Killers of a Certain Age(20)

“Just our luck he wasn’t a complete slackass,” Natalie said. She tapped the spoon against her teeth.

Mary Alice looked around. “We have to get everyone off the boat.”

I pushed myself to my feet. “I’ll do it. It’s my mistake so I’ll clean it up.”

Mary Alice gave me a level look. “Fire in the engine room?”

I nodded. “I’ll make it good and smoky. One of you hit the alarm. That will start evacuation procedures,” I said, remembering the lifeboat drill from the previous day.

“But not everyone will go,” Mary Alice objected. “The engine room crew will stay and try to put it out.”

“Not if the lifeboats are pushed out. Each one has crew assigned to it, and the engine room boys will have to man their lifeboat. I’ll sweep for stragglers,” I promised her. “And I’ll set multiple fires to ramp up the confusion. We’ll get everyone off in time. The captain will send a mayday before he abandons ship. At worst, people will have a few rough hours in the lifeboats on the open sea before help arrives, and the explosion will be chalked up to an engine room malfunction.”

“What about us?” Helen asked.

“What about us?” Natalie replied.

“Someone from the Museum is trying to kill us. When the lifeboats are recovered, they will log the passengers to make sure no one is missing.”

“And?” Nat still wasn’t getting it, but the light was dawning for me.

“We won’t be dead,” I told her. “We’ll be listed officially as surviving the explosion.”

“And they’ll try again,” Mary Alice added. “They might have even assigned Fogerty a backup we haven’t spotted yet.”

We looked at one another. “Shit,” Natalie said.

“So, we need to get off the boat before it blows but not with the other passengers,” Helen summed up.

“And we have about five minutes to make a plan,” Mary Alice added. “We can’t take a lifeboat because they’re all assigned.”

“That’s a very ‘glass is half-empty’ attitude, Mary Alice,” Natalie told her.

I held up a hand. “She’s right. So that leaves the rubber launch we rode in to Basseterre. It’s got a motor but the fuel tank is small. We’ll run out before we get halfway to land, but it has sails and charts. Helen, you’re the only one of us who knows how to sail. Grab anything you think we’ll need. Nat, you sound the alarm and pitch a wall-eyed fit until people start getting into boats. A little bit of old-lady hysteria will get them nervous. Mary Alice, provisions. Water and any food you can find that’s packaged. It may be some time until we’re picked up or can get to an island. Leave your phones. No credit cards, but bring all your cash. And leave the passports. From the minute we go over the side of this boat, we’re operating off-grid.”

Nat groaned and Helen looked resigned. Ditching the passports and credit cards would be a pain when we eventually reached land, but anything that could track us was out of the question.

I started to get up, but Mary Alice stopped me. “You realize what this means? We’re burning our identities. Our own identities.”

We looked at each other, our faces grim. Every assignment had brought cover identities, pseudonyms and papers we tossed aside as soon as the job was done. We never traveled or worked under our own names; it was too dangerous. The aliases gave us a buffer, a layer of protection between our civilian lives and the work we did.

And now the work was forcing its way in, unwanted and uninvited.

“We don’t have a choice,” I said simply.

She nodded. “I know. I just . . . Akiko.”

We were silent again. Akiko would get a call, the call. Someone from the State Department, probably. Informing her in short, awful phrases that her wife had been lost at sea.

“Not a now problem, Mary Alice,” I told her flatly.

I got up and this time she didn’t stop me. I grabbed a few bottles from the minibar and put them into the laundry bag from the wardrobe along with the morning’s newspaper and a T-shirt.

My identification and other papers I left. If any scraps survived, they would support the fiction that we had died in the explosion. I pocketed my cash—a few hundred American dollars—along with a tin of Altoids. I stripped the thin neoprene case off of my e-reader and put the case into the same pocket, stopping just long enough to grab a couple of large safety pins out of the vanity kit to secure it closed.

Into the other pocket went the Swiss Army knife I’d brought in my checked bag, but I left that pocket open just in case I needed quick access to it. I grabbed my lighter, heavy and silver, stashing it in my pocket with the knife. There wasn’t much in my jewelry roll, just a few pairs of hoop earrings and some diamond studs, which I put into my ears. They were a carat each, so clear and flawless they looked like fakes, but they’d be a useful source of cash if we needed to pawn them. Also in the jewelry roll was a narrow belt of gold coins that looked like replicas but were Pahlavis, souvenirs from a job in Iran and the only other thing of value I had brought. I would have clipped it around my waist, but it clattered like hell so I handed it over to Helen for safekeeping. She stuffed it into her Birkin with her address book and her pills.

By the time I finished sorting my things and turned my attention back to the others, they were on their feet. The change in posture had changed the mood. They were focused now, serious and businesslike. We checked our watches—some things we like to do old-school—and looked at each other. We were in a small huddle, standing close enough to one another that I could smell Helen’s Shalimar, Natalie’s neroli oil, Mary Alice’s green tea shampoo. A wave of love for them hit me so hard, it nearly buckled my knees.