DOUBLE KNOT (7 page)

“How?”

“I don’t know exactly how, when, or what we’re going to have to deal with before.
But we’ll be out tomorrow.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“When Bradley’s plane lands in China the first thing he’ll do is call me. When he
doesn’t reach me he’ll call No Hair. When he doesn’t reach either of us he’ll send
Navy SEALS.”

“Since when does Bradley have the authority to engage SEALS?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I appreciate your confidence,” she said. “But whoever’s behind this has done an impressive
job setting it up. They’ve managed to take down No Hair and lock us up. When they
say they have communication with Bradley covered, they might have it covered.”

“I know my husband.”

“The husband you know so well is halfway across the globe.”

“Okay,” I said, “last resort. We have Mother’s phone. Whoever disabled our V2s doesn’t
know we have a phone. Tomorrow, we’ll cruise close enough to Cuba to see land. We’ll
be close enough to pick up a cell signal. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll absolutely
be able to call for help Monday.”

“Why Monday?” Her words were hidden behind a yawn. “What happens Monday?”

“On Monday we’ll be in the Caymans. We can definitely get a call out when we get to
the Caymans.”

SEVEN

Probability
’s itinerary included one port of call—the offshore financial haven of the Cayman
Islands. We were going straight there, stopping for two days, then heading right back
to Biloxi. The Caymans were one of the monetary capitals of the world with forty of
the fifty largest international banks in operation, and our destination was George
Town, the capital city, on the southwest coast of Grand Cayman. Collectively, the
passengers on
Probability
had more than a small stake in the Cayman’s $1.5 trillion in financial transaction
liabilities, and a very vested interest in visiting one, or several, of the six hundred
George Town banks. The Caymans had more registered corporations than people, and the
banking accompanying all that incorporation ran the gamut, including day-to-day trading,
general commercial transactions, investment activities, hedge fund formation, structured
securitization and financing, captive insurance, plus any and all other broad-spectrum
corporate financial activities. Not all Cayman banking was aboveboard and sanctioned
by the United States Federal Government. But all Cayman banking was tax free on profits
and capital gains with no withholding taxes for foreign investors, in addition to
being free of estate and death duties. It was the ideal location for the mega wealthy
to set up trust, annuity, and savings accounts, and the fifty invited guests on Probability
had one thing in common: They banked in the Caymans.

There were three reasons
Probability
was only making the one stop.

First, anchorage—where to park the big thing. The draft of a ship refers to the distance
between the waterline and the keel, the rock bottom. The draft on
Probability
kept it well away from the shoreline. In other words, what you couldn’t see went
too deep to dock the ship anywhere near land without running aground. It had to stay
in the ocean; there weren’t enough tug boats in the whole Caribbean to pull
Probability
off a sandbar. The bazillionaires would be ferried to George Town on luxury commuter
speedboats with three-piece Jing Ping bands housed in
Probability
garages. (The boats were housed in
Probability
garages.) (Not the Jing Ping bands.) (Surely they had staterooms.)

The second reason we were only making one stop was interest level. The passengers
on this cruise had upcountry estates on Maui, chateaus in the south of France, penthouse
condos on Bora Bora, and beach-front mansions in Monaco. They cared very little about
the tourist traps of Jamaica, Cozumel, and Montego Bay, because the activities and
amenities aboard
Probability
were greater than the activities and amenities in all of the Antilles, Greater and
Lesser.

And the third reason
Probability
had one destination: security.

“Only one passenger on the entire guest list won’t be bringing private security.”

“Which one?” I asked. “Me?”

No Hair and I were in his office and the countdown was on. T-minus six weeks before
Probability
would set sail. I’d parked my car ten minutes earlier, having just driven back from
Pine Apple. I’d gone upstairs to Bradley’s and my twenty-ninth floor home to put Anderson
Cooper to bed, then straight to No Hair’s office. He gave me a bear hug with one massive
arm around my shoulders and patted my babies bump. He asked about Mother, he asked
about Daddy, then we took seats at his corner conference table covered with hundreds
of
Probability
dossiers.

“Not you,” he said. “The passenger who isn’t bringing security is actually in the
security business. He’s his own security. You have security. You’re taken care of.”

“Fantasy?” I asked.

“Fantasy is definitely security,” he said, “and she’s definitely booked in your suite.”

“What have we heard from her?”

“We’ve heard exactly nothing.”

Fantasy had been working the bare bones minimum, showing up only when it was absolutely
necessary. Between my pregnancy, managing Bianca Sanders’s pregnancy, and running
back and forth to Pine Apple, I’d spent a whopping hour with her over the last six
months. I had no idea what was going on in her marriage, I missed her, and I was looking
forward to spending time with her on
Probability
. “So it’s been you and Baylor all week?”

He nodded.

“Are we sure Fantasy’s going to make the cruise?”

“Davis, they filed.”

My heart hit a wall. We’d been holding our collective breath waiting for Fantasy and
her husband Reggie to work it out, and filing for a divorce wasn’t a step in that
direction.

“Who they?” I asked. “He filed? He’s divorcing her? On what grounds?” The last time
we’d talked, a good six weeks earlier, Fantasy’s greatest fear wasn’t that Reggie
would divorce her—she felt certain he would. Her main concern was that of every mother:
the fate of her children. To be determined in a courtroom based largely on
how
he divorced her: fault or no-fault. I’m a little of a divorce expert, having been
through a few. Okay, three. Three divorces (humiliating), two previous marriages (even
more humiliating), and in all that only one ex-husband. (Humiliating all the way around.)
(But I’m not one to dwell on the past.) (What’s done is done.) (Move on.) Fantasy
wasn’t a divorce expert. She’d been married to the same man, the father of her three
sons, for fifteen years. She had an accidental affair with a psychotic surgeon and
it cracked her marriage wide open. With this news, it looked like there’d be no repairing
it.

“I don’t know the details.” No Hair rubbed his bald head. “She’s not talking. Not
that I’ve heard from her for her to talk.”

“She hasn’t called at all?” I asked.

“Not only that, she’s not taking my calls.”

“Mine either.” She returned text messages in the middle of the night. She returned
emails days later. Obviously, she didn’t want to talk about it. “I’ll go knock on
her door,” I said. “I’ll just show up and make her talk. And I’ll do it as soon as
I see my husband for five minutes, check in with Bianca, and bottom line, I need more
hours in the day.”

“Me and you both,” he said. “When we ever get this
Probability
business out of the way and before you have the babies, I’ll need your help restructuring
this team. I can’t do this alone. I haven’t been home in time for dinner in two months.
I haven’t had a day off in three. Grace is about to have a fit.”

I felt my eyes sting. “I’m so sorry, No Hair.”

He placed a big meaty paw over my hand. “This isn’t on you. But I do need this boat
business out of the way so I can have my life back.”

“Don’t you call it a ship?” Sniff.

“Does it make any difference?”

“The difference is a ship can carry a boat but a boat can’t carry a ship.”

“Why does it matter?”

“It’s just, you know,” I said, “the right word versus the wrong word.”

“How long do you want to talk about this, Davis?”

I picked at my Pea in a Pod sweater. “I’m done.”

“When we get off the
ship
, you’ll be on maternity leave, Baylor’s pretty much set with Bradley, and Fantasy’s
going to have to decide if she’s coming back to work or not. Thank goodness I still
have you for a few weeks.” He tapped a stack of
Probability
files. “I need you to dig up dirt on these people.”

“Again?” This was back when the babies had plenty of room to lunge and lurch. One
or both did one or both. It was hard to tell. “Whoops!” I sat back and watched.

“I can’t imagine,” No Hair said.

“Swallow two squirrels,” I said. “It’s just like that.”

“No thank you.” He leaned in. “Hello little Jeremys! It’s Uncle Jeremy.”

My hands hopped all over the babies trying to cover their ears. “No Hair, stop scaring
them.”

Since the day we told No Hair about the babies, he’s worn me out asking me to name
them Jeremy. Both of them. Jeremy.

“What if we have girls, No Hair?”

“It’s the twenty-first century, Davis. Why don’t you know what you’re having?”

“We don’t want to know.”

“Well, Jeremy works both ways. If you have a girl, or two girls, just spell it with
an I.”

“Really, No Hair? Twin girls both named Jeremy with an I? No.”

“Why not?”

We’d had this conversation countless times and we had it again today until I picked
up a
Probability
passenger dossier and smacked him with it. Which led us back to work.

“We’ve got the usual,” he said. “Hedge fund, dot-com, real estate, big money.”

“I know already. I could recite the list in my sleep. Why do you need me to look at
them again?” I’d run them through the wringer ten times already.

“I don’t,” he said. “I want you to run backgrounds on their guests and their personal
security. Let’s see what pops. The fifty suites have two guestrooms and they’re booked
out.” He pushed a stack of a hundred blue folders at me. “We need to know as much,
if not more, about the entourages as we do the One Percent.” He piled a smaller stack
of red folders on the blue ones. “These too.”

“Who are they?”

“Ship security,” No Hair said. “I’ve pulled twenty-five from our casino floor, the
vault, and hotel security for my team. Our guys. We know them. But
Probability
has its own security, also twenty-five. They’ll report to me and I want to know who
they are.”

“How will a security staff of fifty cover so much space?”

“They don’t have to,” he said. “The surveillance on the ship is so severe, Davis,
we could probably get by with half the security we’re taking.”

“Severe?”

“Let me put it this way,” he said. “Don’t try to hide anything. It can see through
your clothes and down your throat. It’s military-grade imaging. Eight thousand cameras
with proprietary microelectronic surveillance watching every breath every passenger
takes.”

“Surely not in the suites.”

“No.” He shook his big bald head. “The public access areas only. The suites are so
secure they don’t need it. They’re fortresses,” he said. “They can’t be breached.”

Is that so.

“What about the casino?” I asked. “A security staff of fifty can’t patrol the traffic,
the gaming, and the cage.”

“There is no cage.”

“How can there not be a cage?” Casinos are about money. The money is kept in the cage.
No cage means no money. No money means no casino. “I don’t understand.”

“The boat is electronic, Davis, including the casino. Not a penny of cash will change
hands. Everyone will be issued a phone, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, and one
of its many functions is banking. It also operates as a direct and unlimited line
of credit for the players.”

“The V thing?”

“Right.”

“With no cash and unlimited credit, the gambling will be outrageous, No Hair. They’ll
have a few drinks, they won’t keep track, the players will swipe themselves stupid.”

“They can afford it. And someone has to pay for the boat.”

“Ship.” He shot me a look. “Do I get one of the V phones?”

“Of course,” he said. “Everyone does. Everyone has to have one. It’s the only way
to get on and off the elevators and it’s the only way to gamble. All transactions
are electronically deducted from personal
Probability
accounts. And all wins are paid back into the accounts electronically. It’s the wave
of the future.”

“Where does all this waving happen?”

“What?”

No Hair had so much trouble keeping up with conversations.

“Where does all this electronic exchange of money happen? At kiosks? In the submarine?”

“Right in the gaming chair. Every seat at the gaming tables has a reader. The player
swipes to buy chips and then swipes to cash the chips out.”

“There you go,” I said. “There
is
money. Chips are money.”

“Not
Probability
chips. They don’t have a long enough shelf life to be considered money,” he said.
“They’re only currency when they’re in play. The second they’re won or lost, they’re
done. They’re electronically encoded. They have an imbedded funding chip that can
only be activated for gaming once.”

“The chips have a chip?” Encoded casino chips and tokens aren’t new. RFID tags—radio
frequency identification—have been used in casinos worldwide for years, but for the
purposes of security and inventory. Not to deposit and deduct wins and losses from
individual accounts. I was impressed. “They cash them out then throw them away?”

“No,” he said. “They give them away. The chips actually have one and a half lives.
After the player cashes out the chip to his or her account, they can assign it a one-time
value, then use it for a tip.”

“Who is it they’re tipping?”

“Casino servers, porters, concierge, the maître d’, anyone. It could be five dollars,
it could be five thousand dollars, or fifty thousand dollars. And that’s how the staff
is tipped. The chips are swiped to the receiver’s V2, and
then
it’s a dead chip.”

“Holy moly.” I drew big circles around the babies. “Who dreamed this up?”

“It’s proprietary software written by the processing bank.”

“Which bank?”

He patted folders on his desk. “It’s in here somewhere. It’s a Hawaiian bank with
a branch in the Caymans.”

“Why?”

“Why the Caymans?”

“No,” I said. “Why go to so much trouble?”

“So there’ll be no currency. I doubt there’ll be a ten-dollar bill on all of
Probability
. No cash means no converting, exchange rates, or counterfeiting issues. But the main
reason, Davis, is security. There’ll be no cash to guard, there’ll be no cash to steal,
but the best news is how easy the banking will be. We won’t have to conduct transactions
with fifty different banks. Just the one.”