Sea of Terror by Stephen Coonts Read Free Book Online

that right now."
    "You never want to talk about that."
    "That's enough, Melissa. Mommy's tired!"
    She looked up into the gray overcast, watching the wheel and plunge of seabirds. She didn't want to talk about it. Maybe it was time for that last phone call to her lawyer. It was time to end this.
    "Daddy!" Melissa shrilled, standing on tiptoes and waving wildly. "I see Daddy!"
    Nina looked down and saw Andrew McKay emerging from the glass doors to the cruise ship terminal and security area.
    She resisted the momentary urge to wave.
    It didn't look like he'd seen them up here in any case. * * ? ?
    Andrew McKay crossed the pier toward the banner-bedecked gangway leading up to the Atlantis Queen's quarterdeck, and wondered again what the hell he was doing here.
    Well, of course he knew. Nina's mother had explained it all to him quite carefully, in words a three-year-old could understand. The woman could be incredibly forceful when she put her mind to it--the perfect image of the rich, southern matriarch.
    Nina had left him four months ago, and taken Melissa with her. Eleven years of marriage, flushed down the pipes for no rational reason that he could see at all. Nina's mother apparently thought that a little Mediterranean cruise was all that he and Nina would need to rekindle the romance and find each other again.
    Fuck that. . . .
    Seabirds darted and shrieked, drowning out all else. He stopped and looked up at the enormous ship.
    According to the travel brochure, the Atlantis Queen was 964 feet long, 106 feet wide, and displaced some ninety thousand tons, making her the largest, as well as the newest, of the Royal Sky Line's fleet. She was a damned floating city, with a passenger complement of almost three thousand and a crew of nine hundred, with so much glitter and glitz that passengers could spend two weeks on board and never see the ocean, never even know they were at sea.
    Rich people doing rich-people things. He shook his head and continued up the gangway.
    At the top of the ramp, a uniformed ship's officer greeted him with a public-relations-perfect smile. "Good afternoon, Mr. McKay," he said. "May I see your ticket and your passkey, please?"
    McKay handed them across, and the officer made a note on his electronic pad with a stylus. "You're in Four-one-one-four. That's fourth deck, on the port side. Your wife and daughter are in Four-one-one-six, the adjoining stateroom, as requested." If he thought the living arrangements were strange, he gave no sign of it. "They both checked in about an hour ago. Would you like for me to page them?"
    "Uh ... no. That won't be necessary."
    "Very good, Mr. McKay." He began explaining the need to keep his key card on him and that he should wear the plastic bracelet if he wanted to use the pool, the spa, or some other ship's surface where he might not have a pocket handy. McKay listened to the spiel, thanked the man, and walked on past into the ship.
    He wasn't sure he was ready to see Nina just yet. Perhaps a drink at one of the ship's several bars first. .. *
    For Adrian Bollinger, this cruise represented a chance at a whole new life.
    Tabitha Sandberg clung to his arm. "Oh, look at her, Adrian! Isn't she gorgeous?"
    "She's all of that," Bollinger replied. "Not as gorgeous as you, of course."
    "Oh, you . . ." She gave him a playful slap on the arm. "You're just saying that."
    "No, Tabby. I'm not. Not now. Not ever."
    They stepped through the glass doors and started across the dock toward the gangway.
    A new life.
    Bollinger had to admit to himself that he'd pretty much wrecked his old one. Trading shares on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange had been a lucrative life but an ungodly high-stress life as well. Too much money, not enough sense . . . He'd made mistakes. Bad ones. And he'd ended up as a guest for three years at a state correctional institution. His wife had left him; his daughter refused to talk to him. And they hadn't wanted him back at Tarleton Financial, not a guy