The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [50]
Could that be Kirthis Kanakaratnam? It could hardly be anyone else. Tiffany was already calling to the man, dragging her baby sister toward him.
The man nodded consideringly. Then he turned toward Ranjit, who was leaning out of the van window below. Grinning broadly, the man gestured to him.
What he was trying to say was not hard to understand: He was waving Ranjit to come aboard the ship, pointing to a parking space not far away, pointing to himself and then to the gangway that linked the ship to the dock. Ranjit didn’t hesitate. He turned toward the indicated parking space, shut off the engine, slammed the van door, and trotted up the gangway.
As he climbed, he saw that this ship was clearly not one of the fifty-thousand-ton behemoths that cruised the Caribbean and the Greek islands. It was a lot smaller, a lot dirtier, and had a lot more places in its paint job where chipping indicated the need for a new coat. At the head of the gangway a large black-bearded man in a white ship’s uniform stood before a badge reader and a little gate. Next to him, however, stood the presumed George Kanakaratnam, who said something in the man’s ear and then spoke welcomingly to Ranjit. “Come aboard, come aboard! It’s grand to meet you, Mr. Subramanian. The kids have had so much to say about you! Now—this way, please—we’ll go down and have a word with Dot, and you can see what a nice stateroom the children have, all their own! And I’m getting good pay, and it looks like they’ll find a job for Dot, too. It’s just the luckiest break we ever had!”
“Well,” Ranjit said, “I guess you were pretty lucky—”
Kanakaratnam wasn’t slowing down for interruptions, especially ambiguous ones that could refer to a jailbreak. “You bet,” he said. “Good pay, too! Now we just go down these steps—”
They did, and walked through another passage, and down more steps, with Kirthis (or George) Kanakaratnam never stopping his recital of how lucky his family was and how fond his children were of Ranjit Subramanian. They passed through seven or eight doors, all of the kind that would spring irrevocably closed in an emergency, and most marked NO ADMITTANCE. Until at last they came to a door of a quite different kind, a kind that Kanakaratnam stopped before and knocked on. It was opened by a large bearded man. “He’s Somalian,” Kanakaratnam told Ranjit. “They all look like that, pretty much.”
And he gave the bearded man a nod, and the man nodded back. Then, in a quite different tone, Kanakaratnam said, “Now sit down. You’re going to have to stay here for a day or two. You don’t want to make any loud noises or try to leave, because if you do, he’ll kill you.”
He gestured at the Somalian. Evidently the man understood enough of what was going on, because he patted a wide-bladed kind of knife that he carried thrust into his belt.
“Have you got all that?” Kanakaratnam asked. “No noise, don’t try to leave, you stay here until somebody tells you it’s all right to leave. So don’t make trouble and you’ll turn out to have an interesting trip—after we take over the ship.”
11
PIRATE LIFE
It was a little longer than Kanakaratnam had suggested before Ranjit was freed. It took long enough, anyway, for him to be fed several times—quite well, actually, because the kitchen was after all on a cruise ship. At least twice Ranjit fell restlessly asleep on the hard cot that stood against the wall. The Somalian left him alone several times, but not without locking the door behind him. Ranjit thought it over carefully before taking the risk of trying it; it was thoroughly locked. Kanakaratnam looked in a couple of times, apparently just to be sociable. He was quite willing to explain to Ranjit what was going on. On the second day the pirates—that was the word Kanakaratnam himself used, “pirates”—stormed the bridge, disarmed those of the crew who were not actually already colleagues, and