Ravi kisses her forehead again, chuckling. “No more Pimm’s for you,” he says. Then he releases them both and goes off to find his FBI special agents.
Kiran wraps her hand over Jane’s arm and is walking calmly with her toward the banquet hall before Ravi has even taken three steps. “You understand that we need to warn someone,” she says, “right?”
“Of course,” Jane says, “but how?”
“I know how to get to the bay through the ramble,” Kiran says, pulling Jane past the long table in the banquet hall, “so I’ll go that way. I’ll go after them and try to stall them. You need to find Mrs. Vanders and tell her to warn Ivy and Patrick.” She’s pulled Jane into the kitchen now. Jane realizes that Kiran intends to send her up to the attics in the dumbwaiter.
She’s hardly aware of climbing in. She has a vague sense that Kiran has stuffed her into it like a jack-in-the-box. On the floor, Jasper is hopping and yipping, distressed not to be joining her.
“Good luck,” Kiran says, then shuts the door.
The dumbwaiter starts ascending, slowly. The sounds, from inside the carriage, are a cavernous underwater music. Too slow, Jane thinks. Move faster! How do the cameras work? Will Mrs. Vanders know who’s arriving in the dumbwaiter? As the carriage comes to a halt, Jane calls out, “It’s me! It’s me! Don’t shoot!”
Someone yanks the door open and Jane is astonished to find herself staring into the face of Ji-hoon, the South Korean “cleaner.”
“All right,” says Phoebe’s voice. “Now get back.”
Ji-hoon backs away with his hands raised.
“What’s going on?” Jane squeaks. “Don’t shoot me!”
“I’m not going to shoot you, Janie,” says Phoebe’s voice, sounding amused. “What the hell do you want?”
“I need to tell Mrs. Vanders something,” Jane says, then sticks her head cautiously into the room. Phoebe is holding Ji-hoon at gunpoint.
“Is Ji-hoon a South Korean spy?” Jane asks, then, with a small shock, “Is he a North Korean spy?”
“Ji-hoon’s as American as you are. He’s the Panzavecchias’ research director at the CIA,” says Phoebe flatly. “The new one, obviously, not the dead one.”
“Oh! What are you going to do with him?”
“Nothing at all,” says Phoebe. “Ji-hoon and I are going to stand like this in friendly meditation until various things happen elsewhere, at which point I’m going to escort him from the island.”
“Okay,” Jane says. “I need Mrs. Vanders. It’s urgent.”
“I believe she’s in a meeting in the wine cellars,” says Phoebe. “Ji-hoon will send you down, won’t you, Ji-hoon? Go on, move along, and make sure I can see your hands.”
Ji-hoon glides carefully to Jane again and reaches for the dumbwaiter door. His eyes bore into hers. “I’m not the bad guy here, you know,” he says. “I’m just as committed to protecting those children as any of the rest of you, and without breaking the law.”
“Hurry up,” says Phoebe, bored.
Ji-hoon shoves the door shut with his elbow and a moment later Jane is slowly descending through darkness and a smell of metal and dust and cold. The smell changes to something like wet wood that’s been lying in a pond for a long time. Sweet and sour. Jane recognizes the wine cellars, even though she’s never been in a wine cellar before. When the dumbwaiter stops, she fumbles for the door handle and propels the door open. Mr. Vanders is standing ten feet away aiming a pistol at her.
“Don’t shoot me!” Jane squeaks again, but he’s already returned the gun to the holster at his hip. He comes up to Jane and glares at her.
“Why are you here?” he demands.
“Ravi is bringing the FBI agents to the bay through the ramble,” says Jane. “Someone needs to warn Ivy right away.”
“Hm,” says Mr. Vanders, pursing his lips, thinking this over.
“Call her!” Jane says, frustrated with him for wasting time. “On her walkie-talkie!”
“She doesn’t have it,” he says, jutting his chin at a nearby table, where the walkie-talkie sits. “She’d left by the time it arrived.”
“Call her phone!”
“Phones don’t work at the other end of the island,” he says. “Mrs. V is in a meeting and I’m with a patient. Phoebe’s watching Ji-hoon—not that we could ask any more of the Brits at this point—and Ivy, Patrick, and Cook are already at the bay. I’ll have to cancel my session and go myself.”
“No,” Jane says. “Let me go.”
“Absolutely not,” says Mr. Vanders. “You are a novice and a civilian.”
“I’m not a child,” Jane says, pushing herself out of the dumbwaiter one leg at a time. “I can carry a message. I have common sense. I’m my aunt’s niece,” she says.
Mr. Vanders’s eyebrows rise the tiniest smidge.
“Please,” Jane says, standing tall to face him. “It’s my fault the FBI is here, and there’s no time for this. Please, please, let me go.”
Mr. Vanders lets out a sigh that’s almost a growl. “Come on,” he says, grabbing Jane and pulling her down an aisle of wines so abruptly that she almost falls. He eyes her outfit. “Those look like sensible boots. Can you run in them?”
“Yes.”
He rounds a corner and launches down another aisle, towing Jane with him, shoving a flashlight at her. He’s very strong for a man who seems old. “The door at the bay looks like a rock, but it’s got a leather handle on the left that opens toward you,” he says, turning another corner. “Turn off the flashlight before you open the door, and open it slowly. Step out slowly and call Ivy’s name quietly until you get her attention. She’ll still be on lookout while Patrick deals with the kids and the cargo. The water can be noisy but she’ll be close. Are you getting all this?”
“Yes.”
He reaches for his holster. “Have you ever shot a gun?”
“No!” Jane says. “I don’t want it! I wouldn’t even know who to shoot!”
“Calm down,” says Mr. Vanders. “No one’s going to shoot anybody.”
“It’s not reasonable to assume that when everyone has a gun! I’m not taking it.”
Mr. Vanders draws his bushy eyebrows into a fierce V. “You sound like your aunt,” he says. Then he moves to a shadowy place where a rug is pushed back and there seems to be a square gap in the brick floor. It’s barely big enough to fit a human form.
“There are four steps,” Mr. Vanders tells her, “then a pole you’ll slide down. Don’t miss the pole; the floor beneath is stone. Wrap your legs around the pole as soon as the steps disappear.”
Jane stares at him incredulously.
“Come now, do we have time for gawking?” he cries impatiently, taking the flashlight from her and hooking it somehow to the belt of her sweater dress so that it’s bumping against her hip. Then he grabs her arm and yanks her toward the opening.
“I’m scared,” Jane says.
“That’s very sensible of you,” he says. “Now go.”
It’s the stupidest design Jane has ever encountered for the entrance to anything. The four “steps” are impossibly narrow and very deep and wound in a circle, so that she feels as if she’s screwing herself into the hole as she clumsily descends them, bending and twisting. Beyond the fourth step is empty space and—yes, she can touch it with her boot—a pole. She hooks her ankle around it, grabs on with her hands, and pushes off the steps with her other foot.
There’s a moment of utter lack of control and a scream, then rock comes barreling upward and crashes into her. She tastes blood in her mouth.
Mr. Vanders’s voice comes down the hole. “You okay?”
“Just dandy,” she says, lying in a heap.
The steps shift; the hole closes. Jane is left in darkness.
Patting around at her middle, she finds the flashlight and flicks the switch. A narrow stone passage stretches before her. It leads downhill and is reasonably straight.
Aching in every bone, hands smarting and bleeding from scrapes, and one of her ankles not feeling entirely trustworthy, Jane pushes herself to her feet and begins to run.