19 HOT PURSUIT

Officers’ Quarters

The Emperor of the Seas

May 17

2330 hours

Murray was holding a churro in one hand and what appeared to be a blueprint in the other. He was humming happily and had a look on his face that indicated he was very pleased with himself. “Hey, Dane,” he said to Bjorn cheerfully, mistaking him for his cousin. “Pack your bags. The deed is done. We’ve got just under thirteen hours to get really far away from here.…”

He froze in his tracks as he realized Bjorn wasn’t Dane at all—and that I was in the room as well. The happy look on his face turned to one of terror.

Then he threw his churro at me. And fled.

Murray wasn’t very adept at throwing at the best of times. In his panic, he was even less coordinated. The churro missed me by six feet and landed in a pile of dirty laundry.

Bjorn made a grab for Murray as he scurried out the door but missed and then pursued him into the hall. Jessica and I weren’t far behind.

But since Bjorn was in the lead, he was the one who Murray sedated.

Murray yanked a dart gun from his belt and started firing back over his shoulder as he ran. He was just as inaccurate with the gun as he was with the churro; the only reason he managed to hit his target was because Bjorn was so big. It would have been almost impossible to miss such a large target at such close range in such a confined space—and yet Murray still did. In fact, he missed Bjorn five times, striking both walls, the ceiling, a lighting fixture, and the leg of one unfortunate officer who had exited the mess hall at exactly the wrong time. Finally, on his sixth shot, Murray managed to hit Bjorn, who gave a cry of pain and then collapsed in a heap.

The officer Murray had hit also went down, though he did so a bit less dramatically. Jessica and I leapt over him easily, but Bjorn was a much bigger obstacle. The fallen Scandinavian filled up a considerable portion of the hallway. We had to clamber over his prone body, allowing Murray to get a decent head start on us. By the time we were past Bjorn, Murray was slipping through the exit from the bridge.

I raced that way with Jessica on my heels. “This is what I was hoping for!” she exclaimed. “Action! Adventure! Excitement! This is way better than laser tag!”

We burst into the hallway for regular passengers and spotted Murray ducking through yet another door in the distance. I heard a blast of 1970s disco music before it clicked shut.

Jessica and I followed, Jessica whooping enthusiastically the entire way. “We’re chasing a real-live bad guy! I love it!”

We shoved through the door and found ourselves in the roller rink.

Throughout the trip, I had thought that a roller rink on a cruise ship was a questionable idea, but now it was evident that I had been wrong: A roller rink on a cruise ship was a terrible idea. Skating when the ship was gently rocking would have been difficult enough; during a storm, it was nearly impossible. And yet, the rink was surprisingly full, as an extremely ill-conceived skate party was underway.

Kit Karoo was DJing, blasting disco while glitter balls spun, strobe lights flashed, and fog machines spewed dry-ice clouds. Out on the rink, passengers were doing their best to skate, but since the boat was rocking, no one could really go forward. Instead, almost everyone was merely sliding back and forth across the rink from one railing to the other as the floor seesawed beneath them. And if that hadn’t been bad enough, Murray Hill was now bulldozing his way through.

It was hard to see him directly, given the strobing lights, but I could see where he’d been. He had cut directly through the center of the rink, leaving a trail of toppled skaters in his path. So many people were sprawled out on the floor, it looked like a scene from a D-Day movie.

I went after Murray, Jessica on my heels. There was an intensely difficult obstacle course back at spy school, but crossing the rink was a close second. In addition to trying to stay upright on the pitching floor, I also had to avoid the fallen passengers and dodge the waves of wobbling skaters as they hurtled past, arms flailing. I didn’t make it through unscathed. I stumbled over quite a few of the fallen and was clipped by several people, although since they were on wheels and I wasn’t, I handled the collisions better than they did, sending them careening away or tumbling to the floor.

Jessica wasn’t so lucky. A Bjorn-size passenger slammed into her like a freight train, lifting her off her feet and whisking her away. “Ben!!” she yelled as she disappeared into the dry-ice fog. “Help me!”

I didn’t have time to go after her. I couldn’t afford to lose Murray Hill.

Luckily, I was gaining ground on him. Murray had the athletic ability of a flounder; making it across the rink had been much harder for him than it had been for me. He reached the exit not far ahead of me, huffing and puffing, then spun around and opened fire on me with his dart gun. He missed by a mile, striking a disco ball, two speakers, and Kit Karoo, who yelped in surprise and then passed out on a heap of Donna Summer records. Murray’s gun then clicked empty. “Stupid piece of junk,” he cursed, tossing it aside, and then fled through the exit doors.

I came through them behind him and arrived at the central vertical access corridor for the ship. Here there was a bank of six elevators and a wide staircase. Rather than use the little energy he had left to run down the steps, Murray had opted to slide down the bannister. He was moving quite fast—much faster than he had intended, it seemed—and flew off the end at the next landing, taking out a group of festively clad revelers on their way home from the fiesta.

I leapt onto the bannister and slid down it myself, alighting at the landing with slightly more grace than Murray had. By this time, he had already hopped onto the next bannister, so I kept moving down with him.

We continued like that for the next few floors, sliding down and jumping off bannisters. Murray was still clutching the blueprint he’d had all along, although after two landings, he attempted to destroy the evidence by cramming it into his mouth. However, the blueprint was much larger than Murray had anticipated. Instead of swallowing it, he ended up with half of it wadded up in his cheeks and the rest protruding comically from his lips, looking somewhat like a python trying to swallow a piñata.

The stairway led down to the great hall, and as we approached, descending one bannister after the other, we could hear that the night’s fiesta was still underway. The air was alive with Latin dance music and the joyful murmur of happy partygoers.

I had nearly caught up to Murray as we reached the great balcony on the mezzanine level. The stairs led directly to it. Murray, knowing I was breathing down his neck, took the last bannister as fast as he could. When he reached the landing, he lost his balance and stumbled forward onto the balcony, where the exact same quintet of musicians who had performed at every event was now dressed as mariachis. Propelled by his momentum, Murray crashed into them, sending their maracas and castanets flying, then slammed into the railing and flipped over it. He dropped ten feet into the center of the buffet table, where he landed flat on his back in the guacamole. The force of his impact knocked the chewed-up blueprint from his mouth like a cork fired from a champagne bottle—and splattered everyone in a ten-foot radius with pulped avocado.

Between this and the music suddenly stopping, the fiesta immediately ground to a halt. A stunned silence fell over everyone—except for the passengers who’d been strafed with guacamole, who were shrieking in disgust.

The blueprint plopped into a bowl full of salsa. I leapt over the balcony railing to retrieve it, landing atop the buffet. This might have looked quite suave if I hadn’t landed upon a stray carnitas tamale, which was as slippery as an overripe banana. I tumbled forward, catching the salsa bowl with my elbow and catapulting chopped tomato on the few people close by who had managed to not get hit by guacamole. The blueprint ended up in the middle of the dance floor. I scrambled through the crowd to recover it—and by the time I had, Murray was gone. There was only a massive platter of guacamole with a Murray-size crater left behind.

This caught me by surprise. Murray was already exhausted and certainly in pain after his fall. I hadn’t counted on him still being able to run. Luckily, it wasn’t hard to figure out where he’d gone: There was a trail of green splotches leading across the floor.

I crammed the soggy blueprint into my pocket and followed the guacamole. The path was so slimy, it was as though I were following an enormous slug. It led past dozens of revelers and a troupe of salsa-spackled flamenco dancers into the main restaurant.

The restaurant was closed for the night, as the scheduled dining times were long over and there was plenty of food out at the fiesta. It was merely a big space filled with empty tables and chairs, so it was easy for me to spot Murray across the room, heading for the kitchen doors.

He was obviously in pain, probably in several places at once, and smeared from head to toe with guacamole. With his green pallor and shambling gait, he looked more like a zombie than a human being.

“You might as well just give up!” I yelled after him. “There’s nowhere to run!”

“That’s what you think!” Murray yelled back, then shoved through the doors.

So I followed him into the kitchen.

Which was the biggest kitchen I had ever seen in my life. It turned out, there was only one kitchen for all the restaurants on the ship. The food was prepared in this single place, then funneled to the various dining establishments through a series of conveyor belts and elevators. All the appliances were designed to cook food for thousands of people at once, and thus they were enormous; there were ovens the size of cars, fifty-foot-long griddles, and mixers with bowls big enough to bathe in. It was like being in King Kong’s kitchen.

In the interest of hygiene, everything had been heavily sanitized. The stainless-steel appliances had been polished until they gleamed, and the floor was spotless—except for the slime trail Murray had left. Not that I needed to follow it anymore. I was now only a few feet behind him.

I sprinted the last steps and was about to tackle Murray when something caught the collar of my shirt and stopped me short like a dog on a leash. The next thing I knew, I was flying backward. I skidded across the freshly mopped floor and slammed painfully into a pastry oven.

Dane Brammage had arrived.

He was dressed in a tuxedo and now stood by Murray’s side, amused by Murray’s appearance. “You look like a giant snot,” he giggled.

“No thanks to you!” Murray snapped. “Don’t just stand there! Take care of Ben!”

“All right,” Dane agreed, and lumbered toward me menacingly.

I was trapped in a dead end, surrounded on three sides by giant appliances, with nowhere to run.

Meanwhile, Murray hurried off through the kitchen, as though he was in a rush to be somewhere. “Don’t take any chances with him this time!” he ordered. “No throwing him overboard and hoping for the best. Obviously, that didn’t work. Kill him first and then throw him overboard!”

There was a menace in Murray’s voice that I hadn’t heard before. In our previous meetings, he had wanted me alive—usually for nefarious purposes, but still, that was preferable to the situation I now found myself in. This time, Murray clearly regarded me as a threat and wanted to get rid of me as quickly as possible.

And I was in little position to defend myself.

Although most of the kitchen was filled with items that I could have used as weapons—knives, cleavers, skewers, and assorted blunt instruments like pots and pans—I was in the one section that was devoid of anything useful. The only thing I could find was a whisk, which would have been handy if I were being attacked by some raw eggs, but was useless against a leviathan like Dane. Still, I tried to use it anyhow, throwing it at him in the vain hope that maybe it would poke him in the eye.

It harmlessly clonked off his skull.

Behind him, I could see Murray disappearing behind some enormous mixers.

Then Dane was upon me. I tried to scramble away, but there was nowhere to go. He caught me easily and clamped a hand around my neck.

“Nothing personal,” he said. “It’s just business.”

And then he squeezed.