Chapter 36

The sunset was bright on the water but less spectacular than you might expect thanks to the lack of clouds. We"d been facing away from the sun, but now we could comfortably spin around to face west. Would they call off the search at dark? I hadn"t heard the sound of helicopters for some time.

My mouth worked to find moisture inside itself. I was about ready to be found. If the opponent waited too long to bring the fight to us, we wouldn"t have any fight left.

Hunger chewed my stomach from the inside out but I could almost ignore that. Even with the sun no longer pounding down on our heads, thirst was the greater enemy.

"What if they think we drowned?" Noah asked softly.

Trust a brainiac to think of a new way for us to die. The enemy shrugs and stops looking for us.

"Why would they think that?" I asked.

"That"s the logical conclusion, isn"t it? Especially if the helicopter"s inflatable didn"t inflate."

"Why wouldn"t the helicopter"s inflatables inflate?" Too late, the obvious answer sprung into my mind. Of course. Noah had fixed it. And by fix, I mean broke.

"We didn"t want them coming after us." He could barely speak—and only partly because his mouth was so dry.

"I know. I know. Of course, we didn"t want them coming after us. If we wanted to be caught, we could"ve just landed on their helipad." I exhaled noisily. "None of this is your fault, Noah. I helped think of this..." I swallowed the unhelpful adjective. "We both agreed on this plan. It seemed like a good idea to send them in one direction while we go off in another. It still seems like a pretty good idea to me. I"m sure the Coast Guard is going to swoop in and pick us up at any moment."

I should probably stop talking. We could be in a completely different hemisphere from the Coast Guard. And Noah was too smart not to know it.

We needed to start thinking about basic survival. Food and water. Protection from the sun which would rise again right on time tomorrow morning.

The ocean is full of fish. Sushi is food. And blood is liquid. Even squid ink is liquid.

Where the fuck did I think I was going to catch any calamari?

"Look," Noah said. "What I said... I wasn"t trying to distract you."

"I definitely do not feel distracted," I assured him. "I am very much aware we have a three-ring goat rodeo circus going on."

He managed a laugh. "I"m not the guy. I"m not the target. They"re wrong about me if they think so."

We could both see from the elaborate way they were choosing to hold and question him that they thought he had something in his head worth getting. I didn"t say so. Might as well reserve what was left of my spit.

Venus was out. The evening star that was only a planet. The real stars would start switching on soon.

"I know what it looks like," Noah says. "Seeing all they"ve done, all they"re still doing, I won"t deny they targeted me. But why do they think I still know anything they don"t know? They"ve been pumping me full of drugs to mess with my mind. They"d have the truth of everything I knew by now. I wouldn"t be able to keep up a lie."

"Truth serum drugs don"t work. I saw a YouTube about it..."

"You"re not under oath when you make a YouTube." His laugh was more of a soft grunt. "Besides, drugs are only to make it easier. When you have somebody for days on end, you can"t necessarily force them to tell you the truth, but they get so tangled up in your lies that you figure it out anyway."

I thought about that.

"Like the police," Noah said. "They get people under questioning for a couple of days, and pretty soon they"re so tangled up they"ll say anything, and all the contradictions give the cops what they need to figure out the whole story. And they don"t use any drugs. They don"t have to."

He was right. Cops tripped people up with basic psychology all the time. Not just shiny federal agents, but regular local cops. Weird mind-messing drugs were just a bonus.

"You know how it goes," he said. "You"ve seen it on TV if nowhere else. You"re constantly hammered with questions until you"re so confused you end up changing your story. Lie or tell the truth, either way, they see the gaps and contradictions. So I could be saying all kind of things, true and untrue all mixed up, but it wouldn"t matter. Soon it"s either obvious I know something or obvious that I don"t."

Nothing was obvious to me. His inflatable bumped up against my inflatable. His leg brushed my naked leg.

"By now," he said, "they have to know I"m not the guy."

I didn"t say anything for a long time. What he said made sense. Sort of.

Noah sighed. "Please just say it."

"Say what?"

"Whatever you"re thinking."

"You"re going to think I"m a victim of sunstroke. I"m going to sound so crazy."

"Crazier than all this?" He slapped the sea we were floating in. The splash of salt water barely missed his face.

"Noah, babe." I took a deep breath. "It"s what I said before. If they think you"re the guy, and they"ve dug into you this deep over this much time and they still think you"re the guy, then maybe, just maybe, you are the guy."