4 ILLEGAL ENTRY

Great Hall

The Emperor of the Seas

Just off Corinto, Nicaragua

May 16

1700 hours

“Dane Brammage is on this ship,” I informed my fellow spies. “I just saw him!”

“Really?” Alexander asked, concerned. “Are you sure it was him?”

“Of course I’m sure! He’s the biggest human being I’ve ever seen—as well as the palest. He looks like an abominable snowman without hair.”

I probably should have been doing a better job of keeping my voice down, or at least pretending to be a normal teenage tourist, so that none of our fellow passengers would notice—but all my fellow passengers were very distracted at the moment. Kit Karoo was giving everyone from our shuttle boat a welcome tour. She had led us up a few flights of stairs from the loading area into the great hall of the ship, which was enormous and magnificent, and everyone else was oohing and aahing in amazement. Several other groups of new passengers were scattered about, having followed their guides there, and they were all equally awed. The hall was the length of a city block and stretched five stories high. There were gilded railings and luxurious carpeting and sparkly glass elevators and a sweeping grand staircase. On a mezzanine balcony, a quintet of musicians was playing Caribbean versions of pop music. I probably would have been oohing and aahing myself if I wasn’t on the verge of freaking out.

“How can Dane Brammage possibly be alive?” Mike asked. “The last time you saw him, he was plummeting off the Eiffel Tower. That should have killed him.”

“Nothing kills that guy,” I replied. “He’s also been buried in an avalanche and sunken in a frozen lake. He fell into a shark tank, and the sharks were the ones who ended up in danger. The man is indestructible.”

In the center of the great hall, seven distinguished-looking people in crisp uniforms were greeting guests and taking pictures with young children. There were five men and two women of varying ethnicities, although the man in the center was the oldest and appeared to be the most senior, given the number of medals on his chest.

Kit pointed him out to the rest of the group. “That’s our incredible captain, Dean Steinberg, along with several of the co-captains of this ship! The Emperor of the Seas has the finest crew on earth. As you can see, Captain Steinberg is a highly decorated officer!”

“Highly decorated for what?” Catherine asked suspiciously.

Kit’s bubbly demeanor faded for a brief moment. Apparently, a guest had never questioned her about this before, and she had no idea what the answer was. “Er… important cruise-captain things!” she declared gamely, then quickly changed the subject. “Now, while there is obviously a tremendous amount to see on this ship, I know what all of you are really excited about right now: our all-you-can-eat welcome seafood buffet!”

Our fellow travelers cheered enthusiastically, although Alexander groaned at the thought of eating anything in his condition.

Catherine kept her eyes locked on Captain Steinberg the whole time. “I’ll bet my granny’s knickers those decorations are fake. Just to fool the masses into being impressed.”

“The buffet is at the Hook, Line, and Sinker Café toward the stern on this deck!” Kit announced. “Grab all you want—and by the time you’re done there, our bellhop service will have delivered your bags to your suites, so you can head to your room and relax—or explore the ship before our pirate party!” She turned to Mike, Erica, and me and said, “Come find me at Koolnezz! You’ll have the best time ever!”

Our fellow guests stampeded toward the buffet. We stayed with them until they reached the restaurant, which allowed me a glimpse of all the food arrayed inside. So much seafood was laid out, it was hard to imagine anything was left in the ocean; there were separate stations for grilled fish, oysters, clams, mussels, calamari, lobster, and sushi. A device that dispensed cooked shrimp like a slot machine sat beside a three-foot-tall pyramid of king crab legs. Despite all this, the passengers were devouring food as though they feared they wouldn’t get to eat again the entire vacation. I saw one glutton with two plates piled with shrimp and entire lobsters tucked under each arm.

Before we could enter the buffet, Erica and Catherine pulled Alexander, Mike, and me into one of the glass elevators. Erica jabbed the button for the pool deck, and we were quickly whisked upward.

Erica and Catherine seemed to have agreed on a plan without even discussing it, although the rest of us were in the dark. “Aren’t we going to eat?” Mike asked. “We’ve barely had anything all day. I was really hoping to get some food. And maybe find a computer room to check my messages.”

“What is it with you and your messages?” Erica asked suspiciously.

“He probably just wants to let his parents know he’s okay,” I said, then gave Mike a hard stare. “Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, that’s exactly it,” Mike agreed, relatively convincingly. “And I really am hungry, too.”

Through the walls of the glass elevator, we had a lovely view of the entire great hall. Then we rose through the ceiling and passed through several floors of other amusements. The upper levels of the Emperor were designed with guest rooms along the outer edges of the ship—so that they could have windows and balconies—while the interior space housed entertainment venues. Through the glass walls of the elevator, we saw the laser tag arena, a dance club (which wasn’t being used, as it was the middle of the afternoon), a bingo hall (which was packed), and the roller rink.

“There will be plenty of time for eating later,” Catherine told Mike. “The food service on a cruise ship never stops. But right now is the optimum time to infiltrate the Emperor Suite and confront Murray Hill. All the new passengers are busy gorging themselves, and most of the passengers who were already on board have gone ashore for the day.”

I had spent enough time with the Hales to understand their thought process. “Plus, if Murray is on board, the sooner we find him, the better.”

“Exactly,” Erica agreed.

Alexander Hale groaned again. The Emperor of the Seas was so big that it didn’t even feel like we were on a boat, but that didn’t seem to have made Alexander’s seasickness any better. His skin was moving into the darker shades of green, and he was now the same color as an iguana.

The elevator arrived at the highest level of the ship. The doors slid open, revealing the activity deck.

It wasn’t quite what I’d hoped.

Mike and I had spent a lot of time examining the photos of this deck in the brochure; now it was apparent that they had all been taken from angles that made everything look bigger and more spacious than it was in real life. Even though the top deck was quite large, the designers had still tried to cram too much into the space. The rock wall and the ropes course were smaller than we had expected, while waterslides coursed everywhere overhead, blocking out the sun and dripping cold water. It felt as though we were in a pump room at a hydroelectric plant. In the center sat the swimming pool, which turned out to be the most disappointing element of all, a shallow pond smack-dab in the middle of all the chaos, packed so full of small children they could barely move.

“That’s the pool?” Mike cried with disgust. “I’ve seen bathtubs that are bigger!”

“We’re not here to swim,” Erica reminded him, leading all of us toward the rock wall. “We’re here to find Murray.”

“Even so,” Mike muttered, disappointed. “That’s false advertising.”

Alexander belched ominously. Given how much he had puked on the shuttle, I’d assumed he had nothing left to vomit up, but now he looked like a volcano ready to blow.

“Your husband looks terrible,” I whispered to Catherine. “Why did you let him come on this trip if you knew how seasick he gets?”

“In this line of business, it’s always important to have someone who can create a good diversion,” Catherine replied. Then she turned to Alexander and said, “No point fighting to keep it in, darling. Let it go.”

Alexander clutched his stomach, folded over, and upchucked all over the tanning deck.

The tourists gathered there immediately sprang from their lounge chairs and evacuated the area before the smell hit them.

We were directly beside the rock wall, so the closest ship employees were the ones manning the ropes. The wall was designed mostly for children and people who had never tried rock climbing before, so it wasn’t much more challenging than climbing a ladder. It was wide enough for ten people to climb at once, but since this was the least-crowded time of day, only two young children were using it, and both had only made it two feet above the deck. The rock-climbing guides belaying them were obviously bored—or they had been up until Alexander barfed. Now both guides were desperately looking around for someone to handle the puke instead of them.

Erica ran over and gave them her most imploring damsel-in-distress look, which was extremely effective. “My father’s sick!” she cried. “Can you please help him?”

The guides couldn’t resist her; plus, it was probably their job to help anyhow. They quickly belayed their young climbers to the deck, which took all of two seconds, unclipped them from their climbing harnesses, and ran to Alexander’s side.

While they were distracted, Erica deftly swiped a coil of climbing rope, and Catherine nicked four harnesses. The other guests were all too busy evacuating the area to notice. The Hale women quickly headed in the direction of the ship’s bow, so Mike and I hurried after them, leaving Alexander behind.

One thing I had learned from the Hales was that you could get away with almost anything if you behaved confidently enough. Even though Erica was only a teenager, she strode along so purposefully with the climbing rope that no one gave her a second glance. We swiftly made our way to the foremost section of the activity deck; this area was reserved for adults, as it was as far from the waterslides and other activities as possible and, thus, much quieter. There was another pool here; it was also disappointingly small, although since there were no young children using it, far fewer people had probably urinated in it.

Even though teenagers weren’t allowed on the adult deck, we all looked as resolute as possible, so no one seemed to mind our presence. There weren’t many adults there anyhow, and the few that were all appeared to be drunk. They were clustered around the bar, busily consuming tropical drinks served in hollowed-out coconuts and pineapples; it was possible that, in their inebriated states, they didn’t even realize we were teenagers.

This section of the deck had a commanding view of the harbor. Since we were eighteen stories up, we could see long stretches of beach and green mountains in the distance, indicating that there was plenty of Nicaragua that was far more beautiful than Corinto.

I now realized what Erica’s plan was; the Emperor Suite was directly below us. “We’re rappelling onto the balcony?” I asked.

“Don’t panic,” Erica told me. “This is far less dangerous than a lot of other things I’ve made you do.”

That was true. For example, the last thing Erica had made me do was parachute out of a helicopter while two F-16s were pursuing us. This was considerably safer—although, so was poking a grizzly bear in the eye with a stick. Still, I was pleased to realize that I wasn’t panicked about rappelling down to the suite at all.

Instead, I was panicked about running into Dane Brammage again.

“What if Dane’s there?” I asked, concerned. “Or any other henchmen?”

“We’ll go down first and take care of any trouble,” Catherine assured me. “You concentrate on finding Murray.” She tossed climbing harnesses to Mike and me while Erica expertly knotted the rope around a flagpole.

If anyone could take out a horde of enemy thugs, it was Catherine and Erica Hale. Catherine had even bested Dane the last time we had encountered him. So I simply nodded agreement and slipped into my harness.

“Attention, all passengers!” a sunny voice announced over the loudspeakers. “All guests are now aboard, and we are about to get underway. Next stop, Costa Rica!”

The drunks at the bar gave a hearty cheer and toasted with their coconuts so violently that one man was knocked off his barstool.

A distant clanking arose as the anchors began winching up. Far below us, I could see the chains slowly retracting at the bow of the ship. I calculated that, to hold a ship the size of the Emperor, each anchor must weigh multiple tons, and that each link of the chain was certainly several hundred pounds, but from our distance, they looked as small as the links on a bracelet.

Erica had knotted the climbing rope in the center, leaving both ends loose so that two of us could rappel down at the same time. She and her mother fed the ropes through their belay devices, casually hopped over the guardrail, then slid out of view.

The ropes pulled taut for a few seconds while they dropped down onto the balcony of the Emperor Suite, then went slack as they unclipped.

Mike and I prepared to follow. I looked to him, wondering if he was thinking the same thing that I was, how our lives were so bizarre that within minutes of boarding the biggest cruise ship in the world, instead of pigging out at the buffet or racing down waterslides like normal people, we were rappelling off the top deck to infiltrate an enemy hideout.

“I’m really bummed about the size of that swimming pool,” Mike grumbled.

Apparently, we weren’t thinking the same thing at all.

“All clear!” Erica shouted from below.

Mike and I hopped over the railing and slid down to the balcony. It was only fifteen feet below us, and thus the trip took a mere three seconds.

Erica and Catherine had already jimmied the locks on the sliding doors. The doors weren’t alarmed, as it didn’t appear to have occurred to the designers that anyone would be entering the suite from the balcony, rather than the front door. Mike and I unclipped from the ropes and followed the others inside.

As opposed to the activity deck, the Emperor Suite looked even better than the brochure. We had entered the main living room, which was lavish and spacious with expensive furnishings and chandeliers and fine art on the walls and a grand piano. A gourmet kitchen was directly ahead of us, while several doors led off to bedrooms, bathrooms, and the private movie theater.

We heard the sounds of someone approaching from behind one of the doors.

Erica and Catherine flanked both sides, ready to incapacitate whatever evildoer came through it.

The door swung open.

I gaped in surprise when I saw who it was.

And she gaped right back at me.

“Ben Ripley?” asked Jessica Shang. “What on earth are you doing here?”