Artifact

Keene’s watch read one-thirty. Unable to believe that his lighthearted infiltration had gone so smoothly, he descended slowly and carefully into the shadows.

“You dumb son of a bitch!”

McKendry’s words and fist hit Keene simultaneously. Keene reeled and swiped at his nosebleed. “Are you crazy, McKendry? You’ve probably broken my nose.”

“You have about as much sense as a centipede,” McKendry said, clinging fast to the iron rung Keene had used to descend the derrick.

“At least now we’ll have a story to tell next New Year’s Eve.”

“You’ll have a story to tell. I probably won’t make it.” McKendry let go of the rung and sank to the deck. He held one hand over his left ribs. With the other, he pointed at his foot. “Shark,” he said, his voice reduced now to the slightest whisper.

“Oh my God!” Keene fell to his knees. In the dim light, he could see huge, red blotches, leaking around the protection of his partner’s hand and running across his ankle. “McKendry, I’m so sorry. Oh my God!”

“Could you…could you kiss it better,” McKendry whispered.

Keene looked up and into his partner’s eyes.

“And while you’re at it, Joshua, could you…”

McKendry’s voice was so close to being inaudible that Keene had to lean into it. “Anything, buddy.”

“Good,” McKendry said, whimpering. “Then you can kiss my ass.” He wiped one of the red blotches vigorously. It paled as it left a stain on his fingers.

“The red pen,” Keene said.

“The red pen,buddy .”

“You scared the shit out of me,” Keene said.

“I meant to.”

“I’m sorry I…um…pulled your leg.”

“We’re supposed to be looking for Selene Trujold, not running around at two in the morning playing King of the Hill. As long as we find her, we’ll call it even.” He paused. “Since we’re here, I’d like to take another look around. But first, would you mind telling me what possessed you to pull off this dumb stunt and jeopardize the whole mission?”

“I pissed on the world from up there,” Keene said halfheartedly.

“Was it worth it?”

For a moment Keene was quiet. “Yes, it was.” He decided to give an honest answer, though he didn’t expect McKendry to fully understand. “Listen, we’re out here and we’re ready for whatever happens. Right now, everything’s quiet. We’ve already spent weeks sitting around in Caracas, taking canoe trips through the Orinoco Delta, drinking beer in dockside cantinas. I had to dosomething, Terris.”

He raised his eyebrows and spread out his hands innocently, indicating the ghost town of the oil platform.

“Had to find myself a story to tell. Just in case.”

18

Two black Zodiac rafts filled with commandos sped across the channel of the Serpent’s Mouth. They had eased out of one of the many mouths of the Orinoco Delta at midnight; after two hours Selene Trujold could just now make out the shape of theYucatán near the gleaming beacon that was theValhalla platform. There was half an hour’s worth of water still to cross, the last of it with engines off, moving in silence.

Around her in the rafts, the commandos wore dark suits and carried a stash of black-market weapons, rifles, hand grenades, and explosives. They had night-vision goggles to enable them to direct night operations, but she knew that the Caribbean stars would give them all the illumination they needed.

Her Green Impact fighters were well trained and high-strung, keyed up for this assault, which had been a full month in the planning. Their information had proved correct: the tankerYucatán was lashed to theValhalla ’s separate pumping platform during the darkest hours of the night. Though the normal complement of crew members aboard the tanker outnumbered them, Green Impact had both weapons and determination.

And they had a plan, not the least component of which was the element of surprise.

Selene narrowed her eyes and looked around. “We have to time this properly,” she said. “We know their routine. During the day, theValhalla needs all of its two hundred crew members aboard. That’s why the company gives them time for R and R at night. When the tanker pulls up and begins filling, most of the crew will go over to theValhalla to party with the other workers. During the dead of night, there’s only a skeleton crew aboard the tanker. That’s when we strike.”

Quiet and intent, the members of her force nodded and listened, though they had heard this briefing several times already.

“We are going to hijack theYucatán, get rid of the remaining few aboard. We’ll take them prisoner if possible, but don’t waste any precious time. Then we disengage the pump and head out. The load should be mostly full by the time we’re ready to go. Enough to cause the kind of disaster thatnobody will be able to ignore. If you have any questions, ask them now.”

Selene fingered the relic that hung from her neck, wondering yet one more time what it was. Nothing in her knowledge of physics or the related sciences provided any inkling as to its origins. She’d had it embedded in bark and suspended from a strip of leather soon after Manny Sheppard had delivered it and told her of her father’s death. The pendant’s smooth, irregular edges bit into the joints of her fingers. She rubbed the fragment’s slick, strangely greasy surface. It seemed to have a unique combination of heat and ice deep inside it.

Manny’s delivery had also contained a note from her father, telling her of the importance of the contents of the package—and of how Frikkie Van Alman meant to abuse his connections and the resources of Oilstar to exploit the secrets it held. Her father’s words had left her under no illusion as to who had been responsible for his death: he had dared to defy Van Alman, and had paid for that defiance with his life.

While this assault fit well within the parameters of Green Impact’s agenda, she was doing this for him. She was about to cause a financial disaster, a public relations disaster, and an ecological disaster. And it would all be blamed on Frikkie Van Alman. The media would need a scapegoat, and the pompous CEO would be led to the slaughterhouse.

In comparison, theExxon Valdez spill would become a mere footnote in history. And her father would rest more easily.

The Zodiacs roared forward, plowing through the open waters of the Serpent’s Mouth. The charcoal black sides of the rafts were large inflated tubes, big enough that even her largest man would have trouble getting his arms all the way around. The tubes angled up and together in the front, forming a point. Between the tubes, a hard fiberglass hull gave the riders a place to sit, and at the rear, the outboard motor was mounted to the squared-off aft of the hull.

Relinquishing her hold on the pendant, Selene balanced against the rubber eyelets of the black raft. Through the hum of the powerful outboard motor and the whisper of the waves, she could hear her father’s ghost laughing.

She herself wouldn’t laugh until the bloodshed and the horror of the next few hours were done.

Soon enough, the bulwark of the OilstarYucatán loomed up out of the water, surrounded by starlight. Selene and her assault team switched off the motors of their dark Zodiac rafts. From that point on, they approached cautiously and in silence.

The garish display of the monstrous production platform sparkled like the contents of a treasure chest. Selene wished they could do something against that target—thereal target—but her small group had no chance against something as big as theValhalla . There were two hundred people on board. Her group could cause some damage, but they’d all be killed.

On the other hand, if her information was correct and the timing worked out properly, Green Impact could get aboard the tanker and deal with the skeleton crew. Her group would have a chance of survival—and the oil-ladenYucatán would certainly make a sufficient statement for their cause.

With whispered commands and information communicated through gestures, the two Zodiacs approached the tanker from the rear. TheYucatán sat far from the towering offshore platform, drinking deeply of the crude petroleum that poured down into its holds from the pumping station.

They coasted closer to the stained hull of the ship. Next to her, one of the men stifled an outcry and lunged away from the side of the Zodiac. The large inflatable raft jerked and bumped as something struck it from beneath and swam away, a shadow disappearing into darkness.

“Great white,” the man said.

“Fortunately, we’re not going swimming,” Selene said. “Our business is aboard the tanker.”

A couple of men chuckled quietly.

The commandos lashed their two rafts to the lower rungs of the metal ladder on the tanker’s hull. Moving like shadows, they climbed to the deck, all but one man, whose task it was to tie the rafts together and move them around to the bow in readiness for the planned escape.

If nothing untoward happened, they could all make it back to the encampment.

In deciding which Green Impact members to take with her from their primary jungle compound, Selene had selected the most dedicated ones, those most ready to follow orders and do what had to be done. These people would be called upon to kill. In an operation like this, she couldn’t risk someone flinching or hesitating at the wrong moment.

The Green Impact commandos had studied detailed blueprints of the OilstarYucatán, memorizing every cranny, every deck plate. They had a fairly good idea of where the tanker’s remaining crew members would be. Most would be snoozing in their cabins, perhaps grumbling that they couldn’t go to theValhalla platform like the others. Captain Calisto would almost certainly be in his private stateroom taking care of small details and reveling in the peace and quiet. He loved his ship and would not be the least bit interested in leaving her for R and R.

The assault team carried their packs of weapons, ammunition, and explosives. Upon reaching the deck, they stashed the more fragile items they wouldn’t need until after they’d dealt with the crew. Then they split up, moving in small groups with separate, well-rehearsed objectives.

Selene and three companions marched up to the officers’ quarters while the others entered the lower levels of crew cabins, rec rooms, and mess hall. The first muffled gunshots rang out as she reached the captain’s private stateroom. The door was partially ajar, so she could see his expression as he whirled around, astonished to hear the weapons fire from below.

Her three companions held out their assault rifles and Selene took a step forward. “I’m sorry about the disturbance, Captain Calisto.” Her voice was quiet; commanding. “We need to have a word with you.”

19

“At least you didn’t suggest climbing out there to roast marshmallows.” McKendry pointed at the jet of flame coming from a pipe extended away from the rig, burning off the waste gases before they could build up and become a danger.

Keene managed a soft chortle. It blended into the murmur of music and laughter that came from the complex of living quarters. “They seem to be having a party down there,” he said.

“Another egregious security lapse. Oilstar could certainly use our services as security consultants,” McKendry said.

“I’ll consider making the offer to Frik.” Keene touched his nose, which had begun to ache from McKendry’s punch.

From what he could tell, so many people worked on the rig that it was like a condominium complex. He imagined what it must be like to live in a small cabin, to share common rooms. “Not the life for me,” he said. “Hard work, long hours, boredom—”

“None of which excuses the lack of security.Nobody tried to stop you?”

Keene shook his head. “I didn’t see a single human being. This place is wide open to an attack.” They strolled around the platform, looking in all directions. “I can’t believe Frik Van Alman is so blind. If Selene Trujold means to strike this rig, she won’t have much trouble.”

“Especially if she shows up tonight.” McKendry glanced at his watch. “It’s almost two-thirty. We should get back to the tanker before the replacement crew decides to do its job and head over there. We can talk to Calisto in the morning and maybe get him to call Frikkie and set up some better security here.”

“I’m all for that, buddy. Let’s go.”

They climbed back down the leg of the platform as quickly as possible, not pausing to admire the view of the tanker a quarter mile away. As they swam across the placid water toward theYucatán, Keene thought he sensed movement below him. Despite his professed lack of fear, he got set to defy the laws of motion if he encountered any contact with an undersea creature.

“Hey, McKendry,” he called out. “Did you ever read any of those Peter Benchley books? You know,Jaws, The Beast, White Shark ?”

“Idiot,” McKendry yelled back, but he put on some speed. Keene was impressed by how little fear there was in his partner’s response. See, he said to himself, it was for your own good, Terris.

“I hope the replacement crew hasn’t come back yet,” McKendry said, climbing out of the water and scaling the tanker’s hull ladder.

Keene was right behind him. “If they have, we might have a harder time sneaking back to our presidential suite down in the pump room. Let’s see if the captain’s awake. Maybe we can talk ourselves into a decent meal.”

They had reached the deck. Keene could see a group of people at the far end of the tanker, disengaging the long hose that had been filling theYucatán ’s hold for hours. The shadowy workers made no noise, quietly going through the motions with all the finesse of a Green Beret squadron instead of a crowd of roughnecks.

“A meal sounds fine to me. I’m so hungry I could eat a shark.” McKendry grinned.

“Better than the other way around,” Keene responded. He yawned. “It’s after three in the morning. Asleep or awake, Calisto’s likely to be in his stateroom.”

They entered the crew quarters, climbed up another level, and reached the larger rooms where the crew and officers slept. McKendry sniffed and frowned. “Do you smell that? Gunpowder. Cordite…blood.”

“Looking for trouble, McKendry?” Keene said. They had reached the captain’s stateroom. The door was not entirely shut and light spilled out. “Captain?”

Keene tapped lightly on the door. McKendry pushed it wide open. Both men froze.

Captain Miguel Calisto lay dead in his chair, shot three times in the chest. Pools of blood seeped along the floor.

Keene looked at McKendry. “I get the feeling,” he said, “that we just found Selene.”

Before McKendry could respond, the powerful engines of the OilstarYucatán roared to life. With a lurch, the supertanker began to move. The deck vibrated as the tanker crawled away, detaching itself from the pumping station and heading out into the Caribbean.

“Okay, genius. What now?” McKendry raised his voice above the noise of the engines.

“We arm ourselves.” Keene swiped his knuckles across the sweat on his forehead. “He’s got to have a gun here somewhere.”

He was talking as much to Captain Calisto, slumped in his wooden desk chair, as he was to McKendry. The captain’s corpse was still cooling. An occasional drop of blood oozed from his gunshot wounds, playing counterpoint to the groan of the tanker engines that shuddered through the walls of the bridge superstructure and the crew housing.

“I’d settle for a baseball bat,” McKendry said. Keene knew that his partner was too intent on the imminent crisis to waste words. He moved from cabinet to cabinet, methodically opening cupboard doors, sliding the front panel on an old metal credenza.

Though he could smell the sour blood and the bitter residue of gunfire in the air, Keene, like McKendry, ignored the carnage and ransacked the captain’s office. Unlike his methodical partner, his mode was to rifle the captain’s desk with all the organization of a squall at sea. He found nothing useful: two well-watched Spanish-language porn videotapes, three battered paperback novels, some paperwork, a stack of photos that variously showed a grinning Calisto with what seemed to be six different women. The wide middle drawer held pencils, office paraphernalia. A few thin ledgers contained uninspired captain’s logs.

The bottom left desk drawer was locked.

“This must be it.” Keene tugged on the metal handle and pried into the crack without success, making a loud rattling noise that he knew would put McKendry on edge. When the drawer didn’t open, he reached into the central desk drawer and withdrew a letter opener. Though he snapped the blade off in the hasp of the drawer lock, he finally succeeded in jarring it open. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

He slid open the drawer and rummaged inside. “Nothing but crap!”

McKendry came forward, looked down, and frowned. He pulled out a half-empty bottle of cheap scotch whiskey. “I guess the captain was more worried about someone stealing his booze than his—”

He melted back behind the metal cabin door as footsteps resounded in the corridor outside. A man entered, clearly one of the terrorists. He had high cheekbones, dark hair slicked back with seawater, and a gray jumpsuit with plenty of bulging pockets. His wide black belt was studded with the handles of several weapons or tools.

“Damn,” he said. He stared at Joshua Keene. “Looks like we missed one.”

Keene tried to grin disarmingly. “I’m looking for the gents’ room. Can you direct me, please?”

The terrorist grabbed for a weapon at his belt.

“I don’t think so.” Terris McKendry sprang out from behind the cabin door. Holding the heavy bottle of scotch, he swung it down with the force of a sledgehammer. With a solid crunch of impact between skull and booze bottle, the stranger’s cranium lost the duel. The golden brown liquid sloshed in the bottle as, head bloodied, the terrorist crumpled to the deck.

Keene dragged the man deeper into the cabin and closed the door with a kick of his heel. The fallen terrorist did not let out so much as a groan, and Keene didn’t bother to check whether or not he was alive.

McKendry nudged the motionless form with the toe of his shoe. “Green Impact.” There was no question in his voice. He wiped off the scotch bottle and set it next to the man, as if to offer him a good stiff drink to send him to the underworld.

Raising an eyebrow at his friend, Keene said, “You didn’t spill a drop.” He looked down at the body. “I don’t see a badge or anything, but I believe you’re correct. We can make the assumption that Selene Trujold and her goons decided to hit this tanker instead of theValhalla platform, like Frik thought.”

“Frik isn’t always right.”

“Maybe she considered this just a warm-up exercise.”

McKendry reached down and pried the dead man’s hand away from his weapon. Instead of a handgun, the terrorist had been trying to draw a large knife, well sharpened, good for throwing or filleting. McKendry took it, examined the wide blade, and shook his head. “Damn macho South Americans. Can’t they carry a regular firearm like everyone else?” He slid the knife into his belt just as his partner found the ship-to-shore phone behind the captain’s desk.

“Who do we call? Rescue? Venezuelan military? Trinidad’s coast guard?”

“It’s gotta be Frik,” McKendry said. “He’s not gonna want this to be handled by anybody but his own people.”

Keene punched in the numbers for Frikkie Van Alman’s private phone on board theAssegai . He listened to it ring until a recording kicked in. “It’s a friggin’ answering machine,” he said. “Pick it up, Frik! We’ve got a crisis here!”

With a clunk and a burst of static, the answering machine cut off and the phone picked up, carrying Frikkie Van Alman’s familiar voice and familiar impatience. “I’m here. Who is this? What kind of crisis?”

Keene rapidly summarized what they knew so far. He heard the Afrikaner curse and what must have been him punching several buttons on a keyboard or alarm-control panel. “I’m sending in reinforcements to help you mop up. TheYucatán won’t get far.” In a clipped voice, loud enough to be heard by both of the men, he reminded them of their primary goal. “While Selene Trujold is on board, you have one mission that takes precedence over all others. Acquire that artifact she got from her father.”

“Instead of stomping terrorists? You’ve got weird priorities, Frik,” Keene said. “Your tanker’s been hijacked and the crew’s been killed, and all you can think about is a hunk of jewelry?”

“I’m sending help,” Frik said. “You two just stay on top of it there.”

Keene shrugged. “It’s your problem, Frik. Call up whatever cavalry you want.”

“Who do you think he’ll send?” he asked his partner, setting down the receiver.

“Frik?”

“No. The avenging angel. Of course I meant Frik.” He looked around the cabin. “Maybe we should have told him to call in a cleaning crew while he’s at it.”

McKendry shook his head. “I think you’ve been sniffing blood long enough, Joshua. Let’s get some air.”

Keene opened the cabin door. Bowing slightly, he waved his partner into the passageway and followed him until they reached the football-stadium-sized deck of the oil tanker.

Working silently against the thrum of the tanker’s equipment, they circled around theYucatán ’s white-painted bridge. Behind the bridge house loomed the radar mast with swiveling radar antennas and satellite dishes. The superstructure bristled with navigation and communication arrays. Foam monitors and fire-fighting stations stood unmanned. A third of the way forward from the bridge house, hose-handling derricks protruded skyward like stripped trees, and numerous pressure and vacuum-relief valves studded the deck like dark warts.

White metal rails ran like a spine down the center of the wide deck, flanking the catwalk connecting the fore and aft gantries. The two Daredevils avoided the catwalk and kept to the shadows of bulkheads, vent pipes, and clusters of fifty-gallon drums that held lubricants and waste oil, dirty rags, and powdered absorbents for deck spills.

Beneath the square tank hatches, the tanker deck throbbed as the big engines pushed theYucatán through the calm water, heading into the open straits. Far in the distance to the west, Keene could make out the Venezuelan mainland—a dark line with few marks of civilization. Even without a moon overhead, the billions of stars were like pinprick spotlights; the sparkling wire-caged bulbs scattered around the expanse of the giant ship shone down like guard posts around a prison, and the tall and brightValhalla production platform was like a lighthouse towering over the water.

Looking at the receding platform, Keene figured that by now the disembarked members of the tanker crew, the lucky ones who had drawn R and R time aboard theValhalla, would have noticed that the ship had pulled away from the loading derrick and lurched silently out to sea.

High up, in the center of the top deck, fore and aft walls of windows glowed with yellow light, showing the ship’s main control rooms. Keene looked up and saw shadows moving in the otherwise quiet bridge, two silhouettes inside the control deck, backlit by the fluorescents. One was the trim and compact figure of a woman, directing the show.

The woman leaned forward. Her voice came out of the 1950s-era public address system, old bell-shaped metal loudspeakers stationed along the deck. “Everything is secure. The crew has been eliminated. Dump all the bodies overboard. When Oilstar finally catches up with this ship, I want it to look like theMarie Celeste . They’ll never know how many of their crew members were part of our operations, and they’ll waste time and effort looking for traitors among their own employees.”

“That must be Selene,” Keene said. He had expected her to have a French accent, but what came through the speakers was a flattened version of Peta’s Caribbean lilt with a few hints of Spanish.

Lucky for Green Impact that the production rig’s efficiency stopped short of security, he thought. She didn’t know that they had called Frik and that Oilstar had its security response on the way, but she must know that her group didn’t have much time. “She’s gotta act fast. It’s not like you can hide an oil tanker, and these things don’t get up a lot of speed.”

Hunched in the shadows of one of the derrick brackets, McKendry nodded again, which was the usual extent of his conversation during an operation.

“I am afraid the oil load is not what we expected,” Selene continued. “Apparently, theYucatán docked at the platform two hours late, so there wasn’t enough time to fill the storage chambers to the level we had hoped.”

From his vantage point, Keene saw several members of Green Impact pause in their furtive duties by the equipment bunkers to look up at her. Before groans could ring out from her team members, she raised her voice. “There’s enough to send a message around the world. Oilstar will never get this stain off its shoes!”

20

Following McKendry’s lead—which was mostly to remain flexible and mobile until something better came up—Keene worked his way into the shelter of the thick deck manifold tubing. There, safely hidden, they watched in angry horror as the terrorists emerged from the bridge housing and crew cabins, dragging limp bodies toward the railing as if they were out-of-fashion mannequins.

“Cleaning up their mess. The sharks will take care of the rest,” Keene muttered as Selene Trujold’s followers went to the white deck rails and, one at a time, wrestled the bloody forms overboard into the sea.

McKendry looked even more concerned. “They’re going to get the captain, too. When they enter his cabin, they’ll find the guy we left on the floor.”

“Crap! They’ll know we’re aboard. Let’s go.”

McKendry put on a burst of speed, sprinting forward to where one lone man had wrestled the uncooperative body of a thin dark-haired crewman to the side. The terrorist used his shoulder to push the victim up and over and waited for the splash. He turned just in time to see McKendry and Keene closing in on him from both sides.

As if they had coordinated it ahead of time, Keene punched the terrorist in the jaw while McKendry smashed a pile-driver fist into his gut, making the man retch. Then the two men picked him up and dumped him over the tanker railing to join the dead bodies he had dropped into the calm water.

Keene looked at his partner. “Pity he didn’t have a chance to take off those bloody clothes. With so many hungry sharks around tonight, I’m sure he’ll be quite the dining attraction.”

Moving at its top speed, the tanker soon left the floating bodies behind.

They heard the bass chatter of helicopter blades, fast dark aircraft coming in from the main Oilstar complex on Trinidad. They saw lights in the sky drowning out the stars above the dark and quiet channel.

“Party’s over. Good old Frikkie to the rescue,” Keene said.

On the bridge, Selene’s silhouetted form stood straight, like an empress surveying newly conquered territory. “Time to go. Set the detonators for twenty minutes.”

With a click, she switched off the loudspeaker system. She and her companion on the bridge disappeared from the lit windows and came around the bridge housing, running down the outer stairs to the main deck level.

Once again hidden from sight, Keene and McKendry watched Green Impact troops drop packaged, blinking explosives through the flung-open hatches for the below-deck storage chambers. Top hatches led down into the crude-oil storage chambers, a honeycomb of tanks that comprised theYucatán ’s cargo space. Keene and McKendry saw the terrorists link the timers and detonation cables, rigging everything together on a small cluster of timers outside the top hatches.

“I thought the point of Green Impact was to protect the environment.” Keene shook his head in disgust. “Some conservationists.”

The Green Impact members began to scramble toward the bow of the tanker. Selene gestured urgently for her team to hurry. Apparently the terrorists had boats tied up to the hijacked oil carrier. As each man finished, she signaled him to go over the side and climb down ropes tied to the anchor windlass. When only one of her group remained, she waved to him and grabbed the rope herself. He gathered the wires from the explosives by the petroleum cargo hatches and ran back to the detonator.

That’s some piece of work, Keene thought, watching Selene go over the side, moving with the sleek grace of an otter. At that distance, he could make out cinnamon-colored hair, cut short and practical, and skin the color of burnt sienna. He couldn’t really see her face, but judging by her narrow frame he would guess that she had delicate features. Dangerous, beautiful, tough; doubtless a challenge for any man. “There goes our chance to get Frik’s Cracker Jack prize.”

“I’m more interested in saving this tanker,” McKendry said. “No matter what Frik tells us.”

“Looks like now or never, Terris.” Keene scanned the tanker deck frantically for a means to get to the linked detonators before all the bombs went off.

“Any ideas?”

“Got it.” Keene pointed to two old company bicycles leaning against the fifty-gallon drums; the bikes were used for traversing the long deck on regular inspection runs. “There’s our mode of transportation.” He grabbed one, holding the handlebars as he swung himself over and began to pound the pedals. McKendry mounted a bicycle of his own. The dented wire basket rattled between the handlebars as they closed the distance.

Keene’s sense of the absurd made him wish he had a little bicycle bell to ring. “Not exactly James Bond style,” he said, hunched over and gripping the handlebars. “More like Encyclopedia Brown.”

McKendry grinned. “I vote for Harry Potter.”

“We could sure use a bit of magic right now.”

The thin tires hummed across the oil-stained plates of the deck, ignoring the painted boundary lines that made theYucatán look like some child’s board game.

“Here comes Evel Knie—.” The chain slipped on Keene’s bike. He skinned his ankle on the pedal but kept pumping until the bicycle got moving again. McKendry passed him, saving his breath and using his stronger legs to push the bike for all it was worth.

They both picked up speed.

The lone terrorist at the front hatches heard the buzz of tires and looked up. He dropped the detonator box and slung the rifle off of his shoulder. Like an experienced professional, the man didn’t call out, but simply aimed the weapon.

Keene ducked and swerved the bicycle, but the terrorist shot twice, coolly confident. The sharp crack of the high-powered rifle sounded simultaneously with Terris McKendry flying backward, as if someone had hit him with two sucker punches. Blood spurted from his back as he flipped off of the padded seat. The bicycle coasted forward another five feet and crashed into a set of fifty-gallon drums.

McKendry’s body bounced once on the deck and lay still.

Keene shouted his friend’s name and skidded on the bike, wiping out as the terrorist fired one more shot and missed. The bullet punctured one of the big metal drums and spilled a harsh-smelling solvent.

Though he had seen his partner tumble to a bloody halt on the deck, Keene didn’t watch to see if he moved or not. Though the terrorist had a rifle, he had no choice except to charge forward recklessly, yowling like a madman.

The chattering helicopters came closer, searchlights shining onto the tanker in the water. The terrorist, fixed on completing his mission, glanced upward, then at Keene, measuring the distance between them. Scuttling backward toward the bow and his escape, the man grabbed a grenade from his belt, yanked the pin, and chucked it like an inexperienced baseball player down into one of the open hatches of the small forward oil-storage chambers. He was reaching for his gun when Keene barreled into him.

The man’s hands tangled in the rifle’s shoulder strap.

Moving in a blur, Keene wrapped a powerful forearm around his throat and yanked backward as he leaped up, pressing with his knee. He pulled back with all the strength in his shoulders until he heard the man’s neck snap.

Keene grinned a feral snarl that wasn’t at all a look of triumph. “There—”

The grenade went off inside the oil chamber.

Sealed by bulkheads, the explosion wasn’t enough to rip through the double walls of the tanker. But the fire and the pressure wave vomited upward, a powerful geyser slamming like a hot avalanche and hurling Keene and the broken marionette of the already-dead terrorist off into oblivion.

As he flew into the black void over the sea, he wondered if he would be meeting Satan or Saint Peter. Whichever way he went, he hoped that Arthur and McKendry and the other departed Daredevils would be there.

The afterlife would be way too dull without them.

The Oilstar security helicopters came closer, but McKendry knew they would arrive much too late. Selene Trujold and Green Impact had already gotten away.

He dragged himself forward on his elbows. He couldn’t breathe. Redhot bands of pain tightened around his chest like a medieval torture instrument, and he could feel the gaping wet gunshot hole in his chest, the raw crater of the exit wound in his back. His right side seared where the other shot had grazed his ribs. Shock had diminished most of the pain—that would come later, if he survived long enough—but he could hear the gurgling when he breathed that told him his lung had probably collapsed. He couldn’t tell how much he was bleeding, only that it was too much.

The curtain of fire from the grenade exploding in the storage tanks had nearly blinded him, but he had seen it throw his friend and the last terrorist overboard.

There was no time to grieve.

The most important job right now was to save the tanker. He might die in a few moments from the gunshots, but that would be better than becoming part of the funeral pyre of an exploding oil tanker.

With his eyesight focused more by sheer determination than because of the quality of light, McKendry crawled forward. The terrorists had left the detonators behind. He had seen the man adjust the timers. At any moment, the explosions would go off, engulfing theYucatán in flame.

Every movement was the greatest effort he had ever made in his life. Leaving a long trail of blood, like the markings of a scarlet garden slug, he reached the open fuel hatches and the hastily rigged box of detonators and timers that connected all the explosives dropped into the storage tanks. He felt dead already. Hoping to hang on for just a few more seconds, he made one last, impossible effort.

His outstretched hand touched the connected detonator boxes, and he saw the last few seconds ticking down: fifteen…fourteen…thirteen…

He worked with the big knife he had taken from the terrorist in the captain’s cabin. The wide macho blade severed the first couple of wires. So weak he could barely lift the knife, he brought it down as if he were chopping onions, again and again.

Another wire cut, and another.

In his state, he could not tell how many connections there were, how many remained, but he couldn’t bother with details. His vision was failing, and the blood did not seem to stop pouring out of his wounds. The bright orange glare from the explosion at the bow continued to blind him.

Joshua Keene was gone, blasted far out into darkness.

Hoping he had done enough, McKendry raised the big dagger, point downward, and stabbed the central detonator box, skewering it like a bug on the end of a pin. A few sparks erupted, then died.

It was absolutely the last he could manage. Seeing the helicopters circle for a landing, he collapsed on a deck that smelled of oil and blood as the unmannedYucatán continued to drift into the Caribbean night.

21

January crawled toward February, and suddenly, unaccountably, Peta had been back in Grenada for three weeks.

The first week was spent informing Arthur’s friends and relatives, and her own, about the explosion that had taken his life. The island buzzed with the news. Cried over it. Then, since the Marryshows were townies, they organized a mass at the cathedral in St. George’s.

The second and third week, Peta kept to herself in her house in St. George’s. She ate sparingly, slept little, and spent much time on her balcony staring down at the town and the shallow waters of the U-shaped inlet known as the Carenage. The small bay was filled with the movement of fishing boats, small yachts, water taxis, and the occasional ferry. Periodically, a cruise ship or schooner anchored in the deeper waters or sailed the edge of the horizon beyond. When she did go out to buy food or go to the bank or simply to take a walk, she found herself annoyed that life in Grenada continued as usual. Preparations for February’s annual Independence Day celebrations were in full swing. People loved and laughed, and fought and died, as if nothing had changed.

And for them it hadn’t. At least not much. They had lost a hero. Some of them had lost a friend. She had lost so much more than that. Arthur had been her best friend, her mentor, a father figure after her own father’s death; her lover. He had taught her to drive a car and fly a plane, to perform surgery, to live with losing a patient, and to feel humble when she saved one.

By the end of the fourth week, Peta was able to pull herself together enough to reopen her rooms and reassume the work of caring for her patients and Arthur’s at the small clinic they’d shared. She asked the locum they had left in charge to consider a permanent position—something to which he readily agreed, provided a possible partnership was in the offing—and buried herself in work.

Now, standing at the end of Quarantine Point, she watched the sunrise brighten the rocks and the sea, and wondered if her life would ever return to a semblance of normalcy.

She remembered the day her family’s house had caught fire when she was a girl of twelve. Her father had come back into the house and saved her, but his own clothes had turned into wicks that burned him like a giant candle.

That’s when she’d first met Arthur Marryshow. He fought so hard to save her papa, but there was nothing anyone could do except promise that he would take care of Peta and see that no harm came to her.

What of your promise now? she thought. How can you protect me when you’re dead?

Every week since her return, she’d checked in with the Manhattan precinct which was holding Arthur’s few remains while—so she was told—they investigated the accident. Yesterday, they’d told her the investigation was officially closed.

Her fury knew no bounds. Arthur was gone and she’d never know why or by whose hand.

Below her, the Rasta who lived behind Bronze House tucked his dreadlocks into his turban and strode into the Caribbean for his morning bath. He must have felt her presence and turned to look upward and wave.

“Peta.”

“Ralphie.” She waved back at her old friend. He was a little older than she, but not much. An Oxford-educated geologist and son of a former deputy prime minister, Ralph Levine chose to live as a Rasta. He slept in a cave, ran a rudely built hut that he called his geological museum, and carved black coral into jewelry to sell to the tourists.

Beyond Ralphie, Peta could see the luxury of the Spice Island Hotel, and beyond that the medical school, which occupied the choicest piece of oceanfront property in Grenada. In another week or two the American students would return, and she’d resume teaching there. Those kids had better watch out, she thought. This semester she would brook no unruliness from those spoiled brats.

Holding her sandals in her hand, Peta footed it back to where the real road came up from Morne Rouge Bay. She walked past Mahogany Run and the Grandview Hotel, crested the ridge, and continued toward her rooms, which lay a mile or two down the road. Along the road she passed several paw paw trees—papaya, as the Americans called them. The fruit on the plants was still small and green, but it reminded her that she was hungry.

She passed Tabanca on her left and thought about going there for breakfast.Tabanca . Unrequited love. Great view and excellent coffee, but the owner was a perpetually sullen German woman whose lover had sailed away and never returned. She lived there alone, growling at everyone except her large German shepherd. She was a downer, which God knew Peta didn’t need in her life. Not today.

Reaching the Flamboyant, she made a left turn into the grounds, descended the few steps that led to the Beachside Terrace, their patio restaurant, and breakfasted on papaya and fresh bread and honey. She sweetened her coffee with condensed milk and drank it slowly, watching a small bird enjoy the crumbs at the far edge of the table. The Flamboyant was named after the scarlet trees that dotted the island. It provided its guests with a magnificent view of the three-mile horseshoe of Grand Anse Beach, with its white sand that extended almost half the distance from where she sat to St. George’s.

This being a Monday, the manager came out to greet her and invite her to come to his regularly scheduled rum punch party. She did not answer him but merely shook her head, so as to discourage communication. After that, for a few minutes, perhaps even an hour, she felt more at peace than she had since New Year’s Eve. Reluctantly, she walked the rest of the way up Camerhogne Park Road to her rooms at the Marquis Complex, put on her shoes and lab coat, and saw her first patient of the day.

Within minutes, she was absorbed in the work.

The telephone rang as she was leaving.

“Peta? Frik.”

For one misguided moment, Peta thought Frik might have called to see how she was doing. He soon disillusioned her. Wasting no time on pleasantries, he told her that Terris McKendry had been severely injured in a battle to save one of Oilstar’s tankers.

“He was shot and burned. He’s in bad shape.”

“Where is he?”

“He was medevac’d here, to Mount Hope Medical Center. Unless Arthur’s plane is fueled and ready, I’ll send my jet to get you and have a car waiting for you at this end.”

My plane now, Peta thought, since the reading of his will.

Because she was Arthur’s student in his lifesaving burn techniques, it stood to reason that Frik would turn to her for help, Peta thought. Still, a “Would you mind coming?” might have been nice.

“Mount Hope’s a good place,” she said. “I’ll call and let them know I’m on my way.”

Pleased with herself for having made the arrangements she had with the locum, Peta called him in from his day off. She had left her Honda at the clinic, so getting home to pack a small bag would be no problem. Nor would getting to the airport be a problem, even with a stop first at the closest Barclays Bank for some cash to see her through.

Standing in line at the bank, she fiddled with the pendant around her neck. When she reached the counter, on a whim, she took off the necklace, sealed it in an envelope, and asked to be escorted to her safe-deposit box.

Frik’s jet beat her to the airport; his car was waiting for her upon her arrival at Piarco International. She was pleased to see Saaliim behind the wheel and not Frik. He got out and opened the back door.

“You’re not my chauffeur, Saaliim. I’ll sit in the front with you, if that’s all right.”

He grinned and she smiled back. She had always liked the Honduran, and the feeling was clearly mutual. “Mr. McKendry in bad shape,” he said when she was settled beside him.

“I assume Frik’s with him.”

Saaliim shook his head. “He with Mr. Brousseau out at Dragon’s Mouth.”

“Simon? He’s not diving, is he?”

“Yes. As we speak.”

“Assholes,” Peta muttered. Simon had no business diving in his condition, and Frik had less business encouraging him. She’d have a few things to say to the two of them later. Right now, her focus had to be Terris McKendry.

Twenty minutes later, Saaliim swerved off the Uriah Butler Highway and into Mount Hope Medical Center’s parking lot. “You want me to come inside, Miss Peta? Or maybe wait outside?”

Peta thought for a moment. In all likelihood she’d be fully occupied with McKendry for the rest of the day and, by the sound of it, for several days beyond that.

“You go to come back,” she said, using the Grenadian colloquialism. “I know my way around this hospital all too well. Tell Frik I’ll call him later with a report.”

The charge nurse, to whom she had spoken several times en route, ushered Peta into McKendry’s private room in the hospital’s small intensive-care section. The last time she’d seen him, not that long ago at Arthur’s apartment, he’d looked fit and well. Now he looked as if he probably wouldn’t make it through the night. He was barely conscious. According to his chart, he had presented in shock, a mess of mud and oil and blood. Her initial cursory examination confirmed that he had been hit by two rifle bullets and that he had sustained some surface burns.

The burns might leave some scarring but were not enough to be life-threatening. The bullet wounds were a more complex problem. Where a hollow point or frangible round would have pureed the contents of his chest cavity, he had every chance of surviving these wounds.

The flesh wound along the right flank would heal, even without medical attention. The second shot was less simple: a full-metal-jacketed slug had made a through-and-through penetration of his lower right chest. Fortunately for McKendry, the bullet had not hit a major artery on the way through or a rib on the way out. The former would have exsanguinated him in minutes: the latter would have deflected the bullet, causing major, possibly catastrophic, collateral damage. The through-and-through FMJ chest wound had collapsed the lung, but some bright medic or ED doc along the way had inserted a chest tube and hooked it up to suction; that no doubt had saved McKendry’s life until the local thoracic surgeon got to him and closed the entry and exit wounds.

Peta discovered further evidence of McKendry’s dumb luck when she examined the exit wound and found it just low enough to miss ripping up his posterior shoulder girdle. An inch higher and he’d be looking at permanent disability. Talk about charmed lives.

Telling the nurse to set up a bed for her in one of the little rooms adjacent to intensive care, she washed up and put in a call to Frik.

“It’ll be a while before his next escapade, but with good care and exquisite attention to antisepsis, he’ll make it. His lung’s not reinflating as quickly as I’d like, so I’m going to stay here with him for a few days.”

Frik sounded relieved. “Thanks, Peta. I’ll be in to see you later this evening. I can’t leave the office right now.”

“I heard about Simon. Is he all right?”

“Why wouldn’t he be?”

“I warned you both that he shouldn’t be diving, Frik.”

“Well for your information, he’s fine. He had to come up because he used up most of his tank clearing debris from his entry point. I wish I had half his energy. He’s down in Port of Spain now, pretending to be some TV star, but he’s going back to San Gabriel tomorrow to complete the dive.”

“Alone? No dive buddy?”

“He seems to prefer it that way.”

Idiot! Peta thought. She was fed up with all this macho bullshit. When she had stabilized McKendry, she would hitch a ride to San Gabriel. If Manny was in the area, he would take her there; if not, she’d use one of Frik’s speedboats. Not that she particularly wanted to delay her return to Grenada, but in all good conscience she had to take one more shot at warning Simon that his heart probably couldn’t take another dive. If she couldn’t convince him to stop, she would insist on going along. Barring unforeseen setbacks, she should be able to leave McKendry in the hands of the hospital staff in three days, four tops. She would mention it to Frik when he came to see McKendry.

Ifhe came to see him.

22

Thus far, Frik had called several times, but he had not yet made an appearance. Peta was hardly impressed by his lack of compassion and admitted to herself yet one more time that the Oilstar chief was not among her favorite people.

Two days later, by which time McKendry’s condition had been stabilized, Frikkie showed up at the hospital. He was not a pretty sight. His one eye hadn’t yet fully healed from the explosion that had killed Paul Trujold, and his hand looked as if it had a long way to go before it was good for more than gross manipulation. His visit was short, their conversation brief and more about Simon than Terris; in neither case were his emotions involved.

“Simon’s in San Gabriel. He hasn’t gone down—in the water—again yet. The weather’s not been conducive. Too much rain, too many currents stirring things around.”

“You shouldn’t let him—”

“Let him? May I remind you again that he’s an adult. What he chooses to do is his own business.”

There was obviously no point in arguing with the man. None at all. “I’d like to see him,” Peta said. “I think I’ll head out to San Gabriel for a day or two. I could use the rest.”

“What about McKendry?”

“Terris is a long way from full recovery, but he’s doing well. Barring unforeseen complications, the hospital can manage fine without me. When they think he’s ready, they’ll send him on to rehab. He won’t need me for that, either. If they have to reach me, they can call me in San Gabriel.”

Something in Frik’s expression told her that this was the last thing he wanted her to do. For whatever reason, Simon’s dive was of enormous importance to him. Well, that’s just too bad, she thought. It was not only a man who had to do what a man had to do.

Leaving Frik at McKendry’s bedside, she went outside for a smoke. It was the last American cigarette she had brought from New York. From now on, it was back to the local 555s, which were milder and cheaper anyway. I’ll give up again soon, she told herself, lighting up. After having given them up for three years, she had fallen into old habit the night Arthur was killed.

“Got another one?” Saaliim asked.

Peta jumped. “Didn’t know you were here, and no, this is my last one.”

She handed it to him and they shared it the way they would have shared a joint.

“I’d like to go to San Gabriel this afternoon.” She waved away the end of the smoke. “Think you can take me there?”

He drew on the butt, then crunched it underfoot. “I have to take Mr. Frik to theAssegai, ” he said. “After that we maybe go to the site. Mr. Frik say maybe Mr. Brousseau come dive today. Maybe not.” He looked up at the sky. “Maybe later it storm.”

“Could be.” Eighty-four degrees. Humid. Sultry. Not a cloud to be seen. A tourist would have laughed, she thought. “Is Manny on island?”

“I think so.”

“Good.” Peta glanced at the Hummer beyond them in the physician’s parking lot, unsurprised that Frik would feel it his right to park there. “I’ll get my things and make arrangements with the charge nurse. Don’t leave without me.”

When she was ready to leave the hospital, Saaliim was half asleep behind the wheel of the car. Frik paced impatiently back and forth next to it.

“One more minute and we’d have been out of here,” he said.

Peta didn’t answer; in fact, she said little en route to Frikkie’s dock, and only waved a passing good-bye as Saaliim turned the Hummer around.

To her delight, the first person Peta saw at the dock was Manny Sheppard, inevitable Carib in hand. He was clearly happy to see her.

“Hey, beautiful. What’s up?”

She hugged him. “You first, Manny. What’s up with you? Which way you headed?”

“Which way you want me to head?”

“I need to get to San Gabriel.”

He motioned toward his small steel-hulled freighter. “Come. I’ll take you there. I got a load of supplies headed for Grenada. San Gabby’s a quick stop on the way.”

She had known Manny since childhood, as well as anyone could ever know him. He was the sort of person with whom you could never quite tell what was real and what he was making up on the spot. He’d been running boats up and down the Caribbean since he left the OECS Security Forces. What was in the boats he sailed around was always an open question, though no customs officials had ever found any evidence to back up their suspicions.

“So what you want in San Gabby?”

“I’m looking for Simon Brousseau.” She felt a sudden stab of anxiety. “He hasn’t gone diving today, has he?”

“Not so far as I know. Simon be probably resting up in San Gabriel, making the lovely ladies happy,” he said.

Peta had no idea how many lovely ladies might be hiding in the small fishing village close to the drill site, nor did she care. If the choice was diving or diddling, sex was certainly the less life-threatening option for Simon.

They sailed through a seascape dotted with rock outcroppings and headed toward the Dragon’s Mouth—the narrow channel separating Trinidad from the Venezuelan mainland. San Gabriel was actually a small island off the coast of the Chaguara Peninsula, the northern spit of land pointing from Trinidad toward the body of South America. It was one of a half dozen towns that made most of their living from not-so-rich Americans and Europeans who wanted to experience diving and sport fishing, but couldn’t afford the big resorts and charters.

As many times as Peta had made the journey through the Dragon’s Mouth by sea before, she was still taken by its jagged beauty. Distracted, wanting some escape from the endless worries about Simon and Terris that ran through her mind, at first she only half listened to what Manny was saying.

“…So Paul Trujold, he…You listening to me, Peta?”

“I’m sorry, Manny. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

“It’s all right,” he said. “But you need to hear this.”

Manny repeated what he had been saying. When he had finished telling her about Paul Trujold, about the real purpose of Simon’s dive—to retrieve a piece of the artifact that was wedged in an underwater cave—she thought of the pendant that Arthur had given her and started to put the facts together. If there was any real basis for what Manny had told her, she could come to only one possible conclusion.

“My God, Manny. Are you sure? Because if you are, chances are Frik is responsible for Arthur’s death.”

“How so?”

“Arthur had a piece of the artifact. He always kept it on him. Frik could have seen it and put out a contract—”

“Yes, but you told me you saw the piece with Arthur’s body.”

“I did. It was covered with blood and—”

“So you say maybe the killer—”

“Missed it. Yes. It’s possible, what with the police and so many people.” She stopped. “God, Manny. If it’s true and I don’t get to Simon—”

Manny pointed at a speedboat. “That’s one of Frik’s boats, the one Simon’s been using.” He maneuvered between a small fishing boat and the powerboat tied up to the village’s makeshift pier. When he was up against the dock, he asked, “Want me to stay here with you?”

“I can handle things.”

Without arguing, Manny tossed her duffel and medical bag onto the wooden dock, helped her out of the boat, and blew her a kiss. She watched him reverse into the channel, and waved him onward. Turning to face whatever awaited her in the village of San Gabriel, she trekked to the top of a minor incline.

In the only bar in town, which was also its only hotel of sorts, Peta met the owner—a handsome, charming Venezuelan who introduced himself as Eduardo Blaine and kissed her hand with far too much enthusiasm and spittle for a rank stranger.

“I am a friend of your Mr. Van Alman. He called to tell me you were on your way and told me to take care of you.” He held on to her hand for more than a moment too long. “I am proud to welcome you to my establishment. Your room is ready for you. It has a spectacular view.”

“If I could have that back.” Peta withdrew her hand. She would like to have said that Frik was far from being her friend, but instead she asked after Simon.

“He is in his room,” Blaine said.

“Please tell him I wish to see him. I’ll wait at the bar.”

“He, um, he is—how shall I say it—not quite alone.” Blaine winked blatantly, as if at a co-conspirator. “He did not wish to be disturbed.”

Peta chose not to argue. “I’m told he will be going out early tomorrow morning. I must see him before then.”

“If you will do me the honor of dining with me, I will promise to wake you before he leaves.”

And then we arm-wrestle, Peta thought wryly. “Dinner sounds fine,” she said. “But first I’d like to take a shower.”

“Allow me to show you to your room.” Blaine picked up her duffel.

“How many rooms do you have?”

“Four.”

“In that case”—she took her duffel from him—“the key will do.”

“I will bring the key to you in the bar,” he said. “It is in the office. Please order what you wish, compliments of Eduardo Blaine.”

Peta barely kept herself from laughing out loud. She went over to the bar, which proved not to be in Blaine’s office, seated herself on a stool, and ordered and received a Carib and a pack of 555s. The pretty young barmaid in a floral dress and bare feet looked as if she was Blaine’s daughter.

For some reason, the thought of the Venezuelan having a daughter intrigued her. With a mixture of amusement and guilt, she realized that she was feeling horny about the man. His Antonio Banderas looks and overly florid South American manners were not usually the sorts of things that attracted her. She remembered the sight of Arthur splattered across the bathroom at Danny’s, and her guilt won out.

Deciding that this would be a good time to check on McKendry, Peta retrieved her cell phone from her handbag and dialed the hospital. She could hear a faint voice at the other end, but static on the line made it impossible to converse.

“Is there a telephone around here? I’ll use a credit card.” Peta lit her first 555 in three years, savored the familiar flavor, made herself the same old promise.

The girl took an old-fashioned rotary dial phone from under the counter and pushed it shyly toward Peta, who lifted the receiver.

“…care of her.” Frik’s voice.

“That won’t be a chore.” Blaine. “She is most beautiful.”

Peta covered the mouthpiece with her hand and blessed the inefficiencies of a telephone system which so consistently crossed wires that the idea of privacy was a joke. Even if the two men had heard background noises, they would take no notice of them.

“I have given you my word that I will take care of her,” the Venezuelan continued.

“You do that, Mr. Blaine,” Frik said. “Or I will be forced to take care of you.”

As the line went dead, Peta softly replaced the receiver in its cradle.

Two possibilities raced through her mind: either Frik wanted her protected, or Frik wanted her eliminated. All she had to do was make sure that she stayed alive until she could figure out which one it was.

23

The night air was humid and still. The only thing moving in the room was Peta. She stirred, vaguely awake. From somewhere she heard voices.

She turned over, kicking off the clinging sheet. The voices kept up a steady racket, and she realized they must be coming up from the street below her window. She wished she had earplugs. Somehow she needed to get back to sleep, get some rest. God only knew what tomorrow would bring.

The voices outside weren’t all that was keeping her awake, though. Since Arthur’s death, Peta had sublimated any thoughts of men; none could ever take his place. When her mentor and lover had been alive, she’d had a healthy libido and often found herself aroused by some passing man’s firm ass, or long fingers, or broad shoulders. Now those feelings brought only guilt.

She also considered herself pretty immune to charm, especially when she knew intellectually that it was a con. But Blaine’s eyes, his ready smile, his—for lack of a better word—charisma, had burned a neat little picture in her mind. It made her squirm with competing emotions of desire and embarrassment.

She turned onto the other side.

Sleep, damn it, she thought. Stop thinking.

The unseen strangers below her window laughed as a bottle shattered.

She flipped onto her stomach, tucked her head more firmly into the pillow, and stretched out on the sagging mattress. The air was close, the voices echoing eerily. Not very patiently she waited for sleep to return….

A grinding noise broke through the fog in her brain. A buzzing. Can’t they stop with that racket? she thought sleepily.

She rolled over and opened her eyes. It was morning, bright morning; the type of brilliant sunlight that said dawn had passed hours ago. While her eyes adjusted, her mind identified the sound she’d been hearing: an inboard motor.

She swung her legs off the bed and rushed to the window, trying her best to ignore the rough, splintery feel of the wood floor. Pushing aside the sheer curtain, she looked out to see a boat emblazoned with the Oilstar logo moving at top speed toward the mouth of the harbor, out to the open sea. Simon’s boat.

“Shit.” As Peta stepped away from the window, a splinter penetrated the soft skin of her arch. On her other foot, she hopped to one of the chairs and yanked out the splinter. She grabbed her jeans from the other chair and pulled them on. The fading watery growl of the engine reminded her that with every passing second Simon moved farther out to sea and, she thought, to a dive that was likely to kill him.

Hurrying, she picked up her T-shirt from the floor. An inch-long roach tumbled out of it, another resident of this fleabag hotel having his early-morning sleep disturbed.

She was tempted to step on it, bare feet or no. After all, she thought wryly, she was paying to have the room to herself. Instead she pulled on the T-shirt without checking for any more residents, and looked around the floor for her sandals.

As she put them on she wondered why Blaine hadn’t kept his promise to awaken her.

She remembered her thoughts during the evening. What the hell was wrong with her? Trust wasn’t something she gave out that often—now the right pairing of eyes and smile and she acted like a lovesick lamb.

She opened her door and almost tripped over someone who lay snoring, slumped over only a few feet from her room. It was as if he had fallen asleep on guard duty, she thought. Frikkie’s words echoed in her head:Take care of her, or—

Another roach to squash, she thought. When she had time. Right now what she had to do was catch up with Simon. For that, she’d need a boat. Diving gear.

She charged downstairs to the front desk, where a sleepy-eyed Trini woman in a simple dress stretched to its size limits looked at her as though she were crazy.

“Eduardo Blaine. Which is his room?”

The woman looked confused.

“Señor Blaine?” Peta repeated.

“Ah, sí.” The woman nodded and pointed with her thumb along the hallway beside the stairs. “Room two. End of the hall on the left.” She smiled conspiratorially, as if she thought Peta was going to sneak into Blaine’s room and give him an early-morning quickie.

“Gracias,” Peta called out as she ran down the hallway to the door marked with a gold-plated number 2 hung at a drunken angle. Banging loudly, she yelled, “Blaine? You there? Blaine, wake up!”

She stood there, waiting, the time slipping away. Simon’s boat was now well out of the bay for sure, bouncing over the water.

The bolt clicked open.

“You said you’d wake me. You said that you’d be up, and wake me before Simon could leave.”

Blaine—in white Jockeys, no shirt, and looking more asleep than awake—held the door open wide and backed up to let her in. He raised his left arm as if to check a watch that wasn’t there.

“What time is—God, my alarm. I must have…Maybe Simon hasn’t left—”

“I just saw his boat heading out of the harbor. Thanks for the help.”

“Okay, okay! Relax. Let me get dressed. I got a boat. We’ll catch him.”

“He’s already got close to ten minutes on us.”

Blaine smiled, but the charm that had worked so well the night before had lost its appeal. “No problem, I have a very fast boat.”

“Hope it works better than your alarm clock.”

He grinned boyishly. Peta guarded herself against any impulse to forgive him.

“Okay, wait in the lobby. I’ll get dressed and be out in a minute.”

“Please hurry.”

As she waited, feeling each second tick by, she thought through the possibilities. Could Blaine’s boat beat Simon’s? If not, what would happen if she had to dive after him? It had been a while since she had done a tech dive. Mixed gases—nitrogen, oxygen, helium. She knew it was not something to rush into. Rushing could get you killed.

“Let’s go,” Blaine said, running out of the hotel. She followed him to the town’s small wooden dock. At the last boat in the line, he stopped. “Jump in.”

Peta stared. “Thisis fast?”

The boat looked like a fisherman’s trawler, built for steadiness, perhaps, but surely not for speed. It did, however, have everything in it she would need for the dive, like the several pairs of tri-mix tanks which lay amid the more usual tourist dive gear.

“Don’t knock my boat.” Blaine untied the stern line. “Unless you want to swim after Simon.”

“That might be faster.”

“Just start her up,” he said, running to untie the bow line. “Hit the silver button.”

Peta pushed the button, and the inboard started with a substantial roar that immediately garnered her respect.

Blaine finished untying the lines and, jumping onto the deck, clambered back to the wheel. “Okay,” he said. “Now hold on.”

He opened the throttle and the squat boat reared up like Trigger at the end of a Lone Ranger movie. Peta flew back into her seat and tasted salty spray on her face.

“I’m impressed,” she shouted over the roar.

“You should remember…appearances can deceive you.”

Blaine turned the wheel and curled around the bigger boats, the fishing vessels taking the day off, the moored dinghies waiting for the leisure sailors to return, baked nut-brown and three sheets to the wind with multiple Caribs and Red Stripes. The boat maneuvered wonderfully, its stern sitting deep in the water while the rest of the hull nearly hydroplaned.

“That one should fit you,” he said, pointing to a black wet suit. With its frayed collar and wrists it looked as though it had been through one too many dives already.

“You sure you don’t have something a little more colorful? I would have preferred a stylish neon orange flare on the side.”

Blaine grinned. “I’ll remember that for next time. The rest of the dive gear’s back there.”

Peta nodded and turned to the piles of equipment. The masks, fins, and regulators looked like standard Caribbean tourist issue. Not top-of-the-line, but with the right gas mix, she’d be fine.

She moved to the rows of tanks. The first few cylinders were battered and air-filled, at least if the rubber caps over their first stages were true indications of their state. The smaller double tanks stood beside them. Tri-mix tanks—a nitrogen-helium mix and oxygen—which could be adjusted up or down based on depth or bottom time. Unfortunately, only one set of the tanks appeared to be filled.

“You only have one working set of the tri-mix back here,” she yelled. “Looks like I’ll be going it alone.” She didn’t relish the idea of diving without a buddy, especially since that was one of the reasons she was so mad at Simon.

“If only one of us can go, it should be me,” Blaine called back to her. She wasn’t sure if his reaction was chivalry or South American machismo, but it didn’t matter to her which it was. There was no way she would hang out on the surface.

“No chance. Simon’s my responsibility.”

Thankfully, Blaine quit arguing. She shucked her land clothes and pulled on the wet suit. When she was suited up, she moved forward to stand beside him so that she could see where they were headed. “Is it far?”

Blaine shook his head. “About ten minutes for this boat. We should be able to see the rig as soon as we curve around that spit of land there.” He pointed at a large rock outcropping that sheltered San Gabriel’s harbor. “Then we head straight on. If Simon isn’t down, he’ll probably be able to see us.”

And what then? she thought. If he saw her would that make him stop and wait?

Not Simon. He’d hurry up and dive. If she was going to stop him, she’d have to follow him down and get him to surface.

Piece of cake.

Underwater communication was so very easy, she thought sarcastically, especially with the paltry array of hand signals used by divers. A big O made with the thumb and index finger for “I’m okay.” A slashing palm over the neck for “Out of air.” Thumbs-up for “Let’s surface.” Crawling fingers for “Critter around.” Or her favorite, a vertical open palm cutting the water to indicate a reallybig critter around. As in, “Watch your butt or you’ll be some prehistoric creature’s breakfast.”

Blaine cut the boat hard, steering around a coral reef she saw only in the boat’s wake, then moved back on course for the point of the small peninsula ahead. It was obvious that he knew these waters extremely well. After a few more seconds, the boat was out far enough that Peta could see the small drilling rig and make out the shape of a boat tied up to it.

“I see his boat.”

“Yes,” Blaine said. He looked back at her. “One person topside. Simon must be down already.”

“Shit.”

The closer they got to Oilstar’s exploration platform, the more ominous it looked. No one moved on the skeletal structure, and the small main cabin’s windows were shattered, smashed—Peta guessed—by locals cruising by and taking potshots for their momentary amusement.

She looked at the boat they were chasing. Simon’s pilot, probably some local he’d hired for the day, stood up and calmly watched their progress.

Peta checked her watch. Simon could have been down five minutes, maybe ten. Depending on depth, he was good for another fifteen or twenty minutes. Add one screwup—something to make him breathe too hard, not shift his mixture right, get snagged on a rock—and it could all go wrong fast.

She pulled on her fins and strapped a rusty old dive knife to her leg. It looked like a relic that hadn’t cut anything other than stray fishing tackle since the American invasion of Grenada. Grabbing a face mask, she spat into the lens and smeared the slick liquid around before dangling the mask in the water. Funny, she thought. Who knew why spit defogged a mask?

She dug out a weight belt and slipped on twelve pounds. It was more than she’d use normally, but with 120 feet to the seabed and who knew how much deeper into the cave, she had to be sure of getting down fast and staying there.

The boat bumped. Peta bounced out of her seat.

“Sorry. Getting choppy. The sea can turn nasty quickly out here.” Blaine didn’t look particularly perturbed.

Peta clamped the belt tight and looked up to see him pull alongside the other boat.

“How long has he been down?” the Venezuelan shouted.

The Trini in Simon’s boat shrugged, exposing the bottle of Red Stripe he’d been hiding behind his leg. “Dunno,” he said sleepily in a thick accent. “Five minutes, maybe. Maybe more.”

Peta stood up. It made little difference. However long he’d been down there was too long, and discussing it wouldn’t make it any shorter. She double-checked her gear and assured herself she was good to go. Pulling on the buoyancy vest with the double tanks, she strapped it tightly to her back with twin wide Velcro straps. The tanks were heavy; she cinched them a little tighter, and gave the vest a shot of air. Then she pulled the mask down, popped in the regulator mouthpiece, and made a big O with her right index finger and thumb.

“Good luck!” Blaine shouted.

Without missing a beat, she sat on the edge of the boat, facing into it before she slowly tilted backward, flying head over heels into the water.

After the amusement-park fall into the water, Peta quickly oriented herself, dumped the air out of her vest, and turned facedown, away from the light and the path of her ascending bubbles. She kicked smoothly, straight toward the bottom. With the press of a button she started the timer function of her dive watch, then looked at it to make sure the seconds were ticking down.

While she was traveling to the bottom, she kept her air mix heavier on oxygen than she would have it when she entered the cave. She’d have to check depth and cut back the oxygen to something around a 15 or 16 percent mixture—quickly. If she took too long to do that, the excess oxygen would turn toxic in her bloodstream.

To get her mind off the dangers of the dive itself, she focused on how to find Brousseau. It occurred to her that the oil rig team had probably planted markers when they got to the bottom, showing the direction to the cave. A rip current could play havoc with marking poles, but if they were still there, she could follow them straight to the deep hole…and Simon.

The light began to fade, and with it the colors. Everything settled into a murky gloom. She took a quick glance at her depth gauge. Sixty feet. It would soon be time to turn on the headlight. She checked her time…passing three minutes into the dive. She was tempted to push it, kick a bit harder, but she resisted. It wasn’t just a question of speed. She knew she could swim faster than Simon. The problem was, if she did push herself, the exertion might make her breathe too fast. If she did that, the oxygen-nitrogen mix would be wrong no matter how she tried to balance it, which would makeher the one in need of saving.

That was another danger she didn’t need to focus on.

Her depth gauge was nearing one hundred feet, the edge of the recreational dive limit, when she saw something dark ahead of her.

She reminded herself that this was no rec dive.

Thinking, hoping, that the dark shape was the first outcropping of the sea floor, she turned on her light. Its pale glow caught the floating soup of “snow” in the water, making the tiny falling debris shine around her like fireflies.

Ahead of her, the shape moved, closer than she’d thought. The blackish grayness changed, and she saw her light reflected against white teeth. She thought of the hand symbol: making a fin with your hand to warn other divers.

Except there were no other divers down here. Nothing alive here at all except for her—and the shark seemed to have noticed that fact.

24

The few things Peta knew about sharks rushed into her mind, like life preservers bobbing to the surface after a wreck. The most relevant thing she remembered was that most sharks didn’t want to have anything to do with mankind—or womankind. Even the supposed man-eaters, the great whites, the tigers, and worst of all a rogue hammerhead separated from its pack, dined infrequently on humans.

Eyes locked on the shadowy form of the shark as it grew larger, Peta kicked back. She knew she was sucking her air mixture too heavily. Nitrogen would start building up. That’s not a good thing, she told herself, but there was this bigger problem….

The shark that was coming right at her. A blue shark, she guessed, acting completely out of character.

She had two choices: stay perfectly still and hope the shark did a flyby, or do something to make it reconsider its current course. Preferring the latter, she reached down to her thigh and pulled out the rusty dive knife.

The shark was only meters away, resolute in its intent.

Peta held the knife with the handle facing away from her, blade pointing toward her. She pulled her arm close, holding the knife in tight.

There was a theory among divers that hitting a shark on the nose sharply made it back up. Especially, so the theory went, if it really didn’t have you in mind for dinner. If it did, the theory was probably useless.

A meter away the shark, a gray bullet now, rocketed right at her chest, its eyes expressionless black dots.

For a moment she thought her arm was moving too slowly to catch it, but the handle miraculously hit the shark directly on its piglike nostrils. If she survived, she’d be sure to tell the experts what they could do with their shark theories.

The creature didn’t stop. If anything, the handle acted like a jolt of energy. The blue shark rammed her hard, the force of it shoving her to the side and knocking her regulator from between her teeth. A giant bubble of air exploded from her mouth.

She did a sidearm recovery of her regulator, popped it in her mouth, and sucked in the mixture. When she looked up to find the shark, she saw it trailing away, as if its eyes hadn’t seen her at all. A crazy undersea driver, a hit-and-run expert sailing on to his next victim.

Peta hung in the water for a moment to take stock of the damage. Her buoyancy control vest looked as if it had been shredded by the abrasive skin of the shark, but she realized that it had looked the same way when she’d put it on. Undoubtedly, the result of a zillion tourist dives. Otherwise, she was fine, and she was wasting time she didn’t have.

She continued her dive down to the hole. To Simon.

Just past 120 feet, she found the bottom.

She was very close to where the drill had entered the seabed. Swimming by, she noticed that the test well itself had been sealed with concrete. The entrance to the cave couldn’t be more than eighty feet away. Nitrogen narcosis would normally kick in if she lingered at this depth, but this dive was not about lingering. She had to find the cave and take an express train as deep as it went. Once there she’d have to quickly cut back her oxygen in time to prevent problems. That way at least she wouldn’t go crazy with the rapture of the deep. Although, she thought, she could probably do with a little rapture about now.

Right about then, she spotted a tall marking pole left by the drilling team at the edge of an undersea rift. The markers were usually used to track where samples were taken, or places to test for underground oil. In this case, it was a pointer to Simon’s destination, the underwater cavern.

She didn’t like cave dives, not at normal depth, and certainly not at a tech-dive depth. Once you were inside, your options closed. You lost both light and maneuvering room. One of her best friends once did a deep underwater cave in the Yucatán. They fished him out dead the next day.

She looked at the narrow entrance. Tight, but roomy enough to swim in.

Damn you, Simon, she thought. You should have known better. You shouldn’t be in there. You’re too old; it’s too dangerous.

Time to cut the oxygen—and fast. She reached behind and lowered the oxygen to below 20 percent, while bringing the nitrogen and helium mix up an equal amount. She took a breath. The air tasted a little metallic but otherwise fine.

Finding no further reason for delay, she kicked into the mouth of the cave. Her small light barely caught the walls, and she heard the clank as her tanks scraped the top. The cave twisted and turned, and she tried to check her depth gauge, but there was no room to reach behind and grab it.

She felt the familiar pull of a deep dive: stress, anxiety. It’s okay, she thought. Calm down. Focus. No problems here. I’ll just hope I have a good air cocktail going for this depth, because if it isn’t good, it could be too late for me to tell. Disorientation will hit, confusion, and it’ll be underwater mouse-in-a-maze time. And the maze always wins.

Stop it, Peta! Focus! she screamed inside her head.

She came to a fork in the tunnel and looked around. No Simon, no bubbles. Which way to go? One hole narrowed. No way he could have made it through that one. She looked at the other; the walls were smooth, almost polished. That seemed strange. They should have been rough, with coral fingers reaching out like the ones behind her. Instead they looked shiny. She wondered if it could be something volcanic.

She checked her watch as she swam down the strange channel. Ten minutes. That meant Simon had been down what? Fifteen or twenty minutes? He should be on his way back.

Ahead of her, the cave widened into darkness. She kicked slowly, tentatively, up to the mouth of the opening. When she was practically in the opening she became aware of a distant glow.

Using her headlamp to pick up what it could, she saw an enormous chamber, an underwater grotto. A cathedral, but unlike any she’d seen on her own dives or in pictures. It was as if someone had carved a giant, smooth bubble seventy or eighty feet below the seabed.

She shone her light on the glow—much closer now—and picked up another diver.

Simon floated near the far wall. Not moving. Suspended like a lifeless toy in a child’s fish tank.

Peta stayed at the entrance to the cavern, looking at the body of the man she’d come to save. Damn it, Simon, she thought. Why didn’t you let me talk you out of this?

When she knew she couldn’t put it off any longer, she tilted her body and gave a few small fin kicks to sail nearer to him. His lamp pointed down, dully, at the same meaningless spot, but the reflected glow bounced onto the walls. Peta let herself look up for just a moment to see the strange markings on the smooth surface.

They were…she searched for a word.Incomparable . There was nothing she had ever seen that even came close to them. She thought of the markings she’d seen on Mayan tombs, but they were like cave drawings. These weren’t primitive. They were stylized, with odd shapes that could have been metallic devices and—

She stopped. There was no time for sight-seeing. She reached out and turned Simon around. His eyes were wide open and had bulged, probably as he struggled to breathe, getting the mix wrong. She checked his tanks. They had plenty of air and looked like they were set to a good ratio of oxygen to nitrogen-helium blend. That meant it must have been his heart. It could easily have given out on him. The tension, the pressure.

Looking down, she saw that he had something clutched in his hand. A sharp chill ran through her. The material looked similar to the pendant that Arthur had given her. She reached out and tried to pry Simon’s gloved hand from the object, but his fingers were locked tightly around it. For one grisly moment, she wondered whether she’d have to use her knife to pry off his fingers, but one by one they snapped back like catches on a sunken treasure chest. The object tumbled free, spinning; Peta reached out and caught it.

As her fingers closed around it, she had the same sense of the heat being drawn from her skin as she’d had when she held the piece Arthur had given her. Stranger yet was the fact that the shape looked as if her piece could fit right into it…whateverit was. And she could see places for other pieces to fit, as well.

If McKendry survived and could find Selene and her piece of the artifact, that plus Peta’s and Arthur’s and the one Frikkie still had could be put together to make—what?

There was no time to think about that now.

She looked to see whether Simon had carried a specimen bag and spotted a mesh bag floating empty around his dive belt. Reaching out, she slowly untied it, taking care not to expend too much energy. That could change her breathing rate and—worse—make Simon’s buoyant body spin toward her.

Suddenly, she didn’t want to stay in this bizarre cave for another minute. The place gave her the creeps, especially with Simon’s body hanging there under the strange wall paintings. Briefly, she debated taking Simon’s body with her. According to her dive watch, she had a more than adequate window of time for her return—with or without Simon. Assuming, of course, that she missed the shark on the way.

She stuck the artifact into the bag, thinking, I’m going to leave you here, Simon. I wish I could have made it here in time to stop you, to save you, but you knew the risks. My guess is that this is how you chose to die.

Her contemplation was cut short by the sensation that there was something else in the cavern, and it was coming closer.

Eduardo Blaine watched carefully while Peta’s sleek form disappeared into the clear water. He followed her progress until the only sign of her that remained was the scattered trail of bubbles streaming to the surface.

When he was sure she was far enough down not to notice what happened topside, he moved to the front of the boat, peeled off his clothes, and slipped on a wet suit. He looked over at the man on the other boat watching him.

“You can go.”

“No, man. Mr. Brousseau told me—”

“I’ll bring him back. Don’t worry. Of course, if you’d rather wait for the Obeahman to send you an invitation….”

Blaine looked the man right in the eyes. The Trini blinked. He understood the message: Move or die. He quickly turned away and started his boat’s engine.

Satisfied, Blaine looked back down at the telltale bubbles on the surface. Assuming the currents weren’t pushing them around too much, they told him that Peta was angling away from the support leg and moving toward the center, where the test well would be.

He grabbed a weight belt and slipped on an extra three pounds of metal. He wanted to drop like a stone. If he needed to, he could shed the extra weight on the bottom.

Won’t pretty Miss Peta be surprised, he thought, lifting a chest near the front of the boat to pull out his BCV, fins, and an extra pair of tanks.

In minutes, ready to dive, he sat on the railing, rolled backward, and splashed into the water.

He had no trouble finding the cave opening; it had been clearly marked by Charles and Abdul when they’d discovered it. He assumed that Peta was deep inside by now, perhaps all the way into the cavern. Soon, she and Simon would be coming back.

If Simon was still alive.

He reached over his shoulder and adjusted his air mixture, cutting back the oxygen. When he was satisfied with the new mix, he pulled his knife from its sheath and—holding it in front of him like the bill of a swordfish—started into the cave.

Having done more than enough cave diving to know what to expect, he moved smoothly through the twists and turns. He could almost anticipate the bony stone fingers that lurched out from the top and the sides. He swam sleekly, knife held in front of him, dodging the rocky outcroppings.

How long, he wondered, before he’d be in the cave, face to face with Peta and Simon? The two of them would be totally oblivious to his arrival.

Surprise, surprise.

At a fork in the cave, he chose the wider passage. No diver could make it into the narrower one. The walls of this new tunnel were smooth, looking almost preformed, man-made even. Probably created by the flow of water in and out of the main cave.

He saw the dull glow of a light ahead. Instinctively, he kicked harder.

The rocky tube widened suddenly and he shot into the cave. He could only dimly see what was happening. Simon was suspended near the far wall, which was covered by a mural that looked like something from an alien theme park.

Peta floated partially behind Simon’s body.

Blaine watched as she took a specimen bag from the dead man’s belt and stuffed something into it.

Good, Blaine thought. All the hard work has been done.

He kicked once, twice.

She was turning in his direction. He imagined her shock at seeing someone else in the cave, her relief when she recognized him, and finally her horror when she realized his purpose.

Horror was a bad thing. It was no fun to know that something really bad was about to happen. Better to just go quietly, unaware that—oops, you’re dead. Blaine took no pleasure in the horror. Work like this was meant to be done well, but not necessarily savored.

He came at her hard, pushing Simon’s body ahead of himself like a battering ram. The panic was rising in her face, and he could see her gulping air as she hit the wall. Not good, he thought. You must breathe evenly when you’re diving this deep.

He noticed that his own breathing mixture felt thin and that he was gasping a bit from too much exertion. Unavoidable under the circumstances, he thought. He would check it later.

Keeping Peta pressed to the wall with Simon’s lifeless body, he moved his knife in a broad, sweeping arc and expertly cut the main hose from her regulator. Immediately the air mixture rocketed out. He shifted his grip to her BC to steady her as he cut her secondary hose.

She kicked at him. That was another downside of the subject of the work being aware of what was happening. Nothing alivewants to die.

Fortunately the water and the dead weight between them made her slow, inaccurate. It was too late for her as the twin jets of free air shot from her tanks and wedged her tighter between the dead body and the wall.

Blaine sheathed his knife, scooped up the specimen bag, and kicked his way back to the cave opening. He held the bag tightly in his hand, the prize for Frikkie.

A nice prize, with the added bonus that the witnesses would never see the surface again.

Death wouldn’t come all that quickly for Peta, but it would come. It was sad, really. She was a beautiful woman with a lot of fire.

He would have liked to have bedded her at least once.

25

Blaine moved slowly to the surface, taking his time. He didn’t let himself dwell on Peta’s struggle below. It wouldn’t have been pretty, but—by now—it was over. Time to be forgotten. She was quite beautiful, he thought again, and quite brave. Altogether rather remarkable.

Pity how things turned out sometimes.

At fifteen feet from the surface he slowed to a stop. Breathing a trimix made rest stops absolutely necessary to ensure that no bubbles brewed in his bloodstream as he changed pressure. It was always good to vent some internal gases at low depth. Like a race-car driver making a pit stop. If life had been different, that’s what he would have done: raced cars at high speed. He certainly had the balls for it.

Looking down, he saw a shape moving through the water. It circled coyly under him. His watch indicated that he had been at fifteen feet for only a minute—he should stay at this depth for another two minutes at least.

Beneath him, the shark described another circle, spiraling up his way.

Wouldn’t that be ironic? he thought. Get the artifact, kill Peta, and have a shark rip me to pieces.

He looked up at the hull of his boat. Enough of a rest stop, he thought, kicking toward it.

In moments, he broke the surface. The water had turned choppy and he could feel a breeze building up from the southeast. Little whitecaps slapped him one way and the other as he treaded water. He swam to the edge of the boat and latched on. Removing his vest and tanks in the water, he climbed on board and pulled up his gear behind him. In short order, with his wet suit unzipped to the waist, he had the engine going and had cast off from the rig.

He stuffed the specimen bag into his shorts. This was one prize he would keep very close to himself. He toweled the water from his hair, sat on the edge, and looked down, hoping to see the shark. Keep coming up for me, he thought, and I’ll put a damn bullet in your primeval head.

For a split second, he believed he could see it in the deep water below him, but then it faded and he guessed it had given up the chase.

He tossed away the towel, then eased back the throttle, prepared for a nice, leisurely cruise back to the shore. The boat belly-whapped on the choppy water, sending a cool spray shooting back at him. Feeling relaxed and satisfied, he brought out a silver metal box from under the foredeck hold, popped open the latches, and removed his sat phone. After turning it on, he said, “Frikkie.”

The phone dialed automatically. He could hear the whirring ring: once, twice. Come on, he thought. You have to be there. This is what you’ve been waiting for.

“Yes?”

“I got it.”

“Good. Correct that.Great . Take care with it.”

Blaine smiled. “It’s as safe as my family jewels, Frik. I tell you, though, it is a strange-looking thing. I do hope it was worth that beautiful woman’s life.”

“Wait! What did you just say?”

“Peta. I thought it might be tidier if she didn’t surface to ask questions. Seemed like a nice place to leave someone buried. She and Simon kind of disap—”

“Go! The hell! Back! Now!”

“What?”

Even as Blaine spoke, he started cutting the wheel of the boat, turning around. It rocked as its own wake hit it from behind, and for a moment the propellers cut at air. Then he gunned the throttle.

“Are you going back?”

“On my way. Now tell me—”

“You idiot. Did I tell you to kill her?”

“No, Frikkie, but it seemed like a…how you say…no-brainer. Why would you—”

“Because she still has a piece of the artifact, you fool!”

The Venezuelan let that sink in. This was not good. People rarely screwed up on Frikkie more than once. They didn’t live that long.

“You’d better hope to God she’s still alive down there, Blaine. And if she isn’t, you’d be better off not coming up again yourself.”

He didn’t respond. He could only think that it had been a long time since he’d left her in the cave. The best chance that she was alive was if she was somehow able to breathe the free-flowing gases from her tanks. Slim possibility of that, but a possibility nonetheless.

“Are you at the rig yet?”

“In thirty seconds, Frikkie. I’ll go down. I’ll see.”

“She’d better be alive, Blaine. You hear me?”

“I hear you.”

Blaine shut off the call and, one hand holding the wheel, grabbed his fins and suited up again.

Peta saw the precious mixture gushing out of the cut hoses like streams of water from the mouth of a crazed snake.

If something like this happened during a rec dive, she could just hold the free-flowing hose up to her mouth and breathe while she ascended. This deep, though, that wouldn’t work. With the air shooting out so fast, there was no way it would last long enough for her to get out of the cave, even if shecould sip the air like that.

Her second option was drowning. Already, she was feeling a little glow in her chest, the beginning of that amazing reflex that would eventually demand that she open her mouth and breathe, no matter what was touching her lips. She would suck in the water, putting an end to that crazed demand.

In minutes she’d be dead.

Then she realized that the answer was right in front of her: Simon. His tanks were intact and still had plenty of air in them. If she could hold her breath a little longer, she might be able to get to them.

Trying to avoid looking at the bulging eyes and the rubbery, puffed-out lips, she reached for the regulator. You’re saving my life, Simon, she thought as she took a breath. For a moment she wondered if it had been a regulator failure that had killed him, but the mechanism worked fine. She took a few even breaths before she slid off her own BC vest and tanks, and watched them float to the top of the cave. With Simon’s mouthpiece locked between her teeth, she reached around him and undid the buckle and the Velcro of his BC. As she pulled it open, she tried to slide it down, but his arms wouldn’t cooperate.

Take your time, she told herself. You have to be patient. Don’t expend too much energy.

As gently as she could, she pushed his right arm out of the vest. It wasn’t easy. The arm felt stiff, too long for the armhole. She had to wedge Simon’s body against the wall and use all her strength to force it through.

With one arm out, the other became much simpler.

Once she had the tanks free, she turned away from her friend’s body and ended up facing the wall mural. Something in the shapes drew her attention, as if there were a secret there that she would understand if she just stared at it long enough. Was that shape a head? No, not a head. More like something from a microbiology class—as if the mural were some grotesque enlargement of a slide.

Several sharp beeps drew her attention away from the images. She looked around, afraid that someone else might be attacking, and realized that the sound was coming from Simon’s dive watch.

Time to get out of here, she thought. She had to let the regulator slip from her mouth as she slid her arms into Simon’s considerably larger vest. Putting the mechanism back in her mouth, she took another slow, steady breath. She had to stay calm, not breathe too fast.

It occurred to her that she wasn’t entirely sure what she’d find when she did escape this cave. Would Blaine be waiting in his boat to see if she made it out? What about Simon’s pilot? What would she do if there was no boat up there waiting for her?

None of those questions had answers now. She had to keep her focus. The first task was to get out of this cavern and back to the surface.

She looked ahead to the cave opening, then around at the other walls, their surfaces as smooth as glass. What this place was, she had no idea. She did know that if she stayed here much longer looking for the answer, she wouldn’t live to tell anyone.

She took one last look around the domelike cave. About to turn away, she spotted something she hadn’t noticed earlier: a hole, low to the ground on the other side of the cave. Another way out, perhaps. A good thing, given that she didn’t know what Blaine might have left for her on the path they’d used to come in.

Swimming over to the second passage, she got her head down low to shoot her light inside. The dim light didn’t reveal much. She hesitated for a moment, and went in.

This channel was much narrower, barely large enough for her body and tanks. The walls were even smoother than in the first cavern, glassine and iridescent, silky to the touch.

Half a dozen feet in, the tube opened into a small chamber, a circular passageway with three other thin tubes shooting off in different directions. The chamber was big enough for her to kneel and look around.

On the wall behind her, she saw what looked like a shape. While she watched, it seemed to move—a dark blue-black shimmer. Tiny plankton floating in the water gave the shape a hazy, blurry outline, and she guessed that the apparent motion was a result of the light reflecting on the strange surface, like the inside of the shell of an oyster. The image of an oyster reminded her of the strangest aspect of this cavern: there should have been fish and crustaceans making this nice deep-water pocket home, but she saw nothing alive. Nothing at all.

She heard a series of high-pitched beeps. Her own dive watch this time. She looked at the maze of other channels ahead leading to other chambers, other secrets. They might lead to another way out, but she didn’t have time for errors. She would have to leave the way she’d come in.

Swimming as quickly as she could without straining, she passed through the big cavern and into the channel. Not until she had exited the hole into open water did she pause to check her watch and her gauges. She was doing fine. There was plenty of time for a safe ascent if nothing else went wrong.

Following one of the giant Erector-set legs of the platform, she ascended slowly. As she looked up, she noticed something moving on the surface. When the object came to a stop, she managed to focus on it until she made out the shape of a boat. It looked like Blaine’s boat, but why would he have come back?

After another few feet of ascent, she saw the churning foamy bloom of a diver entering the water. She realized that not only was Blaine back, but he was coming down to make sure she was dead. What other reason could there be?

She reached down instinctively for her knife, but this wasn’t the place to fight.

She checked her compass. Tired as she was, the best thing would have been to go straight up, but with a killer coming down to the scene of the crime, that option was blocked. So instead, she started kicking, turning her ascent into a long angle, heading west. If she could make it to one of the other legs before Blaine noticed her, she could use it as cover.

With luck, he would swim by and never know she was around.

Hanging twenty feet below the surface to rest and let her blood gases even out, she wondered if there might be another reason why he had come back.

Not that it mattered. She was just glad he had been courteous enough to bring her a fast boat. Any other concern would have to be left for later, when there was time to think about what had happened and why this artifact was worth the lives of so many people.

Arthur, Keene, Simon, Paul Trujold, all dead. It’s a miracle that McKendry and I aren’t also among the deceased, she thought as, with a few gentle kicks, she propelled herself to the surface.

26

Blaine rolled into the water and started a quick plummet back to the cave opening. He didn’t take the time to consult a tech dive table, but he was sure that two quick ups and downs at such depth had to be bad.

Besides, this was probably a pointless dive. Unless he could find the object Frik wanted so badly—on Simon, or Peta, or still wedged somewhere in the underwater cavern—the dive would only confirm that Peta was dead. And that Simon was dead. After overstepping his authority so badly, he was sure to join the dead soon himself, if the dive didn’t kill him first.

This must be the way an American death row prisoner feels, he thought, hoping against hope for the governor’s eleventh-hour pardon.

His stomach in knots, he approached the cave opening.

A school of annoying yellowfins hovered there, as if they were thinking about going inside to nibble on something tasty. They dispersed like seeds blown from an aquatic dandelion as Blaine approached, only to reform into a loose school a dozen feet away.

Ready to enter, he adjusted his air mixture. If he kept the oxygen as lean as possible, he might avoid getting bent. One of his tanks scraped along a rocky outcrop with a noise far worse than fingernails on a chalkboard.

He kicked onward, passing into the channel where the walls became smooth and finally widened as he neared the main cavern. As he reached that opening, diver’s intuition told him that something was wrong.

He flashed on the shark.

Had it beat the yellowfins in here? he wondered. Was that why the fish had hesitated? If so, the shark wouldn’t take too kindly to being disturbed while dining.

Entering the cavern, he realized that it was not the shark that had given him pause. It was Simon, who, freed from the weight of his BC vest, bobbed near the top of the cavern above the crazed squiggles.

She was a clever girl, that Peta, using Simon’s equipment to save herself. Frikkie would be happy—overjoyed, even—when he heard that she was alive and that he would have a shot at getting the other piece of the artifact.

That might even get Frik off his back, Blaine thought. He turned slowly and kicked his way out of the cave. Sooner or later he would think about whether it was necessary to deal with the fact that Peta knew he had tried to kill her. Not yet. Not unless she was somewhere up there waiting for him. She was a tough cookie, quite capable, he suspected, of exacting her own justice.

When he had ascended far enough to see clearly where the leg of the oil rig broke through the waterline, now only forty feet above him, he discovered her payback. She was not waiting on the surface to kill him after all. Instead, she had taken his boat and left him with no transportation back to shore. It would be one hell of a surface swim back to San Gabriel.

Resting at fifteen feet for another safety stop, he considered his options.

He could get lucky and flag down a passing fishing boat. That was unlikely, though. The few boats that passed the rig would be piloted by superstitious Trinis who would think he was the Obeahman.

Another option was to pop enough air into his BC to ride the choppy wake of the sea, turn on his back, and kick his way to shore. That would take three hours, maybe more. He would be baked crisp by the sun and easy bait for any passing sharks, but it was not impossible.

Whatever option he attempted to exercise, the real problem was that he would get very thirsty with the hot sun bearing down on him. What was that cliché line from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” that they had taught him in English class back home in Venezuela? Water, water, every where…

Like hooking a billfish, his mind latched onto the answer. The rig would have an emergency radio. He could simply climb out of the water and call Frikkie. He almost laughed into his regulator. She was not so clever after all, little Miss Peta.

His watch told him that it was time to get to the surface. Once there, he shed his tanks, fins, and BCV, and dragged them to the rig’s docking platform.

On the long climb, he thought he could see his boat heading north through the Dragon’s Mouth. It looked like Peta had decided to go all the way home to Grenada, rather than take a chance of running into Frik in Port of Spain.

Reaching the main deck of the rig, he was happy to discover that while vandals had thrown rocks and fired guns at the windows, they had lacked the courage to board the platform for robbery. The emergency radio was intact, and he soon contacted Oilstar’s main dispatcher, who agreed to send a helicopter for him.

Having done that, he called Frik to let him know that Peta was fine. Then, satisfied that he had handled the crisis as well as he could, he reached into his shorts, pulled out the specimen bag, and examined the bizarre object that Frik apparently considered to be worth the life of Simon Brousseau and Abdul, and heaven knew how many others.

The boat rode the choppy sea giddily, a child’s toy bouncing in a giant bathtub. Peta glanced over her shoulder at the rock spires piercing the water behind her.

As soon as she’d passed through the Dragon’s Mouth and moved away from the sheltering effects of Trinidad, the sea had turned rough. She had ridden tramp freighters between Grenada and its southern neighbor many times as a girl, and she recalled how rough the journey could be, even in those relatively large boats. The passage would last more than three hours, even in Blaine’s fast little craft. If she spent the time focused on the ups and downs of the sea, she would soon be leaning over the rail like some land-loving tourist on her first voyage.

To take her mind off of the bumpy ride, she tried to understand what she had just been through and to guess at what made the pieces of that weirdly shaped object so precious that people had to be killed.

She thought of the artifact she had hidden away in the bank vault. It was a match to the one she believed was the reason Arthur had been blown up, and to the one Simon had died to recover. All of the pieces had come from that undersea cavern with its Daliesque wall mural.

What the hell was that place? What made the artifact important enough to Frikkie that he would send his supposed friends to their deaths so that he could get the pieces?

Why? What did he know?

All Manny had been able to tell her was that Paul had said it would change the nature of energy production around the world. Perhaps it could put not just Frikkie but all of OPEC out of business, changing the balance of power around the world practically overnight.

Was that important enough to have her killed?

Obviously, Frik thought so. She had to remember that: he wanted her dead. When he found out she had survived, he’d try again. Which also meant she would have to be prepared to kill to protect herself.

The sunlight disappeared. Looking up, she saw a lone gray cloud, but when she looked east, she saw a dark line following the first, like an army arrayed behind a single scout. How long, she wondered, before the whole battalion reached her? Open ocean in a tiny boat was not a good place to be with a storm coming on.

Behind her, the island of Trinidad was just a memory. If she headed for Tobago, she’d be steering straight into the oncoming storm, but Grenada was a long way away.

A childhood recollection bubbled into her brain. She had been six, spending a week with her grandparents in Carriacou. Her grandfather decided to take her fishing in his little Gouyave sloop, a tiny single-masted sailboat hand-built in Grenada’s famed fishing village.

The day started out sunny and bright. They sailed easily out of Tyrrel Bay and around the southern tip of the island, heading west into the deeper waters on the Atlantic side. As they cruised along, she trailed her fingers in the beautiful blue water. It had felt like magic to her.

Passing the big rock called Saline Island, her grandfather told her to check the gear and bait the hooks on the two fishing rods he’d brought along—a big one for him, a small one for her. She remembered it because it was the first time he had let her ready the lines. From the bucket of small silver fish called jacks she pulled one out, and hooked it just ahead of its dorsal fin, then repeated the process with the other pole.

After her grandfather had brought down the sail, the boat rocked in the current. They cast their lines and, as if God had been smiling on them, were soon catching fish. She remembered that she hadn’t wanted to stop, not even after they had a half dozen in the boat.

“This be plenty,” her grandfather said, chuckling.

She had been so fascinated by the process of casting and reeling and pulling the fish into the boat that she hadn’t noticed how much the little craft had begun to rock. What she recalled most clearly was the feeling when the sun had vanished. It wasn’t like the times when the thin skittering clouds would cut the glare. That time the sun had disappeared and she’d felt the chill of a strong wind on her neck.

“We done with fishing now, little one,” her grandfather had said. She remembered as if the image had been burned into her mind: the way his face looked; the twinkle gone, the fun vanished. “We been too long at sea and Mother getting mad.”

Standing at the wheel of Blaine’s boat, she could remember with her whole body the feel of that little sloop as the growing waves tossed it around.

Her grandfather had struggled with the sail, having to keep it partly furled in the strong wind that had arrived with the clouds. She had wanted to say “Can we go home, Grandpa?” but she sat silently. He obviously wished to get home too.

When the first drop of rain hit her arm, she thought that she had never seen such a large drop of water. It was soon followed by another and another.

As their tiny craft rounded Mushroom Island and her grandfather eased them into a turn toward Southwest Point, they were hit by one large wave that nearly knocked her into the sea. His large hands grabbed her and shoved her into the growing puddle at the bottom of the boat.

She remembered that he’d smiled again. “We be home soon.” His eyes narrowed as another wave broke over the railing, drenching both of their faces. “You not gotta swim for it. You know everything gonna be fine, Peta.”

She had nodded, though she hadn’t known that at all.

“Grandpa—I’m scared.”

The little boat had passed Southwest Point and the rocking eased a little. Her grandfather hugged the coastline to stay in the lee of the island. “I know, little one,” he’d said, leaning forward. “But I tell you, when you not alone, you not ever be afraid, okay?”

In that moment, it hadn’t mattered that the sun was gone, or that their faces were wet with the streaming rainwater, or that the ocean wanted to come into the boat. They were together, and there was nothing to be afraid of.

Alone in Blaine’s boat, Peta looked to the east and saw the line of rain approaching. A bright silver flash in the sky ahead of her heralded the arrival of an airplane at Point Saline Airport.

Today, she would stay ahead of the storm.

She would make it back to St. George’s and watch the storm from the safety of her own home.

The image of the strange mural on the wall of the cavern rose in her mind and she knew there was a much bigger storm brewing than the little squall that was blowing in from the Atlantic.

Who am I kidding? she thought.

Her grandfather had been dead for over twenty years and she still missed him; would always miss him, the way she would always miss her father and Arthur.

No matter how much she missed them, though, they were gone and they weren’t coming back. She was alone now. And she was afraid.

27

Joshua Keene sat up gingerly, as if his body might be rigged to explode. Slowly, he captured a few memories. He recalled flashes: fighting the terrorists onboard theYucatán; seeing Terris McKendry shot in the chest two, maybe three times, impacts that knocked the big man backward, as if missiles had been launched into his body’s core. He saw battered bicycles, heard them clattering to the oil tanker’s deck, felt as much as heard the bamboosnap of a terrorist’s neck under his own grip.

After that, the explosion, fire, his body flung backward as if he had been kicked in the chest by Bruce Lee. He remembered the night and the smoke and the long, long fall to the dark water that cushioned him about as softly as a concrete parking lot. He recalled the water closing over his head, a vision of sharks, and then…nothing.

He tried to focus his eyes to see where he was, but all he could see was the foggy image of a beautiful tanned woman with a haze of red-brown hair that looked like a halo.

An angel, he thought. I’m dead. And passed back into semiconsciousness.

The next time he awoke, his vision was clear. The same woman stood beside him. “I’m Selene Trujold,” she said. She poured a finger of scotch into a white enamel cup and inhaled its aroma. “Here. Drink this and then we’ll talk.”

He took the cup from her, remembering the brief glimpse he had caught of her before all hell broke loose. “How long have I been out? Hours? Days?”

“You’ve been here for a couple of days. I had you fished out of the water after the explosion on the tanker.”

“Why?”

“There were helicopters coming, a lot of chaos. I couldn’t be sure you weren’t one of us.”

“You could have tossed me back to the sharks when you found out that I wasn’t.”

“You’re right. I could have done that. I still can, if you don’t prove useful to us.”

Sheis a piece of work, Keene thought, remembering his assessment of her when he’d first spotted her on theYucatán . “I had a friend with me,” he said. “He was fighting one of your people. Somebody shot him—one of your goons.”

“None of us are goons, Mr. Rip Van Winkle or whoever you are.” Her tone, acrid at first, softened. “But Iam sorry about your friend.” To Keene’s surprise, she sounded sincere. He sipped at the scotch, then drained the glass. The whiskey burned in his chest.

“More?” She took the cup from him.

“Not yet. I want to keep my head clear.”

She smiled. “That’ll be a switch. You haven’t been conscious, not to mention compos mentis, since we hauled you into the Zodiac and cruised away from the tanker.”

“Did you achieve your objective?”

“We thought so—at the time. I expected a much larger explosion, but I’ll accept any victory. If nothing else, I’m sure we called some attention to Oilstar’s activities.”

“And your own,” Keene said.

She shrugged. “For better or for worse.” She poured some of the scotch into the same cup for herself. “Scotch and coffee, two of the greatest amenities of Venezuelan civilization.” She looked contemplatively into the honey brown liquid and raised the cup. “Even out here in the jungle, I wouldn’t do without them.”

Antagonism crawled down Keene’s spine. He looked at her angrily, started to say something, and passed out. He woke up with a pounding head and a throbbing body hinting at more wounds than he wanted to know about. His skin felt oily with perspiration, but he could not determine whether the sweat was from jungle humidity or a severe fever.

He’d been having the most bizarre dreams he’d ever remembered. First he was making love to a woman with velvet skin, short cinnamon hair, a coffee-with-too-much-milk complexion, large intent eyes, a small nose, and a delicate chin. In the midst of their lovemaking, she ripped off her face as if it were a mask and he was catapulted into fiery nightmares filled with terrible visions that pounded inside his skull.

He pressed his fingertips to his chest and found bandages and pain. He touched the patchwork of injuries, pressing down hard because the pain reminded him that he was still alive. His mind was full of questions. Where was he?

He heard jungle crickets, the belching music of small frogs and of trickling water, the crackle and whisper of dried leaves woven into a fragrant roof over his head.

“You awake now?”

Keene turned his head and groaned as even the small movement set a series of pains in motion.

Selene sat on the ground, her back against the inner wall of the hut. She gave him an odd smile, an expression that surprised him more than the amazing fact of finding himself alive. He tried to talk, but his voice came out in a squeak that embarrassed him. “What…happened?”

“You’ve been dried, fed, and nursed back to life. Now it’s time for some payback.”

“Payback?”

She laughed. “Nothing too strenuous, I promise you. First you tell me who you are.”

“Joshua Keene.”

“I assume that since you and your friend were on theYucatán, you work for Frik Van Alman. Is that correct?”

“Not precisely.”

“Then what, precisely, were you doing on the tanker?”

Keene hesitated, confused by his pain and wondering how the beautiful woman questioning him could be the enemy. “It’s complicated. Terris and I are…were in a group with Frik. He asked us to look for you,” he said at last.

“What sort of group? Why would you just blindly follow Frik’s orders?”

Keene felt the fuzz returning to his brain. He tried to shake it off. “It’s called the Daredevils Club. It’s like a brotherhood of adventurers. Frik asked for our help, and we saw the opportunity for some action. He wanted something he said your father stole from him and sent to you.”

“Frikkie Van Alman is a sorry excuse for a human being. I know the things Van Alman says about Green Impact. He’s a liar. A killer. A megalomaniac.” Her whole demeanor hardened. “My father is dead. Van Alman killed him because he knew too much about Oilstar’s operations and their intent.”

“I had nothing to do with that. Neither did Terris, and he’s dead too.”

Selene turned to walk back to a small camp stove where she was heating some water. The tail of her shirt rode up and he saw smooth skin.

“You need to listen, Joshua. Green Impact is not a bunch of wild dogs trying to cause senseless destruction. Not my people, and not me. We’re doing this to stop Frik from destroying our future.”

“Are you sure you’re not as deluded as he is?” Joshua’s throat was dry, his voice hoarse. She moved toward the doorway. “I’ve got some things to take care of.” She tucked her shirt back into her khaki shorts. “We’ll talk more when I get back.”

Yet one more time, Keene drifted off into a restless sleep. He awoke in pain and filled with sadness, but less confused. This time he knew where he was and what he was doing there, though there were still plenty of gaps in the past…what was it? A week? Two? He had heard about temporary trauma-induced amnesia and knew that it wasn’t likely to last. The memories would return in bits and pieces, like misrouted mail.

He struggled off the mildewed canvas cot where he’d been lying and made it outside onto a small verandah. Sitting down on one of two handmade chairs, he surveyed his surroundings.

The verandah overlooked a tiny tributary in the lush labyrinth of the Orinoco Delta. He could see some of the remaining members of Green Impact gathering food, preparing supplies, practicing skills. One man, probably a guard who had remained awake through the previous night’s shift, slept in a mesh hammock. Tall trees filled with colorful tropical birds flanked the stream. Dwellings clustered together in what appeared to be an encampment, raised on poles above the marshy ground and constructed of thin stripped logs with roofs thatched with heavy dried palm fronds.

“I’m glad to see you up,” Selene said, appearing from behind and taking the chair next to him. She was holding the same white enamel mug, only this time he could smell coffee.

“Here.” She handed him the cup. “It’s strong.”

Keene took it from her and placed it on a rickety little table that separated the chairs. “Do you know for sure that Terris McKendry is dead?”

“There were many casualties that night,” Selene said, looking away. “Five of my people, the skeleton crew on the tanker, and, yes, I suppose your friend, too.”

Her expression serious, she reached into her shirt pocket and pulled out a strangely shaped object. She tapped it on the table with a dull-sounding click.

“That’s what Frik’s so hot to have? That’s the reason Terris died?” Keene could hear the rising fury in his own voice.

“Yes. It may not look like much, but this one piece could change the world. Frik doesn’t understand much about it, but he wants to possess it badly enough that when my father tried to keep it from him, Frik killed him.”

“How do you know?” Keene asked her. “We were told it was a lab accident.”

“Right! Funny that it happened the day after he and Frik had a confrontation about this very thing. Frik shouted at him, threatened him.” She held up the odd fragment, turning it so that the jungle light was reflected in skewed patterns. “My father wrote me a letter explaining where this thing came from. He was so frightened of what Frik would do that he separated the pieces of the artifact, sent this one to me for safekeeping, and sent another to himself. I’m not sure what happened to the rest. I think Arthur Marryshow might have another one.”

“Arthur’s dead too. Killed in an explosion on New Year’s Eve not long after your father died.”

Selene looked astonished, then even angrier. “See what I mean?”

Keene contemplated his own doubts. Arthur Marryshow and Paul Trujold, dead within days of each other. Both men concerned about Frik Van Alman’s peculiar artifact. He didn’t believe in coincidences. “What else do you know about…that?” He pointed at the fragment.

“All I know is that it was dredged up by Oilstar’s test drilling rig, the one just off the coast of Trinidad,” she said. “According to my father, the composition is like nothing ever found before, nothing that any human made.”

“Are we talking little green men here?” Joshua allowed himself a small smile.

“You tell me.” Selene thrust the fragment at him. “My father believed it has amazing properties. He was sure that when all the pieces were back together, this artifact—device,whatever you want to call it—could be the key to an energy source that would make filthy petroleum companies as obsolete as woodcutters from the Middle Ages.”

“Frik runs an oil company. Why would he want it so badly?”

“Because he wants to make sure nobody else gets it.”

“Nowthat sounds like Frik.”

The coffee tasted bitter in Keene’s mouth. He added even more sugar than the Venezuelan norm. He didn’t like Frik; never had. The Afrikaner was pushy and self-centered, with an abrasive personality. But a cold-blooded killer…?“So what do we do now?” he asked Selene.

“We?”

Keene thought of what Frikkie Van Alman had told them—the lies and the innuendos. If Selene was telling him the truth, then Frik already had plenty of blood on his hands, and he didn’t seem worried in the least about consequences. “Yes,” he said. “We.”

“Well, to begin with, theValhalla is an abomination,” Selene said.

He pictured the huge structure of the rig’s production platform. The first time he had seen the monolith, it had looked to him like an elephantine skyscraper of concrete and steel, bristling with tall derricks, piping, and tubes, belching flames and smoke. Little had he known that the pair of bright pilot flares burning at the edge of the extended derricks would become a funeral pyre for his friend Terris McKendry.

Selene looked at him, her eyes bright and intense. “Even before I found out from my father what that bastard was trying to do, I knew that it was screwing up the ecosystem here in the Serpent’s Mouth—spilled oil and solvents, natural leakage, ‘acceptable losses’ of toxic chemicals and lubricants. It raises the temperature of the water, killing some fish, attracting others, messing with the entire balance.”

She leaned closer to him. “And the sharks. The population has increased three- or fourfold. That’s not natural.”

The mention of sharks brought a new flood of memories, beginning with his game, a stunt, preparation for the confrontation to come later that night. He envisioned four concrete legs thrust downward all the way to the sea bottom, where a honeycomb of holding tanks were filled with the fresh crude oil, and remembered his fears during the swim from the tanker over to the production platform.

Green Impact had proven far more deadly than any aquatic predator.

“What do you think will happen as the drilling continues?” Keene asked.

“I can only guess,” Selene said, “Who can say for sure what sort of global chaos might follow? Oilstar is producing from one of the bore-holes now, draining out a lot of crude oil, but other crews are still exploring. Frikkie wants to find the rest of that artifact. He needs to see if there’s anything else down below at the Dragon’s Mouth site. There have to be checks and balances.”

“And Green Impact is one of those checks?” Anger and uncertainty replaced Keene’s usual good humor.

“Yes we are.” Selene got up and motioned him to follow. “Come on. Let me show you around.”

At Green Impact’s hideout in the jungle, the group had its supply cache, canned food and propane gas tanks brought in by flatboat, and what remained of its stockpile of weapons.

Automatically, his mind started cataloging the remnants and planning what would be needed to make a real attack against Oilstar. By Keene’s estimates, there was barely enough ammunition left after the assault on theYucatán to defend the compound if it was discovered. It would take months to pull together enough explosives and ammunition to have a real chance at another assault, even if Frikkie did little to improve security on the rig.

Selene explained to him that they traded with the Warao Indians, who went to trading posts and small villages on the larger waterways to surreptitiously pick up items the ecocrusaders needed. No one noticed the Indians, who came and went as they pleased, like jungle shadows, but the trading post owners would certainly pay attention to a group of white strangers. Once or twice, Selene explained, she and her friends could pass themselves off as German bird-watchers or Canadian eco-tourists, but as time went by, suspicions would grow. They would have to move on.

Three days later, Selene took Keene out in one of Green Impact’s small motorized boats. As they moved through narrow caños into broader streams, following the tributaries of a diffused Orinoco to the sea, they passed half-naked Warao fishermen standing at the riverbanks, in search of birds or fish or eggs, the day’s catch. Keene looked at some of the dark-skinned Indio children who hid beside their bare-breasted mothers. He smiled at them, but they didn’t wave back.

When they reached the end of the jungle and the open waters of the Gulf of Paria, Selene brought the boat to a halt, letting the outboard putter into a low purr as if catching its breath. Keene looked up to watch a flock of scarlet ibises take wing from the muddy shallows.

“Amazing, aren’t they?”

Keene nodded, watching the ibises fly off to find other feeding grounds, like matadors waving their capes in the humid air.

Selene turned the boat around and headed back upriver, winding in the direction of the Green Impact encampment. As they approached, she shut off the Zodiac’s motor and drifted, turning into a small caño, brushing past reeds. She startled a cluster of small yellow frogs, which plopped and splashed into the brownish water.

“This isn’t the way back,” Keene said.

She smiled at him. “You have a good memory. This is a special side trip just for you and me.”

She took the black rubber raft as far as the little stream would allow, then beached it in the mud. When she climbed out, the soft ground squished under her boots. “We’re just a stone’s throw from the camp. This is my retreat. No one else knows about it.”

She reached back to take Joshua’s hand. After he climbed out of the boat, she didn’t release it, but led him through the grasses to a little dry patch, a hummock raised above the water level and filled with flowers and sweet grasses. Small birds fluttered and twittered, as if incensed at the human intrusion into what appeared to be a perfect, cozy meadow in the middle of the Orinoco Delta.

Selene took his other hand. Keene found himself helpless, as if his grip had turned to water. Her faded, loose shirt hung partially open. She raised his hand and slid it between the opening in her shirt, cupping it against her left breast. Keene tried to reclaim his hand. She pressed it tighter and he felt her nipple stiffen.

“Don’t pull away,” Selene said. “Feel my skin, feel my heart pumping, the blood beneath my flesh. I’mreal, Joshua Keene, just as everything I have told you is real.”

“Why me?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “Maybe it’s just that I’ve been in the jungle for too long.”

“What about the men in your group?”

“I’m their leader,” she said. “It’s tough enough for them to obey a woman without any other…complications.”

“I’ve wanted you since the moment I saw you,” Keene said. “Even when I thought you were the enemy.”

She took his face in her hands and kissed him, gently at first, then with increasing passion. “I have wanted you too, Joshua Keene,” she said. “I could love you, I think.”

They undressed each other slowly, taking turns, one article at a time. Then they made love in the soft grass under the open tropical sky, laughing as the bugs flew around and the grass tickled and scratched their naked skin.

Keene’s body still felt tired and a little shaky, but enough of his wounds had healed. He lay beside Selene, watching the glow of the sun as it filtered through the overhanging branches, slipping toward afternoon and the western horizon. He wanted to stay this way, without cares, ignoring the future, but he could not remain in an endless present. He knew he had other obligations to face, and decisions to make.

Looking up into the knitted tree branches that formed a canopy overhead, feeling Selene warm beside him but not looking into her captivating eyes, Joshua said, “I meant it.”

She propped herself up on one elbow, looking at him, but he continued to stare upward. She stroked his chest. “What was it you meant?”

He sat up and faced her in the rapidly diminishing light. “I’ll help you shut down theValhalla platform.”

28

Paul Trujold, Arthur, Joshua Keene. Dead of unnatural causes. And now Simon. All but Trujold members of the Daredevils Club.

Something smells rotten, McKendry thought for the umpteenth time. But what…besides his own body, which could use some heavy bathing after weeks of hospital sponge baths? Chances were, boredom had led to his feeling that something was awry. He had little else to do but follow rehab instructions and concoct plots where there probably were none.

After Peta’s initial hands-on care and during the subsequent weeks of his recovery, he had grown tired of hearing about the “miracle of his survival.” Being transferred to rehab was a welcome change, until he found out that he would be staying there through Easter. Fed up with the time-consuming process of recuperation, he became obsessive about obeying instructions. He did whatever he was told to do, and then did it again for good measure, figuring that he had no choice if he wanted to get back on his feet and pick up where he and Keene had left off.

“They tell me you’ll be well enough to leave soon,” Frik said, entering the room without knocking. “If that’s true, you’re well enough to answer a few questions.”

As boss of Oilstar, Frik had made several perfunctory visits to the hospital. Each time, within five minutes, he was there and gone. McKendry had no illusions about this being a simple courtesy call to wish him better or to express his continued grief at the loss of Joshua Keene.

Seeing Frik, he felt more than his usual annoyance at the man’s lack of sensitivity. He had recovered from gunshot wounds before, more often than he wanted to count. He could deal with the residual pain using salves or painkillers, even this time when the flash burns from the explosion were an added annoyance. But nothing seemed able to drive away the ache of his friend’s death. A few genuine words of condolence from Frik might have gone a long way.

Taking McKendry’s silence to mean assent, Frik said, “I’ve been wanting to ask if you got any information about the artifact.”

McKendry held his anger in check. “I was a little too busy to ask Ms. Trujold about her jewelry.”

“Of course.” Frik’s paternal smile and pat on the shoulder were almost more than McKendry could tolerate. “I tend to get focused on my own goals sometimes. As I’ve said before, I’m very sorry about Joshua. I think the choice of his replacement for the club should be at your discretion.”

McKendry clenched his hands under his thin blanket. “At this moment, I don’t really care about the Daredevils Club, Frik. What I want is to feel Selene Trujold’s throat inside my grip.” He hesitated, but only briefly. “You know, you wouldn’t need to worry so much about Green Impact terrorists if you had anybody aboard your tankers or your production platform who gave a damn about security. Joshua and I swam over from theYucatán . We climbed aboard theValhalla platform, ran around for over an hour, and swam back. He even scrambled to the top of the highest derrick. Not a soul saw us. Everybody was busy partying and ignoring standard procedures.”

Frik gave a shrug. “This is South America. What can you do?”

“You can be professional, damn it!” McKendry said. “Put me in charge of security on that rig. I need an excuse to stay around and find Selene anyway.”

Frik grinned as if he couldn’t have been more pleased. Apparently, getting McKendry to work on the rig was precisely the motivation behind his visit. “You’ve got the job,” he said, “starting as soon as you’re ready. Complete carte blanche. Do what you need to do, with one proviso. When you find her, I want that artifact.”

A few days later, McKendry stood on the broad deck of theValhalla production platform in dark blue jeans so new that they were not yet stained with enough oil and grease for him to fit in with the rig crew. This high off the water, he had a commanding view of the lowlands all around, the broad channel of the Serpent’s Mouth with the island of Trinidad to the east and the wide and uncharted swamps of the Delta Amacuro on the Venezuelan mainland to the west.

Standing there, washed by humid breezes that reminded him he was alive, he grieved for Joshua Keene. The medicines he was taking were doing wonders for his residual physical pain, but they did nothing to soften the grief.

He kept remembering the flash of fire.

The explosion on the tanker deck seemed to be tattooed onto his retinas, so that when he shut his eyes he saw the silhouette of Keene’s body, black against the flame front, flying into the night. Again and again, he felt the bullets strike his rib cage, like railroad spikes driven in with a sledgehammer. Barely conscious, he’d sensed theYucatán moving on like a lost, lumbering juggernaut through shark-infested water.

Even as he was sure that he was dying, he’d prayed that his friend was still alive.

Almost in self-defense, McKendry turned his thoughts from Keene to his new job. The crew had accepted his presence as security chief, following strict orders from Frik Van Alman. They were clearly intimidated by his size, his brooding nature, and the fact that he had survived what should have been mortal wounds. As far as they were concerned, he was a hero for having prevented a real disaster on the tanker. They approached him with equal measures of admiration and fear.

That was well and good. But what he really required from them was respect, and obedience to a new work ethic.

As Oilstar’s newly appointed—self-appointed, really—security chief, McKendry was nothing if not serious about his work. He spoke with all of the levels of management, twenty-five people at a time. Though he hated to talk in public, he gave lecture after lecture.

It took him two days, ten talks, until he had spoken to every single person aboard theValhalla . As they met in the mess hall—where cooks were busy preparing spaghetti and fried fish, big pots of black beans, fried bananas, and heavily spiced rice—he saw their admiration turn to resentment with each of his pronouncements. Seeing the resistance, he called in reinforcements from the mainland, twenty private security troops who helped him go through the crew’s personal lockers one at a time, rounding up shopping carts full of rum, scotch, whiskey. The galley even kept a stock of Carib, a flagrant breach of regulations.

During a ceremony reminiscent of a funeral at sea, McKendry made the crew stand and watch as he opened the bottles and poured the alcohol over the side, down into the sea. The quantity of liquor was certainly enough to be detectable even in the warm tropical water; he wondered if sharks could get drunk.

All personnel were required to have valid passports. Even prescription drugs had to be documented with the rig medical staff. Smoking was forbidden anywhere outside the living quarters and the coffee shop, and the workers squawked about not being able to carry lighters outside into the rig machinery and gas-separation towers. He had to crack a few heads together just to enforce commonsense housekeeping procedures. Even then, he was forced to send a boatload of twenty-three disgruntled and intractable rig workers back home with minimal severance pay and no future prospect for a paycheck from Oilstar.

After that, when he looked the remaining crew members in the eyes, he saw a change in their former laughing, carefree attitude. He had their attention, for now. As for what would happen after he achieved his goal and left them to their own devices, that was a different matter. If Frikkie Van Alman didn’t keep watch, they could revert, and Oilstar could go down the tubes.

Frankly, McKendry didn’t care. He was neither their father nor their baby-sitter.

Having lived in Venezuela, he was familiar with the general mañana approach. It had driven him nuts then, and it did so now, even though he understood its origins. Venezuela was one of the prime movers in the formation of OPEC in 1960, and though oil prices had dipped in the 1980s—he could remember the resultant economic and political turmoil—the nation still lived with too much spending money and too little personal productivity, not to speak of enduring and overthrowing a succession of dictators. He figured that Frik’s tolerance for the Venezuelan attitude was possible only because so much of his workforce was Trinidadian.

Not that they were so eager to lift that bale or tote that barge either.

The sooner he could get on with his real reason for being here, the better, he thought, as he raised a pair of binoculars and examined the topography around him: marshy islands, drunkenly balanced trees laden with greenery, the labyrinth of caños, the low swamps.

Scattered, disorganized villages dotted the seashore where the Orinoco petered out into the gulf. Looking at the landscape, he saw endless hiding places for the ecoterrorists. Grim and angry, standing alone under the whistling girders of the north derrick, the one Joshua had foolishly climbed, McKendry swore anew that he would find Selene Trujold and her murderous companions—with or without the law and the Venezuelan military, with or without the help of Oilstar.

For him, tracking down Green Impact had become personal.

To help speed the recovery from his injuries, McKendry used the exercise facilities onboard theValhalla platform, a health club that could have commanded high prices in the States. Most of the time, he felt as if it were his private domain. The potbellied rig workers never seemed interested in using their off-duty hours to exercise. They didn’t bother to keep themselves in shape, and instead grew thick in the gut and spent their downtime smoking cigarettes, playing card games, and watching videotapes which, to his amusement, included a complete library of his former boss, the Spanish action star Rodolfo.

McKendry didn’t need to build his muscles, just keep them from atrophying; the recuperation-forced lethargy had already done enough damage. In less than a month, he was up to fifty push-ups and half an hour on the exercise bike at its highest tension setting. Satisfied, he put himself on a maintenance program and gave himself until May 31—Joshua Keene’s birthday—to complete the details of his security job and begin the second part of his mission: finding Selene and recovering the piece of Frik’s coveted artifact.

He would keep his word to himself and to Frik, even though, to the Oilstar exec, losing Keene seemed to be nothing more than “the cost of doing business.”

What he needed, McKendry thought, was a plan, preferably one that was proactive rather than defensive. Instead of waiting for Green Impact to rally its forces, to pull together the survivors of its terrorist team and find another way to strike against Oilstar, he would take the initiative.

First, he would find out where Selene and her terrorists had gone to ground. The Orinoco jungles were wide and complex, but they were not impenetrable. He had no doubt that he could track her down, given time, and a little help from the Daredevils Club.

Those who were left.

Those he could trust.

He eliminated Peta, to whom he already owed a debt of gratitude, and Frik, whom he neither liked nor trusted. That left Ray Arno. Last New Year’s Eve, when Frik had challenged all members of the Daredevils Club to take on this joint mission, the stuntman and explosives expert had offered his assistance. Now McKendry needed him to put together a team to find Selene Trujold’s encampment and strike Green Impact.

On the last day of May, McKendry put through his call to Las Vegas.

A day and a half later the thump, thump of chopper blades heralded Ray’s arrival. McKendry looked up at the dark bumblebee shape of the helicopter flying in from Port of Spain, and climbed to the top of the helipad, using the ladders and steep metal stairs instead of the elevator.

The helicopter circled around, wavering as it hovered in the air, and settled askew on the painted circles of the landing pad. As the chopper’s rotors gradually slowed, the passenger door popped open and Ray Arno climbed out, all energy and muscles. McKendry came forward to meet him, extending a large hand whose grip was matched by Ray’s.

“Thank you for coming.” Terris had to shout to be heard over the throbbing vibration of the helicopter

“No problem, Terr.” The stuntman looked him up and down. “You look awful, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“I lost a lot of weight and—”

“And your best friend. I was really sorry to hear about Josh.”

McKendry nodded his thanks and led Ray to the lift. They took it down past convoluted pipes, exhaust torches, and fractionating tubes, where the production rig could perform preliminary refining of the petroleum they brought up.

“Tell me about this,” Ray said.

“The crude oil is piped out to tankers like theYucatán and taken to Venezuela’s major refineries on the northern coast at Puerto La Cruz and other places.”

“And Frik gets richer every minute.”

“Not just Frik. Venezuela’s oil boom began in the 1920s. The surge of unexpected money rocked the South American economy. Even with the extraordinary tax breaks and tariff exclusions granted to business developers from the States, Venezuelans suddenly found themselves the most affluent people on the entire continent.”

“Tough job if you can get it,” Ray said. “Bet it took them no time to pick up European and North American vices.”

The two men climbed past teams of workers wearing gloves and helmets, boots, and colorful jumpsuits smeared with crude oil. TheValhalla rig workers stood around talking, halfheartedly monitoring the production equipment. They glanced at their tough new security chief as he passed, then went back to their tasks with greater fervor.

When the two men reached the habitation decks, a large module that seemed to be halfway between a military barracks and a run-down resort, McKendry went on talking.

“If you help me finish this up,” he said, “it’ll be a story you can tell for ten New Year’s Eves in a row. It’ll finish up what Frik asked us to do and—”

“If you want my help, Terris, you have it, but all I need is a story for one year. Not that I mean to go out of action anytime soon.”

They walked through a pool hall, with its billiards tables and pinball machines and garish video games. There was also a small bowling alley, a Laundromat, even a movie theater—amenities that Oilstar used, along with large pay, to tempt crews into remaining offshore for months at a time. McKendry was pleased to see that no one was sitting around killing time during duty hours.

“Some joint,” Ray said, stopping to look back at the path they had taken. “Maybe my next Strip hotel should be an oil rig. Listen, I really could use a drink. A cup of coffee will do.”

McKendry led him to a table in the extensive cafeteria where chefs were working with large hot pans, filling and preparing a lunch of spiced rice, black beans, chicken, fish, sliced mangoes, papayas, and bananas.

Ray had heard some news about the attempted hijacking of theYucatán and the potential disaster that had been averted. Over a large pot of coffee, McKendry gave him the full details. He described Green Impact’s agenda, talked about Selene Trujold, and detailed how it had all resulted in his own near fatal shooting, and the death of Joshua Keene.

“Selene escaped,” he said. “Green Impact must have their camp out in the delta jungles. I think we’ll be able to find them.” He scowled. “I want to disable those bastards for what they did to Joshua.”

Ray perked up. “We can also get the piece of the artifact from Selene.”

“True enough,” McKendry said. “But that’s not my primary objective.”

“Explain that to Frik,” Ray said.

“I don’t think I owe Frik an explanation for anything.”

“Okay, okay. God you’re jumpy.” Ray took a sip of coffee. “So what’s the plan?”

“Joshua and I made the acquaintance of the Venezuelan minister of security, a Señor Juan Ortega de la Vega Bruzual. We had a nice chat with him in Caracas. He wants to keep himself out of the news, especially with all the recent political turmoil, but Señor Bruzual would be very happy to bag these terrorists, put their heads on stakes as it were, and show them off to the world news media. He thinks it would demonstrate that the country is getting back on its feet after all the attempted coups and the economic disasters.”

Ray Arno pursed his lips. “Is he going to help?”

“Off the record, yes. We talked again after I called you.” Not an easy task without Joshua’s language skills, he thought. “He told me he’d provide a handful of mercenaries to join any attack squadron we put together. He said he’ll supply us with whatever we need. Weapons, matériel—”

“Good enough. But I want no killing except in self-defense. We could use two or three men who know the territory and speak the language. I want as few people as possible on the team, people I can trust and train.” He ran his fingers through his curly hair. McKendry wondered why he hadn’t noticed the gray before. “I think we should also track down Manny Sheppard. That old buzzard knows this end of the Caribbean like the back of his hand. He’s probably been up and down the Orinoco Delta, in and out of those tiny streams, more often than you’ve had a beer.”

McKendry grunted his assent. Manny’s name had popped up more than once in Arthur’s New Year’s tales, and in Ray’s, too. “Does he know his way around this kind of an operation?”

“Manny was in OECS security. He’s trained with the U.S. Special Forces. I’d say he could help out.”

“Sounds like he’ll be a major asset. The next question is, do you know where to find him?”

“I know he doesn’t carry a phone or have a listed number. I’ll start by contacting Peta and go from there. Better yet, I’ll take a quick trip to Grenada.” Ray smiled. “Fortunately, I have friends in high and low places. Given time, I can find anybody.”

29

Peta had returned to Grenada with a lot of thinking to do. Most of it was unpleasant at worst and difficult at best, so she was perfectly happy to find ready-made excuses to avoid it.

She got her wish. Independence Day festivities, just over, had increased her patient load. The newly arrived medical students, unruly as the ones before them, demanded far more than their fair share of attention. Not only did she have to help them in the classroom, but she was constantly needed to reassure angry landlords who wanted to kill the kids or sue their parents, whichever turned out to be simplest.

Her life developed a tedious rhythm. She worked. She slept. She ate. Now and then she had dinner with an old friend, but knowing she was not good company, she soon gave up on that. She had heard nothing from Manny and assumed that he was off-island on one of the mysterious trips which often kept him away for months at a time.

Now, suddenly, somehow, it was nearing the end of May.

Carnival wasn’t until August, the students had settled down, and fewer tourists than usual demanded her time. She even found herself with a whole weekend to spend sitting on her balcony. The postcard perfection of St. George’s and the Carenage provided her with a backdrop for a too-long-delayed replay of the happenings in her life since December.

Mostly, her mind was not so much filled with questions, but rather with answers she was loath to accept. For one thing, she was sure now that Frikkie—who had not so much as called with a trumped-up apology for the events at San Gabriel—didn’t care if the rest of the Daredevils were killed. In fact, though she had no proof, she suspected that he had been instrumental in killing Arthur.

Worse yet, thinking back to that night in New York almost five months ago, she remembered that Ray had gone to the restrooms a little while before Arthur. Ray was a demolitions expert. It would have been easy for him to rig a bomb in the toilet, wait for Arthur to enter, and then detonate it by remote control.

That would place Ray Arno squarely in cahoots with Frik.

But why?

What she needed was someone to talk to about all of this, someone she could trust completely.

With Arthur dead, that left only Manny. She would have called his home to see if he was back in town, but he eschewed telephones and refused to have one in his house. His message center was Aboo’s, a bar owned by his father.

Since she was tired of her own company and her circular thoughts, around sundown on Sunday she left her house to find him.

Accompanied by the sound of church bells, she walked past the Parliament building and through the marketplace, abandoned this late in the day to island dogs and stray humans picking through the wilted leftovers of Saturday’s traffic. Rather than struggle over the hill on Young Street, she cut through Sendall Tunnel to the Carenage. Grenadian drivers weren’t known for their caution, and the narrow hundred-year-old passage under the large hill provided little room for error. She walked at a brisk pace, hugging the stone wall. Then, safely through, she slowed to stroll along the Carenage, enjoying the sounds and smells of the compact waterfront.

When she passed the new Cable and Wireless building, she crossed the street to Aboo’s Bar.

The small, run-down blue shack doubled as St. George’s Grand Central Station for a certain class of people. Though Peta had chosen never to ask Manny about it or to explore it herself, rumor had it that there was a dark room behind the bar which had served—still served—as the meeting place for everyone from murderers and ministers to government officials and their underage mistresses.

The bar itself was small and utilitarian. Manny was behind the counter, relieving his father of Sunday-evening duty. He grinned broadly when she entered and instantly pulled out two cold bottles of Carib from the ice chest, one for each of them.

“Looking good.” He kissed her on one cheek, then the other, and handed her a bottle.

Peta smiled. “I’m glad to see you too.”

“You come all this way for a beer or—”

“I need to talk to you.” Peta drank deeply, hot after her long trek.

“So talk.” Manny waved at the empty bar. “Crowd won’t hit till after church.”

Peta settled herself on a worn barstool and lit a cigarette. Manny took it from her. “You gotta stop,” he said, inhaling deeply. Peta nodded and lit another.

“You’re hopeless,” Manny said.

“Probably.” She flicked into a piece of misshapen aluminum that passed as an ashtray. “There’s so much…I’m not sure where to begin.”

“The last time I saw you, you were headed up the hill in San Gabriel,” Manny said.

“Right. I was off to save Simon.”

“Did you?”

Peta shook her head. Like someone who had lost her place in a good novel and found it again, Peta was off and running. She told him about finding Simon and about the attempt on her life. “Blaine got the artifact. If the sharks didn’t get him, I assume he made it to the exploration platform and, eventually, back to Frik,” she said.

“So you think Frikkie has it now?” Manny asked.

“Absolutely.” She crushed her cigarette, reached for another, and thought better of it. Twirling the pack around like a top, she filled in Manny on her convictions about Frik and her suspicions about Ray.

Manny put his hand over hers to stop the nervous mannerism. “I can’t believe Ray would do anything to hurt Arthur, so let’s talk about Frik,” he said. “Correct me if I’m wrong here. You’re saying Frikkie has two pieces of the artifact, one that he had in the first place and the one Simon died to retrieve. The same one Blaine took from you. And you’re saying that you think Arthur died because of the piecehe had—which the police took to their evidence lockup. Have you tried to retrieve that one?”

“Yes. I’ve called NYPD countless times. They’re not ready to let go of it. The good part is that they’ve assured me they won’t release it to anyone else.”

In San Gabriel, Peta had told Manny that she had a piece of the artifact, yet neither one of them added the obvious: if Frik knew she had it—and if her theories were correct—he wouldn’t hesitate to kill her for it when he was good and ready to do so. Now, Manny verbalized his fears for her safety. “We know he’s unscrupulous,” he added, after a short pause.

“Believe me, I’ve thought about that a lot,” Peta said. “I think that I’m safe, for the moment.”

“Why?”

“Because it suits his purposes. We talked before about the possibility that Frik was the person who had Arthur killed to get at the artifact. We know for a fact that the killer didn’t get it. My guess is that Frik called NYPD, said he was Arthur’s closest friend, and asked them if they had it.”

“In which case,” Manny said, “they would have told him that they had guaranteed to hand it over to you when they’re done with the case.”

“Yes, so his best bet is to make nice to me and try to regain my confidence so that he can talk me into giving him both my stone and Arthur’s.”

“I have to think about this.” Manny stared through the open doorway, as if simply looking at the sea would provide answers. “Oh shi-yit,” he said. “Trouble approaches from all sides.”

Peta followed his line of vision. Out on the horizon, she saw the masts of theAssegai .

“Maybe he’s come to apologize.” Manny’s voice was heavy with sarcasm.

“Apologize for what?” Ray asked, filling the doorway with his muscular form.

“Here’s the other trouble I saw,” Manny said.

“I got here yesterday. Didn’t your father tell you?” Ray shook Manny’s hand and hugged Peta. She froze, not knowing whether to shrink from his touch or hug him back, the way she had always done. He looked at her strangely, but said nothing.

“My father didn’t say a word.” Manny handed Ray a beer and Peta a second. “Better get a refund on your bribe. How much was it?”

“Twenty dollars.”

“American?”

Ray nodded. “He said he hadn’t seen you for weeks. I asked the other people in here too. A couple of leathery old men and that layabout fisherman whose wife always comes in looking for him.”

Manny laughed. “How much did you tipthem ?”

“Not much.” Ray set down his beer among the many circular rings on the single Formica tabletop in the corner of the bar. “Feels like home,” he said, cooling himself under the slow-moving ceiling fan.

“To what do we owe this visit?” Peta asked.

“I’ve been with Terris and—” He stopped short, clearly reluctant to continue whatever it was he had to say in front of Peta. “Look, this is confidential.”

“Don’t worry about it. The last thing I need is your little-boy games.” Peta slid off the stool.

“I’m sorry,” Ray said. “Arthur’s dead, but you’re not yet officially a member of the club. That doesn’t mean you don’t have my respect.”

“No problem. I’m leaving.”

“Stay,” Manny said. “I’m not a member of the club either. Whatever I can hear, you can hear.”

Peta was torn between her first instinct, which was to tell Ray to stick it, and her need to find out what part—if any—he had played in Arthur’s death.

“If you have doctor-type things to do, I can call you later,” Ray said hesitantly. “You’re in my database.”

“Bad idea,” Manny said. “You know as well as we do what a problem it is keeping things confidential when dealing with our telephone system.”

Peta knew that Ray couldn’t argue with him, not after being privy to many an argument with Grenadian officials about the fact that line tapping was legal on the island. Any attempt at privacy here was more of a challenge than all of the death-defying feats Ray had accomplished in his lifetime.

Judging by the look on the American’s face, he was making a tough decision. “I’ve been on theValhalla with Terris,” he said finally. “Took a short island hop from the rig to Trinidad, then a flight here.” He looked around, as if searching for eavesdroppers, then lowered his voice and looked at Manny. “We need your help.”

Without wasting words, he filled them in on McKendry’s plan to find Selene. Even before he was finished, Manny had admitted that he knew where to find the camp and agreed to participate on the condition that killing was minimized.

“I’m coming too,” Peta said.

“No—”

“Yes. I’m going to do what Arthur would have done. First of all, it’ll save time if I fly you to Trinidad. Second, you may need a doctor—”

“No—”

“Don’t argue with her,” Manny said. “It’s both of us, or neither. I’ll sail down so we have my boat. I can leave in the morning.”

“I’ll clear things with my locum tonight,” Peta added. She thought for a moment. “Frik will probably call me on the pretext of seeing if I’m all right after the incident in the cavern.”

She was about to ask what she should say to him when, right on cue, her cell phone jangled.

“Yes.”

“Frik here. I’m sailing in. I want to apologize to you for the debacle in San Gabriel. Will you have dinner with me?”

“I’m busy,” she said.

“Tomorrow?”

“No. I’m flying out in the morning.”

There was silence at the other end. “I really need to see you,” Frik said at last.

“It’ll have to wait.”

“I won’t be here again until Carnival.”

August will be too late to feel me out, too late to find out what I know, Peta thought. Nevertheless, deciding she needed some insurance should he become persistent, she said a cursory farewell to Frik and a warm one to Manny. To Ray she said merely, “Be at the airport at noon.”

Exiting Aboo’s, she made her way past the awnings of the tourist shops toward the coal pot where an old woman was roasting corn on a makeshift grill over glowing coals. She bought several ears, wrapped them in one of the sheets of newspaper piled next to the fire, and flagged down one of the few taxis that roamed the Carenage on a Sunday evening.

With darkness descending and the sound of a lone steel drum in her ears, she directed the driver to take her home. She called the airport to tell them to have her plane ready for departure at noon. Then she ate her corn, bathed, and packed a small overnight bag. Before midnight, she was fast asleep.

The next morning, carrying nothing but a tote and her medical bag, she drove her Honda to the bank. She took her pendant out of her safe-deposit box, pocketed it, and headed toward Morne Rouge and her Rasta friend, Ralphie Levine. He was the only person on the island who could be trusted to do what she needed to have done: replicate the piece in her pendant and swap the two, putting his fake in the bezel while he held on to the original.

Everything went so smoothly that Peta was at the airport thirty minutes early. She made one last check on her plane and headed upstairs to the coffee shop. Ray was already there, eating a lunch of chicken roti. He pulled a small bone out of his mouth.

“Have some,” he said, pushing the roti toward her. “It’s good.”

“I know it is.” Though she never tired of the lightly curried chicken, cut into small pieces and wrapped, bones and all, in a thin East Indian flatbread, she scooted the dish back at him. “I don’t eat before I fly.”

“What’s wrong, Peta? Have I done something to upset you?” Ray looked genuinely distressed.

“I don’t know, Ray. Have you?”

“I would never do anything to hurt you. Surely you know that.”

Ray took her hand. His touch was warm and reassuring. “I do know that.” She smiled at him and retrieved her hand. “Now let’s get out of here.”

It wasn’t until the two of them stepped onto the tarmac that she saw Frik. He was dressed in long pants, wore shoes, and carried a briefcase—formal attire for him. His eye remained partially closed; his hand was wrapped in pressure bandages in a continuing attempt to minimize scarring from the deep burns he’d suffered.

“I know where you’re going and what you’re going to do,” he said. “McKendry told me all about it. I’m coming along.”

“Not a chance,” Peta said quietly. “It’s my plane and you’re not getting on it.”

He blocked her path. “You’retellingme what to do?”

“Yup. Now get out of my way.”

Frik didn’t move.

“You heard the lady, Van Alman,” Ray said.

“Even if we wanted you on board, you’re in no shape to come,” Peta added.

Frik stood his ground. Peta and Ray walked around him and headed for the plane. He followed them. Peta slowed down almost imperceptibly. When he was so close that she could feel his breath on her neck, she stopped in her tracks and turned around, forcing him to step aside.

“What part of ‘no’ do you not understand?”

Frik stared at her, eyes filled with hatred. Waving his bandaged hand perilously close to her face, he said, “You’ll regret this, bitch. One hand—no hands—I’m twice as good as any woman.”

30

In early June, standing at the head of Oilstar’s La Brea dock, McKendry looked over his assault team. Except for the fact that Manny Sheppard had been missing for two days and that they still had no specifics about the whereabouts of the ecoterrorists, they were as ready as they would ever be.

The three men Bruzual had sent slouched together against one of the pilings, smoking Peta’s cigarettes and polishing their weapons. The one called José drew his knife against a stone to sharpen the edge. As he spun it, McKendry saw the initials J.R. etched into the pommel.

“You’re his buddies. Where the devil is Sheppard?” McKendry looked at Peta and Ray accusingly.

“Triple A to the rescue,” Manny said, appearing out of nowhere. With a self-satisfied grin, he handed McKendry a grease-stained scrap of paper with a sketch on it.

According to Manny, he had glided up to the shoreline of the jungle in his small outboard boat and asked an elderly Warao fisherman for information about Green Impact. Normally, the indigenous jungle Indians would not take part in any outsider activity, and they certainly wouldn’t have betrayed Selene Trujold, so Manny had expected no answer. But the old man had caught a large and frightening catfish that day—surely an omen, since the Warao considered catfish to be magical creatures. He had given Manny all the details the team could possibly want, including a sketch of the camp itself.

“So when do we leave?” José sheathed his knife and rested his hand on the butt of his pistol.

“When we’ve all memorized the sketch,” Ray answered. He looked none too happy with the man’s apparent bloodlust. “Meanwhile, let’s go over what we know.”

“Again?” Another of Bruzual’s men, Diego.

“Yes,” Ray said. “Again. Peta?”

“As far as we know, Selene’s group lost several members during the raid on theYucatán . They probably have between ten and twenty members left, hiding in the jungle, planning more attacks against Oilstar. Some Warao Indians are also likely to be in the camp, but they’re workers, not converts to the cause—paid with trinkets and supplies. It’s unlikely that they’re motivated by political convictions or personal loyalty.”

“We figure the Indians will disappear as soon as they see trouble,” McKendry added.

“You’re right,” Manny said. “They’re too smart to stick around waiting to be shot or”—he looked at José—“knifed.”

Ray nodded. “I’m going to say this one more time. No violence except in self-defense. We’re there to disable the camp and find Frik’s piece of jewelry.”

“And Selene,” McKendry said. “I hope I can keep my hands off her neck long enough to hand her over to Bruzual for trial.”

Peta looked at him with a worried expression, but Ray, who knew him better, just grinned.

As day became night, with Manny at the helm of the fiberglass boat supplied by Bruzual, they left Trinidad and headed toward the shores of the Orinoco Delta. The stars, bright during the team’s journey across the gulf, were soon obscured by the jungle. Only a few pinpricks of light were visible as they entered one of the narrow channels between overhanging mangrove and palm trees. No one spoke, not even when they reached the first of thepalafitos, sturdy handmade huts that stood on pilings at the water’s edge.

In the lowlands of eastern Venezuela, the slick whisper of water in the caños was like a wet tongue moving through the grasses, thick weeds, and leaf-heavy branches. The night songs of crickets and frogs in the dense underbrush made a din that masked the sounds of the quiet movement of the oars. The fiberglass boat prowled like a piranha through the narrow rivulets. Now, the low strumming of a guitar was added to the nocturnal orchestra as Manny guided the boat up beside Green Impact’s black Zodiac rafts.

The terrorists, falsely secure in their isolation, had not thought to have anyone keep watch.

With Manny leading the way, the assault team slipped through crackling weeds to the sturdypalafito poles. He used worn bumps and notches as if they were a ladder to scramble up the nearest pole to the floor above. McKendry and the three men provided by Venezuelan security minister Bruzual stayed close behind, with Peta and Ray in the rear.

McKendry heard a rustle of palm fronds, small monkeys or rodents scampering across the thatched hut roofs. Through the leaves of a fern he was using as cover, he saw the intense white lights of Coleman lanterns set on tables and attracting swarms of jungle insects. The air smelled of hot oil, fried fish and bananas, and bitter tobacco smoke.

As he climbed the pole behind Manny, McKendry could see a long-legged man through the door opening that led into the next hut over. The stranger’s bare feet were propped up on a windowsill and he was strumming a guitar. It was the young minstrel he and Keene had met in the delta cantina what seemed like forever ago.

Other than that, the compound was quiet. McKendry wondered briefly what had happened to the musician’s girlfriend. Perhaps, he thought, she’s already in bed, somewhere out of sight. He knew that in the jungle, people bedded down once darkness fell, and rose with the dawn. He and his team planned to take advantage of the routine and the darkness.

Manny and McKendry stepped into the first palafito and looked around. It was empty, probably a simple storage hut or one of the dwellings used by a recently killed member of Green Impact. The log floor creaked underfoot.

McKendry motioned for José to slip across to the next dwelling, where the guitarist was making enough noise to muffle their stealthy approach. The mercenary moved like a shadow into the hut and behind the guitar player. There was a flash of metal, a jangling chord, and the guitar fell silent, leaving the jungle with only the insects and amphibians to provide music. Bruzual’s man eased the guitar player back in his chair as he died.

“No,” Ray said, his voice low and angry.

José looked up at him through the window and made an apologetic gesture, as if he’d had no choice but to do what he had done.

“Thank God,” a Green Impact member grumbled from the next hut, unaware of why the music had stopped but evidently pleased. “Now we can finally get some sleep.”

Peta stifled a gasp and moved forward as if to help the guitar player. Ray stopped her and signaled José to come back. They watched until the guitarist stopped twitching and simply bled onto the uneven floor.

Ray faced the Venezuelan. “Now, get your ass back and disable every last one of their boats,” he whispered angrily. “And remember. If anyone else dies, so will you.”

As a scowling José crept through the mud toward the wider caños, Ray motioned for Terris and Manny to move clockwise around the compound while he and Peta and the other two mercenaries headed counterclockwise.

McKendry thought for a moment that Rodolfo would have believed this was exciting. He would have wanted to come along—and he would either have been killed, or have gone back to huddle in the boat, making up stories he would tell later to the women in silvery miniskirts who clung to him in Caracas’s discos and nightclubs.

“Let’s get moving,” he whispered to Manny. “Or we’ll end up like that poor son of a bitch in there.”

31

Taking a roundabout route, Ray Arno circled the outer perimeter of the encampment, with Peta and the mercenaries forming a ragged line, twenty paces between each of them. As he moved through the mud and underbrush, ignoring the insects and the wetness, he reminded himself that he had been on movie sets that had made him more miserable than this.

Following naturally was the thought that those jobs had never been as important as this. It wasn’t hyperbole to say that the fate of the world could depend on their success. And that success depended on this assault team.

Manny and McKendry were good men. Peta was a trooper. The men provided by the Venezuelan minister of security were what gave him pause.

He had worked with mercenaries before, more than once. The whole point of using them was that they did what they were paid to do. Problems arose only if they were serving two masters, in which case they would do what they had been told to do by the highest bidder.

According to the plan, José should have incapacitated the guitarist, tied him up so they could question him to see if he knew where Selene was. Not kill him. There was nothing Ray could do about it now, but there would be plenty he could do when it was time to make the final payment to José.

Frowning, he looked at the encampment, mentally ticking off at least a dozen safety violations that some OSHA representative on a movie lot would have written up. Here, it might even be an advantage. He knew from Manny’s rough map of the camp where the terrorists kept most of their supplies. What wasn’t on the map was where Green Impact kept its munitions. Food was in sealed lockers, some of which were suspended from trees, though the monkeys could still get at them. The rest of the cases and cans remained in the individual huts.

Two large propane tanks provided fuel for grills in what passed for the camp’s mess. He was surprised to note as he circled the building that the tanks also ran a heater and water pump attached to a shower at the back of the mess.

He was examining the tanks when Diego, one of the Venezuelan mercenaries, found the weapons cache in a small, partially camouflaged hut apart from the main encampment. After making whispered calls and gestures, to which Ray, Peta, and the third Venezuelan soon responded, the mercenary used a long knife to pry open the first storage locker.

Both of Bruzual’s other men dropped their old rifles and hauled out assault rifles and boxes of ammunition, making far too much clatter in their excitement. Ray cautioned them to be quiet, but the mercenaries seemed unduly greedy. He wondered if they would simply snatch the contraband rifles, which they could sell at a handsome profit on the black market, and flee with them.

Most of all, Ray was concerned with keeping the resources out of the hands of Green Impact.

He reached a decision. Glancing first at the luminous dial on his wristwatch, he nodded to himself and rapidly opened the rest of the cases. With a shoestring attachment of wires and connected detonators, he rigged up three armed grenades, stuffed them in among packages of C-4 and Semtex, and played out the cord behind himself.

The Venezuelans looked at him, scowling with disappointment as they saw what he meant to do. Clearly, they would have preferred to confiscate the explosives, not destroy them. Ray held the detonator string in the fingers of one hand and urgently waved them away with the other.

One of the Green Impact men rustled through the bushes, calling out, “Hey, what’s going on?” The voice held annoyance and curiosity, but not suspicion. Not yet.

Ray yanked the string, pulling the grenade detonator pins. The Green Impact guard, finally doing his duty, switched on a big flashlight and shone it around the jungle. The beam of light, splashing like melted butter across the branches, struck a scrambling Ray and his partners.

“Hey! I see you!” the Green Impact man called out.

As if on cue, the grenades exploded. Thatch smoldered and burst into flame. Green Impact members started screaming.

“I see you too,” Ray muttered as the shock wave bowled him over into the muddy ground.

32

By the time the grenades exploded, Manny and McKendry had reached the third hut. They saw two blond men on separate cots scrambling awake, shouting, looking at each other. In an instant, both of them had grabbed pistols from beneath their beds and lurched up, swinging the weapons to point at the door.

McKendry was determined to make an arrest, as if to prove to himself that he was in control. He even shot the first round, hitting one of the terrorists squarely in the right shoulder. The crack of his weapon fire sounded loud but was rapidly overwhelmed by the racket in the encampment.

The second blond man pulled up his own pistol as Manny charged forward and threw a pillow at the man’s arm. The terrorist’s shot was wild; the bullet splintered one of the wooden poles beside Manny. Even though there was no longer any need for silence, Manny chose to pull a sap from his belt. He pushed the terrorist’s gun arm away and swung the sand-filled pouch hard into the man’s skull. His head snapped back and he collapsed onto the bed he had only partially gotten up from.

McKendry bent over the first downed terrorist, pleased to see he was still alive and conscious, though barely.

“Selene Trujold. Where is she?”

The man coughed and bled. His eyes sharpened with awareness enough to gasp, “Fuck you!”

McKendry stood up, his face grim. “Bleed to death, then.”

Outside he could hear more weapon fire accompanying the crackling flames from the explosion. He didn’t mind that Ray had blown up the explosives depot, leaving Green Impact without its stockpile. Now was the time for open action.

The flames from the explosion lit up the area, casting witches’ shadows and creating more uncertainty than illumination. He could see that the fire had spread to the central mess hall.

A moment later, the propane tanks exploded in a cough of feathery blue fire that bowled over two of the Green Impact terrorists and splintered the trees within fifteen feet into kindling.

At ground level, Ray and Peta and the two mercenaries were rounding up some of the Green Impact terrorists; a few others hid in the underbrush and opened fire.

McKendry didn’t care about them. He was interested in only one person, and he was determined to get her—for Keene, and for himself. He could save her a lot of trouble if she capitulated. A whole lot.

Pushing his way to the open deck of the palafitos that overlooked the calm caños, McKendry shoved aside a small table where two unwashed coffee cups sat.

Below, he saw someone climbing into a boat. He could not tell for sure in the darkness, but his every instinct told him that it was Selene Trujold. Without calling for others to join her, she slid out into the waterway, moving with spare motions.

In a blaze of anger at José for disobeying instructions, McKendry raised his rifle, sighting in. He would deal with the Venezuelan later. The lazy slug was probably curled up in the bottom of one of the boats he’d been sent to disable. Meanwhile, he could not let the woman get away, not after what she had done to Joshua.

An expert marksman, he aimed, centering the crosshairs on Selene’s head as she entered a shaft of starlight. Through his sight, he watched her head turn to the right, toward the fringe of the jungle. She raised her arm, and he could see the pistol in her hand.

Allowing himself no distractions, he focused on her temple and squeezed the trigger—

“No!”

Manny Sheppard slapped the barrel of McKendry’s rifle aside as the gun went off. Looking downstream, he saw Selene drop, facedown, into the bottom of the boat, which was drifting slowly downriver.

He turned to glare at Manny.

“We need her alive, remember,” Manny said. His voice was very quiet. “She has to tell us where Frik’s artifact is.”

McKendry remembered that Manny had been a friend of her father’s, and that he had known Selene since she was a little girl. He remembered, too, that he was not a killer. Not like this. Shooting someone—man or woman—in the back in cold blood.

He looked back at the boat, which continued to drift. As he watched it, he saw a bloodied hand emerge from the inside and grasp the edge.

He shoved past Manny Sheppard. Ignoring the ladder, he leapt from the hut to the floor of the jungle and wove his way through the underbrush. He knocked branches away and splashed through shallow rivulets.

His headlong rush came to an abrupt halt when he tripped over José’s still-warm body. The Venezuelan had taken a bullet straight through the forehead. His knife, small protection against a pistol no matter how accurately thrown, was nowhere to be seen.

Helluva marksman, McKendry thought, remembering Selene’s raised arm. He stood still and stared into the impenetrable darkness, in the direction her boat had taken.

Behind him in the camp, a few scattered shots rang out before the gunfire ceased completely.

By dawn, after searching through the caños and the islands in the vicinity of the camp, Manny found the bloodstained boat. It was still drifting downstream, but there was no sign of Selene Trujold, or her piece of the artifact.

33

For three months after his idyllic afternoon with Selene, Joshua had worked with the members of Green Impact to scrounge weapons, ammunition, and explosives. He and Selene went over and over the plans of theValhalla until they both knew them by heart. Finally, the day after his birthday, he took off with a Warao guide to see if he could get more information and supplies in Pedernales.

It was his first trip out of the jungle since the night on theYucatán .

They took a boat for some twenty winding miles from the jungles to Pedernales, where he had been told he could safely gather additional information and equipment for the operation against theValhalla platform.

The town lay at the tip of Punta Tolete, where a confluence of delta streams emptied into the gulf. While apparently the closest thing to a town within reasonable distance, it was really not much more than a supply stop. Any hope he had of finding more than basic survival necessities was crushed upon his arrival.

The hub of civilization in the Delta Amacuro, the settlement had grown from nothing half a century ago, when oil exploitation on the adjacent Isla Cotorra had brought the petroleum business to the continent’s edge. Enough traffic and business and people came to the area to set up a town and create a booming local economy.

By the mid-1970s, however, the oil fields had been played out, and the operating firm had abandoned the wells and pulled up stakes, leaving the locals to fend for themselves. The town’s economy crashed, most of the transplanted people departed, and only empty, dilapidated buildings remained. In recent years, speculators had reopened the operations, squeezing hard until crude oil began to flow yet again.

Pedernales was reborn, but it remained a sickly child at best.

Since the locals had not seen Keene in the area before, he was able to move around without fear of being recognized or asked inconvenient questions. For all the villagers knew, he was another one of the yuppie ecotourists who came to the delta, traveling by motorboat up the caños to look at the birds and the wildlife before returning to their expensive homes and fancy restaurants to talk about their “dangerous jungle ordeal.”

Except for a side trip to Isla Cotorra, Keene spent his time in Pedernales bartering for necessary supplies and trying to gain the confidence of the locals. He did not come close to finding what he wanted, but he did discover that he would have to make do with whatever resources Green Impact could scrounge. On the South American coast, he would have no access to the truly high-tech materials he preferred.

He was not particularly perturbed.

Sometimes it was less efficient—and less satisfying—to rely on fancy gizmos. TheMission: Impossible routine, he thought, didn’t work nearly as well in practice as it did in concept.

After almost a week away from the encampment, and Selene, Keene grew anxious to get back.

“Time to say good-bye to the big city,” he told his guide. Though sure that his sarcasm was lost on the man, Keene offered to buy him a meal and a drink in a seedy seaside cantina that appeared to be the center of the town’s entertainment. They started out at the bar, where, with a great stroke of luck, Keene found several disgruntled oil workers who had been fired from theValhalla rig.

Without the prospect of continuing paychecks, the rig workers were perfectly happy to talk with a man who would buy them as many cervezasmás frías as they wished to imbibe.

Keene’s Spanish was good enough that he quickly put them at ease. He discovered that, after theYucatán incident, Oilstar had hired one bastard of a new security chief who had overhauled all the rig procedures, cracked down on booze and drugs and cigarettes, and enforced discipline with no exceptions. A veritable military commander.

Sipping his beer, Keene nodded sympathetically. His commiseration was genuine. From what he had seen while sneaking aboard theValhalla with Terris, the previous procedures had been laughably lax, but he wouldn’t have gotten along well with such rigid rules himself.

By the time the evening was over, the men had told Keene more than he had hoped to discover, and an overall plan gelled in his mind. Given a few lucky breaks and a lot of determination, he was quite convinced, he could succeed in his plan to force Frik to sit up and take notice. He had never trusted Frikkie Van Alman, and now he understood why. The Oilstar man had much to answer for. Not that Selene was an angel. She was an expert manipulator with plenty of blood and blame on her own hands, but Paul Trujold’s daughter was just a minor player compared with Frik.

Leaving at dawn in their inflatable boat, Keene rode back through the caños with his guide, a silent man who spoke enough Spanish to be understood, but chose not to speak much at all. Keene talked for his own benefit, but soon gave up expecting a response from the Indian. Painfully aware of how much he missed McKendry, he made himself as comfortable as possible and began the kind of mental gyrations that had proven useful in the past.

He had acquired some supplies, though not enough, and a few luxuries, including a well-wrapped package of chocolates that the trade-post owner had sold him for an exorbitant amount of money. Chocolate was common in Venezuela, but these were imported from Belgium. Why anybody would want to do such a thing baffled Keene, but what did he care as long as they earned him extra Brownie points from Selene.

She gave him a sense of purpose, which he needed more than ever. Since the fateful night on the oil tanker, he had felt lost and empty without his partner and best friend. Life had seemed to be one continuous string of adventures when they were together.

Not, he thought, that what he was doing now was dull.

The whole truth was that he was the sort of man who needed to have a driving goal, even if it drove him over a cliff. Still, if not for the ministrations of Selene Trujold, he would have been unlikely to pick this particular obsession.

He thought back to the night on theYucatán . Again, in his mind’s eye, he watched McKendry get shot twice and catapult backward off his bicycle onto the equipment-strewn deck…before he himself was hurled overboard in the grenade explosion.

He sought to find something amusing in the image of himself hitting the water, but without McKendry as his audience and straight man, nothing seemed funny. Perhaps someday his cocky good humor would return. It sure had gone AWOL since his recovery and time in the jungle.

Around lunchtime, lulled by the boat’s movement and the early-June heat, Keene dozed off. When he awoke, in the midafternoon, he noticed a succession of Indians looking out at them from the sides of the water. Without signaling to his Warao guide, they hauled up fishing baskets and nets and disappeared into the jungle.

“Why are they so skittish?” he asked, hoping for an answer.

His guide pointed at the sky ahead.

Tendrils of smoke stained the fluffy low thunderheads brewing deeper over the delta jungle.

A hot dread and certainty told Keene that the source of the smoke was the Green Impact camp. “Faster!” he yelled to the Indian, who urged the outboard motor to a quicker pace. But the guide was cautious as he looked around, apparently searching for assassins in the underbrush.

As the boat came up against the narrow streams that led to the palafitos, the Indian slipped over the side and sprinted barefoot into the jungle away from the camp. He didn’t wait to be paid, didn’t help to unload supplies, didn’t even glance at Keene’s stricken face.