“Yes, ma’am!”
“And you.” She turned to the female staffer. “What’s your name?”
“Tina, ma’am,” she replied confidently.
“You help Tommy take care of these people and keep them calm and safe. Are we good?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am,” she said, eyes shining. “Very good.”
Annja nodded decisively. “Okay. I’m going to go deal with some more of these bad guys. And once more, you never saw me, because I was never here!”
“Oh, yes,” they chorused. “Didn’t see a thing.”
It’d be nicer, she thought as she buckled the gory web belt around her narrow waist, if this getup didn’t make me look like a direct-to-video prom queen from hell. But we do what we have to do.
4
Steam wisped from Annja’s mug of hot chocolate as she emerged from the small but well-organized kitchen of her Brooklyn loft. She wore a dark purple sports bra and white terry shorts. Despite the air-conditioning holding the flat summer day’s heat at bay, her skin was sheened with sweat from her morning workout.
Finding a spot at one end of her sofa that was clear of books and manuscripts, she plopped down. She picked up the remote from the coffee table, its glass top also loaded down with artifacts, magazines and stacks of printouts. She clicked on the television.
One of the cable news channels came up. There weren’t many kinds of daytime television she could bear to watch. Actually, most of her viewing consisted of watching DVDs, either of movies or occasionally whole seasons of TV series. She hated only being able to watch part of a story, and she hated commercial interruptions, although she did find some ads entertaining.
Not like I have much time to watch, she thought.
The modest wide-screen set showed a long, gleaming white ship shot from above. Helicopters swarmed around it, including the shark shapes of gunships. Boats of various sizes surrounded the huge luxury vessel.
Annja grimaced. She didn’t have to read the white letters at the bottom of the screen. It was the Ocean Venture, where criminal investigators and counterterrorism experts from the Netherlands, the U.K. and the U.S. were still trying to sort out what had happened.
She muted the sound. It wasn’t as if they were going to tell her anything she didn’t already know. She just felt sorry for the passengers and crew, still stuck on board while authorities grilled them.
“WE’RE CLEAR TO GO,” Garin had said, when he walked into her stateroom without knocking.
“What?” she replied, shocked.
He smiled that devil’s smile of his. “I pulled some strings,” he said. “Amazing what’s available to be pulled when one is CEO of one of the world’s largest oil companies. I could get used to it.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You talked our way out of interrogation? What, did you bribe the SEALs? The Royal Navy? All of the Netherlands?”
“None of the above,” he said. “It’s always easier and cheaper to bribe the media. Listen and learn, young Annja.”
The terrorists had never known what hit them. By the time the first SEALs swarmed over the stern from their fast STAB craft in the wee hours of the morning—they’d beat the Royal Dutch commandos by half an hour—the hijackers were all being guarded by Garin’s highly professional security team in the cruise liner’s ballroom. Garin had communicated with the rescuers in advance, using the ship’s radiotelephone. Captain Nygard, who had started the rescue rolling by surreptitiously pressing a concealed panic-transmission button when the masked men burst onto the bridge, was very cooperative. One of Garin’s bodyguards, himself a former Royal Marine commando, had dropped the hijacker aiming at the captain’s austere silver-haired head with a head shot of his own. Garin’s call had prevented any unpleasant incidents. Under normal conditions a counterterror team hitting a hostage situation would automatically kill anyone they saw holding a weapon.
Annja had captured several hijackers. She hadn’t had to kill any more. Having a beautiful woman wearing a bloody and not very substantial evening gown burst in and aim an assault rifle at them got their attention. Especially since the rattle of gunfire hinted how very far wrong things had gone for them.
The presence of almost a score of far more professional armed thugs in the midst of their intended victims had taken the hijackers utterly by surprise. They’d obviously expected the cruise liner to be a soft, undefended target. Civilian vessels usually were.
The total butcher’s bill had been nine hijackers killed, three wounded. Almost twenty more had been taken prisoner. One of Garin’s men had been wounded slightly when a mettlesome but overwrought female passenger, believing him to be a hijacker despite his evening dress and lack of a ski mask, nailed him above the right eye with the spike heel of her shoe. I knew those things were dangerous, Annja thought when she heard that.
Once the ship was secured, and the antiterror units converging on the liner had been alerted to the fact, Annja and Garin had returned to their cabins to change out of their incriminatingly bloody clothes. En route Annja wiped down her AKM and magazines for fingerprints and hid them in a broom closet. She showered and then had a fit of the shakes.
A pair of SEALs paid a visit to her cabin half an hour before Garin showed up. She was sitting in a chair wearing jeans and a short-sleeved blouse and the most innocent expression she could muster. They had been briskly professional as they searched her cabin for lurking terrorists, told her to stay put and await further instructions, and left.
She fully expected to spend hours being grilled by spooks and operators from half the nations of the earth. When they had rendezvoused briefly after the ship’s recapture, Garin explained that the Americans were coming because they had the closest operational team available. The Dutch were sending men because the ship was in their territorial waters and the UK was getting an oar in because a lot of its nationals were on board the Ocean Venture, and anyway it still liked to imagine the Caribbean belonged to the Royal Navy.
And then Garin came waltzing in to tell her they were free to go. A EuroPetro helicopter was descending toward the afterdeck helipad to lift them off.
SITTING SAFE AT HOME in the air-conditioning of her loft, Annja blew at the hot cocoa, as if that would actually do any good, then tentatively sipped. As always it was hotter than she suspected and scorched her lips and tongue.
She winced and set the cup down. It was all part of the ritual.
She still remembered the surreal feeling as the blue-and-white Dauphine leapt gracefully off the Ocean Venture’s deck while Dutch commandos on guard stood by as unresponsive as statues, as if their camouflage battle dress wasn’t being whipped and their very eyeballs blasted by helicopter rotor-wash.
“Why are they letting us go?” she asked Garin.
He smiled. “I told them something far more compelling to their minds than mere truth,” he had told her. “I told them what they wanted to hear.”
The media, courtesy of Garin’s bribes or not—Annja took what he told her with a grain of salt, although experience had shown her that the more outrageous what he said sounded, the more likely it was to be gospel truth—were asserting that the would-be hijackers had fallen for a multinational sting operation designed to trap modern-day pirates of the Caribbean. It wasn’t as far-fetched as it sounded—on the flight to Curaçao Garin explained what a huge and growing problem piracy was worldwide, although largely unreported even by the sensation-hungry news media.
She could also see how the nations of the multinational antipiracy task force