The Siren's Sting Read online

  ‘And my soul has suffered as only the soul of a Greek woman can. The pain changed the timbre of my voice forever. That is why it is so much in demand.’

  If her soul was the key to her voice, the rest of her secret spell seemed to lie, as far as Stevie could tell, in slurping raw eggs before each performance, in remarkable vocal exercises, and in a tortoiseshell comb that absolutely had to be in its place in the thick black chignon before she would deign to sing.

  Angelina was not modest but she was extraordinary. She saw herself as the guardian of a fantastic talent, and Stevie wondered what it would feel like to have a talent like that, to be the best in the world at something, to be so sure of yourself and your destiny. It must indeed be a marvellous thing. Every morning would bring with it certainty and passion and confidence that you were doing exactly the right thing in the right time and place. Stevie would have given a lot for that sort of comfort. Obviously one had to be born under the lucky star, but perhaps it was a matter of nurture as well as nature . . .

  Had she neglected a burgeoning talent at a tender age, a skill that might have led her to this golden path of certainty? Had she overlooked something? Arms stretching out of their sockets, head still inverted, Stevie could not think of a single thing. She was neither musical, nor artistic, nor could she run very fast; she was far too self-contained for the stage and ball sports were anathema to her; her cooking was simple and edible but hardly something she could call a talent.

  Focusing on the positives—this was a yoga class after all— she listed the things she could do well: fence, shoot, ride, disappear. All in all, not a very promising list for a small, birdlike girl with big ideas.

  A small boat on the horizon caught her attention and distracted her from these somewhat unhelpful musings. The Gulf was full of small wooden skiffs, manned by fishermen out hunting the fast-moving tuna schools. But this one was very far from land. She knew that the skiffs were also used by people smugglers taking desperate Somali refugees to the promise of a relatively better world—and it was indeed relative—in Yemen. The smugglers were ruthless, and they had reason to be: in Yemen, people smugglers could still be crucified; if the wrong coastguard approached, they were likely to dump their cargo of souls into the sea to save themselves. Stevie shook her head slowly and breathed in through her nose. She had to stop seeing menace and darkness in every situation. It was not a Healthy Outlook.

  She could not resist glancing back out at the skiff. Even with her head upside down, Stevie could tell it was going fast, very fast, and that it was moving towards them. The class retreated into the Pose of the Child for the final five minutes of the session. Stevie knelt forward, turned her head and rested her cheek on the deck, her eyes still on the little boat. Another like it appeared and Stevie felt a familiar prickle at the back of her neck. She didn’t like the little boats one bit—something felt wrong.

  She had long ago made a pact with herself to always listen to her instincts, no matter how absurd they seemed, and so, while the rest of the class rolled up their rubber mats and went down to a papaya breakfast, Stevie remained where she was, feigning meditation, green eyes steady on the horizon.

  A third boat had now joined the first two.

  No fishing-boat engine could propel the craft forward at that speed. She raced to one of the on-deck telescopes used for sightseeing and trained the lens.

  The boats were fibreglass-hulled Zodiacs—not fishing boats at all—with high-powered engines. In the first, she could make out eight men dressed in combat fatigues. Could they be from the coastguard? But as far as she knew, Somalia did not have a coastguard, and in any case, they were too far out from land.

  Perhaps it was an American or British patrol helping to keep the Bab-el-Mandeb free of drug traffickers and smugglers. The boats sped closer and the prickling on Stevie’s neck turned to ice. The men in the other two boats were dressed like locals in a mish-mash of T-shirts with Western logos and traditional headdress, baseball caps and ragged shorts, their dark faces blank of expression. In his arms, each man cradled a sub-machine gun, except for the one at the very front—not more than a boy—who held a rocket-propelled grenade launcher steady at his side.

  Stevie leapt up and headed for the bridge. Surely the captain had seen the boats too.

  But when she got there the door to the bridge was locked. Stevie hammered on it but no one answered.

  The first boat was almost alongside. The man standing at the bow of the first boat raised the RPG to his shoulder and fired directly at the bridge.

  There was an explosion like thunder and the deck shook.

  Pirates.

  Stevie’s ears were ringing as she ran along the deck. Cabin doors were opening, balcony doors sliding apart, voices rising in confusion. As Stevie sprinted towards Angelina’s cabin, she noticed the figure of a man by the lifeboat, standing still and staring out to sea. Stevie recognised him almost at once. Unlike many of the other passengers, who had obviously still been fast asleep at the time of the attack, Socrates Skorpios was immaculate in a pale summer suit and navy tie, his dark hair combed, his tortoiseshell glasses in place. He was watching the pirates. As she passed, she saw him calmly take a cigar from his pocket and light it, eyes still on the sea wolves below. Stevie had a second to marvel at his cool before she turned her mind back to the task at hand. Finding Angelina.

  The captain’s voice came over the intercom, preceded by the usual soft ringing of bells. The voice, steady and firm, told all passengers to stay put in their cabins, to lock their doors and not to venture out for any reason.

  There was another explosion, this one muffled by the thick glass and the heavy panelling of the ship’s interior. In the breakfast hall, waiters were trying to fold stiff-limbed silver-tips under tables. The room was surprisingly quiet, the waiters calm, the passengers’ faces frightened and pliant. Stevie wanted to stop and help, but Angelina would not be handling this well.

  After some knocking and reassurance, Angelina opened the door to the cabin. Her eyes and hair were wild with sleep and fright, and she had stuffed her jewels into her brassiere.

  ‘Stevie! For heaven’s sake! The cabin boy said pirates?!’ She dragged Stevie into the cabin, locking the door behind them. Stevie could now see other precious stones spread across the bed behind her, clothes all over the floor. Where was Sanderson?

  There was another explosion and the ship swung to one side, then the other. Clearly the captain was engaging in evasive manoeuvres, swinging from port to starboard and back, trying to create a huge wash that would swamp the attack vessels. Stevie suspected that the Zodiacs would ride it out with ease.

  From the cabin porthole, Stevie could see two high-pressure arcs of white water shooting over the side. The sailors had turned on the powerful fire hoses and were spraying the water down the sides to repel boarding. The attack craft were right alongside the ship now, almost touching it. One man, wearing a balaclava, held a coil of rope with a rappelling hook attached. There was a burst of machine-gun fire.

  Water rushed over the porthole and the raiders became the blurry, terrifying figures of nightmares.

  Angelina staggered to the window. ‘I want to see these pirates!’ she demanded. But Stevie refused to let her look. She was frightened enough herself, and Angelina’s certain hysteria, Stevie knew from experience, would be hard to handle in a confined space.

  Sanderson, Angelina’s maid, a staunch British lady of the old school, suddenly appeared from the bathroom holding Angelina’s robe. She seemed somewhat dazed.

  Action would help keep Angelina calm, Stevie decided. ‘Quick, get me all the paste copies of the gems,’ she said to Sanderson.

  Sanderson hurried to the bed and carefully began to separate the impostors from the real stones. Stevie laid these paste jewels in the empty velvet boxes that lay scattered about.

  ‘We must hide them!’ Angelina was pacing the cabin like a caged tigress, her silk negligee falling from her shoulders, her famous hair snaking down he
r back. She could have been Cleopatra facing the sack of Egypt—one of her most famous roles—and Stevie suspected that a small part of Angelina felt this also and was rising to the occasion.

  ‘If those bandits find them, I’ll be ruined—I’ll never sing again,’ she moaned.

  Stevie ducked into the bathroom and came out with boxes of sanitary pads. She emptied the boxes and began stuffing them with Angelina’s precious stones.

  ‘What are you doing?!’ This did not fit with Angelina’s ideas for the staging of the drama at all.

  ‘What is the one thing men—all men, pirates, brigands, playboys— won’t go near?’

  Angelina’s eyes gleamed. Men were something she knew about, and she knew Stevie was right. She and Sanderson knelt on the floor and began to help. Stevie didn’t care about the jewels but she couldn’t get through to Angelina while she was still panicking about them. Hiding them would keep her client’s mind off the real problem: they were all sitting ducks being stalked by thieves and, quite likely, murderers. Stevie shivered and forced down her fear. She had to maintain her clarity. Her mind raced, looking for a plan—anything.

  The bursts of gunfire were getting wilder. The pirates were obviously trying to drive the sailors manning the hoses away from the deck so they could swarm aboard. A fire alarm went off on deck, more shots.

  ‘Leave the jewellery boxes open—strew them about the room,’ Stevie told Sanderson. ‘It will distract them and hopefully they won’t bother looking for more. There are hundreds of cabins. You and Angelina get into the bathroom and lock the door. If there is gunfire, get into the bath. You’ll be safer there.’

  Stevie opened the timber door to the sundeck and crawled out. The air was thick with smoke and the roaring noise of engines, high-pressure water, sharp shots. Stevie crept to the edge of the deck and saw the three Zodiacs riding the water below. The three drivers, all in black balaclavas despite the heat, steadily and skilfully kept the attack boats right alongside the cruise ship, poisonous remoras watching for their chance to attach.

  The boats carried massive spare tanks of gasoline and Stevie saw one pirate with a hand-held GPS. That explained how they had managed to get so far out to sea. There was probably a mother ship waiting for them just beyond the horizon, bobbing in international waters, beyond law.

  There was a long burst of gunfire. One of the pirates, in a Leonardo DiCaprio T-shirt and no older than seventeen, gripped by adrenaline, was spraying bullets about like Rambo and they were ricocheting lethally. Stevie smelt gasoline.

  It wouldn’t be long before people started dying.

  Her heart was calm and her head grew suddenly very clear. She crawled back to the safety of the wall. The distress flare was in its usual spot, behind glass. Stevie smashed the glass with her elbow and took out the gun. Cautiously, she made her way back to the edge and knelt, steadying her shoulder on the railing. The boats were directly below. She knew the flare gun wouldn’t be powerful enough to pierce the gasoline tanks—that would take a miracle— but she had to do something. Taking careful aim at the first boat with the boy wild-firing the automatic weapon, she shot the flare gun into the middle of it.

  There was a loud bang and a fizz, an arc of hot light, and the flare hit the rubber boat. For a second it lay burning, schitzing red smoke like a failed firework. Then it flared, spewing endless thick red smoke, blinding the drivers, terrifying the spraying boy, who cried out in terror. A crimson thundercloud formed around the boats, all but obscuring them. Stevie heard shouts, then someone fired a grenade. There was a massive explosion somewhere by Stevie’s balcony, and a fierce blast of burning air. Stevie fell hard against the doorframe.

  Inside, Angelina was screaming, her voice pitch-perfect even in panic; Stevie could hear her, only everything was muffled, as if swaddled in cotton wool. Her face was burning and there was blood on the carpet. She tried to stand, to say something about the possible danger of fire and the need to evacuate the room, but no words came out, or at least she did not hear them if they did. The floor swam a little; Stevie concentrated on stilling the ripples.

  Then the chief steward was at the door. There was a blanket over her shoulders, someone holding her head back, the corridor milling with people . . .

  Had the pirates taken control of the ship?

  Stevie, Angelina and the helpful Sanderson were swept along the hall, Sanderson adjusting a silk robe over Angelina’s shoulders as they walked. The ballroom had been transformed into a first-aid station and stewards were busy handing out bottles of water and blankets although no one seemed too interested in either, but rather fired questions at anyone in uniform. There was no sign of armed intruders.

  The ship’s doctor was attending to the injured (shock and awe; one or two bruises). Stevie caught sight of her face in the enormous dancing mirror and started: blood was trickling into her eye from a cut high on her forehead; her face was milk-white, and the heat from the first explosion had singed both her eyebrows to little orange bristles. She looked a lot worse than she felt, if only she could clear her ears . . .

  Someone took Stevie by the arm and pulled her towards the doctor. She grabbed the poor man by the arm and shouted, ‘Pirates?’ The venerable doctor shook his head and mouthed the word, ‘Gone.’ A wave of relief washed through Stevie. He examined her face and ears then reached for a pen and paper. He wrote out his diagnosis in a cramped biro scrawl: the cut was quite deep and would have to be stiched; there was no permanent damage to the eardrum. Stevie’s hearing should gradually return. She was sat on a chair, her cut dabbed with alcohol and injected with a painkiller. Then she felt the familiar, slightly sickening, tug of the needle and thread in her skin. She focused on the captain, who was now standing on the band stage with a microphone.

  Stevie couldn’t hear what he was saying but his face was grave and resolute. She tried to lip-read without much success; the assembled passengers clapped vigorously then something was said about signals and the Dutch.

  Surely the pirates hadn’t been Dutch?

  She turned to Angelina and, although her own ears were the ones with the problem, Stevie found herself gesticulating as she spoke, as if the diva were the aurally challenged one. Angelina, having by now rearranged her undergarments and gathered some measure of composure, took a slow breath, parted her lovely lips and began to sing, completely unselfconsciously, at a crystal-shattering pitch. Repeated at such an extraordinary frequency, the captain’s message made it through to Stevie.

  The ship had been attacked by pirates and had undertaken evasive manoeuvres. These manoeuvres had been successful and the captain wished to thank the sailors for their bravery, especially the person who had fired the flare gun. As a precaution, however, a signal had been sent to a Dutch frigate that was patrolling these waters. Fortunately, the frigate had been relatively nearby at the time of the attack; the pirates off Somalia had the run of something like three million square nautical miles and there was no way an area that size could be successfully patrolled.

  Although the damage to the bridge had not crippled it, the owners of the luxury cruise ship were taking no chances and the Oriana would dock at Aden, where a thorough damage assessment would be done. Specially chartered planes would evacuate the passengers from there in forty-eight hours’ time.

  Stevie wondered about the flare gun—something didn’t sit quite right. Her attack would certainly have been a useful distraction, but it seemed too little to deter such a professional and well-equipped assault. The captain’s evasive manoeuvres, coupled with the aggressive use of the firehoses must have done the trick.

  Angelina opened her mouth again. Stevie’s hearing was fast returning with the help of the doctor’s drops, but Angelina was enjoying her role: ‘O-O-O-Oh!’ she sang for Stevie. ‘The gala dinner planned for the last night on board has been moved forward to tonight. Please see the chief steward for details.’

  The unleashing of the magnificent voice had caused a frisson among the passengers and Stevie noticed it ha
d attracted Socrates Skorpios, who was now making his way towards them. He and Angelina had been circling each other since Port Charlotte Amalie; he sat at the front table at every performance and she carefully and infuriatingly ignored him; he sent her vast bouquets of white roses every night (until the on-board florist ran out and he had to make do with pale pink), which she accepted as no more than her due.

  What did he remind Stevie of, with his great flat head and low, powerful shoulders . . .? He stopped at their table and smiled, taking Angelina’s expectantly raised hand and kissing it elegantly.

  ‘Madame.’

  A great white shark, hunter of mammals and the most dangerous fish in the sea.

  ‘I trust the events of this morning did not disturb you too much.’ He smiled, showing perfect white teeth. ‘My private plane will be waiting in Aden. I would be delighted if you and your companion—’ his eyes shifted briefly towards Stevie ‘—would join me on board tomorrow morning. We fly to Turin.’

  Angelina raised her chin imperiously and gave him a long, steady stare. Finally she declared, ‘Turin will be fine.’

  Skorpios gave a small bow and left.

  The diva fanned herself. ‘The veal is excellent in Turin,’ she declared to no one in particular. ‘One must have the veal.’

  As soon as she could, Stevie escaped to the upper deck and fresh air. A dozen sailors stood to attention, powerful binoculars in hand. Their eyes scanned the horizon. They seemed shaken, as well they might be. Stevie herself felt like she could do with a whisky and some. Yet there was a tension she could not explain but only feel in the men. She followed their gaze and thought she could see something.

  ‘May I look?’ she asked the nearest and youngest crewman.

  He looked down at the bedraggled and scabbed creature beside him. ‘It’s just a routine watch, madam. Please go back inside.’ His voice was a little strangled, taut. Now Stevie definitely needed those binoculars.