If the SOCA agents had managed to kill Rawasdeh and Ghailiani, they had Rawasdeh's assault rifle, and they probably had handguns of their own.
"How many men do we have guarding prisoners in the theater?" Khalid asked.
"Six, Amir Yusef," Haqqani replied. "Four inside, two at the doors outside."
"Alert the two at the doors. Send them up to Deck Six to kill those two."
"Yes, Amir."
"They are to use caution. The targets are armed. They are not to attempt to capture them. Just kill them as quickly and as efficiently as possible. I don't want to lose any more men."
"It will be done, Amir!" "It had better be!"
"Nice place you got here," Mitchell said as they stepped inside Howorth's stateroom. "I didn't get an ocean view."
"Maybe you don't know the right people," Howorth replied.
"Maybe. Who are your people, anyway?"
"Let's go into that later," she told him. She tossed her ID card and Ghailiani's onto the bedside table. "Watch the door, will you? If they're tracking us by these ID cards, they may be on their way here already." All business, Howorth walked to the desk set into one corner of the compartment, next to the sliding glass doors opening onto an enclosed balcony.
"Yeah. And they know our staterooms, too. Why the hell do we need to come here? We need to find a place to lay low."
She was already booting up her laptop. "Because my computer is here," she told him. "And it has its own satellite link, so we don't need to go through the ship's communications suite."
"And that right there rules out MI5 or SOCA," Mitchell said. "So… MI6? CIA?"
"Something like that." She glanced at Ghailiani, who was sitting on the bed now with a dazed and vacant look on his face. "Let's leave it there, shall we?"
Mitchell read her glance and nodded. It wouldn't do to discuss things like that in front of someone who was still, technically, a terrorist, or one of the terrorists' accomplices. He looked over the AK-47, then leaned against the door. Howorth typed in the first of her passwords… and then the second. After a moment, the front page for GCHQ's secure Internet connection came up. She typed in the final password and her user name, then began typing rapidly.
"Maybe we should pack that up and take it somewhere else," Mitchell suggested. "Damn it, they're going to be here any minute!"
"Not much longer," Howorth told him. "Just let me — "
There was a thump at the door, and Mitchell turned, startled as it opened slightly, hitting his shoulder. "Shit!"
Howorth glanced over her shoulder and saw him throw himself against the door, banging it shut. She kept typing
Automatic gunfire thundered in the passageway outside. Bullet holes appeared in the door, sending splinters whirling into the stateroom as Mitchell's body was smashed back a step in a spray of blood. The thunder continued, more and more holes appearing now on the inside of the door as Mitchell collapsed on the deck. Bullets slashing through the stateroom hit the balcony windows, smashing them in shattering glass. Ghailiani was hit as well, knocked back onto the bed as a booted foot smashed the wreckage of the door open.
Howorth had an instant to react. Mitchell's AK was too far, the P226 clumsily inaccessible tucked into the waistband of her jeans. Snatching up the computer, she leaped from the chair and whirled around toward the sliding door.
"Wakkif!" one of the gunmen yelled as he barged into the room, the stock of an AK-47 up against his shoulder. But Howorth was through the shattered glass door and onto the narrow balcony. The man behind her opened fire, and bullets smashed more glass and screamed off the balcony railing.
She hit the railing and hurled the computer out into the emptiness beyond. While it was unlikely that the terrorists would be able to break her laptop's security, there was no sense in handing them the computer's hard drive and the data stored there as a present. Grabbing the railing with both hands, she vaulted over, twisting to face the ship's hull as she slammed against it.
For a dizzying instant Howorth dangled a hundred feet above the ocean and the surging white wake of the ship below. The Atlantis Queen's white superstructure had a slight tumblehome, and her feet and ankles, she could feel, were hanging over empty space — the opening of the next ocean-view balcony below hers. She let go.
Sliding down the tumblehome, she fell into the opening of that next balcony down, snatching at the next railing, nearly losing her grip as the shock wracked her body with pain and concussion. Somehow, though, she managed to hang on, scrambling against the railing, throwing her upper body and then her leg over the rail and onto the balcony. As she rolled up against the glass doorway, she heard voices just overhead, as the attackers came out onto her balcony.
She froze. Maybe they would think she'd fallen into the sea.
They would certainly want to check to make sure. They wouldn't follow her down the outside of the ship's hull, but they would come down to Deck Five and look, just to make sure.
At her back, the glass door suddenly slid aside. She looked up at the surprised face of a man looking down at her, and held her finger to her lips.
Rubens looked up at the main display screen dominating one wall of the Art Room. At the moment it showed a shocking digital photograph blown up with punch-in-the-gut clarity — two women, one in her thirties, the other obviously much younger, lying side by side on a rumpled bed, tied, gagged, and partly undressed. A newspaper lay on their bare stomachs, folded to show the masthead logo, The Sun, and today's date.
"Do we have a positive ID on them?" he asked.
"Yes, sir." The reply came through an overhead speaker. Charles Gaither was an NSA analyst working at GCHQ in England and was speaking over one of the NSA's secure satellite links with Menwith Hill. He had the same image on his own monitor, thirty-four hundred miles away. "The one on the left is Zahra Ghailiani. Age thirty-four. Housewife. The other is Nouzha Ghaliani, daughter, age fifteen. Zahra's husband is Mohamed Ghailiani. Their address is a flat on Lower Mortimer Road, in Woolston. British citizens. Mohamed Ghailiani is a security officer on board the Atlantis Queen."
"So the IJI is holding these two hostage to guarantee Ghailiani's compliance."
"Yes, sir. According to our informant on the Queen, they forced him to make security cards for them that gave them access to all parts of the ship, then forced him to help them get three trucks on board while the Queen was still at the dock. According to him, they've e-mailed him several photos like this since the ship left port. He's terrified for their lives."
Rubens studied the photo a moment, looking for clues in the background. The wall was dirty plaster; a piece at the extreme right edge of the photo had cracked and broken off, exposing the lath beneath.
"You'll have been analyzing this," Rubens said. "Do you have anything yet?"
"Not much. See the hole in the wall at the right? Lath and plaster construction. That means they're being held someplace pretty old, built before dry wall came into general use. Almost certainly not a motel or a hotel. The bed frame is an old style, too, probably at least thirty years old."
"It doesn't look much like an upscale part of town."
"Exactly. We also know they had photos of the two women to show Ghailiani the same morning they went missing. We're operating on the assumption that they're being held pretty close to Woolston, probably in the same neighborhood, within a fifteen-or twenty-minute drive. That narrows the field for the search quite a bit. MI5 has units out now going door to door, asking people if anyone saw anything suspicious last Thursday."