Unlucky 13 (15 page)

A man in camo fatigues, assault weapon in hand, with a knitted
black ski mask covering his face, filled the screen and was coming closer. Two seconds of that, then half the picture went dark. There was another flash of orange carpet and then the video was over.

I was screaming inside.

I replayed the video, hoping to extend the ten seconds, to see something beyond this one heartrending window of time. But of course, the wildly whipping video repeated the
frightening scene before going black.

Rich, his eyes fixed on the screen, kept saying, “Holy crap.”

I said to him, “This has to be a hijacking. But in Alaska? There can’t be terrorists there, right, Rich? It’s not the Gulf of Aden, for God’s sake. Where’s the Navy?”

Richie left my side and went to his computer and typed.

“Oh, man,” he said.

“What did you find?”

“This: ‘Rogue pirates attack
the cruise ship HM
FinStar
.’ And this. ‘The HM
FinStar
, flagship of the Finlandia Line, filled to capacity with approximately six hundred and fifty passengers and two hundred crew, was attacked by an unknown group of commandos as it prepared to enter Alaska’s Inside Passage at Dixon Entrance near Prince Rupert.’”

“Send me the link,” I barked.

He did it.

I reached for my keyboard, backhanding
the coffee that Rich had left on my desk this morning and sending it spilling in every direction. I didn’t even try to contain it.

Richie brought over a wad of paper towels as I read the latest breaking news.

Summarizing: Eight hours ago rocket-propelled grenades had slammed into the
FinStar
’s hull above the waterline, possibly hitting the engine room. An unknown number of gunmen boarded the
ship in the small hours of the morning. The group was unidentified. The ship was damaged but afloat. There was no information about casualties. No official word of any demands made by the presumed pirates.

When Yuki had sent the video, she was well. Was she still safe? Was Brady?

I played the video again, looking for any new detail.

I felt that I was looking through Yuki’s eyes.

Where was
Brady?

I WAS STARING
at the last frames of Yuki’s video when my desk phone rang. It was Joe.

I said, “Honey, turn on the TV—”

“I just saw,” said Joe. “That’s Yuki’s ship, right?”

“Can you find out what’s happening?”

“I’ll try,” Joe said.

I heard Julie whimpering in the background, the voice of Maria Teresa, her funny nanny, talking as the baby bawled.

“Call you back,” said Joe.

When
Joe was with Homeland Security, one of his areas of responsibility was port security. If anyone was connected, it was my husband.

I found a day-old jelly doughnut in the break room, took one bite, and delivered the rest of it to Conklin.
Then I maniacally hit news links while across the desk Conklin took calls from frantic cops, asking if we’d gotten any word from Brady.

When Joe called back,
I grabbed my cell, fumbled it, and recovered it just before it hit the floor.

“Talk to me,” I said tersely into the phone.

Joe said, “The first mate got out a distress call to the Coast Guard just before the radio room was breached. A man, self-identified as Jackhammer, warned that if anyone approached the ship, people would be shot. The crew is detained in the hold. Passengers have been rousted
out of their cabins and corralled under guard to various lounges. There’s a Coast Guard vessel in contact with this Jackhammer. I guess some kind of negotiation is in progress.”

“That’s
it?
”

“No. That’s the good news. A passenger got out a phone call saying two passengers were dead, but they weren’t named. I’ll keep checking.”

I called Jacobi to tell him what I knew.

He said, “Brady will take
care of Yuki. If you were a hostage, Boxer, who would you pick to break you out? Brady, right?”

That was true. But where
was
Brady?

I forwarded Yuki’s video to Jacobi, then sent it to Cindy and Claire, both of whom had e-mailed me after they’d caught bulletins about the
FinStar
on the news.

Cindy had uncut video, just in, of helicopters in the air above the beleaguered ship. It was a haunting
fifteen seconds, during which time sections of the ship went dark until the entire ship had been blacked out. Then shots
were fired into the air. A lot of shots. Long bursts of them. These hostage takers, whoever they were, had no shortage of ammunition.

I organized a conference call, and Cindy, Claire, and I gibbered anxiously, helplessly. We sounded panicky because we were in a three-alarm
panic. We were all accustomed to making things happen, getting things done—but this time we had no moves, no action plan, nothing.

My skull felt as hollow as a drum, empty except for the bad thoughts ricocheting around inside. How could this be happening off the coast of Alaska? Where was Brady? Was Yuki okay? Was she still
alive?
Was Brady?

When I looked up, Conklin was watching me with a steady
brown-eyed gaze.

He said, “Can we do anything to help them?”

“You know that we can’t do one damned thing.”

“Then we’ve got a meeting with Donna Timko.”

The name rang a distant bell.

“Who?”

“Timko. Donna. Head of product development. At Chuck’s,” my partner said distinctly. As if he were talking to a child.

“Right. When are we supposed to see her?”

“You told her ten-thirty.”

It was 10:15
right now.

“I called her. Told her an emergency came up,” Conklin said. “She said, ‘It’s your meeting.’”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Let’s hit the road.”

CONKLIN DROVE US
northeast on Bryant Street toward the Bay Bridge and West Berkeley, a mixed-use residential/commercial area separated from the bay by the Eastshore Freeway.

As we drove, the car radio chattered, dispatch and squad cars urgently tracking the chase of a hit-and-run driver in the Financial District.

Conklin closely followed the chase and also negotiated traffic while
I manhandled my phone. I jumped from news link to news link, cruising for information about the
FinStar
, a fully loaded floating ocean liner under siege.

I found snippets on YouTube—video clips like the one Yuki had sent, truncated and poorly shot, and also taped phone calls from terrified, clueless passengers who’d managed to get out calls before their phones were confiscated.

These postcards
from the front were like random pieces of a table-size jigsaw puzzle, giving only ambiguous hints of the big picture.

And then there was breaking news from a passenger’s cell phone. A CPA from Tucson, Charles Stone, had hidden in a storage container on the sports deck. He called his brother in Wilmington, who taped the call.

Said Stone: “These guys spoke American English. Or I guess they could
be Canadian. I don’t know. They’ve taken a bunch of hostages to the Pool Deck. I heard a burst of gunfire. Tell Mollie that I love her. I love you, too, bro.”

I looked up as Conklin was backing our Crown Vic into a spot between two vehicles parked in front of a modern two-story office building with clean lines and a stucco facade. I was so preoccupied with the thoughts of the passengers on the
FinStar
that I was almost surprised to see we were still in California.

We entered the building, which had high ceilings with exposed timbers and lots of windows letting in the bright morning light. The reception area was devoid of advertising posters and other incidentals, which told me that this was a practical workplace and that the staff here had no contact with consumers. We presented our
badges to security at the desk and took an elevator up one floor.

A young man with a black faux-hawk and a guarded expression was waiting for us. He said, “I’m Davo. Donna just got out of her meeting. Stick with me.”

Conklin and I followed Davo, who opened a locked door and led us down a yellow-carpeted corridor to
Donna Timko’s sanctum, as spacious and as open as the entrance on the ground
floor.

Timko stood and came forward to greet us.

She was a very large woman, obese, actually. She wore a flowing blue dress to just below her knees, an enviable diamond bracelet, and a radiant smile. She looked as kind as she’d looked when we’d seen her on the video screen at the executive meeting.

She said, “It’s good to meet you in person. I am so glad you could come.”

I don’t know what
Donna Timko saw in my face, but here’s what was in my mind: I didn’t want to be there at all.

I DID MY
level best to wrench my thoughts away from my friends on the
FinStar
as Timko shook my hand and asked, “Would you like to see the facility? I’m in love with this place and have very few opportunities to show it off. You could even say that I have
none
.”

Oh, no. Not a tour.

Timko told her assistant we’d be back in fifteen minutes, and Conklin and I joined Timko on her rounds.
She started us off with the executive offices, introduced us to staff, and showed us the plans for the introduction of Baby Cakes, a new product that would be rolling out within the next six weeks.

Next stop was the sparkling stainless-steel test kitchens, fragrant with sugar and spice.

“We’re very focused on Baby Cakes right now,” Timko
told us. “The promotion for this product is going to be
huge, and none of our competitors have anything like it.”

Baby Cakes were the size of big-button mushrooms, each one a single mouthful of a premium flavor combination of cake and frosting to be packaged in six-cake variety packs with a price point of $1.99.

Conklin was like the proverbial kid in a candy shop. He taste-tested mocha cakes frosted with marshmallow and a bunch of tutti-frutti ones
topped with shredded coconut and I don’t know what else.

He was being affable with a purpose.

Making friends inside.

Almost unnoticed, I took up a position between a mixing station and a huge fridge and watched the cheerful elf chefs with confectioner’s sugar on their gloves and noses. I wondered if one of them could be salting cake batter with micro-encapsulated belly bombs.

We returned to
Timko’s office and assembled in her sunny seating area, banked with potted greenery under a skylight.

“So now that I’ve had my fun, what can I do to help you?” the product-development chief asked us.

“We need your informed opinion on what’s behind the bombs, Donna,” Conklin said. “Why do you think Chuck’s is being targeted?”

“I’ve thought of nothing else since the get-go,” said Timko. She reached
into her handbag for an e-cig and puffed until the end of it turned blue. She seemed to be considering how to say what was on her mind.

Finally she said, “I don’t know if this is worth a dime,
but last month, there was an offer to buy Chuck’s. Space Dogs. You know of them?”

Sure I did. Space Dogs was a hot dog chain based in the Northeast somewhere, Philadelphia maybe, or Scranton.

“Space Dogs
wants to get into hamburgers?”

“More like they wanted to take over our real estate—our stores and our plants—and also to cherry-pick our personnel. They’d be expanding the Space Dogs franchise into the West Coast in one very big move,” said Timko.

“And did Chuck’s management want to sell?”

“Stan Weaver, our chairman, was all for it. He had golden parachutes ready for key executives ready to
go in exchange for supporting the sale.”

“How did Michael Jansing feel about selling out?” Conklin asked.

“He’s as loyal to Chuck’s brand and culture as I am, but there was a lot of money involved. In the end, Jansing voted in favor of the buyout. But listen. Whether the company is sold or not, I want to help you catch the maniac who is killing our customers. That’s just so wrong.”

I said,
“There isn’t much time. If the bomber isn’t arrested in the next day or so, the governor is going to have to close Chuck’s down, maybe permanently.”

Timko’s eyes watered, and then, after a moment, she said, “I don’t know anyone who would want to sabotage this company. Most of us just feel damned grateful to work here.”

Conklin and I left Timko to her job and went out to the car, talking about
this corporate buyout wrinkle as we walked.

If Chuck’s was associated with food-related fatalities, the value of the company would tank, making it a cheaper buy for Space Dogs. On the other hand, there had to be plenty of Chuck’s employees who wouldn’t profit from a buyout.

Conklin said, “People get fired when companies are bought out, right? Someone at Chuck’s might want the deal to fall through.”

I said, “Too many twisting roads. Too little time. I don’t know about you, Richie, but I hear the ticking of the next belly bomb about to explode.”

CINDY WAS HUNCHED
over her laptop at the
Chron
, crunching toward her four o’clock deadline, which was ten minutes from now, a piece about a hit-and-run that had turned into a nightmare on Fillmore Street.

Cindy checked the spelling of the victims’ names, did a last polish, then forwarded the piece to her editor.

Before jumping back into her Morales obsession, Cindy checked her e-mail
and was cleaning out her spam filter when a subject heading made her heart lurch to a stop.

I MADE YOU CINDY.

Cindy stared at the heading. The meaning was ambiguous, but the words radiated malevolence. She didn’t
recognize the sender’s screen name, but her own e-mail address was posted at the end of her column every day and anyone in the whole wide world could write to her here. She had been
about to delete it without opening, but those four words stopped her.

I MADE YOU CINDY.

You made me
what?

Cindy sucked in a breath and tapped on the envelope icon. The capitalized text was aimed at her like a shotgun muzzle.