Douglas Child - The Wheel of Darkness

“To get us to help you.”

“Only partly true. It’s because I believed there was a dangerous killer on board, and for the safety of the ship I needed to identify him—with your assistance—before he could kill again. Unfortunately, he appears to still be one step ahead of me.”

Kemper’s depression deepened. He would never get the money back, the crossing was a disaster on every front, and he would be blamed.

Pendergast turned, riffled the money again. “Cheer up, Mr. Kemper! You two may yet get your money back. I am ready to call in my little favor.”

Somehow, this did not make Kemper cheer up at all.

“I wish to search the stateroom and safe of Mr. Scott Blackburn. To that end, I will need a passcard to the room’s safe and thirty minutes in which to operate.”

A pause. “I think we can manage that.”

“There’s a wrinkle. Blackburn is currently holed up in his room and won’t come out.”

“Why? Is he worried about the murderer?”

Pendergast smiled again: a small, ironic smile. “Hardly, Mr. Kemper. He’s hiding something, and I need to find it. So he will need to be coaxed out.”

“You can’t ask me to manhandle a passenger.”

“Manhandle? How crude. A more elegant way to effect his removal would be to set off the fire alarms for the starboard stern side of Deck 9.”

Kemper frowned. “You want me to set off a false fire alarm? No way.”

“But you must.”

Kemper thought for a moment. “I suppose we could have a fire drill.”

“He won’t leave if it’s just a drill. Only a mandatory evacuation will dislodge him.”

Kemper ran his hands through his damp hair. God, he was sweating. “Maybe I could pull a fire alarm in that corridor.”

This time, it was Constance Greene who spoke. “No, Mr. Kemper,” she said in a strange antique accent. “We’ve researched the matter carefully. You need to trigger a central alert. A broken firebox would be too quickly discovered. We’ll need a full thirty minutes in Blackburn’s suite. And you’ll have to temporarily disable the sprinkler system, which can only be done from the central fire control system.”

Kemper stood up, Hentoff quickly following. “Impossible. This is a crazy thing to ask. Fire is the most dangerous thing that can happen aboard a ship, aside from sinking. A ship’s officer, deliberately triggering a false alert . . . I’d be committing a criminal offense, maybe a felony. Jesus, Mr. Pendergast, you’re an FBI agent, you know I can’t do that! There must be some other way!”

Pendergast smiled, almost sadly this time. “There is no other way.”

“I won’t do it.”

Pendergast riffled the fat packet of notes. Kemper could actually smell the money—it was like rusty iron.

Kemper stared at the money. “I just can’t do it.”

There was a moment of silence. Then Pendergast stood, went over to the bureau, opened the top drawer, placed the wad of notes inside, and then raked the rest of the envelopes off the bureau into the drawer. He shut the drawer with slow deliberation and turned to Hentoff and nodded. “See you in the casino, Mr. Hentoff.”

There was another silence, longer this time.

“You’re going to . . . gamble?” Hentoff asked slowly.

“Why not?” Pendergast spread his hands. “We’re on holiday, after all. And you know how I adore blackjack. I was thinking of teaching it to Constance as well.”

Hentoff looked at Kemper in alarm.

“I’ve been told I’m a quick study,” Constance said.

Kemper ran his hand through his damp hair again. He could feel the wetness creeping down from his armpits. It just got worse and worse.

The atmosphere in the room grew strained. At last, Kemper finally let his breath out with a rush. “It’s going to take some time to prepare.”

“I understand.”

“I’ll aim for a general fire alarm on Deck 9 at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. It’s the best I can do.”

Pendergast nodded curtly. “In that case, we’ll just have to wait until then. Let us hope things are still, ah, under control by that time.”

“Under control? What do you mean by that?”

But Pendergast simply bowed to each of them in turn, then sat down once again and returned to his dinner.

38

IT WAS MIDNIGHT WHEN MADDIE EDMONDSON SLOUCHED DOWN the central corridor of Deck 3, bored out of her mind. Her grandparents had brought her on the voyage as a present for her sixteenth birthday, and it had seemed like a good idea at the time. But nobody had told her what to expect—that the ship would be a floating hell. All the really fun places—the discotheques and the clubs where the twentysomethings hung out, the casinos—were off-limits to a girl her age. And the shows she could get into seemed to appeal to those over the age of a hundred. Antonio’s Magic Revue, the Blue Man Group, and Michael Bublé doing Frank Sinatra—it was like a joke. She’d seen all the movies, the swimming pools had been closed due to rough weather. The food in the restaurants was too fancy, and she felt too seasick to enjoy the pizza parlors or hamburger spots. There was nothing for her to do besides sit through lounge acts, surrounded by octogenarians fiddling with their hearing aids.

The only interesting thing that had happened was that weird hanging in the Belgravia Theatre. Now that had been something: all the old biddies leaning on their canes and squawking, the grandpas harrumphing and contracting their bushy eyebrows, the officers and deckhands running around like headless chickens. She didn’t care what anybody said, it had to be a gag, a stage prop, some publicity stunt for the new movie. People just didn’t die like that in real life, only in movies.

She passed the gold-lamé-and-green-glass entrance to Trafalgar’s, the ship’s hottest club. Loud, thumping house music droned from its dark interior. She paused to look in. Slender figures—college types and young professionals—were gyrating in a miasma of smoke and flickering light. Outside the door stood the requisite bouncer: thin and handsome and wearing a tux, but a bouncer no less, eager to keep underage people like Maddie from going inside to enjoy herself.

She continued morosely down the corridor. Although the clubs and casinos were hopping, some of the blue-rinse crowd that normally thronged the passageways and shops had disappeared. They were probably in their cabins, hiding under their beds. What a joke. She hoped to hell they weren’t really going to institute the curfew she had heard rumored about. That would be the end. After all, it had been just a gag—hadn’t it?

She rode an escalator down one level, wandered past the shops of Regent Street, the upscale shopping arcade, climbed some stairs. Her grandparents had already gone to bed but she wasn’t the slightest bit tired. She’d been wandering aimlessly around the ship like this for the past hour, dragging her feet on the carpet. With a sigh, she slipped a pair of earbuds out of her pocket, stuffed them into place, and dialed up Justin Timberlake on her iPod.

She came to an elevator, stepped in, and—closing her eyes—punched a button at random. The elevator descended briefly, stopped, and she got out—another of the ship’s endless corridors, this one a little more cramped than she was used to. Turning up the volume on her music player, she dragged her way down the hall, took a turn, kicked open a door bearing a sign she didn’t bother to read, skipped down a set of stairs, and wandered on. The corridor took another turn, and as she went around it, she had the sudden feeling she was being followed.

She paused, turning to see who it was, but the corridor was empty. She took a few steps back and looked around the corner. Nothing.

Must have been some random ship noise: down here, the damn thing thrummed and vibrated like some monster treadmill.