16 RECOVERY

Emperor Suite

The Emperor of the Seas

Somewhere west of Panama

May 17

2230 hours

“Wake up, sleepyhead,” a familiar voice said.

I returned to consciousness but didn’t open my eyes right away. The world felt like it was pitching back and forth. It took me a few moments to realize that this wasn’t because I’d been whacked in the head. It was because the world really was pitching back and forth. The ship was rocking wildly.

“Hello?” the voice asked again. “Earth to Ben. Come in, Ben.”

I pried open my eyes. Jessica Shang was leaning over me, pressing a frozen steak against my forehead. I felt the area she was tending and found a lump the size of a walnut there.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“My head hurts,” I told her. “But I think I’m okay.”

“Whew.” Jessica heaved a sigh of relief. “I was worried that Bjorn might have hit you too hard and given you brain damage. That happened once before. Some guy tried to break into our house, and Bjorn punched him so bad that afterward, he couldn’t use adverbs. Also, he thought he was a turnip. I asked Bjorn to just grab you, but he doesn’t know his own strength.”

I was lying on a couch in the main room of the Shangs’ suite. It was dark outside, but every now and then, lightning flickered across the sky. We were in the midst of a serious storm. Rain was pounding against the windows so hard that it sounded like popcorn popping.

I sat up, just to see if I could do it. My head felt like it was full of rocks, but the rest of me seemed to be in good shape.

Something smelled delicious. My stomach growled.

“I thought you might be hungry,” Jessica said. “Seeing as you were unconscious during dinnertime. So I had our chef whip up a little snack for you.”

I noticed what Jessica considered a “little snack” on the dining room table. There was steak with béarnaise sauce, lobster claws, green beans, mashed potatoes, freshly baked bread—and a chocolate soufflé.

I immediately forgot all about my headache and made a beeline for the table. Famished, I heaped food onto a plate, poured myself a glass of lemonade, and sat down to dig in. It was probably rude to not wait for Jessica—but then, Jessica had arranged for me to be knocked unconscious and hauled to her suite against my will, so I figured she had been rude first.

The food was amazing. “Where’s everyone else?” I asked through a mouthful of steak.

“Your friends escaped from the theater. I’m not quite sure where they are now. But you were the only one I wanted to talk to.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re the one I trust. Erica just sees the world in red and green.…”

“Black and white,” I corrected.

“Right. To her, you’re either good or bad. No nuance. I barely got to know her mother—and Mike wasn’t a spy last time I met him, so I don’t know how good he is at this yet. So I decided to talk to you.” Jessica put a scoop of soufflé on a plate and drizzled molten chocolate on it. Either she’d had dinner already or she was skipping ahead to dessert.

“Okay. And where’s Bjorn and your mother?”

“Bjorn’s standing guard outside in the hall. And Mom had to go be the mistress of ceremonies at tonight’s Fiesta of Fun.”

I paused with a forkful of green beans halfway to my mouth. “There’s a party tonight? With this storm going on?”

“It was already planned. And cruise people don’t like it if you cancel events. If they paid for a fiesta, they want a fiesta.”

“You can’t move it to tomorrow night?”

“There’s a whole different party scheduled for tomorrow. Plus, if we don’t throw the fiesta, we have half a ton of guacamole that’ll go bad.”

“You could always give it to the staff. They’re eating gruel down below. I’m sure they’d love some fresh guacamole.”

“I think they get the leftovers,” Jessica said, as though receiving the table scraps from a party you weren’t invited to was a good deal.

It occurred to me that maybe I was in no position to judge. I was dining on lobster and steak while the crew subsisted on slop. “What did you want to talk about?”

“My mother’s innocence. I know it looks bad to have those stolen statues in the engine room. But the engineers were smuggling them, not her. She didn’t even know about them until you found them.”

“How did she hear about that?”

“You broke into the engine room. Ship security notified her immediately. They thought maybe it was a terrorist attack or something. We have a special link to the security system on our TV here. We can watch the footage from any camera on the ship—including those in the engine room. So we tuned in and saw it was you guys down there. And we also saw Erica’s mother uncover the statue and realize what it was. Mom was shocked. She is very upset that her own ship was being used to smuggle away our country’s heritage.”

“So she asked you to have Bjorn bring me here so that you could explain all this?”

“Bongo.”

“You mean bingo?”

“Yes, bingo. That’s what I meant.”

I rubbed my head. My mind was still fuzzy after being unconscious, but the timing of everything in Jessica’s story seemed a little suspicious to me. However, I didn’t want to upset her by questioning her mother’s honesty outright. So instead, I asked, “If your mother didn’t know about the statues, then why didn’t she want us to go into the engine room?”

“The engineers had told her it should be off-limits to everyone. Because there’s a nuclear reactor down there. And all sorts of other dangerous machinery. So she believed them.”

I cracked a lobster claw and dipped it in drawn butter. “How could the engineers get twelve huge stolen statues onto this ship without your mother knowing about it?”

“Mom doesn’t run this ship. She owns it.” Jessica was obviously annoyed at me for insinuating anything bad about her mother. “It’s not her job to keep track of who brings what on board.”

I raised my hands in mock surrender. “Then whose job is it?”

“I don’t know. I have no idea if anyone keeps track of everything that’s brought on and off. This ship is massive, and there’s like three thousand employees.”

“So any one of them can move whatever they want on and off whenever they want? That seems like a big security risk. Someone must be in charge of monitoring the cargo.”

“I guess.”

“Who’s in charge of security on this ship?”

“Captain Steinberg, ultimately. He’s in charge of everything. And then, there are all these other officers under him that run the other divisions, like security and safety training and all kinds of other stuff.”

“Then we should talk to Captain Steinberg. Maybe he can direct us to the right person to help us. If I was the captain and there were crimes being committed on my ship, I’d want to know about them.”

Jessica mulled that over while scraping the last morsels of soufflé off her plate. “I suppose that makes sense.”

“Do you think you could arrange for us to talk to him? Right away?”

“I’m guessing he’s awfully busy at the moment.” Jessica pointed to the storm outside the window. “When it’s a calm ocean, they can leave this ship on autopilot. But right now, it’s all hands on duck.”

“Deck,” I corrected. “All hands on deck.”

“Oh. Right. That makes more sense.”

The storm was still raging. It didn’t look like it was going to subside anytime soon.

“Maybe there’s someone else we could talk to,” I suggested. “One of the officers who reports to the captain. I mean, everyone can’t be on the bridge at the same time. They must have shifts.”

“Sure. But at times like this, they’d still be on call in their quarters.”

“Where are those? Down in steerage with the rest of the crew?”

“No, silly. All the officers’ quarters are behind the bridge.”

I dropped a lobster claw that I’d picked clean, struck by this. “They’re right below us?”

“Yes. So they’re close to the bridge. It wouldn’t make sense for the officers to sleep all the way down in steerage. This way, they’re right by their posts in case of an emergency. Plus, the rest of the crew quarters are awful.”

“The officers’ quarters aren’t marked on the map of this ship,” I said. I hadn’t spent nearly as much time perusing the map as Mike had, but I had devoted quite a bit of time to it.

“They’re not?” Jessica asked, sounding surprised. “I guess the maps you’ve seen were designed for passengers. There’s no real need to mark where the officers live on them.”

That made sense. Our map hadn’t shown other things, like the crew mess hall either. So I had simply assumed that the officers’ rooms were all down with the rest of the crew.

“To get to the officers’ quarters, you have to access the bridge?” I asked.

“Right. It’s all in the same complex, but the access is restricted for security reasons.”

“I need to get in there,” I said. “Right away. I think that’s where Murray Hill is hiding.”