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.