Cooks Overboard

by Joanne Pence

  Angie’s gaze caught Julio’s. He must have noticed the colonel yawn earlier while she had missed it.

  “Damn,” Eduardo said, his voice slurred. His gaze bore into Angie as if he knew what she’d done. But it was too late for him to stop it. “Raúl…,” he called, then plopped his head onto the table.

  “Yes, Señor Catalán.” Raúl stood up. He scratched his belly as he peered sleepily at his bosses. “Hmm, I suppose I am in charge now. But there is something wrong here.” He stumbled backward into the wall and opened his mouth in a loud, long yawn. In the middle of the yawn, his legs gave out from under him and he slid down the wall to the floor. His head bobbed forward onto his chest and he was asleep.

  All around them the other guards began yawning and curling up on the table or the floor. Angie and Julio stood stock-still, not moving, not doing anything to call attention their way.

  Soon a cacophony of snoring was the only sound to be heard.

  Angie and Julio tiptoed backward out of the dining room, as unobtrusively as they could, then turned and ran down the hall to the basement stairs. They stood at the top until they were sure they heard the mellifluous sounds of a deep sleep coming from the man who was guarding the prisoners.

  As quietly as possible, they tiptoed down the stairs. “Should we tie him up?” Angie asked.

  “There is no rope nearby. Let us just go quickly and quietly.” Julio slid the key from the guard’s belt, then unlocked the cell door.

  Paavo and the others stared wide-eyed at Angie in her nun’s habit and Julio in a priest’s collar. Angie pressed her finger to her mouth, then pointed at the sleeping guard. “Knockout drops,” she whispered.

  The four ex-spies gave nods and winks of approval. Paavo grabbed her in a crushing hug.

  All of them hurried away from the guards. Once out of the house, hidden by the night’s darkness, they began to run. Paavo took Angie’s hand. It felt so good to feel his strong hand on hers again, she thought her heart would burst.

  They were free!

  “We’ve got a jeep hidden in the brush a couple of miles down the road. We were afraid to drive closer,” Angie said, picking up her skirts so she could run faster.

  “Let’s take one of the cars here,” George said. He ran into the garage. “I’m damned fast at hotwiring.”

  “Good idea,” Paavo said.

  In no time they had piled into a black Mercedes and were flying back down the hillside to Mazatlán, Paavo at the wheel, Angie and Julio in the front seat with him.

  “Wait,” Angie said. “Where’s Livingstone?”

  Paavo glanced at her, and she knew the answer. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “But how…?” she cried. “He said it was safe! He said we shouldn’t worry!”

  “I know.” Paavo caught her eye. “It happens. And good men die.”

  She studied him a moment. “Through no one’s fault.”

  He nodded. “Through no one’s fault,” he repeated softly.

  They were rounding a bend in the road when they saw bright headlights coming straight toward them. Angie held her breath as the approaching car suddenly swung to the side and blocked the road. Let it be the police here to help us, she prayed.

  But Paavo slammed on the brakes and started to back up the hill.

  Out of the car jumped Mike Jones and, with him, a woman. With the Mercedes’s headlights directly on her, Angie could clearly make out a short woman with black hair parted on the side, the shorter side combed back, the longer side straight and shiny as it skimmed her forehead, brushing the corner of her eye and falling to about midear. She wore heavy black eye makeup and dark berry-colored lipstick. Her clothes were the green camouflage of a jungle fighter, complete with heavy boots and the X of a bandolier across her breasts. In her hands, she carried an assault rifle.

  Jones was dressed similarly, and also heavily armed. But his whole attitude was one of deference to the woman.

  At that moment, Angie knew she was looking at the Hydra.

  How had she missed her before? Now it was as clear as anything. Without the makeup, without the sexy hairdo—without the assault rifle—Angie would have seen nobody more threatening than the plain, quiet, and timid person she knew as Andrew Brown.

  The Hydra and Jones took aim. As the Mercedes backed away, Angie could only stare at them, knowing that at any second the windshield would shatter in a spray of bullets. Paavo spun the wheel, threw the car into drive, and aimed it toward the edge of the road. “Everybody out!” he yelled as the shots began and the car started to tip over the hill and begin its slide. Pushing his car door open, he grabbed Angie’s arm and jumped, pulling her with him.

  They tumbled into the blackness of the hillside. The crashing and groans around them told them the others were doing the same. The car rolled ahead of them down the steep slope, faster and faster until, with a loud crunch of metal, it smashed into a tree.

  A hail of bullets flew over their heads and ricocheted off the rocks around them.

  Paavo shoved Angie behind a tree. She leaned against it as he stood over her, his palms pressed to the trunk, both of them panting after running and tumbling in the dark. “Here,” Angie cried, shoving a gun in his hands. “Ruby Cockburn gave it to me. Julio has one, too.”

  Paavo looked over the 9 mm automatic, then checked the cartridge. The powerful weapon was loaded and ready. “Good God,” he said.

  “We were desperate,” she answered.

  He peered up to the top of the hill. The Hydra and Mike Jones were slowly advancing toward them, firing as they walked. They thought they were perfectly safe—that killing their prey would be like shooting ducks in a barrel, with the ducks having no means of shooting back. Even so, the Hydra kept behind Mike, using him as her human shield.

  “Keep down,” Paavo warned Angie. As he started to move away from her, she grabbed his hand.

  “Come back safely to me, Inspector,” she whispered.

  His gaze captured hers, then he nodded and circled away from her, crouching low, heading to the left of their pursuers. He took aim, able to see only their merest outline in the moonlight. “Drop it!” he yelled. When they didn’t, he squeezed the trigger.

  Mike Jones, hit, cried out.

  The Hydra fired and dove for cover. A shot rang out from the other side of the brush. Julio must be shooting—or had had the sense to give up his gun to George or one of the other spies who knew how to use it.

  The Hydra returned fire, again and again, as she backed up the hill toward her car.

  Angie didn’t dare even peek to see what was happening. It was clear from the sounds. The Hydra had too many rounds of ammunition for them to overcome. And now she was going to get away again. Damn. Angie thought of Livingstone, how he had given up his life because of that woman, how she’d nearly lost Paavo because of her. But what could they do against her assault rifle?

  The Hydra reached her car and backed up to the driver’s side, firing as she went. The door had been left wide open. She was easing herself down onto the seat when something pressed against her spine. Immediately, a strong arm snaked around her waist and she was pulled down onto a muscular lap.

  “This is rather friendly of you, Hydra,” Paavo said, jabbing his gun hard between her shoulders. “Now drop the rifle and put your hands up.”

  38

  On the balcony of a luxurious beachfront villa in an exclusive area of Acapulco, Angie and Paavo sat at a glass table in softly padded chairs. An open bottle of champagne was wedged in an ice bucket at the far side of the table, and glasses of bubbly stood at their elbows. In the center was a platter of shrimp on ice, ringed by a variety of dipping sauces.

  “Listen to this,” Angie said, holding the New York Times open and reading from an inside story. “There’s a write-up about the Hydra’s attempt to steal the cold fusion formula. It says that her real name is Jane Potter and she’s from Kansas City, Missouri. To think, she had everyone believing she was some exotic international assassin. Goes
to show you!”

  Paavo just shook his head.

  “Anyway, it says that the formula was no good. Some chemists from the National Science Institute went to the Lawrence Lab and studied all Professor Von Mueller’s papers and concluded his cold fusion formula was a fraud, that it couldn’t even be duplicated.” She closed the paper. “So there was all that trouble for nothing.”

  “It’s tragic,” Paavo agreed. “Particularly about Dudley Livingstone. He was a good man.”

  Just then, one of the many servants who lived year-round at the villa stepped onto the balcony holding a silver tray. A single postcard was on it.

  “Correspondencia, señorita,” the woman said.

  “Gracias,” Angie said, feeling like an elegant lady of leisure as she took the card. How she loved this villa! She glanced at the back of postcard. “It’s from Grundil. She and Béla are in Costa Rica—and she’s going to let him open his Transylvanian restaurant. What fun!”

  “I think they’ll like Costa Rica,” Paavo said. “I hear lots of Europeans, as well as Americans, are moving there these days.”

  “That’s true. Oh, my! She says Shawn MacDougall found true love with Juanita, and George Gresham liked being involved in a shoot-out so much, he took a job as a security guard at a recycling plant in Boise.”

  “I doubt he’ll find much to shoot at there.”

  “But just think of all the tins cans he’ll have to practice on.” Angie handed the card to Paavo so he could see it for himself. “So,” she said, “the only one who got away was the colonel.”

  “Maybe not as far away as you think,” Paavo answered. “When we were locked up in Ortega’s cellar, Grundil told me she recognized his right-hand man, Eduardo Catalán, from the days she used to spy in the Middle East and around a number of big oil interests.”

  “She got around, didn’t she?” Angie said, not liking the thought of any woman locked up with Paavo.

  “It turns out Catalán was a spy as well, a spy for the oil consortium Ortega had been pretending to work with. They didn’t trust Ortega—and as we’ve learned, they were right not to. He would gladly have sold the formula to someone who wanted to use cold fusion to produce energy, if he could have gotten more money that way. Since the consortium is a group that doesn’t like disloyalty, the colonel’s sudden disappearance might not have been of his own doing.”

  “Well, I can’t say I’m sorry,” Angie admitted, folding the paper and putting it on the table. “But now, after all this news, I think we should talk.”

  “Isn’t that what we’ve been doing?” He lifted his champagne to take a sip.

  “I mean, things have turned out well for our new friends, and I’m glad. Even you—you’ve realized you do want to stay with the police force, and you will. I think it’s time to talk about me and what I want. Things like…making commitments. Maybe even—” She paused. “—getting engaged.”

  He nearly choked. “To be married?”

  “What else?”

  He put down the champagne. “Isn’t that impossible?” he asked in an innocent tone, quite unlike him.

  “Whatever are you talking about?” she wondered.

  “Nuns can’t marry.”

  She folded her arms. “Inspector Smith, you are such a barrel of laughs. I don’t give up that easily, you know.”

  “So I’ve discovered.”

  He slid the newspaper to his side of the table. It was his turn to read it now, but he didn’t open it. Instead, he looked across the table at Angie, a simple gesture, yet one that spoke reams about intimacy and companionship. Spending his days…mornings…nights this way with her was something he could get used to quite easily.

  He reached for her hand. “Let me make sure I’ve got my head back together first. I need to go back to work, back to the life we know.”

  She caught his eye a moment, then nodded.

  He slid his thumb over her fingers. “Is it enough that I commit to thinking about a commitment, Miss Amalfi?”

  She smiled. “That sounds just fine—for now, Inspector Smith.”

  Their joined hands tightened.

  Just then there was a long blast from a foghorn, then another and another.

  “The Valhalla!” Angie cried, jumping to her feet. “Julio said he’d let us know as they sailed by.”

  “Bully for him,” Paavo said. He still smarted when he thought of the good-bye kiss Julio had given Angie when they disembarked in Acapulco. If it had gone on one second longer, the steward might have found himself greeting guests in a voice an octave higher.

  “Let’s answer him back,” Angie said. “I’ve got a mirror right in there.” On a chair in the living room, just past the balcony door, lay the waist pouch she’d been using. From it she pulled out her compact. She found she’d become rather fond of having her hands free and her shoulders not aching from carting a big purse everywhere with her.

  “That won’t work,” Paavo said. “It’s too small.”

  “I can try. Maybe the Neblers and Cockburns will stop playing bridge long enough to greet us, too. We’ve certainly given them a lot to talk about for years to come.” She walked over to the edge of the balcony, right by the railing, and opened the compact wide. Holding the powder puff against the pressed powder, she twisted and turned it until the mirror caught the sun.

  A flash of light from the Valhalla sent a return greeting. “Hallelujah! It worked!” she cried, jumping and waving her arms in the air. Suddenly, the compact slipped from her fingers. When it landed, the mirror broke and the tin canister that held the pressed powder bounded out of the plastic case.

  “Uh-oh—seven years’ bad luck,” she said, going to retrieve it.

  “In other words, seven years of Julio hanging around,” Paavo muttered.

  “Wait. What’s that?” Angie said, looking among the broken glass.

  “Don’t cut yourself.” Paavo turned to the front page of the newspaper.

  “Whatever it is, I guess it can’t be the microfilm everyone was looking for. Since it was stuck inside my compact, under the tin of powder, it must be a packaging item of some sort.”

  “Powder?” Paavo said, his brow furrowed. “Wait, didn’t Ingerson say something about powder…?”

  She picked up the tiny square and held it up to the sun. “It sure looks like a little piece of film, though.”

  “You’re joking again, right?” Paavo asked, clearly unable to believe this turn of events.

  “I’m not! Could it possibly be the film with the formula?” she asked. “Have I been carrying it around all this time?”

  “Don’t tell me!” Paavo said, starting to get up.

  “Well, if it is, I don’t want to know!” She flung it over the balcony and watched as the breeze caught it and carried it out over the Pacific.

  “Angie!” Paavo shouted, running to the balcony rail. “You didn’t…” He scanned the horizon, but the microfilm had disappeared.

  “Good riddance is what I say.” She brushed off her hands. “For something completely worthless, that poor old professor died, and Dudley died, and Sven Ingerson died, and we could have died. The whole situation was horrible. Just horrible! Besides that, I may never want to take a cruise again as long as I live!” She paused to catch her breath.

  “Uh, Angie…,” Paavo said quietly.

  “What?”

  “You know that story in the Times about the formula being no good?”

  “That’s what I’m so mad about! All that death, and then the dumb formula didn’t even work!”

  “Angie, sometimes the government plants stories like that. It’s disinformation. You’ve got to remember that they didn’t know who had the formula. They had no idea where it was or when it might show up again—or with whom. There’s a good chance they might have just said it was no good, but it really was.”

  “You mean…that might have been a real formula for cold fusion?”

  “That’s right.”

  Angie mouth formed into an O.
Without another word, she looked from him to the wide expanse of ocean and beach. The microfilm had disappeared out there, lost somewhere between the sand and the sea. Her heart sank as she realized that she might have thrown away the key to solving the energy problems of the twenty-first century.

  “Paavo,” she said, her voice small. “What do you think about keeping this as our little secret?”

  About the Author

  JOANNE PENCE was born and raised in San Francisco. A graduate of U.C. Berkeley with a master’s degree in journalism, Joanne has taught school in Japan, written for magazines, and worked for the federal government. She now lives in Idaho with her family, which includes a multitude of pets.

  For information about Joanne, her books, and some great recipes, visit Joanne’s website at www.joannepence.com. She would love to hear from you via e-mail at joanne@joannepence.com, or by writing to PO Box 64, Eagle, ID 83616-0064.

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