TWENTY FOUR

Just when I had fallen asleep, it seemed, it was time to get up. The alarm that the U.E. had set for us went off and I heard someone shut it off. My eyes cracked open. Jaisen’s face was inches from mine. He was standing right next to the bunk watching me.

“I wasn’t sure how long you were going to try to ignore it,” he said, his voice a low morning grumble.

“I don’t suppose you would like to get ready first?” I asked him.

“No. I would not like to get ready first, but I will make the sacrifice so that you can get a few more minutes beauty sleep,” he said, a dimple breaking out on his cheek.

“What exactly are you getting at?”

“Nothing a few more minutes of sleep won’t help, I’m sure.”

I shut my eyes. “Let me know when it’s my turn. Or not.”

I heard Jaisen laugh quietly behind my closed eyes. Then his footsteps leaving the room and the bathroom door shut.

***

At the docks, disguised and ready, a man walking around with a clipboard put us immediately to work loading the ship. No one asked us any questions or offered to put us on the payroll. Just a lot of grumbling, “hiring people when machines could do the job,” “why did the pier have to be a damned historical structure,” “couldn’t just do the smart thing and build a pier that could take the weight of machines,” and “what a waste of money.”

All I could say was thank god for the historical conservations who were giving us this prime spying opportunity.

The sun peaked over the horizon and shone bright at us. Despite the slight cool of evening still clinging to the ground I began to sweat. I could feel the makeup of my disguise melting into my skin. Carrying my load down the stairs through a short hall and into the storeroom in the cavernous belly of the ship the coolness of the interior washed over me.

The cargo hold took up almost the entire bottom level of the ship. Almost, but not quite. We entered the hull a quarter of the way in from the bow of the ship. The hallway split and one hall lead to the first quarter of the ship and the other hall lead to the larger three quarters of the ship. We took the hall to the right and added our boxes to the slowly rising pile.

None of the workers made eye contact with one another. I recognized a few of the men from the restaurant on Friday, men who had been talking and laughing with one another but here no one said a word or acknowledged one another. Everyone was focused on lifting and carrying and setting down the boxes.

Truck to ship, ship to truck, my emergency button heeled shoes slapped the boards of the dock and my arms began to ache. My bruises from the ninja fight on Saturday were surprisingly quiet. That ointment might not be a spy’s best friend on a mission, but it seemed to have worked for the pain. The terrain beneath my feet changed from one end of my load to the other–across the uneven dock, down the stairs, onto the ship’s floor.

Clip clap clip clap, pick up a load, clip clap clip clap, follow the back of the guy in front of me, down the hall to the right, deposit the load, and then back out to start all over again. How in the world was I going to get any spying done in the middle of this never ending line of ants?

My vision blurred until all I saw was the shirt of the guy in front of me changing from the color of the overhead lights in the boat to the color of early morning sunshine and then back again.

Then I realized that the color of the shirt was a different color all together. I snapped my eyes back into focus and realized that we had gone, not right down the path into the cargo hold but left down the hall into the front quarter of the ship and into a large supply room. One light bulb in the middle of the ceiling cast shadows down the man’s back. He disappeared up the stairs opposite and I was left alone in the supply room. Emergency lifeboats hung deflated in packets along the wall, boxes of light bulbs and batteries were piled up in the corners, ropes sat wrapped around spools and on one wall was a door.

Time to do a bit of spying.

I opened the door hoping to find a little office and I wasn’t disappointed. The room wasn’t much bigger than the desk at the center of it.

What I didn’t count on finding was the figure of a man, slumped in a chair. I turned on the light and discovered that it was none other than Franklin Culpepper slumped in the chair–the freckled wrinkly face was instantly recognizable. He was without glasses and his mouth was sunken in where his teeth should be. His wrists were bound with rope and he appeared to be sleeping.

“Franklin!” I whispered urgently. “Wake up.” I put a hand on his shoulder and shook him. His eyes fluttered open and then closed. He looked drugged. I was going to have to carry him.

I pushed my body forward and tried to maneuver myself under him so that I could flip him over my back and carry him out. Just when I had found a good leverage point and was starting to hoist him up, I heard the door behind me open. I tried to push Franklin back down and turn, but before I had half set him down I felt something hard crack down and my skull, an explosion of pain, and then everything went dark.

I woke up to the sound of voices talking. I kept my eyes shut and tried to orient myself.

One of the voices belonged to Veronica. “I don’t know what one of the workers would be doing in here. I’m lucky that one of them came up to alert me that the work was almost finished. When I came down the stairs I saw that the light to the office was on so I opened the door and found this guy here. I grabbed a wrench and knocked him unconscious.”

This was unbelievable. Scrawny Veronica had knocked me unconscious? I moved my wrists ever so slightly and confirmed the worst–my wrists were bound with rope.

Then the second voice responded. “We can’t let him go. He will go directly to the police and report finding a man tied up on board.” The voice sounded familiar. But it couldn’t be. Could it?

A third voice said in a smarmy tone that I had come to associate with Captain Stan Staley, “He’s an immigrant. He can’t speak English anyway.”

“Yeah, but he’ll make great shark bait along with our ole pal Frankie here.” Hank Friar, Head of Shipping. Undoubtedly he had also heard that sharks were the ocean’s garbage trucks. He probably hadn’t needed Julie the Naturalist to tell him that. He probably had experience dumping bodies.

“Franklin might still give us the information that we are looking for, right Franklin?” said that voice that was frighteningly familiar. I heard feet shuffling and Franklin Culpepper grunting again, as though someone were poking him. “If he just lets us know how to cover our asses, then there is no need to feed him to the sharks, right?”

“Right,” the captain laughed evilly. Veronica and Hank chimed in. I thought about how to make my move with bound wrists. I had seen enough Jet Li movies to know that it could be done. I opened my eyes a crack and saw my worst fears confirmed–standing around the tiny office were Veronica, Hank and Stan along with one more individual. I had recognized his voice. How could I not? He was after all the guy of my dreams. Alex, the guitar playing hottie. How had he got mixed up with these crooks?

I shut my eyes. This was the guy that I thought could see into my soul, certainly a disguise wouldn’t fool him?

Apparently it did. I lay with my eyes shut with villains laughing around me, still swooning from the blow over the head. Then I did the last thing that I wanted to do, the last thing that a head trauma victim should ever do, the last thing a spy should ever do on the job–I fell asleep.