cruise was all that he and Nina would need to rekindle the romance and find each other again.
Fuck that…
Seabirds darted and shrieked, drowning out all else. He stopped and looked up at the enormous ship.
According to the travel brochure, the Atlantis Queen was 964 feet long, 106 feet wide, and displaced some ninety thousand tons, making her the largest, as well as the newest, of the Royal Sky Line's fleet. She was a damned floating city, with a passenger complement of almost three thousand and a crew of nine hundred, with so much glitter and glitz that passengers could spend two weeks on board and never see the ocean, never even know they were at sea.
Rich people doing rich-people things. He shook his head and continued up the gangway.
At the top of the ramp, a uniformed ship's officer greeted him with a public-relations-perfect smile. 'Good afternoon, Mr. McKay,' he said. 'May I see your ticket and your passkey, please?'
McKay handed them across, and the officer made a note on his electronic pad with a stylus. 'You're in Four- one-one-four. That's fourth deck, on the port side. Your wife and daughter are in Four-one-one-six, the adjoining stateroom, as requested.' If he thought the living arrangements were strange, he gave no sign of it. 'They both checked in about an hour ago. Would you like for me to page them?'
'Uh… no. That won't be necessary.'
'Very good, Mr. McKay.' He began explaining the need to keep his key card on him and that he should wear the plastic bracelet if he wanted to use the pool, the spa, or some other ship's surface where he might not have a pocket handy. McKay listened to the spiel, thanked the man, and walked on past into the ship.
He wasn't sure he was ready to see Nina just yet. Perhaps a drink at one of the ship's several bars first…
For Adrian Bollinger, this cruise represented a chance at a whole new life.
Tabitha Sandberg clung to his arm. 'Oh, look at her, Adrian! Isn't she gorgeous?'
'She's all of that,' Bollinger replied. 'Not as gorgeous as you, of course.'
'Oh, you…' She gave him a playful slap on the arm. 'You're just saying that.'
'No, Tabby. I'm not. Not now. Not ever.'
They stepped through the glass doors and started across the dock toward the gangway.
A new life.
Bollinger had to admit to himself that he'd pretty much wrecked his old one. Trading shares on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange had been a lucrative life but an ungodly high-stress life as well. Too much money, not enough sense… He'd made mistakes. Bad ones. And he'd ended up as a guest for three years at a state correctional institution. His wife had left him; his daughter refused to talk to him. And they hadn't wanted him back at Tarleton Financial, not a guy with a prison record.
Somehow, though, somehow he'd managed to fight his way back. A friend with another firm, one of Bollinger's old competitors, in fact, had gotten him back on the trading floor at 11 Wall Street. He was damned good at what he did… and this time he was determined not to let the adrenaline or the stress get to him.
One day at a time. He'd been clean and sober for almost ten years, now.
At the bottom of the gangway, he stopped and turned Tabby to face him. 'Happy us,' he told her. 'Not happy birthday, not merry Christmas. Happy us'
'You're the best there is, Adrian,' she said. 'Happy us!'
She sounded as though she meant it completely. Sincerity, Bollinger realized, was a damned rare commodity these days.
He'd met Tabitha at a party in New York City just a year ago, and she'd become an incredibly important part of his life… a constant reminder that there was more out there than Wall Street, more than stock quotes, more than work. She'd agreed to move in with him two weeks ago, and as a kind of celebration he'd surprised her with tickets for a flight to England followed by a cruise on board the Atlantis Queen. Tabby was something of an armchair historian, and a two-week cruise through the Mediterranean, stopping in at ports rich with history from Marseilles to Alexandria, was just what the stockbroker had ordered.
And why not? He could afford it. He'd gone from well-off to impoverished and fought his way back to wealthy. Money, he'd learned, definitely was not everything.
And now that Tabby was in his life, he could use his money to celebrate that fact.
'Good afternoon, folks,' the officer at the top of the gangway said. He gave them his spiel and handed them their keys. 'Stateroom Five-oh-eight-seven,' he said. 'That's four decks up, starboard side and aft. Enjoy your cruise!'
'Thanks,' Adrian Bollinger said, grinning as he gave Tabby a squeeze. 'We certainly intend to!'
Rubens' office NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland Thursday, 0825 hours EDT
'Shit' Rubens exploded. He stared at the bright blue screen on his computer monitor for a long couple of seconds. 'Not again!'
Of the sixteen agencies operating within the U. S. government, the National Security Agency arguably was the most technically advanced. From the mammoth machines of the Tordella Supercomputer Center, to the secure internal server networks within the agency itself, to the various shared networks and databases theoretically connecting all of the various government and law enforcement agencies and departments both in the United States and abroad, the NSA had long prided itself as having the very best IT systems, personnel, and equipment of them all.
So why the hell did they have to put up with these system crashes that were becoming more and more routine?
He touched an intercom button. 'Pam? NCTC is offline again. Get me Lowell on the phone.'
'Yes, sir.'
Charles Lowell was the closest thing the National Counterterrorism Center had to an IT head; he was in charge of the complex tangle of databases, some classified, some not, that were intended as a resource to be shared among all government agencies taking part in the War on Terror.
And the project had been a nightmare from the start.
It wasn't Lowell's fault, of course. The problem was that the database project itself was simply so big, so complex, and involved so many different programmers and design tracks that it was almost impossible for any one person to see all the parts and how they had to work together at once.
The NCTC had spent half a billion dollars to upgrade the foundering system through a project called Railhead, and things rapidly had gone from bad to disastrous. At the moment, the system was nearly useless, and a lot of data collected through enormous cost and effort had gone missing.
The Counterterrorism Center had been trying to address the issues for several years, but things looked little better than they had when a Congressional oversight committee had flagged the project in 2008.
Rubens had come up to his office from the Art Room to run the name Nayim Erbakan through the sieve. It seemed strange that the man was smuggling what appeared to be a kilo or so of drugs — heroin, most likely — from England back to the eastern Med, and on a cruise ship no less. Maybe the guy just hoped to sell his wares to the rich tourists, but after a while intelligence officers developed a hyper-paranoid sixth sense about anything out of the ordinary, and Rubens was curious about this one.
But as soon as he'd tried to run the search through the TIDE database, the Center's network, one of several connecting various government agencies, had crashed.
'Mr. Lowell on the secure line, sir.'
He picked up the handset. 'Lowell? Rubens.'
'The system's down,' Lowell said. 'I know. We're working on it.'
'You've been working on it for six years. When is it going to work?'
'You've seen the schedule. The upgrades are supposed to be complete by 2012.'
'If they come in on time. Can you put someone on a special search for me?'
Lowell sighed. 'No promises. What is it?'
'A name. Nayim Erbakan.' He spelled it out, waiting as Lowell jotted down the letters and repeated them back. At least the Turkish used the Western alphabet. One of the serious problems with the TIDE database was the problem in transliterating Arabic names. Was it 'Mohammed,' 'Muhammad,' or 'Mohamed'? The answer, often, was yes, and cross-referencing numerous alternate spellings as well as aliases all for the same terrorist was part of the reason the database project wasn't fulfilling expectations.
