The Wheel of Darkness

32

SCOTT BLACKBURN WALKED TO THE FRONT DOOR OF HIS SUITE, placed a Do Not Disturb card on the outside knob, then bolted it from the inside. Climbing two flights of stairs to his dressing room, he yanked off his tie, removed his suit jacket and shirt, tossed them into a corner for his maid to hang up, and slipped out of his pants. For a moment he stood in front of the full-length mirror, rippling his muscles, absently admiring his torso. Then, from a locked drawer, he drew out a set of saffron-colored Toray silk robes. He slowly dressed himself in them, first the i

He stepped into his private sitting room, shut the doors, and stood in its center, surrounded by his Asian art collection, deep in thought. It was necessary, he knew, to calm his mind, which had been greatly disturbed by what he had heard at the di

Or was he, in fact, under scrutiny? Had his movements, his activities, his

acquisitions

, been tracked?

In his fierce climb to the top of the Silicon Valley hierarchy, Blackburn had long ago learned to trust his sense of paranoia. He had learned that, if his instincts told him somebody was out to get him, then somebody generally was. And here, trapped on this ship, without recourse to his usual layers of security, he was in an unusually vulnerable position. He’d heard rumors there was some kind of private investigator on board, an eccentric passenger by the name of Pendergast, looking for a thief and murderer.

Was the bastard investigating him ? There was no way to be certain, but the more he thought about it, the more it seemed likely. He couldn’t afford to take a chance; the stakes were too high. His adversary—for, if his instincts were right, there could be no other term for him—would have to be dealt with in a special way.

A very special way.

He turned off all the lights in the room and stood in the dark, sharpening his senses. First he listened intently, teasing out every little sound—from the faint thrumming of the engines deep within the riveted steel, to the moaning of wind and sea; the splatter of rain against the glass; the sobbing of his private maid in her bedroom; the muffled footfalls in the corridor outside. He tuned in to the sensations of his own body, his bare feet on the plush nap, the scent of sandalwood and beeswax in the cabin, the sensation caused by the deep, ponderous rolling of the ship.

He inhaled, exhaled. The three enemies—hate, desire, and confusion—had to be temporarily banished. All must be calm. Of these three, hate was the most powerful of the enemies, and now it almost suffocated Blackburn in its triumphant embrace.

With iron self-control, he moved to an easel standing beside the far wall, on which something was propped up, covered by a tied shroud of the finest silk. It had been a foolish mistake not to keep it in the safe from the very begi

He would have to find a better hiding place.

Scrupulously avoiding looking at it, he gingerly lifted the silk covering from the object and placed it in the center of the room. With ceremonial care, he arranged thirty-six butter candles on a large silver tray, lit them, then placed them in front of the object to better illuminate it—all the while keeping his eyes averted. He placed bundles of joss sticks into two elaborately chased gold thuribles, arranging them on either side of the object.

The butter candles flickered, filling the room with their peculiar, dancing, golden light. Next, he laid out a quilted silk mat before the candles and seated himself, lotus-style, upon it. Closing his eyes, he began to chant: a strange, low, humming that the careful listener would hear as a braid of the same strange sounds linked together, without begi

After thirty minutes of closed-eye chanting, the three enemies were gone, vanquished. Blackburn’s mind was empty of all hatred and desire, and receptive toit . He opened his eyes suddenly, very wide, and stared at the object in the candlelight.

It was as if he’d received an electric current. His body stiffened, his muscles bulged, the cords in his neck tightened, his carotid artery pulsed. But his chanting never wavered, growing more rapid, moving into the higher registers, reaching an intensity of sound that was nothing at all like the normal tones of the human voice.

He stared, and stared, and stared. A peculiar smell began filtering into the room, a nauseating, earthy smell, like rotting toadstools. The air seemed to thicken, as if filling with smoke, which drew together in a place about four feet in front of him, clotting like dark, viscous cream into something dense, almost solid. And then . . .

It began to move.

33

IT HAD BEEN A VOYAGE FULL OF FIRSTS, THOUGHT BETTY JONDROW of Paradise Hills, Arizona, as she waited in the gilded lobby of the Belgravia Theatre, clutching a program book. Yesterday, she and her twin sister Willa had gone to the Sedona SunSpa® and gotten matching tattoos on their butts: hers of a butterfly, Willa’s of a bumblebee. Both had bought ankle bracelets of real diamonds in Regent Street, one of the ship’s two upscale shopping arcades, and they wore them every night. Who would have believed, Betty thought, that between them she and her sister had borne eight nine-pound babies and boasted eleven bouncing grandchildren? Thank God they had never let themselves go like so many of their high school classmates. She took great pride in the fact that, at sixty-three, she could still fit into her high school prom dress—an experiment she repeated religiously each year on the a