Deep Six (40 page)

“We were sailing on a windjammer when the dumb helmsman ran us onto a reef,” the man called Gruber babbled. “My little woman and I near drowned. Couldn’t see going back home to Sioux Falls early. So we’re finishing our vacation on your boat. Besides, my wife turns on to Greeks.”

“This is a Russian ship,” the purser explained patiently.

“No kidding?”

“Yes, sir, the
Leonid Andreyev’s
home port is Sevastopol.”

“You don’t say. Where is that?”

“The Black Sea,” the purser said, maintaining an air of politeness.

“Sounds polluted.”

The purser was at a loss as to how America ever became a superpower with citizens such as these. He checked his passenger list and then nodded. “Your cabin is number thirty-four, on the Gorki deck. I’ll have a steward show you the way.”

“You’re all right, pal,” Gruber said, shaking his hand.

As the steward led the Grubers to their cabin, the purser looked down at his palm. Charlie Gruber had tipped him a twenty-five-cent piece.

As soon as the steward deposited their luggage and closed the door, Giordino threw off his wig and rubbed the lip gloss from his mouth. “God, Zelda Gruber! How am I ever going to live this one down?”

“I still say you should have taped a couple of grapefruit to your chest,” Pitt said, laughing.

“I prefer the flat look. That way I don’t stand out.”

“Probably a good thing. There’s not enough room in here for the four of us.”

Giordino waved his arms around the small confines of the windowless cabin. “Talk about a discount excursion. I’ve been in bigger phone booths. Feel the vibration? We must be next to the engine.”

“I requested the cheap accommodations so we could be on a lower deck,” Pitt explained. “We’re less visible down here, and closer to the working areas of the ship.”

“You think Loren might be locked up somewhere below?”

“If she saw something or someone she wasn’t supposed to, the Russians wouldn’t keep her where she might contact other passengers.”

“On the other hand, this could be a false alarm.”

“We’ll soon know,” Pitt said.

“How shall we work it?” Giordino asked.

“I’ll wander the crew’s quarters. You check the passenger list in the purser’s office for Loren’s cabin. Then see if she’s in it.”

Giordino grinned impishly. “What shall I wear?”

“Go as yourself. Zelda we’ll keep in reserve.”

A minute after eight
P.M
. the
Leonid Andreyev
eased away from the dock. The engines beat softly as the bow came around. The sandy arms of San Salvador’s harbor slid past as the ship entered the sea and sailed into a fiery sunset.

The lights flashed on and sparkled across the water like fireworks as the ship came alive with laughter and the music of two different orchestras. Passengers changed from shorts and slacks to suits and gowns, and lingered in the main dining room or perched in one of the several cocktail lounges.

Al Giordino, dressed in a formal tux, strutted along the corridor outside the penthouse suites as though he owned them. Stopping at a door, he looked around. A steward was approaching behind him with a tray.

Giordino stepped across to an opposite door marked
MASSAGE ROOM
and knocked.

“The masseuse goes off duty at six o’clock, sir,” said the steward.

Giordino smiled. “I thought I’d make an appointment for tomorrow.”

“I’ll be glad to take care of that for you, sir. What time would be convenient?”

“How about noon?”

“I’ll see to it,” said the steward, his arm beginning to sag under the weight of the tray. “Your name and cabin?”

“O’Callaghan, cabin twenty-two, the Tolstoy deck,” Giordino said. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”

Then he turned and walked back to the passenger lift. He pushed the “down” button so it would ring and then glanced along the corridor. The steward balanced the tray and knocked lightly on a door two suites beyond Loren’s. Giordino couldn’t see who responded, but he heard a woman’s voice invite the steward inside.

Without wasting a second, Giordino rushed to Loren’s suite, crudely forced in the door with a well-aimed kick near the lock and entered. The rooms were dark and he switched on the lights. Everything was pin neat and luxurious with no hint of an occupant.

He didn’t find Loren’s clothes in the closet. He didn’t find any luggage or evidence that she had ever been there. He combed every square foot carefully and slowly, room by room. He peered under the furniture and behind the drapes. He ran his hands over the carpets and under chair cushions. He even checked the bathtub and shower for pubic hairs.

Nothing.

But not quite nothing. A woman’s presence lingers in a room after she leaves it. Giordino sniffed the air. A very slight whiff of perfume caught his nostrils. He couldn’t have distinguished Chanel No. 5 from bath cologne, but this aroma had the delicate fragrance of a flower. He tried to identify it, yet it hung just beyond his reach.

He rubbed soap on the wooden splinter that broke off when he kicked in the door and pressed it into place. A poor glue job, he thought, but enough to hold for a few openings in case the suite was checked again by the crew before the ship docked back in Miami.

Then he snapped the lock, turned off the light and left.

Pitt suffered hunger pangs as he dropped down a tunnel ladder toward the engine room. He hadn’t eaten since Washington, and the growls from his stomach seemed to echo inside the narrow steel access tube. He wished he was seated in the dining room putting away the delicacies from the gourmet menu. Suddenly he brushed away all thought of food as he detected voices rising from the compartment below.

He crouched against the ladder and gazed past his feet. A man’s shoulder showed no more than four feet below him. Then the top of a head with stringy, unkempt blond hair moved into view. The crewman said a few words in Russian to someone else. There was a muffled reply followed by the sound of footsteps on a metal grating. After three minutes, the head moved away and Pitt heard the thin clap of a locker door closing. Then footsteps again and silence.

Pitt swung around the ladder, inserted his feet and calves through a rung and hung upside down, his eyes peering under the lip of the tunnel.

He found himself with an inverted view of the engine room crew’s locker room. It was temporarily vacant. Quickly he climbed down and went through the lockers until he found a pair of grease-stained coveralls that were a reasonable fit. He also took a cap that was two sizes too large and pulled it over his forehead. Now he was ready to wander the working areas.

His next problem was that he only knew about twenty words of Russian, and most of them had to do with ordering dinner in a restaurant.

Nearly a half-hour passed before Pitt meandered into the main crew’s quarters in the bow section of the ship. Occasionally he passed a cook from one of the kitchens, a porter pushing a cart loaded with liquor for the cocktail bars, or a cabin maid coming off duty. None gave him a second look except an officer who threw a distasteful glance at his grimy attire.

By a fortunate accident, he stumbled on the crew’s laundry room. A round-face girl looked up at him across a counter and asked him something in Russian.

He shrugged and replied, “Nyet.”

Bundles of washed uniforms lay neatly stacked on a long table. It occurred to him that the laundry-room girl had asked him which bundle was his. He studied them for a few moments and finally pointed to one containing three neatly folded white coveralls like the dirty pair he wore. By changing into clean ones he could have the run of the entire ship, pretending to be a crewman from the engine room on a maintenance assignment.

The girl laid the bundle on the counter and asked him another question.

His mind raced to dredge up something from his limited Russian vocabulary. Finally he mumbled,
“Yest’li u vas sosiski.”

The girl gave him an odd look indeed but handed him the bundle, making him sign for it, which he did in an illegible scrawl. Pitt was relieved to see that her eyes reflected curiosity rather than suspicion.

It was only after he found an empty cabin and switched coveralls that it dawned on him that he’d asked the laundry girl for frankfurters.

After pausing at a bulletin board to remove a diagram showing the compartments on the decks of the
Leonid Andreyev,
he calmly spent the next five hours browsing around the lower hull of the ship. Detecting no clue to Loren’s presence, he returned to his cabin and found Giordino had thoughtfully ordered him a meal.

“Anything?” Giordino asked, pouring two glasses from a bottle of Russian champagne.

“Not a trace,” said Pitt wearily. “We celebrating?”

“Allow me a little class in this dungeon.”

“You search her suite?”

Giordino nodded. “What kind of perfume does Loren wear?”

Pitt stared at the bubbles rising from the glass for a moment. “A French name; I can’t recall it. Why do you ask?”

“Have an aroma like a flower?”

“Lilac . . . no, honeysuckle. Yes, honeysuckle.”

“Her suite was wiped clean. The Russians made it look like she’d never been there, but I could still smell her scent.”

Pitt drained the champagne glass and poured another without speaking.

“We have to face the possibility they killed her,” Giordino said matter-of-factly.

“Then why hide her clothes and luggage? They can’t claim she fell overboard with all her belongings.”

“The crew could have stored them below and are waiting for an opportune moment, like rough weather, to announce the tragic news. Sorry, Dirk,” Giordino added, no apology in his voice. “We’ve got to look at every angle, good or bad.”

“Loren is alive and on board this ship somewhere,” Pitt said steadfastly. “And maybe Moran and Larimer too.”

“You’re taking a lot for granted.”

“Loren is a smart girl. She didn’t ask Sally Lindemann to locate Speaker of the House Moran unless she had a damn good reason. Sally claims Moran and Senator Larimer have both mysteriously dropped from sight. Now Loren is missing too. What impression do you get?”

“You make a good sales pitch, but what’s behind it?”

Pitt shrugged negatively. “I flatly don’t know. Only a crazy idea this might somehow mix with Bougainville Maritime and the loss of the
Eagle.”

Giordino was silent, thinking it over. “Yes,” he said slowly, “a crazy idea, but one that makes a lot of circumstantial sense. Where do you want me to start?”

“Put on your Zelda getup and walk past every cabin on the ship. If Loren or the others are held prisoner inside, there will be a security guard posted outside the door.”

“And that’s the giveaway,” said Giordino. “Where will you be?”

Pitt laid out the diagram of the ship on his bunk. “Some of the crew are quartered in the stern. I’ll scrounge there.” He folded up the diagram and shoved it in the pocket of the coveralls. “We’d best get started. There isn’t much time.”

“At least we have until the day after tomorrow, when the
Leonid Andreyev
docks in Jamaica.”

“No such luxury,” said Pitt. “Study a nautical chart of the Caribbean and you’ll see that about this time tomorrow afternoon we’ll be cruising within sight of the Cuban coast.”

Giordino nodded in understanding. “A golden opportunity to transfer Loren and others off the ship where they can’t be touched.”

“The nasty part is they may not stay on Cuban soil any longer than it takes to put them on a plane for Moscow.”

Giordino considered that for a moment and then went over to his suitcase, removed the mangy wig and slipped it over his curly head. Then he peered in a mirror and made a hideous face.

“Well, Zelda,” he said sourly, “let’s go walk the decks and see who we can pick up.”

54

THE PRESIDENT WENT ON
national television that same evening to reveal his meeting and accord with President Antonov of the Soviet Union. In his twenty-three-minute address, he briefly outlined his programs to aid the Communist countries. He also stated his intention to abolish the barriers and restrictions on purchases of American high technology by the Russians. Never once was Congress mentioned. He spoke of the Eastern bloc trade agreements as though they were already budgeted and set in motion. He closed by promising that his next task would be to throw his energies behind a war to reduce the national crime rate.

The ensuing uproar in government circles swept all other news before it. Curtis Mayo and other network commentators broadcast scathing attacks on the President for overstepping the limits of his authority. Specters of an imperial Presidency were raised.

Congressional leaders who had remained in Washington during the recess launched a telephone campaign encouraging their fellow lawmakers who were vacationing or campaigning in their home states to return to the capital to meet in emergency session. House and Senate members, acting without the counsel of their majority leaders, Moran and Larimer, who could not be reached, solidly closed ranks against the President in a bipartisan flood.