Deep Six (2 page)

Seconds after entering her apartment, she shed the skirt, stripped the money packets from her legs and counted them. The tally came to $51,000.

Not nearly enough.

Disappointment burned within her. She would need at least twice that sum to escape the country and maintain a minimal level of comfort while increasing the lion’s share through investments.

The ease of the operation had made her heady. Did she dare make another foray into the vault? she wondered. The Federal Reserve Bank money was already counted and wouldn’t be distributed to the branch banks until Wednesday. Tomorrow was Tuesday. She still had another chance to strike again before the loss was discovered.

Why not?

The thought of ripping off the same bank twice in two days excited her. Perhaps Arta Casilighio lacked the guts for it, but Estelle Wallace required no coaxing at all.

That evening she bought a large old-fashioned suitcase at a secondhand store and made a false bottom in it. She packed the money along with her clothes and took a cab to the Los Angeles International Airport, where she stored the suitcase overnight in a locker and purchased a ticket to San Francisco on an early-evening Tuesday flight. Wrapping her unused Monday night ticket in a newspaper, she dropped it in a trash receptacle. With nothing remaining to be done, she went home and slept like a rock.

The second robbery went as smoothly as the first.

Three hours after leaving the Beverly-Wilshire Bank for the last time, she was re-counting the money in a San Francisco hotel. The combined total came to $ 128,000. Not a staggering prize by inflationary standards, but more than ample for her needs.

The next step was relatively simple. She checked through the newspapers for ship departures and found the
San Marino,
a cargo freighter bound for Auckland, New Zealand, at six-thirty the following morning.

An hour before sailing time, she mounted the gangplank. The captain claimed he seldom took passengers, but kindly consented to take her on board for a mutually agreed fare—which Estelle suspected went into his wallet instead of the steamship company’s coffers.

Estelle stepped across the threshold of the officers’ dining saloon and paused uncertainly for a moment, facing the appraising stares of six men sitting in the room.

Her coppery-tinted hair fell past her shoulders and nearly matched her tan. She wore a long, sleek pink T-shirt dress that clung in all the right places. A white bone bracelet was her only accessory. To the officers rising to their feet the simple elegance of her appearance created a sensation.

Captain Irwin Masters, a tall man with graying hair, came over and took her arm. “Miss Wallace,” he said, smiling warmly. “It’s good to see you looking fit.”

“I think the worst is over,” she said.

“I don’t mind admitting, I was beginning to worry. Not leaving your cabin for five days made me fear the worst. With no doctor on board, we would have been in a fix if you needed medical treatment.”

“Thank you,” she said softly.

He looked at her in mild surprise. “Thank me, for what?”

“For your concern.” She gave his arm a gentle squeeze. “It’s been a long time since anyone worried about me.”

He nodded and winked. “That’s what ship captains are for.” Then he turned to the other officers. “Gentlemen, may I present Miss Estelle Wallace, who is gracing us with her lovely presence until we dock in Auckland.”

The introductions were made. She was amused by the fact that most of the men were numbered. The first officer, the second officer—even a fourth. They all shook her hand as if it were made of delicate china—all except the engineering officer, a short ox-shouldered man with a Slavic accent. He stiffly bent over and kissed the tips of her fingers.

The first officer motioned at the mess boy, who was standing behind a small mahogany bar. “Miss Wallace, what’s your pleasure?”

“Would it be possible to have a daiquiri? I’m in the mood for something sweet.”

“Absolutely,” the first officer replied. “The
San Marino
may not be a luxurious cruise liner, but we do run the finest cocktail bar in this latitude of the Pacific.”

“Be honest,” the captain admonished good-naturedly. “You neglected to mention we’re probably the
only
ship in this latitude.”

“A mere detail.” The first officer shrugged. “Lee, one of your famous daiquiris for the young lady.”

Estelle watched with interest as the mess boy expertly squeezed the lime and poured the ingredients. Every movement came with a flourish. The frothy drink tasted good, and she had to fight a desire to down it all at once.

“Lee,” she said, “you’re a marvel.”

“He is that,” said Masters. “We were lucky to sign him on.”

Estelle took another sip of her drink. “You seem to have a number of Orientals in your crew.”

“Replacements,” Masters explained. “Ten of the crew jumped ship after we docked in San Francisco. Fortunately, Lee and nine of his fellow Koreans arrived from the maritime hiring hall before sailing time.”

“All damned queer, if you ask me,” the second officer grunted.

Masters shrugged. “Crew members jumping ship in port has been going on since Cro-Magnon man built the first raft. Nothing queer about it.”

The second officer shook his head doubtfully. “One or two maybe, but not ten! The
San Marino
is a tight ship, and the captain here is a fair skipper. There was no reason for a mass exodus.”

“The way of the sea.” Masters sighed. “The Koreans are clean, hardworking seamen. I wouldn’t trade them for half the cargo in our holds.”

“That’s a pretty stiff price,” muttered the engineering officer.

“Is it improper,” Estelle ventured, “to ask what cargo you’re carrying?”

“Not at all,” the very young fourth officer offered eagerly. “In San Francisco our holds were loaded with—”

“Titanium ingots,” Captain Masters cut in.

“Eight million dollars’ worth,” added the first officer, eyeing the fourth sternly.

“Once again, please,” Estelle said, handing her empty glass to the mess boy. She turned back to Masters. “I’ve heard of titanium, but I have no idea what it’s used for.”

“When properly processed in pure form, titanium becomes stronger and lighter than steel, an asset that puts it in great demand by builders of jet aircraft engines. It’s also widely used in the manufacture of paints, rayon and plastics. I suspect you even have traces of it in your cosmetics.”

The cook, an anemic-looking Oriental with a sparkling white apron leaned through a side door and nodded at Lee, who in turn tapped a glass with a mixing spoon.

“Dinner ready to be served,” he said in his heavily accented English, while flashing his gap-toothed smile.

It was a fabulous meal, one Estelle promised herself never to forget. To be surrounded by six handsomely uniformed and attentive men was all that her female vanity could endure in one evening.

After a demitasse, Captain Masters excused himself and headed for the bridge. One by one, the other officers drifted off to their duties, and Estelle took a tour of the deck with the engineering officer. He entertained her with tales of sea superstitions, eerie monsters of the deep and funny tidbits of scuttlebutt about the crew that made her laugh.

At last they reached the door of her stateroom, and he gallantly kissed her hand again. She accepted when he asked her to join him for breakfast in the morning.

She entered the tiny cabin, clicked the lock on the door and switched on the overhead light. Then she closed the curtain tightly over the single porthole, pulled the suitcase from under the bed and opened it.

The top tray contained her cosmetics and carelessly jumbled underthings, and she removed it. Next came several neatly folded blouses and skirts. These she also removed and set aside to later steam out the wrinkles in the shower. Gently inserting a nail file around the edges of the false bottom of the suitcase, she pried it up. Then she sat back and sighed with relief. The money was still there, stacked and bound in the Federal Reserve Bank wrappers. She had hardly spent any of it.

She stood up and slipped her dress over her head— daringly, she wore nothing beneath—and collapsed across the bed, hands behind her head.

She closed her eyes and tried to picture the shocked expressions on her supervisors’ faces when they discovered the money and reliable little Arta Casilighio missing at the same time. She had fooled them all!

She felt a strange, almost sexual, thrill at knowing the FBI would post her on their list of most wanted criminals. The investigators would question all her friends and neighbors, search all her old haunts, check a thousand and one banks for sudden large deposits of consecutively numbered bills—but they would come up dry. Arta, alias Estelle, was not where they’d expect her to be.

She opened her eyes and stared at the now familiar walls of her stateroom. Oddly the room began to slip away from her. Objects were focusing and unfocusing into a blurry montage. Her bladder signaled a trip to the bathroom, but her body refused to obey any command to move. Every muscle seemed frozen. Then the door opened and Lee the mess boy entered with another Oriental crewman.

Lee wasn’t smiling.

This can’t be happening, she told herself. The mess boy wouldn’t
dare
intrude on her privacy while she was lying naked on the bed. It had to be a crazy dream brought on by the lavish food and drink, a nightmare stoked by the fires of indigestion.

She felt detached from her body, as if she were watching the eerie scene from one corner of the stateroom. Lee gently carried her through the doorway, down the passageway and onto the deck.

Several of the Korean crewmen were there, their oval faces illuminated by bright overhead floodlights. They were hoisting large bundles and dropping them over the ship’s railing. Abruptly, one of the bundles stared at her. It was the ashen face of the young fourth officer, eyes wide in a mixture of disbelief and terror. Then he too disappeared over the side.

Lee was leaning over her, doing something to her feet. She could feel nothing, only a lethargic numbness. He appeared to be attaching a length of rusty chain to her ankles.

Why would he do that? she wondered vaguely. She watched indifferently as she was lifted into the air. Then she was released and floated through the darkness.

Something struck her a great blow, knocking the breath from her lungs. A cool, yielding force closed over her. A relentless pressure enveloped her body and dragged her downward, squeezing her internal organs in a giant vise.

Her eardrums exploded, and in that instant of tearing pain, total clarity flooded her mind and she knew it was no dream. Her mouth opened to emit a hysterical scream.

No sound came. The increasing water density soon crushed her chest cavity. Her lifeless body drifted into the waiting arms of the abyss ten thousand feet below.

Part I

The
Pilottown

1

July 25,1989

Cook Inlet, Alaska

BLACK CLOUDS ROLLED
menacingly over the sea from Kodiak Island and turned the deep blue-green surface to lead. The orange glow of the sun was snuffed out like a candle flame. Unlike most storms that swept in from the Gulf of Alaska creating fifty- or hundred-mile-an-hour winds, this one bred a mild breeze. The rain began to fall, sparingly at first, then building to a deluge that beat the water white.

On the bridge wing of the Coast Guard cutter
Catawba,
Lieutenant Commander Amos Dover peered through a pair of binoculars, eyes straining to penetrate the downpour. It was like staring into a shimmering stage curtain. Visibility died at four hundred meters. The rain felt cold against his face and colder yet as it trickled past the upturned collar of his foul-weather jacket and down his neck. Finally he spat a waterlogged cigarette over the railing and stepped into the dry warmth of the wheelhouse.

“Radar!” he called out gruffly.

“Contact six hundred fifty meters dead ahead and closing,” the radar operator replied without lifting his eyes from the tiny images on the scope.