“Your brain,” he said. “Is terrifying. But okay. Answer this, Evil Genius. Why not simply use the bomb—or a series of bombs—to burn the place down?”
She squinted for a moment, thinking hard. “Maybe... they only had one? Or maybe they’ve used a bomb like this before, and the signature didn’t survive the blast, or the analysis was somehow inconclusive. Maybe they wanted to be absolutely sure that whoever they’re framing gets framed. And? Maybe they really didn’t want to kill anyone.”
“There’s a body out there says that’s probably not true.”
“Oops?” she said.
And okay, she was possibly right. Oops, indeed. A body count of one could’ve been the result of some ill-conceived plan gone horribly wrong.
“The only person who ever wanted to overthrow Ted’s mom was her father’s brother, Ted’s great-uncle, Hendrake. And overthrow is way too inflammatory a word. He wanted to be king, but he wanted to be king easily. I haven’t met him, but Ted says he was a lot like the first Prince Tedric.” She gestured around them. “The guy who turned this place into the glorious sex-pod that it is today.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call it that.”
“Secret hide-out,” Tash said, “really only works if you add for Prince Tedric’s penis to it.”
“It doesn’t bother you that your Prince Tedric appears to have used this place for the same... activity.” Thomas winced as he heard that word coming out of his mouth, and he knew Tasha was going to—justifiably—mock him for it.
She jumped all over it. “Activity!” She was delighted. “And boom, we’re solidly back in Awkwardsville, but kudos to us both for hanging on to Relatively-Normal-landia despite you being too sexy for your shirt for all these many minutes since you first de-jacketed.”
“I don’t have a shirt,” he reminded her as he stood up and headed for the bathroom. “I have your sweatshirt, and I wasn’t going to stank it up. But I’m putting it on right now.”
“Boo,” she said. “Check my jeans while you’re in there. Hey, Thomas?” She raised her voice, so he came back out of the bathroom to look at her.
“So... days?” she asked. “Weeks? I was really little on 9/11, I don’t remember how long it took for things to... well, I know it never got back to normal. But, you know what I mean. If something like that really did happen again...?”
“I think we should plan for both,” Thomas told her. “Days and weeks. I want to give Uncle Navy another few days to get here. If he hasn’t shown up by Friday, then I’m going to hike back down to the town by the airfield—”
Tasha gasped. “Without me?!”
“—and I’m going to get help, and yes, absolutely, because without you I’ll be able to move much faster, cover way more ground. Bonus is that you get to stay here, where it’s safe and warm.”
“If you don’t come back, I’ll have to save my poop and use it to grow potatoes,” she said, which was so absurd, it was surely some pop culture reference to something that he’d somehow missed.
Sure enough, at his silence, she added, “The Martian...? The awesome book...? The also-awesome movie with Matt Damon...?”
“Ah, I missed that one,” Thomas told her. “I was overseas.”
“You are gonna love it,” she said.
“I’ll keep an eye out,” he said, turning back to the bathroom.
“What if it was nuclear?” Tash asked, and he turned back again. “The attack? What if everyone’s dead?”
“Power’s on,” he pointed out.
She immediately came to the right conclusion. “So at least part of the electric grid’s up and running. That’s good.”
“Yeah. We are going to be okay,” he told her.
She nodded her towel-covered head. “Please don’t leave me here alone.”
Thomas couldn’t promise her that. So instead he said, “That’s only our Plan B, remember.”
“Plan A is wait for someone to show up,” she reminded him. “Plan A is pure luck and timing.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Plan As often are.”
Chapter Fourteen
Still Tuesday
Evil Genius.
It was the first nickname that Thomas had bestowed upon Tasha in a long time, but after her first surge of surprise and delight, she’d done a nosedive into feeling incredibly, desperately sad.
They’d once been so close.
She used to talk to him about nearly everything, and he’d shared at least some of his secrets with her, too—telling her about the way his world had exploded when his mom died giving birth to a brother who also hadn’t survived. He’d told her about his years of hurt and anger, and how it had driven a wedge between him and his older sister, and caused him to make quite a few bad choices before he’d found his way.
He’d even told her a little about his dad—Grandma King’s only son—who’d died in prison, awaiting appeal after being found guilty of a crime that he absolutely wouldn’t even have been charged with if he were a white man. Thomas had told her that was why his grandma had become a lawyer. She couldn’t bring his father back, but she could do her part to create a more just world.
Tasha had loved them both so much—Thomas and his grandmother.
But Grandma King had a stroke and left them way too soon, and then Tasha turned eighteen and detonated her relationship with Thomas by stupidly climbing into his bed.
For years, she’d only looked at the outcome of her folly from the perspective of what she’d lost. But now it was hard not to see what she’d done to Thomas. One by one, he’d lost all of the important people in his life, through no fault of their own.
Except for Tasha, who was completely to blame. She’d taken what they’d had—that special, innocent childhood bond—and deemed it not good enough. She’d pushed for more—too hard, too far, too fast—without stopping to consider what Thomas might want or need. She’d thought only of herself. And she’d completely ruined what they’d had.
And because she was Alan’s niece, she’d jeopardized Thomas’s friendship with him and Mia, too. And maybe she hadn’t just jeopardized it. For all she knew, because of her, Thomas had put distance between himself and her aunt and uncle. For all she knew, Thomas had full-on stopped seeking advice from the man who’d been his mentor in the Navy. For all she knew, she’d fully screwed that up for him, too.
So now here they were. Trapped alone together in a relatively small space, for God knows how long. And everything Tash had taken from both of them was right there, in her face.
The teasing nicknames. Wild Thing, Martian Girl, Princess. The ability to know what he was thinking simply from meeting a gaze that was now understandably guarded. The easy way they’d once laughed together.
“You okay?”
Tash looked up to find Thomas standing in the kitchen doorway, sweatshirt on but sleeves pushed up to his elbows. She was wearing a towel like a hat, but he was clearly plenty warm. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
“Glaring at that package of oatmeal with your best Hello my name is Inigo Montoya face is fine?”
“You killed my father, oatmeal. Prepare to die.” Tash adapted the famous quote from The Princess Bride, another movie they’d watched together a few hundred times—back before she’d ruined everything. “No, I’m just clueless about food rationing. I honestly don’t know where to begin.”
“Sure you do, because you’re doing it right,” he said, coming into the kitchen and gesturing at the meager supply she’d pulled down from the cabinet. “Step one, inventory what we’ve got.”
They’d already eaten two jars of peanuts, the entire box of cornflakes, the cold almond milk, and the OJ between last night and this morning, so all that was left was coffee, tea, two boxes of almond milk, the oatmeal, the spices, and a large unopened bottle of olive oil.
Tasha had also grabbed one each of the peanut and olive jars from the storage room, counted them up, and written on a piece of paper Peanuts 19, Olives 24, like the score from some weird sporting/cooking eve
nt. The olives were winning on paper, but the peanut jars were nearly twice as big.
However, if they teamed up, they’d vastly overpower the other food.
Bottom line: peanuts and olives were going to get really old, really fast.
“There’s also beer,” Thomas pointed out. “Lotta carbs. Like drinking bread.”
“Oh, great,” she said. “Beer on an incredibly empty stomach. Nothing whatsoever could possibly go wrong.”
He shot her the eyebrows-raised look that she recognized as his warning that he was about to start using the word awkward a lot.
“We can heat it,” he said. “Lower the alcohol a little.”
Warm beer on an empty stomach, even better. She didn’t say it aloud, but from the smile he now gave her, he knew she was thinking it.
“I’ll drink the beer,” he told her. “You can have the oatmeal.”
“That’s hardly fair,” she protested. “I’m not eating your share of the oatmeal, like I’m some extra-hangry Goldilocks.”
He talked over her as he went into the pantry, clearly ignoring her. “There’s sugar in some of the sodas and mixers, so we shouldn’t forget that, but we don’t want to include the bottles of diet in our count, that crap’s worthless in terms of calories.” He counted quickly. “Fifteen two-liter bottles of sugar water, a half a case of wine, and a case and a half of beer.” She’d followed him in, and he turned to look at her, clearly pleased. “That’s a very good inventory, with the peanuts as protein, and the olives as a source of fat.”
“What, no Vodka’s just like drinking potatoes?” she asked. “Also there’s more wine in the kitchen wine fridge.”
“Prince T has a wine fridge,” Thomas said. “Of course he does.”
“Had,” Tasha said. “Past tense. We’re talking about Tedric the first. My Ted’s more of a beer guy. Although, he would definitely keep wine on hand, for guests.”
My Ted.
Thomas glanced at her, so she knew the words had registered. And for a half of a second, she almost thought he might say something. Like, bring up the conversation he’d started last night, about her Ted clearly using this secret hide out for his activities with guests, and why didn’t that seem to bother her...?
Instead, he said, “If we reach the point where we need to break open the vodka, we’ll be drinking it along with the rabbit we’ve roasted for dinner.”
“Please tell me that’s your Plan Z,” she said, “and that you really don’t think it’s going to come to us cannibalizing Bambi’s best friend.”
He squinted at her. “Pretty sure it’s only cannibalizing if we’re rabbits, too.”
“You probably want to bet on how many days of peanuts and olives it’ll take before I start sobbing and begging you to go out there and murder Thumper, to roast in some of that delicious-looking olive oil that’s in the kitchen,” she said. “Fine. I’ll bet you half of my share of the oatmeal that I’ll cave in just three days.”
Thomas laughed. “Actually, the oil will go well with the oatmeal. It’ll make it more filling. I’ll bet you go longer. I’mma say I cave before you, but some time well after day seven.”
Day seven...? “You really think we’re going to be here that long?” she asked.
He sighed as he realized he’d walked right into that, and he shook his head. “I honestly don’t know, Tash. But I do know this. The oatmeal’s not the prize. Winner gets twenty bucks, paid up after we get back home. Because we will get home. You can count on that. Now, come on. We’ll figure out what our rations are gonna be for the next few days, and then, if we need to extend, we’ll figure out full austerity mode for the next week or so after that. You’ll love this. This is just simple math.”
“I hate math,” Tasha said as she followed him back out into the kitchen.
“No shit, Martian Woman,” he said. “That was what we earthlings call a joke.”
The driving was almost fricking over.
They’d left the highway some time ago, following the state road that wound farther north to Maine through the winter-brown, worn-down New Hampshire mountains. It was so different from the sharply jagged, treeless peaks that seemed to stab upward like serrated knife blades attempting to escape hell through SoCal’s alien-planet desert-scape.
And yeah, Rio was New York City born and raised. He could still remember the first year he’d boarded the bus to attend summer camp, and how, at that time, these New England mountains had seemed alien-planet weird to him, too.
Now they kinda felt like coming home.
The slap of freezing air, however, was not as welcome a sensation.
He and Dave had just finished unhitching their traveling fuel tank and hiding it behind a small mountain of brush, when a call from Admiral Francisco came in.
Reception sucked out here. It was miraculous that the SAT signal had reached them at all, considering they were in a valley with steep hillsides rising around them.
“If we lose the connection, sir,” Dave told the admiral, “we’ll move to a more open area and call you back.”
“Where are you?” Francisco barked.
Rio read off their coordinates, and Dave added, “Not too far outside of town. We’re still about an hour from the site of the burned SUV, another... I’d say two after that from the Ustanzian compound.”
“Fuck.” Francisco was sharply not happy.
Rio met Dave’s eyes, because the admiral rarely used that language. At least not in front of enlisted men.
“I was hoping you’d be closer,” the admiral said.
And Rio suddenly and completely understood what was on the verge of happening here. They were going to be redirected. Now. When they were almost at their destination. Fuck was putting it mildly. “Sir, we are close,” he said. “In fact, I realize now that I read those coordinates wrong—”
“Nice try, Rosetti, but no. We’ve picked up your signal and with it your location,” the admiral said. “You’re significantly closer to the airfield. You need to go there. Now.”
“What’s going on, sir?” Dave asked.
“Prince Tedric took one of the family planes.” The admiral’s voice was grim. “He’s got a pilot license, so he’s flying back in—alone—to try to save Tasha, and instead he’s gonna get himself killed. We need you to be there, waiting for him—to take him to Burlington.”
“That’s all the way over in Vermont,” Dave told Rio, sotto voce as he checked the map.
But the admiral heard him. “It’s closer than Hanscom. He’ll be safe there.”
“Sir, can’t we ask the police or the sheriff’s department—”
“Until we know who’s behind the attack on the ski lodge, we can’t trust the locals.”
Rio took a deep breath and exhaled it, hard. “What’s the prince’s ETA, sir?”
“Unknown.”
“An estimate, then,” Rio asked. “When and from where did he depart?”
“Unknown.” The admiral was apoplectic. “The Ustanzians refuse to share any information that could compromise their location. Our best guess is anywhere from one to five hours.”
Un-fucking-believable. “Sir,” Rio tried, “Patterson and I could split up and—”
“I need both of you protecting the prince,” Francisco shot that idea down, hard and fast.
“Sir, can’t you intercept via air?” Dave asked. “Aren’t all flights still shut down? How did he get permission to—”
“He didn’t. He just got in the plane and left.”
“Fucking shoot him down,” Rio couldn’t stop the words from coming out of his mouth. “Sir.”
“We’re looking to avoid an international incident, Rosetti, not start one,” Admiral Francisco said. “Look, I hate this more than you, but the order is coming from above me. This is top priority. Just go there, wait til he shows, get him to Burlington, and then go find my kid.”
Chapter Fifteen
Tuesday Night
It was obvious that Tasha had waited up for him.
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Their plan had been for her to crash on the living room couch, with hopes that she’d awaken when Thomas returned from his oh-dark-hundred sneak-and-peek. They’d experimented before he’d left, and discovered that if the lights in the pod were out, they went on for five blinding seconds when the hatch door was opened. Still, that was no guarantee that Tasha would wake up.
But the bolt clicked right after he delivered their Lizzo-knock on the door.
“Yay, you’re alive!” she said brightly—clearly not groggy from sleep. Her smile was infectious—it was impossible to not grin back at her in agreement. Yay, he was alive, indeed. She’d taken off her towel-hat—he noticed that immediately—and her hair gleamed as it curled around her face.
“Nothing yet,” he told her as he helped her pull the door more fully open. The lights were blazing in the shelter’s main room.
“I figured,” she said as he locked the door behind him and set down the rifle, “or you’d’ve been back much sooner.”
“Yeah, sorry it’s so late.” He yanked off the fleece poncho that they’d made from a dark blue blanket with a pair of scissors Tash had found in a kitchen drawer. Now that he was out of the freezing cold, he was desperate to pull his raincoat hood off his head, unfasten the damn thing’s front zipper, and peel the sleeves from his arms. The unbreathable fabric was giving him insta-sweat.
Tasha had anticipated that. As soon as he wrestled the jacket off, she handed him a towel, and held out a bottle of water.
King's Ransom: (Tall, Dark and Dangerous Book 13) Page 13