Deep Six (Dirk Pitt 7)

The Pacific Ocean

The girl shaded the sun from her brown eyes and stared at a large pelican gliding above the ship's after cargo boom.

She admired the bird's soaring grace for a few minutes, then, growing bored, she rose to a sitting position, revealing evenly spaced red bars across her tanned back, etched there by the slats of an ancient steamer chair.

She looked around for signs of the deck crew, but they were nowhere in sight, so she shyly shifted her breasts to a more comfortable position inside the scoop-necked bra of her bikini.

Her body was hot and sweaty from the humid tropical air. She moved her hand across her firm stomach and felt the sweat rising through the skin. She sat back in the chair again, soothed and relaxed, the throbbing beat of the old freighter's engines and the heavy warmth of the sun coaxing her into drowsiness.

The fear that churned inside her when she came on board had faded.

She no longer lay awake to the pounding of her heart, or searched the crew's faces for expressions of suspicion, or waited for the captain to grimly inform her that she was under ship's arrest. She was slowly closing her mind to her crime and beginning to think about the future.

She was relieved to find that guilt was a fleeting emotion after all.

Out of the corner of her eye she caught the white jacket of the Oriental mess boy as he stepped from a companionway. He approached apprehensively, his eyes staring down at the deck, as if he was embarrassed to look at her nearly nude figure.

"Excuse me, Miss Wallace, he said. "Captain Masters respectfully requests you please dine with him and his officers tonight-if you are feeling better, that is."

Estelle Wallace was thankful her deepening tan covered her blush.

She had feigned illness since embarking in San Francisco and had taken all her meals alone in her stateroom to avoid any conversation with the ship's officers. She decided she couldn't remain a recluse forever.

The time had come to practice living a lie.

"Tell Captain Masters I feel much better. I'll be delighted to dine with him."

"He'll be glad to hear that," the mess boy said with a broad smile that revealed a large gap in the middle of his upper teeth. "I'll see the cook fixes you something special."

He turned and shuffled away with a gait that seemed to Estelle a trifle too obsequious, even for an Asian.

Secure in her decision, she idly stared up at the three-deck-high ship superstructure of the San Marino. The sky was remarkably blue above the black smoke curling from the single stack, contrasting starkly with the flaking white paint on the bulkheads.

"A stout ship," the captain had boasted when he led her to a stateroom. He reassuringly ticked off her history and statistics, as if Estelle were a frightened passenger on her first canoe rine down the rapins.

Built during 1943 to the standard Liberty ship design, the San Marino had carried military supplies across the Atlantic to England, making the round-trip crossing sixteen times. On one occasion, when she had strayed from the convoy she was struck by a torpedo, but she refused to sink and made it under her own power to Liverpool.

Since the war she had tramped the oceans of the world under the registry of Panamanian-one of thirty ships owned by the Manx Steamship Company of New York, plying in and out of backwater ports. Measuring 441 feet in length overall, with a raked stern and cruiser stern, she plodded through the Pacific swells at eleven knots. With only a few more profitable years left in her, the San Marino mould eventually end up as scrap.

Rust streaked her steel skin. She looked as sodden as a Bowery hooker, but in the eyes of Estelle Wallace she was virgin and beautiful.

Already Estelle's past was blurring. With each revolution of the worn engines, the gap winened between Estelle's drab life of self denial and an eagerly sought fantasy.

The first step of Arta Casilighio's metamorphosis into Estelle Wallace was when she discovered a lost passport wedged under the seat of a Wilshire Boulevard bus during the Los Angeles evening rush hour.

Without really knowing why, Arta slipped it into her purse and took it home.

Days later, she had still not returned the document to the bus driver or mailed it to the rightful owner. She studied the pages with their foreign stamps for hours at a time. The face in the photo intrigued her. Although more stylishly made up, it bore a startling resemblance to her own. Both women were about the same age-less than eight months separated their birthdays. The brown shade of their eyes matched, and except for a difference in, hairstyles and a few shades of tint, they might have passed for sisters.

She began to make herself up to look like Estelle Wallace, an alter ego that could escape, mentally at least, to the exotic places of the world that were denied timings, mousy Arta Casilighio.

One evening after closing hours at the bank where she worked, she found her eyes locked on the stacks of newly printed currency delivered that afternoon from the Federal Reserve Bank in downtown Los Angeles.