start falling into place.
“What? An albatross?”
I tap the page I've got open in the hotel folder, and she leans over to see what I'm trying to show her. “‘The Hanga Roa Royal Resort is part of Hyacinth Worldwide, a network of family-owned hotels and resorts,'” she reads. “Okay, and…”
“On the plane flight out here, you were telling me about your research. One of the companies you mentioned was…”
“Hyacinth Holdings,” she finishes.
“On the wall of the temple, there is an old mural. Most of it is gone, but the trim along the top is still there. An ornamental row of white-winged birds and hyacinths.”
The pieces start clicking into place.
Hyacinths on the wall.
The Bird Man ceremony.
Hyacinth owns the hotel.
Big white bird, falling into the ocean.
Hyacinth is in the agriculture industry.
The albatross. The harbinger of ill luck.
“I remember,” I tell Mere. “I remember why I came here before. Arcadia sent me. We were abandoning the island.”
Mother sent me because I do what she asks. I follow orders.
I had been sent to kill the steward.
BOOK FOUR
HYACINTH
TWENTY-FOUR
We put together a plan to get off the island. We've got an hour or two before a sitrep of zero becomes odd, and we make the best of it. Mere calls the front desk to check into the next flight going east. We're booked on the midday flight to Santiago, Chile, in four days, but if we show up at the counter at the airport and make enough noise and wave enough cash around, we can probably get our flight changed.
Especially if we play up the disgruntled newlywed angle. No one likes to see relationships go sour that quickly.
Mere leaves first, heading out the front door since E was probably the only one watching from the lobby. I linger, mainly to get the body out of the maid's closet and up to our room. I slip the tracking chip into the pocket of E's pants, along with everything else I had taken from her.
I keep the phone. I send one more progress report on the way to the airport and then I shove the phone down behind the seat in the back of the cab.
Mere is waiting for me next to the security check-point. She's wearing a large hat and dark sunglasses, and she's got a handful of wadded tissue. Her glasses are big enough to hide the fact that she's been crying, pretty heavily.
“What happened?”
“I had to put on a real show,” she says, offering me a boarding pass. The flight leaves in forty-five minutes.
* * *
Once the doors of the plane shut, I stop staring up the aisle; once the plane is in the air, I start to relax. I've been anticipating the arrival of any number of people: airport security, Secutores, the captain of the plane. None of those people show. It's just a tiny trickle of tourists, and then it is time to go.
The six-hour flight is uneventful. Mere sleeps for most of it. When we land in Chile, we slip into the flow of passengers leaving the airport. Twenty minutes later, we're outside the main building, standing on Chilean soil, and no one appears to be the wiser. The flight wound back a number of time-zones, and I had been worried that during our actual flight time, our ruse would have been discovered and someone would have called ahead.
For the moment, though, we appear to be ahead of Secutores, and now that we are on a larger landmass, it'll be easier to disappear.
The airport is in Pudahuel, a short subway ride outside of the city. I change some of my dwindling cash into local currency while Mere examines a subway map, trying to figure out which line will take us into Santiago proper.
She's been full of questions since we landed, and I've managed to put her off to this point, but once we get on the subway, she starts up again. This time, I get the sense that she's not going to stop until I give her some answers.
“Let's just find a hotel,” I try. “There will be time enough for all of this.”
“Do we have enough cash? I need some things. What about our passports? Are they still good?”
“I can get more money, and we don't need to worry about the passports.”
“What are we going to do for ID? Should I go to the US Consulate then?”
“Why?”
“I'm an American citizen. I've been kidnapped by an international security company. I was aboard the Liberty when—”
We're sitting next to each other in a pair