the tables, however. They seemed stunned by the sudden, brief battle with the helicopters. Outside, by the Atlas Pool, two armed terrorists watched the distant helicopters circle far out over the sea.
She spotted one man sitting alone at the bar, a nerdy-looking sort with heavy-rimmed glasses and a distracted expression. Then she took a second look. He had a laptop computer on the bar in front of him and was hard at work typing at the keyboard.
A computer was definitely promising. She walked over to the bar and sat down next to him.
'What,' she asked, 'are you doing?'
'Huh? Oh. Coding.'
'Coding what?'
He nodded toward a kind of kiosk at the rear of the casino, not far from the sliding doors. She blinked. The kiosk encircled a vaguely humanoid figure, a woman's figure complete with a plunging neckline between large plastic breasts, robotic arms, and an eerie face on a TV monitor mounted where the head should have been.
'That,' he said. 'Rosie.'
She'd read something about the machine in a brochure in the travel package they'd handed her at Southampton. 'That's the card-playing robot?' she asked. 'The one that plays blackjack?'
'The one and only.'
'Um… I don't know how to say this, exactly,' she said carefully, 'but you do know we've been captured by hijackers, yes?'
'Of course. We all heard the announcement.'
'So why are you doing that?
He stopped typing and looked up, looked around, then looked at her. 'We need guns,' he said, his voice low, a conspiratorial whisper, 'A way to fight back! Maybe Rosie can help us get one. She's very strong.'
'How? She doesn't look very… mobile.'
'She's not. She's bolted to the deck.' He started typing again.
'By the way, I'm Janet Carroll,' Howorth told him.
'Jerry Esterhausen.'
'Listen… I know it's a lot to ask, but can you connect with the ship's Internet with that thing?'
'Of course. It has a built-in router.'
'Jerry,' Carolyn said, lowering her voice in a deliberately and sexually provocative manner, 'you and I need to talk!'
'The attack by unknown helicopters appears to have been beaten off,' Sandra Ames said, speaking earnestly into the microphone as the freshening wind caught and tousled her blond hair. 'We don't have any more details at the time, but at least one helicopter was shot down by missiles fired from the Atlantis Queen's upper decks, and at least two more were damaged. The rest of the helicopters — witnesses said they saw between five and ten additional helicopters off the ship's stern at one point — appear to have left the area.'
The three of them, Fred Doherty, James Petrovich, and Sandra Ames, were standing on the forward deck under the watchful and dispassionate gaze of one of the terrorist gunmen. They were losing light fast. Doherty wasn't sure what time zone they were in right now, so he didn't know the local time, but the sun was approaching the horizon in a blaze of sunset color and gilded clouds astern.
'Amir Yusef Khalid, the leader of the terrorist group, gave this news team permission — it was more of an order, really — to come outside onto the ship's forward deck and film this report. I don't know what — wait. Amir Khalid has just come out onto the deck. Perhaps he has something to say to us on-air… '
Fred Doherty turned and looked aft, toward the ship's superstructure. A grim-faced Khalid had just emerged onto the forward promenade. Behind him were two of his thugs carrying AK-47 rifles, and an older man, his hands bound behind his back. At the sight of the civilian passenger, Doherty felt a sharp chill that was not due to the wind.
They marched the civilian up to the ship's railing and forced him to his knees, facing out to sea. With the camera rolling, without any preamble at all, Khalid pulled an automatic pistol from his belt and stepped up behind the prisoner. The passenger sensed the movement and started struggling, but the guards kept his arms pinned. Khalid brought the pistol up to the base of the man's skull and pulled the trigger.
Ames screamed as the sharp crack of the gunshot echoed back off the ship's superstructure. 'Oh, my God, no!' Petrovich said. The passenger pitched forward into the railing and slumped to the deck, blood pooling beneath his head.
Khalid turned and stalked toward the camera, eyes burning with a ferocity Doherty had not seen before. Glaring into the camera, Khalid pointed back over his shoulder at the body as the two thugs lifted it between them, balanced it upright for a moment against the rail, then heaved it over the side. 'That,' Khalid said, 'was one of the ship's passengers. His name was Arnold Bernstein, of Los Angeles, California. You — the governments in Washington and in London — may take comfort in the fact that we of the Islamic Jihad International Brigade are merciful and did not kill every man, woman, and child onboard this vessel tonight as a result of your idiotic posturing and chest-thumping! Attempt another such attack, however, and over thirty-three hundred more people will die!
'We know you have two warships closing with us. Those ships are to keep their distance. Come no closer than twenty miles with any ship or aircraft to the Atlantis Queen and the Pacific Sandpiper, or we shall begin killing more passengers!'
Khalid turned suddenly and walked away, back toward the ship's superstructure. 'And cut,' Doherty said quietly.
Beside him, Sandra Ames quietly muttered, 'That fucking raghead son of a bitch.'
He'd never heard her use that kind of language before.
Chapter 22
'There we go,' Esterhausen said. 'You can send your e-mail now, and the terrorists up in IT won't have a clue.'
'Excellent!' Howorth said. 'You slowed down the packet rate, you said?'
'Yes.' The man was almost preening, quite proud of his computer savvy. Howorth knew her way around computers and IT networks as well, but she'd reined herself in as she'd talked with Esterhausen, asking pertinent questions and making suggestions, but letting him think he was doing most of the work./It was, after all, his computer, and she needed access if she was going to pull this off. She had the impression that he didn't often have the opportunity to show off to people. Especially to girls.
'My wireless card can connect with the ship's Intranet, of course,' he continued, 'but anyone monitoring the network up in the ship's IT department would know if we tried sending a message out. I've got pretty good encryption — they wouldn't know what you were saying — but they'd be alerted that someone on board was talking with the shore. But by slowing the transmission rate way, way down, they won't see it in IT. It'll look like routine background traffic.'
'Perfect! That's wonderful, Jerry. Thank you!' She checked her watch. It was just past midnight-thirty back home. The two of them had been at this all evening, bent over Esterhausen's laptop. They'd moved from the bar to a booth some hours ago, to give themselves a bit more privacy.
The hour didn't matter. They would pick up her message both at GCHQ and at Fort Meade, middle of the night or not. She started typing.
'So what is this important e-mail you need to send, anyway? What are you trying to do? You said you worked for the government… '
'I do. The less you know about it, the better.'
'What, MI5?' His eyes lit up. 'MI6?'
That reminded her of Mitchell, and it hurt. 'No. Like I said, the less you know, the better. As to what I'm
