Without A Trace. Sandra K. Moore
garlic, ginger and some other scent she couldn’t name. They closed around her tightly, enveloping her completely until her wide-open-spaces, American self felt almost claustrophobic, then hurtled forward to close around her as if she were a tree planted in the middle of a stream.
A hard bump knocked her elbow forward. Nikki instinctively rocked onto the balls of her feet, ready to fight.
A little girl in a pleated skirt and crisp white shirt shot her a half-fearful, half-apologetic smile as she sprinted past, her perfectly straight blue-black hair shimmering on her shoulders. A man who might have been the girl’s father cuffed her gently and guided her in front of him.
Nikki decided she was a helluva long way from home.
The wind kicked up and the scent hit her face-first: sea and salt mixed with diesel fumes and old fish. Now this felt more like home.
Nikki flattened into the shadow of massive metal containers stacked four high and hoped the security guard wouldn’t hear the water dripping from her wet suit. He walked briskly, his boots crisp on the pavement, and disappeared down past a line of containers laid out like a child’s carefully arranged toy blocks.
The Kwai Chung Container Terminal was a city that never slept. It gleamed at night, lit partly from its own high-powered floods and partly from the high-rises packed along the southwest shore of the New Territories. Of its nine terminals—Kwai Chung was the busiest container terminal in the world— Terminal Eight would accept delivery of the SHA shipment.
And it had taken a heckuva lot of cunning to get inside. Fortunately, no one had been watching the water for sneaky swimmers. The ladder bolted into the concrete pier was just as convenient for her as it would have been for a clumsy sailor, and the metal gate guarding it had yielded to some basic lock-picking.
Her goal was simple. Get aboard the SHA vessel and use her PDA to scan for a signal. If Diviner was on the ship, the signal strength would lead her to him. Then she’d contact Delphi.
Nikki peeled out of her wet suit to reveal a black long-sleeved shirt and the formfitting black pants she used for her martial arts training workouts. Her face she’d already smeared with grease, and her hair was swept back in a secure ponytail. The waterproof gear bag was slung on her back like a backpack.
She glanced around the corner of the container stack that hid her. The SHA vessel loomed at the pier’s edge, its massive dock lines—as big around as her waist—looped over the equally massive mooring cleats. Lights blazed on deck as dockhands moved back and forth, adjusting lines and checking the payload. A man in a hard hat and carrying a clipboard emerged from the bridge tower, shouted something to the workers, then headed down the boarding plank for the dock.
Getting aboard that vessel wouldn’t be anywhere as easy as getting into the terminal.
It would have helped if she’d been able to find Johnny Zhao, but he either wasn’t around or he was a ghost. She just hoped he wasn’t the kind of ghost who started out alive but was now dead. Or the kind of ghost who turned on his employer, killed her and then faded away.
Anger mingled with fear trickled through her muscles. If he’d killed Regina Woo—and if she could find him—she’d have his hide.
Nikki waited until she counted eight men leaving the vessel. If whatever was on board was important, it’d likely have security teams crawling all over it. She saw only one man still on deck, a pistol holstered at his belt, so perhaps the ship was running a skeleton crew.
The terminal’s security guard made another pass through the stacked containers. Nikki checked her watch. His schedule gave her about ten minutes to get up and out of sight.
She shimmied through shadows until she crouched next to the bow mooring cleat. The huge dock line arced gracefully up to the vessel’s scupper; the nearest big floodlight pointed away from the bow. Perhaps her unorthodox entrance would go unnoticed. Either that or everyone would see her grappling for purchase on the way up. Not pretty.
Nikki hopped onto the cleat and tested her footing on the dock line. Her soft shoe soles gripped the rough, twisted line, and its texture gave her plenty of purchase. The good news was that it wasn’t anywhere as difficult as dragging herself up a Coast Guard cutter’s wave-washed deck in high seas. In moments she had inched her way up to the scupper and hoisted herself over the rail and onto the deck.
Another minute of sticking close to shadows and moving silently had her sequestered near the containers still stacked aboard the ship. Above her, a crane’s giant hook hung in the air, abandoned, as if the five o’clock whistle had just blown. On the ship, the containers sat bunched together and tied down by massive cables, with little space for a smallish woman to slide between them. Still, she managed to squeeze in.
Hard-soled boots clanged on the steel deck, driving her deeper into the shadows. While she waited for the deckhand to pass by, she scanned the containers that hid her. Nothing out of the ordinary. She needed to get inside, where passengers—including Alexander Wryzynski—would be awaiting the captain’s permission to disembark.
Out of the corner of her eye, she noted a blip of black between the metal containers—someone had passed the gap where she hid. The better place to evaluate the situation would be up top, she realized, and pressing her feet and hands on opposite containers, she crept up between them, using leverage to keep herself suspended. Another blip of movement. Nikki froze. When the person disappeared, she crab-walked the rest of the way to the top.
Far enough from the ship’s deck lights to be in shadow even up here in the open, she could safely assess the situation.
The ship’s five-story bridge gleamed like a Hong Kong skyscraper. She counted six men walking purposefully past windows that were probably crew quarters. Another two, judging from their footsteps far below, paced the deck. Might as well assume another two, maybe three, in the engine room.
Were they all crew, or a security team, or what?
And where the hell was Johnny Zhao? According to her last phone call with Regina, he was supposed to meet them here.
Ten crewmen. One potential but notably absent ally. One unarmed woman.
That sounded about right.
Nikki stifled a snort and pulled her PDA from her gear bag. It fired up instantly.
“Wireless signal, come to mama,” she mouthed as she launched the signal probe.
The PDA registered two wireless signals: one from the terminal that looked like a wide area network, and one whose network name was complete gibberish. Not even random numbers and letters, but blocks, as if it used an alphabet unavailable to her PDA.
Is that you, Diviner? she wondered.
Her PDA faithfully monitored the signal without attempting to access the machine producing it. Dana had told her that Oracle believed the signal to be a sophisticated satellite hookup rather than part of a standard network. The gibberish seemed to confirm that.
The mystery signal was pretty strong, seventy-four percent. Nikki scuttled aft, toward the bridge, then paused. The signal strengthened a fraction to seventy-six.
Nikki stowed the PDA back in her gear bag. There was little chance she’d manage to get onto the bridge or into the hold unnoticed. Maybe she should try to arm herself first.
She slipped back between the containers and shimmied down to the deck. Moments of darting between big metal boxes, pausing to check for guards and sprinting across the occasional open area put her beneath the overhang of the bridge’s house and once more out of the light. She was ready to go inside, and the starboard door sat invitingly open about six feet away.
Shouts drove her to drop to her knees. A split second later, a bullet pinged off one of the containers. She lunged for the bridge door and spun around it—
And stopped short.
The guard’s eyes widened. Without thinking, Nikki swept her right arm down to block the gun hand he was raising, then snapped a front kick to his kneecap. It crunched. He went