Cooks Overboard (19 page)

On the balcony of a luxurious beachfront villa in an exclusive area of Acapulco, Angie and Paavo sat at a glass table in softly padded chairs. An open bottle of champagne was wedged in an ice bucket at the far side of the table, and glasses of bubbly stood at their elbows. In the center was a platter of shrimp on ice, ringed by a variety of dipping sauces.

“Listen to this,” Angie said, holding the
New York Times
open and reading from an inside story. “There’s a write-up about the Hydra’s attempt to steal the cold fusion formula. It says that her real name is Jane Potter and she’s from Kansas City, Missouri. To think, she had everyone believing she was some exotic international assassin. Goes to show you!”

Paavo just shook his head.

“Anyway, it says that the formula was no good. Some chemists from the National Science Insti
tute went to the Lawrence Lab and studied all Professor Von Mueller’s papers and concluded his cold fusion formula was a fraud, that it couldn’t even be duplicated.” She closed the paper. “So there was all that trouble for nothing.”

“It’s tragic,” Paavo agreed. “Particularly about Dudley Livingstone. He was a good man.”

Just then, one of the many servants who lived year-round at the villa stepped onto the balcony holding a silver tray. A single postcard was on it.

“
Correspondencia, señorita
,” the woman said.

“
Gracias
,” Angie said, feeling like an elegant lady of leisure as she took the card. How she loved this villa! She glanced at the back of postcard. “It’s from Grundil. She and Béla are in Costa Rica—and she’s going to let him open his Transylvanian restaurant. What fun!”

“I think they’ll like Costa Rica,” Paavo said. “I hear lots of Europeans, as well as Americans, are moving there these days.”

“That’s true. Oh, my! She says Shawn MacDougall found true love with Juanita, and George Gresham liked being involved in a shoot-out so much, he took a job as a security guard at a recycling plant in Boise.”

“I doubt he’ll find much to shoot at there.”

“But just think of all the tins cans he’ll have to practice on.” Angie handed the card to Paavo so he could see it for himself. “So,” she said, “the only one who got away was the colonel.”

“Maybe not as far away as you think,” Paavo
answered. “When we were locked up in Ortega’s cellar, Grundil told me she recognized his right-hand man, Eduardo Catalán, from the days she used to spy in the Middle East and around a number of big oil interests.”

“She got around, didn’t she?” Angie said, not liking the thought of any woman locked up with Paavo.

“It turns out Catalán was a spy as well, a spy for the oil consortium Ortega had been pretending to work with. They didn’t trust Ortega—and as we’ve learned, they were right not to. He would gladly have sold the formula to someone who wanted to use cold fusion to produce energy, if he could have gotten more money that way. Since the consortium is a group that doesn’t like disloyalty, the colonel’s sudden disappearance might not have been of his own doing.”

“Well, I can’t say I’m sorry,” Angie admitted, folding the paper and putting it on the table. “But now, after all this news, I think we should talk.”

“Isn’t that what we’ve been doing?” He lifted his champagne to take a sip.

“I mean, things have turned out well for our new friends, and I’m glad. Even you—you’ve realized you do want to stay with the police force, and you will. I think it’s time to talk about me and what I want. Things like…making commitments. Maybe even—” She paused. “—getting engaged.”

He nearly choked. “To be married?”

“What else?”

He put down the champagne. “Isn’t that impossible?” he asked in an innocent tone, quite unlike him.

“Whatever are you talking about?” she wondered.

“Nuns can’t marry.”

She folded her arms. “Inspector Smith, you are such a barrel of laughs. I don’t give up that easily, you know.”

“So I’ve discovered.”

He slid the newspaper to his side of the table. It was his turn to read it now, but he didn’t open it. Instead, he looked across the table at Angie, a simple gesture, yet one that spoke reams about intimacy and companionship. Spending his days…mornings…nights this way with her was something he could get used to quite easily.

He reached for her hand. “Let me make sure I’ve got my head back together first. I need to go back to work, back to the life we know.”

She caught his eye a moment, then nodded.

He slid his thumb over her fingers. “Is it enough that I commit to thinking about a commitment, Miss Amalfi?”

She smiled. “That sounds just fine—for now, Inspector Smith.”

Their joined hands tightened.

Just then there was a long blast from a
foghorn, then another and another.

“The
Valhalla
!” Angie cried, jumping to her feet. “Julio said he’d let us know as they sailed by.”

“Bully for him,” Paavo said. He still smarted when he thought of the good-bye kiss Julio had given Angie when they disembarked in Acapulco. If it had gone on one second longer, the steward might have found himself greeting guests in a voice an octave higher.

“Let’s answer him back,” Angie said. “I’ve got a mirror right in there.” On a chair in the living room, just past the balcony door, lay the waist pouch she’d been using. From it she pulled out her compact. She found she’d become rather fond of having her hands free and her shoulders not aching from carting a big purse everywhere with her.

“That won’t work,” Paavo said. “It’s too small.”

“I can try. Maybe the Neblers and Cockburns will stop playing bridge long enough to greet us, too. We’ve certainly given them a lot to talk about for years to come.” She walked over to the edge of the balcony, right by the railing, and opened the compact wide. Holding the powder puff against the pressed powder, she twisted and turned it until the mirror caught the sun.

A flash of light from the
Valhalla
sent a return greeting. “Hallelujah! It worked!” she cried, jumping and waving her arms in the air. Suddenly, the compact slipped from her fingers. When it landed, the mirror broke and the tin
canister that held the pressed powder bounded out of the plastic case.

“Uh-oh—seven years’ bad luck,” she said, going to retrieve it.

“In other words, seven years of Julio hanging around,” Paavo muttered.

“Wait. What’s that?” Angie said, looking among the broken glass.

“Don’t cut yourself.” Paavo turned to the front page of the newspaper.

“Whatever it is, I guess it can’t be the microfilm everyone was looking for. Since it was stuck inside my compact, under the tin of powder, it must be a packaging item of some sort.”

“Powder?” Paavo said, his brow furrowed. “Wait, didn’t Ingerson say something about powder…?”

She picked up the tiny square and held it up to the sun. “It sure looks like a little piece of film, though.”

“You’re joking again, right?” Paavo asked, clearly unable to believe this turn of events.

“I’m not! Could it possibly be the film with the formula?” she asked. “Have I been carrying it around all this time?”

“Don’t tell me!” Paavo said, starting to get up.

“Well, if it is, I don’t want to know!” She flung it over the balcony and watched as the breeze caught it and carried it out over the Pacific.

“Angie!” Paavo shouted, running to the balcony rail. “You didn’t…” He scanned the horizon, but the microfilm had disappeared.

“Good riddance is what I say.” She brushed off her hands. “For something completely worthless, that poor old professor died, and Dudley died, and Sven Ingerson died, and we could have died. The whole situation was horrible. Just horrible! Besides that, I may never want to take a cruise again as long as I live!” She paused to catch her breath.

“Uh, Angie…,” Paavo said quietly.

“What?”

“You know that story in the
Times
about the formula being no good?”

“That’s what I’m so mad about! All that death, and then the dumb formula didn’t even work!”

“Angie, sometimes the government plants stories like that. It’s disinformation. You’ve got to remember that they didn’t know who had the formula. They had no idea where it was or when it might show up again—or with whom. There’s a good chance they might have just
said
it was no good, but it really was.”

“You mean…that might have been a real formula for cold fusion?”

“That’s right.”

Angie mouth formed into an O. Without another word, she looked from him to the wide expanse of ocean and beach. The microfilm had disappeared out there, lost somewhere between the sand and the sea. Her heart sank as she realized that she might have thrown away
the key to solving the energy problems of the twenty-first century.

“Paavo,” she said, her voice small. “What do you think about keeping this as our little secret?”