Without warning

Caitlin snickered despite the seriousness of the situation. ‘Okay. You got any floor plans?’

Rolland removed a set of drawings from a plastic tube. ‘There has been some remodelling of the property in the last five years,’ he explained. ‘These were lodged with the city archives. I had a devil’s job getting them.’

‘Yeah, but God bless continental bureaucracy,’ said Caitlin. ‘Now, what’ve we got here?’

They scoped out the plans of the house across the street by torchlight on a foldout card table, in a windowless room on the second floor of their own building. It looked like it may have been used as a storeroom until recently. A few cardboard packing boxes, folded flat, remained.

The target property was not so different from the one in which they stood. Same number of floors, and a similar layout of rooms, save for the ground floor, which had been opened up into one vast living space. It was not bomb- damaged either, as far as they could tell.

‘This will be very hard,’ said Rolland, ‘getting them alive.’

Caitlin nodded. ‘Like a hostage situation, where the hostage doesn’t want to come with. And he’s armed.’

‘We would normally train in a mock-up facility first. But there is no time.’

‘You could let me go in on my own,’ she offered. ‘I’m renowned as a sneaky bitch, you know.’

‘You are renowned as an assassin, Caitlin. I have no doubt you could make it inside. But perhaps only you would come out, non?

‘Perhaps,’ she conceded. ‘But I could make it easier for you.’

‘How so?’

Caitlin explained what she would need, and although the plan was crazy, to his credit, Rolland heard her out.

When she was finished she folded her arms and shrugged. ‘Captain, it is the only way I can think of to kick down the doors, kill everyone who needs killing, and maybe, just maybe, keep Baumer and Lacan in one piece.’

Rolland pinched his lip between thumb and forefinger, a gesture she had already recognised as his giveaway. He was thinking of betting the pot.

* * * *

47 MV AUSSIE RULES, SOUTH PACIFIC OCEAN

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake…’

‘I am sorry, Captain, but the storm, it put much stress on the engines, yes, much stress on everything, and this can be repaired but it will take time.’

Julianne examined the length of black steel-mesh tubing that was going to kill them all. It was less than an inch thick and just a foot long and it carried coolant to one of the Aussie Rules’s twin 1492- horsepower Caterpillar engines. Or rather, it would have were it not disconnected and dangling uselessly, having blown as a result of running at maximum pressure for way too long. Her Sri Lankan chief engineer shook his head sadly, as though betrayed by his wife.

‘How much time do you need to fix this, Pankesh?’ asked Jules. ‘The truth. Don’t underestimate the difficulty’

‘It is a very specialised fitting, ma’am,’ he said as his two Dutch offsiders crowded in behind him, both of them looking equally despondent. ‘Three hours, minimum. Possibly up to five. You can run the other engine at half power, but that is all.’

She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. Her temples were throbbing. They had a break of twenty nautical miles on the Viarsa 1, but their pursuers would eat that distance up in two hours. They were going to have to fight.

‘Okay,’ she said, standing up and turning away from the mess of spilled coolant. The engine room gleamed as white as ever, but it was eerily still with the power plant shut down. ‘All three of you will work on this as fast as you have ever worked on anything in your fucking lives. Got me? Maybe you’ll perform miracles. First, though, each of you get to the armoury and draw yourself a weapon. If they board us, we’ll need every hand we have – except for you, Pankesh. You keep working here. You don’t stop until one of them comes through that door, understood?’

The Sri Lankan’s frightened eyes were comically wide as he bobbed his head up and down.

‘Rohan, Urvan,’ she went on, ‘when I give the call to repel boarders, you’ll have to down tools here and come help out on deck? You understand that?’

The Dutchmen were both in their thirties, veterans of North Sea oil-rig tenders, who’d been stranded in Ecuador by the collapse of the airline carrying them home from a sex tour of Bangkok. They nodded and tried to look resolute, but she could tell neither of them wanted to leave the relative security of the engine room.

‘All right, everyone. Get your weapons, then get back to work. If you can pull a miracle out of your arses we won’t have to fight.’

She moved from one handhold to the next, negotiating an exit with the engineers on her tail. They’d left the storm behind twelve hours ago, but the sea was still a vista of churning, mountainous waves. At least it would make any boarding difficult. When the Dutchmen headed aft to the gym-turned-armoury, she hurried as best she could up to the main lounge, where she found Shah and Birendra engaged in the interminable process of teaching her passengers how to kill. She held on to the doorway to steady herself and beckoned Shah over when she caught his eye. He moved with fluid grace across the pitching deck, barely needing to check himself against the movement of the ship.

‘Yes, Miss Julianne? The engines, they are down?’

‘Yeah, and I don’t think we’re getting them back any time soon. How’re your pupils going, Mr Shah?’