Cruise (9 page)

“Got it. Believe it or not, that’s how I managed to get around New York City last week. I discovered the way the streets and avenues are numbered and, with some weird exceptions, it worked out fine.”

“We’ve got some exceptions here too,” the woman said. “By the way, my name is Connie Demarra. You may call me anything you want, but I prefer Connie, at least when there are no big wigs around.”

“You got it. I’m just Bibi and it works in any company, although wise guys like to call me ‘Wolf’ and ‘Lynx’, which I will not respond to, no matter who is doing the calling.”

Connie laughed. “I understand,” she added. “A few of the slugs in the dock crew tried calling me Demmie and that got them ignored the first time and a kick in the ass the second time.”

“Okay. Just for the record, Connie, please finish up on the code. What’s the rest of it for?”

“That last line,” Connie narrated in a bit of a singsong voice, indicating that she had memorized the entire pitch and had to repeat it often, “shows the way to the nearest emergency exit. All exits are, of course, well marked, but this code points you towards the nearest. In this case, you need to go forward about twenty meters for an exit or another exit directive. The system is not perfect. If we lost power and the lights failed, these would not do much good. But we have double back-ups on emergency lighting, so if the main goes, the first back-up cuts in…that’s those panel lights. If that system goes, the next one, which is independently activated if there is total darkness in the area for more than ten seconds, cuts in.”

“Thanks. I’ll read up on it. Do you have a key to this door?”

“Thumbprint on the pad under that little brass panel to your right.”

“Mine Gott,” Bibi said under her breath, amazed that they had already loaded her fingerprints in the ship’s database. She lifted the small brass cover, put her thumb on the glass and the lock quietly released. Bibi opened the door and walked into the luxuriously appointed cabin. The bed was high and huge by any standards, topped with a colorful oriental quilt and a dozen or more pillows at the head. The floors were hardwood parquet with small oriental throw rugs scattered about. The wall facing the door offered a long horizontal window with what looked like built-in horizontal shutters. There was a built-in writing desk, a wall mounted entertainment console with a massive flat screen, plasma TV, and an open wardrobe with enough room for everything Bibi owned times two. The doorway next to the closet showed a tile and marble bath in dark green. Bibi stared, stunned at the opulence.

“I hope you’ll be comfortable here,” Connie said, realizing that her guest was a bit taken aback by the glamour. “If you aren’t, just pick up one of the phones, (there are four, including one in the head), and tell them you want to move.”

“Head?”

“Toilet. Bathroom.” Connie grinned. “Read the book on your bunk. It will really help.”

“Oh, right, of course. I just spent three weeks on the M.S. Burtendam and they called everything by shore names, like hallways, stairs, bathroom, beds, etc. I’ve got to get used to the nautical names again.”

Suddenly, Bibi had a mental flash of being bound to the steel four-posted bed in the cruise ship’s suite, a heavy leather hood over her head and a massive penis gag stuffed deep into her mouth while Nate adjusted the electronic contacts that were buried in her cunt and ass. She blinked her eyes to move the images out of her mind for the moment, but relished the memory of the short week of consensual punishment at the hands of the young bartender.

“I think you will especially like the bunk,” said Connie, almost as if she was reading Bibi’s mind. “It’s got lots of great features.”

“Thanks,” said Bibi. “Some bunk,” she said, pointing to the king size bed. “What are its features?”

“Oh, for one thing the sides come up to keep you from falling out in rough seas. Just push these buttons here.” She demonstrated and two dark wood side gates rose with a low whine from electric motors and framed the bed neatly.

“Anything else?” Bibi asked.

“The usual heated blankets, various levels of massage in the mattress, a fingerprint activated storage safe behind the headboard for your weapons, and of course, the ship’s TV surveillance fed into all of the monitors.”

“How many monitors and where are they?” asked Bibi searching for conventional TV screens and seeing none.

“One there,” said Connie, pressing another control panel button and watching with a grin as a large flat screen descended from the overhead and then adjusted to various angles as she worked the joystick on the panel.

“One in the head.”

Listening with one ear and still glancing around the large cabin, Bibi asked, “Is there a shower on this corridor?”

“Pardon me?” Connie said, a bigger grin on her cute, sun-tanned face. Her nearly white blond hair was carefully trimmed to frame a pixie face with light blue eyes and almost invisible eyelashes and brows. Bibi thought she would make a good Peter Pan or Tinkerbell, except for the exceptionally well-developed bust and long legs.

“Where are the showers?” Bibi asked. “I really need a bath, but a shower will do. Coming through Miami airport is enough to make you want to scrub myself for about an hour. I’ve been in cleaner airports in some otherwise dumpy countries.”

“Oh, right. I know what you mean. It’s more like a third world airport than one in the US, isn’t it? The filthiest place I have seen since Bombay, and I wasn’t in Bombay that long,” Connie added quickly. “I think you’ll find an adequate bath right through that doorway. You take your time, look around and call if you need anything. I have to get back to the entry. We’re expecting your associate, ah, Ms. Groff.”

“Is she staying here with me?”

“Oh Lord, no. She’s in a cabin that’s in the same location on the port side. That’s for security so that one of you is on each side and more readily available if needed. Good security practice, you know. And, speaking of security, there are faux cabins for both of you. As far as the working crew knows, that is where you actually stay. In the event that someone wants to annoy you, they’ll go there, not here, which is why there’s no name on the door. Ms. Groff has a similar arrangement.”

“Right,” said Bibi, moving toward the indicated doorway and marveling at a bathroom that exceeded in luxury those in any hotels she had ever stayed in. She had expected perhaps a toilet and sink, not a complete bath suite. The tub was deep enough for her entire body to sit in submerged and the deep sea green enamel fixtures contrasted beautifully with the white marble counters, floor, sinks and toilet. “I think l can get used to this,” she said.

“Great. See you later, Bibi.” Connie waved and left Bibi to contemplate which of the multiple dark green appliances to use first: the toilet, the bidet or the tub. She stripped and settled on the tub after debating whether to fill it with fresh or salt water, both of which had their own set of gold plated taps and temperature controls.

“This is going to be a rough assignment,” she hummed to herself as she settled back in the tub, closed her eyes and wondered how Franz had managed to get them such a plush job.

Chapter Five

Miami

Hermann Bohner, the somewhat effeminate, former volleyball star and now one of Brillcart’s many go-fers, was smart enough to be able to do more than memorize game plays. That intelligence told him that his boss was fully capable and probably already committed to killing him as soon as he killed the Lynx bitch. With this in mind, Hermann took a somewhat circuitous route from Zurich to Miami, stopping and changing planes in Frankfurt and again in Atlanta. Calista, Brillcart’s administrator and general control for his agents throughout the world, was not happy about the multiple flight travel, but arranged it anyway with open tickets that he could and did change after Hermann said that he was building frequent flyer miles on Lufthansa.

“Sure you are,” Calista, responded, sitting in front of her computer screen, booking the one-way flights. “You might spend as much or more time considering how you will deal with the American idiots at the Fatherland Security and TSA interrogations you will be subjected to when you get there.”

“Me?” laughed Hermann. “You know what TSA stands for? Thousands Standing Around. They’re people who couldn’t find any other job and are on the government dole. They don’t do anything.”

He laughed to himself, considering whether or not to tell Calista the obscene German version of the three letter abbreviation. He decided to leave that humor for some other time.

“And, by the way, it’s Homeland Security, not Fatherland. You’ve been in Germany too long, Sweetheart,” Hermann added with a nasty smirk. “I am, in any case, squeaky clean. I have my Irish citizenship, my real estate business cards, my list of legitimate stateside contacts and a small carry-on bag filled with stinking underwear and work clothes. They won’t question me.”

“Well, as you have already been told, don’t call us, no matter what. Get a hungry Jewish lawyer and hunker down and we’ll get you out if there’s trouble.” Calista grinned the poor excuse for a grin that she seldom mustered, aware that most people were either fascinated or repelled by her six shiny steel teeth in the front of her mouth. Calista lost her real teeth in an alley brawl while she still had her virginity and was actively protecting it. The three hooligans who attacked her did not survive the encounter. Two of the upper teeth housed tiny hypodermic needles containing biosmour, a toxic substance that Calista had slowly built up an immunity for, but which were lethal to anyone who she bit. Now she worked for Brillcart and only bit people she needed to kill. Sadly, she noted that, at the moment, Hermann wasn’t one of them.

***

Miami International Airport’s Customs and Immigration officials had more important things on their plate the day that Hermann arrived and he breezed through as he said he would. Some nut from Chicago had told the flight attendants on an arriving flight that he was carrying a bomb and that set off all kinds of alarms. When he headed back up the jetway to escape, three plain clothes federal officers shot him dead.

Getting little more than a nod from the customs officers when they flipped through his Irish passport with its few entries, he had his tourist visa properly endorsed, picked up a form 2910 and emerged into the sweltering, humid lobby of the terminal along with thousands of other passengers, most of them from Latin America.

He rented a car from Avis. His first stop was a small warehouse not far from the airport and on the way to the city. Here he met three totally stoned black men who, after looking him up and down and making unintelligible remarks to each other about him, demanded ten thousand dollars in small bills before giving him the package he was to pick up. Smiling brightly, Hermann studied the three carefully. He noted the poorly concealed, naked, youthful, white woman hanging by her wrists from a ceiling beam in the back of the warehouse and decided which one of the idiots he would kill first and how the rest would die. Then he reminded the trio, who looked like they got their fashion sense from a comic book, that they had already been paid in full.

“Oh, yeah. Sure, Mizzer Hermann. I forgots dat part,” rattled Cert, the only member of the group who seemed to be anywhere near lucid. His idiot companions continued to lounge in the beach chairs, eyes half closed, stained, baggy nylon shorts reaching to their ankles and baseball caps with the stiff brim turned at a thirty-degree angle.

“Youse will find everything dere,” Cert said, sliding a small nylon duffle with leather handles and a larger rucksack towards him from under the table.

Hermann picked up the small duffle, opened it carefully and removed each of the items in it, laying them out on the table. It contained four untraceable, throw-away cell phones, three standard M6 military fragmentation hand grenades, a Microtech QD Scarab automatic, out-the-front tactical knife; a Walther semi-automatic .380 pistol with suppressor/silencer and a pair of leaded black leather gloves. There were three boxes of ammunition, each with a different type of bullet. In the separate rucksack, he found a box containing several sizes of ear plugs, two helicopter rescue/escape breathing rigs, an inflatable flotation vest that looked like an ordinary windbreaker jacket, a pair of night vision goggles and a small pair of Nikon binoculars. The breathing rigs were yellow, Spare Air, three cubic foot cylinders with a regulator and mouthpiece on the top, the commercial version of a more sophisticated rescue type used by the military. The two in the bag were, under controlled conditions and if the user didn’t panic, good for maybe ten to fifteen breaths and were used by SCUBA divers as a back-up alternate air source. The NVG rigs were fourth generation and worked extremely well in limited or zero light conditions.

“What’s with the broad?” Hermann asked casually, nodding to the woman dangling from the chains in the back of the room.

“What broad?” Cert asked, not looking directly at Hermann.

“I’ll give you fifty bucks if you’ll let her go,” Hermann said, considering whether he had enough time to enjoy the rich, full body twitching at the end of the chain and making muffled whines through her gag.

“Make it five hundred and we’ll think about it,” Cert said, swiveling his head around as if to reassess the value of the suspended body.

“Forget it,” Hermann said. He really didn’t want the extra baggage and was intent on getting on with his mission. He put nearly all of the new gear back into the bags, winked at the moron trio in the beach chairs and left the warehouse, pulling the pin on a frag grenade and tossing it back through the open doorway, regretting that he had neither the time nor the resources to kill them properly or to check out the chick dangling from the chain.

The building muffled the grenade’s explosion, but windows and doors blew out and there was a great deal of smoke accented by some kind of indistinct howling from inside the shattered building. It sounded to Hermann a bit like a seized wheel bearing on a tram. Reluctantly, he took the Walther out of the duffle, screwed on the silencer, loaded a full clip of hollow nosed rounds and strode back inside, covering his face with a handkerchief.