It was all quiet on the ship when Lily and Kester emerged again from their cabin. They stood out on the deck to go over their plan. The sky was bright with a cold white light. The mountains seemed to be glowing and, although the sea was dark, it looked like liquid silver on the surface.
‘If there’s someone on the counter, I’ll ask for help using the Internet terminals,’ Kester said. ‘Then you have a look.’
‘OK,’ Lily agreed.
‘Come on then,’ said Kester, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets.
They went back inside the ship and walked confidently up to the reception desk. It was empty, as they’d hoped. Kester looked down a long corridor of bedrooms, then up a stairwell to check for people. ‘Clear,’ he murmured.
Lily moved to the end of the counter and lifted a small hatch, allowing her to step behind the desk. Seeing the passenger list, she began speed-reading the names. Her and Kester’s false names were the last on the list. Then she saw Hawk’s name and moved her finger to find his room number.
247.
Result.
Lily grinned. But then her face dropped. Suddenly the door from the office behind her was opening and the woman they’d talked to the night before emerged, tightening her ponytail.
At first, she didn’t see Lily, then, turning, they came eye to eye, a deep frown appearing on the woman’s face.
‘Hi,’ Lily said, smiling innocently at the woman who had just caught her going through the passenger records.
‘What are you doing behind the counter?’ the woman asked, ignoring Lily’s friendliness. Her tone was harsh, not like the first time they’d spoken. She was wearing her jacket now. Black with gold lines on the cuffs. A uniform that made her look more official.
‘I asked what you are doing?’ she said again. ‘This is a secure area.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Lily said, almost sounding like she was crying. ‘I think I dropped my passport round here and I wanted to find it before … before anyone found out. I was worried I’d be thrown off the boat.’
Kester moved to lean on the reception desk to give Lily his moral support.
The woman eyed Lily sceptically. ‘You’ve lost your passport?’
‘I’m sorry. I know this looks really bad,’ Lily sniffed. ‘I just wondered if one of the crew had found it and left it for me here maybe?’
The woman looked even more closely at Lily. Lily felt herself go hot inside her head, but she knew not to show it by blushing. She breathed in and out, keeping her body calm, even though her mind was far from it.
The woman frowned again, then shuffled through the papers in front of her, almost immediately finding the passport Lily had placed there a few hours earlier.
‘Ah,’ she said, her tone softer now. ‘Yes. It is here. But, please, if you had lost it, we would not have thrown you off the boat. We would have helped you. I am sorry you were alarmed.’
Lily smiled and took the passport and said thank you three times, trying to sound like she was truly relieved to have her passport back.
‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said, ‘that I suspected you. I hope I wasn’t unkind to you?’
Lily shook her head and smiled again, but the woman still looked upset. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘perhaps you would like to have a tour of the boat? I can show you the interesting areas.’
‘Really?’ Lily said excitedly.
‘Yes. We can go now. It will make me feel better about upsetting you. You are the only passengers awake and I am bored. Come, follow me. I am Marie-Ann.’
‘I’m Iris,’ Lily said, remembering to give the same name as the one on the false passport she’d planted. ‘And this is Tom.’
As she followed the woman on their tour of the boat, Lily felt bad. Here was a nice woman who’d been trusting and kind, but Lily had lied to her about losing her passport, about her name and about what she was doing. It was part of her job, she knew. That was what you had to do to be a spy: to stop greater evils, you had to lie.
But she didn’t always feel good doing it.
Marie-Ann tapped a keyboard at the side of a doorway, entering a four-digit code which Kester memorized in case it proved useful later. Lily and Kester followed her through a heavy metal door that was painted white, then down a series of long corridors with other corridors leading off them.
First, she showed them the kitchen storage area and a row of room-sized fridges and freezers packed with food. The children were interested to see hundreds of boxes and giant tins of food, then, in the meat freezer, whole animal carcasses hanging on hooks in cold storage. Next Marie-Ann led them through another door and they found themselves out at the stern of the ship, low down near the water, the sea churning in the morning light. Around them they saw huge ropes coiled or stretched out across the deck. Kester worked out that above them, on the next deck, was the place they had stared out to sea late last night.
‘I had no idea we were at the stern of the ship,’ he said.
‘It is a real labyrinth,’ Marie-Ann said. ‘But follow me. This is the interesting place.’
Their guide led them down another narrow corridor with a low ceiling. All the ceilings were low in the crew area: not like where the passengers sat and walked.
‘This,’ she said. ‘What do you think it is?’
It was a small room with a bed and toilet, both bolted to the floor. A tiny porthole. Nothing else. No bedding. No light fittings.
‘A sick bay?’ Kester suggested as Lily moved inside the room.
‘No,’ Marie-Ann smiled. ‘This is the jail. For prisoners.’
Lily instinctively stepped back out of the cell. ‘Who do you put in here?’
‘People who steal. People who drink too much and are … vi–’ The Norwegian fought to pronounce the word correctly.
‘Violent?’ Kester suggested.
‘Yes. Violent. Now, can you hear this?’ Kester and Lily listened.
‘What?’
Marie-Ann opened a door and led them along another corridor towards a loud cacophony of noise.
‘This is the way to the engine room.’ Marie-Ann raised her voice above the grinding, hammering racket. She handed them two pairs of small yellow foam plugs, pointing at their heads. ‘For your ears.’ Then she put a pair in her ears too.
None of them spoke as they walked through a strange landscape of huge metal pipes and dials and rattling pistons, some silver and pumping, some painted yellow and white. It was like an alien landscape, the engine room taking up the same space as a large house, set on three floors. Looking up, they could see a forest of tubes and wires. All the noise and machinery made it hard to think and they were relieved to emerge out of the engine room into another large space filled with screens and computers.
Marie-Ann took her earplugs out. ‘This is where the engines are controlled.’
The tour went on and – for the time it took place – Kester forgot he was a spy and that the tour was just a diversion to stop them getting into trouble. He was so amazed by what he was seeing: the insides of a massive ship that most people never got the chance to see.
He followed Marie-Ann and Lily through more corridors and up extremely steep metal stairways. Kester tried to piece together where they had been and how it related to the rest of the ship, the places the public were allowed to go. This was like a different world, like a parallel universe that you could duck in and out of, corridors running alongside each other, completely hidden from the public, like secret passageways in an old house.
Then another door opened and they found themselves in the public area of the boat again, out of the cold white corridors that the crew had to put up with every day and into the warm, carpeted, comfortable public areas, face to face with the two American men they had been searching for.
Frank Hawk recognized them immediately.