Blood in the Water by Oliver Davies (book club reads .TXT) 📕

I pulled open a few little drawers and soon found all the bits and pieces I needed.

Back in the control room, I settled myself into Daniels’ seat and typed in the login that Mads had used to access the Syslog. He had a good, random character string password, and he was quite speedy with the keyboard too. There was no way he could have known I’d clocked it, and I’d make sure to wipe all record of it being used when I was done. I pulled up the boat’s schematics and locked both the control room doors. I’d release the one to the passageway again when I was good and ready.

Now for the cameras. Nielsen Senior must have given the kids access to those, so they could turn them off when they wanted some privacy. Mads, I was happy to see, had been a gentleman last night. I hadn’t thought he was the kind to film anyone without their permission, but you couldn’t always tell. The only footage of me on the system was from our little visit on Thursday and the earlier part of the evening.

I wiped all of that.

Next, I ran through the available camera views and pulled the most useful ones up onto a few of the monitor screens. Cory Phelps was up on the flybridge with Mads. That shouting and thumping I’d heard when our hijackers first went below must have been Mads reacting badly to being startled awake by two strange men. Somebody had landed a good solid blow or two to his face.

It wasn’t like they’d hit Conall, which would have made me really angry, but I already considered Mads to be sort of a friend, somehow, or at least a potential friend. They needn’t have done that. From what I’d overheard from the cupboard, Brian Jordan was just plain jealous. After all, Mads was rich, very good looking and very good at seducing people, none of which Jordan could claim to be. Cory Phelps just plain despised him, which was far more dangerous.

I decided that Jordan had probably been the one who’d hit Mads, just to slow him down enough to notice the gun and quiet down after his rude awakening. Phelps would probably have tried to break his nose or knock some teeth out while he was at it. Another view of the flybridge wasn’t worth keeping on display, but it did show me that Phelps had a gun and that he also had a handheld radio. So they could talk to each other.

Everyone else was in Mads’ stateroom. Jordan was lounging on the bed, and he, too, had a gun and a radio. He also had a tablet which he probably used to monitor communications. Speaking of… ah! There were no active mobile signals on board. They must have collected everyone’s phones and turned them all off. But the jammer had only been needed whilst there was still a chance of someone managing to call for help before they’d taken control of the boat. Yeah, Jordan would have known that someone would soon notice if Kværnen stopped communicating with the satellite link for a lengthy period of time.

The students were all sleeping peacefully by then. They must have given them all a choice between a sedative and a bullet, and they’d opted for the less permanent outage. Daniels and Verity were awake, but that made sense. They might need them if there was a technical problem that Jordan couldn’t handle. I put that camera feed up on a screen as well and added a couple of views of the main salon, another from outside the control room door and one that showed me the dive platform hanging off the stern.

I fed in the first segment of the code I’d been working on whilst I was stuck in that cupboard. That patch allowed me to open up a covert link to my laptop back in Stornoway. To Jordan, any data I was receiving or sending out would just look like the usual satellite chatter he was already used to seeing. I woke her up, and she obligingly opened up a remote console for me to work in, which meant I could really get going now. I logged off Mads’ user profile and got started.

Once I’d tracked our course and speed, I could start running calculations on a good spot to stop this baby dead in the water. I set an alert to tell me when Conall got around to turning his laptop on, because I could bounce what I needed straight onto his screen when the time came. He’d probably start freaking out enough to turn it on once he’d had his morning caffeine fix and realised I was missing and not answering my phone.

As I didn’t know what time Conall would wake up, or how quickly he’d start panicking, I decided to set up a few options, thirty minutes apart, covering the period between twelve and two. I picked five different sets of coordinates, more or less on our route for each time slot and got to work setting up a little programme that would make the subtle, necessary course and speed corrections for any of those whilst feeding the unadulterated, alternative data to the helm and the satellite.

Stopping to check my screens regularly and constantly keeping my ears open slowed me down a bit, but there was no real rush. Jordan left the stateroom once, to make some sandwiches and grab a couple of beers. He took Phelps’ snack up to him then returned to the main stateroom with his own. Nothing for Mads? Oh well, I’d seen that he at least had some water bottles up there. He’d be okay.

Coding done, for now, I emptied my pockets and measured out the lengths of wire I’d need from their spools before cutting them. Poor Daniels and Verity didn’t look at all comfortable. Watching Jordan casually swigging that beer down probably wasn’t making them feel any better about their situation. It