Provenance

Part of the settlement would entail an agreement by the shipping line not to pursue the matter through the courts, nor to cooperate in any ensuing investigation. It was not legally enforceable, nor would it ever be admitted—but it would be most scrupulously kept. It would be neither the first such deal struck nor the last. Garin knew the cruise lines were obsessed with keeping a positive public image above almost all else.

As far as he was concerned that was fine. The cruise company’s craven but entirely understandable capitulation would make it difficult if not impossible to recover the cost of his own valuables through insurance. On the other hand the sum of it, including the little bauble with which he had chosen to grace Annja’s charming swanlike neck, amounted to scarcely more than pocket change.

Should the terrorists actually annoy him, they’d find out that as a true son of the Renaissance, Garin had forgotten more about exacting vengeance than these modern upstarts would ever know. His reach, should he really wish to extend it, was as long as his memory.

And the fact he had forsworn cruelty for its own sake hundreds of years ago by no means implied he was averse to making examples of those who crossed him.

“Move it! Move it!” the leader of the gunmen screamed as they pushed the group of captives out the doors of the grand ballroom and into the corridor. Spittle flew out the mouth hole of his mask.

He struck at one older man with his pistol. Garin grimaced. It’s not a club, you half-wit, he thought. He hated to see anything done badly, and anyway, his action was inviting accidental discharge. The man was barely in control of himself, and that was the worst thing.

The little girl, wearing a prim but visibly expensive blue silk dress, her blond hair pulled into painfully tight pigtails, suddenly broke away between the other two masked gunmen and raced back toward the doors of the grand salon screaming, “Mommy, Mommy!”

The leader of the gunman shrieked at her to stop. When she didn’t he raised the handgun.

Garin frowned. “Wait,” he said, and stepped in front of the masked man, holding up his hands.

The man shot him in the chest.

3

The men deep in the immense ship’s brightly lit cargo hold paused in their work as gunfire clattered through the ship. It had a faraway sound, like hail on a neighbor’s roof.

“Idiots,” remarked one. Like the self-proclaimed revolutionaries above, his head was encased in a ski mask.

The resemblance ended there. The dozen men working in the hold wore casual street clothes appropriate to the Tropics. All of them were much calmer than the raging, rampaging, camouflage-clad hijackers—even the several who stood guard holding MP-5 submachine guns with their barrels thickened by built-in sound suppressers.

Their leader was a short man with a powder-blue shirt open to reveal a thick thatch of dark chest hair, silver-dusted and growing down toward a hard, aggressive paunch. He took a lit cigar from the mouth of his own ski mask.

“Hey,” he said in a New Jersey accent. “Give ’em some credit. It’s supposed to be a diversion. What’s more diverting than a damn firefight?”

“Or a massacre,” a third man said from behind the controls of the front-end loader. The others laughed.

The first man, who had fair skin, seemed sour. The ponytail sticking from the mask down the back of his neck was dark blond. “It’s all good fun until the chopper-loads of SEALs start falling on the boat from the sky.”

“Ship,” one of the guards corrected.

“Shut up,” the guy with the chest hair on display said. It came out emphatically but without heat. “That’s just all the more reason to hurry up and get that bad boy loaded on the forklift.” He waved the cigar at a large yellow-pine crate lashed to hold-downs.

“Boss,” the driver said, leaning out of the little roll cage, “it’s a front-end loader.”

“Who asked you?” the leader said. “What is this, remedial English? Now move it, you assholes. We got us a boat to catch. Boat, not ship, Mr. Teach and Learn Network. And watch your fingers—that crate weighs a ton.”

THE PISTOL SHOT echoed in the gangway. As Garin fell passengers screamed in horror.

Slowly, Garin picked himself up off the carpeted deck. He reached to the ruffled white front of his tuxedo shirt to the protective shield over his heart. His fingertips came away bloody. He scowled thunderously.

“You stupid bastard,” he said to the gunman. “You’ve got no idea how badly that stings.”

The hijacker’s eyes almost bugged right out through the holes of his balaclava-style mask.

Garin moved. He had no extraordinary physical abilities other than his longevity. What he had was practice.

The gunman simply stood stunned, as if he’d taken a bat to the side of the head. He had no chance. Garin skipped forward. He batted the handgun offline with a quick swipe of his right hand. Then, closing fast, he clenched the hand to deliver a back-fist to the side of the mask-covered head with a snap of his hips and all the power of his big, well-muscled body.

The gunman’s head whipped around from the blow. A string of saliva trailed from his bearded lips. A pair of his neck vertebrae snipped one of the arteries threaded through them like scissors.

With an arterial break that close to the brain, incapacitation was instantaneous, death almost so. The man simply fell straight down as if the tendons holding his joints together had dissolved.

Garin’s left hand had grabbed the wrist of the man’s gun hand. He caught the pistol as it slipped from lifeless fingers. Then he twisted counterclockwise and snapped his arm straight out.

The other two hijackers were still staring in slack-jawed amazement.

Garin shot one between the eyes. His head whipped back. His eyes rolled up. He sank to the deck. Though his finger was still on the trigger of his big Kalashnikov, he didn’t fire. A hit in what counterterrorists call the “ninja mask” region of the head had punched through his medulla oblongata and instantly switched off his nervous system.

His partner was a little quicker on the uptake. He grabbed an elderly lady around the waist and tried to shove the muzzle brake of his AKM under her ear. It was a stretch, but he was well-motivated.

“Drop the gun,” he screamed, “or I’ll blow this old bat’s head off.”

From somewhere off through the bulkheads Garin heard a rattle of automatic fire. That will be dear Annja swinging into action, he thought. I hope.

Garin swung his arm around until the terrorist’s staring right eye, visible inside a curl of his hostage’s white hair, was perched like a plum atop his foresight post. He squeezed the trigger.

The eye vanished in a red splash. The terrorist dropped out of sight behind the woman.

She turned and looked down at her captor. Then she looked back at Garin. She seemed more startled than afraid.

“That was a remarkable shot, young man,” she said shakily.

“I learned from the best,” Garin said. I wonder what she’d say if I told her that meant Wild Bill Hickok? he thought, amused.

Then he winced. It felt as if he’d been kicked by a mule. His body armor, worn from habit because his business dealings had a tendency to turn nasty, couldn’t prevent bruising from the impact of such a close shot.

“You folks should find someplace to hide,” he said. He quickly subvocalized commands to his security force, whom he had earlier ordered to stand easy and await events, via a high-tech and very well-concealed phone. Events having begun, he ordered them to move quickly to neutralize the other hijackers. He had faith they would do so with discretion and brutal effectiveness. He knew how to hire skill.

ANNJA’S HEART JUMPED into her throat. Garin! she thought. The guard with the long kinky hair was starting to bring up his rifle. His body language suggested he was about to start shooting.

Who are these people? she wondered. Terrorists were vicious by definition and usually crazy, but most of them knew not to massacre their hostages except as a final dying gesture. It not only burned all their bargaining chips, it ensured the authorities, when they inevitably landed on them, would be in a vengeful frame of mind. They’d shoot first—and probably not ask any questions. Ever.

Annja was already moving. Her total lack of coordination on those ridiculous spiked heels acted to her advantage. She tottered a couple of quick steps toward the gunman, then stumbled against him.

He caught her reflexively with his left arm. It left him still clutching the Kalashnikov’s pistol grip with his right hand, and his finger still on the trigger. But in grabbing her he automatically dropped the weapon offline. It no longer threatened the innocent hostages.

His eyes went wide and his pupils dilated inside his mask as his left hand closed around Annja’s right butt-cheek. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “It’d be a waste to shoot a hot chica like you.”

“I think so, too,” she said.

Annja snapped a right backhand into the hijacker’s Adam’s apple.