DOUBLE KNOT Read online

  * * *

  We tiptoed from one end of 704 to the other by the light of the moon. When we reached my stateroom, I closed and locked the door. I held a finger to my lips and led her through the sitting room to the bedroom.

  “You’re freaking me out, Davis.”

  I passed the envelope. She passed out. (No, she didn’t.)

  She went back and forth between the picture of No Hair and the letter. “Oh my God. We’re prisoners.”

  Yes.

  “Who is this? Who’s doing this?” She shook the letter. “And where is he?”

  She shook the picture.

  I had no answers.

  We sank to sit on the edge of the bed.

  “Do you think they mean it?” she whispered.

  “Which part?” I whispered back. “Yes, I think they mean it. We’re trapped and they have No Hair.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “Whoever it is, they want us out of the way.”

  “Of what?” she asked. “A heist? A con?”

  “Or a target,” I whispered. “One of the bazillionaires. Extortion. Blackmail. Kidnapping.”

  “It could be escaped prisoners hitching a ride,” Fantasy said. “Or there’s a Bernie Madoff on this boat. A homicidal first wife. It could be anyone with any number of agendas.”

  “A homicidal first wife wouldn’t lock us in here. Or No Hair there.”

  We stared at the photograph of our boss.

  We stared at the photograph of our friend.

  “Where’s there?” Fantasy asked. “And where did you find this?”

  “It was taped to the bathroom mirror.”

  “Who taped it to the mirror?” She grabbed my arm. “Davis! Either Jessica, Poppy, the butler, or all three of them are in on this! One of them did it!”

  “No.” I shook my head. “Not necessarily.”

  “I didn’t put it on the mirror. Your mother didn’t put it on the mirror.”

  “It could have been on the mirror when we left Biloxi, Fantasy. Anyone could have put it on the mirror.”

  “But you just found it.”

  “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t there earlier.”

  “Well, think, Davis. Was it or wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know! I can’t remember. I didn’t see it before we left, but I didn’t not see it before we left.”

  “Which is it, Davis? You did or you didn’t?”

  “I don’t know.” I fell back on the bed. “I know I went in there, but I wasn’t looking for a note on the mirror. I found it ten minutes ago and I have no idea how long it’s been there.”

  “Oh, holy crap.” She fell beside me. “This can’t be happening.”

  “It’s happening.” We stared at the ceiling until it got a whole lot worse. “My mother.”

  “What?”

  “We can’t breathe a word of this, Fantasy. Not one word. My mother cannot know.”

  “Considering your mother doesn’t know you’re pregnant, I don’t think it will be too hard to hide this from her.”

  We lay there, staring at the ceiling, until Fantasy raised herself on an elbow. “What are we going to do, Davis?”

  “Get out of here. And rescue No Hair.”

  * * *

  We armed ourselves on the fly, me with a lamp base and Fantasy with a satin nickel towel bar she ripped right off the wall.

  “Let’s start at the front door.”

  “You’re not going first.” She pushed in front of me. “You’re too pregnant.”

  We crept through the salon barefoot, catching a moonbeam, which sent our distorted shadows across the floor and up the walls, making the entire endeavor as spooky as possible. We finally reached the foyer. Pitch black. I patted the wall until I found a round dimmer switch. I rolled it to the right, illuminating the silver statue display enough for us to see the cabin door.

  “There’s a panel here,” I whispered.

  Fantasy was facing away from me, standing guard with her towel bar. She looked over her shoulder. “What is it?”

  “It’s a number pad. I bet it’s—” I popped off the panel, “—an override. Like an emergency way to open the door.” I turned to her. “What’s the code? We don’t know the code. We could stand here the whole week and not guess it.” I poked the keypad anyway: seven, zero, and four. “It doesn’t matter. It’s dead.”

  “What?” Fantasy asked.

  “The numbers aren’t lighting up.”

  “What?”

  “Find me a screwdriver,” I said.

  “Where am I supposed to find a screwdriver?”

  “Hold this.” I turned the lamp around, she held the base, and I unscrewed a crystal ball finial from the top.

  “Good thinking.”

  If it had worked.

  She smashed the crystal ball with the towel bar; I used a shard of glass to pry the number pad off the panel. “It’s cut.”

  “You cut yourself?” She turned to look.

  “The electrical.” The red and blue twist of lines behind the number pad had been snipped clean.

  Back to our sofa.

  Anderson Cooper, who’d wandered out my stateroom door, pounced on us, back and forth.

  “We need to sleep in shifts,” Fantasy said. “You go first, because your cat is driving me out of my mind.”

  Sleep wouldn’t be easy, in spite of the fact I couldn’t remember being this tired in my life. Neither of us had a gun. I’d stopped carrying one the minute I passed the pregnancy test, because babies and guns don’t mix. Fantasy didn’t bring a gun onboard, because as Bianca Sanders’s guest, it would have been too hard to explain to the embarkation people why she was packing. We were both lost without our heat.

  “We need to check on my mother.”

  “Check for what?” Fantasy looked down the hall. All was quiet.

  “I don’t want her all the way down there by herself.”

  “Well, let’s go get her.”

  “Under what pretext? A slumber party? Fantasy, we can’t tell her.”

  “At this point, how do we not tell her, Davis? You need to tell her.”

  “I say we don’t say a word to anyone until we know what we’re dealing with.”

  “We’re hostages,” she said. “That’s what we’re dealing with.”

  “I mean the enemy within.”

  “As in here?”

  “Right,” I said. “Chances are someone in this suite is in on it. Where was Poppy for three hours? She could easily be in on it.”

  “And that creepy Burnsworth,” Fantasy said. “He could too.”

  “Plus the fact that Jessica didn’t leave our side all day. Until she passed out.”

  “Meaning?”

  “There are two ways to look at it,” I said. “One, she probably didn’t put the letter on the mirror because she was with us the entire time. Or two, she’s behind everything which is why she was with us the entire time.”

  “I don’t see that airhead behind anything,” Fantasy said. “Much less this.”

  One of my babies bumped into another one of my babies. “Look.” I pointed.

  She placed a warm hand on the babies and was rewarded with a kick.

  “Davis. We have to get you out of here.”

  We listened to each other breathe for the longest.

  “We need to set a timer,” she said. “A limit on how long we’re going to wait before we make a move. There’s got to be something we can do.”

  “Like what?”

  “We can throw all the furniture off the deck. Someone has to notice a trail of white sofas in the water.”

  “Sofas don’t float, Fantasy. And even if th
ey did, it’s the dead of night. If we throw all the furniture in the ocean, we’ll be locked in here with no furniture,” I said. “We could throw ourselves overboard right now and no one would notice.”

  “Okay,” she said, “we Rapunzel. We tie bed sheets together. Make a rope. Climb down.”

  “The ship isn’t built that way. Didn’t you get a good look at the exterior? The decks are designed to prevent anyone climbing around. And the terraces are built for privacy, tiered and staggered, so it’s not like we could drop off our deck onto someone else’s. We’d have to go up or down two decks to get to anything or anyone. Let’s say we did. Let’s say there are that many bed sheets in here. Then we’d have to dangle over the ocean and somehow gain enough momentum to swing in fifty feet to land on a deck that’s fifty feet down, and we’re moving at almost forty knots an hour. There’s no way. Whoever we send down will be lost at sea. And that’s if they don’t land on a Zoom car and splatter at sea.”

  She looked at me in the quiet dark. “I didn’t say it wouldn’t be dangerous. Obviously you can’t do it. You can barely walk.” (Thank you.) “We’ll elect someone by secret ballot. I’m ready to vote right now.”

  “Face facts, Fantasy. We’re stuck here. With Jess. That said, do you think you could hate her a little less?”

  “I don’t hate her,” she said. “Much.”

  Anderson Cooper had fallen asleep.

  “We could build a bomb,” she said. “Blast our way out.”

  I studied her face by the light of the moon to see if she was serious. “Do you think for one second this suite is stocked with bomb-building supplies? Even if it was and we built one, this unit is probably as strong as a vault. We already know the door is. If we build a bomb and set it off we’ll still be locked in, but at the bottom of a pile of rubble after we blow ourselves up. Which will set off the sprinklers. So if we don’t kill ourselves in the blast we’ll drown.”

  “There you go.” She snapped her fingers. “We figure out a way to flood the casino. You know if a blackjack table took a drop of water they’d find the leak, which means they’d find us, and we’d be out of here in ten minutes.”

  “Fantasy,” I said, “the casino is on the deck above us. We can’t defy gravity.”

  We were running out of late-night escape options.

  “For now, we need to sit tight.” I tried to get comfortable. “Think about how we solve problems at the Bellissimo. It’s not by setting off bombs.”

  She raised a questioning eyebrow, mentally tracking our three years of Super Spying, thinking surely we’ve blown something up at one point or another. And she was probably right.

  “We’ve been in some scrapes, Fantasy. Tight spots.”

  “Very tight.”

  “And every single time No Hair believed in us. He let us see things through. Think of how many times he could have pulled the plug when it didn’t look like we’d find our way. Think of how things would have turned out differently if he’d set off a bomb on us. We have to return the favor. As bad as this looks, taking a desperate or drastic measure right now might do more harm than good, especially since we’ve been warned not to. Did you read the part in the note about being dead?”

  “This is horrible,” she said. “We’re helpless.”

  “We’re not. We need to hit it from another angle,” I said. “We play along, pretend we didn’t even find the note, don’t let on we realize we’re prisoners, and approach it from behind.”

  “Sneak up on it,” she said.

  “Right.”

  “How is that going to help?”

  “We can flush out the bad guy,” I said. “And find out why we’re locked in here. There’s a reason No Hair’s being held and there’s a reason we’re hostages, and we need to find the reason. And until we find the reason, we hang onto this: Who do we know that’s tougher than No Hair? Have you ever known anyone tougher than him?”

  “No.”

  “You have to believe he can tough this out until we can get to him. Because if you don’t believe, I won’t be able to believe.”

  “I believe, Davis. I believe.”

  We hooked pinkie fingers.

  We believed for five quiet minutes until I said, “Here’s the plan.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “We figure out who locked us up and why.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “We turn this place upside down and find a way out.”

  “Got it.”

  “Then we rescue No Hair.”

  “First thing in the morning, Davis. We’ll knock off your list. One, two, three. After that, let’s go try on jewelry we can’t afford at Tiffany’s.”

  “I thought you said you believed.”

  She sighed.

  “Okay, then this,” I said. “No matter what, we’ll be out of here sometime tomorrow. We’ll get out, then rescue No Hair.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know exactly how, when, or what we’re going to have to deal with before. But we’ll be out tomorrow.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “When Bradley’s plane lands in China the first thing he’ll do is call me. When he doesn’t reach me he’ll call No Hair. When he doesn’t reach either of us he’ll send Navy SEALS.”

  “Since when does Bradley have the authority to engage SEALS?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I appreciate your confidence,” she said. “But whoever’s behind this has done an impressive job setting it up. They’ve managed to take down No Hair and lock us up. When they say they have communication with Bradley covered, they might have it covered.”

  “I know my husband.”

  “The husband you know so well is halfway across the globe.”

  “Okay,” I said, “last resort. We have Mother’s phone. Whoever disabled our V2s doesn’t know we have a phone. Tomorrow, we’ll cruise close enough to Cuba to see land. We’ll be close enough to pick up a cell signal. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll absolutely be able to call for help Monday.”

  “Why Monday?” Her words were hidden behind a yawn. “What happens Monday?”

  “On Monday we’ll be in the Caymans. We can definitely get a call out when we get to the Caymans.”

  SEVEN

  Probability’s itinerary included one port of call—the offshore financial haven of the Cayman Islands. We were going straight there, stopping for two days, then heading right back to Biloxi. The Caymans were one of the monetary capitals of the world with forty of the fifty largest international banks in operation, and our destination was George Town, the capital city, on the southwest coast of Grand Cayman. Collectively, the passengers on Probability had more than a small stake in the Cayman’s $1.5 trillion in financial transaction liabilities, and a very vested interest in visiting one, or several, of the six hundred George Town banks. The Caymans had more registered corporations than people, and the banking accompanying all that incorporation ran the gamut, including day-to-day trading, general commercial transactions, investment activities, hedge fund formation, structured securitization and financing, captive insurance, plus any and all other broad-spectrum corporate financial activities. Not all Cayman banking was aboveboard and sanctioned by the United States Federal Government. But all Cayman banking was tax free on profits and capital gains with no withholding taxes for foreign investors, in addition to being free of estate and death duties. It was the ideal location for the mega wealthy to set up trust, annuity, and savings accounts, and the fifty invited guests on Probability had one thing in common: They banked in the Caymans.

  There were three reasons Probability was only making the one stop.

  First, anchorage—where to park the big thing. The draft of a ship refers to the distance between the waterline and the keel, the rock bot
tom. The draft on Probability kept it well away from the shoreline. In other words, what you couldn’t see went too deep to dock the ship anywhere near land without running aground. It had to stay in the ocean; there weren’t enough tug boats in the whole Caribbean to pull Probability off a sandbar. The bazillionaires would be ferried to George Town on luxury commuter speedboats with three-piece Jing Ping bands housed in Probability garages. (The boats were housed in Probability garages.) (Not the Jing Ping bands.) (Surely they had staterooms.)

  The second reason we were only making one stop was interest level. The passengers on this cruise had upcountry estates on Maui, chateaus in the south of France, penthouse condos on Bora Bora, and beach-front mansions in Monaco. They cared very little about the tourist traps of Jamaica, Cozumel, and Montego Bay, because the activities and amenities aboard Probability were greater than the activities and amenities in all of the Antilles, Greater and Lesser.

  And the third reason Probability had one destination: security.

  “Only one passenger on the entire guest list won’t be bringing private security.”

  “Which one?” I asked. “Me?”

  No Hair and I were in his office and the countdown was on. T-minus six weeks before Probability would set sail. I’d parked my car ten minutes earlier, having just driven back from Pine Apple. I’d gone upstairs to Bradley’s and my twenty-ninth floor home to put Anderson Cooper to bed, then straight to No Hair’s office. He gave me a bear hug with one massive arm around my shoulders and patted my babies bump. He asked about Mother, he asked about Daddy, then we took seats at his corner conference table covered with hundreds of Probability dossiers.

  “Not you,” he said. “The passenger who isn’t bringing security is actually in the security business. He’s his own security. You have security. You’re taken care of.”

  “Fantasy?” I asked.

  “Fantasy is definitely security,” he said, “and she’s definitely booked in your suite.”

  “What have we heard from her?”

  “We’ve heard exactly nothing.”

  Fantasy had been working the bare bones minimum, showing up only when it was absolutely necessary. Between my pregnancy, managing Bianca Sanders’s pregnancy, and running back and forth to Pine Apple, I’d spent a whopping hour with her over the last six months. I had no idea what was going on in her marriage, I missed her, and I was looking forward to spending time with her on Probability. “So it’s been you and Baylor all week?”