Cabrillo misunderstood Murphy’s disappointment. He wanted more of a challenge. “So I’m looking for either a big container ship, a supertanker, or perhaps an aircraft carrier.”

“I doubt it’s a carrier, but punch it into the search parameters anyway.”

Any station on the bridge had access to the Oregon’s mainframe computer, so Mark remained at his seat as he pulled up a maritime database for tracking shipping in the Sea of Japan. He remained hunched over his keyboard, his foot tapping the rhythm of the music pouring in over his headphones.

“What’s the status on the chopper from Japan?”

“ETA is three hours,” Linda answered. Because there was so much traffic in the area — five ships were within the Oregon’s one hundred mile radar — they couldn’t risk exposing themselves by fully exploiting her mammoth engines. The tramp steamer was only making twenty-two knots, delaying the rendezvous with the chartered helicopter.

“Okay, I’m going back to my cabin to inform Hiro Katsui that his consortium owes us two million bucks. Call me if Mark gets a hit or when the chopper’s ten miles out.”

“Aye, Chairman.”

The screen saver had been pinging geometric shapes across the liquid crystal screen for an hour and a half as Juan sat at his desk, staring sightlessly at his computer. So far he had written exactly eleven words of his report to Hiro. Even discounting Tory’s reticence, nothing fit the way Juan expected. Had a commando team attacked the Avalon, and if so, why? The most likely answer was to prevent the crew from seeing what was taking place on the other two ships. Could Mark be right about an aircraft carrier, and this was a government operation?

The problem was the only naval force in the area that had any carriers was the United States. China wanted to buy an old Russian flattop, but as far as Juan knew, they were still negotiating, and there was no way pirates could have gotten their hands on one. He was sure it was some other type of vessel that Tory saw. He didn’t discount the possibility that her ship was attacked by trained commandos, only he had no idea how they fit with the pirates Hiro had hired the Corporation to wipe out. Were they working together?

His intercom buzzed. “Juan, it’s Julia. Can you come down to my office?”

Thankful to escape the answerless questions swirling round and round in his head, he left his cabin and made his way down to medical.

He found her in the trauma bay, an equipment-packed room as modern as any level-one ER. The temperature was a cool sixty-five. A sheet-draped body lay on a gurney under brilliant lights. Julia wore green surgical scrubs. Her gloved hands were smeared with blood. Powerful ventilators prevented odors from building up inside the room, yet Juan could still sense the lingering smell of decay.

“One of the Chinese immigrants?” he asked, nodding at the shrouded form.

“No, one of the pirates. Want to take a look?”

Juan said nothing as Julia peeled back the sheet. Death never looked more ignoble, especially with the large sutured Y-incision Julia had cut to examine inside the chest and abdomen. The pirate was young, twenty at most, and skinny to the point of starvation. His hair was lank black, and his fingers and the bottoms of his feet were thickly callused. The pair of sneakers he’d worn when boarding the Oregon were probably stolen during a previous raid and were the first he’d ever owned. There was a single neat bullet hole in the middle of his forehead, an obscene third eye that was puckered around the edges.

Cabrillo couldn’t discount the brutality of what the pirates had done, but he also couldn’t help feeling a little pity as well. He had no idea what circumstances drove the boy to crime, but he felt the kid should have been with his family, not laid out on a slab like a dissected specimen.

“So what have you learned?” he asked after Julia drew the sheet back over the corpse’s head.

“This guy’s dead.”

“Well, since you performed an autopsy, I assumed he would be.”

“What I mean is if he hadn’t taken a shot to the skull, he would have died anyway, probably within the next few months.” She waved him over to a computer workstation. On the screen were spectrograph lines of a sample Julia had run. He had no idea what he was looking for. His puzzled expression prompted an explanation.

“Hair sample run through optical emission spectrometer.” The Corporation had bought the million-dollar piece of equipment not only for Julia’s medical bay but also for analyzing trace evidence. It had been key a year earlier tracking a missing shipment of RDX explosives. “During my exam,” Julia explained, “I noticed some pretty significant symptomatology. For one, he was about to suffer complete renal failure. Also, he’s anemic as hell; his gums are severely inflamed with late-stage gingivitis. I noted lesions all along his digestive tract and bloody crusts in both nostrils. It made me think of something, and the hair sample proved it.”

“What’s that?”

“This guy had had long-term exposure to toxic levels of mercury.”

“Mercury?”

“Yep. Without treatment, the mercury, like other heavy metals, builds up in tissue and hair. It eventually shuts the body down, but not before causing madness as it deteriorates the brain. I bet if you recheck the video of the pirate attack, you’ll see these guys fought with little regard for their own lives. The level of mercury contamination would have impaired this one’s judgment to the point where he’d fight on, no matter what.”

“Some of them tried to escape,” Juan pointed out.

“Not all of them had such elevated or prolonged exposure.”

“What about the Chinese?”

“I only checked one for toxicity, and she came up clean.”

“But this guy’s riddled with mercury?”

“You could fill a couple of thermometers off him. I checked two of his compatriots quickly and found the same thing. I bet they’re all suffering to one degree or another.”

Juan ran a hand across his jaw. “If we find the source of the mercury, we might find the pirates’ lair.”

“Stands to reason,” Julia agreed, stripping off her gloves with a sharp snap. She removed her surgical cap and redid her ponytail with a well-practiced twist. “You can get mercury poisoning by eating contaminated fish, but the risk’s mostly to children and women who want to conceive. But with the levels I’m seeing here, I’d put my money on these guys basing themselves someplace close to a contaminated industrial site or an old mercury mine.”

“Any idea if there are such mines in this area?”

“Hey, my job’s medical mysteries and patching you cutthroats back together,” Julia teased. “You want geology lessons, call on someone else.”

“How about their ethnic background? That might help narrow the search.”

“Sorry. The fifteen pirates I have on ice are a veritable United Nations. This one looks Thai or Vietnamese. Three others are either Chinese or Korean, two Caucasians, the others are Indonesian, Filipino, and a mix of everything else.”

“Super,” Juan said acidly. “We have the luck to run across a bunch of politically correct pirates who believe in diversity. Anything else?”

“That’s it for now. I need a few more days to finish up everything.”

“How’s your other patient?”

“Sleeping. Or at least pretending to so she doesn’t have to talk to me. I get the feeling she wants off this tub ASAP.”

“Why am I not surprised? Thanks, Hux.”

Juan had only just gotten back to his cabin and ordered a lunch of steak and kidney pie when Mark Murphy knocked at his door. “What do you have, Murph?”

“I think I found her.”

“Have a seat. So is it a bulk carrier of some kind or a container ship?”