediate talks with Tel Aviv and has stood down its military, which had been on high alert since the outbreak of hostilities with Iraq and Iran.’

‘Man’s a fucking genius,’ said Cesky. ‘A fucking devil, but a genius.’

‘You think he’s a genius?’ Zood arced up without warning. ‘A fucking Hitler is more like it. He’s a fucking war criminal, Cesky. A mass murderer. He should be fucking stoned to death for the rest of his life.’

Cesky laughed in the pornographer’s face. ‘With a name like Zood, you would think that, wouldn’t you? Where’d your family come from again? No, lemme guess – they were ass-fucking goats in the Bekaa Valley for the last three thousand years, right?’

‘You fucking Jewish pig!’