Chapter Ten

CHAPTER TEN

Helen kept the launch pointed east-northeast for the better part of the night, supervising as the rest of us took turns with the tiller. We held the speed low to save fuel, letting the wind carry us along, gigging the engine only to correct the course. Sometime after we set out, a boom shook the world and a pillar of fire reached up into the night sky. A cloud of oily smoke obscured the moon.

“Well, that’s that,” Helen said with a sigh. She turned her face to the blankness of the western horizon. Everything, sea and sky, was black and vaguely spangled with stars. We settled into the boat, wrapping up against the breeze that had sprung up.

It wasn’t a pleasant night, but we had all had worse. By late the next morning, Helen was steering us into a small cove on Nevis. We grabbed our gear, scuppered the launch so it couldn’t be traced to the Amphitrite, and headed along the paved road at the top of a little rise, skirting the houses and hotels. After half an hour of walking, I led the way down onto the beach.

“Where are we going?” Nat demanded, struggling. My espadrilles were flat, but she was wearing her wedges, hard going in the loose-packed sand.

“There,” I said, pointing to a sign which spelled out sunshine in rope lights that were unlit in the daytime. It was a beach bar, one of the most legendary in the Caribbean. “We’re going to order lunch and a round of Killer Bees. Anyone asks, we’re on vacation and we’re staying on St. Kitts,” I told them.

Whether it was the promise of roasted fish or the bar’s legendary rum punch, they didn’t fuss. We ate and drank until our plates were empty and the last drop of rum punch was gone, paying cash with a tip that was generous enough to be appreciated but not so generous as to be memorable. When we finished, the bartender dialed us up a cab, which dropped us at the water taxi landing. It was directly across The Narrows from the bottom end of St. Kitts, where the Park Hyatt lay gleaming under the sun. The landscaping was lush and the whole resort was tucked between the edge of the sea and the hills rising directly behind it.

The water taxi took six minutes to cross The Narrows, carrying vacationers and commuters. The captain chatted with his regulars, and Mary Alice made a point of flipping through a tourist magazine she had grabbed from a rack at Sunshine’s. The water taxi dropped us directly at the Hyatt’s dock.

I nodded towards a line of sun loungers on the beach, facing Nevis. “Go and sit comfortably for a minute. I’m going to get a room.”

“How do you expect to do that without a passport?” Helen demanded.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the neoprene e-reader case I’d been carrying since I went off the stern of the Amphitrite. A quick flick of my knife along the seam, and it was open. Sealed inside was a Canadian passport with my face but a different name.

“I’ll be damned,” Nat said slowly. “Do you always travel with extra papers?”

“Ever since Argentina,” I said with a grimace. The Argentina job was one of the most dangerous I’d ever done, and an extra set of papers would have saved me a rough interrogation and two months’ incarceration in a prison camp on the pampas.

“And how is our Canadian friend planning to pay for her room?” Helen asked.

I dipped back into the case to retrieve a Black Amex. “She has a credit card.”

Just then a staff member wearing a striped T-shirt and a broad smile came over with tall glasses of iced water decorated with slices of cucumber. She served Nat and Mary Alice while Helen and I made our way up the hill to the main lodge. In other circumstances, I might have been impressed. It was open-air with koi ponds and a spectacular view across The Narrows to Nevis. The atmosphere was serene, and I wanted to relax, but it was too soon.

The front desk was like something out of Architectural Digest—a long slab of polished black concrete with rattan barstools and a lofty arrangement of orchids. Only a slim tablet computer indicated any business was done there. The clerk greeted us graciously. I gave her a thin smile in return. It was important to pitch the tone just right, somewhere between irritation and entitlement.

I eyed her name tag. “Sophia, I hope you can help us. We’re booked into a luxury villa on the other side of the island, and I’m afraid it will not do,” I said, pinching my mouth to suggest something unspeakable. “Do you have a room available?”

“I’m so sorry to hear that! Let me see what I can do.” She tapped rapidly at her tablet. “I do have a lovely beachside double queen, but I’m afraid it’s on the far side of the resort, away from the restaurants and pools,” she said, gesturing towards the opposite side of the curving bay.

I sighed a little. “I’m sure that’s fine,” I said in a tone of mild disappointment.

“It’s ready right now,” she assured me. “And as I said, it’s beachside, so it is on the ground floor with direct beach access.”

“That will do,” Helen put in, her English very faintly accented with something that might have been Dutch or Danish or anywhere in between.

Sophia smiled gratefully at us. “I’m so glad. I will just need a credit card and your passports.”

Helen made a pantomime gesture towards her nonexistent wallet, and I placed my card and passport decisively in the little tray on the table. “No, no. I’ll handle it.”

“Thank you, dear,” she murmured.

“My friend has left her wallet back at the villa. We’ll stop by later and let you make a copy after we’ve sent for our bags.”

Sophia hesitated for the length of a heartbeat and then smiled. “Of course. If you’ll give me just a moment.” She disappeared with the credit card and passport into a back office. If anything was going to go wrong, this was the moment. I took deep, calming breaths and repeated the mantra I had adopted while on assignment at an ashram in Kerala. Helen flipped through a coffee table book on the photography of Lorna Simpson.

A few eternal minutes later, Sophia emerged with a basket of chilled towels and bottles of mineral water. She passed them over with our papers and room keys.

“Welcome to the Park Hyatt, ladies. Enjoy your stay.”

We refused the resort tour on the grounds that we were meeting friends for lunch. As soon as we left the main lodge, we collected Nat and Mary Alice from the beachside and followed the map to our room.

“Safe for now,” Nat murmured. That had been another of the Shepherdess’ dicta. Whenever you were safe, even if it was for a short time, it was important to give yourself a chance to exhale, to take nourishment and rest and live to fight again.

I kicked off my espadrilles and stretched onto the bed, lacing my hands behind my head.

“What now?” Mary Alice asked. “We’ve gotten this far, but we’re still in the Caribbean with one passport and one credit card amongst the four of us. How are we getting home?”

“Not home,” Helen reminded her. “We need a safe house. We need to buy ourselves enough time to figure out what the hell is going on.”

We were silent a minute, all of us probably thinking the same thing. For all our experience, we were used to the luxury of an entire organization at our disposal, ready to pluck us out of the field if we were in danger, prepared to clean up our messes, remove us from the line of fire. For the first time in forty years, we were on our own.

I sat up slowly. “I have a friend who can help. Someone with no connection to the Museum at all.” I eyed the phone. “But we can’t take the chance of using the hotel’s phone to contact her. It’s traceable.”

Instead, I dug out the local directory and dialed an electronics shop in Basseterre. I told them what I needed and they promised delivery of a pack of burner phones within the hour. I stayed in the room to wait while Mary Alice sulked on the patio and Helen and Nat paid a visit to the hotel shop, collecting some toiletries and criminally expensive clothes for each of us, which they charged to the room. When the burner phones arrived, I plugged one into the charger and punched in a number from memory. Minka answered on the fourth ring, and I could picture her, Doc Martens propped on the desk while she fired lasers at aliens in a game she’d designed herself.

I skipped the preliminaries and rattled off what we needed—documents, tickets, etc. She knew better than to ask questions.

Minka promised the package would be to me within twenty-four hours and we hung up. When Nat and Helen returned, I explained what I had done. Mary Alice came in from the patio in time to catch the tail end, rubbing her eyes. She looked like she’d been trying—and failing—not to cry.

“Who is Minka?”

“Long story,” I said, waving aside her question. “But she’s solid. I’d trust her with my life.”

“And ours,” Helen pointed out coolly.

“If you have another suggestion, knock yourself out,” I told her.

She didn’t. We ordered room service and ate in exhausted silence. Helen had bought a few books and magazines from the hotel shop and she curled up with the latest from Reese’s book club while Nat surfed the Caribbean news channels, settling on a Venezuelan soap opera featuring a highly rouged woman who screamed her lines.

“I’m going for a walk,” I said to nobody in particular.

Mary Alice got up to join me. We left through the sliding doors and past the patio, out onto a grassy area lined by beds planted out with bougainvillea, banana trees, and pawpaws. A little distance away, a few loungers had been drawn up on the edge of the beach.

“Should we risk it?” Mary Alice asked, jerking her chin towards the loungers.

I shrugged. “Everybody else seems to be at dinner.” Sounds of silverware and soft music flowed out from the various restaurants dotted around the resort. At our end of the beach it was peaceful and deserted.

We settled ourselves and I lit a cigarette, the little scarlet glow of it winking like a firefly in the gathering darkness.

“Don’t tell me those survived a dunking in the ocean,” Mary Alice said with a smile at the cigarettes.

I shook my head. “Helen. From the hotel shop along with moisturizer and dental floss.”

“Helen hates it when you smoke.” Mary Alice and I sat perched on the edge of the loungers, our knees nearly touching as we faced out to sea. The sun had set off to our right, beyond the headland, and the air was purple

“And she got them anyway. That’s friendship.”

Mary Alice snorted. For a while there was no noise but the rhythm of the waves. Down to our left, a single palm leaned out over the water, as if listening to the secrets the sea had to tell.

I heard a brisk sniff. “I’m fresh out of tissues, Mary Alice. If you need to blow your nose, you’d better use your shirt.”

“Screw you, Webster,” she said, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. But her tone was better, her back a little stiffer. “I just can’t stand this—being away from Akiko and not knowing what she’s thinking. How she’s doing.” I didn’t say anything; it was better to let her keep going and get it all out at once. “This is the only secret I’ve ever kept from her. Well, the only one that matters,” she amended. “She also doesn’t know how much I spent on recarpeting the hall stairs.”

“Wool?” I asked.

“Organic. From New Zealand,” she said. “I’ll send you the link.”

She leaned over and took the cigarette out of my hand, drawing a deep breath and causing the cherry to glow bright red before she handed it back. She held the smoke in her lungs a good long while before blowing it out in an exhalation that went on forever.

“I miss that.”

I flicked her a look and she pursed her lips. “Don’t give me that look. I know I can’t smoke. One more thing breast cancer managed to take away.” She gestured loosely towards her chest.

“They look good,” I told her. “Nat said she’d love a new pair.”

“Nat can kiss my pretty plump butt. They look good but I was sick as a dog for eight months and my nipples are still numb.”

“You’re here,” I reminded her.

“I’m here.” She edged nearer, bumping my shoulder with her own. “The question is, for how long?”

I shook my head as I ground out the cigarette on the sole of my espadrille. I tucked the butt into the pack. “I still can’t believe that little shit tried to blow us up. I want to know where he got his orders.”

“Who says he did?” she said. “He might have gone rogue.”

“To take out four retiring agents? Why?”

“We know things.”

“We don’t know anything that would be a threat to Brad Fogerty, the punkass little dynamite jockey.”

“So, Fogerty had no grudge against any of us,” she said, working her way through it. Mary Alice’s approach to everything was slow and methodical. She was good at detail, even better than Helen, often spotting what the rest of us had missed even if it took her longer to get there. I rushed in, relying more on instinct than anything else, and sometimes just blind damned luck. It’s what made us such a good team. I was her hare.

She smiled, the first genuine smile I’d seen from her in twenty-four hours. “I know. I’m tortoising. Bear with me.” She went silent for a while and I watched the lacy edge of the waves, ruffles that flounced up onto the sand and drew back again like a flamenco dancer’s skirt. A tiny grey crab scuttled over my foot.

I turned to stare at her. The pale oval of her face glowed in the shadows. If I could have seen it better, I knew I’d find a narrow line sketched between her brows. And suddenly I was impatient with it all. “Mary Alice, you can’t whitewash this or find a silver lining or look on the goddamned bright side of life. Either we were meant to be blown up by the same people who cut our paychecks for forty years, or they knew it was going to happen to us and did nothing to stop it because they had bigger fish to fry. And it doesn’t matter. They won’t let us go. We know too much. In the space of a day, we’ve gone from possibly expendable to a monumental threat.”

“How?” she challenged me, squaring for a fight.

“Knock it off, Mary Alice. You’re not this stupid. We know where the bodies are buried—literally. This isn’t a footnote, it’s a goddamned reckoning, and you don’t want to acknowledge that because it means you have to figure out what to do about the problem of Akiko.”

I heard her exhale through her nose, sharply, like a bull will before it charges. “My wife is not a problem, Billie. But I don’t expect you to understand that.”

She started to stomp off, a tricky thing in deep sand. “Hey, Mary Alice,” I called after her. She turned back and I stuck my middle finger up.

She flipped me off in response as she stalked away. I dug out a fresh cigarette and lit it, blowing a mouthful of smoke out slowly. “That could have gone better,” I said to the crab.