by K. T. Tomb
A man approached the front desk, where Paulson was on the phone.
“Young man, may I use the telephone,” the guest asked in a gruff voice.
“One moment please, Sir,” Paulson said into the receiver and looked up at the guest. “As you can see, we are all quite busy right now.”
“But I have to call my daughters in Jamaica and see that they’re okay.”
Paulson cupped the mouthpiece of the receiver.
“I’m sorry but staff telephones are currently restricted to in-house calls only, you’ll have to use the phone in the lobby hall or the one in your room.”
The man gestured obscenely to Paulson, who could only shrug. He hung up the phone as the guest walked away and shrank back into the crowd. Paulson turned his attention to the lobby TV.
“It sounds insane, but we’re flying into the eye of Hurricane Freda,” a different reporter said on TV. The reporter was on board an airplane with men and women in military uniforms. “We are over the middle of the Caribbean with the men and women of the Air Force Reserve, on a hazardous mission to take the temperature and pressure inside the storm,” a reporter said on the wide-screen TV mounted on the lobby wall.
“And the news does not bode well.” The men and women catapulted censors into the eye of the storm, and the readings that appear on the computer screens on board the airplane are not good. One-hundred-sixty-three mile-per-hour sustained winds, and Freda’s pressure was steadily dropping; the hurricane is growing stronger. The ocean is very warm at 90 degrees Fahrenheit, with feeder bands stretching out a hundred miles.
“Can you believe we’ve been at this since seven o’clock this morning,” Anita said to Greg and Paulson.
“Yes, I’m well aware of that,” Greg replied, snarling at the crowd. “The way some people treat us here, my guess is they think we’re supposed to respond automatically with kindness like we have microchips in our necks.”
“Stop it, you two,” Paulson admonished them. “Grace and dignity. Watch yourselves.”
The phone next to Paulson rang and he picked up the receiver. A woman’s voice fired off her request; Paulson was unable to comprehend her exact demand, but he extracted a word here and there, enough for him to prepare a coherent response.
“My apologies, ma’am, but there is no more room for anyone else here. We are limited on resources just for our guests,” Paulson said. An array of colorful language blasted forth from the phone afterward.
For the next 90 minutes, Paulson gave static replies to what seemed to be at least five dozen callers, all with the same request. The kind rejection to bring in any more guests, followed by the swearing, the apologies. Amid the monotonous pattern in these conversations, Paulson’s patience wore down as the hours stretched on.
At 9:30 a.m., Paulson hung up the phone on the last inquiring individual. Paulson caught sight of the crowd in front of him. As though there was a rotating schedule of who would view the weather reports, a different set of people stood transfixed and viewed the screen.
The lines of Paulson’s phone lit up again.
“Paulson,” came the voice of Isabel, the hotel operator. “I have an important call from the police for you. Please hold the line.”
“What the hell?”
“Officer Worthington of the Kingston Police.” the voice on the other end announced.
“Yes, Sir. How may I be of assistance?”
“I’ve just received a distress call from the jail on your island telling me that several of the inmates, including Mike Morton, escaped from a cell block there last night. It’s certain they’re loose on the island, but despite the guards best efforts the weather hasn’t permitted them to catch many of the men.”
“I see,” Paulson replied, slowly.
“There’re still sixteen of them on the loose and we wanted to let you know about it. We suspect that they might very well be on their way to the hotel considering the history there.”
“Yes, I understand. I’ll alert our security personnel. Thank you for the information.”
“Okay, Mr. Paulson. Take care of yourselves over there.”
Paulson stood transfixed for a minute as he hung up the phone.
What else could possibly go wrong? He wondered. Carter had better realize now that it’s time for a complete shutdown of the compound. There’s no way we can risk an attack by Morton and a gang of hardened criminals. That bastard knows a lot more about this building than most of us working here.
“Anita, Greg,” Paulson said, “I’ll be in my office. See that I’m not disturbed for a few minutes.”
“Yes, Sir,” they replied in unison.
Paulson closed the office door and called the Control Center immediately.
“Shut it all down, Mr. Carter. Completely. Gates, windows, breezeways, hatches everything and arm the alarms as well.”
“What’s wrong, Paulson?”
“Morton and fifteen other prisoners are on the loose. They broke out of the jail last night and I’m sure they’re heading here.”
“Oh, Christ!”
***
Daniels and Roberts stood at the side door with Paulson as he braced himself to open it.
Ten of the agents’ officers were dressed and armed; ready to conduct a swift search of the grounds and locate the relatives of Barry and Monica Sandhurst. The Control Room team had finally gotten a fix on their location. They were huddled under a tarpaulin that was covering the majority of the lawn chairs near the pool pump house building.
Paulson was convinced this would be the height of the drama for the remainder of the storm since Control had already shut all the gates and every possible entryway into the building and set the alarms as well. He just needed to get these people inside and he could go get some sleep. He felt like the walking dead.
“You two,” he heard an officer in the yard shout, “Get your things and make your way over to that door. Quickly, we don’t have a lot of time. It’s windy and dangerous out here.”
In a minute or two, a small group of people came filing through the side door and tumbled into the warmth.
“Oh, thank you. We’ve been waiting for someone to come since this morning,” the arsonist woman said.
“Why did you try to burn down my front door yesterday?” was all that Paulson could say to her.
“We had to get in. Our boat sank at the dock and we couldn’t leave after we had spent the day sightseeing with Barry and the kids. That bastard charter operator just shrugged at us and left us standing on the dock. There was no way for us to get back to Kingston.”
Paulson looked at them all and said, “Don’t move from here.”
He turned to Daniels and said, “Lock this door and arm it then have your people check every single one of the other entrances in this building. No one else can get in here, understand?”
Chapter Twelve
“So this is what my paradise has been reduced to,” Masterson said under his breath.
Masterson sensed an air of movement behind him as someone approached him.
“Mr. Masterson, Paulson asked me to advise you that we located and retrieved Mr. Sandhurst’s family from the pump house building,” Daniels said.
“What about the convicts? Is there any news about them yet? There’s a storm raging outside, and any minute there could be an uncontrollable mob of criminals pounding down my gates!”
“We haven’t had any updates from either Kingston or the local police, but all the gates are closed and I have my men inspecting every single vent in this place constantly. Even though Morton may know this place inside and out, he won’t find it that easy to get in here.”
Agent Daniels looked Masterson straight into his eyes.
“I came here with every intention to take you down only to find that you’re a man of integrity. You were good enough to shelter me and my team because you were smart enough to know that the property could never have enough security in a crisis like this one. It’s a good thing we came along to help and
that’s exactly what we intend to do. Don’t worry about it. It’s all going to be fine. At the very least, if these guys just escaped from a jail; we have guns, they don’t.”
Masterson laughed, and Daniels smiled back at him.
“You really think it’s going to work out?” Masterson asked.
“Of course,” Daniels said. “We’re in Samsara!”
It was just past noon and the lobby was steadily emptying. The majority of the guests were on the Lido deck for lunch and the hotel staff members were working extremely hard to take everyone’s minds off the storm. Everywhere inside of the hotel, bright, warm sun lamps shone down delicately from the high ceilings, giving everyone under them the illusion that it was bright and sunny outside. But even as the eye of the storm was passing over the island, the sky was as dark as night with a bright moon.
Not one of the outside cameras caught a single image of the men as they jumped to the grass in the garden from the top of the perimeter fence. Neither did a single alarm sound when the tiny hatch that led into the basement complex air vent was pried open.
They crawled through what could have been a mile of cramped duct before Mike stopped and looked through a grate. He saw what seemed to be a corridor on the dormitory level of the basement.
Score, he thought.
“This is where we get off gentlemen,” he said to the others. Now that we’re inside, this is where the real work begins. They’ve got security and weapons; the only way we can take control of this place to get to Steve Masterson.”
“How are you going to do that, Mike?” one of the men asked.
“Well, there’s sixteen of us and only one of him. All I have to do is get up inside his office. Come on, follow me.”
Mike kicked out the grate and shimmied through, dropping feet first into the deserted corridor. He knew it was around midday and assumed that with a full house in the middle of a storm, every single staff member would be busy taking care of the residents in one way or another. Every housekeeper would be upstairs cleaning rooms, every waiter, waitress and steward would be tending to their needs in the restaurants or with room service and every one of the entertainment and security departments would also be on duty.
He helped the first few men down to the ground then left them to help the others while he scouted the hallway. The first thing he came across was a laundry toss for staff uniforms.
Man! This just gets easier and easier, he thought.
“Hey guys!” he called to the men, “I’ve got wait staff uniforms here. Everybody find one that fits, get changed quickly and follow me.”
They dove into the large hamper of uniforms and every one of them found one of the burgundy jacket and pants uniforms to fit them. They quickly changed into the uniforms. It was nice to be in dry clothing again. They had been out in the cold, pelting rain for almost twelve full hours now. Every one of them was starving, wet and cold; at least now they were only starving.
“Mike, man, we really need something to eat. It’s torture smelling all this food in the air when we’re just about dying of hunger.”
“I know, I’m hungry myself,” he replied stopping to think.
Suddenly he smiled to himself.
“Follow me,” he said.
***
For hours after telling his wife about his uncle and mother, Karl sat in his chair, looking out at Freda as the hotel became engulfed in the still calmness of the eye.
“This is supposed to be Category Five?” Karl said. “By now you would think that something should have happened to us.”
He wiped his tears from his eyes.
“Karl, you didn’t do anything wrong,” Rebecca said.
“How can you sit there and say that?”
“Because you’re my husband. Because I see the good you do in people’s lives. I believe that it’s not really about what you did once, but whether you’re truly sorry for whatever you did or didn’t do.”
The haze of his uncle’s image still haunted Karl tremendously after all these years, but the combined trauma of telling her the story, reliving the entire experience and then being confronted with the same crazed expression on Barry Sandhurst’s face was proving all too much for Karl. The lights around them flickered.
“Karl?…” Rebecca said.
Karl did not respond. Suddenly the lights puttered out.
Screams blared outside their door.
“I’m checking on what’s going on outside,” Rebecca said. She headed out.
Karl turned around in his chair and saw the door close, indicating that Rebecca had left. Alone in the dark, Karl groped around, feeling past the desk, chair and then the bed. Rebecca rushed back into the room just as the lights came back on.
“It seems the power went out finally but they must have gotten the generators running,” she said. “I didn’t expect there to be a delay like that.”
“I have to go,” Karl said.
“And just where do you think you’re going?” Rebecca asked.
“Somewhere, anywhere but here is good. Maybe down to the bar or … Is there anything in the mini-bar?”
“What do you think? Didn’t you see me dump the last lot or hear me talk to the people here about not giving us any more alcohol?”
Karl flung the fridge door open and stepped back from it shocked as he gestured to Rebecca to look. Her jaw dropped open at seeing a large vodka bottle lying on the middle shelf. Karl pulled the bottle out.
“Hey, it’s that Scottish bottle with crystals on it—Paulson really does know how to keep his guests happy!”
Rebecca moved toward Karl.
“This merry-go-round of staff incompetency is too much!”
She seized the bottle from Karl’s hand. He shoved her to the ground. Rebecca landed on the floor with a thud.
“I’m having my moment. Let me nurse it,” Karl said.
Grabbing the bottle tightly in his hands he unscrewed the top and flicked the cap off, putting the bottle to his head and guzzling several large gulps from it. Rebecca stood up. She marched over to him and pulled the bottle from his lips. She placed it on top of the mini fridge and strolled calmly to the bathroom. She emerged with two glasses and an ice bucket.
“I don’t care if Freda takes us away before she finally decides to leave this place and us alone. I’m tired of being out here on my own, Karl,” she said.
Karl grabbed Rebecca’s hand.
“Oh, Rebecca.”
Rebecca snapped her hand back and handed him the ice bucket. Karl took it from her questioningly.
“If you’re going to drink, then at least don’t be a savage about it. Get us some ice.”
“You sure about this?” he asked.
“Shut up and go get the ice, Karl.”
After a few minutes, he returned with a full ice bucket and set it on top of the fridge beside the large bottle of vodka. Silently he filled their glasses, turned to face her and handed her one of them. Rebecca took the glass from Karl’s hand and went over to the bed. With one hand she held the glass tenderly and sipped the luxurious contents while she swept their books and things from the bed onto the room floor. She fluffed the pillows a little and lay down propping herself up against them and sipped from the glass again.
Karl looked at her questioningly. Had she gone mad? He couldn’t believe that she was doing this. When they had met, she had been able to drink him under any table no matter what was being served; it had been one of the things he had loved the most about her. But as their marriage had started to break down and she had insisted that he admit his problem and join the recovery programs, she had stopped drinking any form of alcohol and become as dry as a bone.
She looked so sexy with the drink in her hand, Sipping the clear, luscious liquid as delicately as she always had.
“You know what this needs?” she said suddenly, “A twist of lime. How could you have decided to give this up so readily, Karl? Was it just because I asked you to? I know how much you enjoyed your drinks and yet the mo
ment I put my foot down, you complied. The alcohol was never your problem, you realize that, don’t you? It was your lack of control over it. Maybe I’ve been going about this the wrong way. Maybe your path to recovery isn’t total sobriety, maybe I need to teach you how to enjoy the stuff intensely but in moderation.”
She stopped her rhetoric and turned to look at him.
“Look at us. We’re locked inside a fortress in the eye of a catastrophic storm. If we were to get caught outside this magnificent building we’d certainly die, but all we can do is sit on top of each other and bicker. I’m tired of bickering Karl, come lie down beside me. Let’s drink this fabulous stuff and make out like we did when we met.”
Karl picked up the cold bottle and moved over to the bed. He set the bottle and his glass on the side table and lay down beside her, taking her in his arms. Before she could spill hers, he took her glass and set it down beside his. Rebecca’s hands went to the buttons of her blouse and soon the garment was tossed aside. Karl’s cold hands were shaking as they went to her shoulders, ran down over her smooth back and held her waist. She ran her fingers through his hair, all the while never taking her eyes off his face. Karl looked deep into those familiar eyes and for the first time in five years, he felt a connection. It wasn’t quite the same as it had been when they were first married, but what surprised him was that he couldn’t say it was diminished either. It was deeper, more mature, understanding and accepting. She had finally gotten it; they were now both on the road to recovery.
“I love you, Rebecca,” he said, as he kissed her lips and rolled on top of her.
He stripped the rest of her clothing from her beautiful body slowly and purposefully and touched every inch of her tenderly, savoring it. When Rebecca wrapped her legs around his waist and moaned her ecstasy into his ear that afternoon, Karl was drunk on her and the vodka beside the bed had been completely forgotten.
Chapter Thirteen
On the way to the fourteenth floor, Morton and his men had a stroke of dumb luck. When they were walking through the fifth-floor hall trying to find the staircase, a teenage girl in sweatpants ran around the corner and bumped into him.
