Plague Ship

were awaiting parts from Germany. Although the vessel was inside Monaco’s three-mile territorial limit, the harbormaster had declined to come aboard, after observing the Oregon through binoculars fifteen minutes earlier.

The speedboat ate the distance to the ship at nearly sixty knots, cutting across the light chop like an offshore racer. Juan descended to the main deck near the ship’s boarding ladder. Linc was waiting for him with their overnight bags, his eyes hidden behind stylish sunglasses.

“I don’t like leaving right now,” the big former SEAL said, and not for the first time.

“This is the best way we’re going to get Max back. I’ve called Thom Severance’s office in California a dozen times, all but telling them who I am and what I know, and the bastard won’t call back. We’ve got to force his hand and to do that we need leverage.”

“Langston Overholt won’t help?”

“Not without evidence. I talked to him for an hour last night. The bottom line is, the Responsivists have a lot of money, which means they have a lot of clout in Washington. Lang won’t act on anything other than solid proof that Severance is up to something.”

“This sucks.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Why don’t we bypass the Philippines, go straight to the source, and take on Severance for ourselves?”

“Don’t think I haven’t thought of that. Lang warned me specifically about not going after Severance. And you and I both know if we get caught operating in the United States, we will never see the outside of a prison again.”

“So we don’t get caught.”

Juan looked at his friend. Linc was dead serious. “If it comes down to that, I’ll put it to the crew.” He knew every member of the Corporation would risk everything to get Hanley back, even if they knew they would never get another contract from Overholt again, which the cagey CIA veteran had threatened if Thomas Severance or his wife so much as suggested they were under surveillance.

The executive water taxi pulled up alongside the ship. As sleek and beautiful as the boat was, it was nothing compared to its driver, a young blonde wearing a blouse that couldn’t be cut any lower and a skirt that couldn’t be raised any higher. With their chopper still in pieces down in the hangar, the harbor taxi was the fastest way to shore without calling undue attention to the Oregon .

“Capitaine Cabrillo, je suis Donatella,” she called over the burble of the boat’s idling engine. Her accent sent a wolfish grin flashing across Linc’s face.

“Only in Monaco,” Juan whispered to Linc.

“You think some rich guy wants an ugly driver taking him out to his yacht after a night at the casino?” The young woman kept her craft steady by holding the boarding ladder as the two men made their way down with leather duffels over their shoulders. At the end of the twenty-foot climb, Juan tossed his bag onto the rear bench seat and stepped over the gunwale.

“Thank you,” he said.

When Linc jumped into the boat, it bobbed as if it had been hit by a wave. Donatella gave them both a big smile, her eyes lingering on Linc much longer than Cabrillo, as she reached for the chrome throttle controls.

“Chairman! Hold up!” Eric Stone leaned far over the railing overhead to get his attention.

“What is it?”

“I found something.”

“Can it wait? They’re holding a chopper for us to take us to the airport in Nice.”

“Hold on a sec.” Eric climbed over the rail and awkwardly descended the ladder while clutching a laptop computer. He noticed Donatella for the first time when he reached the boat but barely gave her a first, let alone a second, glance. Obviously, he was distracted by whatever news he had.

Juan nodded to her and she eased forward on the throttles. He went aft to let Linc chat her up while he pushed aside their luggage so he and Eric could sit. They had to raise their voices over the rush of the wind and the throb of the powerful motor.

“What do you have?” Juan asked.

Eric opened his computer. “I’ve been checking for any unusual incidents that may have occurred on ships where the Responsivists were holding their Sea Retreats.”

“Did you find anything?”

“Did I? Oh yeah. Do you remember recently how there have been reports of viral outbreaks on cruise ships, usually a gastrointestinal norovirus?”

“Seems there have been a lot more in the past couple of years,” Juan remarked.

“It’s not a coincidence. At first, I was checking passenger manifests from the cruise companies.” Juan didn’t need to ask how Eric obtained such confidential information. “I cross-referenced those to Responsivist membership lists. When I started seeing a pattern, I switched my focus to cruise liners struck by unusual illnesses. That’s when I hit pay dirt. Of the seventeen outbreaks I’ve looked into in the past two years, sixteen of them occurred when Responsivists were on board. The seventeenth wasn’t a norovirus and was traced back to E. coli found on lettuce grown on one specific farm in California. That strain also hit people in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“It gets worse. Mind you, there’s no pattern to cruise lines or ports of call. But there is one definite pattern we could see. During the first incident, only a handful of passengers were sickened, and most of them were elderly. The second one saw forty people showing symptoms. But by the time we get to the seventeenth, which happened two months ago aboard a ship called Destiny, nearly every passenger and crewman was infected. The cruise line had to chopper in a medical team and a healthy group of officers to get the ship back to port.”

Juan leaned back in the soft leather seat, feeling the engine’s vibration trying to loosen the knotted muscles in his back. In the cockpit, Linc towered over their driver, and he could tell she was delighting in his company. Her laughter carried through the air. He suddenly leaned forward again. “They’re perfecting disbursal methods.”

“That’s what Mark and I think, too. They got better every time until they achieved a near one hundred percent infection rate.”

“How does the Golden Dawn fit into the pattern?”

“Once they worked out how to infect an entire shipful of people, they needed to test the lethality of their toxin.”

“On their own people?” Cabrillo was shocked.

“They could be the ones who developed the agent in the first place. Why take the risk of one of them having a change of heart?”

“Good God! Why?” The pieces of the puzzle were there before him, he just didn’t know how they fit together. What could the Responsivists possibly gain by killing people aboard cruise ships? And the answer that kept coming back to him was, absolutely nothing.

He could see other terrorist organizations jumping at such a chance, and he considered one of them had paid for such a weapon-and-delivery system, but the Responsivists were flush with money from their Hollywood believers.

They espoused population control. Did they think killing fifteen or twenty thousand retirees who were blowing the children’s inheritance on Caribbean cruises would make a difference to the world’s overcrowding? If they were that insane, they would go for something much bigger.

The puzzle hung tantalizingly close in the front of Juan’s mind, but he knew it was incomplete. “We’re missing something.”

The speedboat slowed as it entered the inner harbor and made its way to a pier next to an elegant restaurant. A waiter was hosing off the wooden jetty in anticipation of a breakfast crowd looking to lessen the effects of their hangovers.

“What are we missing?” Eric asked. “These whack jobs plan to infect people on cruise ships with a toxin that shows to be one hundred percent fatal.”

“It’s not one hundred percent. If they released it on the Dawn, Jannike shouldn’t be alive.”