The police chief caught his attention. “There’s a hatch over here. You can go inside if you like. It doesn’t look like much. There are no signs of anyone living on board recently. I’m starting to wonder if your red card was even connected to the ghost ship at all.”
Andre made a wry smile. “It’s a possibility. I mean, it’s not like Sam Reilly used this boat to sail here. Of course, that still leaves the question of how he got here in the first place.”
“Maybe someone dropped him off from a mother ship, and he just rowed into the harbor.”
“Sure. But if you’re going to do that, why bring the girl you just murdered? Why not dispose of her body in the sea for God’s sake? He must have known her body would immediately bring with it a crime investigation?”
The police chief held the hatchway open for him. “No idea. If you happen to work that one out, you let me know, won’t you?”
“Of course.”
Andre ducked down, and climbed into the decks below.
The inside of the ship seemed barren, but otherwise in much better shape than she was above decks. It made him wonder whether the hatch had been closed all these years, protecting the inside of the hull, while time and seawater corrosion decimated the outside of the ship.
He shined a small flashlight around the hull.
Careful not to let the hatchway close and somehow trap him inside, he headed deeper into the ship. The place was dry. The air, stale and musky. He walked around for a little while, before stopping to carefully pace out the full length of the internal hull. He reached the end and stopped.
Glancing up at the police chief, he asked, “Where’s the rest of the boat?”
“What rest of it?” the police chief replied, his palms facing upward. “What you see is what you get.”
“No, it isn’t,” Andre said, emphatically. “I’ve never been a sailor and I can’t say I know much about boats, but I do know that this isn’t the entire boat.”
The police chief shot a puzzled look at him. “It isn’t?”
“No. For one thing, where’s the cockpit? Boats, even ghost ships, need a helm or somewhere to steer the boat from. Then there’s the issue of an engine room, sleeping quarters, toilets… there’s nothing in here.”
“Maybe the place has been stripped by salvagers?”
“No. There’s more to it than that. If someone went to the trouble to gut this ship, they would have extracted the steel from her hull. Mark my words, there would be more here than we’re looking at. Find its second hull, and we’ll find answers to our mystery.”
“You’re that confident?”
“Yes! The length of the exterior hull, taken from my assessment on the deck is precisely seventy-nine feet in length, yet the internal hull is just sixty. So, you want to take a guess where those other nineteen feet disappeared to? Also, we’ve lost nearly four feet on either side of her beam. You know what this means, right?”
The police chief’s eyes narrowed. “There’s a double hull.”
Andre said, “Exactly! And I think I know why.”
The police chief glanced at him. A mental image of the ship out of water appeared to be coming to him, giving credence to the theory. He turned to one of his officers. “Go back to the shore. I want two UV light sticks. If there’s a secret door, I want it found.”
“Understood, sir.”
A few minutes later, the police chief reappeared with a pair of UV lights. It was amazing what things the UV light highlighted. The iron from removed blood, sweat, salt, and other human byproducts ordinarily hidden from the naked eye, became radiant under the UV rays. He handed one to Andre and kept the other one to use himself.
Andre took the UV light, switched it on, and then switched off his own flashlight, leaving them in the dark blue haze. He slowly walked the length of the ship’s hull, searching for signs of human presence. There was very little evidence of human habitation. If anything, he was starting to return to his original theory that the ghost ship had nothing to do with Sam Reilly.
Maybe it really was just one hell of a coincidence the ghost ship washed up into the harbor of Vernazza the same night Sam Reilly happened to make an attempt to survive. It didn’t really matter to him. In the end, all he wanted to do was make certain that the man hadn’t left anything incriminating on board — anything that might bring down his employer.
He’d been paid to complete a kill contract, but as a loyal servant, he would be remiss if he were to leave evidence, allowing the truth — which Sam Reilly was in possession of — to come out anyway. No. He needed to be certain.
He turned and headed toward the stern.
About eight feet from the edge, he stopped and grinned. There was a small outline that looked like a series of handprints.
But no door handle, no latch, and no sign of anywhere to go.
Andre frowned.
Behind him, the chief of the police asked, “Find anything?”
“I don’t know. This whole area here lights up with evidence of hundreds of hand prints, carefully placed on exactly this same location.”
The chief stared at it. “The door, if there is a door, is perfectly sealed. Someone has gone to great lengths to keep its location hidden.”
“Mark my words, there’s a door right there.”
As if to prove the point, the door flung open.
A figure in dark clothing and wearing a black balaclava, stepped out, grabbed the chief of police, and dragged him inside again — like a predator in the night.
Leaving Andre all alone and unable to enter the locked door.
Chapter Fifteen
Andre tried to blink the foggy haze out of his mind.
The door had smacked him in the face as it opened with such force that it nearly rendered him unconscious.
He kicked at the door, but it didn’t budge. His heart was pounding. He had it. He’s close. He just needed to get inside that damned door.
He withdrew a silenced, Heckler and Koch, Mark 23 semi-automatic pistol. He leveled the weapon at the section of the near-invisible hatchway where the handprints were confined, and paused, contemplating shooting at it. He dismissed the thought in an instant. The internal hull was made of steel — his .45 ACP rounds would barely dent it, before most likely ricocheting and killing him in the process.
He gave the door one solid kick with his boot.
Andre gave a loud grunt.
It certainly felt like kicking steel. The intricate web of tendons and ligaments that held the patella — that small flat bone that acts as a protective cover for the knee joints — felt like it was going to snap.
His jaw hardened, and the lines around his face deepened. He was reacting on instinct and reflexes. Not the way he usually operated. His best-case scenario — what he really wanted and needed to do — was get through that hatch, kill everyone inside, and close the hatch again.
But that was no longer an option.
He needed help.
If he could get some reinforcements and a welder, there might just possibly still be time to go in, and kill everyone. Maybe, if he acted fast enough, and told the polizia about someone taking their chief captive, he might still have a chance to succeed. It would mean more collateral damage. For a start, the chief of police couldn’t be allowed to survive, given what he must already now know. And next, everyone who came on board to help him would need to die.
He didn’t like it.
It would be a lot of collateral deaths.
Not that he was squeamish about that — after all, he was first and foremost, a paid hitman… maybe with a better ID badge, and the pretense of a perfectly respectable job with Interpol, but none of that removed the simple fact that he was paid money in exchange for murdering people he knew nothing about.