Kent Clarke and the rest of the team at Kent Clarke Films all said that both Jasper and the tablet were still in the meeting room when they packed up their gear and left, Daniel to his home in Hanga Roa, Kent and Brittany to their room, and Mike to his end of the bar. Several members of the delegation remembered seeing him there, and none of them had seen the rongorongo tablet in his possession.
Kent told the police, or so she said, that she had asked Gordon Fairweather and Rory Carlyle to have a closer look at the tablet. She said she was not prepared to take Jasper's word that it was authentic and was hoping for a second opinion. She said that both men had agreed to take a look at it the next day. She said she was reasonably sure the tablet was still in the room when they left. There was a slight element of doubt in her statement, however, just enough to make both Gordon's and Rory's situation even worse than it already was.
The next morning, the carabineros swept into the hotel, asked all of us to standby, and quite methodically searched our rooms while we watched. It took all day, and we were not allowed to leave the hotel.
By this time I was getting really worried and completely paranoid. I was convinced I was being watched every moment and worried that they'd managed to slip a bug into our hotel room while they searched, even though they'd made us watch while they went through our stuff. I hadn't said a word to anyone, not even Moira, who had not taken the news of Rory's incarceration well, and was now off in a little world of her own, usually by the pool.
I tried a couple of test runs into Hanga Roa by taxi, and on both occasions, within a few minutes, the carabineros had pulled in behind me, and when I got out, they cruised up and down the street watching me. Twenty-four hours a day, there was a police vehicle at the hotel entrance. So much for renting a car and making a dash for it. By now the better part of two days had gone by.
The only bright spot in all of this was that I figured out a way to keep tabs on Gabriela's condition. It occurred to me, in a rare moment of lucidity in those couple of days, that, given Gabriela had worked there, she might have a friend. That friend, it turned out, worked at reception. I mentioned that I hadn't seen Gabriela in the bar or dining room for a couple of days. Was she on a break? I asked.
"She's very sick," said the young woman, whose name, according to her badge, was Celia.
"That's too bad," I said. "I hope she'll get better soon. I'm rooting for her for Tapati queen."
Celia burst into tears. "They think she's tried to kill herself," she said. "She's in a coma!"
I feigned surprise and expressed genuine dismay. "What happened?" I exclaimed.
"Nobody knows. They think she may have taken it herself, but they can't find any poison around. Pills, perhaps, but nobody knows how she would have got them. They've sent some blood to Santiago for tests, and we're just waiting. I'm afraid she may die before they figure it out," the girl wailed.
"I knew she was unhappy about something," I said, rather tentatively.
"She was," Celia said. "She wouldn't tell me what it was. But to do something like this!" She stopped and looked at me for a minute. "When she came to the hotel to pick up her belongings, she told me two nice ladies from the hotel had tried to help her, but that no one could. Was that you and Ms. Meller?"
"We did try, without success," I said. "But I had no idea it was this bad."
"Nobody did," Celia said, but she gave me a little smile.
I hoped I had found an ally if I needed one. I even contemplated asking her to take a message for me to Victoria Pakarati; indeed I wrote a note and sealed it in a hotel envelope, but later when I went to reception to ask her, she was deep in conversation with Pablo Fuentes. They stopped talking the minute I walked in. Given I couldn't be sure of the tenor of that conversation, I just asked the first question that came into my head, something about the weather, and left with the letter still in my bag.
I finally poured out my heart to Moira. I asked her to go for a stroll on the hotel grounds with me and told her everything, then held my breath waiting for the reaction. "I'm glad you told me," she said. "I knew there was something bothering you. I was afraid you were annoyed with me about not believing you, and, I guess, about other things. Yes, I will help. We are intelligent women, to say nothing of devious when called for, and we will figure this out. If I can sum up what I think you've told me, Victoria can't go to her husband, nor can Rory and Christian, given they are both under house arrest. You can't go to Victoria because then they will be watching you. If any of her close relatives try to get to him, they'll be seen. So it's up to us. First we need food and water. Then we need a diversion."
"If we buy a lot of food and water, the guy who is following us around will begin to wonder," I said.
"Who said anything about buying?" she said.
It was another day before we could get everything organized. I was worried sick about Gordon by then. Every meal, we'd emptied the bread basket into our bags, and at breakfast we took lots of extra cheese and fruit, keeping it in the minibar in our room. The water was easy. We just ordered extra for our table every meal, and we did, in fact, go shopping, but only once. It was not the food that was slowing us down. It was devising a way for me to get it to him. We knew what we needed to do. We just had to find the right place to make it happen. We did the tourist routine, looking at the menus at every restaurant, buying T-shirts, walking up and down the streets of Hanga Roa stopping to look at everything.
Finally we were ready. We went into town, followed closely by one of Fuentes' men. We went into a car rental agency and came out with a white Suzuki four-wheel-drive, drove along the main street, parking in front of a restaurant carefully chosen, which we entered. I, as the one viewed with most suspicion, sat in the window with my menu and pretended to talk to Moira whose chair, had she been in it, was hidden from view. I smiled, I laughed, I didn't have a care in the world. In a few minutes she was back in her place, eating the cheese enchiladas I'd ordered for her. After lunch, we did a test drive to Anakena Beach, leaving the carabineros who'd been following us to sit in a hot van while we swam and sunbathed for the rest of the afternoon. We knew we were ready to roll.
But then Seth Connelly did something really, really stupid.
URE E REKA
THEY SHOULD NEVER have come back, Ure e Reka thought. As much as they had dreamed of the return to their home, as harsh as the life had been, they should have stayed where they were.
He could still feel his face burn at the humiliation of it, the way the men from the big ship had thrown their gifts onto the sand of the shore, forcing all of them to crawl on their hands and knees to retrieve them. And then, while they scrambled, those same bad men had grabbed them from behind, tied their hands, and carried them to the waiting boats. So many of them! Even the ariki mau and the other wise men of the clan Miruf Even his father, maori rongorongo.
They had been frightened then, on the long voyage to the terrible place, but it was nothing compared to what awaited them: the guano fields of the Chincha Islands, where they had worked in the stench and the heat, forced to the hard labor by the men who took them. He and the others could only dream of returning home.
But then, the word came, from some important ariki far away. They were to be returned to the island. Their fortune had been almost too happy to be believed.
Marama was the first man among them to fall ill. As the ship sank into the troughs, then rose again, he began to scream, tearing off his clothes as the fever took him. And then one by one the others had succumbed to the fever, and one by one they had died. His father had been among the last to be taken.