“This way,” Rafan said, drawing her down side streets to an alley behind the Golden Crescent Hotel. The sky rumbled and they saw lightning over the sea. Jenna remembered darting through the rain with Dafoe; like the sky overhead on that day, the dusky sky above Malé looked ready to burst another seam. It was the stormy season.
“Why are we back here?” she asked Rafan. “We’re still going to have to go in the front way.” A swirling gust of wind hit them so hard she staggered, and looked up quickly to see the tops of palm trees shaking like raised, angry fists. “My key won’t work back here,” she added hurriedly. “Why don’t you just come with me?”
“Because there are eyes everywhere. I can’t walk in the front door with you, go to your room, and then spend the night. It would look terrible for you and for me. But there’s a rear door by the pool. You go in the front, then come back through the hotel and open it, and I’ll meet you by the big slide and go in the back way.”
“You’ve done this before?” she said to him.
“With you. Don’t you remember?”
She paused, then smiled and nodded, recalling their romantic rendezvous after she’d returned from doing research on an outer island.
Jenna headed for a well-lit walkway around the building, smelling salty air as she neared the corner of the hotel. As she turned toward the ocean, the wind pounded her so hard her hair flew straight back behind her, and she realized that she’d been standing in the lee of the hotel.
Hunching down, she bulled her way forward. The last time she’d slipped Rafan into the hotel, the twilight had been much calmer, and she’d been so eager to get him up to her room that she’d run through the lobby to the back door.
Tonight felt very different, and it wasn’t just the storm. She had Dafoe in her life, and she felt much more settled, desirous of only him. She’d text him as soon as she got inside.
A wall of rain drenched her.
Startled, Jenna glanced up, horrified to see a waterspout ripping from the shore like a tornado. It tore a path in the sand, ripped smaller palms out by their roots, and headed straight at the hotel—at her!
Get inside! she screeched at herself.
She raced for the entrance, eyes still on the seaborne twister, and plowed into a young Maldivian man jumping from a white van, a look of unbridled panic on his face.
The impact knocked Jenna down. The young, dark-skinned man staggered toward the hotel, oblivious to the fact that his key fob was skittering across the wet concrete. She understood his fear.
A doorman raced over to help her, though Jenna was already on her feet. Together they fled to the lobby; Jenna kept running, anxious to open the rear door and get Rafan to safety. She glanced back to see the fifty-foot-tall spout smash into the hotel. The building shuddered but held; the waterspout had lost power when it moved onto land. The storm was still rocking, though, sending great flashes across the sky.
She sprinted down a hallway, realizing that the young van driver was racing ahead of her. He fled out the rear door. Into the storm?
Seconds later, she threw open the door. Rafan was close by and the guy from the van was barely forty feet away and looking back over his shoulder at her. The storm shook every leaf and palm frond in the area, raising a ruckus.
“Get inside!” she shouted at Rafan.
“What’s with him?” he asked, jerking his head at the other man. “He almost knocked me over.”
“I don’t know,” Jenna said, ushering Rafan past her and closing the door. “We collided in front of the hotel. The wind sent me flying into him as he was getting out of a van. Then a waterspout almost hit us.”
Rafan’s expression was curious and bewildered. “But what’s he doing?” Rafan asked. “Leaving a van by the entrance and running out the back of the hotel—”
Without another word, Rafan raced toward the lobby, with Jenna close behind. She remembered the Times Square bomber, the naturalized U.S. citizen who’d left an SUV loaded with a bomb in the famous district. By the time she reached the entrance, Rafan was running around the front of the white van. He threw open the sliding side door. When Jenna saw the cargo space, her heart pounded so hard she thought it would beat