'But we have one along as backup,' Esterhausen told him. 'Just in case there's a glitch.'
'Hey, Rosie!' another young man called out. 'Are those hooters of yours real, or is that where you keep your batteries?'
'Please, sir,' Rosie replied. 'You're making me blush!'
'Rowdy crowd tonight,' Reilly said.
'I've seen worse,' Paulson said, sliding off his bar stool. 'Mr. Esterhausen? An impressive show. I think I can promise that Royal Sky Line will be doing more business with CyberAge in future.'
'That's good to hear, sir.'
Paulson walked off through the crowd.
'The house wins,' Rosie announced as the blackjack hands were revealed. Rosie held a 19; one player had a 17, while the others all were over 21.
'I think I've just been screwed by a machine,' one of the players said, laughing as he stood up.
Rosie held up one mechanical arm, the fingers working back and forth. 'I'm sorry, sir. All I can manage tonight is a hand job.'
That one brought down the house.
David Llewellyn led Carolyn Howorth up the steps and into a passageway on the Eleventh Deck, one level up from Kleito's Temple.
He'd fed her lobster bisque and shrimp scampi as the last of the sunset colors faded from the sky ahead, and talked about his job as head of shipboard security. After a phone call to clear things with someone — she suspected that the call was to Vandergrift, the staff captain — Llewellyn told her that he'd obtained clearance to take her to the Security Office. A handprint scanner mounted on the bulkhead next to the door admitted them. 'You have these throughout the ship?' she asked.
'Only the most secure compartments,' he said. 'Security. The bridge. Engineering. The Purser's Office. Places like that. And only a few key personnel have handprint records on file.' He pointed up at a familiar glassy black hemisphere mounted on the ceiling. 'Smile,' he said. 'Big Brother is watching.'
Inside, the Security Office consisted of a long room with security monitors lined up along one bulkhead. Four men and two women sat at the monitors, watching them as, occasionally, the view shifted to a different camera. Most of the monitors, Howorth saw, looked down onto passageways. A few showed decks outside, or places like the restaurant they'd just left. One of the men was watching an alcove beneath a ship's ladder, somewhere outside. The light was poor, but there was enough to see a man in a jacket and a woman in a blue gown in close embrace, kissing. The man's hand was roving at the base of her spine.
Llewellyn cleared his throat. 'I don't think we have any terrorists there, Jenkins.'
'Yes, sir!' the man said, starting. 'No, sir! Sorry, sir!' He typed an entry on his keyboard, and the scene changed to the Atlantean Grotto Restaurant on the Eleventh Deck.
'The computer cycles from camera to camera every thirty seconds,' Llewellyn explained. 'Or the operators can deliberately override the system and look at what they want.'
'Privacy issues?' Howorth asked.
'No security cams inside staterooms, crew's quarters, dressing rooms, or public toilets, of course,' Llewellyn told her. 'But everything else is pretty well covered twenty-four hours a day. Yes, there are privacy issues. But it's a tradeoff. If we see drunks in a stateroom passageway, or someone locked out of their room, or an ugly confrontation, we can have security people there in a minute or two.'
'How many security personnel do you have?'
'Enough,' he said.
'Computer network security,' she said. 'You use Netguardz?'
His eyebrows rose. 'Yes, we do. And how did you know that?'
'SOCA has its ways, David.' She nodded toward a closed door at the end of the compartment. 'What's back there?'
'Computers, and our magnetic keying machines.'
'Where you create key cards for passenger's staterooms?'
'And every other door on the ship. Just like in a hotel.'
She'd seen and heard enough. 'Thank you, David. This has been most enlightening.'
'So what will your report say?'
'Report?'
'You didn't con me into giving you this tour just because you like security cams,' Llewellyn told her. 'You intimated that SOCA wants to know about how we handle security on board.'
'At some point, SOCA will want to establish a single security computer network, something embracing MI5 and 6, Scotland Yard, and a number of other agencies. It looks as if they could add you to the network with a minimum of fuss.' She saw the look on his face and smiled. 'Don't worry. It won't happen for years… not with funding at the levels it's been lately!'
She allowed him to take her for an evening stroll on deck, carefully avoiding the spot where the two lovers were kissing.
And in the locked IT room at the back of the Ship's Security Office, Mohamed Ghailiani pulled the last of a stack of plastic key cards from the magnetic imprinting machine and then typed in a keyboard command that erased the log record of his having made these copies. He'd gotten the password for that access from a friend in IT, Danny Smith, claiming he needed an extra master key for a rendezvous in a secure area with a very special lady friend who wanted to see how the ship really worked. Smith had only grinned and given Ghailani his personal password; the computer tech was known to have a weak spot for willing women, too.
There would be a record of Ghailani's computer access kept in permanent storage, and he could do nothing about that, not now. When this was all over, an investigation would note that Danny Smith had printed out twenty- five unauthorized master keys and Smith would point the investigators to Ghailiani. Khalid had promised him that the hard drive could be destroyed once he and his friends took over the ship, and that would ensure Ghailiani's anonymity.
The stack contained thirty-one master keys, key cards that gained admission to every locked room, every secure area, every stateroom, on the ship. With these, Khalid and the people he'd snuck on board the ship would have access to every compartment on the Queen. And he'd made the operation possible for them. Ghailiani scarcely cared anymore. All he could think of was Zahra and Nouzha, and whether he would ever see them alive again.
Chapter 8
'Good morning, everyone,' Captain Jorgenson said as he walked onto the bridge, pipe in his teeth, a heavy mug of strong coffee in his hand. As long as he'd lived in Great Britain, he'd never gotten the hang of their mimsy preference for tea. Jorgenson had been drinking coffee, good strong coffee, since he was twelve. 'What's our status?'
'Good morning, Captain,' Dunsmore replied, rising from the high captain's seat behind the helm and stepping aside. 'We lost the Campbeltown four hours ago. It's just us and the Is She now.'
Jorgenson quirked an eyebrow at Dunsmore's use of the IshikarVs popular nickname. Most of the English speakers in the crew, Jorgenson knew, had taken to calling the Japanese vessel the Is She or, more formally, the Is She? Ain't She? It was a harmless and typical bit of merchant marine humor. Jorgenson preferred a higher standard of propriety on his bridge, however.
Perhaps Dunsmore caught a taste of Jorgenson's displeasure. Standing with his hands stiffly at his back, he cleared his throat. 'Sir. The Ishikari is currently eight hundred yards off our starboard bow. We are on course, on time, on a heading of two-three-five degrees true, speed twelve knots. Winds are blowing a fresh breeze from the southwest at twenty knots.'
'Very well, Number One.' Jorgenson walked over to the radar console, where a seaman stood watch at the
