Douglas Child - The Wheel of Darkness

She wandered on, letting herself slide along one wall, pushing away with her elbow, then tacking over to the other side to slide again. Four more days to New York City. She couldn’t wait to get home and see her friends.

There it was again: that feeling she was being followed. She stopped abruptly, this time pulling out the earbuds. She looked around but, once again, there was nobody. Where was she, anyway? It was just one more carpeted corridor with what looked like private meeting rooms or something on either side. It was unusually deserted.

She tossed back her hair with an impatient gesture: jeez, now she was getting as spooked as the old-timers. She glanced through an interior window into one of the rooms and saw a long table lined with computers—an Internet room. She considered stepping inside and going online, but decided against it—all the good sites would certainly be blocked.

As she turned from the window, she saw a movement out of the corner of her eye and caught sight of someone just ducking around the corner behind her. No question about it this time.

“Hey!” she called. “Who’s that?”

No answer.

Probably just some maid—the ship was crawling with them. She moved on, but more quickly now, keeping the earbuds in her hand. This was a depressing part of the ship anyway; she should get back up to where the shops were. As she walked, she kept an eye out for one of the diagrams posted about that told your current location. But as she did so, she could swear she heard, over the hum of the ship, the brush of feet on the carpet.

This was bullshit. She walked faster still, taking another turn, then another, still without coming to a map or an area she recognized—just more endless corridors. Except that now she noticed the carpet underfoot had given way to linoleum.

She realized she’d entered one of the off-limits areas of the ship, having missed the Do Not Enter sign. Maybe it had been the door she’d kicked open. But she didn’t want to retrace her steps and go back: no way.

There were definite footfalls behind her, bolder now, that quickened and slowed with her pace. Was some pervert following her? Maybe she should run—she could outrun an old pervert any day. She came to a side door, ducked through, and descended a metal staircase, coming into another long corridor. She heard the clatter of footsteps on the staircase behind her.

That was when she broke into a run.

The corridor made a dogleg, then ended in a door with a label stenciled in red:

ENGINEERING ONLY

She grasped the handle. Locked. She turned in a panic, holding her breath. She could hear, echoing down the corridor, running footfalls. She frantically tried the door again, shaking it and crying out. Her iPod slipped out of her pocket and skidded across the floor, unheeded.

She turned again, looking around wildly for another door, a fire exit, anything.

The running footsteps got closer, and still closer—and then, suddenly, a figure came around the corner. Maddie jerked violently, a scream rising in her throat—but then, looking more closely at the figure, she broke down, sobbing with relief. “Thank God it’s you,” she said. “I thought . . . someone was following me. I don’t know. I’m lost. Totally. I’m so glad it’s you—”

The knife came out so fast she didn’t even have time to scream.

39

LESEUR STOOD IN THE REAR OF THE BRIDGE, MASON AT HIS SIDE. He watched Commodore Cutter, hands clasped behind his back, pace back and forth in front of the bridge workstation, alongside the array of flat-panel screens, one foot placed carefully in front of the other, moving with slow deliberation. As he strode the length of the middle bridge, his silhouetted form passed before each screen, one after another. But his eyes remained straight ahead, neither looking at the screens nor at the officer of the watch, who stood to one side, displaced and unhappy.

LeSeur glanced across the radar and weather system displays. The ship was skirting the southern flank of a large, unusual clockwise storm system. The good news was they were traveling with the wind at their backs; the bad news was this meant moving in a following sea. The stabilizers had been fully extended hours ago, but even so the ship had a slow, queasy rotational yaw that guaranteed additional discomfort for the passengers. He glanced over the displays again. Seas were running thirty feet, winds at forty knots, the radar showing a lot of scatter. Nevertheless, the ship was doing beautifully. LeSeur couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pride.

Kemper appeared soundlessly at his elbow, his face a ghastly blue in the artificial light from the displays. He looked like a man with a lot on his mind.

“A word, sir,” he murmured.

LeSeur glanced at Mason and gestured with his eyes. The two of them followed Kemper out to one of the covered bridge wings. Rain hammered against the windows, running down in heavy sheets. Outside, all was blackness.

Wordlessly, Kemper handed LeSeur a sheet of paper. The first officer glanced over it in the dim light. “Good Lord. Eighteen more people reported missing?”

“Yes, sir. But you’ll see at the bottom that sixteen have already turned up. Someone steps out of a cabin for ten minutes and their spouse calls security. The point is, the situation on the ship is deteriorating. The passengers are getting more and more panicky. And my staff is just about paralyzed.”

“What about these two that haven’t been found?”

“One is a sixteen-year-old girl—her grandparents reported it. The other is a woman with a mild case of Alzheimer’s.”

“How long have they been missing?”

“The girl for three hours. The old lady for about an hour.”

“Do you consider this a cause for serious concern?” Kemper hesitated. “Not the old lady—I think she’s probably gotten confused, maybe fallen asleep somewhere. But the girl . . . yeah, I’m concerned. We’ve paged her regularly, we’ve searched the public spaces. And then, there’s this .” He gave LeSeur a second sheet.

The first officer read it with growing disbelief. “Bloody hell, is this true?” He stabbed his finger at the sheet. “A

monster

roaming the ship?”

“Six people on Deck 9 reported seeing it. Some kind of . . . I don’t know what. A thing, covered with smoke, or made of dense smoke. Accounts vary. There’s a lot of confusion.”

LeSeur handed the sheets back to Kemper. “This is absurd.”

“Just shows the level of hysteria. And to me, that’s a troubling development— very troubling. Mass hysteria, on an ocean liner in the middle of the Atlantic? As it is, I don’t have the staff to deal with all this. We’re overwhelmed.”

“Is there any way to transfer other ship’s staff to temporary security duty? Pull some capable junior engineers off their usual jobs?”

“Forbidden by standing orders,” said Staff Captain Mason, speaking for the first time. “Commodore Cutter’s the only one who could override that.”

“Can we make the request?” Kemper asked.

Mason glanced coolly toward the middle bridge where Cutter was pacing. “This is not a good time to ask the commodore anything, Mr. Kemper,” she said crisply.

“What about closing the casinos and assigning Hentoff’s staff to security?”

“Corporate would string us up. Forty percent of the profit margin comes from the casinos. And besides, those people are dealers and croupiers and pit bosses—they aren’t trained in anything else. We might as well reassign the waitstaff.”

Another long silence.

“Thank you, Mr. Kemper, for your report,” said Mason. “That will be all.”

Kemper nodded and left, leaving LeSeur and Mason on the bridge wing, alone.