“If you kill Keller and his followers. What next? Who’s in charge? Someone needs to run the city.” God, tell me it’s not one of them.
Neither of them answered, which I took to mean they hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Let’s be blunt, this will probably end in our untimely deaths, but we should have some kind of contingency plan in case we get really, bizarrely lucky.”
Renati lifted his hand and rubbed at the bristly stubble coming in along his chin. “Who is the first…ah…reasonable officer below him? One who could conceivably hold the city together in case of mass panic.”
Logan scratched his head.
“One who won’t arrest us.” I sat down next to him. The couch was every bit as comfortable as it looked. “I’m not going back to prison.”
It didn’t make me sound scarier. Damn. My brain shifted gears, and something abruptly clicked back into place. We had a ranking military officer. Someone who could take charge. “Why can’t Durkee do it?”
Their heads snapped toward me so fast I’m surprised they didn’t give themselves whiplash.
“You been inhaling a little too much of that ash, Vibeke?” Logan asked. “Durkee’s dead. That’s why we’re in this mess.”
“He’s alive. I saw him.”
“Alive?” Logan’s voice went up a notch.
“Explain,” Renati demanded.
Evie placed her paw on the couch and stared at me beseechingly, as if she, too, wanted to know the story of Durkee. Damn, now I wished I had something more dramatic to share with them. “He’s in lockdown. We met him when Keller dragged us in.”
“Are you sure he’s alive?” Logan asked. “Apparently dead people talk now.”
“He said the same thing,” I said. “Seemed alive enough to me. He wasn’t killed, he was overthrown.”
Renati drifted over to his bookcase of Shakespeare and stared at the titles, as though drawing some sort of inspiration from them. “That is a twist.”
Logan reached out a hand toward the dog. She edged closer to him, her tail still wagging. “Shit. They kept that one on the down-low. Must’ve just been a few…”
“His most trusted men,” Renati murmured. “Only his most trusted men. Five or six, maximum. Probably the same men we’ll be killing tomorrow.” He pulled a copy of Hamlet down from the top shelf and began paging through it.
“Good idea,” I said. “Ask Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for advice.”
He paused on a page. “Odin had the Mead of Inspiration, and I have my books.”
And I felt quite uncouth. All I had was…well, Dead Mennonite Walking. Hardly an inspirational read.
“We’ll all meet at the medical facility tomorrow morning,” Renati said. He snapped Hamlet shut and set it back on its shelf, then glided over to a varnished wood bar in the opposite corner of the room. “Vibeke and I will need to gather our equipment, anyway. We do what we must and worry about the rest later. If we pull this off, somehow we’ll get word to Durkee.”
How? When? What if we’re all killed?
Silly question. If we were all killed, there’d be no story to tell, no captain to free. We’d just be dead and our problems would be over.
Well, maybe not. Considering what had happened to Alyssa, death might end up being just the beginning of my problems.
Renati poured three glasses of some sort of strong-scented liquor that came out of a fancy bottle, then glanced at Evie. “Does she drink?”
“She’s the designated driver,” I said.
He brought the glasses over, and sat on the couch opposite me and Logan. We each took a glass. I sniffed mine and almost sat back from the strength of it. I’d chased whiskey and tequila before; this stuff seemed more powerful, something rich men sipped as they concocted their next plan for a company takeover.
The doctor next produced a leather-bound book. He held it out, and instructed us to put our hands on it to swear our oath.
“Really?” I asked. “Aren’t we past this?”
“It’s The Iliad,” he said. “We’re going to swear our oaths on The Iliad.”
Logan shrugged. “At least it’s not King Lear.”
Renati lifted his glass in the air. Logan and I followed suit. I could just see him digging through his mental files to find the perfect soliloquy, and I feared another barrage of Shakespeare.
But then he shrugged, and decided brevity was the soul of wit.
“Lady, gentleman, golden retriever.” He paused. “Here’s to committing the perfect crime.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Alyssa didn’t look too great in the light of the early morning. The overall lack of sunshine just highlighted the ashen color in her cheeks, and though she held herself somewhat better than the rest of the dead, you didn’t have to stand very close to her to realize something was off. Her face, with its unblinking eyes, moved too little, while the rest of her body moved a bit too much.
She must have stared at me for a good couple of minutes after I spilled our entire sad little story to her. I don’t even know why I told her, really. Maybe I just wanted an impartial audience. Maybe I wanted to see if she really understood.
“You want to remove Keller from power,” she said.