Eventually Mark bowls back into our suite, full of energy.
“Done.”
He plops down on the sofa next to me. I let my head fall onto his shoulder, exhausted from the waiting, from the tension. I think we’re friends again. Fight-or-flight stress endorphins have healed the rift I made by using the iPhone earlier. We’re a team again. The Robertses versus the world.
“Great work,” I breathe into his shoulder. I kiss it softly through his T-shirt.
“How did you leave it?” I ask. It doesn’t really matter, I just want to hear the sound of his voice, the vibration from his chest. I already know he will have played it flawlessly.
“Very well, thanks. Leila and I are best friends. She’s given us a letter for two free nights in any Four Seasons we choose. And I told her she was a credit to the hotel and we’d be passing that on to the manager. She seemed pretty pleased in the end.” He kisses my temple.
“You did great, Erin,” he says, tilting my head back to look up at him. “Seeing you like that…with the CCTV. I’ve never seen you like that. I can’t believe we managed it. You got our ID’s too, didn’t you? I didn’t even think of that. You did great. So great.” He bends to kiss me.
Those were the only links to us being here. If they come. If they even come for us. The important thing is the hotel no longer has copies of our passports or London address on file. If anyone comes looking, then they won’t be able to find any ID for us. Plus, the footage of who used the computer this morning no longer exists. A ghost took the phone and there will be no way to find the guests who stayed in our room except…it suddenly occurs to me. A terrifying flash out of nowhere.
My eyes flick up to Mark. “I forgot about the computers! Their computer system. We forgot! They’ve almost definitely put our check-in info on their system already, Mark. It doesn’t matter that we took the file; they still have all our info.”
He breaks my gaze, leans away from me. We have to go back. Shit! He knows it. He stands and starts pacing. We have to go back and somehow erase those files. Shit shit shit. And I thought we’d both done so well. I thought I’d been so clever. But in fact all we’ve been doing is making it more obvious. Highlighting who we are, who did it. If someone comes looking. And someone will come looking. They won’t see our missing files, but they will find our details on the hotel database and they will know we tried to cover our tracks. We have flagged ourselves, nothing more. Unless. Unless we go back to that office right now and delete our names from the system completely. Unless one of us does that.
Mark looks down at me again. A thought is solidifying in his mind. He has to go; he has to be the one this time. I can’t go back to reception. I’m supposed to be on my sickbed; that’s the story we’ve sold. I’ve made my sickbed and now I have to lie in it.
Mark slowly paces, thinking. After a few minutes he heads into the bedroom and comes out holding an earring. One of my emerald earrings, a birthday present from the year before. He holds it up.
“You lost an earring. That’s what’s happened. I’ll go and find it, shall I?” He nods. There’s a finality to it. “Yeah, I’ll go.”
Forty-three minutes later he’s back in the room.
“It’s done. I changed our names, numbers, emails, and address. All of it. Done.” He looks exhausted but relieved.
God knows how he did it but I knew he would. Thank God. I smile.
“We need to talk about the guy-on-the-phone problem, Mark.” Time to stop congratulating ourselves and get back to the situation at hand. Since he’s been gone I’ve been running it through in my mind.
He nods and sits down next to me on the sofa. He moistens his lips.
“Okay. What do we know? Let’s start there. What do we know about him? Or her?” he asks. We’re going to work it through.
“His phone number is registered in Russia, but his text messages are written in English. All the plane people’s emails were Russian. They must have been Russian. But they wrote to the man in the text messages in English and he replied in English. So I’d hazard a guess he at least is either American or English. We don’t know if he’s the same person as on the American number too. He might just be the same guy with two phones. We don’t know. It sounded like he was arranging the exchange for the plane people with the American number. He wanted the deal to go through. He knows we’re not the plane people, and he knows we pretended to be….” Mark’s eyebrow is raised. I stutter to a stop.
“Huh, okay. He knows I pretended to be—” I correct myself.
Mark nods.
I continue, “—the plane people. He will assume we’ve looked through the phone. He’ll assume we’ve either killed them for whatever reason and kept the bag, or we’ve found it and seen things that we shouldn’t have seen. Either way, we are a threat to him. Or them. And he’ll try to find us.”
Mark leans forward, elbows on knees, frowning. “Can they trace the phone signal? Well, not signal—you weren’t using a signal, were you? Wi-Fi? Can they trace that somehow?” He’s thinking out loud but I answer.
“No. No, they can’t! There’s no iCloud connection on the iPhone. You can only locate via Wi-Fi with a special app or through iCloud. I mean, he can trace the last place the signal was received but that was maybe before the plane people even got on the plane. Sometime before the crash, at any rate. The phone was packed away and turned off when the plane went down. So he may know it’s somewhere near the Pacific but no more than that.” I’m pretty sure that sounds right. Mark nods; he agrees.
“So the only link to here, to this hotel, is the accessing of the email account from the business center?” He’s forming a plan, I can tell.
“Yeah, the IP address will be logged somewhere. It’ll show where the account was accessed. I’m guessing these people probably have a way to find that out. At any rate they can certainly afford to get someone who can,” I say.
They will come. It’s just a matter of time really. They might have the IP address already. They might be on their way this very minute.
“So they’re coming?” he says; he can read it off my face.
“Yes,” I reply.
He nods thoughtfully. “In which case, we are going.” He rises and heads for the laptop.
“Mark—?”
“It’s fine,” he tells me. “We’ve got the perfect excuse now. You got sick, food poisoning, so we cut the vacation short to get you home to the doctor.”
I smile. It does solve a lot of problems.
“I’m going to change the flights. I booked flexible tickets, so it should be fine. I’ll try and get seats for tomorrow. Sound okay?” he asks.
“Sounds ideal.” I get up and head to the bedroom. Time to start packing, I guess. It’s sad to be leaving, but if and when these people do arrive at the hotel, I’d rather be anywhere else on earth, but preferably in my own home.
I pull out our cases and empty out the contents of the wardrobes onto the bed.
I look up to the top shelf.
“Mark?” I wander back into the lounge.
“Yeah?” He looks up from the screen.
“Are we keeping it?” It’s just a question. I don’t know anymore. I don’t know what we’re doing. I don’t know if we’re running away from these people or if we’re robbing them.
“Well, we can’t just leave it in the room, can we?” he asks. “Unless we want to get arrested on the flight home. If we leave it, we’ll need to hide it…I suppose? Under the bungalow, maybe? Or we could take it, keep it? Erin, once we’re gone, there’s no way to trace us.” He studies my face. The question unanswered.
Two million pounds.
I don’t want much in life. Just my house, my husband, the occasional vacation—economy flights are fine. Just a quiet life. Our life.
Two million is our whole house paid off. A startup fund for Mark if he wants to set up a business, or a cushion until he finds a new job. It could be a university fund for the child that might already be growing inside me.
I remember the vomit on the floor yesterday morning. Maybe? I’ve been off the pill for eight weeks now. No, no, it’d be too soon for symptoms. I’m fairly confident that yesterday’s vomit will have been down to piña coladas and fear. I suppose time will tell.
And once we’re gone, there’s no way to trace us.
“Are you sure, Mark? Could they find us from the flights maybe?” Perhaps even though we’ve cleared our records here they could somehow check flight manifests for the whole island? Check all the incoming flights for names and find which two names don’t appear in any hotel guest registers?
Mark looks out the French doors into the fading light across the lagoon. The sound of the waves lapping under the bungalow muffled and steady.
He answers slowly. “There are around thirty-six hotels on this island; it’s coming up to peak season, so let’s say they’re running at half capacity. This hotel has one hundred suites, that’s two hundred people—half capacity, one hundred people. One hundred times thirty-six hotels: give or take thirty-six hundred people. Five flights in and five flights out daily back to Tahiti. That’s a lot of different people. A lot of names to check. Three thousand six hundred constantly changing names. They’ll need more to go on than that. Trust me.” He’s right, there are too many variables.
We could take it and no one will ever find out.
“Yes. We’ll keep it. I’ll pack.” I say it clearly, so that if at any time in the future the question rises as to whose idea this was, we’ll remember it was mine. I’ll take the weight for both of us.
Mark nods; he smiles softly.
We are keeping it.