Plague Ship Read online

  The injustice of what had happened to those innocent people was like a cancer eating away at his guts, with the only cure being the utter annihilation of the killers. He had no sense of who they were, their image was lost in the fires of his fury, but the Corporation’s investigation would quell those flames as they drew closer to their quarry, and bring the monsters into focus.

  The knuckles of Juan’s index fingers popped, and he relaxed his grip on the railing. The metal had scored lines across his palms. He shook blood back into his hands and took another deep breath. “Showtime.”

  The conference room was filled with the aroma of spicy food. With Africa such a short distance away, Maurice had laid out an Ethiopian meal. There was a stack of injera—unleavened sour-dough bread—and dozens of sauces, some cold and others steaming hot. There were chicken, beef, and mutton stews, lentils and chickpeas, and spiced yogurt dishes. A diner eats the meal by tearing off a section of bread, ladling on some stew, and rolling it up like a cigar, to be chewed in a couple of quick bites. The affair could get messy, and Juan suspected Maurice had served these dishes intentionally for the comic relief of watching Linda Ross, a notorious chowhound, stuffing her face.

  As a veteran of the Royal Navy, Maurice strongly believed in the English tradition of grog aboard ships, or, in this case, amber bottles of an Ethiopian honey wine called tej, whose sweet flavor could cut the strongest spices.

  Cabrillo’s brain trust—Max Hanley, Linda Ross, Eddie Seng, and Dr. Huxley, as well as Stoney and Murph—sat around the table. Juan knew that, down in the armory, Franklin Lincoln was holding a meeting of his own with the Ops team. Juan didn’t have much of an appetite, so he charged his glass with the wine and took an appreciative sip. He let his people fill their plates, before calling the meeting to order by leaning forward in his seat.

  “As you know, we are facing two different but possibly related problems. The first is rescuing Max’s son from the Responsivist compound in Greece. Using satellite images and other information that Mark and Eric put together, Linc is working with his gundogs on a tactical assault plan. When they’re finished, we’ll go over it separately. What do we need to do on our end, once we’ve gotten Kyle?”

  “Will he need to be deprogrammed?” Hux asked, wondering if Kyle would require specialized psychiatric help to break the mental grip Responsivism had on him.

  “By all indications, yes,” Mark replied.

  “So they are a cult?” There was heaviness in Max’s tone, sorrow that his directionless son had fallen in with such a group.

  “They fit all classic parameters,” Eric said. “They have charismatic leaders. Members are encouraged to sever relationships with friends and relatives who do not belong. They are expected to live by a certain code laid out in their founder’s teachings, and when someone drifts away from the group other members will try to stop him.”

  “Stop them how?” Juan asked. “Physically?”

  Eric nodded. “There are reports of lapsed members being abducted from their homes and transported to facilities run by the group for, uh, reeducation.”

  “We know about the compound in Greece,” Juan said, looking around the burnished table. “And they replaced their old headquarters in California with that estate Murph showed me pictures of this afternoon. What else do they have?”

  “More than fifty health clinics in some of the poorest third world countries in the world—Sierra Leone, Togo, Albania, Haiti, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and several in China—where they receive a lot of government support, as you can well imagine.”

  “That’s an interesting case,” Mark Murphy interjected, with his mouth half full of food. “The Chinese hate cults with a passion. They crack down on practitioners of Falun Gong all the time, seeing it as a threat to the central party rule, but they allow the Responsivists because of their whole population-control thing.” Under a ragged denim shirt, Murph wore a T-shirt that had an arrow pointing up with I’M WITH STUPID below it.

  “Beijing knows they could be a threat but are willing to risk it because the Responsivist presence gives a little Western legitimacy to their draconian one-family, one-child policy.” Eddie said. Given his experience inside China, no one doubted his assessment.

  “Back to helping Kyle,” Juan said, to move the meeting along. “Have we been in touch with a deprogrammer?”

  “We have,” Linda Ross replied. “Technically, we are kidnapping Kyle, so we need to get him out of Greece as quickly as possible to avoid any problems with local police. The counselor will meet us in Rome. Tiny’s repositioning the Gulfstream from the Riviera to the Athens airport to fly him to Italy. We have rooms reserved at a hotel near the Colosseum. The shrink’s name is Adam Jenner. He specializes in helping former Responsivists return to a normal life, and, from everything we’ve been able to gather, he’s the best in the world.”

  “Was he a member himself?” Juan asked, knowing it was common for deprogrammers to have once been held sway by the group they fight against, much like recovering alcoholics helping others overcome their addiction.

  “No, but he’s made it his life’s mission to bring the group down. He’s helped more than a two hundred people escape Responsivism in the past ten years.”

  “And before that?”

  “A private-practice therapist in L.A. Not that it matters, but his fee is fifty thousand dollars, plus expenses. He guarantees, however, that, when he’s finished, Kyle will be back to normal.”

  “He damned well better be,” Max grumbled.

  “For someone to make their living deprogramming, the group must be pretty big,” Eddie said. “How many members are there?”

  “On their official website, they claim there are more than a hundred thousand worldwide,” Linda replied. “Jenner’s site said that that estimate is overblown by half. Either way, it’s still a significant number. And with some high-profile Hollywood types jumping on the bandwagon, recruitment is up as people copy the stars.”

  “Just so I know in case I meet him, what cover story did we use in our approach of Jenner?” Juan asked.

  “I have it all here in my report.” Linda held up a binder. “Max is a real-estate developer from L.A. who wants to get his son back. We are the private security company he’s hired to coordinate his return. Jenner’s assistant was pretty nonplussed when I laid out our story, so I have a feeling this is something they’ve seen before.”

  “Okay, so once we grab Kyle we get him to the airport, where Tiny Gunderson flies to Rome, and we hand him over to Jenner.” Cabrillo had a sudden thought. “They’ll have control of his passport, so we need to make a new one.”

  “Chairman, please,” Linda said, as if she’d been insulted. “Max’s ex has e-mailed a picture of Kyle. We’ll doctor it so it looks like an official passport shot and print a new one from our store of blanks.”

  Juan indicated Linda should wipe some grease from her chin. “That takes care of problem number one. Now, on to problem number two. What happened to the Golden Dawn and why? What do we know so far?”

  Linda tapped at the keys of her laptop to bring up the information. “The Golden Dawn and her sister ships, the Golden Sky and Golden Sun, are owned by Golden Cruise Lines. They’re out of Denmark, and have been in business since the mid-eighties. They do the typical Caribbean, Mediterranean, and South Seas cruises that everyone else does, as well as charter ships for specific groups or events.

  “The company was approached four months ago to ferry four hundred and twenty-seven Responsivists from the Philippines to Greece. The Dawn was the only ship available.”

  “That seems like a lot of people to staff a reproductive-education clinic,” Juan said.

  “I thought so, too,” Linda agreed. “I’m looking into it. There is nothing on the Responsivist website about the trip or what such a large group was doing in the Philippines.”

  “Okay, keep going.”

  “They left Manila on the seventeenth, and, as far as what Murph coul
d get from the logs, there were no incidents reported. It was smooth sailing all the way.”

  “Right up to the point where everyone died,” Max said caustically.

  Eric glanced down the table at the Corporation’s number two. “Not everyone died. I went back over the computer discs of the UAV flyby. One of the Golden Dawn’s lifeboats was missing.” He glanced at Cabrillo. “Sorry, I didn’t notice it last night.”

  Juan let it pass.

  “The ship’s computer log confirms that a lifeboat was lowered about eight hours before we showed up,” Mark confirmed.

  “So the killer or killers were on the Dawn the whole cruise?”

  “That’s what it looks like to us. Stoney and I hacked the cruise line’s computer for a passenger manifest and list of the crew, but without having the bodies to verify who was aboard when she went down there’s no way to narrow our list of suspects.” Mark forestalled Juan’s next question. “We already checked. There were no unscheduled crew substitutions after the charter was first proposed, and there were no last-minute changes to the passenger manifest. The people who were supposed to be on that ship were on it.”

  “Then who the hell killed them all?” Max asked.

  “If I were to guess, I’d say the Responsivists either did it to themselves, but they aren’t a suicide cult, like Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple or Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo. Some people claim Lydell Cooper took his own life in the ultimate act of Responsivism, but the group doesn’t support suicide. They say that since you’re already born, it is your moral responsibility to spread their beliefs, not kill yourself. The other option is that someone infiltrated the group.”

  “Any suspects?”

  Linda said, “Because of their stance on birth control and abortion, they’ve been engaged in a running battle with the Vatican for years. The same goes with a number of conservative Christian organizations.”

  Cabrillo shook his head. “I can see one nut job with a rifle killing an abortion doctor. But to kill a shipload of people takes a highly organized and well-funded team. I don’t buy a handful of priests and nuns infiltrating the cult in order to kill a few hundred of their members.”

  “My money’s on a group of zealots,” Mark said. “A countercult to the Responsivists, maybe made up of former members or something. You know, apart from the whole not-having-kids thing, this group’s into some pretty weird stuff.”

  Juan ignored him. “Let’s explore why they would kill some of their own. Ideas?”

  “No, seriously,” Mark continued. “Once you’ve been involved for a while, do your charity work in some third world toilet, they start letting you in on some of the bigger secrets to Responsivism, and how the knowledge will save you.”

  “Go on,” Juan said to indulge him. Murph might be flakey, but he had a topflight mind.

  “Ever heard of ’brane theory?” He’d already talked with Eric about it so only Stone didn’t return a blank stare. “It’s right up there with string theory as a way of unifying all four forces in the universe, something Einstein couldn’t do. In a nutshell, it says our four-dimensional universe is a single membrane, and that there are others existing in higher orders of space. These are so close to ours that zero-point matter and energy can pass between them and that gravitation forces in our universe can leak out. It’s all cutting-edge stuff.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Cabrillo said.

  “Anyway, ’brane theory started to get traction among theoretical physicists in the mid-nineties, and Lydell Cooper glommed on to it, too. He took it a step further, though. It wasn’t just quantum particles passing in and out of our universe. He believed that an intelligence from another ’brane was affecting people here in our dimension. This intelligence, he said, shaped our day-to-day lives in ways we couldn’t sense. It was the cause of all our suffering. Just before his death, Cooper started to teach techniques to limit this influence, ways to protect ourselves from the alien power.”

  “And people bought this crap?” Max asked, sinking deeper into depression over his son.

  “Oh yeah. Think about it from their side for a second. It’s not a believer’s fault that he is unlucky or depressed or just plain stupid. His life is being messed with across dimensional membranes in space. It’s an alien influence that cost you that promotion or prevented you from dating the girl of your dreams. It’s a cosmic force holding you back, not your own ineptitude. If you believe that, then you don’t have to take responsibility for your life. And we all know nobody takes responsibility for himself anymore. Responsivism gives you a ready-made excuse for your poor life choices.”

  “With people suing fast-food companies because they’re overweight, I can see the attraction,” Juan said. “But what’s this have to do with someone killing a ship filled with Responsivists?”

  Mark looked a little sheepish, “I haven’t thought it all the way through, but what if it’s true, you know”—his voice took on a feverish edge—“and some alien from another ’brane is fighting one trapped in ours and we’re caught in the middle? Like pawns or something?”

  Cabrillo closed his eyes and groaned. Mark’s flakiness was overwhelming his first-class mind again. “I’ll take that under advisement, but, for now, let’s stick to terrestrial enemies.”

  Mark whispered to Eric, “That sounded better when we were talking last night, didn’t it?”

  “That’s because we hadn’t slept in twenty hours and had downed about thirty Red Bulls each.”

  Eddie Seng popped a piece of bread into his mouth. “Could this particular group have been selected because they were trying to leave the cult and the leaders made an example out of them? Eric mentioned earlier that kidnapping isn’t beyond them. What if they’ve taken the next step to murder?”

  Max Hanley shot him a startled look, his face etched with concern over Kyle’s safety.

  “That’s a possibility,” Linda said, before seeing Hanley’s obvious pain. “Sorry, Max, but we have to consider it. Besides, your son’s a new convert. He doesn’t want to leave them at all.”

  “You sure you want to be here for this?” Juan asked his closest friend.

  “Yes, damnit,” Max snapped. “It’s just, I don’t know, painful and embarrassing all at the same time. This is my son we’re talking about, and I can’t help but feel I’ve let him down. If I’d been a better father, he wouldn’t have drifted into something so dangerous.”

  No one knew what to say for a second. Uncharacteristically, it was Eric Stone who broke the silence. So versed in technical matters, it was easy to overlook his human side. “Max, I grew up in an abusive home. My father was a drunk who beat my mother and me every night he had enough money for a bottle of vodka. It was about the worst situation you could imagine and yet I turned out okay. Your home life is only a part of who you become. You being a larger part of your son’s life might have changed things or it might not have. There’s no way of knowing, and if you can’t know for certain there’s no need for useless speculation. Kyle is who he is because he chose to be that way. You weren’t around for your daughter either, and she’s a successful accountant.”

  “Lawyer,” Max said absently. “And she did it all on her own.”

  “If you don’t feel you can take responsibility for her success, then you have no right to take responsibility for Kyle’s failings.”

  Max let the statement hang, before finally asking, “How old are you?”

  Stone seemed embarrassed by the question. “Twenty-seven.” “Son, you are wise beyond your years. Thank you.”

  Eric grinned.

  Juan mouthed the words Well done to Stone and resumed the meeting. “Is there any way to check Eddie’s theory?”

  “We can hack into the Responsivists’ computer system,” Mark offered. “Something might turn up, but I doubt they’re going to break down their membership into lists of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.”

  “Try it anyway,” Juan ordered. “Cross-reference the passenger manifest with e
verything they have going on. Some factor singled these particular people out. If they weren’t about to leave the cult, it has to be something else.” He turned to Linda. “I want to know why so many of them were in the Philippines at the same time. The answer to that question might be our only solid clue.”

  Juan stood to indicate the meeting was adjourned. “We hit the Suez Canal at oh-five-hundred tomorrow morning. Remind your staffs that we’ll have a pilot on board until we clear Port Said, so we’re running on full-disguise mode. Max, make sure the tanks to the smudge engine that sends smoke out our funnel are topped off, and that the decks are double-checked for anything that can give us away. Once we’re in the Med, we have twenty-four hours to finalize our plans with Linc, another twelve to put everything in place, and then we extract Kyle Hanley. Forty-eight hours from now, he’ll be in Rome with the deprogrammer and we’ll be on our way to the Riviera on that eavesdropping job.”

  There was no way for Cabrillo to know how far from simple things were going to be.

  CHAPTER 12

  JUAN SETTLED THE EARBUD OF HIS RADIO A LITTLE deeper and tapped the throat mike to let the others know he was in position. Below him lay the Responsivist compound, a collection of rambling buildings surrounded by a whitewashed cement-block wall. Behind the compound was a rocky beach with a single wooden jetty running a hundred feet into the Gulf of Corinth. With the tide just coming back in, he could smell the water on the soft breeze.

  The buildings were low-slung, as if clinging to the ground, reminding Cabrillo of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. The shallow roofs were covered in barrel tile that looked black through his third-generation night vision goggles, but he knew from their prelaunch briefing the tiles were red clay. The lawns within the compound were burned brown from a drought, and the leaves on the few gnarled olive trees were dried husks. It was three-thirty in the morning, and the only lights showing were affixed to strategically placed poles.