Chapter 3 - The 40 Men in Black SUVs
Up on Pier 4, the crowd had swelled silently, though no one had officially been invited. Fourteen black SUVs stood in two rigid rows with their high-beam headlights aimed directly across the dark water toward the burning hull of the ship, cutting through the swirling harbor mist like searchlights over a prison yard. Not a single engine was running. Forty men in long, dark wool coats stood shoulder-to-shoulder behind that blinding wall of light, their hands buried deep in their pockets, their faces expressionless.
In Ridgeport, those men moved when one man told them to move.
Arthur Brereslin stood slightly ahead of the group, leaning heavily on a carved ebony walking stick as he watched the white steel of the ship's stern disappear behind billowing clouds of black and white smoke. Beside him, Garrett Holloway stood shivering slightly in his perfectly pressed gray coat, dabbing at his forehead with a silk handkerchief while the fire captain’s radio crackled with broken, staticky reports from inside the hull.
"She went in anyway," Garrett muttered, his voice tight with a mixture of disbelief and simmering rage. "The nurse. She actually took the fire captain's spare gear and crawled through the service hatch."
"A nurse," Arthur repeated softly, his old, gravelly voice carrying easily across the silent pier. "Not a union man. Not an engineer. A woman who spends her nights changing IV bags and counting pills at Ridgeport Memorial."
"She knows too much about the gas lines, Arthur," Garrett hissed, glancing sideways toward the line of silent men in coats. "She recognized the manufacturer's stamp on the valve assembly. She said she saw it in a report she wrote herself years ago, before she came to this city. If she comes back out of that ship alive, she's going to start asking questions about who authorized those non-standard fittings during the retrofitting process. And you know whose name is on the primary contract authorization."
Arthur didn't look at Garrett. His gaze remained fixed on the christening lights still burning stubbornly at the bow of the ship, casting a sickly yellow glow over the water. "Elias is still down there," Arthur said quietly. "The head count was taken three minutes after the general alarm sounded. One hundred and ninety-eight guests accounted for. Twelve crew members accounted for. The security detail checked the perimeter twice."
"And Marquetti?"
"Elias went back down to the lower archive room near Deck 1 to retrieve a bronze plaque bearing his sister's name before the hull temps spiked," Arthur said, his fingers tightening around the head of his walking stick. "He never came back up through the main stairwell. The structural shift must have jammed the hydraulic bulkhead doors."
"Then he's trapped in the dry core," Garrett whispered, a sudden, sharp light flickering in his eyes. "With forty percent of the oxygen in that compartment consumed by the fire, he has maybe twenty minutes before he passes out from carbon monoxide poisoning. And if the pure-oxygen line blows the bulkhead..." He left the sentence unfinished, but the implication hung heavy in the damp harbor air.
"None of the men will move without his direct order," Arthur said, turning his cold, weathered eyes toward Garrett. "You know how this harbor works, Garrett. If Elias dies down there, the contracts dissolve, the municipal council resets the zoning laws for the entire waterfront, and your little construction project on Pier 6 becomes the most valuable piece of real estate on the Eastern Seaboard. Is that why you look so remarkably calm for a man whose boss is roasting alive?"
Garrett stiffened, taking half a step back. "Watch your tongue, old man. I am executing the operational rollout approved by the board."
May you like
"The board answers to Elias," Arthur murmured, leaning slightly forward on his cane. "And Elias answers to nothing. Which is precisely why that nobody nurse in the faded green scrubs is the only person on this pier running toward the fire instead of calculating how much money she can make off the ashes."
Out on the water, a sudden, violent shudder rippled through the hull of the ship, followed by a muffled metallic groan that made the pilings of the pier vibrate beneath their boots.
