'As tour guide you can make special arrangements,' Caruthers told him. 'People like us shouldn't have to go through these machines like we were riffraff! And you should have known that, and made those arrangements in advance!'
'What seems to be the problem here, folks?' a security guard asked, joining them. The tour group was piling up now in front of the X-ray machine as they came through the metal detector, bringing progress to a halt.
'I'm sorry, Officer,' Myers told the man. 'Ms. Caruthers, here, has some concerns about the safety of this X- ray scan.'
'It's perfectly safe, ma'am,' the guard said. 'You'll get more X-ray radiation walking outdoors on a bright, sunny day.'
'My sunblock,' Caruthers told him with an acid touch to her voice, 'is over there, in my carry-on luggage, which you people seem to think is hiding bombs or drugs or something!'
'Ma'am — '
'On my flight from Baltimore, they confiscated my knitting and a plastic bottle of water, and then they made me take off my shoes so they could see if I had explosives hidden inside them!'
'I'm sorry, ma'am, but — '
'Young man, I am sixty-nine years old and I'm not a threat to anybody! Except, perhaps, to certain overzealous civil servants and incompetent tour guides!'
'Please, Ms. Caruthers!' Myers said. 'If you make a scene — '
'So now I'm making a scene, am I? Good! I refuse to be frisked like a common criminal, and I refuse to be zapped by X-rays! What are you going to do about it?'
'I'm going to ask you to step outside the line, ma'am,' the guard said, 'so we can allow the other passengers to continue boarding.'
'What's the matter, Elsie?' Nancy Haynes asked, grinning. 'Don't want your picture took?'
'I don't know about this,' Mabel Polmar said, looking worried. 'Elsie's right about X-rays. My doctor told me when I had my hip surgery last winter that I couldn't have too many X-rays, or else I'd — '
'It's safe, Ms. Polmar,' Myers said. He turned to the guard. 'Look, is there anything else we can do?'
'Company rules, sir. Everyone goes through the scanner, or they allow themselves to be searched.'
'I'd better discuss this with your supervisor, then.'
'Very well, sir. But can we get the rest of these people moving? They're holding up the line.'
'Okay. Let me go through and show them it's okay.'
He walked into the white smooth-surfaced tunnel, turned, and held out his arms. 'See, everyone? Nothing to it!'
One by one, the members of Myers' tour group followed him through the tunnel, some hesitantly, some with dogged determination, some fearfully, some with good-natured banter. Judy Dunne hobbled through step-by-step with her walker. Myers hoped that the security personnel were getting a good look at all of their skeletons, or whatever it was that they were looking at. A more unlikely terrorist group he couldn't imagine… though Ms. Caruthers did come close. She was, in his opinion and at the very least, a royal pain in the ass.
A few — Caruthers, Polmar, Jones, the Kleins, Kathy Morton — chose to follow the security guard off to the side and were engaged in a spirited discussion with him.
The Elderly Ladies' Home Terrorist and Sewing Circle, Myers thought. With a grimace, he turned and walked back to join the discussion.
This really was going to be his last time as a tour group guide.
The gray morning's overcast was breaking at last, giving way to bright sunlight. Several hundred feet aft from the Atlantis Queen's boarding gangway, the garage-sized doors to her main cargo hold on A Deck had been slid open and another lorry filled with crates of provisions drove up alongside.
Chester Darrow picked up his electronic clipboard and walked down the loading ramp to meet with the driver. 'Good afternoon!' he called cheerfully. 'What do you have for us?'
'More food,' the driver said with a disinterested shrug. 'Where do you want it?'
'Let's see what it is first,' Darrow said. 'What's the lading number?'
A cruise ship the size of the Atlantis Queen had a population as large as many towns — almost three thousand in all. The amount of food and other consumables required for a two-week cruise was staggering in its amount and in its variety. So far, Darrow had checked aboard twenty-five tons of beef, five tons of lamb, five and a half tons of pork, four tons of veal, a ton of sausage, seven and a half tons of chicken, three tons of turkey, nine tons of fish, and two tons of lobster… and the loading was continuing as more and more shipments arrived at the pier. In two weeks, the four restaurants on board the Queen would run through almost twenty-five tons of fresh vegetables, four thousand liters of ice cream, four tons of rice, five tons of coffee, fifteen tons of potatoes, twenty tons of fresh fruit, five tons of sugar, and twenty thousand liters of milk. Her alcohol lockers routinely stocked over four thousand bottles of assorted wines, three hundred of champagne, four hundred of vodka, five hundred of whiskey, and a thousand of assorted liqueurs… not to mention some eighteen thousand cans or bottles of a bewildering selection of beers.
The Atlantis Queen's guests and crew wouldn't consume all of that vast mountain of food and drink in two weeks, of course. A percentage was held against the possibility of a delay somewhere along the line and as a precaution against the unthinkable — that the ship's larders would actually run out of something toward the end of the cruise. The ship's commissary department would also have the opportunity to buy fresh provisions along the way — in Greece and Turkey, especially — if anything in the ship's computerized lists of stores appeared to be running low.
Odd, the manifest the driver handed Darrow was in a different format than the one routinely used by the Royal Sky Line. It listed the truck's contents as two tons of rice, three tons of potatoes, and one ton of sugar… but he'd already checked four tons of rice on board that morning and they weren't scheduled to receive any more. There'd been a screwup somewhere down the line.
'I'm sorry,' Darrow said, handing the clipboard back.
'I can't take this. I'll need to check it with the commissary office.'
'Is there a problem here?'
Darrow looked around and saw two of the ship's Security officers approaching along the pier from aft. He recognized one as a guy named Ghailiani. He didn't recognize the other one, though that was hardly surprising. There were nine hundred Royal Sky employees on board this ship; you couldn't possibly know them all.
'Nah, not a problem,' Darrow told him. 'I think this shipment is for someone else, though.'
'What makes you say that?'
'It's not our inventory form, for one thing. And I can't tell if it's been screened. I don't see a customs stamp, either.' All shipments of cargo and provisions were carefully checked before they were loaded aboard ship, by security personnel, by customs officers, and even by public health inspectors. Bombs, smuggled contraband, and diseases were three things that could give the company a very bad public image, and every step was taken to make sure that none of those got on board. 'Come to think of it,' he added, paging through the manifest, 'I'm not sure how he even got in here.'
'Let's take a look,' the second security man said. 'Maybe the right papers are in the back.'
Darrow shrugged. 'Sure.'
The lorry had been backed up until it was directly alongside a huge Dumpster on the pier, and Darrow had to turn sideways to squeeze through the narrow passage. The truck's tailgate came down with a bang, and Darrow pulled himself up onto the cargo bed. It was dark inside, the space filled with a number of large crates masked in deep shadow.
'You have a torch?' he called back. 'It's bloody dark in — ' He caught movement out of the corner of his eye. 'What the hell?'
'What's wrong?' the security officer called from outside.
'I thought I saw — '
Someone grabbed Darrow from behind, a hand clamping down over his mouth, an arm pinning his arms at his sides. A second shadow emerged from behind the crates in front of him, and he felt something hard and metallic rammed against his ribs.
He tried to scream.
