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“How far removed?” Mary Alice asked.
“Completely,” I said.
“Dammit, Billie—” Nat began.
Helen put up her hand. “Billie did what she had to do,” she said. For all her prissiness, Helen was loyal as a lapdog. “And it’s done now. We checked his cabin and pockets. He must have memorized it like he was supposed to instead of leaving it lying around.”
“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 thealarm. 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.
“Whataboutus?” 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. Ourownidentities.”
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,thecall. 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.
