The pirates took control of the Compound Interest in less than two minutes. Wilson watched, helpless, as thirty brown men swung over the side. A few actually had knives between their teeth. Most were Africans, their faces marked with tribal scars, but Wilson saw a few red-turbaned Malays, a handful of South American types, and an Asian or two.
Ackerman was hauled out of his office and tied with nylon cord to the forward mast. “I was in the middle of a very important conference call,” he said, “corn prices—” but they bashed the thick glasses off his face with the butt of a rifle before he could finish.
A moment later two Africans came up behind Wilson and knocked him down. They pushed his face into the deck, snapped plastic bands tight around his wrists. He had been seduced away from his quiet life in the city for this final moment of irony. What would Andrea say if she could see him now? It was a ridiculous thought. Didn’t these people kill everyone so as to leave no witnesses? The dread took a knowing bite out of the inside of his stomach.
The leader of the boarding party was a tall, narrow-faced African wearing an oil-smeared pair of gabardine dress slacks cut off at the knees. His bare chest was crisscrossed with a complicated pattern of raised scars, and he carried a leather quirt wrapped with silver wire that seemed to be a badge of office. His men in place, he approached Cricket with a respectful gesture and said a few words in a language that Wilson could not understand.
“O.K., Mustapha. Good job,” Cricket said in English when the man was done. “It’s good to see you again.” Then she picked up the bullhorn. “Ahoy aboard the Storm Car,” she called. “This is the all clear. Prepare to come aboard.”
A chain ladder lowered over the side with a loud rattling noise. Two men descended. The first was a youngish fellow with a helmet of Germanic blond hair, wearing an expensive-looking plaid blazer, creased khakis, and new leather boat shoes. A notebook computer in a clear waterproof carrying case hung from one shoulder. Wilson heard the man’s shoes squeak as they touched the deck. He was tall and nicely proportioned, with the earnest Aryan type face that appeared on Nazi propaganda posters of the thirties. He blinked his pale blue eyes at the glare for a moment, then stood aside for his companion.
The second man was of a different type entirely: a short, bowlegged, scruffy gnome in a gaudy Hawaiian shirt. He wore his thong sandals with white socks, Japanese style. His pockets bulged with bits of rope and other odds and ends. A rectangle of duct tape crept halfway up one leg of his baggy shorts. His shirt lay open, revealing a half dozen barbaric gold chains hidden like snakes in grizzled chest hair.
This man’s face looked familiar to Wilson: the strong jaw, the Roman nose, the lines of determination around the mouth. A windblown tangle of thinning coppery hair sat atop his head like a coonskin cap. A black eye patch covered one eye. The other eye, large and malevolent, studied the three prisoners slumped together now beneath the mast. When he had seen what he wanted to see, he smiled the smile of the Devil surveying the sorrows of mankind. Wilson felt a chill to the bone and looked away.
For a moment the deck was quiet. He could hear the sound of the wind, and porpoises gamboling oblivious off the bow, and the grating of the two hulls scraping together. And a loud thumping sound that was the beating of his own heart.
Cricket stuck the .38 in the waistband of her jeans and went over to embrace the little man. The top of his head barely reached her breasts. “Dad,” she said.
“How’s my big girl?” the man said, and patted her on the ass.
“I’m fine,” she said. “But it was a little touch and go there for a minute. The old bastard caught Noog doing his thing to the engines.”
“When this is over, we’ll go on vacation, honey,” the man said soothingly. “Where do you want to go?”
Cricket thought for a minute, raised an eyebrow to the blue sky, insouciant as a coed. “Oh, Paris, I guess,” she said. “I could do a little shopping.”
“That’s a date,” he said, then he rubbed his hands together. “Now, where’s our prize turkey?”
Wilson shot a glance at Ackerman. The billionaire trembled violently in the hot sun, his face white with fear. The shadow of the mast fell like a great weight across his shoulder. Tears slid down his cheeks into the collar of the foolish pink shirt he wore.
The pirate who was Cricket’s father approached and stood, hands on his hips, staring down. Ackerman fixed his myopic eyes on the polished planking of the deck and would not look up. At last the pirate prodded him with one white stockinged toe.
“You Ackerman?”
The billionaire blinked painfully, the side of his face sore and bruised. “No,” he said in a small, miserable voice. “Could I have my glasses back?”
“I wanted to congratulate you on that Caltech Industries takeover three years ago,” the pirate said. “Fastest, meanest leveraged buyout I ever saw. Damned elegant. Stockholders never knew what hit them.”
“You heard about that?” Ackerman said, surprised.
“It was in all the financial papers. The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times of London. Both had good in-depth articles on your maneuverings.”
“Who are you?” Ackerman said.
“I’m Captain Page, in command of the good ship you see yonder,” the man said, and nodded over his shoulder at the rusty vessel looming behind. “Member in good standing of the Brotherhood of the Coast. That’s all you need to know.”
“You’re a p-pirate?” Ackerman stuttered.
The pirate shrugged. “You see the eye patch, don’t you?”
“Is it real?” Ackerman said.
“Lost the eye in a household accident,” the pirate said. “A drill bit snapped and went right through my cornea. Then the thing got a nasty infection and had to come out. Could have gotten a glass one, but what the hell. Guess you could say I’m a traditionalist as far as my work is concerned.”
“You’re a goddamned murderous thief,” Captain Amundsen spit out suddenly, “a robber who kills innocent people. Tell him what that black flag means. Tell him what you plan to do with us when you’ve got what you want.”
“What are you going to do?” Ackerman cried out, hysteria in his voice. “I’ve got money, I’ll pay you. Please …” His words disappeared into a whine.
“We know you have money, Ackerman,” the pirate said quietly. “It’s just a question of how much.”
“That’s not fair,” Ackerman said, petulant as a child.
“What’s fair, Schlüber?” the pirate called over his shoulder.
The young man in the blazer approached, unshouldered his notebook computer, and snapped it out of the clear plastic case. Then he sat cross-legged on the deck, and Wilson heard the tiny click and whine of the computer’s hard drive coming up to speed.
“Give me a second, sir,” he said. “Got to call up the database.” He spoke the correct, faintly accented English common to most educated Germans. He peered at the screen with his pale blue eyes for a few seconds. The keys made demure clicking noises beneath his fingertips.
“Here he is,” he said at last. “Filed under rich bastards. Ackerman, Dwight A. Born San Luis Obispo, California, April seventeenth, 1946. Paid federal income tax last year on income and assets totaling just over one and a half billion. Means he ought to be worth at least two billion more, sir. These bastards always have substantial amounts tucked away in banks in Switzerland or the Bahamas.”
Ackerman licked his lips. “That’s just not true,” he began, but Captain Page made an impatient gesture, and Mustapha came forward and clubbed Ackerman on the back of the neck with the quirt. It made a sharp snapping sound, and the billionaire slumped forward into the nylon rope.
Wilson turned his eyes to the white sky and tried not to see or hear any more. The pirate boarding party loitered in the background, smoking cigarettes and laughing like construction workers on a lunch break. The shadow of the forward mast inched across the deck.