He ignored her question, which in her limited experience wasn’t unusual for him. “Do you have anything electronic with you?”
She frowned, not sure what he meant. As he hadn’t let her fetch her bag, all she had was what she carried in her pockets—her phone and her watch, which was an old Mickey Mouse one that she’d had since childhood. She felt around in her jeans. Oh yeah, and some lip balm and a few tissues.
She didn’t even have her passport. Her mom had bought her one of those waist belts to travel with, but she’d hated it and stuck it in her suitcase as soon as they arrived from the airport.
“Keep it with you at all times.”She would happily tell her mother she was right just as soon as she got out of this.
“Just my phone,” she said.
“Let me see it.”
Figuring he was going to call someone, she pulled it out of her pocket and handed it to him—nearly going overboard after it when he immediately tossed it over the side.
Her attempt to reach for it, however, proved futile, and it disappeared beneath the waves forever.
Outrage made her forget that she should be terrified. She spun around on him. “Why did you do that?”
“I didn’t want anyone tracking us.”
“You could have just turned it off.”
“That isn’t a fail-safe.”
“I highly doubt Jean Paul and his friends are that sophisticated.”
“But the police might be. I’m not taking any chances—and OPF is a powerful organization. Don’t underestimate them.”
“How do you know so much about them?”
He didn’t answer, instead pulling a radio out of his bag.
“What about your cell phone?” she asked. “Is yours going overboard, too?”
“Mine’s a burner and untraceable.”
Great. That wasn’t what she needed to hear. Why did hehave an untraceable cell phone? Weren’t those the province of drug dealers and other criminals? What was this guy involved in?
She didn’t have a chance to ask him, as he was on the radio—channel 16 was the international distress channel—already giving the “urgent” signal of “Pan-Pan.”
Mayday might have been appropriate under the circumstances—the situation was grave and imminent to her mind—but he was obviously taking a more rational, less terrified-out-of-his-mind perspective.
It took a few minutes for a response. The fact that they were in the range of a boat or coast guard station was some small relief. Not that five to twenty miles was going to help her much if he decided to get rid of her.
She’d definitely watched too many movies.
The captain was quick and to the point. He gave the name of the boat, the last known coordinates, that there were three ecoterrorists who’d planned to blow up the drillship waiting for them, and told them “not to miss the explosives in the equipment cases in the storage room.”
The long pause made Annie wonder whether the transmission had been lost. But the coast guard operator repeated what Dan had said and asked him to confirm. He did, but as soon as they asked him to identify himself and his position, Dan stopped them. “You better hurry. They’re tied up and one of them is injured.”
He turned off the radio, which she took to mean that he considered his duty done.
Still upset about her phone—it was new and not cheap—she said, “Doesn’t that one magically turn on, too?”
He made a gruff sound that she thought might be of amusement. She was certain of it when one side of his mouth curved. “Nope. No way to track it if it’s off. I just brought the old radio—no GPS. I also didn’t bring the sat EPIRB.”
In other words, no satellite beacon to let someone track them down. Not necessarily what she wanted to hear. What if they got in some kind of... predicament?
“I hope you know where you are going.”
