A Death on The Horizon Read online

  Melissa had traveled extensively, in vehicles of every description—buses and trains, on road trips and countless plane flights, with family, friends, lovers, and by herself. But the biggest ships she’d ever boarded were the ferries that crisscrossed the bays and channels of Puget Sound. Now, driving home, her career seemingly plucked from the precipice, she rolled down her Legacy’s window and inhaled deep breaths of the condensing air, trying to imagine the size of a cruise ship. Lady GaGa’s “Poker Face” came on the radio, her new favorite song, its erotic keyboard riff surging as a fresh splatter of big raindrops required she flip her windshield wipers to their highest setting.

  Back at her condo in sleepy Port Rachel, a close-in suburb with a reputation for being safe and unexceptional, she Googled Trans Oceanic and then clicked on the Northstar.

  A stunning web page opened, depicting the flagship liner in all its glory. The mighty hull was painted a deep-sea navy blue with a gleaming white stripe across the gunwale. That sun-soaked white continued up to the myriad-windowed heart of the ship, culminating at the bridge’s football-field girth. Two magnificent black smokestacks striped in red, white, blue, and gold rose to a crystalline sky. Melissa’s heart thumped as she clicked through the pages. An Olympic-size pool enticed her with its reflected blue ionosphere. A grand ballroom with chandeliers looked right out of one of her father’s favorite movies, The Poseidon Adventure. Staterooms had bathroom sinks like Grecian urns. Melissa would finally experience the kind of exotic travel that had remained out of reach for the daughter of a cabinetmaker and a stay-at-home mom. And she’d get paid for it.

  Excitement settled into a splash of professional reality when she considered Lara Svenko. But a day of submersion in the Laszlo file and her surprise assignment had drained the last of her will to know things. She couldn’t make her fingers type the luckless reporter’s name. There was plenty of time for research before the Northstar’s departure. Leaving the ship’s grand image on her screen, she went to the kitchenette and prepared herself a microwave dinner.

  Her muse during that meal floated in a large psychic sea, which carried her from the buzzing and competitive Charon headquarters to the glaciated bays that backdropped the Northstar’s online image. She felt a shipboard martini glass in her hand and could already sense the delicious chill of a Canadian night.

  After dinner she swam in her building’s pool, luxuriating in water just warm enough to soothe back and thigh muscles too long cramped in an office chair. The swim did her good, the chorine working a throbbing cleanse over her split lip, but on her final lap, a vision came unbidden—Svenko’s sea-swept body rolling up like a waterlogged bundle on a wet sand beach. She imagined the half-surprised and party-hardy Native fishermen who pulled her out of the surf.

  Back in her condo bedroom, Melissa flipped the bureau-top television to local news. Reports about a Bellingham woman cited for having too many rabbits and an East Coast transplant who hanged his wife’s dog had her wondering if last night’s hidden full moon had inspired an epidemic of unhinged pet owners. Before pulling closed the mini-blinds on the picture window, she discerned a few stars above Seattle’s haze of big-city light. Perhaps tomorrow would see the end of the gloomy and tepid front. Indeed, the broadcast weather warned of rising mercury and protracted high pressure. During a hyperbolic report about the Mariners’ pennant hopes, Melissa lowered the volume on her television and lay back more comfortably against her pillows, recalling again the course of study that brought her to this career precipice and apparent second chance. The Cape Lookout experience had been flavored with the manufactured drama and pimply angst of high school. Her passion for swimming had stuck, and even during this time of turbulent, rocky relationships with various suitors, she always found her way to the roomy campus pool. The act of stretching her muscles and gliding over water was not just good exercise; it was also therapeutic escape from the strictures of demanding men and her choice to study police science and the investigative arts.

  The thing was, she could just as easily have chosen a career based on a Redbook Magazine aptitude test. A guidance counselor had recommended Police Science 101, and it was the idea of helping people that first engaged her. In the end she’d done well on her class finals and the certification exam and been referred to Charon, where she was immediately accepted for an entry-level position. She showed great promise in the realms of interpersonal relationships and private investigation but of late had proven no great shakes in the areas of fiscal malfeasance and fiduciary Armageddon. The Charon men were professional to a fault, but she sensed that she had reached some ending point for the forgiveness newbie status had afforded her.

  As she pulled up her comforter and waited through a commercial about a mail-order housefly lure, she wondered if part of her had hoped that Scrimshaw would deep-six her.

  Deciding she wasn’t in the mood for late-night humor, she pressed her remote control off button and cut her bedside lamp. Listening to the absolute still of Port Rachel at midnight, she let go of her self-absorption and channeled a reservoir of dormant resolve. There was a dead woman who’s passing needed closure, just as there was every night and every morning in America.

  Her fingertips found her temples, and the split in her lip throbbed suddenly. If Jimmy were around, he would have kissed her gently—and not been so gentle with other parts of her body. It had been a long time, too long. She got up to apply some lip balm. A good night’s sleep was what she needed.

  Her last flickering, overtired thought came just as she heard a big ship’s mordant boom

  cut the muggy darkness out on the sound.

  Shakedown cruise, she suddenly thought. This was Scrimshaw’s paternalistic way of shaking down her commitment to her career. If she didn’t get it right, there would be no more mysteries, except the one starring her.

  Chapter Five

  Rad approached the tee on the same seventh hole on which the binocular golfer of three days’ past had sunk a hole in one. Nancy had gotten off without a hitch, saving him the Sea-Tac ordeal by taking a town car to the airport, and he was missing her already.

  The delicious balmy wind, which could be counted on to blow up Port Rachel Valley each June afternoon, was not in evidence. He noticed a few dead spots marring the fairway’s multimillion-dollar lawn. After taking a swig of his energy drink, he wiped his brow and then drove a shot, knowing at the second of impact that it would cut through the languorous heat and sail true. The ball fell well within his putting capabilities.

  When flying solo on the links, he would often forego the cart in favor of a healthy heart muscle. Walking down, he saw that some predator had gotten to a large raven on the turf. It was not unheard of for a plummeting golf ball to strike a lawn-bound avian. Overhead three dove-colored F-15s ascended in succession from Fort Lewis, their roar cutting down and lording over Arbor Glen’s tile roofs. He waited for the noise to subside into the undeveloped hillsides and then knocked his putt down slope and into the cup.

  The jets’ passage made Rad think of the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and his newfound doubts about whether the Iraq invasion had been a smart move. An unblinking reading of the true history of Saddam’s old dominion begged the question of whether such a tribal, wandering people were capable of Western democracy. The WMDs that had scared up congressional approval for the invasion were AWOL, and Iran and South Korea were further along in their pursuit of nuclear weapons than Saddam had ever been. Rad mulled over whether leaving the despot Hussein and his sadist sons in power might have been a decent bargain with the devil you know.

  Such doubts would be kept strictly mum on the Rainier Policy Institute cruise. It could be counted on that many had kith and kin who were still bound to the mission and that a handful had lost loved ones in Old Persia. It would not do to have these veterans portrayed in anything but the most justifiable and redemptive light.

  His final action in Vietnam had involved assisting in a large-scale evacuation of South Vietnamese loyalists
who were doubtless included on any list of Communist enemies. The Saigon refugees who made it onto his ship, who vomited up their fear as the transport headed into the swells of an Indian Ocean typhoon, were shadows of the unlucky souls still within the burning city. Rad received his Distinguished Service Cross simply by refusing to withdraw in the face of a raging fire that caught on oil-slicked water and engulfed the pier. He ordered his crewmen to direct steady streams of water at the last of the souls who reached the lowered rope ladders, some of them afire.

  Therein lay the troubling rub of second-guessing Bush’s left turn into Iraq. Operation Iraqi Freedom’s supporters warned that there could be a comparable tragic consequence of a precipitous withdrawal there. Even now, seven years after Bush’s counterintuitive appearance in front of a Mission Accomplished banner, carnage and inchoate civil war could be counted on in the streets of Baghdad. John McCain’s miscue about a hundred-year war didn’t seem as crazy as it had during the campaign. Osama’s visage, his smile in the face of unthinkable terror, told a tale of continuance. Of abiding hatred that inspires a man to live in cold caves and plot a pitiless jihad. Al Qaeda was re-forming in the dark hollows of prehistoric mountains, and the Taliban was on its backward march again. It was all one big War on Terror, and if you cut the legs out from under one justification, you might upset the whole apple cart.

  Rad teed up for a drive on eight. This shot arced and dropped every bit as propitiously as that of his drive on seven. But once on the eighth green, he saw that the terrain was not as advantageous as it seemed from afar. He’d need to come up the incline against the lawnmower grain of grass blades, whose tips were dried out and ragged despite the groundskeepers’ religious predawn sprinkling. He planted himself in a Lee Trevino stance, waited for a blue jay in a nearby tree to stop squawking, and then gave the ball an assertive tap. The gods of golf were with him; the Titleist covered the parched turf nicely and dropped. He heard the sound of clapping and noticed an old-timer seated on a bench off the cart path. His upper lip damp from unfiltered sunlight more reminiscent of Scottsdale than Puget Sound, Rad waved back at the elderly spectator.

  Two creamy sand traps stood between him and the ninth’s distant teal flag, discernable in its garishness against a copse of waxen-leafed birch. The sound was good coming off his driver, like when old NBA rebel Bill Walton used to pivot and hook and you knew the second it left his fingers that it was an in-your-face swisher. The ball sailed like a cruise missile and dropped on the ninth green with a prominent bounce. More applause from the bench, and Rad saluted again before hoofing over the thirsty green. The gimme putt would put him one under.

  Back home, after grabbing a microwave fish-stick dinner out of the freezer, Rad saw that the mail jeep had stopped at his box. He walked out into the bright sunlight of his driveway and noticed Alvin Alderson’s golf cart at the seventh hole, its telltale Seahawks flag fluttering in an afternoon breeze that had finally blown in off the sound. Alderson noticed him but stayed focused on his practice swings in preparation for a drive on seven.

  The mailbox held but two pieces of mail. The identity-theft protection outfit he’d retained was doing its job, rendering junk mail and preapproved credit offers virtually nonexistent. One of the letters had an Internal Revenue Service return address and was in a different kind of envelope from any he’d seen from the agency before. The second letter was from his local Republican Party precinct, also different from the donation request letters he often got.

  The sirocco that had fluttered Alderson’s team flag reached him now, and Rad felt a prickle of sweat form on his brow. He heard the thwack of his friend’s drive and then saw that Alderson was breaking away from the links to let another party play through. Rad heard the electric motor whir as it reached top speed.

  “Hey, Big Rad, good news,” called the consistently under par Goldwater man. “Wayne Fero is getting an angioplasty, God help him, and I purchased his berth.”

  With a wan smile, Rad pondered three things: the newly installed Obama wealth redistributors who had contacted him directly, a battered Republican ship of state desperate for candidates, and his new shipmate.

  “I’m in,” Alderson enthused.

  The two men high-fived and Alderson returned to his solitary game. Having his Arbor Glen neighbor along wouldn’t be the same as having Nancy, but it was something. Rad could count on Alderson to deflect a growing chorus of voices arguing that the GOP needed to moderate its positions on social issues like life, immigration, and gay marriage. The staunch conservative would also come in handy running interference when inquiring minds inevitably pressed Rad about politics and his intentions thereof.

  Beyond Alderson’s company, there were other reasons to buck up and make the best of things. There would be times after retirement when Rad would miss having a cruise assignment almost as much as he would miss Nancy on the voyage. When a circumnavigation of Lake Washington in his sailboat Abigail would be the only seamanship available to a lifelong seaman.

  Yes, times were troubled, and there’d been better years. But it could be worse.

  There could be loss of life. There could be a woman overboard, a death at sea. Rad had never lost a peacetime passenger before Lara Svenko.

  Chapter Six

  Stan Hundtruk let his steel-blue eyes rove easily over the pages of the Svenko case file and linger when they got to Charon investigator Melissa Blythe’s NSA dossier and headshot. They had not been officially introduced since he’d joined the firm under the alias identity of Jeff Griffin, investigative associate, and that was fine with him. Only their boss, Scrimshaw, coerced by Trans Oceanic CEO Richard Blaisedale, in turn pressured by the persuasive realities of Democrat ascendancy, would know exactly who he was and why he was sailing with the Northstar. His companion investigator, Ms. Blythe, aka college reporter Sue Ross, would be led to believe he was joining her in the hunt for Svenko’s killer. There was that, but it was of second-or even third-tier importance at best.

  After eight years as a shadowy dynamo of Bush-era Democratic special ops and opposition research, Hundtruk was being groomed for an auspicious coming-out party. The plum being offered, dependent on his work on the Trans Oceanic assignment, was an appointment to a very public blue-ribbon commission tasked with advising the Obama-nomics team on options for optimizing transportation sector tax revenue.

  They’d already decimated scores of Republican-owned auto dealerships nationally and taken over, with the UAW, a vast slice of the auto industry. They ran the bankrupt national railroad, shades of Atlas Shrugged and, with the unintended and provident consequences of Bush airport security overreach working in their favor, fielded an army of TSA body-searchers. The last bastion of freedom was the ships, and if there were one ship that embodied what needed to be held under a microscope, it was the GOP’s favorite luxury liner.

  The supportive mainstream media lost no opportunity to chide, zing, and excoriate the great ship as it hauled the Rainier Policy Institute’s conservative manifest up the Inside Passage each year. But, as with Reagan’s legacy, none had been able to convincingly sully her aura of patriotism and destiny.

  Nobody wanted to kill off the host, drive the crown jewel of the pleasure cruise industry onshore. But there had to be huge accounting disconnects, laundered sums concealed in the depths of files from Reykjavík to Buenos Aires. Money changed hands in so many ways over the high seas. It was time to tighten the screws on Blaisedale and his fleet.

  And maybe even to find out who killed Lara Svenko. Or at least make sure Obama Homeland Security got credit for solving a mystery understandably lost in the excitement and exigencies of the New Leftist World Order.

  It was time, in a world of strangled credit and bankrupt state and municipal governments, to consolidate power—to take a close look at Trans Oceanic, and any other cruise line that considered America its home port. In paramilitary terms, Hundtruk was part of the pre-audit parachute drop. He was going into the cold, as it were, into Canada’s summer-warmed f
orests, in view of her magnificent Coastal Range, all the way to where Alaska’s glaciers pushed inexorably toward the sea. His job was to lay the groundwork for the assessment of a possibly punitive duty from the Republican Bismarck, thereby sending a message to the entire cruise ship industry, and the nation at large.

  The cruise lines, and later the shipping lines, would watch with interest when Admiral Blaisedale’s books were brought before the mast. In the new era, taxes had to be exacted continually, relentlessly, and publically. If the private sector was to absorb massive new rates, fees, hikes, and regulations, there needed to be a strong perception that scrutiny was falling equally if not more harshly upon the big interests.

  That the Northstar had been chosen for the first major maritime audit under the new

  administration was a bit of inspiration from Internal Revenue and Homeland Security. Hundtruk reviewed the logic: you can’t have marketplace predictability without money and those corporations who benefit most from global passengers and trade must pay every penny of their fair share. And more, lest the laws, agencies, and navies that protect them be stretched too thin, and the high seas they sail become more dangerous.

  Hundtruk ran his hands through the side of his bristly gold curls. Haircut—he needed a haircut before the voyage.

  The time had definitely come for a redistributive reset. The corporations had it coming, having built speculative fortunes on assets hardly worth the paper they were written on and then leaving Main Street to hitchhike home. The moment was ripe, and Attorney General Holder had said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

  Hundtruk couldn’t be more in solidarity with his mission, but for him there was a personal silver lining over and above the prime objective of capital acquisition. Conservative media had been bashing government workers daily for two decades. Rank-and-file public employees and unions had been pilloried and demonized. The chief purveyor of this mass denigration was conservative radio host Grant Sharpe, a guy who had been using the term bureaucrat as if it were an epithet since Bush 41.