Page 58 of No Escape

“That’s it. Retrieve the disc and have it on the pool deck before the clock runs out without activating the alarm on your caps.”

“But how do we get the disc if it’s underwater and we can’t get our heads wet?” Vittoria asked.

Brando smiled. “That’s for you to figure out, my dear. Now, if you have an emergency or if you decide to end the game early, just push the red button on the wall over there. The challenge will be terminated immediately.”

He studied us for a long moment, his eyes stopping on me. “I will add that no one has ever completed this challenge. A few teams eventually figured out how to do it, but they lacked the time to complete the necessary tasks. So, I sincerely wish you good luck, because if you solve it, your team will be the first. According to the pool clock, it is now 1:25. I’ll see you in precisely two hours.”

He walked away, locking the pool door behind him.

“Great,” Oscar said, eyeing the pool. “An impossible challenge.”

“Nothing is impossible,” I said absently, already calculating. “It’s just a puzzle we have to figure out in a compressed timeline. We can do this.”

For a moment, we all stared into the pool at the weight lying at the bottom of more than eleven feet of water. Although I’d told Oscar nothing was impossible, retrieving that disc in two hours without going underwater seemed almost inconceivable. Except therehadto be a solution, so our job was to find it.

“I’m going to start with the obvious,” Stefan said. “How about one of us swim out there, keeping our heads out of the water, to get a closer look at the float and weight? I’m happy to volunteer. I can tread water for several minutes.”

I studied the lump and its location at the back of Stefan’s cap. “It’s risky,” I finally said. “If we get any water on the cap, we’re finished. Let’s see what else we have to work with first.”

Vittoria pointed to the skimming pole hanging on the wall. “Could we use that to snag the float and pull it up? The pole has a hook on the end of the handle, so maybe we can use it to our advantage.

“I don’t think that the pole is long enough unless it telescopes a lot,” Oscar commented.

“Guess there’s one way to find out.” Tito walked around the pool and removed the pole from the wall to see if it could be extended like a small folding umbrella. He pulled on it, but it didn’t extend. “Well, there went that good idea.”

“Maybe if we were able to get closer, we could reach down and hook the float,” Juliette suggested.

Her comment got everyone running around to see what might float. Vittoria tried putting one of the pool recliners in the water, but it sank quickly to the bottom. She doubled down and dropped another one, trying to stack them in the water. However, the recliner drifted as it sank and only partially landed on the first recliner.

“Those are heavy,” Juliette scolded. “You shouldn’t be lifting them in your condition.”

“They weren’t heavy,” Vittoria protested. “I promise.”

“She’s right,” I said. “The typical aluminum recliner is light enough to lift, even if you are seven months pregnant.”

“I hope we didn’t need one of those to solve this puzzle,” Stefan said with a tinge of annoyance in his voice. “We ought to be thinking this through instead of just randomly trying things. What if our solution was to disassemble those recliners and use the parts to make a longer pole?”

“I’m sorry,” Vittoria said, somewhat crestfallen. “I didn’t think of that. It just looks so impossible.”

“It was actually a good idea,” I said. “If it had worked, it could have helped us. Besides, given the location of the lounge chairs, we can hook them and pull them back up if we need them. Good try, Vittoria.”

I glanced around the room and saw Juliette exploring the cans along the far wall. “You know, Lexi, these cans are empty,” she said. “Perhaps we could fill them with water and drain the pool.”

I did a quick calculation of the amount of water in the pool. I paced off the sides, estimating the pool was ten meters by five meters or thirty-three by sixteen feet. Given the average depth of approximately seven feet and seven and a half gallons per cubic foot of water, that would equal more than twenty-five thousand gallons.

“It’s a good idea, Juliette, but it won’t work. Even if we could somehow drain one hundred gallons a minute and keep it up, it would take us more than two hours to drain even half the pool. Given the size of those cans, and the fact that there are only six of us, we’d be lucky to drain thirty gallons a minute. Plus, we have no place to put the water.”

“We could dump it into the hot tub,” Vittoria offered.

“We could,” I agreed, “but it’s only a fraction of the size of the pool. We might get the top foot of the pool in the hot tub, but that’s it. And that wouldn’t be enough to get down to that float.”

Tito paced back and forth along the pool deck. “What if we tied a bunch of the cans together and made a raft to float out into the middle of the pool, where we could try to snag the float with the hook on the pool skimmer?”

“Does anyone see a rope?” I asked. “Or any way the cans could be tied together?”

While we were talking, Stefan started to go down the steps into the water. “Brrr…the water is cold.”

Juliette said something to him in Italian, and I presumed she was reminding him not to get his head wet.

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