A Quarter for a Kiss (39 page)

“That’s out by the airport,” Abraham said. “On St. Thomas.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Holt said into his microphone, “I would like for team one to head to St. Thomas. We are going to STT Secure Storage, unit forty-two.”

Amidst the cheering, I told Tom I had been talking to Eli and that he was awake.

We embraced, and a surge of emotions swelled in my heart. Relief. Elation. Confusion. Fear.

This day wasn’t over yet.

From Abraham, I caught up on all that had happened while I was in the other room on the phone. Using face recognition software, FBI headquarters had gotten a match on the two goons. Apparently, they were a pair of two-bit thugs with a long list of petty crimes but few incarcerations. Dianne Streep was known to employ them from time to time, and much to our surprise, it turned out that they were the ones who had been caught in the act of art theft by Interpol and had subsequently become informants. It was their tips that led the investigation to the Streeps and St. John in the first place.

The two goons had finished loading the truck items into the
Enigma
, and now one of them was waiting there with the boat while the other one was driving back toward Dianne’s house. Merveaux was currently sitting in a taxi on the south side of the island; his bodyguard was still in the process of hiking from the taxi down to the Drake’s Pond area. Using the archaeological grid to locate F12, the FBI agents had found the code there already, a weird row of letters written on a rock. At first look the agents thought the letters were hieroglyphics, but when they asked Tom to look at the screen he had simply chuckled and told them that it was a mix of letters and numbers that had been written upside down and backwards. The rock protruded out over the pond, and the code was meant to be read in the reflection on the water. I remembered Dianne and Merveaux’s conversation, where they said he could “pause and reflect” there. They had been making a joke.

“Actually, that is not an original idea,” Abraham said. “Some of the most interesting petroglyphs on this island are reflected in pools of water. Archaeologists think it may have been done for the same sort of reason—to hide messages by making them upside down and backward.”

I listened to Holt communicating with his agents, and I thought he was acting prudently in all regards. They would keep the satellite focused on Merveaux, but otherwise they were going to lie in wait at the storage facility and catch him red-handed there with the stolen goods, thereby ensuring the greatest number of possible criminal charges for him.

As for Dianne, they were ready to arrest her now, but they wanted to wait until Merveaux was off the island so as not to tip their hand. In the meantime, they were trying to ascertain the whereabouts of Earl, Larry, and Zach—all of whom had been conspicuously absent so far.

Thus we waited, watching on the monitor as the beefy, sweating bodyguard emerged at the bottom of the trail, walked over to the dig site, and began checking the tags on the posts.

“What’s he doing?” I asked.

“Looking for F twelve,” Abraham answered. “The dig site has been divided into a grid. See the wires that stretch between the posts? That is how they catalog the items they uncover. He will find row F going down then row twelve coming across, and where the two meet is where the code will be found.”

“Amazing.”

Sure enough, the man found the code and seemed to know already that he was supposed to write down what he saw in the water, not on the rock. Once he had done that, he rolled up his shirt sleeves a bit higher and started back up the trail.

“Don’t you have to unencrypt it?” I whispered to Tom.

“No,” he replied, “that’s the numeric security code Merveaux will use to unlock the storage unit.”

I couldn’t take the tension of waiting, so I offered to go and pick up some lunch for everyone. That was met with an enthusiastic yes, so Abraham gave me directions to the nearest restaurant, and Tom and I set off down the street on foot.

As we walked along in the fresh air and sunshine, I was filled with the overwhelming urge to be out in a canoe, paddling into the water, sailing across the shimmering waves.

“You know what I want more than anything on earth right now?” I asked as we went.

“For this waiting to be over?”

“More than that.”

“To hear how much I love you?”

I giggled. “More than that.”

“To get your hair braided by Mrs. Ruhl?”

“How did you know?” I asked, laughing.

“No, really, what do you want, Callie? Your wish is always my command.”

I reached out for his hand but then remembered it was bandaged. I held his wrist instead.

“I want to be on a canoe,” I said. “Right now. I want a paddle in my hands and Sal in the bow and miles of empty water stretching out in front of me.”

“You want to go home?” Tom asked.

“Not really,” I replied. “I love my river there, but that’s not what I mean. I just want a canoe. I feel like paddling. Why did I ever have to have a hobby that was so utterly not portable?”

Tom slipped his arm around my shoulders.

“I tell you what,” he said. “When all of this is over, I will take you somewhere and get you a canoe. With all of the water sports they have going on around here, I wouldn’t doubt we could find one somewhere. How about I’ll sit there with an umbrella while you paddle me around?”

“Why, sir, it would be my pleasure to take you for a ride.”

We found the restaurant easily and placed an order to go for a variety of food, including salad, garlic chicken, and something called “johnny-cakes.” It took a while, but eventually the food was bagged and ready. As usual, Tom picked up the tab. We argued about it, until I remembered that all I had in my wallet was ten dollars anyway.

When we arrived back at the command center, it was obvious something was going on. We set down the bags of food and looked at Abraham questioningly.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“It’s Dianne,” he replied. “Looks like she’s on the move.”

Forty-Three

We all ate as we watched what was happening on the monitor. Abraham said Dianne and her goon had come out of the house and were now in the white truck. The farther they drove, the more obvious it became that they were heading to the
Enigma
. If that were true, then we all felt fairly certain she was about to make her getaway from the island. Calculating the risk, Holt decided he would rather be safe than sorry; the agents would wait as long as they could to stop her, but if Merveaux was still on the island by the time Dianne started to leave, they would have no choice but to move in and make the arrest.

We watched two satellite feeds—one of the cab carrying Merveaux to the Sugar Manse, the other of the truck bringing Dianne to the
Enigma
. We wanted Merveaux to move quickly and Dianne to move slowly. It was trying to watch it all unfold, to say the least.

“Parker, any chance you can cause a little traffic jam on the road that leads to the marina?”

“I’ll try, sir,” a voice said. “The street is pretty narrow here. I can jack up the back and make it look like I’m changing a tire.”

“Good. Maybe that’ll hold things up a bit.”

In the meantime the technician was working on getting a third satellite shot, this one of the Streeps’ estate. Once Dianne was arrested at the boat, agents would also be moving in on the house; but with Larry, Earl, and Zach still unaccounted for, they wanted to go in with as much knowledge as they could.

Finally, Merveaux reached the resort, and we all breathed a sigh of relief when he and his bodyguard emerged out of the other side of the building without much delay. Dianne, meanwhile, was less than a mile from the marina.

“Come on, come on,” Holt whispered as we all watched, spellbound. There were now three agents ready to apprehend Dianne—Craig on the boat, Reese on foot, and the one named Parker with the car. The remaining agents were well on their way to St. Thomas, setting up the welcome party for Merveaux at the Secure Storage facility.

The truck reached the small cluster of cars that were feeding around Parker and his flat-tire diversion. When the truck finally made it around, Merveaux was just climbing onto his boat at the Sugar Manse.

“It’s almost time,” Holt said.

A few minutes later, Parker announced he was back behind the wheel and heading into the marina.

The
Cezanne
pulled away from the dock at the Sugar Manse. Moving slowly, it made its way past rows of other boats and yachts and then slowly picked up speed out in the open water.

On the video feed from Craig’s boat, we could see Dianne and the second goon getting out of the truck and walking toward the
Enigma
. Her movements were tight, her posture tense. Despite the floral skirt and scarf, she now looked less like a tourist at the beach and more like a fugitive on the run.

“Gentlemen, make your arrest,” Holt said.

Reese was the first to move, jumping up from behind a barrel on the dock, holding out his gun, and yelling at them to “Freeze!”

We could hear Parker’s car screech to a stop, and then he also yelled for them to “Freeze! FBI!”

Dianne stopped moving and held both hands up in the air. The goon, however, surprised everyone by turning, grabbing her, and then making a dive for the boat. They landed face down on the deck, with her struggling to get back up as he sprawled out as flat as he could get. The boat roared to life and sped away from the slip, the ropes snapping just before they ripped the cleats right out of the wood.

Gunfire ensued, but the boat kept going. Both agents jumped aboard Craig’s boat, and they shot out of their slip in hot pursuit.

Stunned, we all watched the scene play out in front of us through the satellite feed, helpless to do anything. As Holt cursed a blue streak there in the command center, the FBI agents at the scene fired off some shots at the
Enigma
. The FBI’s boat was smaller but faster, and the distance between them quickly narrowed.

Then the
Enigma
exploded.

With a piercing
kaboom
, the large boat burst into flames. We could hear our agents yelling and we watched as they managed to veer quickly to the side, avoiding the inferno there on the water.

Dianne and her two goons were dead, the boat totally destroyed before our eyes. Despite everything, I couldn’t help but feel a surge of pity for the woman who had made so many wrong choices in her life.

I looked at the monitor of Merveaux, praying his boat was far enough away so that he wouldn’t see the fire and smoke on the horizon. In shock we listened as the agents at the scene all yelled at once. They hadn’t been shooting when it blew, they said. The didn’t know why it had exploded. With a lurch in the pit of my stomach, I had a feeling I knew.

Rushkin had located his target.

Instantly, Holt was on the phone with the Coast Guard. Sirens blared in the distance.

“Sir,” the technician said, interrupting. “We have satellite on the house.”

We looked at the third screen, at the bird’s-eye view of Dianne’s estate. I had stared at the satellite photos so many times that the image was completely familiar to me.

Except for an odd black blotch that was now on the tennis court.

“Look at that!” I said, running to the screen and pointing. “What is that?”

The technician zoomed in tightly.

“It’s a helicopter!” Tom cried.

As we watched, two people ran from the house to the helicopter. It looked as though they were carrying something large and square, which they put into the helicopter’s side door. The camera zoomed in further.

“The house, the house!” Holt yelled into his mike. “Get to the house!”

As he directed his agents how to reach it by boat, Abraham dispatched the police. Meanwhile, the two men ran from the helicopter back toward the house. Just before going inside, they paused and looked up at the sky.

“That’s Earl and Larry,” Tom said, leaning forward.

Abraham put his hand over the phone.

“I have a man in Coral Bay,” he said. “He’ll be there in one minute.”

Sure enough, though we had no sound feed, after about a minute we could see a police car racing up the driveway. The two men were just coming back out of the house when the car screeched to a stop and the cop jumped out. Unarmed, the men saw what was happening and ran back inside.

Ten seconds later, the house exploded.

This time, we didn’t hear a thing. We simply watched in silence as the structure blew into a million pieces.

Flames shot toward the heavens and debris fell down to the ground like rain.

Forty-Four