“We’ve had to tinker with some of the settings,” said the first mate. “We’ve had some issues with schools of tuna tripping it, but we’ve kept it at a pretty sensitive level. Truth is, anything much larger than a dolphin tries to come at this ship and it’ll have a warhead heading toward it. There was one time when we nearly blasted a whale out of the water.”
“And that would not have made me happy,” said an authoritative voice. “Even with the amount of money I give to Greenpeace, I never would have heard the end of it.”
Storm turned to see a middle-aged woman, nearly six feet tall and well kept, with black hair cut in straight bangs across her forehead and lively gray-blue eyes.
It was the warrior princess herself.
THERE WERE PROPER INTRODUCTIONS, followed by a lively recounting of the previous evening’s activities.
“I must apologize, again, for the method of extraction,” Karlsson said when they were through. “In addition to my usual concerns about privacy, I felt the CIA’s involvement required some extra care. If we had met at Slip F-18 as planned, we would have been practically begging for someone to tail us. Unleashing Tilda on you was the only way I could think of to prevent that.”
“That’s okay,” Storm said, winking at Tilda. “There were benefits.”
Storm and Karlsson left Tilda and the other crew members, retiring to a salon just off her private quarters.
As with other rooms in the ship, this one was decorated in its own style — in this case, Queen Anne. Storm recognized a classic example of portraiture of that era. The largest was of a man with a doughy face in knight’s armor. He had a towering pouf of center-parted curly hair. It was a wig that would have made a Jersey girl proud.
Storm selected a high-backed walnut chair with swooping cabriole legs and sat.
“That’s from the early eighteenth century,” Karlsson told him. “It is believed that Queen Anne herself sat in that chair when she celebrated passage of the Acts of Union with Parliament. Are you familiar with the Acts of Union?”
Storm bit his lip rather than make a joke about the acts of union he personally preferred. “Not really,” he said instead.
“They were two acts, passed by the parliaments of England and Scotland, that ended hundreds of years of bloody fighting between the English and the Scots with the stroke of a pen rather than the flash of a sword. What’s interesting is that, unlike most treaties, both sides came away claiming to be the victor. But I would argue that’s what happens when you erase national borders, which are human constructs that never should have been drawn in the first place. Everybody wins. That chair is a symbol of my hope for humanity.”
“Should I stand instead?”
“No, no,” she laughed. “I know my tastes are a bit eclectic, but it is done thoughtfully. I don’t want to be a slave to one design style any more than I’d want to be a slave to one government. I don’t want people to come here and say, ‘Oh, a Swedish lady lives here’ or even, ‘Oh, here’s a Swedish lady who’s pretending to be Hindu.’ I want the whole world represented on this ship. I want people to find something that’s familiar and comfortable in one place, and then something that broadens their horizons or challenges their perspective in another.”
“It’s breathtaking,” Storm said. “Every bit of it.”
“Well, thank you,” she said. “To tell you the truth, Brigitte had a very heavy influence on this room. She picked out several of the pieces. She loved the Michael Dahl portrait behind you.”
Storm turned around and again appraised the painting of the guy with the Jersey-girl hair.
“That’s Prince George of Denmark. He was Queen Anne’s husband. Brigitte picked out that painting because of the kind of spouse Prince George was. He was always supportive of his wife in public, even when they disagreed privately. And unlike most men of that era, who would have tried to assert their dominance over their wives in some or all aspects, Prince George was quite content to let Queen Anne be the powerful woman that she was. You could say Queen Anne had the world’s first truly modern mate, a person who was not fixated on gender roles.”
Ingrid’s voice trailed away. Storm could tell she was lost in a memory.
“You cared for her a lot, didn’t you?” he said.
“Oh my, I…yes, of course. Brigitte and I were lovers, as you may have heard. She was…I won’t say she made me realize I was a lesbian, because that’s not true. I had figured out fairly early on I was not interested in a sexual relationship with a man. No offense.”
“None taken. I’m not interested in a sexual relationship with a man, either.”
Karlsson smiled and continued: “But even though I knew men weren’t for me in the way that women were, I wasn’t sure if I could ever really have a true relationship with a woman. Most of the women I was attracted to physically were not attractive to me in other ways. I wasn’t really sure I could be a true-life partner with any of them. This sounds conceited, but I didn’t think any of them could be my equal. I certainly wasn’t ready to share equally with them, to give and take and compromise the way you have to if you are to succeed in a relationship. Then I met Brigitte and everything changed. She was what I had been looking for even before I knew I had been looking for it.”
Her gaze again went distant. Then she returned her attention to the room and said, “Please don’t share any of this with the press. These are not things I want to read in the tabloids.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Thank you. Brigitte and I talked frequently about living more openly, because we’re proud of who we are. It’s not like we were ashamed of anything. Our families certainly knew the nature of our relationship, as did our close friends. But we just didn’t feel like it was anyone else’s business. No one talks about the sexuality of the CEO of UPS or FedEx. Why should mine be an issue?”
“I understand,” Storm said.
“Anyhow, we were not married in the legal sense, because neither of us wanted to recognize the hegemony of a nation-state, nor did we want the complications of a religious union. I’m not sure either of us could have decided which religion we actually practice” — she interrupted herself with a laugh — “but we were married in the emotional sense. There was never going to be another woman for me, or for her. And I don’t think it ever occurred to me we wouldn’t live to a ripe old age together. Then the plane crash…”
Storm shifted in his seat, which creaked with the ancientness of wood that had held many bodies before his. He could tell he had lost Ingrid to her thoughts again, so he brought her back by saying, “Which is, of course, why I’m here. Jedediah Jones tells me you’ve developed some information about who’s behind this?”
“Yes. It turns out fifty million dollars buys a lot of cooperation from people who otherwise wouldn’t be very helpful to anyone. These terrorists claim to be undyingly loyal to their causes and their ideals, but it’s amazing how fast their fealty fades when you dangle enough money in front of them. Have you ever heard of the Medina Society?”
“The Medina Society. A violent splinter cell of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Storm said, as if reciting from a textbook. “Named after the city in Saudi Arabia where the Prophet Muhammad fled after being forced from Mecca in the year six-twenty-two. This journey, known as the hijra, is considered the beginning of the Islamic era. The siege of Medina was the first major military victory for Muhammad and his followers, who eventually conquered all of Arabia. Medina is also where Muhammad is buried, which makes it a holy place to followers of Islam, second only to Mecca in its importance. Non-Muslims are not allowed to enter portions of the city.