I dipped back into the case to retrieve a Black Amex. “She has a credit card.”
Just then a staff member wearing a striped T-shirt and a broad smile came over with tall glasses of iced water decorated with slices of cucumber. She served Nat and Mary Alice while Helen and I made our way up the hill to the main lodge. In other circumstances, I might have been impressed. It was open-air with koi ponds and a spectacular view across The Narrows to Nevis. The atmosphere was serene, and I wanted to relax, but it was too soon.
The front desk was like something out of Architectural Digest—a long slab of polished black concrete with rattan barstools and a lofty arrangement of orchids. Only a slim tablet computer indicated any business was done there. The clerk greeted us graciously. I gave her a thin smile in return. It was important to pitch the tone just right, somewhere between irritation and entitlement.
I eyed her name tag. “Sophia, I hope you can help us. We’re booked into a luxury villa on the other side of the island, and I’m afraid it will not do,” I said, pinching my mouth to suggest something unspeakable. “Do you have a room available?”
“I’m so sorry to hear that! Let me see what I can do.” She tapped rapidly at her tablet. “I do have a lovely beachside double queen, but I’m afraid it’s on the far side of the resort, away from the restaurants and pools,” she said, gesturing towards the opposite side of the curving bay.
I sighed a little. “I’m sure that’s fine,” I said in a tone of mild disappointment.
“It’s ready right now,” she assured me. “And as I said, it’s beachside, so it is on the ground floor with direct beach access.”
“That will do,” Helen put in, her English very faintly accented with something that might have been Dutch or Danish or anywhere in between.
Sophia smiled gratefully at us. “I’m so glad. I will just need a credit card and your passports.”
Helen made a pantomime gesture towards her nonexistent wallet, and I placed my card and passport decisively in the little tray on the table. “No, no. I’ll handle it.”
“Thank you, dear,” she murmured.
“My friend has left her wallet back at the villa. We’ll stop by later and let you make a copy after we’ve sent for our bags.”
Sophia hesitated for the length of a heartbeat and then smiled. “Of course. If you’ll give me just a moment.” She disappeared with the credit card and passport into a back office. If anything was going to go wrong, this was the moment. I took deep, calming breaths and repeated the mantra I had adopted while on assignment at an ashram in Kerala. Helen flipped through a coffee table book on the photography of Lorna Simpson.
A few eternal minutes later, Sophia emerged with a basket of chilled towels and bottles of mineral water. She passed them over with our papers and room keys.
“Welcome to the Park Hyatt, ladies. Enjoy your stay.”
We refused the resort tour on the grounds that we were meeting friends for lunch. As soon as we left the main lodge, we collected Nat and Mary Alice from the beachside and followed the map to our room.
“Safe for now,” Nat murmured. That had been another of the Shepherdess’ dicta. Whenever you were safe, even if it was for a short time, it was important to give yourself a chance to exhale, to take nourishment and rest and live to fight again.
I kicked off my espadrilles and stretched onto the bed, lacing my hands behind my head.
“What now?” Mary Alice asked. “We’ve gotten this far, but we’re still in the Caribbean with one passport and one credit card amongst the four of us. How are we getting home?”
“Not home,” Helen reminded her. “We need a safe house. We need to buy ourselves enough time to figure out what the hell is going on.”
We were silent a minute, all of us probably thinking the same thing. For all our experience, we were used to the luxury of an entire organization at our disposal, ready to pluck us out of the field if we were in danger, prepared to clean up our messes, remove us from the line of fire. For the first time in forty years, we were on our own.
I sat up slowly. “I have a friend who can help. Someone with no connection to the Museum at all.” I eyed the phone. “But we can’t take the chance of using the hotel’s phone to contact her. It’s traceable.”
Instead, I dug out the local directory and dialed an electronics shop in Basseterre. I told them what I needed and they promised delivery of a pack of burner phones within the hour. I stayed in the room to wait while Mary Alice sulked on the patio and Helen and Nat paid a visit to the hotel shop, collecting some toiletries and criminally expensive clothes for each of us, which they charged to the room. When the burner phones arrived, I plugged one into the charger and punched in a number from memory. Minka answered on the fourth ring, and I could picture her, Doc Martens propped on the desk while she fired lasers at aliens in a game she’d designed herself.