She took a deep breath. “Well, I suppose if we die tonight, I’m okay with it. I’ve had a good life, you know. I was married to Kenneth for over thirty years. Eighteen of them were really happy. That’s not so bad.”
“What happened to the other twelve?”
“Erectile dysfunction and his abortive attempt to breed Weimaraners.”
I burst out laughing and for an instant she bristled like she was getting ready to take offense. But then she laughed too.
Just then the door opened and Mary Alice and Nat appeared with our handbags and boxes of leftovers. “What happened to you two?” Mary Alice asked as Natalie held up one of the boxes.
“Some sort of rice pudding shit with rose, but it’s good,” she said. She handed out spoons as Mary Alice looked at the case on her bed.
“What’s this?” she asked. I told her the code and she opened it. “Well, hell,” she said, stepping back.
Nat shoved a spoonful of rice pudding into her mouth before coming close, bending over the explosive like a fond mother with a newborn child.
“Oh, that’s good stuff,” she said. “So the little prick was getting ready to blow the boat—with us on it.”
“We’re either the marks or the Museum doesn’t care if we were collateral damage,” I said.
“That’s hurtful,” Mary Alice put in. “We’ve given forty years to those assholes and this is how they repay us. But why? It doesn’t make sense.”
“That’s not a now problem,” I said, reverting to training. It was a reminder to focus on the job at hand and set the priorities where they should be. “Right now, we have to figure out how to dismantle this or how to get everyone off this boat before it blows.”
“Easy,” Nat said, spooning up more of the pudding. “Override code.”
Helen cleared her throat. “Billie removed Fogerty from the equation before we could secure it.”
“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 the alarm. 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.
“What about us?” 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.