Coincidence - Alan May [72]
She realized that her body had been like a wall, too, held stiff and unyielding to maintain her inner wall. Now she could feel the tension beginning to slip away from her shoulders. She laughed, and then, without warning, was engulfed in a flood of pent-up tears.
She was still hiccupping when the phone rang again.
“Hey, how ye doin’ there, lass?”
Mac. His voice was, as always, such a comforting presence that she burst into tears again.
When she had regained the ability to speak, she filled him in on the strategy that Rob Montgomery had sketched out.
“What about the code word?” she asked when she had finished. “It’s got to be something that won’t call attention to itself when I say it, something that won’t sound suspicious to the hijackers. But it can’t be anything so ordinary that I might say it by accident, either, just in the normal course of conversation. And it has to be something distinctive enough that it couldn’t be easily confused with some other word I might be likely to say.”
“Hmm. Maybe you could say it’s rainin’ cats and dogs in Montréal, just after he tells you what the weather conditions are out here,” Mac said. And then: “Och, no, that’s nae good. If they found out the sun was actually shinin’ brightly there, they’d be on to us in a flash.”
They spent a few minutes bandying about more ideas, rejecting them one by one as too obvious, too silly, too something.
“Got it!” Mac said. “What d’ye think of this one?”
She had to agree it was perfect.
29
Phillip strode to the first-aid room, opened the door without knocking, and announced to Dr. Williams that it was time for him to stop what he was doing and take a break.
As soon as the doctor had put away his dictation and closed the door behind him, Phillip said, “You’re looking better, Stefano. It’s time we made some plans.”
The little bastardo gets cockier every day, Stefano thought. What it’s time for is to remind you who’s the boss here. He looked at the tubes protruding from his arms, hooking him to the upside-down bottles of fluids and medications that flowed through his veins, and knew he was in no shape to drive the lesson home.
“Tell me what it’s like out there,” Stefano said, nodding with his chin to indicate the ship beyond the first-aid room. He struggled to sit upright. Sweat dampened his brow from the effort.
“Pretty much normal. The ship-director broad” —Phillip didn’t mention Anika’s name, or how attractive he found her—“is doing a good job keeping everybody in line. The kids are going to classes and sticking with their work and watch routines. Nobody’s giving us any problem, and there’s no way they could have gotten word out. I’m standing right beside the captain when he calls in his morning report to their headquarters in Canada, and he’s sure not giving anything away. As far as anyone outside knows, it’s business as usual aboard the Good Ship Lollipop.”
“Bueno.”
“But now we’ve got to decide what to do with them,” Philip said.
He was glad Juan wasn’t there. He knew very well what his opinion would be about how to take care of them. He looked over at Stefano, hopeful that he might already have devised a plan—a plan that didn’t involve killing off everyone on the Inspiration. But Stefano’s eyes were closed, his brow wrinkled.
He waited a minute. Stefano said nothing.
“The one thing we know for sure is that the Coincidence and the Inspiration can’t get to Easter Island at the same time,” Philip said.
Stefano’s face remained impassive, but his right hand lifted slightly in a dismissive gesture, which Phillip chose to interpret as agreement with this patently obvious statement.
“So how about if we disable their boat, wipe out all their communications systems, and just let them drift?” Philip said. “It would be days, maybe even a week or two, before anyone found them.”
And, he thought, at least they’d be alive when they were found. Probably.
“In the meantime we’d go to Easter Island, do