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his officers. The chief steward called them away a few minutes ago.”
    Khalil considered her answer. The captain had come to the bridge, but he’d been alone. “Where is your husband?”
    “I’m a widow.”
    Khalil resisted the urge to tell her that she would soon be joining her husband. Instead he turned back to Shaw. “On your feet, Mr. Secretary, you are coming with us. Someone wishes to speak to you.”
    Karen Shaw was clutching her husband’s arm. “Who?” the former SecDef asked.
    “Why, Osama bin Laden, of course—”
    An unsilenced pistol shot rang out at the back of the salon, immediately followed by the rapid putt-putting of at least two machine pistols. Khalil spun around in time to see that one of his operators was down, as was one of the male passengers. Blood was splattered all over the paneled wall, and was pooling under the two bodies.
    “He had a gun,” one of the operators said.
    Khalil turned again to Shaw. “Was he your bodyguard?”
    The former SecDef nodded tightly. “However long it takes, we will hunt you down; you and the scum bastards you work with. Make no mistake.”
    “It is you who have made a mistake by coming on this trip,” Khalil said, calming himself. “Get to your feet now, or I will kill your wife.”
    Shaw stood up, disengaging himself from his wife’s grasp. “First Afghanistan, then Iraq. You and al-Quaida are next.”
    “You will have plenty of time to practice your speech,” Khalil said. “Where we are going there will be many people most interested in your words.” He laughed. “Very interested indeed.”
    He turned to his operators at the door. “The man has a satphone. Destroy it,” he ordered. Without warning, he slashed the machine pistol’s heavy butt across the side of Shaw’s head, nearly knocking the former SecDef off his feet, a six-inch gash opening from his cheek to the hairline above his ear.

SEVEN
    McGarvey and Grassinger reached the inside corridor cabin assigned to Mr. and Mrs. James Garwood without seeing any other passenger or crewman. Once again the hairs at the back of McGarvey’s neck prickled, though he couldn’t say why. It was some inner sense, some inner earlywarning
system kicking in. But like an overused smoke detector, he sometimes got false alarms.
    He unlocked the door with his key, and eased it open with the toe of his shoe. They’d left one of the lights over the bed on, and it provided enough illumination for him to see that nothing had been disturbed.
    Grassinger pulled his pistol, glanced both ways up the corridor, and then eased McGarvey to one side, and looked inside the cabin. “Okay, boss, what’s going on?”
    “Probably nothing,” McGarvey said. He went to the closet, where he found Katy’s blue velvet zippered pouch in one of the side pockets.
    “I don’t like that word probably, ” Grassinger said. He looked inside the tiny bathroom tucked in the forward corner, then checked under the bed and took a look out the big window. But there was nothing to be seen except for the reflection of the ship’s running lights in the water rushing past.
    “Like I said, I’m tired,” McGarvey answered absently. His mind was elsewhere. There was something he was missing. Something at some unconscious level of his awareness. Something he was hearing, or feeling, or even smelling that wasn’t registering. Yet it was there.
    He found the gold hoop earrings Katy wanted, and slipped them into his jacket pocket.
    Grassinger went to the door and looked out into the corridor. “It’s too quiet,” he said softly, as if he didn’t want to disturb the silence by raising his voice.
    “Everybody’s in the Grand Salon.”
    “Most of the crew aren’t,” Grassinger said.
    “That’s right. They’re on the bridge, in the radio room, down in the galley, or in engineering doing their jobs. The ones off duty are either in their bunks or in whatever common room they have aboard, not up here wandering around in the