managed to hang on, scrambling against the railing, throwing her upper body and then her leg over the rail and onto the balcony. As she rolled up against the glass doorway, she heard voices just overhead, as the attackers came out onto her balcony.
She froze. Maybe they would think she'd fallen into the sea.
They would certainly want to check to make sure. They wouldn't follow her down the outside of the ship's hull, but they would come down to Deck Five and look, just to make sure.
At her back, the glass door suddenly slid aside. She looked up at the surprised face of a man looking down at her, and held her finger to her lips.
Rubens looked up at the main display screen dominating one wall of the Art Room. At the moment it showed a shocking digital photograph blown up with punch-in-the-gut clarity — two women, one in her thirties, the other obviously much younger, lying side by side on a rumpled bed, tied, gagged, and partly undressed. A newspaper lay on their bare stomachs, folded to show the masthead logo, The Sun, and today's date.
'Do we have a positive ID on them?' he asked.
'Yes, sir.' The reply came through an overhead speaker. Charles Gaither was an NSA analyst working at GCHQ in England and was speaking over one of the NSA's secure satellite links with Menwith Hill. He had the same image on his own monitor, thirty-four hundred miles away. 'The one on the left is Zahra Ghailiani. Age thirty-four. Housewife. The other is Nouzha Ghaliani, daughter, age fifteen. Zahra's husband is Mohamed Ghailiani. Their address is a flat on Lower Mortimer Road, in Woolston. British citizens. Mohamed Ghailiani is a security officer on board the Atlantis Queen.'
'So the IJI is holding these two hostage to guarantee Ghailiani's compliance.'
'Yes, sir. According to our informant on the Queen, they forced him to make security cards for them that gave them access to all parts of the ship, then forced him to help them get three trucks on board while the Queen was still at the dock. According to him, they've e-mailed him several photos like this since the ship left port. He's terrified for their lives.'
Rubens studied the photo a moment, looking for clues in the background. The wall was dirty plaster; a piece at the extreme right edge of the photo had cracked and broken off, exposing the lath beneath.
'You'll have been analyzing this,' Rubens said. 'Do you have anything yet?'
'Not much. See the hole in the wall at the right? Lath and plaster construction. That means they're being held someplace pretty old, built before dry wall came into general use. Almost certainly not a motel or a hotel. The bed frame is an old style, too, probably at least thirty years old.'
'It doesn't look much like an upscale part of town.'
'Exactly. We also know they had photos of the two women to show Ghailiani the same morning they went missing. We're operating on the assumption that they're being held pretty close to Woolston, probably in the same neighborhood, within a fifteen-or twenty-minute drive. That narrows the field for the search quite a bit. MI5 has units out now going door to door, asking people if anyone saw anything suspicious last Thursday.'
'People always see suspicious stuff,' Rubens said. 'That could take a long time.'
'We have one thing more to go on, Mr. Rubens. Take a look at this.'
The two kidnapped women vanished from the big screen, replaced by a grainy and slightly fuzzy photo in gray-green tones. It showed a suburban street scene — rows of trees and neat, brick houses — and with a dark- colored sedan parked to the right. A man leaned on the car, smoking a cigarette and looking away up the sidewalk.
'We have a tap into the British security street-camera system,' Gaither explained. 'Cameras mounted on lampposts take shots every few seconds and forward them to the local police. Nouzha Ghailiani goes to school in the Woolston district, and we knew what bus stop she used. We dialed into several cameras in the area and came up with this.'
'What about it?'
'I don't know about America,' Gaither said, 'but over here the police are extremely interested in older guys who hang around school bus stops. Nouzha's stop is just out of frame to the left. This photo was taken about fifteen minutes before her bus was due to arrive last Thursday morning.'
'I see.'
A white rectangle drew itself around the man's head, and the scene expanded until only the head was visible, vast and disturbing, filling the screen.
'We can't tell a lot from this shot,' Gaither went on, 'but the subject's mustache and skin tone are at least consistent with Middle Eastern profiling data.'
''Profiling' is a bad word over here,' Rubens said dryly, 'but your point is taken.'
'We got a total of thirty-two photographs of this subject,' Gaither went on. 'Unfortunately, the camera didn't happen to catch Nouzha.'
The face vanished, the image shifting back to the street scene. The image changed, tree branches and cars in the background jumping back and forth like a choppy movie viewed frame by frame. The last three frames showed the man throw his cigarette down, grind it underfoot, and begin to walk out of frame to the right. The final image showed the car pulling out away from the curb.
'And one thing more… '
The image cut back to one showing the car parked by the curb. Again a white square drew itself around the license plate mounted on the car's front bumper. The plate was partially obscured by the trunk of a small tree growing out of a planter area in the sidewalk, but as the scene zoomed in close, 'E83K,' the last four figures in a longer registration number, became visible.
'We have a partial plate number,' Gaither continued, 'and a make and model on the vehicle. MI5 is running the data through their databases now.'
'Good work,' Rubens said. 'They may not be holding the Ghailiani family at the same address where the car is registered.'
'No, but it will give us a start. We're putting together a team now to liaise with the HRT in Southampton.'
'Who's running the team?'
'Edward Cartwright. Colonel, SAS.'
'Okay. I'm going to send two of my agents to work with him,' Rubens said. 'We need to stay on top of this. I don't want to lose even thirty seconds because the lines of communication get scrambled or some idiot bureaucrat decides we can't have access.'
'Right, Mr. Rubens.'
'Let me know the minute you turn up anything else. Rubens out.' He cut the connection.
Rubens walked over to Jeff Rockman's workstation. 'Patch me through to Charlie Dean and Lia DeFrancesca,' he said. 'Where are they?'
'Holiday Inn, Southampton, England,' Rockman told him.
A moment later, Dean's voice sounded over the speaker. 'Dean. I copy.'
'And DeFrancesca. What's up?'
'New assignments,' Rubens told them. 'Lia, you're going to the MI5 branch office in Southampton tonight, and putting yourself at their disposal. Talk with Colonel Edward Cartwright. He knows you're coming. You'll be our liaison with the SAS hostage rescue team they're assembling for an important op. Code name Imperial. Ilya Akulinin will be flying back out to join you tomorrow. He'll be your backup.'
'Yes, sir. What's this all about?'
Briefly Rubens filled them in on Ghailiani and the need to find and free his family. 'There's just one hitch,' Rubens added. 'Ghailiani may be dead or captured. We… lost contact with our operator on board the Atlantis Queen in mid-transmission.'
'Who was that?' Dean demanded. 'Carrousel?'
Rubens hesitated, then said, 'Yes. She began transmitting over her secure link with Menwith Hill a little over an hour ago. She told us she'd hooked up with a British MI5 agent, gave us a fair rundown on the terrorists, and said they'd captured Ghailiani, one of the Ship's Security men, who's being forced to help the terrorists. But halfway through the transmission, she was cut off, mid-word. We have to assume that she and the MI5 man are dead.
Ghailiani may be dead as well.' Rubens paused, then added, Tm sorry, Charlie. I know you've worked with
