Invisible Armies

Chapter 39

Keiran goes alone to today's hacker-training session. He supposes that now his apparent cooperation has been established, they don't need Danielle around to remind him to be helpful. Laurent does not stay with him and Sophia either; only one of the bodybuilder guards.

"I need to talk to Shadbold," Keiran says to Sophia, as she boots up her laptop.

"You can't."

"It's something I need to tell him personally," he lies. In fact he is hoping that Mulligan's distraction happens to arrive while Keiran is in Shadbold's chamber, and he will be able to somehow take the chief monster hostage. It's a slim chance, but anything that increases his miniscule odds of survival is worth trying for.

"I didn't say we won't, I said you can't," Sophia says archly. "He's not on board. He's in his private hospital in Switzerland. His condition's worsened."

Keiran shrugs, disappointed. "Couldn't happen to a nicer fellow. But surely you could fly me up there for a couple hours?"

She gives him a nice-try look. He was hoping for a hint about where they are. They couldn't have been drugged for more than a day or two. But that is plenty long enough to fly them from Vegas to anywhere on the planet. There is still no land in sight, no seabirds, and the air is warm by day but cold by night, so his guess is somewhere in a northern ocean, but they could well be off Cape Town or Tasmania.

Not knowing where in the world he is, or even the date, makes Keiran feel strangely disconnected, as if in a parallel universe, or dreaming. As if whatever happens on this boat is not part of real life, cannot truly affect him. The feeling would make it easier to deal with the horrible certainty – barring some miraculous intervention – of his impending death, but Keiran makes a point of rejecting it utterly. He has devoted his life to rational thought. He won't let irrational comfort ease his death.

"Get on with it," the guard growls. His accent is South African. "I've been advised I need to keep your head and your fingers intact. Everything else is optional."

Keiran looks at Sophia.

"You think I won't let him?" she asks.

"All right," he says. "Where were we?"

"ExxonMobil's corporate intranet."

"Right. Let me drive a moment. I'll show you how to own an oil tanker."

** *

Lost in the intricate details of ExxonMobil's virtual private network, it takes Keiran a few moments to realize that some new sensory input is tickling his brain, somewhere on the edge of awareness. A kind of low buzzing sound, coming from the east, the direction of the bow. Sophia and the South African look at one another uncertainly. The strange noise intensifies, clarifies into a recognizable auditory signature: a helicopter, approaching.

"Are we expecting a visitor?" the South African asks.

"No," Sophia says. She taps at her laptop, and a window called WHEELHOUSE materializes on it, above a diagnostic diagram of a ship. Keiran starts paying very close attention. She opens a new window, a radar screen with a ship in the middle and a red dot approaching from the east, and studies the ancillary data scrolling on the margins of the screen for a moment. "It's not Coast Guard, no transponder. We're outside the 200-mile limit anyhow. I'm going to raise anchor and start the engines, just in case."

She closes the window, returns to WHEELHOUSE and types a few commands. Beneath them, the Lazarus begins to hum with power. Then she opens up four camera windows and tiles them across the screen. The inrushing helicopter is barely visible in the bow camera, the size of a gnat on a windscreen.