“Who is in our room?” I whisper.
A man appears in a dark suit distracted as he talks to another man and they stop in the doorway for a moment to discuss something. They seem to be talking to someone else in the room.
Oh my God, they’ve found us.
Stace turns us and we start to speed walk down the corridor in the opposite direction.
“Hey, you!” a man calls. “Stop right there!”
23
“Don’t run, keep walking,” Stace replies calmly. “Just keep walking.”
My heart is hammering in my chest as we quickly walk down the corridor.
“Don’t look back.” He growls.
Thankfully, the corridor turns a corner, and for a moment we are shielded. I’m not sure if they are coming after us, but damn, we are doing a bloody good job of acting like we don’t have a care in the world. We start to run.
We pass by a cleaning cart parked in the hallway. The maid is in the adjacent room with the door propped open and a lanyard with a card key is hanging from the top of her tea and coffee tray. Stace casually picks it off and we continue up the corridor a bit and he swipes the key and the door unlocks. We scramble inside and he closes the door quietly. He immediately looks through the security peephole.
“Fuck, that was close?” he whispers.
I stand still for a moment, in shock. “Stace. They… they are in our room and they have our things,” I stammer. I put my hands on top of my head as I try to grasp the situation.
He continues to look through the hole. “It’s definitely them,” he whispers and he moves back from the hole to let me see. I stand on my tiptoes and peer through the small glass hole and see the three men walking down the hall looking for us.
“It’s one of the men from Bogota that was outside the bank,” Stace whispers.
“Shit.” I look around the room and, thankfully, it doesn’t appear to have anyone staying here. The room smells of cleaning fluid and has obviously just been turned over by the maids.
“What are we going to do?” I whisper. “All of our money, our clothes.” My eyes widen. “Our fucking passports are in that room.”
“Where are the diamonds?” he asks.
“I unscrewed the light fitting in the room and hid them in there. Nobody should find them.”
“We get new passports tomorrow and you still have four chips, right?”
“Yes.” I scramble through my bag and retrieve the four chips and hold them up to him.
I start to pace as Stace continues to stare through the peephole. My heart is hammering. “What if someone checks into the room?”
“Then we’re fucked,” he snaps.
“Holy shit.” I drop my head into my hands.
“How did they find us?”
“Vernon.”
I shake my head. “Fucking Vernon.” I continue pacing with my fingers on my temples. “I fucking hate that guy. I knew I hated that guy.”
* * *
For the next hour, Stace watches through the peephole as the men walk up and down the corridor looking for us.
I’m nearly in a fetal position on the bed.