Pandora's Curse - v4 (49 page)

The guards turned along one of the hanging promenades, passing darkened storefronts that read like a one-block section of Rodeo Drive — Gucci, Movado, Armani, Chanel, Godiva. Mercer stayed well back, partially to find cover in the thinning crowds, partially because he couldn’t match their pace wearing ill-fitting sandals. The Mauser was tucked into his waistband, and he cleared away a fold in his robe so he could reach it easier.

The two Germans wound through a couple of corridors and stopped at an elevator. When the car arrived, they stepped inside. Mercer ran down the hall when the doors closed. Above the elevator was a digital counter indicating the floor the car was on. He watched it descend to one deck below where the marina was located.

He charged through the staircase fire door behind him. Pounding down two steps at a time, his feet hurting with every impact, Mercer paused after descending three flights when he thought he heard a door open above him. He captured his breath in his mouth but could hear nothing over the blood thumping in his ears. He continued downward.

One flight above his destination a STAFF ONLY door blocked his path. He stopped to listen again and then swung open the unlocked door. Gone were the rich carpets, subtle lighting, and wood paneling. This was the crew’s area of the vessel. It was as utilitarian as a battleship and painted the same institutional gray.

He paused for a minute, his head held at an angle to see if anyone had followed him. The pistol grip became sweaty. Nothing. Dressed like a passenger, he knew he couldn’t spend any length of time in the bowels of the ship without catching the attention of a crew member. Still, he needed to find Rath’s prisoner.

Edging down a companionway so long he couldn’t see the other end, he kept his back pressed against one wall. There were countless doors lining the corridor and every thirty feet or so another hall ran off at a right angle. The ship was a maze. The linoleum was so new he could see individual scuff marks and amid the subtle abrasions of waiters’ loafers he recognized the heavy black smears left by rubber-soled combat boots. Rath’s men.

He followed the trail like a bloodhound, twisting through the labyrinth while a subconscious part of his brain mapped his route of retreat. A door opened just as Mercer passed, and without breaking stride, he threw himself into the handsome, twenty-something man who had come out wearing a purple robe. They crashed into the bunk beds on the far wall of the cabin, the young man yelping in pain. Mercer closed the door with his foot.

“Don’t hurt me please!” the blond boy said. He was English, delicate as a girl. A waiter, Mercer guessed.

“I won’t.” Mercer kept menace in his voice. “What size shoes do you wear?’

The boy’s eyes widened. “What?”

“Shoes? What size shoes?”

“Twelve.”

“Got any sneakers?” Mercer hoped the American and English sizes were the same, or at least close. The boy nodded. “Give them to me.”

Mercer let the waiter back to his feet and stripped off his monk’s robe. The boy blubbered when he saw the handle of the Mauser. “Give me the shoes and keep your mouth shut, and I’ll leave you alone.”

The young Englishman opened a closet and rummaged through the detritus at the bottom for his sneakers. “Here, here you are. You won’t hurt me?”

“I promise. Now turn around and put your hands behind your back.” Mercer used a tie from the closet to bind the waiter’s hands to the metal bed frame. The ball of socks he found was still warm and damp from the day’s use. Mercer jammed the socks in the youth’s mouth.

Gagging at first, the young waiter calmed enough to start drawing even breaths. Mercer put on the shoes, pleased that they fit. “When your roommate unties you and you go to the security office, you might want to come up with a better story than a deranged terrorist stealing shoes.”

The boy mumbled into his gag and Mercer laughed. “Don’t worry, kid. Believe it or not, your sneakers might save everyone on this ship.”

Back in the hallway, Mercer took up the trail again. The scuff marks led him to a watertight door much thicker than any he’d seen in the below decks area. It was marked ENGINEERING STAFF ONLY. The floor thrummed with the force of the ship’s mighty power plants. He decided that he’d come as far as he should. Fumbling around down here was wasting time he didn’t have. He’d take his chances getting into the communications room without Rath’s prisoner. He had the Mauser and the element of surprise.

Backtracking, he passed the waiter’s cabin again. He couldn’t hear anything from within. Satisfied, Mercer rounded a series of corners, brushing past a few off-duty crewmen who shot him queer looks but said nothing. As he turned one more corner, he had just enough time to recognize a mass of blond hair before his crotch exploded in agony. Mercer dropped to his knees and through tear-streaked eyes saw a knee coming at his face. He could do nothing. His world had gone black by the time his head hit the deck.

Fighting the urge to retch, Mercer came awake in slow increments. His lower body felt distant, like the pain belonged to someone else. But as he became more aware, he knew the agony was his alone. The pulsing waves radiated from his genitals and settled in his lower belly like molten lead. To distract himself, he concentrated on the sharper pain in his face. Experimentally he traced his tongue across his teeth and was relieved they were all there. He tasted blood. Opening his eyes sent bolts of electricity to his battered nose. He spat.

“Who are you?” The question came from beyond Mercer’s gray vision.

“An idiot.” Mercer’s voice was pinched by clotted blood in his nose. He braced himself for what was about to come and sharply exhaled twin jets of red mist. After a surreal moment where his head felt like it had shattered, he peered around the spiky pinwheels of pain. It took him a minute to realize where he was — a crawl space below some kind of engineering room tangled with piping — and who had spoken — the blond man he’d first spotted talking to Gunther Rath in the Pandora cavern.

“I promised myself when I saw you again I’d kill you.” Mercer pulled his hands against the plastic strip ties binding his wrists over an insulated pipe above him. The man was similarly shackled. “You’re Rath’s boss, aren’t you?”

“Klaus Raeder.” They were both on their knees under a steel catwalk. Even if they could stand, there was barely enough room. Lamps in the room above them made the floor under the grated catwalk look like bricks of light mortared with shadow. The ties were threaded over a pipe suspended from the metal grid. Mercer pulled until the plastic ripped his flesh.

“I’ve tried that,” Raeder said. “You won’t be able to do it.” He paused. “I recognize you now from your Surveyor’s Society picture. You’re Philip Mercer.”

Mercer was unwilling to give Raeder the satisfaction of being right. He’d already guessed that Rath had somehow double-crossed his superior to steal the last Pandora box. “Why did he lock you up?”

“He needed me to get aboard the
Sea Empress
. We came on the boat stored on the
Njoerd
. The captain wouldn’t have given him permission if I wasn’t forced to order him to.”

“And when you got to the ship, you were put in here in case Rath needed you again?” Raeder nodded. “What’s Rath’s plan with the last box?”

“I was going to dump them in the sea,” Raeder boasted. “No one was supposed to know about it and no one was supposed to get hurt.”

“You think I care about your intentions?” Mercer couldn’t believe the German’s self-righteousness and lack of shame. “Your hopes don’t amount to shit and never have, considering how easily Rath managed to hijack your plans. Someday I’d like to know how you thought you could sweep something like the Pandora Project under the rug. For now I have to worry about stopping Rath.”

“It was an economic decision.” Raeder feebly clung to his original justification. “I was trying to save my shareholders from paying hundreds of millions of dollars for something none of us are responsible for.”

“Your company profited from the thousand dead slaves in that cavern and you’re telling me you’re not responsible?” Mercer couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Hate to tell you this, Raeder, but you are. There’s no statute of limitations on murder. Just because you didn’t pull any triggers doesn’t mean you can duck the culpability of the company you represent.”

“I thought I could get away with it.” Raeder’s voice was nearly drowned by the sound of pumps and other machinery. The air was stifling hot.

“No one can walk away from their past.” Mercer began looking around for something sharp to cut his bonds. “And that includes a company like Kohl. Now your company is going to lose a lot more than the money it rightly owed and you are going to pay with your life.”

“Do you think you’re immune? Your life is as forfeit as mine. No one can stop Rath. He controls the box — and me — which means he controls everything. He’s invincible.”

There were no tools within reach, but Mercer’s tone was still defiant. “You sound like you want him to win.”

“No. I just know he will. It’s hopeless.”

“Because he beat you?” Mercer scoffed. “Arrogance and gullibility are a dangerous mix. And Rath will be stopped. There are five other people from the U-boat with me, and we have a contact on the ship. They’ll get the alarm out.”

“Sorry to tell you this, but when they brought you down here, Greta Schmidt was talking with another of Rath’s people about a report of stolen clothing near the ship’s marina. I suspect that was your doing. She was on her way there to investigate.”

A door above them crashed open and Mercer heard a babble of voices he recognized: a snarling curse from Ira, Hilda’s quiet sobs, and Anika’s attempts to comfort her. Greta Schmidt’s clear laughter sounded, and again Mercer strained at his bonds. The effort left him panting. A guard lifted a section of the catwalk directly above him and let it fall back on its hinges. His partner kept Mercer and Klaus Raeder covered with a submachine gun as he came down the steps to the low crawl space.

“How are your balls?” Greta smirked from the catwalk above.

“Sweaty. Want a taste?”

In a fury, she slammed her boot onto his exposed hands and would have broken Mercer’s wrists if he hadn’t laid them flat together. Gritting his teeth against the pain did little. “When Gunther is finished on the bridge, you are going to be the first to die.”

The guards led Mercer’s party into the cramped space and tied them to other lengths of pipe, far enough apart so they could not help one another escape. Hilda was in tears, and despite the bravado he was trying to show in front of the women, Marty Bishop’s cheeks were also wet. Erwin was nearly catatonic. Only Ira and Anika had embers of the fire that had carried them so far. Anika even managed to throw Mercer a smile just before her plastic cuffs were wrenched tight. Her body rippled with pain.

Ira waited until Greta finished speaking with one of the guards before he said, “Mercer, don’t worry. We made the call to your FBI buddy Henna on the sat-phone. By now he’s alerted our Navy as well as Iceland’s.”

“So the solar max abated enough for us to use it.” Mercer smiled. “About damn time. I was tired of playing staked goat until you could use it.”

Greta looked from one man to the other, dismayed that she couldn’t detect fear in their voices. “You have no satellite phone,” she said at last.

Ira gave her the withering look he’d used on a generation of naval cadets. “I tossed it just before you captured us. Why do you think we didn’t put up a fight? We’ve won already — only you don’t know it.”

“This is not true.” There was doubt in her eyes.

“You go right ahead and believe that, you sick bitch,” Anika Klein blazed. “The truth should be here in about an hour aboard a dozen American helicopters.”

Greta crossed over to where Anika was tied to a heat exchanger. “And I will tear out your ovaries long before they get here.”

She considered slapping Anika’s face, thought better of it, and climbed the seven steps back to the catwalk. A guard closed the hatch grate, and the outer door slammed with a metallic bang.

From his position, Mercer couldn’t see where Ira Lasko had been secured, but he thought it was someplace behind him and around a piece of equipment. “You were trying to tell me that you found Erwin’s friend and he had a sat-phone, right?”

“Ah, no. That was all bullshit. We called his cabin again, but he wasn’t there. Greta found us about five seconds after Erwin and I got back from the dining room. Seems we robbed the only Buddhist monks who actually care about their property. They had gone to the ship’s security office and Rath was alerted. Greta and a couple of his boys ferreted us out. Considering their firepower, we figured surrender was a better idea than suicide.”

“We thought you were still free,” Anika added.

“I went to find Rath’s prisoner. That’s him over in the corner. Klaus Raeder’s his name. He’s the head of Kohl.”

“Hi, hope you burn in hell,” Ira called as a greeting.

Perhaps he’d survived one narrow escape too many or perhaps because with all of them together and under Rath’s control they were as good as dead — either way, Mercer finally lost control. This was as far as he could go. There were no other options. There was no hope.

He began to laugh. The deep anomalous sound crashed against the steel confines of the machinery room, lashed everyone and echoed back, hammering. It was manic, frightening. When he caught his breath again, silence hung as heavy as steam.

“I figured out the paradox to the mythological story of Pandora,” he said, in control of his voice if nothing more.

“What paradox?” Anika asked. “She opened a box that Zeus gave to Epimetheus and accidentally released all the ills on the world. But when everything like greed and envy and disease had escaped, she found that hope was still in the box. It’s a beautiful story that means despite everything that may happen to you, hope always remains.”

“That’s the lesson people get from it,” Mercer agreed bitterly. “That’s not what I’m talking about. Hasn’t anyone ever wondered why hope was in the box to begin with? Why was it in there with disease and hate and lust? Because hope’s as destructive as any of those, maybe worse. It was never meant to be a gift from the gods. It was punishment. Hope gives you strength when you have a chance. When the situation’s impossible, it becomes a torture.”