2007 - Eye of the Cruiser

[Calder]

Eye of the Cruiser
By Stuart Slade

Lido Deck, MV Zuiderzee, Off Bonaire, Caribbean.

People who live dangerous lives learn to sleep lightly. People who believe somebody has been paid to kill them, sleep very lightly. People who are paid to kill other people sleep with one eye open in case their proposed victim tries to get in first. We're a bit like cats, we're never unaware of what is going on around us. So, when Conrad groaned happily in his sun-chair and moved slightly to get into a more comfortable position. I woke up to make sure he wasn't being threatened, harassed, disrespected or slightly inconvenienced. He wasn't, he was just relaxing in the sun. He was happy and that makes me happy. Don’t ask me why, I don’t understand these things. It just does.

I'm Angel by the way. If you move in the right circles, you've probably heard of me, either under that name or as Hēilóng Shāshǒu. Don't worry about the reputation, if I wanted you dead you already would be. Nothing personal, just business. Anyway I retired from the hired killer business a few years back.

So what is the legendary Angel, the world's top gun-chick, doing on the lido deck of a cruise liner? Well, the truth is that I like spending my days sitting in the sun watching the wrinkles gumming down soft-cooked food. Yeah, right. In fact, there are several reasons why I'm here right now. One is that I'm still recovering from a bad gunshot wound in the guts and the docs say I need rest to make sure the injuries heal properly. So, Popie had the Vatican give Conrad and me tickets to a 16-day cruise around the Caribbean. Payment for services rendered I guess. Another is that Rotterdam House has concluded an agreement with the cruise line company to provide armed security on its ships. I'm here to check that Rotterdam House is complying 'above and beyond' with the contract and that the team it has on board is fully capable of its duties. Normally I'd send one of my Straw Sandals to do that but since I was going to be here anyway, might as well keep my hand in.

Now I can hear you asking, why is there a Triad security team on board a cruise liner? Are the cruise line management scared that the wrinkles will rise in mutiny over people trying to reserve poolside chairs by putting towels on them? Will they storm the bridge in their wheelchairs and walkers, take command of their ship and go pirating?

Of course not, although they aren’t really that old. Not quite. The towels-on-chairs problem is real though. It will cause a riot one day. Promise you.

The truth is that Caribbean waters are getting more dangerous. Reason why is about 40 miles off to our left. Place called Venezuela. Real shit-hole. Wasn't always that way, there was a time when it was like most South American countries and better than some. Huge oil reserves you see. Only about thirty years ago, everything started to go bad. A shit-for-brains called Chavez took over and destroyed the place. At the time, it seemed like he was just too much of a dumbass to understand socialism was a total bust. Later, when we found out about The Trust, we understood what the real plan was.

The Trust? I guess you haven't heard of them either. You didn’t know there's a war been going on behind the scenes since the beginning of the century? Doesn't surprise me, like everything else important, it happened behind the scenes. The Trust are a bunch of dumbass businessmen who didn't have the smarts to make it in the big-time so about the start of the last century, they formed a secret society dedicated to ripping off everybody else. At first, they just went with the flow but then they got ambitious and tried to mold events to their taste. Ambition has killed more people than I have. Well, mostly the two got to be linked when their ambition caused them to step on the toes of people who have my telephone number. Anyway, their big shtick was to infiltrate something or somewhere, destroy it, ruin everybody involved then buy up the wreckage for peanuts and make a fortune off the rebuilding effort.

Venezuela was one of their operations, only the Trust got its ass handed to it before it was done. So Venezuela went down and stayed down. Their problem. Only, some of the people on the coast got desperate and started to go in for piracy. Cruise ships look like big fat targets. Our problem. A pirate attack on one would wreck business for the whole cruise industry. The cost of eight Sai-Los on board plus their pay is peanuts in comparison. So Rotterdam House moved fast and started making deals.

All this is a bit nostalgic for me. After I left the States, I was an anti-pirate guard for a while. Mostly on the small fishing boats that were really taking it in the shorts from piracy back then. Piracy is a stupid crime, very high risk, low profit margin. It's a fugitive industry, goes where there are no countermeasures and leaves when people start taking them. It was only a question of time before somebody tried it on cruise ships. As I said, dumbasses; you'd be surprised how little money there is on these ships. Gold and expensive jewelry sure, but next to no cash. Tell that to a fisherman trying to feed a starving family in a wrecked economy. Ironic thing is, if he asked for food for his family, the crew would give him some, even if doing so risked their jobs. Don’t ask me why but they would.

Good crew on this ship though. One of the stewards saw some movement over here and has come to see if there was anything that needed doing for us. Every member of the crew knows that Conrad and I are special. Quite apart from anything else, you know what a cover-up is? Not the criminal kind, women's clothing. It’s a loose robe that gets thrown over a swimsuit but it's largely see-through so the expensive and fashionable swimsuit can still be on show. I've got one on now, over a one-piece swimsuit. Downside is that my boys are clearly visible. They are not quite the only privately-owned firearms on the ship but they're a majority of them. They attract quite a bit of attention and made some of the wrinkles panic at first. They're getting used to them now.

OK, so Conrad's ordered a large, six-cheese pizza, a beer for himself and a virgin Pina colada for me. Being gut-shot means I can't drink alcohol until my liver damage has repaired itself. I really miss my rum. That's a pity, but I got badly chopped up and recovery isn’t easy. I learned a long time ago that meticulously obeying the medical instructions I've had been given is sensible. I've been in hospital with various gunshot, knife wounds and blunt object trauma so often that I got into the habit of listening to the doctors.

Our deck steward has trotted off to bring us the order. I'm watching him of course, in my line of business we get into the habit of watching the people around us as carefully as we watch everything else. On the other hand, this is a peaceful environment. You know, I could learn to live like this. Which reminds me, I need to keep exercising. I'm way out of condition. Time for a swim. I'll need to take my boys off for that. It's not the weight; I can swim wearing them without any problem. It's just I don’t like getting them soaked. Takes forever to dry them off and clean them afterwards. As for what chlorinated water does to the leather of the holsters, nothing good that's for sure.

"I'm going for a swim. Could you watch my boys for me, please?" Conrad looked up and gave me a smile and a nod. I stood up, took off the cover-up and then peeled off my twin shoulder holsters with the Berettas still held in by their retaining straps. He took them and tucked them down beside him, positioned so he could draw one if needed. I appreciated the thought but I hope it never comes to that. Conrad isn’t quite the worst shot I've ever met but he's close. If he tried to fire one of my boys, everybody except the person he's aiming at would be in mortal danger. Fortunately, he doesn't need to. While I'm around, I'm his gun. It's best that way; if Conrad killed somebody, he would be in anguish for months about it. For me, it would be Tuesday.

Now, I can hear you asking. How do I live with myself after having killed so many people? You do realize that I'm a high-functioning, well-compensated psychopath don't you? Killing somebody does not worry me at all. Contrary to the shocked mythology, I don't see their faces every time I close my eyes or anything like that. In fact I can't even remember most of them. They all just blur into each other. I don’t even really know how many people I have killed. Over a thousand, certainly. They all had one thing in common though, it served my interests to kill them. That's all I care about. Well, nearly all, I don’t let Conrad see me committing a cold-blooded murder. It would upset him. Other than that, people's concerns and emotions really don’t register with me.

Climbing up on the diving board hurts a bit. That's my stomach muscles pulling against the damage inside me. As usual, the elaborate tattoos all over my right shoulder attract people's interest. Chinese people, especially women, don’t normally have tattoos and the better-informed realize that me having them means I'm a gangster. That causes a lot of interest but it's another emotion of theirs that doesn't really register with me. I'm more interested in the swimming pool. I like swimming and I'm good at it. When I dived into the pool, I entered the water cleanly without anything more than a minor set of ripples. Now, I can somersault and spin around any way I like. Conrad says I swim with the grace and style of a seal. By the time our pizza and drinks arrived, I'd completed a dozen lengths of the pool and my stomach was really beginning to hurt. Time to dry myself off and slip my shoulder holsters back on. Then, I can settle back down with a slice of pizza. I split a slice away from the pie and passed it over to Conrad. He smiled his thanks at me and I got a warm feeling. Perhaps I'd been in the sun a bit too long.

"How's your stomach?" Conrad had gulped down some of his beer and gave another happy sigh.

I rubbed my abdomen slightly. The ache was fading now I'd stopped stressing the muscles but it was still there. "Still hurts. Bennie says it could be a year or more before everything is back the way it was. .45 magnum is a bad, bad bullet to take a hit from. You know that if Mason hadn't tried to be clever, I'd be dead. More pizza?"

"Mmm, please. Got any plans for the afternoon?"

"Did you know they do skeet shooting from the stern? I'm going down for an hour after we've done soaking up the sun." I can see Conrad is slightly surprised by the thought that I might use a shotgun. I don't think he's ever seen me use anything other than my boys, even when playing. "I'll use my boys. Do you want to come and watch?"

"I'd like that." Conrad settled back as I passed him another slice. "Talking about pistols, did you see the day's edition of the ship's newspaper? It came with the pizza."

I shook my head. This may sound odd to you but I like reading the ship's newspaper. Full of interesting things like how many miles we sailed yesterday and who won the ship's lottery. Yesterday's edition had a cautionary article about how one of the passengers had assaulted a stewardess when she told him the audiovisual suite had been booked for a course on the wildlife reserves and conservation policy at Bonaire. Courses and lectures are a big thing on cruise ships, no matter what you want, there will be somebody teaching it somewhere. Anyway, the chump wanted to watch "the game" there instead of on the big screen TV in his stateroom and tried to push her out. Another thing I've never understood, why people watch sports on television or why they think it gives them some sort of super-priority over everybody else. He's in the brig now. Yes, cruise ships do have one although they don’t call it that. He got escorted there by one of our Sai-Los. Very well-handled and I gave the girl a commendation for the way she did it, that is without breaking any important bones. But, back to today. "Anything interesting? Make my day and tell me there's a Guitar Wolf concert on."

Conrad chuckled. "I think your taste in heavy metal rock would probably give most of our fellow-passengers heart failure. No rock concert I'm afraid. However, there is something that might interest you. Joe Mendoza, billed as the holder of the world record for the fastest pistol draw, is staging a demonstration of his skills in the main theater tonight."

Alright people, I've heard of Joe Mendoza. He's not a gunslinger, he's a trick-shot artist and I'm not sure the claim to be the fastest in the world is anything more than male bovine excrement. He is good, I'll give him that. Using the same measuring equipment, he's at least three hundredths of a second faster than me. Of course, nobody is shooting back and he doesn't do a full draw. Be interesting to see how fast he really is. I would challenge him but I don’t think the cruise company would like a gunfight on the Lido Deck. Too many of the wrinkles would drop dead of heart failure. Before they'd paid their check for shipboard services.

"Conrad, Angel?" The voice from behind me was familiar but I wasn't expecting it here so I didn’t place it for a second. It was Conrad who got there first. "Cristi!"

"It's Doctor Cristi now." Cristi gave us a big beaming smile and sat down beside me. "I got my MBBS a month ago."

"Congratulations! I suppose this is your graduation present. Is Igrat on board?"

Cristi shook her head. "No, I wanted her to come but she said it was time I learned to go solo. That she would always have my back if I needed it but she'd stay out my way until then. I'm working here."

Conrad nodded. "I always said Igrat is far wiser than anybody gives her credit for. The hardest thing for anybody to do is let their child fly on their own."

"I thought you wanted to be a forensic pathologist?" I looked Cristi over. She had changed a lot since I first met her and had matured into a good-looking young woman. She also had the solemn look about her that seemed to mark doctors.

"I do. But now I have my paper, I have to do two years of what they call Foundation Medicine before going back to school for the specialized training. Working on cruise ships is one of the preferred options; it means we get a good variety of cases and patients while being in a controlled environment. Of course, there's a lot of competition for the handful of positions but I won out and now I'm a junior assistant medical officer on the ZuZee. You're one of my first patients Angel."

That made me raise an eyebrow. "How did I manage that?"

"When the passengers embarked, we got a list of guests with special medical needs. You are on it so I let the CMO know we were already friends and he agreed to let me take you on as one of mine. What happened to you, Angel? Your file says you've got a partly-healed gunshot wound to the abdomen, severe liver damage and inflammation to the abdominal cavity."

"Somebody was paid a quarter of a million dollars to kill me and nearly managed it. He's dead of course although the slaughterhouse he took with him was bad enough."

"St Peter's Square!" Cristi put her hand over her mouth when she made the connection. "We were watching it on television. It was so awful. I thought I saw 'Lea there but I didn’t recognize you or Conrad."

"Conrad was elsewhere. I was on the stand with Popie and took a poisoned bullet that damned near gutted me. If it hadn't been for 'Lea and Lagertha, I wouldn’t have made it."

"So I read in your notes. All right. I am now officially your physician of record for the duration of your cruise. I have to see you daily, check you for inflammation and any sign of complications, take your temperature and remind you about your diet prohibitions. Oh, and make sure you have all your medications. If there's anything you need, call me and I'll bring it around. What are you taking right now?"

Before I could answer, Conrad had my prescription list out. He's sweet like that. Thinks of all the things I can’t. Like when to make nice to people. Cristi read it and made a few notes. "Ibuprofen for inflammation?"

"After-effects of the poison. Ricin." I watched Cristi trying to conceal her shock at that. She hadn't got the doctor's detachment thing down right yet. She knew very well I was damned lucky to be alive. I beat the odds all the way down the line that day. Beat them by a tiny margin but I won out. Conrad was furious when he found out that I'd been poisoned as well as shot. He nearly went off the deep end and it took Popie and I working together to pull him back. If you know me a bit better now, you'll have guessed I was the only person in Rome who wasn't upset by what happened. It was all business, not personal, and I'd already killed Mason.

"All right. May I touch you please, Angel?"

"Sure." I started to reach up to drop the halter-top of my swimsuit but Conrad coughed and then pulled the curtain that surrounded our bay closed. Something else I've never been able to understand. I don’t care whether people are looking at my lady-bits or not, so why should they? But, Conrad said they would be embarrassed and he knows about these things. "Bennie in Italy told me that I absolutely must not get sun on the wound area. If I did, my belly would end up looking like the surface of the moon."

Cristi nodded. "Scarring is going to be a real issue. But, you've got enough already so I guess this one won’t worry you."

Her fingers were touching the area where the ricin had chewed up my body. I could feel my stomach churning and the need to vomit becoming irresistible. Conrad had quietly moved a bucket near me. Like I said, he's sweet about things like that. Cristi pulled her fingers away before things got critical and I felt the nausea subsiding. "All right. Your liver regeneration is going nicely. A bit faster than usual but that's genetics I guess. You know what's happening with the rest?"

"The ricin killed a lot of body cells and recovery means replacing them?" I'm guessing of course. I know a lot more than I used to but it's just enough to know how badly behind I am in the education thing.

"That's right. The cells you lost will grow back but you'll be left with scarring, internal and external. There's also a danger that you could get cancer from the process going out of control." Cristi was looking careful when she said that. She knows about us long-life types and some of the implications of our gift. Especially that cancer isn’t the terror for us as it is for short-lifers. It makes us really sick but we almost always recover. Doctors who know about us, and that's more than you might think, are trying to find out why. "The internal scarring could be more problematic. You could get something called adhesions and they hurt like crazy. If you start getting sharp pains inside, tell us. You might need surgery to catch it before it gets serious."

"Right doc." I gave Cristi a friendly grin. Now, people, take a lesson from a real psychopath and forget the stuff you see on television. I may act friendly but I am not your friend. Cristi knows this because I told her. I explained to her that I can't be real friends with people however much I want to be. What I can do, thanks to Conrad teaching me how to do it, is recognize the people I would be friends with if I could and fake it. I have a whole library of 'friendly actions' and pick ones that seem appropriate. Cristi and Igrat are people I would be friends with if I could. I do have two real friends, Conrad and Popie. With everybody else, it really is faked. What does it mean if I do seem to be friendly towards you? Probably that you are useful to me for some reason. If you're not, I'm not even really aware you exist. You're just part of the scenery. Cold, isn't it? That's me.

"One other thing, Angel. If your temperature starts to go up, it could be an infection setting in. Very unlikely but it can happen. If it does, straight to sickbay and no arguing. You're fine now though. I'm off to see my next patient. Good luck and please don’t kill anybody. We had enough trouble with that fracas yesterday." Cristi wiggled her fingers at me and was off on her rounds.

"Well that was a surprise." Conrad looked at the empty pizza plate. "More pie?"

"I've heard that the fish and chips in the Lido Restaurant is good. We'll send our steward over for some."

[Calder]

Chapter Two
Stern Leisure Deck, MV Zuiderzee, Off Bonaire, Caribbean.

Hello again. I'm back. The rumor on the ship was true, the fish and chips were damned good. Almost as good as the ones in the Inn at Marsh Baldon. Anyway, I've washed up and changed, ready to get in some target practice. Usual outfit, black jeans, black polo-neck top, black nylon jacket. The outfit makes my boys a bit less obvious but more importantly, I don't have to worry about what to wear.

There aren't many people on board the ship right now, most of the passengers are on Bonaire, exploring the wildlife reservations. Not my thing. Animals don’t like me, somehow they recognize who and what I am. There was a dolphin reserve on Amber Island where people could get in the water and play with the dolphins. Not in my case, I went in the water, the dolphins took one look at me and retreated to the other end of the pool. I did get a refund but Conrad stayed on and had a ball. Those damned fish loved him. They should have seen him plowing into the fish and chips a couple of hours ago.

The crew have taken a lot of care in making sure this range is safe. We're shooting out to sea and the aft navigation radar shows we're cleared to the horizon. We got red flags, stay-clear signals, flying as well and the range master shoots off flares before firing starts. There are arc-of-fire limiters that prevent us from shooting towards the superstructure or towards Kleine Bonaire. That's an offshore island that is another nature reserve. It might surprise you to know I approve of all this attention to safety. Take my word for it, there's no substitute for being careful. The ship's master-at-arms, Rikkert Liefhebber, is on duty here as the range officer and he knows what he is doing. I don’t know of him so he isn’t a gunslinger. At a guess, I would say he's formerly Dutch Marines. I have been meaning to meet with him since I got on board. The head of our on-board security team reports to him and I want to know if there any problems.

"Have you ever fired a gun before?" I suppose you might be expecting the question to offend me but it doesn’t. I don't offend easily, in fact most times when people insult me, I don’t realize they've done it. The question he asked though is one he has to ask so he knows what I'm likely to do. That includes dropping a gun on my foot. Oh it happens with people who've never shot one before. If they're really unlucky, the gun breaks one foot, goes off and shoots them in the other.

"Me? Sure. My friend, no. He won’t be shooting."

"Have you handled a shotgun?"

"Not my primary weapon, but yeah. Not this time though, I'll be using my pistols."

Liefhebber blinked at that. "You do realize this is skeet, don’t you. You can't hit a clay with pistol fire."

I saw Conrad wince in the background. He could guess what was about to happen. I gave the master-at-arms a friendly smile and saw him instinctively step back. He's got good instincts. "Let's see. Ask your man on the traps to send up two clays, at once. Just yell 'pull' when you're ready."

"Alright. Eye and ear protection on now." Again, a good idea on his part. It amazes Conrad that I can hear anything after doing close-quarters gunfights for more than a quarter of a century. I should be deaf but I'm not.

Protective stuff on, I unzipped my jacket and he caught a glimpse of my boys. That told him this wasn't a normal situation. Without any warning, he suddenly yelled 'pull' and two clay disks went spinning across the engagement arc, some fifty yards away. I drew and fired one round from each pistol, leaving the disintegrated wreckage of the clays to fall in the sea. Fifty yards is just fine for me. My boys have a maximum practical range of around 80 yards; beyond that they lose too far much accuracy although I did nail a sniper at 75 yards once.

How does a pistol-fighter kill a sniper you ask? I was up against two SWAT teams and I knew they had a sniper each. Because they always do. Also, they were police snipers, not army. Army snipers would have blown my brains all over the sidewalk from several hundred yards away. SWAT team snipers fire at much shorter ranges so they don’t lose tactical coordination with the rest of their team. Also, snipers like to see themselves as predators so they get up high. Put all of that together, add the need for a wide field of vision and the number of places they can be is limited. So, I picked out where I'd be if I was them and watched. I also set up a target, a baseball cap on some rags and set it up. Then I pulled it up and watched some more. I had my pistol, I used a Smith and Wesson back then, in both hands with my wrists supported on a garbage can. Sniper saw the target and fired, I saw the muzzle-flash almost where I had expected and fired at it. He hit the dummy and a few seconds later I saw his rifle slide down the roof and on to the road. My shot had gone right through his head. Guess who had won that one. I got the other sniper a few minutes later. I'll tell you how some other time.

"Verdomme dat is onmogelijk." Liefhebber's words were blurred by his jaw hanging open. I don't speak Dutch, Conrad does and he was smiling proudly.

I holstered my boys and gave him a slight bow. "Would you like me to try again? Just in case that was a fluke?"

Liefhebber nodded dumbly but I caught the skin around his eyes tighten and flush slightly red. That's a good signal that somebody is about to do something. I hope you're taking notes about all this, there will be a quiz later. Those who pass get to live. Just joking. The British Police pay Dragon Security Consultants a lot of money in consultancy fees to get told all these things. I've got a letter from a British Police DI explaining how listening to me had saved his life and thanking me for the insights. That's pretty ironic when I think about it.

I heard the 'pull' order again only this time, Liefhebber had done a sneaky. He'd had one clay thrown up high-path, the other down low. Didn't help much though. I still got them both, almost simultaneously.

You see, I don't really aim guns. I know where I want the bullets to go and they go there. My first Triad Dai-Lo believed that I was followed around by Devils who guided my bullets to where they needed to go. He might have been right, it's as good an explanation as anything else. If you think you're good with a gun, ask yourself one thing. In a close-quarters fight, do you take aim? If you do, you aren’t good. Not even close to being professional-style good. A professional like me fights on autopilot. By the time somebody has decided what to do it's too late to do it. Too late as in dying on the ground. I call it being in the red-zone.

"You fired those pistols independently." Liefhebber still has his jaw hanging open again. "I didn’t think that was possible. May I look at one of your pistols?"

I holstered one, then took the magazine out of the other, racked the action to eject the cartridge in the chamber and handed the pistol to him, slide locked back. That's how you hand guns around, people. Don’t let me catch you fooling around with guns. If you mess around with them, I'll get somebody to hurt you. Trying to tell somebody you didn’t mean it when you just shot them in the face doesn't cover the situation.

"This is not a standard Beretta 98. Long slide with 150mm barrel? 9x21 Skoda?"

"Also, single action and hair triggers. I carry them cocked and locked. Skoda, yeah."

"We used to carry the 96. In 9x25mm Browning Long. 120mm barrel."

"Dutch Marines?"

"32nd Raiding Squadron, Korps Mariners." He handed the pistol back to me and I reloaded it before slipping it back to its holsters. He was watching me very carefully and gave a smile of approval. "Madam, you would pass our firearms proficiency course."

"The name is Angel. And thank you." I guess you think that was perceptive of me, realizing he had given me a compliment. If you could see behind him, you'd noticed that Conrad had casually patted his left hand with his right. That's our private signal for "he's being nice to you and you should acknowledge that". Before I met Conrad, that was something I never realized and I guess a lot of people got offended. Now, things go a bit smoother for me. One of the smaller ways Conrad has made my life a whole lot better. People wonder why I look after Conrad so carefully. It would be easy to say that without him I'd be dead by now. That's true but it's wrong. The reason why I look after him is because with his help, my life is worth living.

Anyway, for the next half-hour Rik made a whole string of efforts to try and catch me out. Even had three clays fired, not the two he'd told me were coming. Again, not that it made much difference. That's why my boys have hair triggers; I can fire them so fast the shots all pile on top of each other. He had the three clays fired Hi-Lo-Hi and I got the lot. By then, we were Rik and Angel and swapping war stories. Some of them may even have been true. There was a mandatory ten-minute break in the middle of the range hour I'd booked and we had some iced coffee brought up. Sitting on the aft deck with Conrad, some great coffee and surrounded by the smell of cordite is about as good as it gets for me. Well, if I could put some rum in the coffee that is.

It was obvious Rik was really curious about Conrad and was discretely trying to find out more about him. Everybody does that. If they're friendly about it we have some fun. If they are not, I scare the shit out of them. One of my talents. Remember I told you just because I act friendly does not mean I'm your friend? Well, the opposite holds true as well. Just because I act hostile does not mean I'm your enemy. Rik was being polite and Conrad was making sure I knew it.

"So, what do you do, Conrad?" Rik has the same way of interrogating people as Conrad, starts off very polite and inoffensive and then starts drawing the net in.

"I'm a private investigator, I work for a group called the Clarkson Foundation. We work on cases where there is evidence that an innocent person has been accused."

That, of course, is the secret to Conrad and me. Conrad knows I'm guilty of everything he can possibly imagine and probably some things he can't but that's not important to him. He's concerned with saving the innocent and only catching the guilty if he has to in order to do the saving bit. As long as nobody else is accused of something I did, he's OK. No, that's not true. He hates what I used to do and told me the happiest day of his life was when I gave up on killing people for money. He's not OK with the criminal side of my life but he doesn't allow it to affect our relationship. Something about hating the sin not the sinner.

"Platonic lifetime partners." I filled the dots in for Rik. He'd found out Conrad isn't just a priest, he's a Jesuit and that made him ask about me. Everybody assumes we're married or at least sleeping together. So I put Rik right in that. Not that it was any of his business but I won’t have people thinking badly of Conrad. "We're friends who work together. Nothing more."

Rik seemed quite relieved by that. I'll have to ask Conrad why later. He usually explains people things to me. "Are you two going to see the Joe Mendoza show tonight?"

I glanced at Conrad and he nodded slightly. "I think so. I'm curious to see how he does it."

"So am I. There's something weird about his act. Either his insurance company has a death wish or he's faking everything. They're setting up in the Main Stage now and there's no sign of any safety screens."

Rik and I exchanged very meaningful glances. You might have realized by now, we both take safety very seriously. In my case, it's because I don’t get paid for people I shoot by accident. It was Conrad who answered though. "Now that is very odd."

The Main Deck Theater, MV Zuiderzee, Off Bonaire, Caribbean.

"Rik was right. No safety screens." Conrad looked at me, slightly worried. I'm the expert on guns and shooting and he defers to me when questions about either come up. I'd already thought about this a lot and I came to the conclusion the whole act had to be a fake. There was no way any sane person was going to shoot live bullets in a small theater with no safety screens in place. Quite apart from anything else, Dutch-Atlantic's lawyers wouldn't allow it on liability grounds. I'm surprised they allowed the trick-shot show at all.

"He isn’t using live ammunition. It's the only thing that makes sense." I whispered the words back to him. In prison, we learn to speak so we can’t be overheard easily. I've tried to teach Conrad to do the same but it's something one has to do to learn on the job as it were.

"But he bursts the balloons when he does the fast draw." Conrad and I had found film taken at one of his shows on the Cyberweb and we had watched them intently. Come to think of it there were no screens there either.

"That isn't a fast draw." I'd watched the mechanics very carefully. Mendoza used a Colt Cobra revolver with a two-inch barrel. He had leaned backwards by almost 45 degrees before drawing and just flipped the pistol out of its holster and fired from the waist. The balloons were barely 18 inches in front of him when his shot burst them. "His gun doesn’t clear the holster properly and he doesn’t acquire the target. He must be using shot-shells or cartridges loaded with fine-grain sand. The short barrel gives a very wide spread. In a real duel, he'd die."

Conrad nodded. He knows me well enough to understand that what I had just meant was that I would kill Mendoza in a walk-down. He's right too; that fake draw doesn't allow for a target going sideways or downwards. I'd have done just that, probably both, and be rolling in the ground pumping shots into him while his own went into space. Anyway, if my guess about his ammunition is right, unless he hit me in the face, the sand wouldn’t hurt me.

"Place is filling up." Conrad was looking around the theater. We'd come a bit early to get seats but the place had been only half-full. Especially the seats closest to the stage. I guess quite a few other people had noticed the absence of safety screens and kept clear. Wrinkles didn't get that way by taking unnecessary chances. There was a time when I assumed that the way I lived wouldn't let me get beyond 20 years old. How ironic is that? Only now is it beginning to sink in on me that I might live a very long time. Or not, remember this time last year I was dying in a hospital bed.

"Not as fast as I had expected." I looked around again. People were trickling in, but it was already fairly obvious the house was only going to be half-full at best. Again, I wondered briefly why the shipping line had booked such an unlikely act for its entertainment program.

"Do you realize that there were only three walk-down duels in the Wild West?" Conrad had dug that fact out when we were doing research.

I nodded in agreement. It's true, despite television and cinema legends, walk-down duels were very rare. Most western duels follow the rule of three - three shots in three second at three feet - and they still mostly missed. One show got it right, the pilot episode of Gun smoke. That was about a fast gun who killed people by the dozen. A bit like me I guess. Matt Dillon worked out that he wasn't accurate and required a very short range to hit anything. So, he won the duel by keeping the range stretched out. That's more or less what I do. Keep telling people, distance is your friend. I did a walk-down against Henry McCarty once, using paintball guns of course. We fired more or less simultaneously after I went sideways and down some fifty feet away from him. I was firing both guns before I hit the ground and soaked his shirt with green paint. His shots went where I had been.

Henry is a real mensch. After that, he admitted I'm better than him. Before you ask, I'm also better than 'Lea with guns and Lagertha isn’t even in the running. On the other hand, I last just a few seconds against 'Lea when we're sparring. 'Lea's deadly, she can use anything as a weapon. Damn it, she doesn't have to, she is a weapon. In case you haven't guessed, 'Lea is another one of those people I would be friends with if I could.

The show's running a bit late. Conrad glanced at his watch and frowned slightly. He's not upset about a few minutes in a schedule, we're on vacation and time doesn’t matter. We also don't chatter mindlessly to each other; we’re both quite happy sitting quietly and enjoying each other's company. Igrat once told me that the one thing women can do to make themselves beloved by their men is to know when to shut up. As always, she's right. Igrat is with people the way 'Lea is with weapons.

No, what’s worrying Conrad is that the cruise ships operate on schedules that are measured to the second and lateness just doesn't happen. Here's a hint why. All the crew set their wristwatches ten minutes fast so they all have a reserve of time to make sure they are never, ever late for anything. Suddenly, things are worrying me as well. This isn't right.

Five minutes past the announced show time, the entertainment manager came out on stage looking very embarrassed. He should be, the cruise line companies are unforgiving employers and anybody on their staff who screws up gets fired. "Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to announce that Joe Mendoza is indisposed and will be unable to perform tonight. In his place, the ship's orchestra will play a program of music from classical and modern cinema film."

That actually won applause and in the five minutes it took the orchestra to get on stage and set up, the rate of people coming in picked up quickly. Then the sounds of the Imperial Storm troopers March from Star Wars sounded out. That always grabs people's attention. So did the announcement that followed it.

"This is a call for Mr. Langstad. Will Doctor Cristi Shafrid and Father Conrad de Llorente please go to section D5, Botticelli Deck."

Conrad and I looked at each other. Mr. Langstad is the phrase that alerts the on-duty security team. Beyond that, the announcement means me as well, I go where Conrad goes. Taken together it makes one thing clear. Whatever was happening on Botticelli Deck wasn't good.

[Calder]

Chapter Three
Section D5 Botticelli Deck, MV Zuiderzee, Off Bonaire, Caribbean.

Now, here’s a good piece of advice for when something is going down and you don’t know what it is. There will be a group of people gathered around where the emergency was taking place. Most of them have nothing to do with what is going on and are just eyeballing the fun. Stay away from them or you’ll get involved and that rarely ends well. This time a group of people had gathered around the door of stateroom 9112. Botticelli deck is the 9th deck of the cruise ship and the higher up the occupants are, the more luxurious their quarters. Deck 10 is the Lido Deck and Deck 12, the Leonardo deck, is where Conrad and I have our suite. We have a three-room suite in the forward corner of the superstructure with a side balcony and a great view forward. Nine isn’t bad though, it's where the ship's celebrities get parked. 9112 is a compact two-room suite with a balcony. Joe Mendoza was inside and the door was locked. Now, I ask myself, why is that a problem? Doesn't anybody here have a pass-key?

One of the two security guards saw me and came over. "Eldest sister, we have a problem here. Mr. Mendoza did not answer his call . . . ."

I held up my hand. "Younger brother, please make your report to the Master-at-Arms. He is in charge here."

The kid flushed deep red and bowed in apology. Then he went over to Rik and spoke with him. Rik nodded and then came over to me.

"Thank you Angel. Tan Jing-sheng is right, we do have a problem. Mendoza did not answer his call to stage, did not respond to telephone calls and when a stateroom steward came down there was no reply from within the room. He tried his master-key, I tried mine, but neither of us could get the door to open. I have a feeling the lock opened but something is jamming the door."

"Let me try." Cristi had arrived, complete with white coat, her Doctor's bag in her hand and a stethoscope hanging around her neck. "My pass-key gets me places even yours won’t."

I gave a quiet smile of approval, Cristi had been well-taught by Igrat and had addressed the Master-at-Arms directly. I don’t understand human relations but I do know all about the chain of command and I'm not in it right now. Cristi had understood that, younger brother Tan had not. He will require instruction in that area but he is young and shapes well although he still has much to learn. That can wait though. I watched her go over to the door and place her stethoscope to it.

"Rik, it's silent in there. Not a sound. The television isn’t on, nothing. My key doesn't operate the door either. My guess is that something has been wedged under the handle to stop us getting in. This doesn't look good." Cristi glanced at me. Igrat believes that one of Cristi's little problems is that she is too deferential towards authority figures and I'm one of course. That deference makes her very suited to shipboard life but other places, not so much. I also get the feel that she's wondering if I'm responsible for whatever is on the other side of that door. That's the trouble with having a reputation like mine. Every time a dead body gets found, people look at me suspiciously. They don’t seem to understand if I did it, they wouldn’t be finding a body unless there was a good reason for them doing so. Mind you, there was that accident where somebody forgot to send a cleaning crew and the motel only realized there were three dead bodies in the room when maggots started crawling under the door.

Business hint for you. You can make a lot of money by cleaning up crime scenes after the police have finished with them. You can make a lot more by cleaning up crime scenes before the police get to them.

"Rik, if you want, I could go through the cabin above and rappel down the outside of the ship on to the balcony?"

"Won't help Angel. If the sliding doors are locked, you'll be as stuck on the stateroom balcony as we are out here. I've sent for the Bonaire Police, technically this is their jurisdiction. They may be a small department, but they are pretty good."

I reserved judgment on that. "They have a battering ram to break in the door?"

"I hope so. The Korps Politie Caribisch Nederland used to be a low-key force, mostly just dealing with some local drunks and tourists who have got into trouble but there's been a problem with Venezuelan refugees in all these islands and the police have bought new equipment to deal with it. They also got some technical advice and training." Rik looked meaningfully at the two sai-los and I cheered up. If DSC have got a training course going here, we're off to a good start.

When the police turned up, they did seem well-suited to the situation. A blonde Inspector, tall but thin which made her painfully obviously Dutch, and two locally-recruited Agents, who were huge. I'm not small and Conrad is pretty tall but they dwarfed both of us. Now, don't believe size is everything. I once saw Achillea who is two inches shorter than me pick a six-foot eight man up by his throat and slam him against a wall with his feet clear of the ground. She was annoyed with him, obviously. All right, she was stretching upwards to do it, but speed, leverage and balance have as much to do with things like that as sheer strength. ‘Lea has all four in spades. These two Agents though were obviously the two the KPCN used when they wanted to control a riot. They looked a bit like rhinoceroses and, if anything were built even more heavily.

"I am Inspector Elaine van den Heerik. Could you tell me what is going on please?"

Rik explained what was going on and why everybody was backed up in the corridor. When he'd finished, the Inspector simply gestured at the door with her thumb and the two human rhinos took a short, heavy door breacher and swung it once. The crash was impressive and the door came right off its hinges. That also confirmed a chair had indeed been jammed under the door handle to wedge it shut. Not just wedged, it had been tied in place with string around the top of the chair, securing it to the handle. I was beginning to get a really bad feeling about this

Inspector van den Heerik nodded with satisfaction. "Thank you, Agent Henriquez, Agent Kreukniet. If you would now like to keep everybody else out while the Doctor and I go in and see what is happening here?"

Cristi followed the Inspector in. The gasp that followed was clearly audible and the Inspector’s voice was suddenly authoritative and emphatic. "Nobody else in here. Everybody keep out."

That really made me curious, but the Agent Rhino-One and Agent Rhino-Two were quite serious about obeying orders. They wouldn’t allow people to stand near where the door had been, let alone get inside. Despite that, I could hear a shocked conversation going on in the bedroom section of the suite. Eventually the Inspector’s voice addressed the outside world again. "Joakim, Bartele, absolutely nobody to come in here. Rik, please clear everybody else away."

I heard Cristi speaking urgently and the Inspector had obviously agreed with what she had said. "Except Conrad and Angelique de Llorente. You two, get on forensic isolation suits and come in."

"You'll find them in the television room." Cristi spoke clearly but there was something about her voice that told me she was shaken. "Wear everything, boots and gloves as well. Elli, shouldn't we get the ship CMO down here? I've only been qualified to practice for a month."

By the time we got in, the Inspector was on the telephone speaking to the CMO. Cristi was suited up in a light blue plastic forensic isolation suit and was starting gathering the evidence from the corpse hanging over the bed. She was moving neatly and precisely, each action getting the information she needed with minimum disturbance of the scene. In between getting samples and making readings, she was taking multiple photographs of the body. If she's this careful after a month, I hope she never works on one of my crime scenes. ‘You know too much’ is such a terrible cliché and the solution to that would upset Conrad so it's out of the question. Anyway, I don’t want to cross Igrat. I saw her go berserk once and it's scary.

"All right. Doctor Shafrid, Doctor Bierkens tells me you have preliminary forensic training. That makes you the best qualified person here to handle the scene. Don’t hesitate to tell me if you get out of your depth but bear in mind we'll have to fly another forensic officer in from Willemstad if you can't measure up. And the fewer people who know about this the better."

I felt Conrad bristle slightly at that. Here's a strange thing. Despite all the backchat and teasing from Igrat, she and Conrad are good friends. When Cristi arrived on the scene, Conrad sort of became her Godfather. Not formally, but that's the nearest I can think of. Assuming I got the Godfather thing right of course. In my world, it means something different. So, when the Inspector started pushing Cristi around, Conrad got annoyed and when that happens, I don’t like it. I stared at the Inspector and she stared right back. So she's got guts, most people don’t do that.

Once we had finished trying to intimidate each other, she explained. "Look, this is going to be a major case, and a bad scandal. Bonaire lives on its tourist income and if this scandal blows, a lot of good local people could be ruined. So, if Cristi can’t handle it, we should know now and get somebody else. She says you two are the best investigators around and, for all the same reasons, we need your help. Right?"

"Right." I agreed. "Well, Conrad is the investigator. I just look after him."

"So I heard." The Inspector held up her right hand, the thumb and forefinger making a circle, the three remaining fingers held straight up. It is a 14K recognition sign, one we teach to people who aren't in the Triad but are friendly with us. Mostly Dragon Security Consultants clients and that means mostly police officers. I returned the gesture, making sure she could see the extended fingernail on the little finger of my right hand. "I attend the courses your organization runs. I've heard of you, never thought I'd meet you."

Cops and villains have the something in common. We can have the most surreal conversations in the presence of dead bodies. We are doing that right now, exchanging notes on a ‘do you know’ and ‘what happened to’ basis while Cristi gathers the evidence and Conrad looks around. The body in question is that of Joe Mendoza of course and it’s fairly obvious he died from strangulation while hanging by his neck. Going by the amount of drool, there was no drop and he died slowly. You'll notice I didn’t assume that he had been murdered. There was a simple reason for that. Joe Mendoza wasn’t naked. He was wearing a woman’s bra and a pair of panties.

Suite 9112, Botticelli Deck, MV Zuiderzee, Off Bonaire, Caribbean.

Half an hour later, Cristi had finished collecting evidence, Rhino-One and Rhino-Two had cut the body down, bagged it and were ready to take it to the sickbay. Nobody outside our little group had seen it, not yet anyway, and now it was in a body-bag nobody would until it got to the sick-bay. The Inspector and I were now Elli and Angel following swapping some crude jokes that had Cristi giggling and Conrad trying to look stern.

"Murder, accident, suicide or natural causes." Conrad had produced the four likely categories of death. Every death fits into one of those. The problem is deciding which one and sometimes nobody can. That’s called an open verdict and usually stops the case right there. This is why finding a body is so important and people like me try to make sure that a body turning up doesn’t happen. Sometimes, finding a body doesn’t help and this looks like being one of those cases. The complicating factor is that this is a classic sealed-room case. The doors were not just locked, from the inside, but blocked as well. If it is a murder then we have to find out how the killer got out.

This is how we always get started. Conrad puts up the possible motivations on cards and we start to shuffle them around trying to make sense out of how they fit the situation. When we first got together, I’d mostly just watch but later I started to throw in my own opinions. Mostly from the criminal perspective of course. We start with everything imaginable and eliminate them as the evidence rules them out. Eventually, we end up with a handful of cards and often only one suspect.

"I'll go for accident right now." Elli shook her head. "We get this every so often; some people get their kicks by partial strangulation. Once in a while it goes bad and they get fully strangled instead of partially. The clothing is indicative. Normally an intentional suicide won't do that."

"Me too." Conrad had his own motives for coming to that conclusion. In his religion, suicide is a mortal sin and accusing somebody of it comes very close to passing judgement. Conrad tries very hard not to pass judgement on people, another reason why we get along well together. He won’t pass judgement and I don’t. "At this point, I'd guess this was a sex-act that went badly wrong. I agree with Elli, the clothing suggests that as well. We need Cristi's evidence to be more than theorizing though."

"Dr Beer-can is doing the autopsy as soon as the Agents get the body up there. We'll know more then. I really should go up there and be present when he starts to cut." Cristi looked around. "My job will be to tell him what we are looking for. At the moment, though, I agree with Elli. Accident looks the most likely. From the lectures we got and the forensics we have so far I think if he had committed suicide, he would have been wearing his cowboy clothes. People tend to commit suicide so their remains present the image they want. That’s why women make themselves up before doing it. Mendoza put great store in his cowboy act. That’s how he would want to have been found.”

Cristi looked around, trying to find some agreement that would validate her opinion. She got it; Conrad was nodding and I faked my most friendly smile for her. “It’s a good start, Cristi. My only question would be why he hanged himself over the bed. The way people who are into this sort of thing usually do this is they stand inside a closet with the other end of the noose attached to the fully-opened door. That way when they lose consciousness, they slump, the weight pulls the door closed and slackens the noose. Even then it still goes wrong. This, there’s no safety.”

There was more to it than that of course. The way he was hanging gave him nowhere to put his feet when he wanted to take the pressure off his neck. That made it look much more like suicide or murder to me. Then there was the way the door had been secured, a way set up to make entry as difficult as possible. The truth is, the more I looked at the way this was arranged, the more I kept thinking of murder.

Conrad was staring at the body as well. I’ve noticed before that Conrad is completely unshockable, or at least to any normal person can be. I am as well but nobody has ever accused me of being normal. ‘Heartless murdering bitch’ is usually the starting point although I have noticed that a lot of people who know what happened in St Peter’s Square are more polite to me these days.

“What is it Conrad?” He’d seen something.

“Cristi, can you get a full blood panel run on the body as soon as possible?” Conrad looked at the bed more carefully. “Special attention to opiates and other tranquilizers. And can you take close-up pictures of the bed under the body? I think there may be some critical evidence there.”

“Of course, Conrad. But, I don’t see anything unusual.” Cristi has one of those new Australian electronic cameras. I’m pretty certain that was a graduation present from her grandfather. She changed the lens to close-up and started taking pictures, patch by patch. “There’s nothing here I can see, but we can blow these pictures right up. If there is something there, we’ll see it.”

“It’s a dog that barked in the night thing, Cristi.” Conrad was still looking carefully but he glanced at me and he nodded slightly. He was beginning to think the same way I was. Accidental death, as in things went wrong while he was having his fun, was beginning to recede as a possibility. The issue right now is that we have little in the way of hard facts to go on. Things will begin to clear up when the forensics start to arrive. Like Conrad, I want to see that blood work.

Cristi carefully packed up everything she had gathered and set off for the ship’s medical bay. I say medical bay but it is as well-equipped as a hospital and fitted out for everything up to and including quite serious surgery. The ship probably has better medical facilities than the Bonaire Hospital. Which raised a question in my mind.

"Who is in charge here? Elli, you're Dutch Police, Rik, you're the master at arms, somebody better be in charge."

Now, that's me playing with people. When I get bored I play with the people around me. Try and convince them that something dark and dire is about to happen and watch them panic is a good game. So is convincing them that they are the only people who know, or have seen, something dangerous. Conrad tells me off for doing that sometimes, so I try and think of things he won't spot. This time, I'm pitching Elli and Rik at each other to see what happens. In the background, Conrad is shaking a finger at me. I'm in trouble.
Elli was quite smooth about it. "I am, Angel. The ABC Islands are part of the Netherlands and the ship is in our territorial waters so I have jurisdiction. Rik is in charge of security on the ship of course and we collaborate there. The inquest will be held under Dutch Law, given the circumstances, probably in camera. If there is a trial, that will be held in Willemstad."

We were about to discuss the liaison issue a bit further, everything very polite note, when there was a scream from the corridor outside, a scream that was very recognizably Cristi's. I took the lead going out with Elli behind me and Rik just behind her. You ask about Conrad? He stays out of the way. He's learned enough over the years to understand that he's a liability when violence is going down. The one time he got involved, he damn near got himself killed saving my life. Something I won’t ever forget.

A man had Cristi pinned up against the wall and was trying to rip her camera out of her hands. In doing so, he was also slamming her head against the wall. Something that can kill somebody surprisingly easily by the way. He saw us coming out of the room, gave up on the robbery and started to run. Elli yelled "Angel, stop him". In retrospect, she was making what she knew I was about to do official.

I drew, realized that we needed to talk to him, and shot him through the ankle instead of the head. He went down screaming and holding what was left of his foot. Rik went over to him, spun him onto his face and cuffed him. "Under the Dutch Code of Criminal Procedure, all statements that you make must be made freely, and you are not obliged to answer the interrogator. You have an absolute right to remain silent while the interrogation takes place. The statements that you do make, specifically those that include a confession of guilt, are to be recorded in your own words in the procès-verbal. You have the right to be represented by an attorney or to have one assigned to defend you. Your decision is be included in the procès-verbal. The procès-verbal will subsequently be made available, unedited, to the court."

Elli nodded then went over to Cristi who was clinging to her camera with one hand while holding the back of her head with the other. "Are you all right, Doctor? How is your head?"

Cristi looked at her with indignation. "Well, I've never had any complaints."

[Calder]

Chapter Four
Suite 1201, Leonardo Deck, MV Zuiderzee, Off Bonaire, Caribbean.

Time to bring you all up to date. A lot happened overnight but we weren't really part of it. We just took delivery of the results when our breakfast arrived. The dumbass who attacked Cristi turned out to be one Thomas R. Cisneros from Annapolis, Maryland. He's a reptile from a sleazy magazine called the National Spectator. They specialize in following celebrities around and gathering dirt on them. I wonder if he knows how dangerous that is? I guess he does now. He's lucky, some of his fellow-reptiles found out something really bad about somebody who knows the right people and are no longer with us. In fact, I did a couple of them myself. If it's any consolation, they never knew what hit them. They were walking down the street, I stepped out behind them, matched steps, fired three shots into the back of their heads and was lost in the crowd before anybody realized shat had just happened. Those were in the old days of course when I was just a street warrior. Important lesson there, people. If you want to blow somebody away, keep it simple.

Anyway, Cisneros had heard Joe Mendoza was dead and wanted pictures of the stiff for his magazine. Agents Rhino-One and Rhino-Two had stopped him getting into the suite so he tried to steal Cristi's camera. That ended with him being taken to the hospital in Bonaire where surgeons tried to save his foot but couldn't. My shot blew out three centimeters of his Achilles tendon, went through all the ankle bones, shattering them on the way, and then wrecked the central three metatarsals. Yes, I do know anatomy pretty well. From a practical point of view of course. Anyway the doctors amputated his foot last night. I've heard that it was suggested somebody cut off the other foot as well, just for symmetry but the surgeons refused.

Why so much fuss about a simple robbery-with-violence? Elli explained it to me over my breakfast coffee. When the Germans occupied the Netherlands they started off quite reasonably but after a year or so got nasty. One of the things they did was announce rules that prohibited doctors and nurses from giving medical attention to whole groups of people like Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, gypsies, the mentally-disabled and resistance people of course. The doctors said that they had a higher loyalty and they treated people, not members of groups. And they went right on doing so. It got to be a nasty little war with the medical people trying to treat everybody who needed it and the Gestapo trying to stop them. It wasn't long before the doctors and nurses who got caught were being executed and they didn’t die easily. By the day of The Big One, there were hundreds of dead medical people. So, doctors and nurses have become national heroes on one hand but so has the principle that they treat everybody regardless of who they are or the personal risk involved. Today, the lowest-class villains will not lay a violent hand on either and take grave exception to those who do. I don't really understand that since they were just doing their job but there it is. Cisneros had violated a pretty seriously-held taboo by attacking Cristi and he'll have to hop back to the Netherlands for trial.

Back on the good ship Zuiderzee, we've been getting ready to try and work out what happened. Our suite has three rooms, a bedroom with a side balcony, we're portside if that interests you which I doubt, a living room that has scenic windows facing forward and a bathroom that has no outside view. We have our corkboards set up in the living room and we're transferring evidence as it comes in. We still haven't much got beyond the cause-of-death verdict yet. For once, having a body doesn’t help.

"I think we should start with accident." Conrad was happiest there for a variety of reasons. "Erotic auto-asphyxiation that went wrong. The general situation, the clothing, all point to that. The problem is that he didn’t have anywhere to put his feet so how was he going to take the pressure off his neck?"

"It's the easiest explanation for the door as well." I closed my eyes and re-visualized the scene. "He didn't want anybody coming in when he was playing his little game. Even locking it wasn't good enough, the room stewards have pass-keys."

"Good point." Conrad added that to the card and pinned the result on the left side of the board, indicating it was the most likely theory right then. Of course, it was the only card so far. "I think we can rule natural causes out?"

I hesitated at that. You know the scenes in detective shows where the head dick looks at a mangled body and says that it must be the perfect murder? Not even close. The perfect murder is one where nobody suspects it is a murder. I've never pulled that off. The people I've hit either disappear without trace or are found riddled with bullets. Nammie, now Nammie is different. She's provided natural causes with a helping hand when the situation requires it. Look at cases where somebody really unpleasant but regrettably important has died of a mysterious disease and where Nammie was at the time. Amazing how often the two coincide. This time though, I am inclined to write natural causes off. "I suppose he could have had a heart-attack or something but that's not a likely scenario. If it is something ike that, the medical people will pick it up in short order. Right hand side?"

"I agree." Conrad pinned up the 'natural causes' card, one almost completely blank except for the title on the far right. "Now, murder?"

"That explains the way we found the body. Being over the bed like that meant he had no way to save himself. His hands were free though so I suppose he might have hauled himself up and out. Is that even possible?"

"Yes." Conrad seemed very certain of that and he explained why. Apparently on a previous case, many years back, he met a woman who had been hanged the slow way but had managed to save her life by struggling free.

I mentally tipped my hat to her; surviving that kind of situation takes a lot of luck and a lot of determination. Then something occurred to me. "We'd better check with the autopsy, see if there are restraint marks on the wrists."

"I already asked while you were in the shower. Cristi says the results are ambiguous. There are marks on the wrists but it's hard to say what they are and they may be seriously pre-mortem. Of course, if chemical restraints were used, then there would be no marks. Cristi says we'll have the tox screen results by the end of the day. Elli has taken statements from the stateroom stewards by the way. Nothing of any importance there. We can re-interview them when we're done here."

One of the delusions brought about by television programs is that forensic testing gives results that are almost immediately available. It isn’t true. Screening blood for toxins can take two or more days, DNA results can take a week or more. We're running into that right now. The cruise schedule was for us to spend a day, night and day at Bonaire before pulling out for Willemstad this evening. This case has thrown a wrench into that and we've heard the passengers are already grumbling. That's something the cruise company will worry about. But, if they try and leave without permission from the Bonaire Police, the ship could end up being arrested. Right now, I'd place my bet on murder although I can't understand how the killer could have got out of a locked room. Based on the body being where it was, we pinned the card up so that it replaced accident as the extreme left.

That just left the question of whether suicide was more or less likely than accident. Despite Conrad's reluctance to make the allegation, he really had no choice; suicide was the more likely of the two. Position of the body again. So, we had it. Murder is the most likely based on what we know right now. That raises the next question. If Mendoza was murdered, why? What was the motive? This is one reason why I've got away with my life for so long. Usually all the organization is done through cut-outs and these days most major criminal networks own their own banks. Good luck trying to get information out of them. So, the general rule is that professional hired killers don’t get caught. They may get killed in the act, most do eventually, but rarely caught. It's the amateurs who keep the courts busy.

So, money, sex, revenge or silence. Those are the four classic reasons why people get killed. Conrad wrote out a card for each and put them under the "murder" card. That made the problem even more obvious. We'd ranked our cards, we'd listed the possible motives but none of it really fitted what we know so far. It's all mixed up like a Chinese menu. Take one from column A, one from column B and two from column C. We can't even be sure if we really are dealing with a crime.

"It's a mess." Conrad had stepped back and looked at the board. "None of these cases are clear-cut and in most of them, the available data fits all the possibilities. We're spinning our wheels here."

You have to understand that from my professional point of view, the police spinning their wheels while investigating something I had something to do with is high on my list of preferred outcomes. I live in the gray world where quite a few people know a fair bit about me but can't prove any of it. That's why I like honest, non-corrupt police and try to organize help for those who fall into that category. And reform those that don't. Honest, ethical police won't respond to "know but can't prove" by fitting me up for something I didn't do.

That made me think; it was almost impossible to get rid of a body discretely on board a large ship like this. There's always people everywhere and somebody will see something. If we were under way, the body could be taken on to the balcony and thrown over the side but we're at anchor. Anyway, the ship's side is covered by TV cameras in case somebody does go overboard. The situation we had in 9112 was a good way of tackling that problem. "Conrad, there's another side to this. This could be a professional hit. The situation is so messy and confused that we're looking at an open verdict here. Confusing the issue beyond redemption isn’t as good as getting rid of the body but it’s a possible Plan E or Plan F."

Conrad thinks he's joking when he says while most people have Plan B or possibly Plan C, I have Plan P, Q and R. You'd think he would know better by now. I usually have Plan X, Y and Z. That's because I'm a professional. Anyway, the next step will be interviewing people and we might get some of the doubts cleared up. No such luck. As we were going out, Conrad stopped and looked at the door handle. Then, he got a chair and tied the top to the handle with the door open. He stepped outside and closed the door behind him. Sure enough, doing so pulled the chair up and wedged it into position, just like the chair in 9112.

"That's how it's done, Angel. It's not a sealed room any longer. A killer could have done that to get out and leave the door wedged behind him."

I had to admit, that made Mendoza being murdered a whole lot more likely. I also made a mental note of the idea, I might need it myself sometime.

Hospital San Francisco, Kralendijk, Bonaire

"Ah yes, Cisneros, Thomas Roberto. The foot amputation." The nurse on reception, looked at the card with his details. "And you are?"

"The gun-chick who shot him." I watched the nurse carefully, well you've probably guessed that if you've been reading this properly.

"Ah yes, a nice shot so the surgeon told me. Did you know you blew off his big toe as well?"

I looked at the nurse's name tag. Doenja Pruis didn’t seem at all sympathetic to a poor, suffering victim of gun violence. "No, I didn’t. How sad."

"The surgeon, Dr. van Roosendaal, said your bullet probably ricocheted off the deck and went through his foot a second time. Mr. Cisneros has recovered consciousness now. Are you going to shoot him again?"

So, Nurse Pruis had noticed my boys. Well, they're rare enough here. Even the police don't usually carry them. Bonaire is really peaceful.

"Probably not. Although if he slugs another Doctor." Conrad made another sign telling me include the nurse, "or nurse, I might do his other foot."

"AHEM!" Elli sounded annoyed. "This could be construed as inciting violence. Doenja, we need to interview Cisneros. Will that be possible or should we come back later?"

"I will check with Michael." Nurse Pruis vanished into the back room behind reception for a couple of minutes. "All right, Dr. van Roosendaal says you may discuss the events last night with the patient but he will attend and end the interview if, in his opinion, carrying on will cause the patient harm. If he calls a halt, the interview must end immediately."

My primary role when Conrad is interviewing, he doesn’t like it called interrogating, somebody is to lean up against the wall and look menacing. Secondary role is to protect Conrad if the subject tries to attack him. That's never happened by the way. Partly because I look very menacing and partly because Conrad has a way of taking all the tension out of such interviews. He's polite, gentle and soft-spoken. This time round, Cisneros took one look at me and tried to escape. Bit hard with only one foot and the other leg all wrapped up and hanging above the bed. Eventually though, Conrad had him calmed down and talkative. Elli was watching carefully and taking notes. That shows she's a lot smarter than she lets on.

The story was more or less what we had expected. Cisneros had seen Mendoza listed as part of the entertainment on the Zuiderzee and followed him onboard to see what he could dig up. Then, when the body had been found, he'd decided to make the best of a bad job and get some photographs of the body. Only Rhino-One had stopped him. Then, he had tried to steal Cristi's camera so he could use those pictures but his ballroom dancing career had ended first. It was a bit pathetic really.

Conrad had picked up on something though. "This cruise costs something like 4,000 sovereigns. I suppose your inside cabin cost a lot less than that. Why did your editor think it was worth paying that on the off-chance that Joe Mendoza might do something inappropriate?"

Cisneros's eyes narrowed. I read body language very well and I knew he had something he didn’t want to tell me. I didn't say anything but looked pointedly at his other ankle. He gulped and looked at Conrad, obviously seeking protection from the mad psychopathic gun-chick who had already blown one of his feet off. That's me by the way, in case you hadn't guessed. I think that's a lot of the secret behind Conrad's success as an interrogator; he gets his subject to look to him for protection against all the far worse things that he knows could happen. Conrad had already picked up on the situation, so smoothly it seemed like he had known all along. "What is it that you know about Joe Mendoza? He's dead now, it can't be worth anything."

"Are you joking? Now he's dead, he's hot news. Those pictures are worth a fortune. You get them for me, I'll give you half."

"That's not answering the question. Why were you following him."

Cisneros looked down at his foot and obviously came to a conclusion. "Cruise ships like this are notorious for people letting down their hair. They do things on board that they wouldn’t do at home. And Mendoza has always had some pretty bad stories following him around."

"Such as?"

"Oh, the usual celebrity things. Sex with under-age girls or boys. Or both. Sometimes at once. Unrecognized pregnancies with the mother abandoned and left behind. Drunken behavior, drug use, accidents while DUI. Harassment of colleagues. Violence. Then there are rumors of financial irregularities with his businesses. Oh, God, how come you shot my foot off and it still hurts?"

As you probably gathered, that last bit was aimed at me. I know what he meant; contrary to what you see on television, getting shot hurts. Once air gets into the wound, it feels like a red-hot poker stuck into you. Dr. van Roosendaal was already consulting the tell-tales on the wall. "That's enough. The patient is now officially in distress and I'm ending this interview. Check with me tomorrow and I'll decide if he's healthy enough to continue.

Master-at-Arms Office, Navigation Deck, MV Zuiderzee, Off Bonaire, Caribbean.

"Do you have any ladies of negotiable virtue on board, Rik?" I was asking the questions this time; Rik and I had already bonded over guns, or at least he thought we had. I know better.

"Of course. There's half a dozen or so on every cruise. Some of our guests want services of varying kinds so we have to make provisions. The company doesn’t interfere with their work as long as everything is kept discrete. Anyway, prostitution is not illegal in the Netherlands. Is this connected with the death of Mendoza? I suppose it must be."

"It is." Conrad had taken over. "We have received information that Mendoza may have some unsavory history behind him and it might be relevant to his death. The ladies working on board may be able to give us an insight into whether there is any truth in these allegations. Can you put us in touch with them?"

"After I've asked their permission, yes. As I said prostitution is not illegal in the Netherlands. That means it is legal on this ship and on the islands by the way. If you're going down this road, you need to speak with Inspector van den Heerik about services available in Kralendijk. It would be quite possible Mendoza went ashore for his business."

All right, I can almost hear you wondering, we provide a security team that's gray-area. Do we provide the girls as well? Well, the answer is a very clear yes and no. The 14K is in the business of providing sexual services, both from men and women. Now, before you get sanctimonious with me, whoring is like serving in the armed forces. It's a pretty good life if the server is at the top and can be pretty bad if the server is at the bottom. There was a time when we were quite heavily involved at all those levels but, just as we've pulled out from street crime, we have also pulled out from the rough end of the sex trade. Now, we're top of the line only and we treat the girls who work for us really well. Not because we're good people, we aren’t, but because that is the profitable thing to do. Also, when a girl, or boy, wants to join up, we sit them down and tell them what the job really entails and what we can offer in the way of protection and services. We offer health plans, pension schemes, everything that a reputable employer does. And, if somebody wants in, they have to ask us to accept them. Just like a Triad business or personal insurance scheme, these days you have to come to us and ask us to provide one. We don't come to you.

As it happens, on the Zuiderzee, we do not provide the girls. They're freelance independent contractors. It's possible that one or more carry 14K insurance but I'll find that out when we talk. If they do and they are involved in this matter, it means I'll have to deal with the problem somehow.

[Calder]

Chapter Five
Lookout Bar Observation Deck, MV Zuiderzee, Off Bonaire, Caribbean.

Dumbasses who don't know their way around the half-world think that women selling their services either barely wear clothes at all or are ridiculously over-dressed for the time of day. You see a woman in a bar wearing a full evening dress at 10 in the morning and the way to bet is that she's either nuts or is recovering from the night before. Unless you're dumb enough to be dealing with women working from a street corner, believe me, that really is dumb, the girls will be well-dressed for the time of day but no more than that. They'll also be well-behaved. The women live and work in bars and being thrown out of one is professional death.

Marianne Heijdra fitted the job-description of a high-class working girl perfectly. She was very well-groomed, her make-up was perfect and her dress was suitable for the environment and time of day. She'd obviously had professional training in deportment and so on. Conrad, ever the perfect gentleman, seated her and called one of the bar stewards over so he could order some drinks. Marianne ordered a champagne cocktail of course; a significant part of her income was commission from the drinks her customers bought. I had one as well. I know, I'm not supposed to be drinking alcohol but a whore's cocktail has so little champagne mixed with the orange juice, it should be safe for my liver.

"Thank you for agreeing to see us, Ms. Heijdra." Conrad had ordered himself the most expensive Armagnac brandy in the bar. Together the commission on this round of drinks alone would be about five times the average for a three-person table. Marianne obviously appreciated the gesture.

"In my business, when the ship's master-at-arms asks us to help him, we help." Marianne had a soft, gentle voice. Don't ask me how but I suddenly got the feeling she would be a very good mother. I don’t know if you know this or not but I never knew my mother. She died long before my coherent memories start. My earliest flash-memory is a simple picture of a woman holding me and saying something about an Angel. I've always assumed that was my mother and I'm Angel but I don’t really know. "So here I am. I assume that this is about the death on Botticelli Deck?"

"It is, yes. We still have no idea what really happened in that room. We know the end result of course but how did we get there and were other people involved? The forensics will be coming in this evening but until then, we're working in the dark. I was hoping you might be able to assist us with some background information."

"That's a problem." Marianne wasn't being aggressive, just didn’t want any misunderstandings. "I'm like a priest, I do not tell anybody anything about what goes on between me and my clients. In this case though, I will say that Mendoza had no business or other dealings with me."

I didn’t want any misunderstandings either. They can cause difficulties out of all proportion to their importance. I know that Vanna once explained to Conrad how the code of silence worked and said more or less what Marianne had. I guess that given the length of time Conrad's been around, other women in the same line of business had said much the same thing. So he already knew and understood the situation.

"Let me explain something." Conrad took another sip of his Armagnac, sighed gently, and then continued with his usual spiel about wanting to ensure that innocent people didn’t suffer as a result of what had happened. It sounds a bit phony to those with a cynical mind but it's quite true. Marianne started cynical but her body and facial language showed that she was a convert. She had also realized that Conrad was quite right, this was a case where an innocent person could end up being canned for something they didn’t do. All it would need would be for the coroner to decide this was a sex-game that had gone wrong and a convenient scapegoat could be sent down for manslaughter. Which would be sad for her, because the more I think about this, the more I am convinced that Mendoza was murdered.

Usually, I don't interrupt when Conrad is talking with somebody. He constructs his flow of questions very carefully so people get into the habit of answering them and get carried along with the flow. The normal end result is that they end up telling the truth before they realize what they've done. The only way to get out of the net is to say nothing but Conrad's great gift is to make saying nothing impossible. Marianne was getting the gentle treatment, Conrad's questions were all soft and benign. He wasn't trying to trap her, just to get the information he needed. No, that's wrong. Conrad's questions are always soft and benign. It's their objective that differs. Sometimes he tries to back the person he's talking with into a corner so telling the truth is the best way out. Other times he encourages them to talk freely so he can learn as much as possible and sort it all out later. This time he was doing the latter. I just listened and tried to understand how he does it. I've been trying for more than twelve years now and I still can't.

I wish I could tell you all the strange, perverted and otherwise fascinating things that were happening on board the good ship Zuiderzee but I can't. Not because of client confidentiality but simply because the ship's guests were pretty unimaginative. To most of them, the height of kink was one of the girls joining a husband and wife in bed for a threesome. That made me wonder if it was the reason why the beds in the suites were unusually large. The weird stuff was really rare; it's my theory that the wrinkles are so surprised they can do it at all, they haven't time to think of anything odd.

That's when something occurred to me. One thing I've learned on this trip is that unusual sexual habits are rare on board these particular cruise ships. There's the usual range of male-female, male-male and female-female couples of course but nobody cares about that. Erotic asphyxiation was well out of the normal though for this environment and that is one more factor that is making me certain this was a murder. Marianne made it quite clear, some of the cruise lines are notorious for wild behavior and the resulting unfortunate outcomes but this particular company was known to be quiet and conventional. Which, to my mind, made it odd that Mendoza was on board at all. A trick-shooting display just didn't fit the profile. I couldn't help wondering whether the ship's entertainment agency had other reasons for wanting him on board.

Carefully steered by Conrad, Marianne also gave us a profile of Mendoza himself. Like all the entertainers on board ship, one part of his contract was to socialize with the passengers. This he did although she made it obvious that she wasn't alone in that she didn't particularly like him and didn’t find him congenial company. He used to hang out in the ship's bars, usually wearing American 'western' clothes, and tell everybody who would listen about how good he was with a pistol and how he could outdraw any of the old western gunslingers. She looked at my boys and smiled slightly when she said that; I suspect she realized that Mendoza would have had a hell of a shock if he had gone up against a professional gunfighter. It was significant that, while most passengers on the ship took any chance to rub shoulders with a 'celebrity', they tended to avoid Mendoza. Again, I found myself wondering why he was on board in the first place. Almost everything about him seemed to be uncharacteristic for the environment.

Eventually, Marianne had given us everything she wanted to and she ended with advice that, if we wanted to speak to the girls together, they would usually congregate in the Poseidon Bar from 11pm onwards. All those who didn’t have 'other' arrangements of course. I asked her just one question. "Do you think he was law enforcement?"

Prostitution may be legal in the Netherlands, like it is in all civilized countries, but working girls have a sort of muscle-memory ability to spot cops. And gangsters of course, she had me spotted as a villain from the moment I walked in. She thought very carefully before shaking her head. "Undercover cops fit in. Mendoza doesn't. He drew attention to himself all the time and not in a good way. I suppose it's possible he was double-bluffing; making himself so obviously out-of-place that people would rule out him being an undercover narc, but that's a dangerous way to go."

I nodded at that. It's the police equivalent of an over-complex criminal plan. Over-egging a cover story so that it falls apart under its own weight. It's much rarer than its criminal equivalent because cops are, on average, smarter than their street-level opposition. Meyer Lansky used to say that 'every wise guy who made it big in the rackets would have made it much bigger if he'd stayed straight.' It's true too. Every street thug I know, believe me, that's a lot of them, is always boasting about his next big score only it never happens. Every girl like Marianne expects that one day soon a rich client will set her up for life only that never happens either. A girl in Marianne's business has three years to make her pile and retire. If she doesn’t, she'll be hooked on the life. She'll try and retire but, like an over-the-hill boxer, will keep making come-backs. Each time a little older, a little fatter, a little dumber. Conrad's friend Vanna made it out just in time, largely due to Conrad. I don’t think he quite realizes how many lost people he has saved.

Marianne was looking at me and smiling slightly as she guessed what I was thinking. "I know, Angel. This is my last trip. I've got my stake saved up and a business planned. This time next year, I'm out of the life."

"What you going to do?"

"Promise you won't laugh? I'm going to open a luxury chocolate store on one of the cruise ships out of Amsterdam. Already got the agreement signed and the space booked. When it succeeds, I'll expand to the other ships in the Dutch-Atlantic fleet."

After she'd gone, Conrad looked across at me. "What do you think, Angel?"

"If she sells luxury chocolates, she'll get fat." Seriously, I could see how she was on to a winner. The only candy bars on sale on the ship were cheap and nasty ones from mass-production factories. Really good chocolate would sell very well. Suddenly I had an inspiration. If her chocolate was really good, people who'd bought some on cruises would want more when they got home. She could also sell it on the Cyberweb and have it delivered by Freight Express. That jumped my mind to something else. "I've got another question to ask. Was Joe Mendoza who he said he was and if he is, what was he really doing here?"
"That's a good question. Now I have another question for you." Conrad grinned at me. This is a game we play when we're thinking through a problem. "Is Cisneros really a journalist? He came on very heavy for somebody who just wanted some photographs. Robbery with violence, against a doctor on a Dutch ship?"

"Assuming he was going for the pictures of course. Cristi cleaned the place up very methodically and had everything movable as evidence. Isn't it more likely he was aiming for that?"

"He was trying to grab her camera. Its electronic so all the pictures she took are inside. That suggests either he did want them or he didn’t want us to have them. As for Mendoza, we did look into him a little yesterday. A more-detailed search perhaps?"

"I think so. And look up Cisneros and see what his background really is. We can use the business center; I think the Cyberweb connection there is a lot better that it is in our suite.

Business Center, Observation Deck, MV Zuiderzee, Off Bonaire, Caribbean.

I was wrong, it wasn't. Like the link in our suite, it was slow and tended to freeze up. I guess the problem is that everything has to go by satellite and the ship's uplink is mostly taken up by the ship's business. Add more than two thousand six hundred guests on board and the capacity runs out fairly fast. We repeated the searches on Joe Mendoza and this time we hunted down everything we could find on him, not just film of his stage show. It quickly turned out that his claims were a lot more questionable than the entertainment write-up suggested. His alleged records had no written evidence to back them up and there was no trace of the trophies he claimed to have won. It also turned out that he used customized lightweight pistols for his demonstrations, something that was not allowed in most competitions.

It was also apparent that his career had been in decline for some years. His appearances on the competitive circuits were getting rarer, something that his publicity explained was due to him winning everything and wanting to give others a chance. That caused a lot of bad feeling which isn’t a good idea when one is around people with guns. In short, our Cyberweb searches confirmed what Marianne had told us. He was, to quote the Texans, 'all hat, no cattle.' By the end of one of his on-screen interviews, I got the distinct feel of a sad-sack dumbass who had talked himself into a situation where he was completely out of his depth.

Cisneros was quite different. He was a dumbass as well but had the balls to back it up. A search through his Cyberweb references showed he had a long history of taking down major public figures for a variety of 'personal misconduct' issues. He'd had a major coup three years before when he'd exposed a child-sex ring that was servicing prominent citizens in one of the north-eastern US states. Reading that made me regret blowing his foot off. A little bit, anyway. Well, it didn't really but I would have if I could so I faked it. I could see what the problem with him was. He'd had that one major success and now everybody was waiting for him to do it again. The clock was ticking and he was getting desperate. That explained the attempt to rob Cristi.

Conrad had obviously come to similar conclusions but he was making odd movements with his thumb and forefingers that indicated something was worrying him. I just kept quiet and waited, knowing he'd tell me what the problem was as soon as he was ready.

"It doesn't fit, Angel. Cisneros has a history of taking down big fish. The Boston case was just the biggest of a whole string of similar exposes. Yet he's spending time out here on a cruise ship following a has-been sideshow artist. That doesn't match up. It's like you spending a week hunting a stray dog."

I snorted with laughter at the picture, then suddenly got serious. "I might do that you know, if the dog was rabid and threatening people who looked to us for protection. Having a real heavyweight turn up to do a simple job is good public relations sometimes."

"Or the has-been sideshow artist is a cover for something much bigger. I keep asking myself why he is on this ship at all? His act isn't really appropriate for the clientele here and he hasn't the sociability for the cruise ship circuit so why did the entertainment agent book him on to this ship? Angel, is it possible that he mouthed off about being a great gunslinger to somebody who was foolish enough to believe him? That somebody did the search we did, assuming they used a computer that doesn't keep locking up, and took what they saw as evidence of somebody who really is a skillful gunman?"

Oh yes. It happens all the time. The stories of the petty thug or pathetic wannabee who get into waters so deep they could swim down for a month and never touch bottom are common talk amongst the real villains of the world. Many such dumbasses come into our world trying to make a name for themselves and end up being swallowed by the darkness, never to return. A shallow, muddy hole in the ground awaits any half-assed small time crook, who believes that being a swaggering tough guy in a small town somewhere, somehow qualifies him to become part of the big time. Was Joe Mendoza just another sacrificial lamb had wandered too far from home? Did he believe that his stage tricks and illusions could get him through, right up to the time when he realized he was already dead?

You want to know something? Dumbasses who talk about the look in people's eyes when they realize they are going to die don't know shit. When the wannabee dumbasses go down to a real professional, almost every time, the eyes don’t show fear or anger, they show disbelief. They can't believe it's happening to them. They put on a great show, they threw their weight around, they did everything they thought would establish them as being serious players. Only, when the crisis point came, they were killed by a teenage girl with a gun who understood the reality around her, a reality they didn’t even comprehend existed. It's quite simple really. Hear now the wise words of Angel and take them to heart for your life may depend on understanding their meaning.

Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. And some of us are very, very good at it.

If Joe Mendoza believed the myths he had created around himself, he could very easily have talked himself into a world where he didn’t belong. He'd already done it, he didn’t belong on this ship and he didn’t belong performing for tourists. I could almost see what must have happened; perhaps he was shooting off his mouth and somebody had called his bluff.

"It's possible, Conrad. It happens more often than you'd like to think. It never ends well for anybody. You know the story, you saw it when you were working that porn case in Hollywood a few years back. The girl who is the town beauty queen in Podunk West Nowhere and comes to Hollywood thinking she has it made. Only, when she gets there, she finds the town beauty in nowhere is only a touch above nothing in Hollywood. So she ends up being screwed on camera for peanuts. If she's lucky."

Conrad was nodding in agreement. Sadly, but in agreement. Quite some time ago, he'd told me about the case he had handled in Hollywood half a century before, the one where he had befriended Miriam Margolis-Jacobs and her sister. He knew that Hollywood wasn't a paradise, it was a dangerous and ugly trap for the unwary. "Angel, you've met Robbie Burns haven't you?"

I nodded, he'd signed some of my checks from the British government. The ones for "professional services". "Nice man but his accent is incomprehensible and he tried to get into my pants."

"That's the one. He's quite a poet and one of his more famous lines is 'O, wad some power the giftie gie us. To see oursels as others see us!' If we interpret that as see ourselves the way we are, not the way we would like to be, then there's a lot of truth there."

"I think it would have saved Joe Mendoza. I'm convinced he was murdered, Conrad. This wasn't suicide or an accident. He got involved in something that was way over his head and was killed for his pains."

[Calder]

Chapter Six
Suite 1201, Leonardo Deck, MV Zuiderzee, Off Bonaire, Caribbean.

All right, you probably won't believe this but I'm wearing an evening dress right now. Hey, what can I say? It’s the gala night on the cruise ship when everybody is supposed to get dressed up. If we hadn't followed tradition we would have stood out and caused comment. Personally, I still don’t see what's wrong with the black jeans I usually wear. Conrad's wearing a tuxedo and I do have two evening dresses, one and the other one. This is the other one and yes, Igrat did choose it for me. Before you ask I have one of my boys strapped to my thigh and accessed via the side-slit in the dress and a sub-compact piece in the Victoria's Secrets safe. Neither arrangement is ideal but needs must and all that.

Cristi has brought up prints of the pictures she took and the latest forensic evidence. Cause of death is confirmed, strangulation by suspension using a ligature. In other words, Mendoza was hanged. The marks on the neck showed that he was hanged, not strangled or garroted. Otherwise there was no sign of a struggle or any restraint apart from some small and inconsequential lesions around the mouth. That would all point to a suicide. Whoever had set this up had done a good job of it. Our presence here was really bad luck for them. By the way, if you are planning to off somebody, do remember that bad luck is as likely to trip you up as anything else and allow for it.

Our situation board has now been simplified to murder and suicide with the first noted as being the most likely. Accident and natural causes have been relegated to the side of the board, pinned on by the side, not the top. We now have a second board up trying to identify the motive and possible suspects. Motives, we have the classic four of course, but suspects? None so far.

Elli and Agent Rhino-One are staring at the boards trying to think of something to add. Elli is in an evening dress as well while Rhino-One looks just the way you'd expect of a rhinoceros wearing a tuxedo. Cristi, also in an evening dress, is going through the pictures and evidence again. I will say that we're a particularly glamorous group to be investigating a sordid murder. Cristi was looking at one large picture that showed the body hanging from the light fitting over the bed. I doubt if it would have worked in a hotel, the fittings aren't usually solid enough to carry the weight, but ships are different. Even so, I would have thought struggling would have tipped the balance and caused the light fitting to fail. That suggests to me he was hanging as dead weight.

"I see you got the lobster this morning." Cristi was looking at the folded towel the picture was propped up against. Every morning we get an artistically-folded towel left on the bed. Different one each day and some of them are really good. As far as we know, nobody ever uses them except as decorations and all the guests we've talked to put them carefully on one side to admire. Some even take a daily picture of them. They're that good.

"Yeah. I thought the elephant was better though."

"I preferred the peacock." Conrad had come over to look at the pictures. He seemed very sad when looking at them, he always does when looking at people who have died violently, but then I saw furrows appear between his eyes. "Where's the folded towel sculpture?"

Cristi and I looked at each other and started rooting through the pictures. Conrad was, as usual, quite right. There was no animal made of folded towels anywhere in the room. Nor was there an unfolded towel that might have been one such sculpture. Take my word for it, those folded towels were a work of art. Nobody used them as towels.

"What the hell happened to that towel?" Cristi sounded more confused than anything else. She picked up the autopsy details and read through it again. Suddenly, she made a triumphant grunt. "There were two cotton fibers in the victim's mouth and one in the throat. About a centimeter long and curled."

"That's consistent with one of these towels." Elli had come over to join the fun. "I'll get a sample towel sent over to the Island and see if it matches the fibers. We did keep them I hope?"

"Of course." Cristi sounded slightly offended. "Samples G-9, G-11 and G-15."

"Good work" Elli picked up our room telephone and dialed the bridge. That's something one isn't supposed to be able to do from a stateroom so there has to be an access code. "Captain? Inspector Elaine van den Heerik here, I know we're supposed to be leaving in a few minutes but we need to delay that for a few hours. Can we do that without too much disruption?"

There was a pause before she resumed. "Yes, we now have a strong possibility this was a murder. I need to have some evidence checked; probably take a few hours. We'll call the night shift in. Thank you."

"All right, its 99 nautical miles to Willemstad, we were supposed to amble over at 8.5 knots. Instead, the Captain will hold departure until dawn and we'll run over at 24.5. That way we'll stay on schedule and give the lab team ashore time to do the comparison. Agent Kreukniet, please take this towel to the hospital and ask the team there to compare the fibers with samples G-9, G-11 and G-15. If they are even close, I want to know immediately."

"Elli, when your team does the check, is it possible for them to check the Mendoza's nose to see if there are any fibers up there?" I had a picture of what might well have happened and some fibers in the nose would go a long way to confirming it.

Elli agreed and got on her portable telephone to the autopsy room and to her forensic people. You know, there was a time when I was one of the very few people to use a portable telephone. Now everybody has one and they can do things with them that I couldn’t even have envisaged ten years ago. It's one of the reasons why organized crime networks are pulling out of old-fashioned crime. There are just too many people taking pictures and recording videos of what's happening around them. There's no point in denying we offed somebody if the film of us doing it is on the television news for all to see. That wasn't why I retired from doing contract hits but it really justifies the decision.

I went into the bathroom and got a towel similar to the ones used to make the sculptures. "Cristi, can I borrow you for a second?"

"What part of me?" Cristi had acquired Igrat's sense of humor at some point.

I lifted up a finger and twirled it around so she was standing with her back to me. I folded the towel so it made a thick pad about six inches wide and 18 inches long. I was about to do the Thugee trick using Cristi as a model when Conrad glared at me and made an urgent negation. He was telling me I was about to make a catastrophic error in human relations so I stopped on the spot. Conrad relaxed slightly and I gave him a quick nod of appreciation. Also, I thought I'd better explain what was going on.

"Cristi I want to demonstrate an old trick used by a cult called the Thugee in India. It's where our word thug comes from. There are two ways this is done, one is with a silk scarf around the throat which kills the victim in seconds. The other, which they used when kidnapping people, was a soft pad that covered the nose and mouth and left the victim unconscious. I'm going to demonstrate the second if that's all right with you? I promise I'll let go immediately."

Cristi nodded and took a deep breath. Then I flicked the folded towel out with one hand and caught the flailing edge with the other. A quick jerk back and it was covering Cristi's nose and mouth while I pulled her back on to my knee in the small of her back. Instinctively she tried to scream but it was completely muffled by the towel. Her hands flailed upwards but with my knee in her back she was helpless. I only held it for a second or so but when I let go, her eyes were already round with panic. "What the hell!"

"I'm sorry, Cristi, but it's easier to show than explain." I wasn't sorry, as far as I was concerned it had made my point perfectly which was all I cared about. I faked the apology though, just to keep Conrad happy.

"Angel, that's terrifying! I couldn't breathe, I couldn't call out, being pulled backwards with your knee in my back like that I couldn't do any of the tricks Mom and 'Lea taught me. I knew you were going to let go but I couldn't help being afraid you would kill me."

"I really am sorry, Cristi. It's impossible to explain to people how helpless they are when somebody does that. It's one of a series of moves called a blitz attack. Another is to grab somebody's chin from behind, pull their head back and slash their throat. That was really common in the 19th century and people out on the street at night back then used to wear heavy leather or even chain mail collars as a defense. The blitz attacks are still very hard to counter. I thought that after Iggie and 'Lea had taught you how to look after yourself, if anybody could get out of a Thugee attack before they passed out, you could. Even 'Lea has problems defeating one. Size and weight don't matter; within limits obviously. Mendoza didn’t stand a chance."

"But Mendoza was hanged. Not suffocated." Elli had said the obvious more from duty than anything else. It was obvious she had been shocked by the demonstration. That's why I used Cristi, not her. I don’t want to be banged up for assaulting a police officer.

"I think the killer put chloroform on the towel, or at least the part that would cover the nose and mouth, before he used it. That's why he, or she because a woman can kill even a big man that way, took the towel. He knew the smell of the chloroform would give the game away. Then, after Mendoza was unconscious, the killer stripped him, dressed him up and hanged him."

"Why would he do that?" Cristi was still breathing heavily. She looked at me and smiled weakly but at least the fear started to fade.

"To humiliate him. This was a revenge killing. Probably as payback for some kind of sexual situation. The killer didn't just want him dead, she wanted him utterly destroyed. This is all assuming, of course, that fiber comparison tells us the fibers we could correspond to those towels."

"There's a couple of things to support the idea." Cristi had the autopsy report in her hands. "Those lesions around his mouth? They could have been caused by chloroform pressed hard against the skin. And something I noticed, the underwear he had on didn't fit. If he was into this sort of thing, wouldn’t he have clothes that fitted?"

Conrad nodded. "There is more evidence as well. Look at the pictures of the bed underneath Mendoza's body. It's clean. So are the pants he was wearing. When people are hanged, they lose control of their bowels and bladder. There's no sign of that which suggests he must have been deeply sedated when he died."

Two hours later, we had examined all the forensic stuff and transferred the relevant information to the corkboards. We'd finished that when Elli's telephone rang and she went over to a corner to listen. When she came back, she was smiling. "You called it, Angel. The cotton fibers from the towel match the autopsy samples, more were found in the victim's nose and, just to put a ball and chain on it, a chemical test showed traces of chloroform on the samples. Mendoza was attacked the way you showed us, heavily sedated and hanged."

Cristi reached over and vigorously ruffled my hair. "Well done, Angel."

For a second I couldn’t believe what had just happened. I have a deeply-seated phobia against being touched and nobody does it without asking first. Disbelief was suddenly replaced by acute nausea and I knew I was going to throw up. I ran for the bathroom and just made it before the heaves started. Fortunately, the reaction was also beginning to fade then and I managed to avoid spewing my guts. I stood over the toilet breathing deeply, just the way Cristi had been trying to get her feelings under control earlier. When I'm in danger I get very cold and calculating and everything seems to slow down. It's as if large parts of my brain have shut down so I can't panic or get hysterical. Annemarie tells me it’s a survival mechanism common to psychopaths. That had happened this time but by the time I started back to our living room, I was back to normal. Or, as normal as I ever get. And I'd worked out what had happened. It might surprise you to know I was good with it.

Cristi was sitting on the couch with a self-satisfied grin on her face. I smiled at her, a faked smile of course but they nearly all are. "Well played, Cristi. Payback is a bitch isn’t it."

She grinned as well and held up one hand with the second finger crossed over the first and the third over the pinkie. "Isn't it. Quits now?"

"All square and on the level." I returned the gesture. This time I meant it and the matter was closed with honors even. Be warned, when dealing with people like me, that isn’t necessarily so. Annemarie told me that ending a row with an enraged 'this isn't over' is a reasonably sure mark of a sociopath while ending one with a friendly 'well-played' is a possible mark of a psychopath. The difference is that the sociopath doesn't mean it while a psychopath may or may not depending on what he plans to do next.

I caught Conrad's eye and he gave me a quiet smile. Obviously I'd done this bit right. "Angel, is there any way anybody could get out of that attack?"

"Don't ask me, you'd have to talk with 'Lea. The problem is that the position of the victim, leaning back and bent backwards like that, means they haven't any leverage so they can't use their strength. I saw 'Lea get out of it once by positioning herself close to a wall so she could lift her legs and push against it. That was her thinking ahead of course." I didn’t tell Conrad that 'Lea and I had been sparring at the time and it was the only time I have ever got close to beating her. Normally she throws me around like a rag doll no matter what I do. I've learned a hell of a lot from her and I'm still a novice in comparison.

Elli was looking at our 'motives' corkboard and the four cards on it. "I think 'revenge' should be on the left. If it was to silence him, it would have been done differently. Robbery also. Given the circumstances, I'd put 'sex' next to revenge with a note that the two are probably linked. This seems to me to be a revenge killing for some kind of sexual attack."

"There is something else." Agent Rhino-One had spoken up for the first time. To my astonishment, he had a beautiful deep voice, one that sounded like water running over stones. "Strength. To lift a deadweight body like that and hang it would need strength. I do not mean offense, but I do not think a woman could do it unassisted."

He had a good point and it was one I think 'Lea would have made if she'd been present. Very strong people, especially those who are familiar with the mechanics of using their strength, are conscious all the time of how much damage they can do and control their use of strength very carefully. Even in simple things like putting a glass back on a table. Thinking about it, I could see no way that a woman could have done this alone. Even a normal-strength man would have had problems. This had to have been the work of at least two people. A man and a woman would be the minimum.

"Assuming Mendoza wasn't into cross-dressing, wouldn't the clothes he was found in have to have been brought by his companion? A female companion and that would mean she also had a partner." Conrad was thinking through the implications. "She would have had to carry them in, probably concealed."

"She could have been wearing them?" I thought that was probably the best route. I was wrong.

Cristi had the autopsy and forensic file open. "The clothes were new, apparently unworn prior to use and had no examples of female trace evidence. If we discount Mendoza having owned them, they had to have been bought specifically for this murder."

"Does the report give a brand-name?"

"Yes, Graficos."

Elli nodded. "That's a mid-range brand, mostly sold back home and here. The first step will be to check with local retail outlets for the brand. I doubt if there are that many of them and I suspect most of the sales from Kralendijk will be to people on this ship. With luck we can get a customer list."

"The Captain will be seriously annoyed if you hold his ship again. It's ship's business and I shouldn't be telling you this but we're already getting anxious messages from Rotterdam about the delays this business is causing. He'll want to sail at dawn, almost regardless of circumstances." Cristi looked around. "Will that be a problem?"

Elli thought carefully. "No. I'll call the Captain and tell him the ship is released and he can get under way at his discretion. My team and I will stay here in Kralendijk and try and get find a suspect list from the clothing stores. If we draw a blank, we'll have to assume the clothes were bought back home and that will make any further investigation really hard. We'll catch up with you in Oranjestad in Aruba. We're all part of the same police entity so there won’t be a jurisdictional dispute."

Conrad seemed happy with that. "Elli, one extra thing. You have a passenger and crew list from the ship. Can you call the Netherlands and see if any of the names tie up with a sexual assault case back there? There are probably a lot and I really doubt if the records are complete but if one of them ties into the list of clothing purchases as well, it will narrow the field a lot.

[Calder]

Chapter Seven
Disembarkation Area, MV Zuiderzee, Off Willemstad, Curacao

There are only two pistols licensed for private ownership and carriage in Curacao and by the inscrutable workings of the underworld, I own both of them. Have you any idea how many problems that causes? Like all passengers, I have to go through a metal detector when leaving the ship and they would set off the alarms. That gives me a choice; I either have to take my boys out of their holsters and hand them to the security person until I've cleared security or walk through the detector carrying them and cause a panic. Which do I do? Here's a hint; the security officer in question addresses me as 'eldest sister'. He turns off the detector before I step through it. Common sense is best defined as the ability to find another option.

We packed up the conference at 3am yesterday morning and Conrad and I got some sleep. Elli and her team are busy visiting clothing stores back in Bonaire, Conrad is doing Churchie Stuff with the local church bigwig here. I don’t know what it is about and I don’t want to but if made to guess I would think it’s the problems facing the Church over in Venezuela. Cristi? Well, here's the punchline, Cristi and I are going on a girl's shopping trip to the Zeelandia Mall.

Yes, you heard that right. These are troubling times.

The thing is this, Cristi and I are beginning to find we have a lot in common. All right, I was born in 1968, Cristi in 1982 but we grew up within a mile of each other. Cristi has a fierce hatred for her birth mother, or as she calls her, ‘my incubator’. I feel exactly the same way about my father only I had the great pleasure of killing him. She feels much the same way towards Igrat as I feel towards Conrad. It’s not impossible that Iggie could have rescued me, we lived very close to each other remember and Iggie has a lot of contacts with organized crime. That would certainly have changed my life completely and it’s quite possible Cristi and I could have become real sisters. The downside of course is that if that had happened, I wouldn’t have met Conrad. That idea is enough to fill me with misery. Yet Cristi shares that with me as well; the window for her meeting Iggie was only a matter of minutes and Cristi honestly believes if it hadn’t happened, she would have been dead within a year. I don’t disagree with her on that by the way. She isn't built to be a gangster so in the gang-banger environment she was in, she would have been one of their victims.
There is the big difference of course. I’m long-lived and we don’t know about Cristi yet, but it doesn’t look like she won the lottery. It’s still early, she’s 25 now but she had a rough early life which tends to bring transition age forward. That’s why it’s disappointing she’s still showing none of the early signs of transition starting. I’m through transition now, I’m forty and look 25 as well. So, we’re at the point where we could be sisters on that ground going by apparent age. It’s not hopeless for Cristi, some women don’t start transition to their late thirties or even later, but the chances of her getting lucky are fading. But, for a few years we can be the sisters neither of us ever had. I can’t believe I just said that.

Don't get the idea that we're friends. Cristi is afraid of me and I don’t feel anything for her other than curiosity. At the moment we're sort of probing each other's edges and trying to understand where the other is coming from. Despite all that, we are beginning to feel comfortable with each other and that is rare for me. I've still got my guard up of course but now the perimeter has extended to include her.

At the moment we're in a clothing shop, looking at tops made of the local Sea Island cotton. Apparently it is considered to be the best cotton in the world. Or so they claim. Cristi's buying some shirts in local prints and trying to persuade me not to wear black all the time. She can't get her head around the fact that, with the exception of a couple of high-class women's business suits, all my clothes are black. Black jeans and long sleeved black shirts if I want to hide my tattoos and spaghetti-strap sleeveless tops if I want them on display. She keeps trying to tell me that white will be more comfortable in the heat. I keep reminding her that Conrad and I live in Bangkok.

"Why not try this one Angel. The red pattern will go perfectly with your hair."

"Are those supposed to be flowers? They look more like I'm splattered with blood."

Cristi dropped her voice. "Is that a problem in your line of business? Anyway, I think they are generic butterflies."

I looked at the shirt she had picked up. I had to admit that it did look good. Igrat taught Cristi how to shop for clothes; she tried to do the same for me but gave up in despair. I'm a penny-pinching Chinese bitch; I grew up counting money in cents and finding a dime on the pavement was a big score. Cristi was the same until she met Igrat. I looked at the price tag on the shirt, converted it from guilders to sovereigns and nearly passed out. That one shirt cost more than I normally spend on clothes in months. Then I noticed that the guilders to sovereign exchange rate was about as extortionate as one could get. That made me feel better disposed to the management. In spirit at least, the owner was one of us gangsters.

All right, Cristi won. We both left that store with a carrier bag each of new clothes including the butterfly-wing shirt and some white jeans. Suddenly, for the first time, I started to like Cristi. Why? Because without prompting, she was carrying my bag so I could keep my hands free. It sounds a little thing but it's literally life-and-death for a gunslinger. Anyway, we ended up in the Waterfront Sea Food Bar and Grill. I had a plate of Kibbeling, which is Dutch fish and chips. Cristi was eating grilled fish and salad. I detected Igrat and Naamah's influence there.

Cristi caught my look. "Mom says that if I eat right and keep fit, I could stay active and healthy into my 90s. I accept I'm not one of you but that will be fine for me. Is it true you live on pizza, rum and cigarettes?"

I couldn't help laughing at the poorly-disguised horror. As far as I know, until I gave it up, I was the only one of the long-lived who smoked. I must admit, I did feel a lot better once I stopped. "Not quite. I've expanded my diet to include tempura shrimp and fish and chips. You've seen my medical records. I'm off the rum until my liver gets back to normal."

"Which reminds me, Angel, we need to do some blood work on you when we get back. We need to check on how your liver is functioning while it regenerates."

I nodded; I've got used to doing regular blood work over the last year. I just hope that none of it comes back to haunt me. "How do you like being a ship's doctor?"

Cristi hesitated. Igrat has an abiding principle, if you can't say something nice, say nothing. Obviously Cristi has been taught that. "It's not the luxury lifestyle people think. I suppose people come on cruises and think that the crew members have the same accommodation they do. We don't. My cabin is half the size of your bedroom but I'm sharing it with three other girls. And we don't even have a porthole. Lammerink did offer me a cabin by myself but he made it clear that the price was me entertaining him in there. I just laughed at him and so into the four-berth cabin I went."

"Who is Lammerink?" My trouble-sense was wailing like a nuclear-alert siren.

"Josephus Lammerink, the ship's entertainment officer. There's plenty of staff to look after the guests but for running the ship? Not so much. So, everybody does double-duty. I'm a junior assistant medical officer, which does make me a ship's officer, but I'm also the ship's environmental officer. That's a classy way of saying I have to take documented samples from the ship's septic system and have them analyzed for possible contamination. Also, I have to prowl the ship twice a day, making sure all the hand sanitizer points are full. The last thing we want is a norovirus outbreak on board. That thing can rip through a ship."

I'll be honest, if I wasn't capable of multi-tasking I wouldn’t have heard most of that. Five words were ringing through my head. Josephus Lammerink, ship's entertainment officer. And our murder victim, Joe Mendoza had been seriously ill-suited to be a featured entertainer on this ship.

"Cristi, I'm going to ask an awkward question. Don't answer if you don’t want to, but do any of the crew take kick-backs?"

Cristi didn’t hesitate. "Absolutely not. The crew aren’t even allowed to take tips from the passengers. If you look at your shipboard account, there's a 'hotel charge' added per day which is divided out between the stewards in lieu of tips. Officers, its instant dismissal for taking kickbacks from suppliers and the company are serious about enforcing it. I could get into trouble for our shopping trip if I hadn't told the purser that I was getting an extra allowance from my mom when I signed on. Why do you ask?"

"One of the things that has been worrying us is that Joe Mendoza was hired as part of the entertainment for the ship. Everything we have heard was that he was unsociable, didn’t relate well to the passengers and his act was grossly unsuited to the clientele. Now, we have evidence that the man who hired him is a real dipshit. So why was he hired? From what you say, he couldn't have taken a kick-back from a theatrical agency or something like that?"

"Not without losing his job, no. Angel, losing your job on a ship like this means being paid off, put ashore at the first port of call and left to fend for yourself. Not something to be taken lightly. Whatever he got, was serious, and it wasn't in cash."

Suite 1201, Leonardo Deck, MV Zuiderzee, Off Willemstad, Curacao.

When we finally got back to the ship, we went to the sick bay and had my blood samples taken. We had a phlebotomist from the shore side hospital take them and he was so panicked by the sight of my boys he nearly stuck Cristi by mistake. That made us both laugh and I think we became friends then. She went off on her duties and I went back to our cabin.

When I got there, Conrad had returned and was obviously concerned about his Churchie business. It turned out that there was a massive refugee crisis with hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans fleeing an economic and political shit-storm in their home country. To make matters worse, countries all over South America are closing their borders to the refugees and even using troops to drive them out. The Jesuit Refugee Service was trying to deal with a total societal collapse in Venezuela that had made basic necessities like food and medicine devastatingly scarce. The economic collapse had fueled a violent crime rate that was one of the highest in the world. The number of Venezuelans who have fled the country had now reached three million.

I could understand why Conrad's Church was worried, most Venezuelans are Catholic so they are the Church's people and the Church should look after them. If they were Chinese, the Triads and Tongs would be in there looking after them as well. But what I can't understand is why anybody else is worried about them.

Nevertheless, Conrad broke down there. The news he had been hearing all morning was more than he could bear. He had been asked to make a report back to The Orders Committee on what needed to be done. How, he asked, could he compile a report when everything needed to be done and nothing was possible? As long as the government remained in power in the country, nothing could be done for the people who remained there. Conrad remembered all too well what had happened the last time the Church had tried to interfere in a situation like that.

I knew how he felt; he was in dire distress and there was nothing I could do about it. If it was just the dumbass in charge over there, it would be easy enough to get rid of him. The problem really was that if an assassin got him, an equally moronic dipshit would simply take over. I did the only thing possible; I got the bottle of brandy, slopped a good dollop into a glass, added some more and gave it to Conrad. Then I stood over him until he had downed it all.

"What do we do, Angel?" The question was almost plaintive.

"We put it to one side and let the situation marinate. Perhaps if we think about it for a couple of days, something might come to mind. To be honest though, this seems to be beyond both our pay grades."

Conrad and I don't talk for the sole purpose of filling silence. We're both quite happy with quiet contemplation. Eventually Conrad drained his third glass of brandy and said, simply. "For a revenge killing, this was surprisingly good-mannered."

That foxed me. I was mulling over the likely reasons why Lammerink could have hired such an implausible entertainer as Mendoza when Conrad had abruptly changed his subject. "What do you mean?"

"I've seen a lot of revenge killings. Most of them are bloody affairs. People tortured, men castrated, women mutilated. Parents made to watch their children killed. Most of them are human nature at their absolute worst. All of that is going on in Venezuela right now. Mendoza's killing was almost merciful in comparison. Drugged into unconsciousness and then hanged. I doubt if he felt a thing. There's no mutilation, nothing."

I thought about that and realized Conrad was right. As usual. I knew why I had missed it. You see, when I was doing hits, I'd say a half to three quarters of the people I killed never knew what hit them. Not including the ones who died in face-to-face gunfights of course. The one I hit who did see it coming usually didn't have the time to take offense. For me, Mendoza dying as neatly as he did was the norm. But it is very definitely not the norm for revenge killings. So, I asked myself, what the hell happened in that room? Then several things occurred to me at once. Me multi-tasking again.

"Concentrate on the receiving end Conrad. You can't do anything about the conditions in Venezuela, it’s a government level matter and can only be resolved by sending troops in and replacing the present government. I doubt if any of the non-government organizations have the firepower to do that. We certainly don’t. Instead, look after the people who've already escaped. Build them decent places to live, find them jobs so they can make a living. I bet there is already a major prostitution problem with the refugees who have escaped and that will mean that, sooner or later, they will be in direct conflict with local organized crime. If you turn those refugees into an asset for the surrounding countries rather than a liability, the opposition to them will fade away."

Conrad cheered up which made me feel better. I could see how to set this thing up. Get the various churches together and stage a concerted effort to solve the refugee problem as a joint venture. Do it at two levels, one being working directly with the refugees at local level to make sure they have the basic necessities for survival. The other is work with the government to ensure that the refugees coming in don't destabilize them. Spread the burden out across all the countries in the region, not just those that border Venezuela. Damn it, set the thing up right and the organizations involved could make a nice profit out of it.

"Now, looking at our motives board, we're missing one critical driver. Self-defense. Conrad, isn't it possible that Mendoza was the aggressor here? He attacked somebody in his room, there was a fight and he came out on the losing end. The other party realized he had just killed Mendoza, panicked and tried to make it look like an accident. That suggests, by the way, that the 'other party' in the room might not have been a woman but a man. Or another possibility, that Mendoza came on to another man in that room. Very few people really care about sexual orientation these days but there are still some that do. Mendoza got to be unlucky, came on to one of the people who do and got slugged."

Conrad was visibly a lot happier now that there was a viable way the refugee problem in Venezuela could be addressed. He quickly wrote out a card entitled 'self-defense' and stood staring at the motives board with it in his hand. "Angel, I like that possibility a lot more than any of the others we've come up with. It isn't the whole story but it fits the body of evidence that we have and explains why there's none of the brutality that normally accompanies revenge crimes. Far left?"

"Far left. You said that Mendoza came on to somebody who took offense? I learned something interesting today when Cristi and I went ashore. There's somebody else on board who comes on to people. The ship's entertainment officer, Josephus Lammerink. The crew accommodation in this ship is really cramped, presumably to make as much space as possible available for paying passengers. Cristi shares a cabin with three other junior officers. Lammerink offered her a cabin to herself . . ."

"With Cristi providing sexual services as a quid-pro-quo." Conrad winced at the thought. Think about this one people. Cristi was taught how to defend herself by Achillea. She was taught how to handle situations like that by Igrat. Lammerick could have, had been, made to look like a complete fool but if he'd pushed the matter he could suddenly have been hurt very badly. If he'd tried to bring a charge of assault against Cristi, she'd have produced a sexual harassment defense that would be a slam-dunk. Especially since one woman bringing that defense would result in other harassment cases surfacing.

"Angel, I've known a lot of cases over the years of a fight in which one person was knocked down, hit his - or her - head on something and gave every appearance of being dead. The other party panicked and tried to make the situation look like a suicide or accident, not realizing that the person on the floor wasn't dead. So, it wasn't the blow that killed them but the attempted cover-up. That could easily have happened here."

"We're still missing the obvious." My mind was now linking things up in an unexpected pattern. It all came back to the original question. Why was Joe Mendoza on this ship at all? He didn’t have a suitable act, he didn’t have the necessary social skills. The only thing he could do was put on an act with guns. An act that might convince unprofessional observers that he really was skilled with them. People who weren't familiar with gun-fighting might actually believe what they were seeing and not realize that it was a stage illusion like a magic or mind-reading show. Had he been brought on board because he gave the appearance of being a genuine gunslinger and that the stage act was a cover?

Take that one step further people. If I suddenly arrive at a given location, the people who know who I am will immediately assume I've come to kill somebody. Quite often they will be right. All right, these days not so much, but there was a time when if I walked into a bar, everybody present took it for granted that one of the people there was going to die. So, had Mendoza been brought in to kill somebody? Brought in by Lammerick either on his own account or as a service to co-conspirators? I could almost hear the idea being put forward. 'Have you ever seen Joe Mendoza's display? He's really good. Why, he's even three hundredths of a second faster than the legendary Angel! We'll bring him in to do the job.' And the other dumbasses applauded.

I was about to say something when Conrad looked at me thoughtfully and showed he's been thinking along the same lines. "The question I have is why was Mendoza brought in to kill somebody and who was the proposed target."

[Calder]

Chapter Eight
Lido Deck, MV Zuiderzee, Off Curacao, Caribbean.

We have a theory of the crime now. What is that you may ask? It's a sort of model, the most likely explanation that fits the evidence available. As each fact is unveiled, it's compared to the theory of the crime and if there is a discrepancy, the theory of the crime must be either changed or abandoned. Conrad says there is a deadly danger buried in this approach, that people become committed to the theory they have evolved and bend the evidence to match the theory rather than the other way around. He's right of course; I've seen that done myself. Damn it, I've done it myself and Conrad really ripped me a new one for doing so. Conrad doesn't shout and rave when he's angry with me but he has this "not angry but terribly disappointed" approach that is worse.

Anyway, our current theory of the crime is that Lammerick, under the impression that Mendoza's apparent skill with guns made him a potential hired killer, brought him on board to do somebody. Mendoza lured that victim to his cabin because that is the only place on the ship where somebody won’t turn up on the scene unexpectedly. That's something people don’t understand about these ships, once a passenger steps out of his stateroom, there are always people, i.e. witnesses, around. Anyway, once there, he tried to kill his victim and botched it. The potential victim may have called for help and somebody passing responded. In the fight, Mendoza was apparently killed although he was actually just knocked out. The victim and his rescuer were convinced they had killed him and staged the death to cover their tracks. That's the bit I don't like. Where did the chloroform come from and why was it used if Mendoza was already thought to be dead?

I have an idea about that. You see, I've got away with my life for so long because I never leave witnesses, or victims, alive. In this world, there are two kinds of criminals, the ones who leave witnesses and the ones who don’t get caught. If there's even the slightest chance that the victim is alive, I put an extra shot or four into his or her head. So, my theory is that the intended victim, or victims, knocked out Mendoza somehow and knew full well he was alive. They also knew that if they left him alive, he would come after them again. So, they decided he had to die and also that they should disguise the death as an accident or suicide. One of them got the chloroform and the underwear, brought it back and they dosed Mendoza with the chloroform, dressed him up and hanged him. Perhaps they were afraid that if they didn't use the chloroform, he'd wake up and start screaming.

"You know something Angel? In all the years I've been around murders, I've never known a victim to be more than temporarily and ineffectively incapacitated by inhaled chloroform. I don’t think one can disable somebody in a fight by holding a chloroform-soaked pad over their nose." Conrad had been thinking our theory of the crime over as well and he didn’t like it either.

"The British Medical Association has offered a lifetime pension and 'a permanent scientific reputation' to anyone who can demonstrate instantaneous insensibility using chloroform." Cristi had arrived for my medical. We went through the usual drill while she checked me for any adverse developments. She was probing my abdomen with her fingers while she continued speaking and I tried not to vomit. "It doesn't even end there . After a person has lost consciousness due to chloroform inhalation, a continuous volume must be administered and the chin must be supported to keep the tongue from obstructing the airway. You need a trained anesthesiologist to do that properly. All right, we're done. Your liver is doing well. No sign of any adhesions developing, Angel?"

I shook my head. The truth was, in general I'm feeling pretty good right now. Perhaps there is something to these restful vacations things. Cristi smiled happily. "I'll repeat the warning, you feel something is wrong, get down to see us right away. Don’t try and convince yourself its nothing. Also, good news for you. We sent your blood work over to Dr. Toscana in Italy and he's quite definite. You can have one small glass of wine, preferably red, every day now. As an Italian he believes that drinking a small glass of red wine each day is actually good for you and there's a lot of medical evidence to support that. I'd suggest you start by diluting it with soda water for a week or so though. The ship does a pretty good sangria cocktail."

"Thank you, Doc." I watched Cristi glow with pride. Her diploma was so new that recognition of it by anybody did that.
"I'll order a jug for us." Conrad waved a steward over and asked him to get it for us.

Cristi held a hand up. "Not for me, I'm working. If there's nothing you need to tell me, Angel, I'll be off. I've got an elderly patient with angina to keep an eye on."

"Just one?" I couldn’t resist the question.

"Gods, no." Cristi laughed at the thought. "The experience I'm getting here could qualify me as a heart disease specialist. See you later."

Our jug of sangria arrived. Cristi hadn't mentioned it was full of chopped-up fruit as well. Still, Conrad poured me a glass and I sipped at it. It tasted surprisingly good and the feeling of alcohol in my stomach after almost a year without gave me a sensation of being at peace with the world.

"Thank you, Conrad. Tell me, if you were going along one of the passageways and you heard a fight in a cabin, would you go in?"

Conrad thought about that. "I suppose it depends. If somebody was calling for help, perhaps. But you've taught me to stay out of things I'm not equipped to handle. I'd certainly try to get qualified help as quickly as I could though."

"Good boy. Now suppose you were in the same position, you heard a fight and it was a woman screaming for help, would you go in?"

"Of course." Conrad drank his glass of sangria and poured himself another. I put on my best puppy-dog eyes and held up my glass but he shook his head and lifted a single finger. I'd had my ration for the day. "There's a problem though. The cabin doors are solid and the walls are strong. Somebody would have to stand close to be able to hear anything like that."

"Doesn't that suggest that the visitor to Mendoza went along with a friend or partner to watch out? That person was standing close to the door when the fight started and charged in right away. Added into everything else, that suggests that the person who went in first was a woman and her partner a man."

"That makes sense." Conrad hesitated. "Not many women will go to a man's cabin for a private meeting alone. Even if they take a friend and he waits outside. Even today, when we are a lot easier about such things, there's reluctance to cause gossip."

"Never worried me. I just walk in." I was just teasing Conrad and he knew it.

"I know, but half a second later the person you're meeting will be full of bullets." We both laughed at that, Conrad a little uneasily because it's often true. "I'll bet though that if Cristi is visiting a man, even a patient alone in his room, she'll make sure somebody else is there as well."

"I can think of one group of women who are constantly visiting men alone in their rooms. Prostitutes." This was touching on a sensitive area. Nell and Igrat both worked as prostitutes when they were young and they still have fellow-feeling for women who do so now. Conrad still has his prejudices from when he was young and sometimes they show. Igrat's good-humored about it and doesn’t take offense but Nell isn’t and does. His friendship with Vanna might be a problem as well but its local convention that her career before she became a Police forensic artist is never, ever mentioned, even obliquely. Anyway, she's respectably married now and has two children, quietly adopted of course.

"And that brings us to the working women on board." Conrad was thoughtful. "They wouldn't be worried about visiting a client in his stateroom. In fact, this ship is probably the safest place for them to work I can imagine. Even if it's just to eliminate them from the inquiries, we need to find out where they were when Mendoza was killed."

Master-at-Arms Office, MV Zuiderzee, Off Curacao, Caribbean.

"I assume we have an approximate time of death?" Rik was logging in to the ship's surveillance cameras. I'd expected that question of course and got the data from the autopsy report. Rik had a copy as well, but I assume he hadn't had time to read all the gruesome details. With other people handling the investigation, there was no real need for him to do so.

"His show was supposed to start at 20:30; we found the body ten minutes later and the coroner estimated the time of death as around half an hour earlier plus or minus ten minutes." I looked at the picture that came up on the screen. It was of the deck lobby area with the elevators that fed the floor. "Don’t we have cameras that show the passageways feeding the staterooms?"

I could see Rik hesitating. "No, we don’t. We tried the installation on one of our ships but the passenger reaction was intensely negative. So much so that people wrote to head office complaining about the invasion of their privacy. A few even mentioned lawyers. Bookings, especially repeat bookings, on that ship went way, way down and took a year or more to recover. So, we have cameras to monitor the evacuation routes in case we need to abandon ship but not the passageways. Let me guess, we could wrap this up in a couple of minutes if we had the passageway cameras."

"Damn right." I hate surveillance cameras. They make my life difficult.

The camera footage was being run at a speeded-up rate which made things look comical. There were a scattered number of people moving through the elevator lobby but the traffic was hardly excessive. "This is one of the main feed lobbies for the theater. Mendoza's show was not popular."

Rik sounded a bit guarded there. It wasn't quite as if he was hiding something, more as if the information was embarrassing and he wasn't sure whether he should reveal it.

"Spit it out, Rik."

"There was something a bit odd about the way he was booked on to the ship. He came in at the last moment and the entertainment program had to be reshuffled to make room for him. Some of our regular entertainers aren't happy about that."

"Hold the tape a moment." Conrad had spotted something. "Now, who do we have here?"

A man was coming out of the elevator. As he stepped away from the doors, he was clearly visible as Thomas R. Cisneros. He walked across the floor of the lobby and disappeared through the passageway that led to D5 starboard. He vanished from the field of view but it was at least possible he was heading towards Mendoza's room. That was unusual enough to be interesting; most of the movement was people heading out from their cabins to the restaurants, casino or clubs. A few minutes of real-time later, a couple came out of the elevator. The woman was Marianne Heijdra, the man appeared to be right on the age-break between late middle-age and elderly. The way they were walking together was a little off as well; almost business but not quite. She was also carrying a bag although that might have been professional necessities. It was quite apparent that they were, at least, potential witnesses to what might have happened and had to be considered potential suspects.

Business Center, Observation Deck, MV Zuiderzee, Off Bonaire, Caribbean.

Why are we here? Two reasons, one is a scrambled telephone call from Bonaire and the scramble-telephone in here is the only one accessible to passengers. There are others of course, but they are reserved for crew use and we're not crew. The other is that this place is secure and secluded. Exactly what we are is an interesting subject. Anyway, Elli was calling us from Bonaire and what she had to say was really interesting. She's flying over on the Aruba Airlines rotodyne later today but she passed through what she and her rhinos had learned.

It turned out there were only three stores that stocked Graficos in Bonaire and they did most of their business with visiting tourists. Between them, they had sold underwear to thirteen passengers, all female, eight of whom had paid by credit card and had been firmly identified by name. The five who had not had paid in cash and were anonymous. Now, here is the trick. When a passenger boards a cruise ship, they get a picture of themselves taken in front of a green-screen. They get a souvenir version of that photograph with a picture of the ship as background. The image though gets stored. Elli had them on a portable computer and shown them to the store managers. The pictures were indexed by gender, hair color, eye color, age and so on. It had taken less than five minutes in each store to identify each of the five anonymous customers. Four of them were normal passengers, the fifth was Marianne Heijdra.

It's hardly conclusive evidence on its own though. After all, women working in her profession run through a lot of underwear. In civilized countries they can even claim it off against income tax. I wish I could do that with the ammunition I get through. That's where the next bit came in. The store had kept a detailed inventory of what she had bought, presumably for stock control. There were various styles and colors of course but the key piece of information was the size. She had bought all the clothing in the same size and that size matched the examples found on the body of Joe Mendoza. That clothing also matched the style and color of one of the sets she had bought. Given that there were few women passengers of her age on the ship, that made it look very much as if the underwear found on Mendoza was hers. The fact it had been unworn confirmed it.

In a mighty leap, Marianne Heijdra has just made it to the top of the suspects list. The only problem was that she was with a companion at the time. We used the same photo base to identify him as well. It took a few minutes because the surveillance footage was in black-and-white but we got him. He was Richard V. Frost, 66 years old and was a retired venture capitalist from Michigan.

We closed down the Business Center, not that many people ever used it, and sent some of our security team to bring Marianne and Frost in. As soon as they were brought to the Business Center, we separated them and Conrad started talking to Frost. That left me to baby-sit Marianne until he could take over.

"I thought we had covered this. Marianne was annoyed, to my ears just a touch too much so. "I'm not going to tell you anything about my clients. I suppose you can beat it out of me but it will take time and I won’t be in any condition to take the witness stand afterwards."

"I don't beat information out of people. I would shoot you through the ball of your hip joint. That means you'd never be able to stand erect again and would be in intense pain for the rest of your life. However, there's no need for any of that. We know Richard Frost is your client and the two of you may be material witnesses. We don’t care about you two, we just want to know what you saw and heard."

You probably gather that very little of that was true. It's fortunate that us psychopaths are first-class liars. I'm just setting myself up as being the "worse" Conrad will protect her from. I kept quiet from that point onwards and left her with a mental picture of living with a shattered hip joint to ponder. Not for too long though. Conrad brought Frost back in. This is a major switch from normal procedure; normally Conrad likes to keep suspects separated.

"Marianne, you can answer the questions about us. We've got nothing to be ashamed of." Frost seemed very earnest and he gave a strong sensation of wanting to protect Marianne from harming herself more than anything else. He looked at her and nodded.

"All right." Marianne relaxed a little and I saw her hand touching her hip, as if to reassure herself it was still working properly. "Richard is my client. Every other night we go out to dinner together and then go back to his cabin to have sex. It's an all-evening appointment."

"Girl-friend experience." I reminded myself to explain that to Conrad later.

"That's right. Richard meets me on the Lido Deck, we go down to his cabin and I change into my date-night clothes. He likes to watch me change and get ready. Then we go to one of the restaurants, that night it was the Italian one, have dinner and so on. It's as simple as that."

Here's a tip for you. If you hire a working girl for the girl-friend experience and she gives you a discount because of the meal and general pleasant atmosphere, she really likes you. If she charges you a premium because of the time the appointment takes, she hates the sight of you. Conrad was watching the interaction between the two and had obviously decided Frost was getting a substantial discount.

"You saw or heard nothing that evening? Going from your cabin to the Volcano must have taken you right past the cabin where Mendoza was killed." I watched Conrad take over the discussion and realized why he had allowed the two together. Their interactions were giving him more information than their overt answers.

The telephone rang and I answered it while Conrad continued their discussion. It was Elli and what she told me was critical. The list of sexual assaults in the Netherlands had come in and, thanks to computers, Elli had been able to check it out. One name in particular had jumped out at her. Mariella Heijdra, a ten year old schoolgirl had disappeared from a Wild West show outside Ijmuiden four years ago. Her body had been found several days later and her killing had been just about as bad as it could be. The police investigation had been inconclusive and Elli felt there were signs that it had been deliberately blocked.

I scribbled the key data on a pad and gave it to Conrad. He asked one simple question. "Marianne, do you know anybody called Mariella Heijdra?"

The reply was equally simple. "She was my little sister."

[Calder]

Chapter Nine
Emergency Unit Waiting Room, Hospital Nobo Otrobanda, Willemstad, Curacao

Sorry about the delay in getting back to you all. Things got a bit busy after my last update and I've been otherwise involved. Also, this is a bit of a new experience for me; usually it's me in the operating theater having a bullet pulled out or a knife wound stitched up while other people are out in the waiting room hoping for my recovery. Or not.

Anyway, what happened was that Cisneros had a thing called a marrow embolism. The bullet I put into his foot shattered his ankle but also caused micro-fractures to the bones in the lower part of his leg. The surgeons in Bonaire didn't spot them, some bone marrow leaked into his bloodstream, and it caused a blockage somewhere. It was touch and go for a while but he made it and was flown to the hospital here in Willemstad where the facilities are better. The hospital Nobo Otrobanda is brand new, only completed a few months ago, and seems to be very well equipped. Next time I get shot, I'll try and make sure it's here.

Cisneros was still in bad condition when he arrived and Conrad gave him the last rites. That's when Cisneros started to recover. I think it must have been a traumatic experience for him. Anyway, once he was in a fit condition to answer questions, Conrad had at him. It didn’t take long to get the truth out of him, or at least part of it anyway. I'll save you the details of how Conrad got him to tell us what happened and give you the quick version.

According to the story he had come up with, Cisneros has been chasing a European child sex-trafficking ring for the best part of two years. He had found that the group, called the Ringcluben, consisted of a group of government, industry and media people who recruited under-age victims and either traded them around their membership or killed them. Once he had shown his evidence to his magazine, the management had thrown all their resources behind him and told him to put a stop to the racket. The problem was, the police were implicated in covering up the Ringcluben's activities in several key countries. That made it hard for him to know who to trust. Nevertheless, he had pieced together a long list of likely victims and a shorter list of probable Ringcluben members.

One of those members was Josephus Lammerick. Cisneros had noted that some of the kidnapping and murder victims had been on cruises with Dutch-Atlantic prior to their disappearance and/or deaths. Digging in a bit further showed that only certain specific ships had been implicated. Digging still further showed that the common factor between those ships was that Josephus Lammerick had been the ship's entertainment officer. Cisneros had booked on to the Zuiderzee so he could investigate Lammerick further. It was only after he was on board that he realized this particular cruise specialized in an older clientele than the ones he normally worked on.

Now, to me that sounds like he had been blown and was being set up for a killing. Lammerick went on to this particular cruise liner to draw Cisneros away from the younger-generation cruise ships where the Ringcluben operated. That way, they believed, when Cisneros was killed the investigation wouldn't endanger the Ringcluben activities. Suddenly I began to wonder about those tickets Conrad and I had been given. Something I've learned over the last couple of years is never underestimate the reach and power of Vatican intelligence. Popie put it this way 'God may be omnipotent and infallible but he does appreciate a helping hand now and then.' I'm glad they are on my side.

Anyway, that was when Mendoza came into the picture. He'd contacted Cisneros and told him that he had information about a child-abduction, torture and murder that would implicate Lammerick and multiple members of the Ringcluben. If Cisneros came to his cabin, he'd give it all to him. Now, that does sound suspicious, doesn't it. If I got an invitation like that, I'd assume it was a planned hit and act accordingly. Cisneros is fundamentally a good person and they tend to assume that other people are as well. Very bad mistake. Anyway, he went to Mendoza's cabin with a pen and notepad. Mendoza promptly attacked him.

Now Mendoza is nowhere near as tough as he thought he was and there was a serious fight. Cisneros was being strangled and screamed for help. Fortunately for him, somebody, he wasn't sure who, came in and helped him subdue Mendoza. Cisneros wouldn't identify the good Samaritan although Conrad and I both had a firm guess on who that was. Anyway, they thought they had killed Mendoza so they dressed the scene up to look like a suicide or sex-game gone wrong. Later, they realized that they had left some key evidence in the room and Cisneros tried to recover it. He'd thought Cristi had it and was taking it for examination. He apologized for slamming her head against the wall, said he wasn't thinking straight. I gently, well, not so gently, pointed out that if he hadn’t smacked her head into the wall, he would still have two feet.

We didn't believe the last part of the story; he knew who had helped him and what had happened afterwards. We knew though we would find that out in due course. One thing I did know, this was a clear case of self-defense no matter what Dutch law might say. That's one reason why I was so busy afterwards. We sent Agent Rhino-One and Agent Rhino-Two to the Zuiderzee to detain Josephus Lammerick. My Sai-Lo security team on board caught Lammerick trying to sneak off the ship and threw him into the brig. Literally threw him into the brig. The Rhinos were disappointed, they wanted to throw him into the brig as well so the Sai-Los took Lammerick out and let them throw him in. By the sound of it, Lammerick made quite a few trips in and out of that cell. I hear that he doesn't bounce off walls very well. He doesn't need to worry, he'll get lots of practice in the prison system. Ordinary decent criminals don’t like people who molest or murder kids. Organized crime, who really run the prison system, don’t like prisoners who have molested or murdered kids. Lammerick is in for a really interesting time.

Anyway, when Conrad had everything we needed, we went back to the ship and spoke with Marianne Heijdra. She had been confined to her stateroom; that wasn't too difficult since she had an interior cabin well down in the ship. In fact, the least expensive one on the ship. It didn't take long for him to get another part of the story. She tried to deny any involvement but Conrad put the underwear form the body on the table and showed her the sales documentation from the store. Then, I invited her to take of her clothes and try them on, adding that if she didn’t want to, I had three Sai-Los who would enjoy helping her. She's a dignified woman and the prospective indignity made her tell us what had happened.

It was quite simple really. She had been walking past the stateroom when she had heard a fight and heard Cisneros call for help. She charged in, saw Mendoza trying to hold a cloth over the reporter's mouth so she grabbed another tower, flipped it over Mendoza's nose and mouth and dragged him off. They then subdued him, women in Marianne's profession are pretty good at fighting in confined areas since their lives may depend on it. Realizing that they couldn't just let him go, they used the chloroform towel he had tried to use on Cisneros to put him out, then they dressed him up using a change of underwear Marianne had in her bag and hanged him. That way, they thought it would be mistaken for a sex-game gone wrong.

Close but no seegar. By the way, before you get all critical, remember this is a group of amateurs dealing with a situation that they'd never thought they would be in. I think they did pretty well all things considered. I'm a professional and there are things I would have done differently but I'm me. Something else, you might think that we're being a bit hypocritical about being annoyed with Lammerick? Yes, the 14K and other organized crime groups are in the sex business but we keep away from children. These days, the women are of age and get a good deal for their insurance payments. Yes, we are involved in drugs although not at street level any more. If we find one of the people we supply has been selling to kids, we cut his supply, and several other things, off. This is not because we are nice people, we aren’t. It's because the costs involved far exceed the potential profits.

Anyway, we now had two thirds of the story and I doubt if any court would make a conviction stick. A smart lawyer would make it self-defense aided by a Good Samaritan followed by an accidental death. Unless something else happened, I could even see a Coroner handing in an open verdict. So, it came down to what Richard Frost might say.

We interviewed him in his suite and he very carefully did not say anything that would implicate himself or Marianne and Cisneros. He confirmed that they had been walking past 9112 when they had heard a fight and somebody called for help. Marianne recognized Cisneros's voice and went to help him, Frost following behind. By the time he could see what was happening, Mendoza was on the floor, Cisneros was claiming he was dead and that they would all be tried for murder. Frost had calmed them down and they'd decided to disguise the death as a sex-game. Personally, I thought that was a bad decision, they should simply have stated what had happened and watched the Coroner bring in a justifiable homicide verdict. But, as I said, these aren’t professionals, they are civilians caught in a situation that came straight out of their worst nightmares. Conrad and I agreed that the story we had was good enough. Nobody innocent was being charged and Conrad honestly couldn't condemn Marianne or Cisneros for what they had done in that room. Technically they were guilty of obstructing justice but everybody with any brains regards that as a male bovine excrement charge. We had our suspicions of course but Conrad decided that they were for God to judge, not us.

There's an old television series called Dragnet which usually ended with the court verdict and sentence. Sometimes, it finished with "A meeting was held in the Captain's office. The results of that meeting will be given after these messages.”

Well, that's what happened. Elli agreed with us, that a lot had been left unsaid but nobody would ever know the truth to the standards demanded by a court and there was nothing to be achieved by pressing charges that were certain to be thrown out of court. In any case, the Coroner brought in an open verdict and that was that. Captain Joel van Noorloos had the interests of his ship and his company to bear in mind. An open verdict with a strong presumption of sex-game gone wrong was probably the least damaging outcome for them. Has-been entertainer committing suicide after his show fails was a good second. The truth was, though, with the authorities unwilling to prosecute, nothing was going to happen. And nothing did.

Postscript.
Conrad tells me I should finish this off by telling you what happened afterwards. The day after our cruise ended, Marianne and Frost asked us to join them in a Fort Lauderdale Catholic church. There, they asked for our personal word that we would keep quiet about the rest of the story. We gave it of course, and its something Conrad and I take very seriously so they told us the rest of the story. Apparently, Mendoza was conscious when subdued and tried to intimidate everybody by impressing them with how hard a man he was. In particular he realized that Mariella was Marianne's little sister and told her how he had organized her abduction from the circus, taken her to a group of the Ringcluben and passed her around until she died. Marianne was going to slaughter him, starting by gouging out his eyes with her nail-file but Frost talked her out of it. Said it would make her as bad as him. Instead, they told him what they would do with his body so that he wouldn't be remembered as 'the world's fastest gun' but "the nut who hanged himself while wearing women's underwear". Then, they doped him and hanged him.

We're OK with that.

Elli got a commendation and the offer of a prestigious post in Amsterdam. She turned it down and stayed in Bonaire along with her rhinos. She made a good decision there I think. Cristi is beginning to like the cruise ship life and is reconsidering her decision to go into forensics.

Dutch-Atlantic cleaned house really thoroughly. Doing so was the smart move and the only way they could save their reputation after the sex-trade scandal broke. They got lucky, the fact they fired every one of their employees who was even suspected of collaborating with Lammerick was buried by a torrent of arrests across Europe. Cisneros's investigations were the key, especially since, without actually saying so, he made it sound as if Mendoza had shot his foot off during the botched murder attempt. Thanks, Tom. I appreciate that. Not really, but I would if I could. From there it was the old story, the first few arrested people grassed on the rest to try and save themselves and the cops rolled the whole gang up. By the time we got back to port, the newspapers were full of the story. Cisneros's magazine was the hero of the hour and their circulation has skyrocketed. Doing well by doing good, I guess. Conrad says they deserve it.

Marianne got out from the life, opened her chocolate business and it’s a roaring success. Frost looked at her business plan, told her she was under-capitalized and invested in it. That made all the difference. Cisneros got an artificial foot and has carried on his investigations. He's now an international authority on the sex-trade. You've probably seen him on television. I told him that there were two lessons to learn from this. One was not to slam a girl's head against a wall. The other was, don't apply permanent solutions to temporary problems.

Lammerick? He died in prison. I honestly don’t know who got him. Could have been us, could have been the ordinary decent criminals, could have been his own associates trying to limit the damage. Who cares? Nobody will miss him.

Conrad and I? Well, we're still out here. Marianne sent us a 5-kilo box of her chocolates for Christmas. We never eat things we get sent by delivery service without checking them very carefully. We sent them to Nammie so they could be analyzed for poison. When we got the box back, there was one chocolate left in it, a sliced hazelnut cluster. Conrad ate it.