Jack Du Brul - Pandora's curse

“Don’t hurt me please!” the blond boy said. He was English, delicate as a girl. A waiter, Mercer guessed.

“I won’t.” Mercer kept menace in his voice. “What size shoes do you wear?’

The boy’s eyes widened. “What?”

“Shoes? What size shoes?”

“Twelve.”

“Got any sneakers?” Mercer hoped the American and English sizes were the same, or at least close. The boy nodded. “Give them to me.”

Mercer let the waiter back to his feet and stripped off his monk’s robe. The boy blubbered when he saw the handle of the Mauser. “Give me the shoes and keep your mouth shut, and I’ll leave you alone.”

The young Englishman opened a closet and rummaged through the detritus at the bottom for his sneakers. “Here, here you are. You won’t hurt me?”

“I promise. Now turn around and put your hands behind your back.” Mercer used a tie from the closet to bind the waiter’s hands to the metal bed frame. The ball of socks he found was still warm and damp from the day’s use. Mercer jammed the socks in the youth’s mouth.

Gagging at first, the young waiter calmed enough to start drawing even breaths. Mercer put on the shoes, pleased that they fit. “When your roommate unties you and you go to the security office, you might want to come up with a better story than a deranged terrorist stealing shoes.”

The boy mumbled into his gag and Mercer laughed. “Don’t worry, kid. Believe it or not, your sneakers might save everyone on this ship.”

Back in the hallway, Mercer took up the trail again. The scuff marks led him to a watertight door much thicker than any he’d seen in the below decks area. It was marked ENGINEERING STAFF ONLY. The floor thrummed with the force of the ship’s mighty power plants. He decided that he’d come as far as he should. Fumbling around down here was wasting time he didn’t have. He’d take his chances getting into the communications room without Rath’s prisoner. He had the Mauser and the element of surprise.

Backtracking, he passed the waiter’s cabin again. He couldn’t hear anything from within. Satisfied, Mercer rounded a series of corners, brushing past a few off-duty crewmen who shot him queer looks but said nothing. As he turned one more corner, he had just enough time to recognize a mass of blond hair before his crotch exploded in agony. Mercer dropped to his knees and through tear-streaked eyes saw a knee coming at his face. He could do nothing. His world had gone black by the time his head hit the deck.

Fighting the urge to retch, Mercer came awake in slow increments. His lower body felt distant, like the pain belonged to someone else. But as he became more aware, he knew the agony was his alone. The pulsing waves radiated from his genitals and settled in his lower belly like molten lead. To distract himself, he concentrated on the sharper pain in his face. Experimentally he traced his tongue across his teeth and was relieved they were all there. He tasted blood. Opening his eyes sent bolts of electricity to his battered nose. He spat.

“Who are you?” The question came from beyond Mercer’s gray vision.

“An idiot.” Mercer’s voice was pinched by clotted blood in his nose. He braced himself for what was about to come and sharply exhaled twin jets of red mist. After a surreal moment where his head felt like it had shattered, he peered around the spiky pinwheels of pain. It took him a minute to realize where he was — a crawl space below some kind of engineering room tangled with piping — and who had spoken — the blond man he’d first spotted talking to Gunther Rath in the Pandora cavern.

“I promised myself when I saw you again I’d kill you.” Mercer pulled his hands against the plastic strip ties binding his wrists over an insulated pipe above him. The man was similarly shackled. “You’re Rath’s boss, aren’t you?”

“Klaus Raeder.” They were both on their knees under a steel catwalk. Even if they could stand, there was barely enough room. Lamps in the room above them made the floor under the grated catwalk look like bricks of light mortared with shadow. The ties were threaded over a pipe suspended from the metal grid. Mercer pulled until the plastic ripped his flesh.

“I’ve tried that,” Raeder said. “You won’t be able to do it.” He paused. “I recognize you now from your Surveyor’s Society picture. You’re Philip Mercer.”

Mercer was unwilling to give Raeder the satisfaction of being right. He’d already guessed that Rath had somehow double-crossed his superior to steal the last Pandora box. “Why did he lock you up?”

“He needed me to get aboard the Sea Empress . We came on the boat stored on the Njoerd . The captain wouldn’t have given him permission if I wasn’t forced to order him to.”

“And when you got to the ship, you were put in here in case Rath needed you again?” Raeder nodded. “What’s Rath’s plan with the last box?”

“I was going to dump them in the sea,” Raeder boasted. “No one was supposed to know about it and no one was supposed to get hurt.”

“You think I care about your intentions?” Mercer couldn’t believe the German’s self-righteousness and lack of shame. “Your hopes don’t amount to shit and never have, considering how easily Rath managed to hijack your plans. Someday I’d like to know how you thought you could sweep something like the Pandora Project under the rug. For now I have to worry about stopping Rath.”

“It was an economic decision.” Raeder feebly clung to his original justification. “I was trying to save my shareholders from paying hundreds of millions of dollars for something none of us are responsible for.”

“Your company profited from the thousand dead slaves in that cavern and you’re telling me you’re not responsible?” Mercer couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Hate to tell you this, Raeder, but you are. There’s no statute of limitations on murder. Just because you didn’t pull any triggers doesn’t mean you can duck the culpability of the company you represent.”

“I thought I could get away with it.” Raeder’s voice was nearly drowned by the sound of pumps and other machinery. The air was stifling hot.

“No one can walk away from their past.” Mercer began looking around for something sharp to cut his bonds. “And that includes a company like Kohl. Now your company is going to lose a lot more than the money it rightly owed and you are going to pay with your life.”

“Do you think you’re immune? Your life is as forfeit as mine. No one can stop Rath. He controls the box — and me — which means he controls everything. He’s invincible.”

There were no tools within reach, but Mercer’s tone was still defiant. “You sound like you want him to win.”

“No. I just know he will. It’s hopeless.”

“Because he beat you?” Mercer scoffed. “Arrogance and gullibility are a dangerous mix. And Rath will be stopped. There are five other people from the U-boat with me, and we have a contact on the ship. They’ll get the alarm out.”

“Sorry to tell you this, but when they brought you down here, Greta Schmidt was talking with another of Rath’s people about a report of stolen clothing near the ship’s marina. I suspect that was your doing. She was on her way there to investigate.”

A door above them crashed open and Mercer heard a babble of voices he recognized: a snarling curse from Ira, Hilda’s quiet sobs, and Anika’s attempts to comfort her. Greta Schmidt’s clear laughter sounded, and again Mercer strained at his bonds. The effort left him panting. A guard lifted a section of the catwalk directly above him and let it fall back on its hinges. His partner kept Mercer and Klaus Raeder covered with a submachine gun as he came down the steps to the low crawl space.