Dead Sea (18 page)

Sakai led them along the corridor to a lift. The three of them crowded in. The first officer crushed against Reona, his donkey jacket smelling of cigarettes and fuel oil, the rest of him smelling sharply of sweat. The men did not look at each other. Reona stole a glance at Aika but she too was looking away, trapped against the first officer's other side. But he thought she looked excited, and was a little disappointed that he was not more excited himself. ‘The port officials have been aboard and OK'd us for departure. Customs, immigration and so forth,' growled Sakai. ‘We're just waiting for the pilot and the tide. You'll have to stay low till we're well clear, though. You do realize that? There are sometimes spot checks.' Reona's heart lurched with nervousness, but both he and Aika both nodded silently. The lift hissed on upwards through three decks with the atmosphere relentlessly thickening before it opened on to the vessel's command bridge.

Captain Yamamoto welcomed them coolly and accepted both their story and their passage money with a blank stare and a shallow smile. He was a middle-aged man with long white hair and a silvery goatee who seemed out of place among the taciturn officers and crew aboard his relentlessly workaday command. He was preoccupied with preparations for departure, however, and clearly wanted rid of them before the pilot came aboard.

Sakai immediately showed the disorientated young couple to the owner's suite, one deck below, and gruffly advised them to settle in. He looked around the room, narrow-eyed, then went and pulled thin curtains across the widows. As he did this, he informed them that he would send something up from the galley when the crew had their dinner. Other than that, they would not be disturbed until the ship was well under way. They stood a little forlornly in the middle of the day room as he worked and nodded that they understood his orders. He looked at them thoughtfully, then left them to their own devices.

Reona found the suite a pleasant surprise, for the
Dagupan Maru
herself had by no means impressed him so far. The door from the corridor opened directly into a decent-sized day room with a square window that had looked aft across the poop deck before Sakai closed the curtains. The walls and ceiling were painted in cream, and the whole suite seemed to be mahogany-panelled to waist height. There were framed prints of famous harbours around the South China Sea. The throbbing deck was carpeted. There was a desk convenient for his laptop, a small square table and a couple of chairs. While he put his precious computer in place, Aika dropped her case beside the table, shrugged off her damp coat, draped it over a chair and went through the next door. ‘There's a little corridor with a shower room off it,' she called, sounding as excited as if she really was on her honeymoon. ‘And a bedroom at the end. Oh, Reona, it has a lovely bed. Wardrobes. A nice mirror for my make-up. And windows that look to the side as well as to the rear, though you have to peep round the curtains . . . I can see the dock and those silly boys in their racing cars. And it's so big! Bigger than your room at the university and my room put together! How fine!' There was a rhythmic squeaking and Reona hurried through to find her bouncing on the double bed like a child, arms and legs wide. She caught him looking up her skirt like a naughty schoolboy and laughed at his blushes.

They were still unpacking when a sudden peak in noise and activity coupled with a slight lurch warned them that the voyage was beginning. They both ran over to the port-side window and peeped round the curtain, watching in wonder as the dock appeared to slide slowly past, vanishing surprisingly quickly into the drizzling darkness. ‘What an adventure!' she whispered, turning to him with her eyes wide.

Suddenly breathless, Reona found himself undressing her, slowly at first, but then with dangerous urgency at her imperious dictates. ‘Be careful,' he gasped at last, holding her hands still for an instant. ‘We don't want to tear our clothes! We haven't all that many spares!'

‘Oh, come on!' she laughed, opening the wings of her warm silk blouse to reveal a basque of black lace and red silk that plunged provocatively past the waistband of her conservative-looking skirt. He had already caught a tantalizing glimpse of black lace stocking tops and matching red silk knickers. ‘Live a little. See! I bought you a special present at the sexy underwear shop! Isn't this just what the naughty girls in the dockside Soaplands houses wear?'

He laughed with sudden excitement, thinking although it was a present for him, it was she who was wearing it. For a moment longer, at least.

Reona was never quite able to put his finger on the precise moment when it stopped being an adventure. Perhaps there was no moment – just a series of tiny incidents and growing feelings that only seemed to make any kind of a pattern when he looked back on them later. He had not expected this to be a pleasure cruise such as he had seen advertised on television travel programmes. With expensive shops, swimming pools and saunas; fawning stewards and dinner at the Captain's Table. This was a working vessel. The officers and crew had jobs to do and pandering to passengers was not one of them. But it seemed to him, even on the first morning after they had dropped the pilot and were safely under way in international waters, that Aika and he were being viewed as more than simple unexpected passengers – something between customers and cargo.

At first, when the short hairs on the back of his neck began to prickle, Reona supposed it was simply his sensitivity to the way the all-male crew were watching the only woman aboard – and the man who was all too obviously doing what almost all of them would like to do with her. Even her more modest outer garments could not disguise the truth of that. And then there was the fact that the only man aboard they knew – and who they needed to rely on to show them the ship and explain the routines, was suddenly too preoccupied by his duties to deal with them. And there were little things that they really did need to get clear.

One of the first was the laptop. Reona tried it in the cabin soon after he and Aika had satisfied several appetites by following their love-making with the food a surly crewman brought up to their cabin. He noticed two things at once. First, the reception was not strong enough to allow him vital Internet access, so he could not follow the progress of his priceless bottle nor of the two vessels racing towards it. Secondly, he was surprised to see that the battery had very little power. His first reaction to the second problem was to look around the cabin for a plug that would take his charger, but the sockets, although they were two-pin, seemed to be of a slightly different design to the charger he had brought, and it suddenly occurred to him that the ship would be running on its own power, as generated by one of the machines that made everything around him throb. It was in all probability on a different setting to the one hundred volt, fifty hertz he was used to in Tokyo. The last thing he needed was to damage the vital laptop now. Reluctantly, he switched off the power and closed the top. Then, a great deal less reluctantly, he went through to join Aika in bed.

Reona was up and about early next morning, roused by the bustle of a working ship at sea. Aika responded to his advances by grunting, rolling over and beginning to snore, so he got dressed and went out to explore, taking his laptop with him. He was hungry, but the feeling was more than overcome by a desire to check up on the position of those three vital dots, if he possibly could. And it occurred to him that if the metal walls of the bridge house were thick enough to break his laptop's communication with the Internet, then taking the machine outside – and ideally, up to somewhere high, might solve the problem.

His first ginger sortie out into the corridor the first officer had brought them along last night revealed that it ended in a door leading out on to a balcony which reminded him a little of a fire escape on a city tenement. He opened the door and stepped out into a fresh and bracing blue morning. He paused to look around, distracted by the vastness of the view across the quiet ocean. During the night, Japan had dropped below the horizon and there was nothing to see but the sea. Closer at hand, however, he soon discovered that steps led up and down from the balcony, climbing the outside of the bridge house. Slowly at first, and then with growing confidence, he climbed up these towards the top of the bridge itself. Two levels up, he stepped through a kind of a gate on to a flat green area that seemed to him almost as big as a football field.

There was a repainted funnel to the rear, which seemed to be giving out very little in the way of smoke or fumes. The front stretched sideways as the top of the two bridge wings which extended the bridge itself to right and left. In the middle, at the front, there was a tall, white-painted mast that looked surprisingly substantial. Placed between the funnel and the radio mast there were other white-painted housings that he was not certain about. Logic dictated that at least one of the big white boxes would contain the lift mechanism, but what the others might be he had no idea.

Still looking about in wonder at the top of the bridge and the vast morning that his new position revealed, he wandered forward until he was standing near the mast, at the front of the green deck, looking down the length of the main deck at the four squat cranes and the five square hatch tops they stood above. Unlike last night's brief glimpse in the drizzling darkness, this morning's long look revealed clear lines, a purposeful precision. The distant bow cut through the huge green ocean with a solid certainty. The wake churned along the sides of the powerful vessel, then split into a wide V across the ocean behind it. Here, thought Reona, a little overcome, was a vessel with a purpose. A ship who knew where she was going.

Then it hit him. He, Reona Tanaka, needed to know where she was going. Needed to know where she needed to go. Needed to dictate that course. He ran across to the nearest white housing that looked about as tall as a table. He put his laptop case on it and opened the side. He pulled out the laptop and opened it. Switched it on and put up a swift prayer to Un, god of Luck. The screen cleared. The lights above the keyboard all lit up. Including the one promising Internet access. With his heart in his mouth, he guided the cursor up to the icon for his search engine. Clicked on it. Continued to pray. But it too worked perfectly. He was safely over the first hurdle. Now all he needed to do was to access the cloud programmes that stored the vital information on
Cheerio
,
Flint
and
Katapult
's locator beacons. ‘Come on,' he whispered to himself, as the computer consulted the vital storage facility. ‘
ComeoncomeoncomeON
 . . .'

‘
Hey!
What are you doing here?'

The challenge was so sudden, so unexpected and so close at hand that he whirled round in a panic and nearly knocked the laptop flying.

There was a low-browed young man in overalls glaring at him like a fighter just about to throw a punch.

‘I was trying to get on the Internet. I can't access it in my cabin so I thought—'

‘Why didn't you connect it to the ship's system?' demanded the young man suspiciously.

‘System? What? I didn't know.'

‘
Dagupan Maru
may not be much to look at but she's up with the twenty-first century!' sneered the sailor.

Reona blushed. ‘I didn't know. I've never been aboard a ship like this one. And she seems a very fine ship to me!'

The stranger seemed to relax a little. ‘Senzo Tago.' He introduced himself. ‘Junior engineering officer.'

‘Tanaka Reona,' bowed Reona formally. ‘Greenbaum Professor of . . .' his voice trailed off as he realized that in fact he wasn't Greenbaum Professor of anything any more.

But, ‘I know who you are,' said the engineer. ‘You're famous! I've seen you on the TV and on the Net. And you and your girlfriend are the talk of the ship in any case. Now, what's the matter with your laptop?'

‘Nothing. Except it needs charging. I . . .'

‘Hey, is that the new Sony? I've heard about these but I've never seen one. Awesome . . .'

An hour later, Junior Engineering Officer Senzo Tago had overseen the incorporation of Reona's laptop into the ship's systems, and Reona was happily tracking the signals given out by the three locators he was most worried about.

He was so preoccupied – and had been so during the whole process – that he had entirely failed to notice several things. He remained ignorant of the fact that Tago had kept looking through the half-open doorway at the bedroom where the sleeping Aika had rolled on top of the covers and now lay absolutely naked and clearly visible. Had he noticed either this fact or the expression on the sailor's face, he would have been deeply disturbed.

He did not know either – could not be expected to know – that engineer Tago had actually been sent on to the bridge on purpose by the first officer. Had been given orders to do with the laptop exactly what he had done. And to be sure he did
not
explain to the all-too trusting ex-professor that now his laptop was part of the system, everything he could see on his screen could be monitored on the bridge.

And, that it could, in fact, be transmitted to the private office high in the Luzon Logging Building in Quezon City, Manila, where another professor – one who still held his post, his position and his power – was able to see it all quite clearly too. Almost as clearly, in fact, as he was able to observe the video footage from the cabin that the naked Aika Rei was sleeping in.

R
ichard Mariner and Nic Greenbaum made it back from the docks to the Mandarin Oriental in time for the dinner which Nic had won and Richard was to pay for. They made it by the skin of their teeth, with hardly time to freshen up before they were rushed to the thirty-eighth floor. Service at Sora began at eight thirty local time or not at all, for it was a performance as much as a meal.