Chapter Fifteen
They snatched Sonja’s phone off the desk, locked Sonja and Paul in the stateroom, and sprinted to the nearest stairwell, taking the steps three at a time and running flat out once they hit the next level down. Rounding the corner, right under the stateroom, they skidded to a halt in front of the engine room.
Laptop in one hand, Jamie ran his other over the glowing red electronic lock. “The system override locked down the door.”
Danny took the flash drive out of his pocket and handed it to Jamie. “Don’t suppose whatever you downloaded onto this will reverse it?”
“Nope. This—” he held up the jump stick “—is what we need to deactivate the bomb. Doesn’t do us much good though if we can’t get to it. Who’s got the hard keys?”
“Dad. He wanted to give them to mom. Symbolism and all.” Danny flipped open his pick set, eyeing the bolt lock beneath the keypad. “We’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way.”
Old-fashioned, handed down to him by his brothers.
Twenty-Five Years Ago
Danny was miserable. His best friend, his older brother, was going to college. No matter how many times his parents explained that Aidan would only be a few miles away at Stanford, home for Sunday dinner each week, the center of his eight-year-old world was leaving. He sat in the middle of his brother’s bed, legs pulled up, hiding his quivering chin in his knees.
“You ready to start third grade tomorrow?” Aidan asked, as he fought the zipper on his bulging duffel bag.
“Ms. Mast is the devil.”
“Daniel,” Aidan chided over his shoulder.
“What? You’re the one who said it.”
Aidan lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Because she is. But that’s our little secret. Don’t repeat it to anyone else.”
“How are we gonna have secrets if you’re gone?”
Aidan told him secrets that he didn’t tell anyone else. Not their parents, not their sisters. Just him. And who would Danny tell his secrets to—like how he’d pulled his pretty classmate Sarah’s ponytail—with Aidan gone.
Aidan stood, hand messing up his bleached blond hair. The red had been showing last night before their mom re-dyed it. Another secret, though everyone in the family knew that one.
“When can I dye mine too?” Danny asked.
Diving on the bed, Aidan pulled him into a headlock and knuckled his black hair. “Never. Dad needs at least one kid who looks like him.”
“Sean looked like us.”
“Yeah, he did.” Aidan chuckled, though it sounded sad, like when their mother and father or sisters mentioned Sean.
He had one memory of his oldest brother, and in it, he remembered digging his fingers into thick black hair. Like Danny and their father, Sean had dark hair and dark eyes, nothing like the red hair and warm brown eyes of their mother, sisters and Aidan.
“How about I share a secret with you that Sean shared with me?” Aidan said. “He was my best friend, before you.”
Danny lifted his chin out of his knees. “What kind of secret?”
Aidan scooted to the end of the bed and reached an arm out to his desk, pulling something from the drawer. He moved to sit next to Danny on the bed and handed him a black leather pouch. It was worn, like their dad’s old wallet, and the things inside the pouch clinked together like silverware.
“What is it?”
“Open it and see.”
Danny folded back the flap and fingered the three metal items inside. Tools of some sort, but nothing like he’d seen his mom or dad use around the house. They were dull and scratched; Aidan had used them a lot. One was L-shaped and flat, one was long with a triangle on the end, and the last one looked like a key, the pirate skeleton kind. “What are they?”
“Lock-pick tools,” Aidan said. “Sean gave them to me when I turned ten.”
Danny pulled each one out, feeling their weight and running his thumb over the rough edges. “But I’m only eight.”
“You’re smarter than me,” Aidan said with a wink. “This was mine and Sean’s secret. He taught me how to use them. So how about I teach you? You can practice each week, try new locks, and we’ll race each other on Sundays. See who can do it fastest.”
A new secret, handed down by his brothers. Clutching the tools to his chest, Danny smiled for the first time in days. “I’ll be better than you by the time I’m ten.”
Aidan grinned back. “I’m sure you will, baby bro.”
Present
Danny had never imagined those lessons would come in handy as much as they had over the past year and a half. Thank God and his brothers for them, though. Kneeling, he withdrew the shiny new tension wrench and inserted it first. Using a single finger, he gently nudged it left, then right. A little more give to the left, the direction the key would turn. If he had more time, he’d use the pick to test each pin, find the binding one, set it and then the others one by one.
But Jamie’s two-minute warning had Danny reaching for both the pick and rake. Holding the rake in his mouth, he inserted the pick above the tension wrench and quickly gauged the pressure of the pins inside the lock. That done, he switched his pick out for the rake. It’d take a novice multiple sweeps of the rake to pinpoint the binding pin and position the others. It took Danny two. On the third pass, he exerted exactly the right pressure with wrench and rake to set the binding pin first, then each of the others.
The lock clicked.
He twisted the tension wrench left.
The door opened.
Jamie slapped his shoulder as Danny rose. “Nice work!”
Danny grinned, silently thanking both his older brothers for the handed-down secret, but his smile died when they pushed inside and found...nothing. “Where is it?” he asked, expecting to find tanks wired with C-4.
Jamie was already moving, searching the left side of the engine room. “Look for a briefcase, probably stashed between tanks or behind pipes. Close to a fuel line or other flammable source.”
Made sense. Sonja didn’t need to bring fuel for the explosives when she had almost everything she needed in the engine room. All she had to bring was a trigger device and a spark. Halfway down the right side, he found it.
“Over here!” Danny shouted, and Jamie rushed to his side. He pointed at the briefcase wedged between two fuel tanks.
Jamie carefully withdrew the briefcase and opened it next to the laptop. Danny inhaled sharply. A tablet sat atop a single layer of C-4 bricks and a jumble of wires. Combined with all the flammables in the engine room, it’d be enough to blow the ship. Danny thought for a second about grabbing the briefcase, finding the nearest window, and chucking it outside. But windows were few and far between on this level and they weren’t on the open sea. The briefcase bomb would explode in the Port of Oakland, injuring God only knew how many people and causing massive amounts of property damage.
In ninety seconds, according to the running countdown clock on Sonja’s phone.
“Any idea which wire to cut?” Danny asked.
“In this maze?” Jamie waved a hand at the spider web of every color wires. “No.”
“New-fashioned way, then,” Danny said, trying to hide his fear behind the humor. “Hack it, future bro.”
Jamie fished a cord out of his pants pocket, connected the laptop to the tablet, and inserted the flash drive. The flash drive lit, the tablet brightened, and Jamie’s fingers flew across the laptop keyboard. So fast Danny thought he was going to be dizzy.
It got worse when Jamie gave him the comm device with a mumbled “need to concentrate,” and Danny shoved the bud in his ear. Sirens, helicopters and a cacophony of noise, all in mono, threw him off. “I see what you mean,” he said, fighting the vertigo.
Until his world stilled with a single word spoken in his ear.
“Daniel.”
He’d have fallen to his knees if not for the metal strut he braced himself against. “Melissa.”
“Dios, it’s good to hear your voice again.”
“Good to hear yours too, chica.” It’d been since the bridge, after Sonja first appeared. Less than an hour had passed but it felt like a lifetime.
“Report,” she said, but the order didn’t have the usual snap to it. Her voice was a little softer, a little weary, and more than a little relieved.
“Jamie’s working on deactivating the bomb.”
On cue, Jamie cursed behind him.
Danny whipped around. “What happened?”
“Failsafe activated. How much time is left?”
Danny glanced down at Sonja’s phone. “Sixty seconds.”
“I can do this,” Jamie mumbled, fingers flying impossibly faster.
“Is everyone off?” Danny asked Mel.
“Aidan and John are ushering the last group off as we speak,” Mel replied.
“Where are you?”
“Coming back on board, to you.”
“No!” Danny’s stomach clenched and he rested back against the metal strut, head bowed, voice lowered. “You stay on shore and make sure the rest of my family stays there with you, especially Aidan.”
“Daniel.”
“Chica, please. I almost lost them tonight. And I almost lost you. Please don’t let it really happen.” He swallowed down the lump in his throat. “Listen, Melissa, if I make it out of here—”
“No if,” she cut in. “How’s Jamie doing?”
“Whiskey, update?” Danny asked.
“Almost there,” he answered, the words slightly slurred with his tongue tucked into one corner of his mouth
Danny leaned with his side against the strut, and Mel’s gift in his pocket knocked against the metal. He wanted to believe Jamie could strike the magic keys in the remaining seconds, but if he didn’t, Danny also wanted Mel to know what he’d been planning, what he wanted to give her more than anything.
“Melissa, when this is over, I’ve got a ring in my pocket that’s yours.”
A small gasp, then she said, “I can’t wait to see it.”
The smile in her words turned up the corners of his mouth.
“Danny!” Jamie called. “I need you.”
“Twenty seconds, Mel,” Danny said as he hurried over. “Get them clear.”
“Love you, husband.”
“Love you too, wife,” he replied, then did the hardest thing of his life.
He turned off the comm.
He needed to concentrate if he had any hope of ever hearing her voice again.
“What do you need me to do?” he asked Jamie.
“I couldn’t crack the failsafe,” Jamie answered, and Danny’s fear exploded.
“What?” His exclamation boomed around the cavernous room.
The countdown clock hit ten seconds and started blinking red.
“Part of the ship’s security system is an EMP generator. Mel demanded it. I programmed an EMP kill switch into the mainframe.”
“Why’d you do that?”
“Because bombs follow us the fuck around. And as protection against high-seas hijacking. But it’ll blow all the ship’s electrical.”
“Better than blowing up the entire ship. We can rebuild the electrical.”
Jamie clasped his shoulder, squeezing. “Then hit Enter, baby bro.”
Danny’s heart warmed, remembering his brothers. He’d be okay if their endearment for him were the last words he ever heard.
He struck Enter.
The comm in his ear crackled and whined, but through it he could hear Mel’s anguished “Daniel!”
And then the world went dark.