Free Chasing Ivan by Tim Tigner Page B

titled: the Champagne went to his head .  
    I whipped out the Range-R and began walking down the left side of the corridor, pressing it against the wall with my left hand while my right supported the Champagne as cover. The Range-R Xtreme was like a sophisticated stud finder that painted a picture of bodies in a room. Very cool. Of the seven staterooms, only two contained animate objects. The third on the left had a couple I was quite certain were naked, and the VIP suite contained a trio I was equally certain were not. Neither room looked particularly promising, but tactically there was a smart place to start. I wasn’t worried about dying from embarrassment.

Chapter 17

    JO MENTALLY URGED Michael to hurry as he set his cell phone down on the table, and opened an app. Dangling face down over the rail, hooked by the crook in her legs, her calves were really wailing now. She’d been crossing and uncrossing her ankles to shift the weight, but that no longer helped. Soon they would give out and she’d drop. On the upside, by using the monocular’s fine-tuning, she’d brought the phone’s screen into sharp focus.  
    As Kian watched, oblivious to Michael’s sinister intentions, the app came to life. It displayed red, yellow, and green buttons on the left, and a slider switch on the right. “The slider controls the wire’s length,” Michael said, his tone making this achievement out to be the equivalent of cold fusion. To demonstrate, he slid it until the grapefruit looked like a fat man in a tight belt. Michael shifted his gaze to Kian, obviously expecting a reaction.
    “Fascinating. What do the buttons do?”
    “Green is the release,” Michael said, extending his index finger with a flourish. He ceremoniously tapped the screen, causing the wire to slacken and the puck to thunk onto the table. “It’s heavier than it looks. Now, I want you to remember that button. It’s going to be very important later on. Next is yellow. When I tap this one, like so, the belt begins to tighten. The Swiss precision is too slow to see, but trust me, it’s moving.” He lifted the widget by the puck, and sure enough, after about ten seconds it was tight enough that he could remove his hand without it falling.
    “Now, as you might guess, red is the opposite of green. Would you care for the honor?” He proffered the phone.  
    Ever the gentleman, Aspinwall mimicked Michael’s fanfare as he pressed the red button.  
    The grapefruit puckered and then burst as the wire tightened, sending sticky pink juice spraying in all directions. A second later, the puck clattered to the table and Michael lifted the top half of the grapefruit clean off. “No breakfast table should be without one.”
    Jo thought Aspinwall was doing a great job of maintaining an enthusiastic face, despite being confronted with what appeared to be a late-night infomercial reject, at the end of long campaign day. Again his response was politely ambiguous. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
    Michael held up a finger, asking Aspinwall to hold that thought. Then he swapped apps on his phone, and again propped it up on the table so they both could see the screen. Jo strained to get the right new visual angle, adding a cramping back to her list of discomforts. Just a few seconds more, she repeated to herself for the dozenth time.
    While both Kian and Jo watched with rapt attention, Michael tapped the screen and the image of a woman appeared. Jo didn’t recognize the face — she’d never been close enough for that — but she did recognize the dress. It was Emily Aspinwall.  
    “What is this?” Aspinwall asked, his tone no longer entirely cordial. “Why are you showing me a video of my daughter?”
    Jo studied the picture. The first thing that struck her was that the image was being captured by a lapel camera. The centering was off, as was the angle, and the focus was less than perfect. It was just like the footage shot during her undercover training