The Skill Conspiracy Read online

  I assumed those big boxes covered up fuel tanks, but they could have been full of rum or chimpanzees for all I knew. It didn’t really seem important, so I didn’t ask. A ladder opposite those tanks led up one level, which is where we’d seen Kevin standing on his way into the marina. That was obviously where you drove the boat from. On either side of that ladder were steps leading down and toward the front of the boat. Peering down that way, I could see that there was a small seating area, a kitchen beyond that, and some other space just beyond that, which I couldn’t quite make out from here. It struck me that the décor of this boat was almost exactly the same as what we’d seen on the private jet. They both had white leather furniture and a bluish rug with silver accents. It made me start to wonder if all rich people had the exact same taste in decorating, or if their designers were all just really lazy.

  “Let me just put this food in the kitchen, and we’ll be on our way,” Kevin said as he passed by us, walking down the steps toward the area of the boat I’d just been peering into.

  “Can we come down?” Annie asked as he finished descending the steps.

  “Of course. Of course,” Kevin said with a big smile. “Mi barco es tu barco.”

  Huh?

  “It means my boat is your boat,” he said by way of clarification. “You guys don’t know any Spanish?”

  “No,” I said. “Not Really. Why?”

  “Nothin’, just, Tony told me you guys were looking to buy a boat down there. Might be a little tough to get what you want at the price you want if you don’t speak the language.”

  “They don’t all speak English in Cuba?” Annie asked.

  “They might,” Kevin said with a smile that only touched half his face. “But you not knowing the language will automatically make them jack up the price on ya.”

  I was just about to open my mouth to say we didn’t care about the price, but everybody cares about money. Everybody, I suppose, except for two people who are on a desperate flight from people trying to kill them. So instead I said, “What do you suggest?”

  “I buy boats in Cuba all the time,” he said. “You tell me what you’re looking for, and I’ll get you exactly what you want. I’ll make sure it’s a quality craft too, and not some thing that’ll break down as soon as you push off from the dock. You give me five hundred bucks, and I’ll negotiate you one hell of a deal that’ll save you ten times that number.”

  We really didn’t care about the savings, but the help with picking out a good boat actually did sound very helpful.

  “Deal,” I said and extended my hand to shake.

  Five hundred bucks to get something that wouldn’t sink halfway to Colombia? That was a good deal.

  Kevin shook my hand, finished putting the food and snacks into the little cabinets, then walked back up the stairs.

  “Before sundown!” he said, calling back to us as he climbed the little ladder up to where the controls were. “I guarantee it!”

  18

  The sound of the engines on this boat were deafening. When Kevin fired them up I thought that we’d been struck by lightning. In a strange way, that actually gave me some relief in regards to my earlier worries about this being a smuggling boat. No way in the world was this thing designed to be sneaking anything anywhere. It was way too loud, and you could hear it coming from a mile away.

  Fortunately for my eardrums, I realized after returning down to the little seating area, that if you closed both of the doors leading down into this spot, it got a lot quieter. Like, an amazing amount quieter. Annie had taken a seat on a little couch, and I was just about to join her so I could finally put my sneakers back on. As soon as I started to slip one on, I realized it was still very wet.

  “What are you doing?” Annie asked, as I stood back up and took a couple steps toward one of the doors I’d just closed.

  “I gotta dry these things off,” I said, holding both of my sneakers out in front of me.

  My plan was to go back up to the rear deck of the boat and find a rail or something I could tie my sneakers to, so the breeze might finally dry them out. Unfortunately, as soon as I opened the door, I noticed that the boat was kicking up a rather huge amount of spray and plumes of it were raining across the back deck.

  Well then, I thought, half-dried shoes it is.

  Closing the door behind me, I walked back down into the seating area, tossed my sneakers on the ground, pulled out a little bag of popcorn that Kevin had put away in the kitchen, then sat down next to Annie on the little couch again. We talked mostly about our experience at the bizarre Beer Shack. The strange bartender, the stranger Biker Guy, and the strangest thing of all that being that incredibly, neither of us had gotten an upset stomach from eating those burgers. Annie started to say something about our skydive from the airplane, but I quickly and politely cut her off, pointing around at all the electronics in the room. This day and age, you never did know who could be listening to you.

  Instead, I thought-commanded my PCD to pair with the 3D TV screen in front of us on the couch and called up a travel site that was created for tourists visiting Cuba. I knew we wouldn’t have any time to actually do anything fun down there, but just for a minute, as we finally got to sit here with some real time to ourselves, it was nice to pretend for a little while that we were just two normal people going on a normal vacation.

  Eventually, Annie started to doze off. It was still early in the afternoon, but the day had been more exhausting than most, so I scooped her up and tried to walk her into one of the little sleeping cabins near the front of the boat.

  “Ow!”

  That was Annie. I kinda smacked her head off of a wall on my way out of this seating area. Turns out, it’s not so super easy to carry a girl in your arms while you’re in the belly of a boat traveling fifty miles per hour over relatively choppy seas. I put her down and tried to help her into one of the little beds, but she playfully pushed me away, saying I’d done enough for her already.

  I was tired, but I didn’t think I could sleep, so I grabbed a pair of wireless headphones that were on a little stand next to the TV and paired them to my PCD. They were noise-canceling, which was cool. The two doors separating us from the rear deck of the boat drowned out most of the noise from the engines, but not all of it. Only when I put the headphones on and activated their noise-canceling feature did I truly get to enjoy some real silence.

  Headphones on and PCD paired to the TV, I called up that special I’d been watching about the SS Olympus again and re-watched the whole thing. A number of times, the portable STU unit could be seen in the background of the video, and no one seemed to be anywhere near it. It was literally just sitting there out in the open. I really hoped that’s the way it actually was up there on a day-to-day basis and not just something that they were doing on TV to make it look extra chill. I watched those scenes again and again, trying to come up with some sort of a plan as to how I would be able to get close to the thing, but eventually, I had to give up because I just didn’t have enough information. I knew that watching a special on TV wasn’t going to be nearly as informative as actually being there.

  Once it was over, I turned off the special and, against my own better judgment, decided to flip on over to one of the local Florida or Florida Keys news channels. A part of me didn’t want to see it. If Annie and I were on the news yet again, I knew that it would be hard to watch, but staying ignorant wasn’t going to be the smart move here. As an old cartoon used to say, “knowing is half the battle,” so I started flipping around in search of some knowledge.

  The first channel I came across featured local Miami news. They were doing a story about a man who’d gotten drunk and jumped into a gator pit at a local gator farm. He had made it out alive and unharmed but was complaining to the reporter on the scene that the gator had made him spill his beer.

  The next channel had a story featuring a woman who was trying to steel vodka from a liquor store by hiding the pilfered bottles in a baby carriage . . . that the baby was
sleeping in. The next channel, oh, there it was. Me again.

  The caption of the story said “FLIGHT from the law,” which I found to be decidedly very unclever, and had a picture of my face up on the screen next to Annie’s with some obvious stock footage of someone skydiving.

  “These are the same two people who allegedly shot and killed two Skill Donor Union officials just this morning up in New York City.”

  Well, at least they are saying allegedly, I thought wryly.

  “The pilot of the airplane they were trying to make their escape on says that only one parachute was used during their jump, and officials have been unable to confirm if they jumped together, or if only one of the suspects used a parachute while the other did not.”

  “What?” I said out loud, indignant. What were they saying? Did they think I just chucked Annie out of the plane and used a parachute for myself? Or maybe that she’d done that to me? Wow. That’s rough.

  “The flight had been bound for Bogota, Colombia, but the jump happened over the water somewhat near a number of the southernmost Florida Keys. Officials are asking for your help. If you spot either Alden Heath or Annie Crown, call this number.”

  They flashed a toll free number up on the screen, then went on to say that we could be using the names of Jake Kline and Sophia Bowers as well.

  Good thing I’d changed those names out after we’d landed on Vaca Key.

  The bulletin on us ended, and they quickly flashed to a story where a man with no pants on was running out of a local grocery store carrying a carton of milk, which he was splashing all over himself as he ran.

  Whoever was looking for us knew that we had been bound for Bogota. They also knew that we knew that they knew that. So, it might be safe to assume that there was no way in hell that we would keep on going to Bogota because we knew that they knew that that’s where we were going, right? So continuing on to Bogota was actually the safest place in the world to go. Unless, they knew that we knew that they knew and assuming that we’d think that them knowing would make it so we’d never actually go there actually made it so that we did go there instead.

  I don’t know. This was hurting my head.

  One thing I did know. True that they knew we were going to Bogota, but there was no chance that they knew we were trying to head to the Space Elevator. I mean, really, an enclosed box that contained thirty people, all of whom were stuck in said box together for a one-way non-deviating trip? That’s like the worst escape plan ever. We’d have to keep our eyes peeled once we got to Colombia, but I was deciding that there was almost no chance that they’d have anyone looking for us specifically at the Space Elevator. At least, that’s what I was hoping.

  Having given myself a rather instant headache thinking about all of this, I pulled off the headphones, unpaired my PCD from the screen, found my way into the little bedroom that Annie was asleep in, and slipped under the covers alongside her. The rising and falling of the boat as it darted across the sea was distracting and almost a little stomach-churning at first, but eventually, I fell into the rhythm of it and managed to drift off to sleep.

  19

  Funny how the absence of noise can be the thing that wakes you up sometimes. I’d become familiar with this phenomena when I’d gotten my very first apartment in New York City. Manhattan is noisy. Like, constantly noisy. I never really noticed it, until the very first night when I’d gotten my very first apartment on the corner of Fifty-fourth and Seventh. I’d climbed into my bed and had tried to fall asleep, but even though my apartment was on the thirteenth floor, I could still hear every single thing every person was saying down on the street as if they were somehow hovering right outside my window. I could hear the people going to the bars at midnight, leaving them at 4:00 AM and milling around looking for after parties even as the sun was trying to creep up over the skyline in the morning. The noise was constant, but before I knew it, I had grown used to it. After only a couple of weeks I noticed that instead of keeping me up, it was the noise that was helping me to fall asleep. Every once in a while, in the middle of the night, when there was one of those rare moments of complete and total silence, that would be the thing that woke me up. The same thing had just happened here in one of the sleeping cabins of this speedboat.

  “Annie,” I said, gently squeezing her arm a little bit. “Wake up. I think we’re here.”

  The constant drone and muted roar of the boat’s engines had suddenly stopped, and the rhythmic undulation of the craft had gone from alternating highs and lows in the water to a much more subtle feeling of bobbing.

  “Hey, guys,” came Kevin’s voice from a little speaker in the ceiling.

  Ha. I knew they had the ability to listen to us down here.

  “We’re here,” he said.

  I checked my PCD and saw that it was just a few minutes before 7:00 PM. I couldn’t remember the last time I had fallen asleep in the middle of the afternoon, but then again, I couldn’t ever remember having a day quite like this one. We climbed out of the bed, walked through the little kitchen and seating area, I put on my mostly dry shoes, and we went up the three little steps and out onto the main deck of the boat.

  “Oh, wow,” I said, taking in the view.

  Kevin had climbed down out of the captain’s area and was on this part of the boat talking to two men on a dock, who were holding some ropes Kevin had apparently tossed to them.

  It was gorgeous here. It was, as promised, just a few minutes before sunset, and these vibrant orange and purple colors seemed to be spooling off of the sun as it fell into the clear blue water off to our right.

  “Look at that,” Annie said, pointing at the beautiful scene.

  “Told ya,” Kevin said with a smile. “Just in time for sunset.”

  The two men on the dock were pulling our boat closer and closer toward their position with what looked to be very practiced hand-over-hand motions. As we got a little closer, Kevin scrambled up toward the front of the boat and threw some big rubber thingy over the side and asked me to do the same with one of them that was right next to me. It was a white, rounded cylindrical thing made of thick rubber and seemed to be filled with air. I watched Kevin throw his overboard, but instead of it falling into the water, it stopped short because it was tied to a little rail on the boat, which caused the rubber doohickey to just sit there on the side of the boat, just barely skimming the top of the water. I tossed mine just as Kevin had done with his, even though I literally had no clue as to why I’d done it until, as the two men finished pulling us into the dock, the boat gently bounced off of the rubber things once, then twice, and eventually came to rest alongside the dock.

  Oh. That’s smart, I thought, realizing that the things were basically little bumpers designed to prevent the sides of the boat from smashing into the dock repeatedly during docking and while being tied up.

  “Blabbidy blah blah blah blah blah,” said Kevin. He was obviously speaking Spanish, but since the word cerveza wasn’t in the sentence, I had no idea what he was saying.

  PCDs did have a form of translation software built into them, but it was basically useless when a native speaker was talking at a normal pace.

  One of the two men responded, saying something else I couldn’t understand, as the other man reached out to hold the boat as close to the dock as possible.

  “He’ll give you a hand onto the dock,” Kevin said, looking at Annie and gesturing toward one of the men.

  She took one step up onto a slightly raised level of the boat, bent down to grab the man’s hand, and leapt lightly down onto the dock. Kevin jumped down onto the dock from his perch near the front of the boat, and I followed Annie without help from either of the men, not that they’d been offering help to me anyway. The one who had helped Annie down was now tying a second rope near the front of the boat to the dock, and when that was done, the other man tied a second rope near the back of the boat to the dock.

  “Gracias,” Kevin said.

  I knew that one.

  He p
ulled his PCD out of his pocket and quickly passed it along the PCDs of the two expectant men. A tip, I was assuming.

  “So, listen,” Kevin said, turning back to Annie and me. “I got ya here before sunset as promised, but I reached out to my boat guy, and no one’s gonna be at the marina tonight.”

  As anxious as I was to keep on the move, I had expected this would probably be the case.

  He continued, “I’ve got a place I’m gonna spend the night, but the two of you might enjoy something a little more, I don’t know, touristy?”

  I thought about this for a second. Thought it might be nice to spend some of the money I had on something other than our getaway plan. I realized, though, where the tourists were is probably where you’d find a New Yorker or some residents of Miami who could have been watching some of their local news and might recognize Annie and me from the fact that our faces had been plastered all over the TV today.

  “We might just do a little exploring on our own first,” I replied, garnering a semi-confused look from Annie.

  “Suit yourself,” Kevin said with a shrug of his shoulders. “My guy’s an early riser, so don’t go crazy tonight. His place opens up promptly at 6:00 AM, so I’ll send you the address and a tether before then.”

  With a tip about what direction we might want to go if we were looking for food, Kevin went in the opposite direction, leaving Annie and me to make our own plans. I told her why we should probably stay away from the tourist traps, then suggested maybe we go get some new clothing. Getting her out of her NYC sweatpants might be wise, and I was kind of dying to find a shirt that was a little more comfortable and far less flashy than this silky thing from Trace I’d been stuck in all day.