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The Skill Conspiracy Page 15
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The trip was going pretty smoothly. After our embarrassing start, Annie and I had stayed up in the captain’s area for nearly two hours watching the ocean whiz by and talking over the noise of the engines as best we could within the mostly enclosed area atop the long, sleek vessel. After a while, though, the noise was starting to get to me, so I suggested we go back beneath deck to the seating area and maybe have a little something to eat. As soon as I stepped outside of the captain’s area, my PCD buzzed, and I looked to see that it was the vessel telling me that it would notify me if any changes in course would be required.
Down below, it was a lot quieter, and I could actually hear my stomach rumbling. I had originally thought that two of the frozen meals I’d purchased for us were breakfast burritos, but they ended up just being regular steak and bean burritos with cheese. Fine. Whatever. I was starving. I heated up two of those, while Annie peeled herself a banana.
We’d started the trip at 7:48 AM local time, and the trip monitor, which was now mirrored to my GPS, said that we’d be getting into Castillogrande at 10:27 PM. The trip looked like it would take just over fifteen hours, but we’d actually be getting an hour back by crossing over a time zone. Besides burritos, and a modest amount of tequila, which led to an afternoon session of boat sex, something I’d kind of always wanted to do, followed by a short nap, there really wasn’t much else about the trip that was worthy of reporting.
As the sun was setting later in the evening, it occurred to me that if docking the boat was anything like departing, I’d probably have to do it manually. The thought of trying to find a dock and then steer the boat into it without smashing either the dock or us in half in the dark did not sound appealing, so I called up the User’s Guide for the boat on my PCD and started looking up how to park the thing in open water. Turned out that there were two ways to do it on this boat. The first was that if the water was shallow enough, you could press a single button to drop anchor. The other option was designed to moor you in deeper water. Normally, if you just cut your engines in the middle of the sea, you’d end up drifting wherever the wind, current, and tides wanted to take you. If, however, you activated the “deep water mooring” feature, the vessel would engage eight small impellers, all of which were run by stored solar power, and they would keep you in the same spot indefinitely, so long as your solar cells were charged.
This second option was going to be perfect. For one, I didn’t want to try to park the boat until daytime, so being able to stay out of sight until sunrise would be perfect. Also, the thought of a full night’s sleep on board The Runner before taking to land in Castillogrande also sounded pretty appealing. Other than looking up the anchoring protocols, the only other thing to do was try to figure out our travel arrangements going from Castillogrande to Bogota.
Time passed, the boat bounced up and down as we rocketed over the water, sometimes rather jarringly, and on a couple of occasions my PCD buzzed with notifications from The Runner that it was going to be making slight course adjustments to avoid a small storm with choppy waters up ahead. Honestly, the novelty of being on a four-hundred-thousand-dollar boat—or two-million-dollar boat, depending on how you looked at it—wore off kind of quickly. Eventually, though, after nearly fifteen hours at sea, three microwaved meals, and quite possibly a little bit more tequila consumed than was necessary, I received a notification from the boat that we were on final approach to Castillogrande. I pressed “PAUSE” on the navigation pane that was on my PCD and started to walk up to the captain’s area.
“You need a hand?” Annie asked from her spot on the couch.
“No, I’m good.”
We had been watching a little news on the screen built into the boat and had seen our faces staring back at us twice. Sure enough, they were telling the public to look out for Alden Heath, aliases Jake Tyler and Randy James, as well as Annie Crown alias Sophia Bowers. The fact that they knew two of my assumed identities and only one of Annie’s led me to believe that someone on Vaca Key had given up some information, and seeing as how the only “someone” I made a payment to on that island was Mr. Dirty Shirt the bartender, the culprit seemed pretty obvious. It was a glaring error on my part to have paid for those burgers and beers and not changed my identity right afterwards, but still, I hadn’t really pegged Mr. Dirty Shirt as the kind of guy who cooperated with the law. Then again, we’d heard about the STU Corporation offering up a reward of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for information leading to our arrest, so, that seemed like a good enough incentive for pretty much anyone to rat us out.
When I’d hit PAUSE on our trip navigation, the boat stopped moving, but the engines were still running. Even at idle, this boat was still insanely loud, so it was with some haste that I climbed back up to the captain’s area and hit the black button on the control console that I’d learned earlier was the kill switch. The silence washed over me, and the boat bobbed slowly in the tranquility of the sea. I couldn’t see any land from where we were, but the onboard trip planner showed that from this spot it would only take about twenty minutes to get to shore. I navigated to the “deep water mooring” pane on the boat’s control panel and hit “GO.” At first, it seemed like nothing was happening, but after just a couple of moments I could hear what sounded like a distant jet ski firing for just a couple of seconds beneath the boat. I guessed that noise was coming from the “impellers” I’d read about in the manual. Without any land nearby as a reference, it was kind of difficult to visually verify that we were indeed staying in place, but I noticed that on the control panel, the Deep Water Mooring pane was showing our latitude and longitude, and every time the boat strayed more than a single second from our set position, the impellers would fire up and put us back into our original position. Their sound was subtle and almost soothing compared to what I’d been hearing for the last fifteen hours.
“We good?” Annie asked as I came back downstairs and into the seating area.
“Yup.”
It looked like she’d switched to some nature program on the screen.
It was a little before eleven at night, and I decided to brush my teeth with the cheap, coarse toothbrush I had bought at the convenience store in Cuba. It only cut up my gums a little bit, but, what did you expect for the equivalent of one and a half American dollars?
“You coming to bed?” I called out of the bathroom to Annie.
“Right after this show is over,” she replied.
It actually almost felt like a normal night in Hoboken for the two of us.
23
“Estas rodeado!”
I was dead-ass asleep, it was the middle of the night, and some idiot was screaming into a megaphone.
“Rindete!”
What is it, the Puerto Rican Day Parade? That whole thing used to go right past my old place in Manhattan, and man, did they start early? Wait a minute. No. Where am I?
“Rindete!”
I was hearing the words, but I had no idea what they meant.
“Alden. Alden! Wake up!” That was Annie. She sounded panicked.
“What?” I asked, then I heard a quick blast of a siren from outside. “What’s going on?”
“I think it’s the police,” Annie said. “They found us.”
“What!” I sat bolt upright. Now I was wide awake.
I jumped out of bed, threw on a new black T-shirt, my old, dirty jeans, and my finally dry sneakers, then dashed through the seating area, opened the door, and ran up the steps to the open-air back part of the boat. As I did, I realized that I probably should have tried to come up with some sort of a plan before running headlong toward the police.
“Rindete! Blabbidy blah blah blah blah!”
I was catching the first word, but nothing else. I knew this much, though, they weren’t saying, “Welcome to Castillogrande.”
Worse than not understanding, I also wasn’t able to see. As soon as I’d come out onto the deck, I was hit with some massive lights beaming right into my face.
“Gi
ve up! Put your hands in the air and surrender!” came the voice from the megaphone in accented English.
“Oh,” I said out loud. Then, fully realizing what was going on, “Ohhhhhhhhh.”
I put my hands up in the air and tried to squint through the lights to hopefully see something. It looked like there were three boats surrounding us. I could make out a little bit of writing on the one closest to me but had no idea what any of it said. Squinting a little harder and making very sure not to shade my eyes with one of my hands even though I really, really wanted to, it became obvious that they were either police or military boats.
“Prepare to be boarded!” came the heavily accented and very pissed-off sounding voice. “Are you alone?”
“What?” I called back.
“Are you alone on the vessel?”
“Yes,” I called back. “No, wait, I mean, no. I mean—”
“Which is it?”
A part of me didn’t want to tell this guy that Annie was on the boat, but, really, where was she going to hide? They were going to find her eventually.
“Yes, I am not alone!” I shouted back.
“What?” the man on the boat blared back through his megaphone.
“My girlfriend is on the boat with me,” I called back, hoping to clarify things a little bit. I was obviously very sleepy and very disoriented.
“Prepare to be boarded.”
They kept the light in my face, but I could now see that at least three men on each of the three boats were pointing huge rifles at me. The boat with the Megaphone Man started to move up alongside The Runner, and as soon as they got almost close enough to touch us, I started getting yelled at.
“Keep your hands up, and step to the other side of the boat!”
“What side?” I asked, wanting to make sure I didn’t do anything to get myself shot.
“The side opuesto our boat!”
“Op what shuh?”
“Get down on your knees!”
He roared this last bit at me, and I quite literally almost fell to my knees in immediate compliance. As I did, two men from the police boat grabbed the railing of The Runner and began tying their boat to mine. Some little part of my mind noticed that their boat also had those little bumper things, and that they had tossed theirs out before tying up to us. That was nice of them.
“Where is the girl?” I heard a voice ask. It was Megaphone Man, but he was no longer using the megaphone because he had apparently jumped onto the deck of my boat, which I hadn’t been able to see until now.
“She’s in the bedroom,” I replied. “In there,” I said, gesturing to the door that led below.
Two men with handguns moved toward the door.
“Hey!” I said, still remembering to keep my hands over my head. “You don’t need to go in there with the guns. She’s just—”
“Quiet,” Megaphone Man yelled at me, again with no megaphone.
A few seconds later Annie was getting marched out of the little doorway with the two men behind her, both pointing their guns at her back. Thank God, I thought, seeing that she had taken the time to put on some clothing. She normally slept naked, unless there was a reason not to, and since we had no way of knowing we would wake up to “guests” . . . I had been concerned she would still be in an indecent state.
“Next to him,” Megaphone Man shouted at Annie. “On your knees!”
I was basically in the back left corner of the boat, and Annie came over to join me.
“Are you okay?” we both asked each other at almost the same exact moment.
“Quiet!” the man shouted at us again.
We exchanged nods of confirmation, and Annie got down on her knees right next to me. One of the men who had gone into the cabin of the boat to fetch Annie stood right in front of us and pointed his gun at my head.
“No move,” he said in an extremely thick accent, which at first made me think he had said, “No mood.” Funny, because I wasn’t in the mood for any of this either.
Megaphone Man took a couple of steps toward us and reached into his pocket. When his hand emerged, I could see that he was holding a PCD. He pointed it first at me and then at Annie, as the small flash on the back of the device illuminated our faces.
“Michael Tully,” he said, looking at me. Then “Lindsay King,” as he looked at Annie. His facial recognition software had tagged us quickly with the false identities I’d set up for us in Cuba.
Megaphone Man stepped back and continued to do some work on his PCD, while the other man, who had gone to find Annie, walked back over to his own boat. There, he was handed some long thing that looked like a weed whacker.
“What’s going—” I started to ask.
“Quiet!” both Megaphone Man and the guy pointing the gun at my head shouted at the same time.
The man with the weed whacker thing held it with one hand and started tapping it on different parts of the boat, making himself appear more like a confused blind man with a cane than anything else. I was completely baffled, until his weed whacker cane thing let out a long beep.
“A key,” he said, though I don’t think it was actually, “a key” but rather, a Spanish word that sounded like it because then he said, “Blabbidy blah blah blah,” which was clearly not English.
The man pointing the gun at me and Annie stayed where he was, but Megaphone Man went over to join Weed Whacker Guy, whereupon the two of them unlatched the box thing near the stern of the boat. Megaphone Man bent down, pulled something out of the open compartment, and laughed.
“Bad hiding place,” he said, turning to me.
“Huh?”
I couldn’t see what he was holding, and I wasn’t sure what he was talking about anyway.
“What is it?” I asked, trying to make some sense out of all of this.
He ignored me, and Weed Whacker Guy started tapping his cane thing on the other compartment at the stern. Just as his instrument let out another little beep, I heard a whistling from off in the distance. It only lasted for a second, just long enough for everyone on our boat to turn our heads to where the noise seemed to be coming from.
BOOM!
BOOM!
Two massive explosions rocked the pre-dawn sky. The light that came from them dwarfed the lights that had been shining in my face, and the heat was like a living thing enveloping my body and moving from head to toe in a flash. I pulled my arms down and covered my head, while throwing myself to the ground in a ball. I felt Annie crashing into my back as she apparently did the same thing. After a few tense moments, I finally opened my eyes and saw large fireballs rising from somewhere just beyond the deck of The Runner. Curiosity grabbing hold of me, I lurched to my feet and saw that the fireballs were actually coming from where two of the three police boats had been just a moment earlier. The one that Megaphone Man and his cohorts had come from was still tied up to The Runner, but the other two boats were just mounds of burning fiberglass, plastic, and metal crackling atop the sea.
“Ahhhhhhh!” That was Megaphone Man. I looked over to see him bent over at the waist, doing something with his thigh. As my vision adjusted to the flame-orange light, I could see that some long bit of shrapnel had embedded itself in his upper thigh, and he was clutching at it with both of his hands. The man who had been holding us at gunpoint had his back to me and was also looking at Megaphone Man. Eventually, Megaphone Man managed to yank the shrapnel out of his leg, and just as he stood up to his full height, looking like he was about to toss the object he’d pulled from his leg into the sea, the top half of his head vanished.
Annie screamed.
“Oh my God,” I said out loud.
I tore my eyes away from Megaphone Man but only after watching him collapse to the ground. Annie was curled up in a ball on the deck of the boat with two pieces of burning something-or-other on either side of her. I stepped on one of them to put out the fire, and as I went to stomp on the other, the man who had been holding Annie and me at gunpoint whirled, pointed his weapon in my face, and
started screaming in Spanish. As his gun became level with my head, I reached out with both of my hands, simultaneously smacking the gun aside and ripping it from his grasp. Next thing I knew, I was holding the thing and pointing it at him.
Wow, thanks, Frank.
He looked like he was about to lunge for me, but just then, the roar of other boat engines could be heard coming from nearby. The two of us stood stock-still and waited to see who the newcomers were going to be. If it was going to be more police, it would probably be smart of me to drop the gun so they didn’t shoot me on sight. Then again, if I dropped the gun, what was to say this guy wouldn’t kill me himself?
Damn it. I didn’t know what to do.
Two boats similar in make to The Runner but a little smaller and sleeker converged on us just as I was about to make up my mind.
“Alden!” a voice from one of the boats called.
Who is that? I thought.
“Go ahead. Shoot him!” the voice called again. It was a deep voice heavily accented with Spanish, but I had no idea who it was.
“Shoot him!” the voice called again.
“Ummmm,” I said out loud, but without much volume. Then, louder, I said, “No?” but it definitely came out as more of a question than anything else.
“Okay,” the voice called back. “I’ll do it, then.”
BANG!
A shot fired, and the man who had been standing in from of me fell dead to the ground.
24
I was standing in a puddle of blood, two guys with half of their heads missing were lying no more than ten feet away from me, my girlfriend was curled up in a little ball on the ground, sobbing loudly and staring at two boats full of armed men, and for some reason, I was trying to figure out what had happened to the guy with the weed whacker-looking thing.
Had he just fallen overboard? Was he in the water somewhere?
It’s funny what the mind tries to grasp on to in moments of complete irreconcilable insanity.