Sea of Terror Read Free

sales rep for Del Rey Computers. He lived in Westchester, just outside of Boston; he had a wife, Anne, and two children ... and was on medication for depression and for type 2 diabetes. Apparently, he was taking the long way home, by way of a Mediterranean cruise. That, Dean thought, was unusual.
    "What. . . you don't have his credit history?"
    "We can call that up for you, if you want," Mitchell said.
    And Dean knew the man wasn't joking.
    It's not that Americans are squeamish about nudity, Dean thought, watching the image on the screen, though that was of course a factor. The whole privacy issue had become a hot button on both sides of the Atlantic in the paranoid years since 9/11. MI5 itself had been called on the carpet back in 2006, he recalled, when a member of Parliament had disclosed that the security agency maintained extremely detailed and highly secret files on 272,000 British subjects--the equivalent of 1 in every 160 adults.
    How far did you go to stop the threat of terrorism, and to protect your citizens?
    Where did you draw the line between protecting your citizens ... and spying on them?
    The man on the screen walked off to the left. A moment later, he was replaced by an attractive young woman. She was wearing a bracelet, a watch, two rings, a single-strand necklace, and small, bright bits of jewelry in her navel and through both nipples. Quite obviously she was not carrying a gun ... or anything else for that matter, not even a book of matches. Hurriedly Dean looked away, focusing instead on the security cam image that showed a pleasant-looking woman in her twenties, wearing a skirt and a bright green blouse and with an exuberant cascade of long blond hair hanging down past her waist.
    Damn it, he was embarrassed.
    And yet Mitchell had a point. Dean remembered a humorous but half-serious comment that had floated about in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror hijackings ... something to the effect that the only way to ensure passenger safety on an airline flight would be to strip every passenger stark naked and handcuff them to their seats.
    Technology had all but delivered the first of those two requirements.
    Lockwood used her keyboard to call up the woman's information.
    "O-kay, then, Miss Johnson," Llewellyn said, reading her name off the screen. "Here, Mr. Dean. Watch this."
    He turned a dial on his console, and on the big screen the young woman's hair faded to a pale transparency, then vanished completely. A plastic hair clip continued to hang unsupported behind her now completely bald head, and Dean noticed that her tuft of pubic hair had vanished as well. Somehow, if possible, the complete lack of hair made her appear even more shockingly naked.
    "We can adjust the strength of the X-ray beams," Mitchell explained. "We've had people try to hide stuff in long hair, men and women both." He glanced at Dean, and seemed to read his expression. "Look, I know it's intrusive ... but most people would rather have this than have security guards frisk them ... or put them through a strip search!"
    "Both of which slow down the queue," Lockwood added, "and make for unfortunate delays at the security checkpoints."
    "Do they have a choice?" Dean asked.
    "Oh, yes," Llewellyn told him. "They can walk through the machine, or they can submit to a hand search. Of course they have a choice!"
    Dean wondered if most people knew they even had that option. That had been a problem with trials in the United States, he remembered .. . that, and the fact that most people simply didn't know how graphically revealing this sort of device actually could be. They heard "X-ray" and immediately thought of medical X-rays, black-and-white transparencies showing decidedly non-erotic shadows of bone and translucent tissue.
    "So how much radiation are those people getting, anyway?" Dean asked. He knew the answer but wondered what the security people would say.
    "About as much radiation as you would pick up walking outdoors in full sunshine,"