'No. Should I be?'
Llewellyn seemed to relax a little. 'So you're not with Mitchell or Franks?'
'No, Mr. Llewellyn. I'm not. I know neither of the gentlemen. SOCA has about forty-two hundred employees and operates out of over forty offices scattered all over the UK. It's impossible to meet or to remember everyone in the firm.' Time to change the subject, she thought. Despite what she'd just said, the last thing she wanted was a face-to-face introduction to Mitchell or Franks, especially Franks, who might ask her questions only a real SOCA agent could answer. 'Why? What happened on the docks?'
'Nothing important,' Llewellyn told her. 'And if you didn't ask to see me about that, why did you ask to see me?' His smile broadened. 'Not that I at all mind meeting a beautiful woman on a romantic cruise.'
'Why, Mr. Llewellyn,' she said. 'I didn't think ship's crew was allowed to fraternize with the paying passengers!'
'Strictly speaking, no… though officers have a bit more leeway than the housekeeping staff, say. And it is after hours. I'm off-duty. May I buy you a drink?'
'That would be great. Thank you.' Her glass was empty.
'What are you having?'
'Coke.'
'Nothing stronger?'
'Coke is fine. My God, will you just look at that sky?' The colors, if anything, were becoming more intense. The sky appeared to be on fire. 'What is it they say… 'red sky at night, sailor's delight'?'
'That's what they say. Never having been a sailor, I couldn't tell you.' He flagged down a server, ordered two soft drinks, and turned back to face her. 'Now, you were telling me what you wanted to talk to Security about?'
'Actually, David, I was hoping to get a private tour of your security facilities on the ship. See how they work, day-to-day.'
'Indeed? Why?'
'Because SOCA is concerned with smuggling into the United Kingdom. Drugs. Also people.'
Llewellyn's eyebrows rose. 'People?'
'Twenty-first-century slaves, David. People who answer ads for work in the United Kingdom in countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Pakistan. They're brought in by professional smugglers — usually by the Italian Mafia or other Mediterranean organized-crime groups, though we've been seeing a bit of activity from Russia lately, as well. The Russian mafiya. Men are brought in and put to work in illegal sweatshops, sometimes drug factories. Same for women and children, except they're also exploited sexually, often. They end up in brothels, or working for almost nothing as housekeepers or servants for people who abuse them. They're required to pay for their passage from their wages and, of course, somehow they never manage to get enough to buy their freedom.'
'And what does all this have to do with the Atlantis Queen!'
She shrugged. 'Nothing directly. My boss wants me to have a look at the security arrangements on board your ships. How do you know you don't have a few hundred stowaways? How do you control access to sensitive areas of your ship, such as the computers? We hope to build an intelligence network that includes all methods of entry through our borders — airlines, the Chunnel, Channel ferries, passenger liners — to help us monitor the people who come into the UK every day.'
'I… see. It all seems rather comprehensive.'
'It's also low-key and off the record, David. I can show you a letter from my boss authorizing me to see your system. If you'd rather not go that route, I'll let him know and SOCA can make a more… formal request of Royal Sky's board of directors.'
Howorth could almost see the wheels turning in Llewellyn's mind. If he turned down her informal request, he might soon be dealing with a formal order — and questions from his own boss as to why he'd not been more cooperative with the government.
'If I say no,' Llewellyn said, 'do we have to send you home?'
She grinned. 'Technically,' she said, 'I'm on vacation.
This is informal.'
'And if I say yes.. will you let me buy you dinner first?'
'Plying me with food? I think I could manage that.'
'Then let me see what I can do,' he told her.
Rosie, bless her little Intel chip of a heart, was an unqualified success.
Jerry Esterhausen leaned against the bar, turned on his stool so he could watch the activity at the blackjack table. On the bar in front of him, his laptop was open, the screen showing the feed from Rosie's camera as she dealt out another hand.
The Atlantis Queen's onboard casino was doing a fair business this evening. Men in formal black and women in colorful gowns and plunging decolletage mingled with men and women in more casual attire, feeding coins to electronic slot machines, sitting around green-felt tables studying fans of playing cards, or hanging out at the bar. By far the largest group, though, had clustered around Rosie at her station in front of the broad, glass doors leading out to the after pool deck. Only three were playing; the rest kibitzed with raucous good humor. But when one human player decided he or she had had enough and stood up, another would slip into the vacated seat.
Esterhausen was flanked at the bar by Sharon Reilly, the Queen's CD, or Cruise Director, and by William Paulson, the Hotel Manager — or 'hotman,' in cruise ship parlance. The CD was in charge of the staff devoted to the care and entertainment of the ship's passengers — hostesses, entertainers, stage managers, fitness instructors, teen counselors, and all the rest who provided recreation for the guests. The hotman, in turn, was a ship's officer and the CD's boss, reporting directly to the staff captain, who was the ship's second in command. The hotman ran the immense floating hotel that was the Atlantis Queen.
'That,' Paulson said, leaning over to peer at Esterhausen's screen, 'is impressive.'
The screen showed a Rosie's-eye view of her hands as she shuffled a deck of cards, jointed fingers coated in a thin vinyl skin that stretched and grabbed and manipulated as skillfully as the fingers of any human dealer. The earlier programming glitch appeared to have cleared up completely.
'So, can you operate the robot from your computer?' Reilly asked him.
'Sort of,' Esterhausen said. 'I can type in code to make changes to the programming, and I can control some of the gross motor movements with this ' He tapped the tiny, rubber-capped controller in the center of his keyboard, a miniature joystick. 'I can make her turn, make her move her arms, that sort of thing. But to do that I would have to use the t-gloves.'
On the screen the cards were almost magically scooting off the deck in Rosie's hand as her thumb flicked back and forth.
'T-gloves?' Paulson asked.
'Teleoperational gloves. They look like thin rubber gloves. You put them on, plug them into a USB port, and they sense your hand positions and finger movements, transmitting them to the robot hands. That's how we trained them to do stuff like shuffle, cut, and deal in the first place. That's just for emergencies, though.' He shook his head. 'I can't deal as slick as Rosie's doing there. We actually had a professional gambler come into our labs to train her with the gloves. Those are his hand movements she's using, stored in her hard drive.'
'Hey, Rosie!' a young man in the audience called out. 'I think I'm in love with you!'
The robot's monitor turned to face the speaker, the female face appearing to look him up and down. 'If I weren't bolted to the floor,' she said in her provocatively sultry voice, 'I'd take you up to your stateroom and let you prove it!'
The audience laughed, and a few clapped their hands. They seemed as entranced by Rosie's banter as by her manual dexterity.
'Fascinating,' Reilly said. 'But that means, if something went wrong, you could kind of take over for her? Work her like an electronic puppet?'
'Pretty much, yeah. Of course, what we'd probably have to do is hook up a black-box shuffler.'
'I've seen those,' Paulson said, frowning. 'You put a deck in the top, it shuffles them inside and spits cards out one at a time. Not nearly as impressive as that'
