Danny and Floyd were just as eager for answers as everyone else, so when they saw a crowd gathering around a member of the ship's security force, they hurried over to join it.

They soon realised that they were wasting their time there, though. People were shouting questions at him, and the poor man could only tell them that communications would be restored as soon as possible, and that in the meantime they should stop worrying and enjoy the ship's activities.

"He's carrying a gun," Danny observed.

"Yeah," Floyd replied. "He's pretty sure trouble might break out."

"I wonder if he'd be willing to use it on passengers, if he felt threatened enough."

"Dunno," said Floyd, "but it makes me really glad I've got my little friend here." He patted the small pouch he was wearing around his waist, in which he was carrying his phone and a small pistol.

"Me too,"said Danny. "Never go travelling alone. That's what I say."

As it became clear that the security man had no answers for them, the crowd was breaking up into clumps of three to half a dozen, voicing their fears to each other in quiet, hushed voices. Danny and Floyd began moving away as well, but then they stopped as they both caught a glimpse of a person they immediately recognised as a kindred spirit. They shared a glance at each other, and then, by unspoken agreement, they angled towards him, trying to get closer without drawing attention to themselves.

They got close enough to be able to overhear his conversation with a woman they presumed to be his wife, and then they turned to look out over the railing at the sea, while straining their ears.

"I'd be a lot happier with my Winchester in my hand," the man was saying. "That man had a gun. If he needs one, then I do as well."

"If there's going to be trouble," the wife agreed, "better to be one of the ones doing the protecting than one of those being protected."

"Right. We'd be a real asset to this ship if we'd been allowed to bring our guns. As it is, looks like we'll be depending on the protection of people who've probably only fired a gun on a firing range, and not very often there, either. The ship's defence needs to be in the hands of people who have real experience in combat."
"Not much we can do about it, though. Our guns are all back in Knoxville."

"It's our duty to defend the ship," the husband insisted. "These people don't know it, but they're depending on us. We should introduce ourselves to the Captain and tell him that we can be useful to him."

"He won't listen," the woman replied. "He has no idea who we are, how qualified we are. He's not going to hand over guns to random passengers."

The man nodded reluctantly, his face growing grim. "These bloody Europeans. If pirates attack, they're likely to just hand over all their valuables, and ours as well, and tell us to claim on the insurance. Well we're Americans, and our insurance is made of blue steel."

"Damn right," the wife agreed.

"We stand our ground. We fight for what's ours. Anyone who wants to rob from us has to ask themselves if they value their lives more than our stuff." He was pacing back and forth across the deck now, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. "There is no way I'm going to kneel at the feet of a pirate while he takes what I've earned with my own sweat and blood. What's mine is mine and I will fight to keep it."

"We've got nothing to fight with," his wife pointed out. "If this was an American ship, they'd let us have the means to defend ourselves."

"Right," the man agreed. "Bloody Liberal Europeans. From now on we travel American. See if any pirates feel like taking on a shipful of good 'ol boys who know their second amendment rights."

"But right now, we're on a European ship," his wife reminded him. "We can get knives from the kitchen... I don't know what else there is around here we can use as a weapon."

"There are weapons aboard this ship," the man told her. "We..." He looked around furtively, then took his wife by the arm and guided her a little further away. "We have a duty to do what needs doing."

They kept moving further away until Danny could no longer hear the conversation, but he'd heard enough. "They're going to try to steal a gun from one of the ship's security men," said Floyd, looking alarmed. "That would be bad. Very bad."

"Right," Danny agreed. "Can't have that." The crew searching for a stolen gun would be very bad news for people who already had illegal guns on them.

As usual, Danny took the lead, moving forward with Floyd following behind. There was a door in the bulkhead behind the married couple. Danny moved close beside the husband, reaching for the door handle. The husband moved aside to make room for him, but then Danny grabbed him and shoved him through into the room beyond. The man opened his mouth to shout, and Danny pulled his gun on him. "Quiet," he told him.

The wife followed them in, under the urging of Floyd, who was covering her with his own gun. Danny closed the door, and quickly scanned the room to make sure it was empty. There were tables and chairs, arranged as if in a classroom, facing the front, but no people.

"Forgive the strong-arm tactics," said Danny, still covering the man with his gun, "but we are professionals, and the last thing we need is a pair of amateurs causing trouble for us."

"We have a son," said the wife, her eyes wide with fear. "His name is Eric. He's eight years old."

"We're not going to kill you," said Danny.

Floyd gave him a curious glance. "We're not?"

"And if we were," Danny continued, "knowing your names wouldn't make us think twice, so forget the amateur psychology. I think we can be of use to each other."

"How?" the man asked.

"There isn't going to be a pirate attack," Danny told him. "If there were, they would have attacked by now. You don't capture a cruise liner by alerting them and giving them time to organise their defences. However, there is something going on. Something bad."

"What are you thinking?" asked Floyd.

"I'm thinking that, if there's something brewing, this might be a good time to start making alliances," his partner-in-crime replied. "Recruit people to our side, in case we need to call upon them some time soon."

"People we can trust," said Floyd, looking at the husband suspiciously. "Amateurs who know too much about us could be a liability." He turned to Danny. "You and me, we make a good team. We know we can depend on each other. These two are what Harris called an unknown quantity, and you know how he deals with unknown quantities."

"Right now, the whole ship is an unknown quantity," Danny replied. He tucked his gun back away in his waist pouch. After hesitating for a moment, Floyd did the same.

"I have no idea what's going on," Danny went on, "and that scares me. I want to get off this ship. I want to get back to the world I know, where I know how to survive and make a profit. I want to fulfil our contract, get off the ship, collect the Bounty, buy a private island in the pacific and watch whatever happens to this ship on the telly while sipping piña coladas and being massaged by topless beauties with flowers in their hair. The only problem is the getting off the ship bit. That's where we'll need help."

"You want to take one of the lifeboats?" said the husband. "In broad daylight?"

"We can do it if there are three of us with guns."

"Four of us," the husband corrected him, nodding towards his wife. "Doris can handle a gun as well as I can."

Danny nodded. "Four of us, then. Two to operate the winches, the other two to keep the security men away. They won't risk a firefight. They'll let us go, and leave the Brazilian authorities to deal with us. And we're very, very good at evading the authorities."

"Very good indeed," said Floyd with a grin.

"And then the two of you get away, leaving us to face the music," said the husband, his face darkening.

"No we won't," said Danny, "because you'll have guns as well, and if we try to betray you, you'll shoot us."

"Damn right," said the wife, nodding fiercely.

"Yeah, you get to come with us," Danny continued. "You can make up whatever story you want, that you got off at the last port or something. You go back to your lives, we go back to ours, and whatever happens to the ship is someone else's problem."

"We've used our credit cards since leaving Trinidad," said the husband, frowning uncertainly.

"They were stolen, obviously," said Danny with a grin. "Someone's been using your cards to live the high life on this ship while you were taking in the sights in Trinidad. Just make sure you throw them overboard, so you don't forget and use them yourselves when you get back to your lives."

"So where do we get these guns?" asked the husband.

"Not from the crew," said Floyd firmly. "The last thing we want is to alert them that we're on to them."

"Right," said Danny. "We have spares. We'll give them to you."

"No we won't!' said Floyd in sudden alarm. "How do we know they won't use them on us?"

"You can trust us the word of Abraham Dillinger the Third," said the husband proudly. "Just ask anyone who knows me."

"We'll do as you say," Doris promised them. "We have a son to protect. All we want is to get him away from danger. If that means taking orders from a pair of criminals, then we're okay with that." She turned to her husband. "Right?"

"Right," he agreed. "The real criminals are the authorities who think they can keep us cooped up here while we die like animals. I'm an American. If I'm going to die, it'll be with a gun in my hand."

"Die like animals?" asked Doris.

"Yes," said Abraham, nodding vigorously. "I mean, it's obvious what's going on here. The ship's been placed under quarantine." He turned to face the two hit men. "Someone has decided that this ship has to be completely cut off from the rest of the world. Why would they do that? I'm thinking it has to be because there's some kind of deadly disease aboard."

"No, it's not that..." said Danny, shaking his head.

The husband was steamrolling on, though, caught up in his own private fantasy. "One for which there's no cure," he said. "If it reaches shore, it'll kill millions. So they cut us off from the rest of the world until every last one of us is dead. If the world finds out, there'll be an outcry. People will insist that the healthy be taken off the ship, to save them, but the authorities might not want to take the risk."

"They'd rather see every last one of us dead than risk their own precious lives," said the wife, nodding wisely.

"It's not plague," insisted Danny, though. "I don't know what it is, but it isn't that. The crew thought it was pirates, that's why they had the water cannons going. They turned them off when they realised they were wrong. The crew's completely clueless. They've got no idea what's going on."

"If it was plague, they confine everyone to their rooms," said Floyd, speaking as if to an imbecile. "Keep people from mixing."

"The infected people may already have been confined to their rooms," Abraham told him. "Quietly, so as not to alarm everyone else. Locking down the rest of us will have to wait until they can get more armed men on board. At the moment, there are precisely twenty guns on this ship, in addition to the ones in your possession. That's not enough to control three thousand panicking passengers. There'll be armed men on their way right now, though. Helicopters, speedboats. And there'll be warships around us, to keep us in and the press away. Which means we haven't got much time. If we're going to steal a lifeboat, we've got to do it quickly."

Danny decided there was no point trying to argue with him. Let him believe in a shipboard plague if he wanted, so long as he didn't do something stupid that would get him and Floyd discovered. Their assumed identities were rather basic. They wouldn't stand up to proper scrutiny.

"As I said, we've got one little bit of business to take care of first," he said instead. "A job we agreed to do. Then we can go."

"And when do we get the guns?" asked Doris warily.

"When we're ready to take the lifeboat. What we've got to do will only take an hour or so. Two tops. Then we'll meet you back here. That okay with you?"

"We'll be here with our son," said Abraham. "Everything we do is for him, you understand."

"Of course," said Danny with an innocent smile. "Family is everything. So be here in two hours."

"We'll be here," Abraham promised him.

Danny went back to the door and peered through the small window at the Promenade. Seeing no-one outside at the moment, he opened it and he and Floyd slipped out, strolling casually away along the deck. When he'd gone a few dozen metres he looked back to see Abraham and Doris also leaving, heading in the other direction.
"Well, that's them taken care of," he said with satisfaction.

"Taken care of?" asked Floyd.

"They were going to steal a gun. Now they won't. Now the ship will be nice and peaceful when we steal a pair of jet-skis."

Floyd grinned with relief. "I knew you were kidding," he said. "Give them a pair of our guns. You really had me going for a moment."

"By the time they realise they've been had, we'll be safely ashore and away from whatever madness is happening aboard this ship. Back to our normal lives."

"Can't wait," said Floyd happily. "We just gotta take out Dixon first."

"Oh yes," Danny replied. "Can't renege on a contract. No-one would ever hire us again. If I know him, he'll be in the casino again. Making life hell for another innocent croupier. Maybe we can persuade the poor soul to help us."

"People helping each other always makes me happy," said Floyd, and Danny laughed in agreement as they made their way towards the rear of the ship.