6 COUNTERFEIT PIRACY

Suite 1722

The Emperor of the Seas

Somewhere off the coast of southwestern Nicaragua

May 16

2030 hours

According to the brochure, the nightly themed parties aboard the Emperor of the Seas were thrown to create a sense of camaraderie and merriment amongst the passengers. They were also a good way to sucker all of us into forking over extra money for costumes.

Before attending, we had to visit one of the many shops on board the ship and procure pirate outfits, which I suspected weren’t remotely close to what real pirates had worn. Instead, they seemed to have been inspired by the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World, featuring things like loose-fitting white shirts, red-and-white-striped bandannas, and eye patches. There was an entire aisle of plastic hooks, as though it was a rarity for any pirate to have more than one hand. If any real pirates had seen us, they probably would have taken offense at our stereotyping—but it appeared that, in our increasingly compassionate times, pirates were one of the few remaining groups of people whose culture we were allowed to insensitively appropriate.

The costumes were cheaply made, but not cheaply priced. However, Catherine felt that we needed them. “We’ll be much less conspicuous when dressed the same way as everyone else,” she had explained, and then reluctantly charged all the outfits to our room.

Acquiring them turned out to be significantly easier than putting them on. Partly because they were so shoddy that half the buttons and snaps didn’t work. And partly because our suite was so small, there wasn’t enough room for all of us to change at the same time.

It was a far cry from the spacious opulence of the Emperor Suite. We technically had two adjoining rooms, but even combined, the suite was slightly smaller than our dorm rooms at school—and those were notoriously cramped. Catherine and Alexander had the master bedroom, while Erica, Mike, and I had the kids’ room. We all had to share a bathroom the size of a Porta-Potty. The suite was designed with what the brochure referred to as “cruise ship efficiency,” but that turned out to be a euphemism for cramming way too much into one space. Between our small beds and our luggage (which had been delivered by the staff while we were with the Shangs) there was barely even room to turn around. It didn’t help that Alexander had practically taken up residence in the tiny bathroom, his head poised over the toilet.

To make things worse, we didn’t even have a balcony. Those were luxuries for people with more money. We merely had a small porthole in each room.

“Are you sure this is a suite?” Mike asked, skeptically surveying the tiny space. “Maybe they made a mistake and put us in a storage closet.”

“We’re in the right room,” Catherine replied grumpily. “The cruise ship company appears to have a very flexible definition of what ‘suite’ means.” She and Erica were getting dressed in the master bedroom, but the wall between us was so thin, we could talk right through it.

“Maybe we ought to take the Shangs up on their offer of a bigger room,” Erica suggested.

“Erica!” Catherine gasped. “You know that would be unethical.”

“You know what else is unethical?” Mike replied. “Saying this suite sleeps five people comfortably. I believe the official term for this space used to be ‘steerage.’ If this was the Titanic, we’d be the people who didn’t get life rafts.”

“At least we don’t have to worry about hitting an iceberg,” Catherine replied, trying to sound positive. “Not down here in the tropics.”

“That’s the only good thing about this ship,” Mike muttered under his breath. Since leaving the Shangs, he had been growing increasingly sullen as we discovered more and more ways in which the Emperor of the Seas didn’t live up to its own hype. He and I had taken some time to explore the ship and found that the laser tag arena and the escape room were disappointingly small. The waterslides were too short, while the lines for them were too long. Koolnezz, the teen club, had been a decent size, although it was filled with out-of-date arcade games, many of which were broken. Kit Karoo had greeted us enthusiastically and tried to get us excited about the imminent karaoke tournament, but we had bailed instead. I wasn’t a fan of butchering pop songs in public, and Mike desperately wanted to check his messages.

However, when we finally tracked down the computer center, we discovered that the Wi-Fi access wasn’t free. In fact, it was exorbitant. Mike could only afford to log in for five minutes, which was barely enough time to skim through the dozens of messages Trixie had sent him. He then dashed off a quick message in return, claiming that all was okay and that he missed her a lot but that, sadly, it might be a while until he could write again. (He’d asked me to stand guard in the computer lab in case Erica or Catherine came in, and I had read his messages over his shoulder. I learned, among other things, that he and Trixie really liked each other, and that his pet name for her was Pookums.)

In addition to all that, we had been forced to attend a mandatory safety training for all new guests, which involved standing on a deck in the blazing sun for a half hour while a crew member explained how to work a life jacket.

Therefore, Mike was in a surly mood. “Nothing about this ship is anything like they advertised,” he grumbled while adjusting his pirate shirt. “Unless you’re rich. The Shangs have a giant suite, while we’re staying in a bread box. I’d write a nasty review about this boat if I could afford the Wi-Fi.”

“Oh, it’s not so bad,” Erica said.

Mike and I reacted to this, stunned.

“You like this ship?” I asked. “You don’t like anything.”

“That’s not true,” Erica replied.

“You don’t like ice cream,” I reminded her.

“What’s to like about ice cream? It’s full of empty calories, and it gives you brain freeze. All I’m saying is, there are some positive things about this ship. Like the safety training.”

Mike goggled in astonishment. “You enjoyed that? All they did was tell us how to operate the lifeboats in case of an emergency!”

“Emergency training is always fascinating,” Erica said. “And important. In addition, a cruise is an extremely convenient environment to conduct an operation. If Murray was running his scheme in some random city in Nicaragua, he could go anywhere in the country he pleased. But now, he’s limited to the confines of this ship, which should make tracking him down much easier. And when we do find him, he won’t be able to escape.”

Mike said, “So then, the reason you like this ship is because there’s a focus on safety, and it’s a good place to catch bad guys.”

“Yes,” Erica agreed. “Oh, and the food is good.”

“It is,” I had to admit. “And there’s a lot of it.” Even though I was disappointed by many of the same things on the Emperor as Mike, I had also been pleased to discover that there was a ridiculous amount of food available for free, including a well-stocked make-your-own ice cream sundae bar that actually opened at eight a.m. every day, just in case you wanted a fully loaded banana split for breakfast.

A disturbing gagging noise suddenly arose from the bathroom, reminding me that, even though the Emperor of the Seas hadn’t fully lived up to our expectations, we were all still having a much better trip than Alexander. He was no longer green, but instead a ghostly white, as though he had vomited all the color out of his body. The doctors in the ship’s infirmary had given him plenty of anti-motion-sickness remedies, and none of them were working. He was wearing so many therapeutic wristbands and adhesive skin patches, he looked like a bear that had been tagged by park rangers, but despite them all, he remained nauseous, clutching the toilet bowl and moaning despondently.

I finally managed to get all my pirate gear on. My outfit was the same as Mike’s—we each had a puffy shirt, a bandanna, an eye patch, and a fake sword in a plastic scabbard—but I felt he looked significantly more roguish than I did. Somehow, I looked more like a hobo than a buccaneer. I finished it off by cinching my utility belt around my waist. Catherine had given it to me as a present: She and Erica both wore them all the time and made them look quite fashionable. Mine wasn’t as well stocked with espionage supplies as theirs, but I still had a few useful items, like my junior CIA agent badge, a small flashlight, a canister of mace, and breath mints. (One of the few things Alexander Hale had taught me was that it was always a good idea to have fresh, minty breath; it made people like you.) I hid the utility belt beneath the waist sash that had come with my costume, yet another item of clothing no real pirate had ever used. Then, while Catherine and Erica finished dressing in the other room, I sat on my bed and perused the manifest again, trying to deduce where Murray might be.

There was no one else registered in the Premier level of the ship with a name that jumped out at me, the way Harry and Ophelia Butz had. I did find a Seymour Heinie and a Weldon Rumproast listed in the cheapest section, but I assumed those were real people with horribly unfortunate names. I was sure that Murray would never stay in quarters like ours—and he was probably now wise enough to use a false name that didn’t draw attention to itself.

Many of the guests registered to the Premier level had last names that indicated they were from China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, and the Philippines, which made sense, seeing as the Emperor had begun its journey in the western Pacific. But I had no way of knowing if any of those might be a fake to hide Murray, Dane Brammage, and whatever other henchmen Murray might have aboard.

Assuming Dane was even on board. It was entirely conceivable that I had seen Bjorn, rather than Dane. In fact, it was conceivable that neither Murray nor any of his cohorts were even on the ship at all and that this mission was merely a wild-goose chase.

Although the International Tulip Growers Association did bear investigating.

“Any luck?” Catherine asked.

I looked up from the manifest to find her and Erica standing in the narrow doorway between our rooms, dressed in full pirate gear.

They were easily the two most beautiful pirates there had ever been.

With her costume bandanna around her hair, Erica’s resemblance to Trixie was even more pronounced. Mike noticed it too and was stunned. “Whoa, Erica,” he said. “For a moment there, I thought you were…”

I swallowed hard, fearing he was going to say Trixie and inadvertently reveal that we’d met her, but he caught himself at the last second and trailed off.

“Thought I was who?” Erica asked.

“Anne Bonny?” I suggested. “The famous female pirate?”

“Yes!” Mike agreed quickly. “That’s exactly who I was thinking of. Let’s go see what the ITGA is up to!” He immediately left the room.

I leapt to my feet and followed him, with Erica close behind me.

Catherine paused before leaving to call to Alexander. “We’re heading out,” she said through the bathroom door. “Will you be all right without us?”

There was a pained but affirmative wail in response.

“Good,” Catherine said, and then joined the rest of us in the hallway.

The halls on our floor were far less opulent than those on the Premier level. They were so narrow that you couldn’t even walk two abreast and decorated with cheap fake wood paneling and floored with linoleum. We hustled through ours quickly.

“You never answered my question, Quincy,” Catherine said.

It took me a half second too long to recall that was my alias. “Oh, right! The manifest. I couldn’t find a name that tipped me off on the Premier level, but if Murray is holed up anywhere on this ship, I’m sure he’d be there.”

“Then we’ll have to get access to that level,” Catherine said.

“You know what would give us access to that level?” Mike asked. “Taking the Shangs up on their room upgrade offer.”

“For the last time, we are not accepting bribes,” Catherine said sternly. “Plus, you boys need to lose the eye patches. I admit, they give both of you a knavish charm, but they completely bollix up your depth perception.”

“I can handle an eye patch just fine,” Mike told her peevishly, then promptly misjudged the width of a doorway due to his lack of depth perception and walked straight into the wall.

“Very smooth,” I teased, removing my own eye patch as I passed him.

We entered one of the several “vertical integration passages” on the ship. There was a bank of four elevators and a wide staircase. We opted for the staircase, as we had already learned that the elevators were in high demand and thus the slowest way to get from floor to floor.

Our room was on the lowest guest level, so the stairs only went up. Although there were two levels of crew quarters, engine rooms, and other facilities below us, the stairs to them were concealed behind locked doors marked CREW ACCESS ONLY.

We were still waiting for the Shangs to obtain our passes to those areas.

The stairs were much wider than the hallway, so I was able to ascend them beside Catherine. “Why don’t you trust the Shangs?” I asked her. “Jessica isn’t a bad person. We never would have caught her father without her help.”

“Even so, her mother’s reticence to allow us to visit the bridge or the engine room is suspicious.”

“She had a good argument as to why.…”

“To heck with her arguments. She’s the owner of this ship. If she wanted to bring an elephant into the engine room, they’d let her do it. And yet, we made it very clear that there are criminals operating on board here, and she still refused. Ergo, I suspect she’s hiding something. Which is why we’ll need you to spend more time with Jessica. If she is honest, then maybe you can talk her into getting us a tour somehow.”

“I’ll do my best,” I agreed. I was wary of taking advantage of Jessica Shang’s friendship once again, but the idea of spending time on the Premier level of the ship was far more appealing than hanging out at Koolnezz or waiting hours in line for the waterslides.

Mike seemed to be thinking the same thing, because he immediately piped up, “I’ll help too!” Then he walked straight into a railing, because he still hadn’t removed his eye patch.

We emerged from the stairs into the great hall to find the pirate party in full swing. It appeared that whatever money the cruise company had saved on building larger guest rooms had all been blown on decorations. The hall was now bedecked with streamers and bunting, and fake cannons on the higher levels were blasting confetti bombs into the air. Even though the party had just begun, the room was jam-packed with passengers, all of whom were wearing almost the exact same pirate costumes we were. (And since many of them were as insistent upon wearing the eye patches as Mike was, they were all bumping into one another or the furnishings.) Along the walls, banquet tables were piled high with food that could be eaten with your hands, the idea apparently being that pirates hadn’t mastered utensils; there were mounds of spare ribs, corn on the cob, and giant turkey legs. Bartenders were handing out goblets of pirate grog (which was really just apple juice). On the mezzanine level, a pirate band—which was made up of the same five musicians as the Caribbean band from earlier in the day—was playing a lively reel while fake buccaneers danced around them. High above us, actual acrobats and aerialists swung from trapezes and dangled from long silks.

I had to admit, it looked like a great party.

Unfortunately, we weren’t planning to attend it.

It was the perfect time to do some snooping. It appeared that virtually every guest and staff member on the ship was distracted by the festivities, and since everyone was dressed nearly identically, we could easily move about without anyone realizing who we were. We had learned the layout of much of the ship by now and knew that the Chrysanthemum Ballroom was on this level, so we worked our way through the crowd, with a brief stop at the banquet tables to grab turkey legs and grog. (Since almost everyone else was eating and drinking, this helped us blend in even more, and besides, we were hungry—and the turkey legs were delicious.) As we went along, I caught a glimpse of Shayla and Jessica Shang on the mezzanine. Shayla was holding court with several guests, wearing a sequined couture costume that looked like the sort of thing a pirate would wear to the Oscars. Meanwhile, Jessica looked bored. If I hadn’t been on a mission, I would have gone to talk to her.

We were almost out of the hall when Kit Karoo leapt into our path. “Tell me you’re not leaving the party!” she exclaimed.

“We’re not leaving the party,” Mike said, even though we were quite obviously doing exactly that.

“You can’t go!” Kit pronounced. “There’s so much fun ahead! We’re about to have a dance competition! And then there’s going to be a reenactment of a real-live pirate attack! And then we’re making s’mores!”

“S’mores?!” Erica asked exuberantly, back in full Sasha Rotko mode. She sounded as though Kit Karoo had promised her a million dollars. “I love s’mores! We are definitely in for s’mores! We’re just running out to get some more bandannas at the store, and then we’ll be right back!”

“You promise?!” Kit asked.

“Cross my heart and hope to die!” Erica replied.

Mike and I echoed this sentiment as enthusiastically as we could.

“All right!” Kit whooped. “That’s the spirit! See you at the s’more pit!” She let us pass and went off to badger some other teens into having fun.

The party had spilled out beyond the great hall into the shopping mall, where plenty of guests who hadn’t planned ahead were still grabbing costumes at the last minute, but the crowd thinned out as we got to the onboard theater, where the night’s pirate-themed juggling performance wasn’t scheduled to begin until after the celebration had died down. The ballrooms were just beyond the theater, at the stern of the ship.

There were four of them, arranged around a large foyer. A placard on the wall indicated that over the course of the next few days, there would be three weddings, six corporate retreats, and one bar mitzvah. However, none of them were scheduled at night, probably to avoid conflicting with the shipboard parties—except for the meeting of the International Tulip Growers Association, which was supposed to be taking place right then.

The door to the Chrysanthemum Ballroom was locked, and when we pressed our ears to it, we couldn’t hear a thing inside.

“Sounds like no one’s there,” I observed.

“Which means it’s the perfect time to break in,” Erica concluded. She considered the lock and coded keypad entry for the door. “There’s some decent security on this. It’ll take a while to crack it.” She removed her favorite set of lockpicks from her utility belt and went to work.

Catherine handed Mike and me some radio earpieces so that we’d all be able to stay in touch. “Benjamin and Michael, why don’t you be our lookouts while we handle this?”

“Sure thing,” Mike agreed. We both inserted our radios in our ears and returned to the main entrance for the ballroom area, leaving the Hale women to jimmy the lock.

We ended up in a long hall that stretched from port to starboard across the ship. There was another vertical integration bank in the center, with elevators and a staircase, while at each end was a door that led outside to the Promenade Deck.

This was the same deck that we had visited for our mandatory safety training. Besides the Activity Deck on the top level, it was the only other public outdoor space on the Emperor of the Seas. It was five stories above the water and was a sort of indentation in the bulk of the ship, like the beginning of a paragraph, so that it ran on top of the suites below it and was roofed by the suites above it, with one side open to the air. The deck circled the entire ship like a belt and was a half mile around. It had a walking track and a few shuffleboard courts, but the real reason for it was to store the emergency life rafts, which had to be deployed relatively close to the water.

“There’s probably a window from the Chrysanthemum Ballroom out onto the Promenade Deck,” I suggested. “I’m gonna go check it out. You stay here and keep watch.”

“Good plan.” Mike remained where he was and dug hungrily into the turkey leg he was lugging around.

I still had a turkey leg myself. It was so large, I had barely made a dent in it.

I headed out onto the deck. Even though it was night, it was sultry and humid, but the ship’s movement created a slight breeze, and we were so far from shore that there was no light pollution. A million stars were visible in the ink-dark sky. It was so beautiful, I had to stop at the railing for a moment to take it in.

The deck was actually two stories tall, with the life rafts stored overhead so as to not block anyone’s view of the sea. They were all wadded up inside white metal canisters the size of oil drums, which the crew would drop overboard in case of emergency. Ideally, upon striking the surface of the ocean, the canisters would burst open and the rafts would automatically inflate. There were hundreds of them, lined up in ceiling-mounted racks like bullets in an ammunition belt. In addition, the sleek-looking speedboats used to ferry the wealthy passengers were suspended on davits that jutted from the edge of the ship above. I realized that the gaily colored shuttles we had used to access the ship before must have belonged to the port of Corinto, but for the exclusive guests, the Emperor of the Seas had its own craft. The speedboats were so dark, they were hard to see against the night sky.

The shuffleboard courts and the walking track were all currently unused, as everyone appeared to be at the party. The deck was eerily empty.

The Emperor’s running lights illuminated the surf below, which churned and foamed as the ship plowed through it. Even though there were another thirteen stories of ship above my head, I still felt like I was surprisingly high up.

It occurred to me that this was the farthest I had ever been from land while still on the surface of the earth and not in an airplane thirty-five thousand feet up. The sea looked massive and endless from where I was, even though I was only seeing the tiniest fraction of it. I was on the starboard side of the ship and since we were heading south, I was facing west, which meant there wasn’t another speck of land until the Philippines, almost ten thousand miles away. Even a ship as colossal as the Emperor of the Seas was really just a flyspeck in the great expanse. I had always known that the ocean was enormous, but I had never really felt how enormous until then.

I turned my attention away from the water to the ship itself.

The windows of the Chrysanthemum Ballroom were dark, indicating that no one was inside. Still, in the interest of being thorough, I went to the closest window and attempted to peer through it.

I couldn’t see a thing.

The planks of the deck creaked behind me. For reasons I couldn’t explain, a chill went down my spine. Since my turkey leg was as big as a medieval mace, I figured it might make a decent weapon. So I tightened my grip on it and whirled around, ready for action.

Dane Brammage was standing there. And this time, I was sure it was him and not Bjorn Turok for three reasons:

1) I was close enough to see the slight differences in their faces that set them apart.

2) Murray Hill was right next to him.

3) He immediately tried to kill me.