DOUBLE KNOT (22 page)

TWENTY-TWO

There was an underwater quality to my world, as if the ship were sinking. Maybe I’d
been tossed overboard. Maybe I fell overboard. Maybe I’d jumped.

Everything in my limited field of vision was floating. No Hair was there, but I didn’t
remember swimming with him or even swimming at all from
Prospect 1000
to 704. I must have, though, because everything was soaking white linen and my limbs
were dead from swimming. I could feel their lifeless weight sinking into the white,
with the only active part of my body the wide and spherical middle. Something in the
middle of me moved with vibrant energy, and that must be how I was breathing underwater.
I was floating on my back and the image of my mother’s head zoomed in and out above
me, and someone, Fantasy I think, kept putting something to my lips and telling me
to drink. I didn’t think I should be swallowing, I’d drown for sure, so I refused.
It was when No Hair demanded—his voice coming in loud rippling soundwaves, demanding,
insisting, breaking through the high-pitched ringing in my ears—that I let my lips
part. My mouth filled with sweet, stinging ocean water. It bit my tongue and froze
my throat. Above all this, a liquid slideshow played in the air, near the light, near
the air, near the surface I couldn’t reach. Through the water I saw us in our first
apartment: we were at the stove, Bradley was stirring, offering me a taste. Bradley
and me in the park, playing with someone’s dogs, telling me we needed puppies of our
own. Bradley in his office, a woman standing beside him holding three sharp pencils,
sharp enough to draw blood, and I tried to take the woman’s pencils so she wouldn’t
stab my husband. The aquatic movie played on and on, and I couldn’t understand why
No Hair wouldn’t pull me up for air. Then everything went dark again. Merciful sleep.

* * *

The first coherent words I processed between receiving the news about Bradley on the
deck of
Prospect 1000
and waking fully in 704 were No Hair’s. “She brought her cat?”

Fantasy dropped Anderson Cooper on my babies. “Here she comes.”

I lifted my head and buried my face into the warmth, the scent, the music of my cat.
I held her with one arm and reached out with the other to touch my mother, No Hair,
and Fantasy, all within reach, all with end-of-the-world faces. Arlinda was across
from me, sitting beside Jess, whose head was hanging off the white linen sofa, her
dark hair covering her face as she napped. “Is he alive?” The words clawed their way
out of my throat. My follow up was, “I need the computer.” No one would know if Bradley
and Baylor were alive on the Gulfstream. I would have to answer my own question.

Fantasy shot off in the direction of the dressing room.

“Of course he’s alive, Davis,” No Hair said. “This is a con. There’s no money in a
kamikaze mission.”

He was right. Of course. Yes. Hope. Blessed hope.

Mother moved to sit on the arm of the white linen sofa, at my side. “Davis? Do you
want more Coca-Cola?”

“No.”

I pushed my hair out of my face. I stirred my sleeping babies, they pushed back reassuringly,
then I set to work to find their father.

“I’m going to make you the Starbucks, Davis.”

“Thank you, Mother.”

She stood, always happy to have kitchen work in times of trouble, and kissed the top
of my head.

“I have a pot roast in the slow cooker.”

(Slow cooker?)

No Hair and I looked at each other, long and hard.

“He locked us in here.”

“I know,” he said.

“I had a baby when I was sixteen.”

“I know, Davis.”

“Fantasy is leaving Reggie. Not the other way around.”

A tendon in his neck jumped, the news catching him off guard.

“It’s the game, No Hair. Knot on Your Life. DeLuna is diverting the deposits to an
account set up in Bradley and Jessica’s names. The players don’t know because their
V2s are showing a balance that isn’t there. He’ll have two hundred million in a Cayman
account before the casino closes today.”

“I know,” No Hair said. “Fantasy told me.”

“Did she tell you about Burnsworth?”

He inhaled sharply. She’d told him. Then she returned, sat beside me on the sofa,
and passed me the laptop.

I went straight to (my husband) the deep web, then opened a browser window. I pulled
up FlightView and my shaking fingers typed GPT, the airport code for Gulfport-Biloxi
International Airport, where
Bellissimo One
was hangared and scheduled to depart from Friday when this nightmare started. The
chances of the flight being tracked were so very slim—Colby Mitchell the Skyjacking
Pilot would have flown dark, without registering—and plugged in the Gulfstream’s tail
numbers. Nothing. No flight records. Of course not.

Mother placed a champagne flute of hot coffee in front of me.

No Hair scratched his ear, but didn’t ask.

I spent the next five minutes in the airport’s Human Resources department, hiring
myself. Air Traffic Controller, no dependents, yes 401K, just give me my password.
I had to stop, open a second screen, and create a Firefox email account to receive
the password. The only person in the room I knew for sure was breathing while I worked
my way into the airport’s radar archives was Jess, because she was snoring. It felt
like hours, but it was just minutes and a champagne flute of hot mostly decaf coffee
later when I was able to log into Friday’s records and find the one afternoon flight
departing GPT without a flight plan.

“Nome,” I told my quiet audience. “She flew the plane to Nome.”

“Al
aska
?” Fantasy asked.

“The edge of the world,” No Hair said.

“Nome.” I couldn’t stop saying it. “Nome.”

* * *

The International Airport Transport Association airport code for Nome was OME. And
I cyber-hired myself as an Air Traffic Controller for the second time in twenty minutes
at the Nome Airport. Having just been through the FAA application and screening, I
got the job in two minutes instead of the three it took me to hire myself in Gulfport.

“It was a direct flight from Gulfport to Nome.” I didn’t look up from the computer.
“Five souls onboard. Four thousand miles.”

Jessica did the math. “They landed in Alaska at ten on Friday night.”

I clicked through Nome departures, a very short list, and found the one unregistered
flight between two Bering Air flights. “The plane has been sitting on the tarmac this
whole time.”
Bellissimo One
slept ten and had every creature comfort known to man, but still, this long? “Until
an hour ago.” I glanced at the computer clock. “It took off an hour ago.”

“For where?” Everyone in the room asked the question.

“South. The plane is traveling south. It’s over the Bering Sea right now.”

“We need that plane traveling east,” No Hair said. “Where in the hell is it going?”

I looked up from the laptop. “Hawaii.”

“Of course,” Fantasy said. “The bank.”

“So, Elima?”

Fantasy and I stared at Jess.

“What?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Elima. Banco de la Elima.”

“I’m not following,” No Hair said.

“They’re making a run for it, No Hair,” I said. “They’re cashing out. Colby Mitchell
is flying Bradley to Hawaii to have him withdraw the money. The account is in his
name. She’s going to walk him to a teller window and have him empty it.” I flew all
over the keyboard calculating the flight, distance, and speed. They’d land in Hawaii
an hour before we docked in the Caymans, exactly when the casino closed for the passengers
to disembark. “The Knot on Your Life deposits are being diverted to a Cayman bank,”
I looked up, “that has a branch in Hawaii.”

Jess waved. “Hello! You can’t get that much cash and it’s not a branch.”

Fantasy and I had developed Jessica immunities, knowing we only had to halfway listen
to every fifth or sixth thought, but No Hair hadn’t been here long enough.

“Excuse me?” he said.

Jessica splayed a hand across her red bra. “Me?”

He was looking right at her. We all were.

“Yes,” No Hair said. “You. What did you say?”

“Banks require a fourteen-day notice for large withdrawals.”

“Make a lot of large withdrawals, Jessica?” No Hair asked her.

She looked at him curiously. “So, what?”

My husband’s very life was at stake. No Hair could interrogate Jess about her banking
habits later. I agreed it was well worth looking into, but not here and not now. “Can
we talk about this later?” I asked. “This deal is going down
tonight
.”

“They can get a cashier’s check.” Jessica whispered, mostly to herself. “But they
can’t get that kind of cash. Unless they called ahead.”

If I knew the magic words, I’d say them and put her to sleep. I wasn’t the least bit
concerned with bank rules and regulations and very concerned with what Colby Mitchell
had planned for Bradley and Baylor after she got her money. Or her cashier’s check.
I didn’t care. What I did care about was this: When Bradley finished banking for her,
what would happen to him? To Baylor?

No Hair got it. “The only way to stop the withdrawal is to stop the plane,” he said.
“They can’t land that plane in Hawaii.”

“How do we stop a plane from landing?” My hands hurt. Because my nails were digging
into them between laptop operations. “If Bradley or Baylor had control over the pilot
or the plane they wouldn’t even be on their
way
to Hawaii. They
can’t
take control of the plane, No Hair, because they’re not
pilots
. And how is it you suggest
we
keep the plane from landing?” Now my hands hurt and my face was wet. I swiped at
my wet face with my hurt hands.

My questions filled the salon and no one had answers.

Mother began saying the Lord’s Prayer under her breath.

Arlinda stood. “Mr. Blackwell. My player.” She pointed up. To the casino. “He was
a pilot in the Navy. He was with NASA. He parks satellites. Surely to God he can do
something.”

Of course he could. Of course. The question was, would he? How in the world could
I convince Fredrick Blackwell to disrupt the flight of a jet in the sky? By speaking
every billionaire’s favorite language on the ground, or in this case, at sea—money.

Money talks.

* * *

From the ottoman in my dressing room, surrounded by
Probability
server bikinis and an odd collection of power tools, I launched a cyber-attack against
the thieves who’d locked us in 704, taken No Hair hostage, and now had my husband
and Baylor in their grips. I didn’t go deep or dark web because I no longer cared
and I didn’t have time.

I isolated the eighteen-digit Knot on Your Life
numbers assigned to the fifty players and cracked into the Cayman bank. I left the
withdrawals alone, so funds would still be pulled from the personal accounts, but
I stopped the funnel of cash to Max DeLuna. When I plugged in the final eighteen-digit
number and hit enter, the flow of player money to con man stopped, and for the first
time since the switch was flipped, the Knot on Your Life wins went to the right place—the
player accounts.

Max DeLuna still had plenty, the money he’d already stolen, and I took care of it
next. I had no idea how to allocate it, which left one option: trigger the jackpots.
On all fifty machines. Give them two and a half million each from DeLuna’s account
and call it a day.

There was no way in the Bellissimo system backdoor, so I went in the front: my name,
my password. I wiggled my way into the mainframe and went into the Knot on Your Life
software and changed the payout on all fifty machines. Instead of the machines giving
and taking, Even Steven, as my mother said, I set them to give. I cranked up the payout
code from fifty to one hundred percent.

It’s better to give than to receive, Max DeLuna. Everyone knows that.

Clock ticking, I made it to the final screen, my very last cyber chore before we sent
Arlinda to the casino to recruit Fredrick Blackwell. I entered the new payout codes
into the fifty slot machines, and there, I hit a wall. The Knot on Your Life software
wouldn’t take the new payout codes. The machine payout percentages couldn’t be changed
remotely, a safeguard, so clever hackers couldn’t bring down the house from the comfort
of their cruise ship dressing room ottomans. A security feature of land-based casino
slot machines I was well aware of, but I had no idea it would apply to the Knot on
Your Life machines in the
Probability
casino. The final step had to be completed manually on the ship just like it had
to be completed manually on the casino floor. A gaming regulation I never dreamed
would apply to a bank of machines with a one-week shelf life operating on international
waters.

One of us had to do it. Live and in person.

Not only would it return the money to the rightful owners, all fifty jackpots hitting
at once might be the fastest way to convince Fredrick Blackwell to help, in addition
to sending DeLuna into a tailspin and providing the cover we needed to reroute
Bellissimo One
. The Knot on Your Life machines were about to hit the motherlode, and it would have
to be my mother who hit the load. The software would have to be installed live, directly
into the lead slot machine’s brain, the one slot machine that told the other forty-nine
what to do, and my mother was the only candidate. She was the only face Max DeLuna
didn’t know.