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“Slow to idle!” Sam ordered. “Just enough to hold position.”
“Idling!” Remi replied.
Sam grabbed the six-foot length of line from the deck and dove over the side. Three strokes brought him to the raft. Five loops through the bell’s crown and a bowline knot over the crossbeam, and the bell was secure. Sam lifted his hands triumphantly, like a cowboy who’d just roped a calf.
“Done!” he called.
The Andreyale’s engines sputtered and went silent. Remi walked onto the afterdeck, smiled, and returned her husband’s thumbs-up.
“Congratulations, Fargo,” she called. “Now what?”
Sam’s smile dropped away. “Not sure. Still working it out.”
“How did I know you were going to say that?”
CHAPTER 6
ZANZIBAR
IN TRUTH, THERE WAS NOTHING TO WORK OUT. THEY DIDN’T DARE tow the bell back up the coast to their bungalow. The needed a safe place to stash it while they made some decisions and arrangements.
While they both recognized their encounter with the Yulin might be a molehill they’d built into a mountain, they’d also come to trust their instincts, and on this issue Sam’s and Remi’s gut reactions were in agreement: Neither the Yulin’s initial visit nor its repeated appearances were happenstance. Also, her captain’s questions were variations on a theme: Were the Fargos looking for something specific? This suggested someone—perhaps the shadowy figure hiding in the Yulin’s cabin—was concerned that something of note was at risk of discovery. Was it the bell or the Adelise coin, or something else entirely?
“The question is,” Sam said, “do we want to wait and see what they do or shake the tree a little bit?”
“I’m not fond of sitting on my hands.”
“I know. Me neither.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Behave like we’re people with something to hide.”
“We are people with something to hide,” Remi replied. “A two-hundred-pound ship’s bell suspended from a homemade raft.”
At this, Sam laughed. His wife had a knack for cutting to the heart of a matter. “If we’re not blowing all of this out of proportion, they—whoever they are—have probably already searched the bungalow.”
“And found nothing.”
“Right. So they’ll watch and wait for us to come home.”
Remi was nodding, smiling. “We don’t come home.”
“Right. If they come looking for us, we’ve got confirmation the game’s afoot.”
“Did you say ‘the game’s afoot’? Really?”
Sam shrugged. “Thought I’d try it out, see how it plays.”
“Oh, Sherlock . . .” Remi said, rolling her eyes.
WITH THE BELL and raft in tow, they retraced their course through ankle inlet and to the mangrove lagoon. Nightfall was only a couple hours away. They spent an hour of this time tooling around the lagoon’s perimeter looking for a suitable hiding spot for the raft, which they found along the eastern shoreline where a cluster of cypress trees were growing diagonally from the bank. Using the gaff, they eased the raft beneath the overhanging branches, then Sam dove in and tied it off to one of the trunks.
“How’s it look?” Sam called from behind the screen.
“Can’t see a thing. They’d have to get in there to find it.”
THEY RETURNED to the mouth of the inlet, where Sam used a dead line to catch four small red snappers, then they returned to the lagoon and waded ashore to the beach. Remi, who had the better filleting skills, cleaned and prepped the snapper while Sam collected wood for the fire. Before long the fillets were sizzling and, as the sun dropped behind the coconut palms, they were eating.