David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“Mr. Patel,” said Mark before he stepped over the raised threshold, “we’re not aboard Sine Wave, are we?”

And here Mr. Patel gave his first smile. “No, Mr. Deveraux,” he said. “Indeed we are not. We are aboard Sine Wave Two. ”

A steward, unarmed, met them just inside the bulkhead. “I am Mr. Singh,” he said to Mark. “Please follow me.” A different steward came for Cole and led him off in a different direction. Patel went with Mark and the steward.

From the deck, the pilothouse had looked maritime-functional. But once inside, Mark saw that it had yacht-grade surfaces and appointments (again with the walnut paneling and the subdued lighting; Mark spotted a piano, an orchid in a vase, a painting on the wall that was maybe a Rothko), and there was a zing in the air, the kind produced when subjugated staff members move swiftly through corridors.

They arrived at the door to a cabin. Mark’s cabin, apparently. Singh said, “You are to dine with Mr. Straw in forty-five minutes. I will return just prior to that. You will please not leave your room before then.”

“Where would I go? The Lido deck?” Neither Singh nor Patel laughed. “Well. Thank you, gentlemen.” He nodded gravely at Singh. “Mr. Patel, thank you for seeing me here.”

“It was Mr. Straw’s wish,” said Patel. The man had probably been in service for decades and had learned how to deliver a brush-off so that the sting was delayed a few beats.

Right. Okay. This guy wouldn’t extinguish me if I were on fire . Mark’s charm was flattery-based and so only traveled up. Employees hardly ever liked him. Well, fine, whatever. He didn’t need Patel’s blessing or friendship.

Alone, Mark checked out the cabin. It was plain, close to spartan. But the expensive kind of plain: wood with twelve coats of varnish, drawers on smooth metal bearings, only a few moving objects in the whole room. There was a berth he would need to climb into; there was a porthole; there was a little writing desk with twelve blank legal pads and a fist of sharpened pencils in the pencil well. There was a tiny and ingenious bathroom, a bar of soap engraved SW2 in the soap well. Mark looked out of the porthole at the empty sea in the last light and tried to feel like Jack London.

Dinner was crown roast — Straw liked showy food — and lots of claret, poured by a gloved table man who held a folded square of napkin at the neck of the bottle to blot any errant drops. The third person at dinner was a man whom Straw had always referred to as “my boon friend Parker.” This turned out to be Parker Pope, CEO of Bluebird, the security company that had recently changed its name to Blu Solutions/Logistics. He was twenty years younger than Straw but looked like he was made from the same stuff. Mostly, the two men carried on a contentious discussion about whether the Cape buffalo or the southern white rhinoceros was more difficult game. Straw said, “Rhinoceros. It’s megafauna.”

“It’s a small-brained ungulate is what it is,” said Pope. “Whereas with the mbogo, you never know what they’re going to do. They despise men.”

Mark tried to see both sides of it (“I’m not much of a hunter myself”), but in the end, he went with the rhinoceros, because of the armored hide. Pope seemed to set himself against Mark right then.

“You came in with the new head of engineering, I believe,” Straw said to Mark. “Seamus Cole?”

Mark said that he had.

“Cole says he can mend the new drift net,” said Pope to Straw although he was looking at Mark.

Mark bit. “Cole mends nets?” he asked Pope. “He’s a net mender?” Then, turning to Straw and adopting the intimate tone he used with him during their sessions, he asked: “Is that why we’re on such a huge vessel? Is that what we’re doing here, James? Fishing?”

“Of a sort,” said Pope, quick as an eel. “Cole is a fisher of men. One of the best. But they like to be called data hydrologists—”

Straw cut him off. “Mark hasn’t been belowdecks yet, Parker. And I think the phrase we went with was information architect.”

Pope raised his hands, a sarcastic jeez Louise, sorry . “I just assumed that since you’re offering Marcus here the, uh, position, you would have been over the outlines of the project.”

“I was going to do that tomorrow. But I may as well do it now, I guess.” Straw sounded angry, like a kid whose party had been ruined. “Mark, how would you like to be SineCo’s storyteller-in-chief?”

Mark sat before his unfinished sherbet cup. He hated sherbet. Was that a title? What would be the compensation? If he was going to play this right, he had to quit letting Pope rattle Straw. He had to get Straw away from Pope. “I’m intrigued, James,” Mark said. “But I’m also exhausted. Let’s discuss it tomorrow, you and I together.”

Then a quick rap at the bulkhead, and a hot, butchy woman stepped into the dining room. “Excuse the interruption,” she said. “Mr. Pope, you’ll need to be on the next call. The prince is irate.”

“That fucking cum-guzzler,” Mark definitely heard Pope mutter, presumably of the irate prince. “Thank you, Tessa. I’ll be right there.” The woman stepped back but remained nearby. She was waiting for Pope in a way that made it clear to Mark that she was his first assistant. Pope pushed back his chair. “James: Until tomorrow. Marcus: Congratulations on the storyteller thing.” Then he looked straight at Mark and said evenly: “It’s the last job you’ll ever take.”

That night, Mark woke like a shot from a dream of a cigarette. His plan had been to get by with nicotine patches — he didn’t want Straw to know he smoked. But the patches made him feel thin-blooded and their effect lingered, making sleep into a briar patch. He paced the cabin. His porthole laughed at him. All he wanted were a few smoke-moderated breaths in the night air.

He decided to chance it. He found the two cigarettes he’d nicked from the Israeli grandma in the fumoir, and he slipped out into the hallway. He just had to find some access to a deck or gangway. But he was immediately confused by the labyrinth of the giant ship. It was like being in the gut of something. His first many steps took him away from the porthole in his cabin; then he made a right and then a right and then went up a flight of metal stairs. And then he could swear he was in the same place he’d been in thirty seconds ago. His heart began to beat faster. Singh the steward hadn’t exactly ordered him to stay in his room when he’d escorted Mark back there after dinner, but there was definitely a stay-in-your-room, Agatha Christie — type vibe on this ship, like dinner was the last scheduled event of the day, and then it was curfew.

So when Mark heard very intentional steps heading down the corridor intersection he was approaching, he slipped quickly through a nearby doorway. The move would have been superslick and graceful but for the fact that it landed him in a cabin that belonged to Pope’s assistant, the woman who had interrupted dinner. She was standing at a desk, leaning over a computer, wearing what he believed was called a camisole.

“You did not just sneak into my room,” she said.

There are times you go straight to the truth. “No. You are correct. I did not,” said Mark. “I was trying to get outside, on deck or whatever. I want to smoke this cigarette”—he held up a thin cigarette as proof—“but I got lost. This boat is nuts. And then I was kind of ducking to hide somewhere, because someone was coming, and I’m afraid of that creepy steward, and I know that’s stupid…” She wasn’t buying it; her expression said, Un interested in the particulars. “Look, sorry, please excuse me,” Mark said, and he stepped into the corridor, out of her space. But she did not move to shut the door behind him. He looked left and then right. Then he turned around to her again and said, “Any chance you could help me out here?”