Gates of Hades

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Jason was the only white or male in the line outside the cinder-block building that Barclays Bank shared with Island Hair and Beauty. Although he had stood in this very spot more times than he could count, he already felt like a stranger here. He had spent last night in a resort hotel on Providenciales, the islands’ tourist destination, where he knew no one. This morning, he had hired a stranger to bring him to North Caicos by boat.

After leaving Dr. Kamito yesterday, Jason had taken Pangloss to one of those high-end kennels found in cities where a large segment of the wealthy population were frequently unable to take their pets on their excursions abroad, a place where treatment of four-legged guests was designed to soothe the consciences of two-legged owners. Jason had stayed in hotel rooms — nice hotel rooms — that cost less per diem than Pangloss’s temporary home. Of course, hotel rooms rarely came with soundproofing, regularly scheduled exercise, or personal attendants. The dog’s quarters were even video monitored so separation-anxiety-racked owners could view their pets on closed-circuit TV accessible from the establishment’s Web site.

Despite the glory of a tropical morning, Jason was in a black mood not entirely attributable to Pangloss’s absence. Generally the homeless had a cardboard box, a street corner, a bridge, some familiar place that included that sense of belonging that tethered the human soul to reality. Jason was truly homeless. He was domiciled no place at all, had no location where he belonged. Annoyed at his own self-pity, he reached in a pocket to make sure he still had his real passport and bankbook. The homeless weren’t standing in line to move a high six-figure account. He felt a little better.

He could have simply had Barclays wire-transfer the money, but anything done by computer was theoretically subject to hacking. If his new enemies, Eco or whoever they were, knew he had been living here, it would be logical for them to watch for the transfer of funds to learn his new location — of which, at the moment, even he was uncertain.

He’d had a couple of other details to clear up, too. Jeremiah would sell the Whaler for him and reap the political profit of donating the proceeds equally to the island’s four or five churches. He had succumbed to a compulsion to sift through the charred remains of the house to make sure there was nothing of Laurin’s that was salvageable.

There wasn’t.

He planned to spend no more than half a day in the Turks and Caicos before beginning a convoluted series of international flights. Even if the islands were being watched, he should be able to get in and out before his enemies could muster an attack.

The door opened and a dozen or so native women queued up inside. He was the sole bank customer.

The solemn-faced teller dolefully counted out the money, a large stack of hundred-dollar bills, as Jason had specified by a phone call to the bank’s main branch in Grand Turk. The request was facilitated by the fact that the U.S. dollar was the currency of the islands, rather than pounds sterling. He was leaving when he spotted Felton, the island’s constable and entire police force.

It was not unusual to see Felton in his uniform of starched white jacket and red-striped navy trousers. It was unusual for the policeman to have an old Welby revolver stuck in his shiny black belt. Since most crime on North Caicos involved drunkenness, fighting, or petty theft, there was little or no need for Felton to be armed. Sentences, imposed by Felton acting as prosecutor, judge, and jury, consisted of confinement for a day or two in the constable’s guest room, which doubled as the jail. The prisoner served his time by playing endless rounds of dominoes with his jailer.

More unusual yet were the two young men walking beside Felton, two men whose uniforms identified then as police from Grand Turk.

Someone was in trouble, and Jason had an uncomfortable feeling he knew who.

Felton and his two companions stopped, blocking Jason’s path.

“ ’Lo, Jason,” the constable said, his eyes refusing to lock onto Jason’s.

“Morning, Felton,” Jason replied. “There a problem?”

Felton, clearly unhappy to be the harbinger of ill tidings, nodded. “ ’Fraid so. Police over to Grand Turk got a ’nonymous call day or two ago, say some folks were killed ’fore your house blew up.”

The coffee and island fruit Jason had eaten for breakfast felt like a cannonball in his stomach. He didn’t have to guess at the source of the call.

Felton continued, “Police from Grand Turk came over, looked ’round. Sure ’nough, there be human remains where yo’ house was. Police figger you burned the house to hide the evidence.”

“Why would I do that? If I had killed someone and wanted to hide a body, I’d dump it in the ocean or bury it, not burn down my house.”

Felton nodded, acknowledging the logic of Jason’s argument. “Mebbe so, but they wants to talk to you over to Grand Turk.” He produced a pair of rusty handcuffs. “Sorry, Jason. I hates this, but you gonna haff to go wid’ dese here fellas.”

Jason thought about making a run for it and discarded the idea. Even if he succeeded, where on the island could he hide?

“If I’m being arrested, I get a telephone call, right?”

“You can call from Grand Turk,” one of the policemen said.

Felton snapped the cuffs closed around Jason’s wrists and handed the key to the man who had spoken, visibly relieved to no longer be in charge. “Like I say, Jason, I hates this.”

As he was marched away, Jason turned his head and spoke over his shoulder. “Not your fault, Felton. I’ll be back and kick your black ass at dominoes.”

The constable’s face lit up. “Dat’ll be de day!”

Jason hoped Felton believed the match would take place more than he did.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Rassavitch handed his Canadian driver’s license and passport through the car window to the fat immigration and naturalization officer. Neither had his real name nor address. False identification was a cottage industry along the northern side of the U.S. — Canadian border.

The official retreated to the small customs building beside the road, presumably to run the fictional name into the computer for a useless comparison with known terrorists. Since Rassavitch had made the name up, he was less than worried.

Sure enough, the man returned, handing the documents back. “Canadian citizen?”

Rassavitch nodded. “Yes, sir.”

No further identification required.

With millions of foreigners in Canada due to the most lax immigration standards in the western hemisphere, Rassavitch and his group caused no suspicion. No one was surprised when they availed themselves of equally liberal welfare laws so they might devote full time to their true purpose.

Even in December of 1999, when Ahmed Ressam had been apprehended near here with a carload of explosives with which to celebrate the new millennium, the Canadian authorities had done nothing to tighten security. It was the Americans, not the Canadians, who had to worry. Ahmed’s target had been the Los Angeles airport, not something in Canada. Besides, prosecuting or even extraditing accused terrorists was contrary to the country’s open-door policy to all people, a policy that endangered their neighbor to the south, much to the glee of most Canadians.

United States bashing had replaced apathy as the national pastime of Canada.

Don’t offend, don’t interfere, don’t get involved. Canada’s national mantra. A national character that rivaled cottage cheese for blandness. And why not? Any external threat would be met not by the few largely ceremonial troops of Canada’s military, but by U.S. military might. Like most recipients of charity, Canada was resentful, believing it could avoid global conflict by political correctness and siding against their protector on every issue.

Rassavitch smiled, showing yellowed teeth, as the officer waved him across the border. Didn’t even ask for the keys to inspect the trunk. That would be racial profiling, hassling someone to whom English was not a native language. And America, the democracy, would not treat any of its minorities differently from its majority.

Apparently dogs were immune from political correctness. The black Lab had sniffed its way around the car and wagged its tail in a most friendly manner. Of course, there was nothing in the car for the dog to smell. Only Rassavitch, who intended to be much more effective than a few hundred pounds of explosives.

He returned the officer’s wish that he have a good day and entered the United States. When he was out of sight of the border station, he pulled to the side of the two-lane road and waited for a fully loaded logging truck to pass before he flicked a flame from a cigarette lighter and burned the driver’s license and passport to unrecognizable ash.

The he turned east and began the long drive to the opposite coast.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

On the few occasions he had visited there, Jason had been impressed with just how unattractive a tropical setting could be made. Grand Turk was a center for off-shore banking, corporations and individuals who were willing to pay handsomely to remain below the radar of any number of tax-collecting authorities and the lawyers who served this very specialized clientele. One-story office buildings, mostly concrete block, crowded one another for space along one side of Front Street. Any number of colors, apparently based on the availability of paint at the time of construction rather than aesthetics, had been used. Across the street, a beach, framed by tired palm trees, had probably once been a spectacular crescent. Today, litter and garbage of every description covered the golden sand and floated in the turquoise surf as though a giant party had just ended.

The business of Grand Turk was business. Scenic vistas belonged elsewhere.

Jason sat in the backseat of an ancient Ford between two burly officers who reeked of sweat and stale tobacco smoke. The prison occupied two blocks of the town’s less desirable real estate, ten-foot-high stone walls topped with broken glass that sparkled in the sun with a cheerfulness that seemed out of place.

Upon arrival, he was taken to a small, airless room where the smell of lye soap was strong enough to make his eyes water but not sufficient to conceal the odor of old urine, feces, and despair. He was stripped and searched by two other officers and fingerprinted with a kit J. Edgar Hoover would have discarded as antiquated. His clothes, minus belt and shoelaces, were returned to him. The size of the eyes of the guard examining the contents of the money belt told Jason what was in the man’s mind.

“Barclays has a receipt for issuing every dime of that,” Jason said. “I’d hate to have to make a claim for any that was missing.”

The glance exchanged between the two guards did little to reassure Jason.

“And I believe I’m entitled to a phone call.”

The two looked at him as though he were speaking in tongues.

“A phone call,” Jason repeated, holding a fist next to his ear to simulate the device.

One of the men grinned. “Mon, dis ain’ some hotel on de beach.”

The other nodded. “Yeah, we ain’ got room service, neither.”

The first twisted Jason’s arms behind him with more force than was necessary and shoved him forward. “An’ you don’ gets a choice of view wid de room.”

A short walk down a hallway brought them to an enclosed square, each side lined with six cells. The man behind Jason gave him another push that sent him stumbling into darkness and crashing into the far wall.

“You does git a private room, though!”

Both found this extremely funny. A barred door clanged shut, and the two men were laughing as the sound of their footsteps faded.

Jason guessed the room was about six by six. A single bunk with a soiled cotton-tick mattress occupied one entire wall. Opposite from the entrance, a barred slit of a window was next to the ceiling. Below that, a seatless commode and a stained basin with a single handle added to the austerity of the room. A cursory inspection showed the walls to be island limestone, a porous material that was likely to seep water in a driving rain but hard enough to resist any efforts to escape.

A colony of mold was prospering on one wall.

Jason examined the barred door closely. Although the lock was of the old type that required a key, the lock plate was firm and, as far as he could tell, well maintained.

He stretched out on the bunk for lack of a better place. If they didn’t know already, Eco’s minions would soon be aware he was confined, locked up with no chance of escaping whatever they had in mind for him. The memory of Paco’s headless body was enough to guarantee he would not accidentally doze off.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

There was something downright strange about Charlie Calder’s four passengers, the ones who had just gotten off the international flight from Miami.

They didn’t smile, unusual in a place where the sun was almost always shining, the beaches and water almost always beautiful. People were mostly happy to get here and smiled a lot. It was the eyes, Charlie thought, dark, almost black eyes that seemed to scowl from faces that looked very much like they had spent time in a boxing ring, faces very much like those of the six men he had seen here at the airport last week.

Those men, he understood, had chartered a fishing boat run by his cousin Willie, but had done nothing but drift outside the North Caicos reef and look at the beach through binoculars before having Willie put them ashore at North Caicos’s only dock just at dark. As far as Willie knew, they were still over there.

Now here were these men, just as dark, just as grim, and just as big and muscular, who wanted Charlie to fly them over to Grand Turk in the charter service’s aging Piper Aztec just as soon as they had recovered their baggage from the airport’s sole carousel.

Odd. Their only luggage appeared to be one briefcase apiece, leather attaché cases that could easily have been carried on board. Why check such little luggage? Hard question, unless maybe there was something in the cases they didn’t want scanned by security before the boarding gates. What would somebody bring here like that?

Willie said his customers carried only briefcases, too, ones they never relinquished once they took them from the baggage claim. Strange, too, that they were willing to pay to charter the Aztec, because Turks and Caicos Air had a flight to Grand Turk that left in a little over an hour. The Twin Otter, a ten-passenger job, was a lot roomier than the Aztec, but Charlie guessed they were in a hurry, something no native ever was.

In these islands, people in a hurry usually got angry when things didn’t move fast enough for them, and these men looked like they were angry about something the minute they got off the international flight and walked into the charter office. Charlie wasn’t sure what, but they spoke back and forth between themselves in a language he had never heard before, one that seemed as angry as they did.

Another thing they had in common with those others, the ones Willie had taken to North Caicos: although they wore golf shirts and jeans like any visitor to the islands might, all the clothes were new. Wherever they had come from, apparently they didn’t wear golf shirts and jeans.

Of course, wanting to go to Grand Turk explained a lot, Charlie guessed. Most people who went to Grand Turk weren’t going for fun. That might explain why they carried only the briefcases.

Well, it wasn’t any of Charlie’s business. They paid him in cash, crisp new dollar bills. Providenciales and Grand Turk were only about seventy miles apart, a distance even the old Aztec could cover in a half an hour, including climb-out. In thirty minutes or so, he’d be on the ground, waiting to take his big, unhappy passengers back.

At the same time seventy miles away, Jason was rubbing eyes he had fought to keep open all night. If he was being held here for interrogation about the fire on North Caicos, no one seemed in a hurry to ask the first question. The only official he had seen had been the white-haired old man who had brought him supper and now stood outside his cell with breakfast. As though serving an animal, the old man stooped without a word and slid a steaming bowl under the bars of the door. If last night was the standard, he would return to collect the empty cheap plastic container and fork in a few minutes.

Jason was more interested in the ring of keys jingling on the jailer’s belt than in the meal he had brought.

From the bones sticking out of the steaming dish, Jason guessed he was getting another serving of bonefish and grits, a strong-smelling yet bland native dish. It was a meal to be eaten carefully and slowly. Swallowed, one of the sharp bones would likely puncture something vital on the way down the throat.

The thought gave Jason an idea.

Cautiously probing the grits with the fork, Jason extracted a four- or five-inch section of bone with a wickedly sharp point at one end. He finished his meal and listened to the conversations shouted between cells. He was unable to understand most of the words, either because of dialect or because they were in the Spanish of the Dominican Republic, or in Creole, the combination of French and African peculiar to Haiti, both less than a hundred miles away.

At fifteen hundred feet, Grand Turk was visible from ten miles out. Charlie squinted into the morning’s haze for the airport. Constructed as a part of the Atlantic Range recovery station during the early days of the United States’ space program, the runway was unusually wide, built to accommodate cargo aircraft, a broad black asphalt belt across the island’s southern tip.

“Got the field,” Charlie said into his headset, noting that he was the only aircraft on the frequency this morning. “We’re out at fifteen hundred.”

With the prevailing if fitful southeast breezes, the landing clearance that came back almost immediately was no surprise. “Cleared to land runway niner, wind light and variable, one-two-oh to one-four-oh, altimeter two-niner-niner-eight.”

He and his passengers would be on the ground in a few minutes. If he was lucky, Charlie would have time to go over to the TCA office and see how his application was coming along. Flying for the charter service beat fishing for a living, but the airline paid a lot better.

The seals in the windows and doors of the Aztec were worn, making Charlie raise his voice to a near yell to be heard over the engines and airstream as he asked the man next to him, “How long you reckon you’ll be ’fore you wants to go back?”

His question provoked a chilly stare from eyes like brown ice. “You’ve been paid enough to wait.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The jailer reached an arm through the bars to accept the plastic bowl Jason was handing to him. The bowl clattered to the floor as Jason moved with the speed of a striking snake. In a single movement, the old man was snatched up against the bars and the daggerlike point of the fish bone pressed against his throat.

“Nice and easy,” Jason said calmly. “You take those keys off your belt and unlock the door. Do like I say and you don’t get hurt.”

The men in the cell opposite Jason’s saw what was happening and began to shout. Although he couldn’t understand the words, Jason guessed they were clamoring for their freedom, too. It wouldn’t take many minutes before someone came to investigate the disturbance. The jailer was fumbling with the ring of keys.

Jason pressed the bone harder against the man’s throat. “I got nothing to loose, mon. Somebody come before you get this door open, you die.”

Either the threat was effective or the old man had already found the right key. The door swung open with Jason still holding his captive through it. He let go of the arm long enough to snatch the key ring. He shoved his former jailer into the cell and slammed the door shut before turning the key. He was gratified to hear the lock’s bolt click into place.

Jason tossed the key ring into an adjacent cell as he sprinted down the hall. He could hear other cell doors opening amid excited voices. The escapees wouldn’t get far, not on a twenty-five-square-mile island, but they would provide the distraction Jason needed.

At the end of the cell block was a steel door. Jason shoved but it didn’t move. It was locked from the other side.

Curious, Charlie watched his passengers carry the attaché cases into the sole taxi parked outside the one-room terminal. He was almost certain he had heard the one who spoke English ask to be taken to the jail.

Surely not.

He shrugged. None of his business. He looked at his watch. There was nowhere on the island that would be more than ten minutes away by cab. Figuring in, say, ten minutes for his passengers to go wherever they had business, another ten to do that business and another ten to return, he had at least a half an hour to spend at the TCA office, trying to get his application moved to the top of the pile.

For some reason, he was thinking about those briefcases as he crossed the street. Maybe they had business papers in the little cases and were planning on flying back to Miami that day. Except the Delta flight on which they had arrived was the only departure today, now long gone.

He shrugged. Mon wants not to carry fresh clothes in this heat, that be his problem, not Charlie’s.

Jason turned from the locked door and dashed back down the cell block behind the last group of prisoners to escape their cells. He stopped long enough to snatch a thin mattress from a cot before joining the rush to the prison yard.

Outside, the dozen or so prisoners overpowered two guards. As a leaderless mob, they seemed unclear as to what to do next. With a few quick steps, Jason was at the base of the wall. Grabbing the mattress by one end, he swung it up and across the top of the glass-encrusted stone. Taking a few paces back, he got a running start and jumped, his fingers digging for purchase but finding none.

He slid back to the dusty yard and tried again just as truncheon-swinging reinforcements surged out of the jail and began clubbing the unfortunates within reach. As Jason made his second attempt, six or seven prisoners were beginning what looked like some sort of organized resistance.

This time Jason got high enough to hang one arm across the mattress and get a grip on the rough stone on the outside of the wall. With his feet scrabbling against the rocky surface, he managed to propel himself upward and over, dropping onto the ground below with an impact that buckled his knees.

He stood, turned, and looked straight into the shock-widened eyes of a woman carrying a huge bowl of mangoes on her head.

He nodded politely. “Mornin’, ma’am.” Then he bolted for the police station in front of the jail.

It was unlikely, he reasoned, that the police would anticipate his return after escaping. The emptiness of the building verified his assumption. It took him less than a minute to empty several open lockers in the room with a coffee machine and two worn Naugahyde couches. As he had hoped, neither of the two officers who had taken his money belt had trusted the other enough to allow its removal from where it was hidden under a pile of odoriferous laundry. A quick glance satisfied him that most, if not all, the bills were still there. More important, so was his passport.

Now he was good to go. The question was, where?

From the sounds coming from the prison yard, there wasn’t a lot of time before the would-be escapees’ resistance collapsed and the police on duty returned.

As calmly as he could manage in shoes with no laces, he sauntered outside, hands in his pockets to support beltless trousers, and merged with the foot traffic. He could easily walk to the airport; it was less than a mile away.

He had gone one, perhaps two blocks when the squeal of rubber against asphalt split the air. He turned just in time to see four men spilling out of an eighties-model Lincoln on which a faded TAXI was still legible. Jason’s attention was not drawn to the passengers themselves as much as the briefcase each was opening. He didn’t have to look twice to recognize the collapsible-stock Uzis. It was the same gun, carried the same way, as the Secret Service’s presidential detail.

He had hoped to get the hell out of Dodge before Eco’s disciples, Eglov or others, arrived for their revenge. A few more minutes and he would have made it.

Jason ducked into an alley along the back of Front Street, trusting the shade to make him difficult to see by the gunmen standing in brilliant tropical sunlight. He never knew if the theory worked. A string of shots showered him with concrete fragments as they dug into a wall above him.

He tried to pull his head into his chest like a turtle into its shell. In these narrow confines, the ricochets and cement chips could be deadly.

There was screaming from behind him, a terrified woman in shock, mixed with shouts in Russian that were getting closer.

The alley was only a couple of blocks long, ending in an open park just off the beach where Jason would have no cover at all.

Desperation made a decision for him.

He snatched at a door leading into one of the buildings, finding it locked. He had better luck with the second, pulling it open only wide enough to slip inside and locking it behind him.

He was in a well-lit, air-conditioned corridor lined with offices. In those with the doors open, Jason could see guayabera-clad solicitors and consultants advising clients or speaking softly on telephones as they conducted the financial affairs of those who did business where income and property taxes were only nightmares. From the voices he heard, both blacks and whites had spent time in England. There wasn’t a native accent among them. A couple of heads came up with curious stares. Jason made himself walk slowly and calmly, as though looking for someone in particular.

“Can I help you, sir?” a well-dressed native woman asked in Oxfordian tones. “Is there someone you wish to see?”

Jason tried to push his pursuers from his mind long enough to remember the name of the Irish-born solicitor who had handled the purchase of the property on North Caicos. “O’Dooly, Seamus O’Dooly. Is he in?”

One eyebrow twitched in what might have been annoyance. “I believe Mr. O’Dooly has his offices next door.”

Jason gave her the best imitation of embarrassment he could manage as he headed toward the front of the building. “Thanks.”

He stood in the reception area for a moment, trying to see past the four or five people plastered to the plate-glass window that looked out onto Front Street and the beach.

“What’s going on?”

“A shooting,” someone said without turning around. “Some idiots just started firing guns in the middle of the street and looks like someone’s hurt.”

Edging closer, Jason saw ten or so people gathered in the middle of the street. Behind them, its doors still open, was the Lincoln. The gunmen were nowhere to be seen, no doubt checking each door off the alley behind him.

Soon enough they would come around front to check on those they couldn’t enter. Jason didn’t intend to wait.

With purposeful steps he strode into heat made all the more intense from his brief exposure to air-conditioning. He hardly noticed that his shirt was instantly sweat-plastered to his back. He kept his face away from the buildings and alley, fighting the urge to look around for men with guns. He gave only a cursory glance at the crowd gathered in the middle of the street. Shielded from view by the morbidly curious, a woman was wailing. From the few words Jason heard, her child had caught a stray bullet.

He should, he supposed, have felt some degree of guilt. Had he not been here, there would have been no blameless victim. The child lying on the pavement had been no more deserving of that bullet than Laurin had been of a hijacked airliner. His well of remorse was long dry.

Besides, he did not have the luxury of debating hypothetical fault. If he didn’t make the right moves, any guilt he might bear would become academic.

The Lincoln was empty, its doors open and the engine running. Jason cast a thankful glance skyward. As usual, luck was going to play a stronger hand than skill. No one noticed as he shut all but the driver’s door and climbed in behind the wheel. The interior stank of stale tobacco smoke, the headliner had long ago been replaced with some sort of ragged and gaily colored cloth, and the seat’s loose spring was trying to castrate him.

Whatever amenities the car lacked were more than compensated for by the opportunity. At the moment, he would gladly have settled for a garbage truck.

As he slipped the balky gear into drive and eased away from the center of town, he could hear a siren. He crossed his fingers that the ambulance from the island’s only medical facility got there in time.

He might be fresh out of guilt but he had a full tank of hope.

In minutes, the stubby control tower was visible above the low brush along the road. Jason pulled into one of the three parking places outside the small cement-block passenger terminal. The absence of other cars told him no arrivals were imminent. Getting out of the Lincoln, he walked past the terminal and onto the tarmac of the general aviation area, that part of the airport reserved for private aircraft.

Under the shade of the only tree nearby he recognized a familiar face and walked over to where a young native in a white shirt and dark, well-pressed pants was sipping the last swallow from a drink can.

Jason extended a hand. “Charlie, how you doin’, mon?”

Charlie looked up with a smile showing perfect, brilliant white teeth. “Doin’ fine, Jason.” He shook the hand briefly. “Sorry t’ hear ’bout that fire over to yo’ place, though. Folks say you gonna leave.”

In these latitudes, custom required polite conversation before coming to the point. Jason opted for brevity instead. “Charlie, some men are after me. There’s already been some shooting in town.”

Charlie’s smile was replaced by confusion. “Mens? Mebbe four big guys, carryin’ briefcases?”

“Those are the ones, yeah. I—”

“But dey can’t,” Charlie protested. “I mean, can’ nobody bring guns into the Turks ’n’ Caicos, not ’less you gots a permit.”

Jason just stared, thinking of the collection of firearms that had gone up with his house, weapons that had sailed through local customs when accompanied by a liberal “gift” for the inspector. Charlie, like anyone else who lived here, knew full well that a few dollars placed in well-connected hands bought the right to do just about anything.

Capitalism was alive and well in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Charlie turned his head to look down the road toward town. “That noise I heard…”

“Gunfire, shots aimed at me.”

What Jason was about to ask suddenly dawned. “Listen, Jason, I got me a charter, gotta wait on ’em to come back. They kill me, I go off an’ leaves ’em.”

Jason pulled his shirt out of his pants and dug into the money belt. He slowly counted out ten one-hundred-dollar bills. “Tell you what, Charlie: you go back to the terminal, buy yourself another cold drink, take your time. You hear a departure, you just finish refreshing yourself there in that nice air-conditioned terminal. You come out, your plane’s gone… well, you walk — don’t run, walk — over to the police and report it.”

Charlie’s eyes flicked between the money and the Aztec parked fifty or so yards away. The door was open in the vain hope of a breeze to cool the interior. “Jason, I can’t…”

“Can’t what, Charlie? You know how many planes were stolen in the Caribbean last year, snatched just to make a single dope run, then abandoned? Hell, look how many old dope wrecks you see in the water ’tween here and Provo! Your plane gets stolen and it’s unfortunate but not even unusual.”

“But in the daylight, right here at Grand Turk?”

Jason began to slowly fold the bills up as though to return them to the money belt. “I’d thought theft was the reason the man who owns your charter service paid for insurance. But that’s okay, Charlie. I understand you can’t take a risk to save my life from those men with guns. I understand….”

Charlie’s hand grabbed Jason’s. “You let go that money, Jason.” He gave the area a quick, nervous survey, the look of a small child checking to see if parents were watching. “Jes’ you sit here; let me get into the terminal. What you does then, that be yo’ bidness.”

“Remember: about thirty minutes before you report the plane stolen.”

Charlie nodded. “You be in Haiti, the DR by then.”

“Never mind where I’ll be.”

Charlie stood and walked away, then stopped and turned. “Jason?”

Jason looked up.

“Good luck!”

There wasn’t time for a complete preflight inspection of the aircraft. Jason only unscrewed the caps to the plane’s two gas tanks to visually verify they were full. He had never flown a Piper, let alone an Aztec before. He had, however, taken the hours of flight instruction mandatory for all Delta Force officers. He could only hope there was enough similarity between the Aztec and the light miliary trainer to keep him from killing himself.

His first glance at the panel was both encouraging and a little frightening. What gauges were present were familiar: altimeter, turn and bank, and their like. A number of empty holes told him he would have a single radio and navigation unit, no transponder or other electronics common to even small aircraft.

The switches were double what he had been used to, one for each engine. He flipped the first one on the right to ON and did the same with one marked PUMP. He heard the reassuring whine of a fuel pump. He gave a winged switch a twist and the left prop began a slow rotation. Keeping the knob turned, he used his other hand to work the fuel-flow lever in the middle of the panel back and forth. He was delighted when the small plane quivered and the prop caught, disappearing into a blur.

He was about to do the same thing with the right engine when something made him look up in time to see an old Buick almost collide with the parked Lincoln as it came to a stop. The four men piled out, this time not even taking the trouble to conceal their weapons. They had not noticed the Aztec yet as they looked around for Charlie before running into the terminal.

Now acquainted with the procedure, Jason had the second engine started and was rolling toward the runway in less than a minute. There was no time to seek taxi and takeoff clearances from the tower. Instead, he went to the western tip of the runway and prepared to do a run-up, the procedure by which magnetos, fuel-flow, and propeller pitch were given a final check.

Through the aircraft’s windshield, he saw the four men racing across the general aviation area, guns held out. They might have missed him earlier, but even the poorest of shots was going to hit the Piper somewhere if they could get within the Uzi’s limited range.

So much for the run-up.

Jason pushed the two center levers flat against the panel and the Aztec began to creep forward.

The four men certainly saw him now. They were gesturing in his direction.

The airspeed indicator was quivering around twenty-five knots. The white arc showed Vmc — liftoff — to be between sixty and sixty-five.

Nothing to do but press the fuel levers harder, hoping for any increase in power. The outside-air-temperature gauge read eighty-two, and standard humidity here was at least the same, adversely affecting power. Too bad he wasn’t trying to escape from an arctic desert.

The four men stood in a line, Uzis raised. The guns were designed for massed fire at close range. The Aztec would be at the outer limit of the weapons’ accuracy and reach. The plane was going to take some punishment, but not nearly as much as it would have from twenty-five yards closer. The fragile aluminum skin was too thin to protect vital parts or Jason from the bullets that did get that far.

The gauge’s needle was crawling past forty knots. If only the damn plane would accelerate a little faster…

The needle hovered between forty-five and fifty.

Parts of his brief aviation instruction came back with the suddenness and impact of a thunderbolt. There was a way to get this thing off the ground quicker.

His looked at the bottom of the panel, where he saw an oddly shaped switch. Pulling it down produced a whir of electronics, and the plane unweighted like a diver about to leave the board. He had hit the flap switch, lowered the flaps at the back of the wing. A procedure designed to slow the aircraft for landing, it also changed the airfoil of the wings, producing more lift, if less speed.

The small plane clawed its way into the air, with Jason pulling the control stick back far enough to keep the stall warning screeching. A stall would occur when the aircraft’s angle of attack could no longer be sustained by available power and the plane simply quit flying. It was an acceptable landing maneuver, but to have all lift spill from the wings only a hundred feet or so in the air left neither time nor altitude for recovery.

But no more fatal than a hailstorm of automatic rifle fire.

There was a loud sound like the clap of hands, and the plane shuddered. At least one of the men had hit the mark. Jason could only hope no essential had been struck. The gauges told him nothing.

At five hundred feet he let the nose down to only a few degrees above the horizon. Turning his head, he could see Grand Turk shrinking in the distance. He lifted the flaps, anticipating the sinking of the aircraft with the loss of extra lift. At a thousand feet he leveled off, pulled the power back to his best guess of economy cruise, and put the Aztec into a slow right turn until both compass and gyroscope indicated a few degrees east of due south.

He sighed as he looked around the small cockpit. He gave the rudder pedals an experimental push, testing the force required to operate each. Maybe flying was like riding a bicycle in that you didn’t forget how.

Quit kidding yourself, he thought. You’ve got to land a plane you’ve never flown before and with possible characteristics of which you’re ignorant.

Oh well, his other self — the pilot self — replied, you’ve already seen the speed at which this baby comes right up to a stall, and what is a landing but a stall into the ground? You’ll be fine as long as you can find a nice long, deserted beach to put her down. Nothing to it.

A flicker of a needle caught his eye. The left fuel gauge was bumping against the empty peg. Gas gauges in airplanes were notoriously inaccurate; hence the visual check of the fuel level before takeoff. Still, the wing tank could have taken the hit he had heard. He quickly searched the floor between the two front seats and found a lever for each tank. He switched the left engine to feed from the right tank. He was unsure exactly what that would do to the balance of the aircraft, but better another unknown than the certainty of a fuel-starved engine.

Squinting, he peered into the blue haze. Clouds made dark patterns on the water easily mistaken for islands. Each form had to be examined closely. Where he was headed, he would quickly run out of altitude at a mere thousand feet. The mountains were some of the Caribbean’s highest.

In a pocket in the door beside him was stuffed a tattered map, a color chart published periodically by the United States government’s Coast and Geodetic Survey. Jason unfolded it carefully, fearful it might tear. To his pleasant surprise, the side that did not show part of the Turks and Caicos depicted the north coast of the island of Hispaniola. It was well out-of-date — he would not be able to rely on the printed radio frequencies — but he had no intent of making contact with facilities that could well have been alerted to the theft of the airplane. The depiction of the physical shape of the coastline, however, would be valuable.

He glanced up from the map in time to see shadows ahead coalescing into a definite form. A strip of foamy white surf along a golden beach confirmed his arrival. The question was, exactly where?

He turned to fly almost due east along the coast and passed over what was clearly a resort area. A golf course was laid out amid a jungle; the blue of a swimming pool twinkled in the sun. He was low enough to see people on the tennis courts. A few minutes headed the other way and he was over a finger of land running east and west. It took only a glance at the map to confirm he was over the Samana Peninsula of the Dominican Republic’s north coast. Now to find a place to land.

There were several airstrips carved into the jungle, distinguishable from roads only by their straightness and the fact that one or two aircraft were visible on the ground. Tempting, but Jason decided not. Leaving a stolen aircraft where it likely would be found would start a trail he would prefer did not exist.

He descended slowly, his eyes on the beaches below him. Over a slight ridge, a muddy river formed a small delta along the coast. As far as Jason could see, there were no roads or other signs of habitation nearby, probably because the silt from the river’s mouth spoiled the beach for swimming and sunbathing.

With one eye on the airspeed gauge and the other on the altimeter, he entered a lazy downward spiral. He made one final check, a low pass over the coast to spot rocks or other obstructions along the beach, before he lowered the gear and let the flaps back down. With the wheels hanging in the airstream, the Piper settled faster than Jason had anticipated. He was reluctant to add power, which would increase speed, which, in turn, would extend the length of beach required to stop. He eased back on the controls until the stall warning’s bray began.

With a nose-up attitude, the Aztec slammed its wheels into sand that felt far less solid than it looked. There was the sound of tearing metal and the plane dipped to the left as it careened across the beach toward the river. One of the gear struts had collapsed. Now Jason was a mere passenger with no control over the aircraft. He could only flip off the power switches and hope.

The plane took a couple of spins before the left wing dug into the riverbank and came to a tooth-jarring stop. Either the frame or the door had been bent, because Jason had to put his back against the exit and use his feet against the other side of the Piper to force it open. Panting with exertion, he dropped into wet, cool mud.

His shoes, still without laces, were underwater, invisible in the brown flow. Holding on to the crippled plane, he climbed onto the bank and surveyed his location. Palm trees screened anything more than a few yards behind the beach. Unless someone happened to be flying along the coast, he doubted the Piper would be seen for some time. Within a day or two, it was likely the force of the river might push it underwater, where it would never be found.

He sat, took off his socks, and wrung them out before putting his shoes back on and beginning what he knew would be a long trek to the resort he had seen. Before rounding a curve of the beach, he stopped and took one last look at the little twin engine.

Old pilots’ lore: any landing you can walk away from was a good one.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The warm night air brought whiffs of salsa music from the band on the beach sixteen stories below the balcony of Jason’s hotel room. He could also hear party voices, although he could not tell if the words were in Spanish or English. He had had a spicy Spanish dinner, the name of which he could not remember but one he suspected he would continue to taste for hours, if not days. He had washed the meal down with several El Presidentes, the light Dominican lager. If he was going to make the early flight out in the morning, he needed to go to bed soon.

But he really didn’t want to end the evening. He had never been in a city quite like this. He had been to tropical climates before, in the slums of dusty settlements on the Horn of Africa, where the rodent population outnumbered humans and the smell of rotting garbage and open sewers were strong enough to make the eyes water. If he had been lucky, he had arrived by aircraft, fixed-wing or rotor. More often, he and the members of his six-man Delta Force squad had reached their destination by parachute — HALO (high altitude and low operations) — at night into leech-ridden Asian jungles where the night brought fever-bearing mosquitoes that filled the moisture-laden air with buzzing, and where cotton uniforms were always damp.

The enemies he had been sent to bring out or leave for others to bury frequently did not live in the resort spas of the world.

Santo Domingo had the same humid air Jason associated with snakes, insects, and rot. But here, the night’s fragrance hinted at tropical flowers. Here in the city, he had seen more high-rises than tin-roofed hovels. Cars filled streets lined with high-end shops. People smiled at one another and laughed a lot.

Sort of like an egalitarian St. Barts with a Latin beat.

The band below launched into a samba, and Jason took a sip from the Brugal rum and tonic he held.

The old life was behind him. Instead of risking his ass for a soldier’s pay, he was rich. Instead of chasing petty warlords, he sought the major pooh-bahs of world-stage nasties. He could afford good hotels and flew first-class only, thank you.

He thought of the Aztec and the cashier’s check he had instructed his Swiss bank to send its owner to cover any insurance deductable. Mostly first-class, anyway.

The bigger the game, the higher the stakes. No matter how high, he’d trade it all for a final five minutes with Laurin, a chance to say a proper good-bye rather than wait for a cup of coffee that never came.

The rum, he guessed, was making him maudlin. High stakes, big money. Had he been asked to, he would have hunted at his own expense the animals who killed the innocent. He had a major score to even. Moslem fundamentalists with a hijacked airplane, a shadowy group who killed those who earned a living in a manner they didn’t like. Terrorists were terrorists whether using a bomb or a secret weapon. Jason would take pleasure in eradicating them like the vermin they were.

He patted the money belt, fattened this afternoon by the arrival by diplomatic courier of three passports, each with supporting driver’s permits, credit cards, club memberships, and the like. One even had a Dominican Republic entry visa already stamped in it. Mama thought of everything.

Tomorrow he would take a number of flights that would eventually end on the other side of the Atlantic.

Rome, then to Sicily, where Dr. Bergenghetti was currently doing some sort of research, according to Mama. He frowned.

Rome.

It was a city he and Laurin had planned to visit in the spring of ’02. She had already begun the planning, looking at hotel brochures, reading guidebooks.

The glass in Jason’s hand shattered before he realized how hard he had been squeezing it. He went inside and wrapped a towel around his bleeding palm, so absorbed in his mental anguish he did not feel the throbbing of sliced flesh.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Taormina spilled down the side of a mountain, ending at the Strait of Messina. The slope upon which the town had its tenuous grasp was not what snagged the visitor’s eye, however. The center of visual attention was Mount Aetna, a dark mass in the haze to the northeast. At eight in the morning, its white beard of heat-generated clouds was the only blemish in an otherwise blue sky.

Jason sat at one of only four tables on the hotel’s piazza, sipping coffee with the consistency of molasses. He would not have been surprised had it sucked the spoon out of his hand. Probably enough caffeine to make Sleepy, one of Snow White’s dwarves, into an insomniac.

He was just about to help himself to the breakfast buffet of fruit, cereal, cheese, and meats when the hotel’s manager stepped outside. “Mr. Young?”

Jason’s passport, the one with the Dominican entry and exit visas, proclaimed him to be Harold Young of Baltimore.

“Mr. Young, the package you asked about has arrived.”

The parcel was heavy for its size. Besides his name, it had no other markings. If the manager found the private delivery of a package to a foreign guest unusual, he didn’t show it.

Giving the man a few euros as a tip, Jason abandoned breakfast for the moment to return to his room, a white plaster-walled backdrop for paintings of the flowering cacti that covered Sicily. Once alone, he tore the brown paper from a box made of heavy cardboard. Inside was a holster with a belt clip, a SIG Sauer P228, the same type of weapon he had carried on St. Bart’s, and two clips loaded with thirteen rounds each. A quick inspection revealed a third clip, also loaded, already in the weapon.

Jason slid the extra magazines into his pocket and fastened the gun onto his belt at the small of his back, where it would be concealed under the loose-fitting guayabera he had purchased for that purpose. For the first time since arriving, he felt completely dressed.

Maria Bergenghetti was waiting for him when he returned to the lobby.

He had anticipated a middle-aged academic, perhaps with the dark skin and short stature of most Sicilians. Instead, he was looking at a young woman of five-nine or — ten whose sun-streaked hair was tucked into a bun under a pith helmet, the sort of headgear one would expect to see on a British archeologist of the last century. She wore khaki shirt and shorts, loose fitting but not enough to conceal a figure that would be perfectly at home on a beach on St. Bart’s.

Blue eyes peered at him quizzically. “Mr. Young?”

Jason managed to shake off his surprise. “Er, yes, you must be Dr. Bergenghetti.”

“Well, I am hardly Dr. Livingstone. Do you stare like that at everyone you meet?”

He felt himself flush as he extended a hand. “Only the ones who look more like a swimsuit model than a volcanologist.”

She shook. Her hand was cool, as though it had somehow managed to evade the growing Sicilian heat. “I am not sure what a volcanologist looks like.” There was a sparkle in her eyes. She was obviously enjoying the repartee. “And that remark borders on sexism, something I understood you Americans abhorred.”

He couldn’t place her accent, if indeed she had one. “Only unattractive women, Doctor. The pretty ones enjoy being admired, as they do in any country. Join me for breakfast?”

He led her out onto the piazza, gratified to see his table was still vacant. They sat, and Jason filled her coffee cup. “You speak excellent English.”

She smiled, showing a gap between her front teeth that was somehow rather sexy. “I should. My father was with the Italian diplomatic corps in Washington. I spoke English before I could even pronounce Italian.” She took a sip of the coffee, wincing from the bitterness. “In fact, I did my undergrad work in the States.”

“In volcanology? Seems an dangerous field, climbing up mountains, dodging hot lava, never knowing when things are going to blow up.”

She treated him to another glimpse of gapped teeth. “Dangerous for a woman, you mean. Your sexism is showing again.”

Jason held up his hands, palms outward. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean…”

“Of course you did,” she said pleasantly. “And it is refreshing. Did it ever occur to you that women get just as tired of political correctness as men? Anyway, I got interested in geology, went to the Colorado School of Mines, came back to Italy with my parents, got bored, got married, got even more bored, and got divorced. I was looking around for something to do, something that would sufficiently shock my ex into finally accepting the fact that I was no longer his playmate. Studying volcanoes seemed perfect for all the reasons you mentioned, plus the fact that you get really grimy.” She reached into her purse, producing a pack of Marlboros. “Don’t suppose you speak any Italian?”

“Not much. Just a few situational phrases picked up in bad company.”

“Such as?”

Jason watched her light her cigarette. “Muova quel rottame, cretino!”

She laughed, an almost musical sound. “You must have been driving in Rome. ‘Move that junk pile, you cretin!’ ”

Jason grinned. “Then I learned, ‘Ma perche e chiuso il museo oggi?’ ”

“Why is the museum closed today?”

“Ma perche il museo e chiuso domani?”

“Why is the museum closed tomorrow?”

“And ‘Quanto tempo starano in sciopero?’ ”

She laughed again. “ ‘How long will they be on strike?’ What do you do for a living, other than Italian phrases?”

Jason was unprepared for the question. “Well, I have a business back in Baltimore….”

“One that involves the geographics of volcanic material?” She arched a skeptical eyebrow. “That is pretty lame, Mr. Young. Or whoever you really are.”

He grinned. “Dr. Kamito said you were the best. He didn’t say you were perceptive, too.”

“Being married to an Italian man makes you perceptive. Suspicious and skeptical as well. Remember Casanova?”

“The greatest of lovers, at least according to him.”

“Perfect description of my ex. But so much for my life and hard times. Exactly what is it you want me to do?”

Jason produced the vial of material Kamito had given him. “Tell me where this came from.”

She accepted the glass tube, holding it up to the light. “Where did you get it?”

“From Kamito.”

She sighed loudly. “I mean, what is its origin?”

“Apparently somewhere around the Mediterranean. Exactly where is what we want to know.”

She took the sample and stood, her coffee cup still full. “I hope you are more generous in paying for my time than you are with information. I have a crew checking monitors up on the hill”—she nodded toward Aetna—”and I need to make sure they do it right. One mistake and a lot of people around here would be unhappy.”

“Unhappy or buried?”

“Both, most likely.” She turned for the door. “But I should have whatever answer there is by the end of the day.”

Jason walked beside her, stopping to open the door that led to the postage stamp — size parking lot. “Figure out what I owe you. And if it isn’t too much trouble…”

She regarded him with a mocking expression. “Let me guess: you would like me to show you the town and have dinner.”

Jason chuckled. “Close. I was going to ask you for your recommendations as to restaurants, but I like your idea better. What time suits?”

She opened the door of a dusty Ford Explorer, one of only two cars that nearly filled the lot. “I will be here about seven or so.” The door slammed shut and she cranked the engine, her head out of the window. “In the meantime, there is an old Norman fort at the top of the hill you might want to explore. At the bottom, there is a pretty well preserved Greek amphitheater. I would invite you to come up Aetna with me, but we would be in areas closed to the public.”

“And as you said, it’s both dangerous and grimy.”

He watched as she backed out and drove downhill, shading his eyes until her car disappeared around the first of the series of hairpin turns that was Taormina’s only road.

CHAPTER TWENTY

They sat in a café facing the piazza that was the center of Taormina. Since no motorized vehicles were allowed in this part of the town, the only sound came from the square’s baroque fountain, which, along with the fortresslike cathedral of San Nicola, was radiating with the Chianti red glow of sunset. A few blocks away, faint shouts came from a street soccer match between several boys, each of whom wore the jersey of a different team. Jason drained the last of a beer; he felt dehydrated from an hour’s tour that had included everything from Palazzo Corvaja, the Norman building that had housed the first Sicilian parliament in the fifteenth century, to the ancient Greek amphitheater.

Tourism, he decided, was thirsty work, particularly when every third building sold adult refreshment.

Maria nursed a glass of Sicilian white wine, a product Jason had determined would have better use in removing paint. Her streaked hair was down, giving a softness to her face. Her simple black dress was adorned only by a brightly colored scarf around her neck, an embellishment Jason instantly recognized as Hermès.

The signature blue and red of the silk had given him a shock he was not sure he had been able to conceal. Hermès — one of Laurin’s few extravagances. She had adored the colors and patterns unique to the French designer, keeping each in its signature orange box. At thirty-five and a half by thirty-five and a half inches, the square was large enough to serve as scarf, shawl, skirt, or even a top. Utilitarian as well as decorative, Laurin had described them.

Maria glanced down, checking the neckline of her dress. “I hope it is my scarf you’re admiring.”

“Uh, yeah,” Jason managed. “Hermès, isn’t it?”

She smiled. “Something men do not usually recognize unless they’ve bought several.”

“At three hundred per, they’re hard to forget.”

Would he ever find a place where Laurin was absent, somewhere a phrase, a landscape, a scarf wouldn’t remind him of her loss? He hoped not.

He forced his attention back to Maria. The dress she wore displayed her figure to more advantage than did her work clothes. Jason was deciding she was more than simply attractive. She was receiving admiring glances from almost every man who passed.

“Well,” she said, “you have now pretty much seen everything except the Wunderbar.”

Jason stopped watching men watch Maria and faced her. “Wunderbar?”

“Favorite haunt of your Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, movie stars.”

“Thirty years ago, wasn’t it?”

“People here still talk about it.”

Jason drained his glass, noting the surrounding buildings, some of which dated back to the Hellenistic period. “I don’t doubt it. Probably still talk about Ulysses passing thorough on his way home from Troy, too.”

She looked up from making concentric circles on the tabletop with the bottom of her glass. “I thought Americans loved their celebrities.”

“Want to try getting a waiter’s attention when Tom Hanks is at the next table?”

She laughed. “Point taken. But I doubt Liz and Richard are at the Wunderbar tonight.”

Jason signaled to the waiter. “Hungry? Where’s a good place for authentic Sicilian cuisine?”

He paid the tab and she slipped an arm through his as they walked down the cobbled streets. Greek, Norman, Ottoman, all had left their imprint. They had gone only a few blocks when she veered into an alley, stopping in front of some tables in the street. From inside came recorded accordion music.

“Best spada alla ghiotta on the island,” she announced.

Jason started to ask for an interpretation, thought better of it, and pulled a chair out for her. “I’ll take your word

for it.”

Over more white Sicilian wine and beer, he asked, “The samples, could you determine where they came from?”

She spoke to the hovering waiter in the harsh Italian dialect of Sicily and then nodded, digging in her purse. “The percentage of sulfates, the presence of certain igneous similarities such as the radiation level… they differ with each volcano.”

Jason shook his head. “Whoa! I appreciate your work, but I don’t need a tutorial.”

“No doubt about it, the Campania.”

He waited a moment for the sole waiter to set down the prima platte, a steaming plate of pasta con le Sarde. “Campania? You mean around the Naples area?”

She was spooning half of the macaroni, sardines, and wild fennel onto her plate. “Yep.”

He reached for what was left, noting it was considerably less than half. “What volcanoes are around Naples? I mean, Vesuvius hasn’t erupted since, what, 1944?”

She took a tentative taste, sighed with satisfaction, and said, “The sample was from a volcanic area, not necessarily an active volcano. Besides, the whole Bay of Naples has seen volcanic activity. The ancient Greeks and Romans regarded the thermo-mineral water that bubbled up in the Phlegraean Fields to be curative of a number of—”

Jason’s fork stopped halfway to his mouth. “The what?”

“Phlegraean Fields, in Baia.” She saw his puzzled expression. “At the northern end of the Bay of Naples. Mount Nuovo erupted there in 1538. Then there’s Lake Averno, a perfectly round lake that surely was a volcanic crater.”

“The whole Bay of Naples area is pretty large.”

He took a bite of the appetizer. Now he understood why the local wine had an astringent, puckering effect: the native food had a salty quality, sort of like anchovies out of a tin.

“Couldn’t you be a little more specific?”

She had nearly cleaned her plate and was eyeing his. “Just why would a Baltimore businessman want to know, Mr. Harold Young?”

He finished the last of his appetizer before meeting her gaze. “Does it matter?”

She sat back in her chair, fished around in her purse again, and produced a pack of cigarettes. “Do you object?”

“They’re your lungs.”

A lighter appeared and she puffed greedily. Blue smoke disappeared into the surrounding darkness.

“Does it matter?” she mused. “I suppose not, not if we say good-bye tonight.”

Jason was surprised to realize he very much did not want to say good-bye at all.

“On the other hand, as you Americans say, if we remain, er, friends, it matters very much. You see, Harold, or whoever you are, I was married to the ultimate liar. I think I mentioned him.”

“Casanova.”

“Yes, him. Just like some people have a violent reaction to, say, penicillin, I am allergic to liars. I know damn good and well some businessman from Baltimore didn’t come all the way to Sicily to see me just because he had a personal curiosity as to the geographic origin of some soil and rocks. I also listen to my colleague Dr. Kamito at various professional gatherings. I cannot say I know, but I sure suspect that he does work for some people who are not in it for the pure science.”

Jason started to interrupt but she went on. “No, let me finish. What Ito does and for whom is none of my affair. But I view with suspicion anyone he refers. I don’t really care what your ‘business’ is.” She made quote marks in the air with her fingers. “But I do insist on knowing who the hell you really are. Short of that, we will enjoy the meal, part on good terms, and I hope you enjoy your stay in Sicily.”

Jason was silent while the dishes were removed and the swordfish served.

“Answer enough,” she said, tearing off a piece of bread and dipping it in the small dish of olive oil. “I hope you like the entrée.”

They ate in silence, the only sound music piped from inside. He would never know if he had eaten the best swordfish cooked in vegetables on the island, but he was certain that the meal would not be easily bested. He was even beginning to tolerate, if not enjoy, the local wine.

Leaning back on his chair’s rear legs, he looked up and down the narrow alley, where unevenly spaced streetlights created archipelagos of illumination in a sea of darkness. An old woman, dressed in the traditional black, leaned from an upper window to shake a tablecloth free of the evening’s crumbs. Another reached to tend to a window box of listless flowers. Men gathered around a pair of cardplayers inside gave grappa-induced laughs.

Jason broke the silence between them. “This is authentic, Liz and Richard notwithstanding. Seems like the real Sicily. No TV, no iPods, no ringing cell phones. Totally un-Americanized.”

Maria looked up from her plate with mischief in her eyes. “You sure about that?”

“About what, that this is one of the most non-American-like places I’ve seen in Europe?”

She put a hand behind her ear. “Really? Just listen.”

The canned music that he had hardly noticed. It was the theme from The Godfather.

A few minutes later, they were walking back to Maria’s car when Jason said, “I’m at a bit of a loss: I know the samples came from around Naples, but that’s too large an area to be of any help.”

Maria stopped, turning toward him. “I would like to help, but I don’t even know your real name, let alone what you are looking for.”

“ ‘Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.’ ”

“Milton, Paradise Lost. Knowledge is its own reward.”

“Ben Franklin?”

“Maria Bergenghetti.”

Jason grinned. “Okay, you got me….” He stopped midsentence, his attention drawn to the sound of an engine. “I thought you said cars weren’t allowed….”

Maria was looking over his shoulder, a question on her face. “They are not, only delivery vehicles and garbage pickup, both in the early morning.”

Jason turned and saw it: one of those trucks peculiar to European cities with narrow streets. Not as large as a small pickup, but larger than a conventional sedan, the truck filled the alley. Its headlights were dark, it showed no intent of stopping, and there was no room on either side for Jason or Maria.

Jason didn’t have time to think; he reacted.

Roughly shoving Maria into the first recessed doorway he saw, he began to run. There was no hope of outdistancing the truck, but the farther he got from Maria, the less likely the driver was to take the time to try to harm her also.

He thought of the SIG Sauer clipped to his belt and discarded the idea immediately. A bullet ricocheting from the sides of the buildings lining the narrow alley would be as likely to hit a resident as the truck driver. Besides, there was always the chance the driver had gone to sleep at the wheel, had a heart attack, or was motivated by something other than homicidal intent.

And there was the certainty that gunshots would bring the attention of the police, something that could end Jason’s mission as certainly as that truck.

The sound of the small engine at high rpms told Jason how fast the truck was gaining on him. At one point, he hoped he could make it to an intersection with a wider street, giving him more room to dodge the oncoming vehicle.

His pursuer was now so close, he imagined he could feel the heat of the engine.

And there was no intersection to be seen.

But there were window boxes like the ones he had seen from the dinner table.

With hardly a break in stride, he gave a leap, adrenaline adding a Michael Jordan quality to his jump. His fingers touched the rim of a ceramic window box and managed to close before gravity reclaimed him. His prize was much heavier than he had anticipated, but at least he could move it using both hands.

Half running, half stumbling, he made it to the next recessed doorway. As anticipated, the truck swerved just enough to aim a fender at him.

At the last possible moment, Jason took advantage of the truck’s effort, stepping into the narrow angle between where the front bumper angled toward the door and the wall of the building. The truck was committed, although brakes screeched in futility against cobblestones before the left front fender smashed into the edge of the doorway at precisely the place Jason had been. At the instant of impact, Jason swung the window box at the windshield.

He was rewarded with the sound of crunching safety glass and a yelp.

Without stopping his forward motion, he had a hand on the truck’s door handle and wrenched. He didn’t slow to bend over and look. Instead, he grabbed the first thing he touched and snatched.

There was another yell and Jason held a man by the shirt collar. The man struggling in his grip had the same bulky build, the same slant to the eyes and shaved head as the man whose picture he had seen, Eglov. But it wasn’t the same man.

The man was reaching inside a pants pocket when Jason took a hand from the shirt’s collar to grab his assailant’s wrist. As Jason pulled it upward, light reflected from the long, thin blade of a stiletto.

Jason saw not only the knife but flames of that September morning. He heard screams, one of which could have been Laurin’s. The agony of his loss, coupled with his anger at nearly being run down like a dog in the street, ignited a fury that erased any rational thought.

Grabbing the hand with the knife, Jason snatched the arm level, at the same time bringing the heel of his other hand crashing down on the wrist.

Jason thought he could hear the ulna snap a split second before there was a howl of pain and the clatter of steel falling onto stone.

His former assailant was moaning as Jason changed hands to take the shattered wrist in his left hand while stooping to scoop the knife from the street with his right. Blade in hand, he drew back for the underhand stroke that would drive the blade under the protection of the rib cage and up into the heart.

“Stop it!”

Startled, he whirled to see Maria standing only a couple of feet away.

“Stop it!” she commanded again. “You are not going to kill that man!”

Something in the tone of her voice made Jason hesitate just long enough to think rationally. Lights were flickering on up and down the street. No doubt the sound of the truck’s crash had drawn more than one person to their window. Poor light or not, Jason was not going to bet someone wouldn’t be able to identify him to the police.

Instead of the coup de grâce he had begun, Jason drew back his hand and threw the knife as far as he could before slamming the would-be assassin against the wall.

“A little something to remember me by,” he said, delivering a kick to the man’s groin.

There was a grunt, and the man melted into a groaning heap on the cobblestones.

Maria had Jason by the arm. “We must go. Someone’s surely called the police by now.”

As though to verify her observation, the pulsating wail of a siren could be heard.

Jason let himself be led down the alley and into another.

Damn, he thought. Someone must have found the plane on the Dominican shore. That discovery, coupled with a liberal application of cash to Dominican officials for a search of names on exit visas as compared with recorded entries, as opposed to mere stamps on a passport, would have revealed that a Mr. Harold Young was the only person within days to depart the Dominican Republic without having first entered it. Having apparently dropped out of the sky, Young then departed Santo Domingo for Paris via Air France. It would have taken simple hacking into reservation computers to determine that Mr. Young had taken Alitalia from Orly to Rome, thence onward to Messina.

They had arrived at Maria’s Explorer. She was fumbling with the keys. “Whatever your real business is, somebody is displeased by it.”

He took the keys from her shaking hand. “Apparently.”

The lock popped open and he held out the keys.

She was staring as though seeing him for the first time. “You really were going to kill that guy.”

Jason was walking around to climb into the passenger seat. “Think of it as returning the favor. He very nearly ran over both of us.”

Now Maria was having trouble getting the key into the ignition. Jason got out and opened her door. “You’re in no shape to drive. Let me.”

Wordlessly, she climbed over the gearshift and brake and sat.

Jason started the engine. “Where to?”

For a moment he wasn’t sure she heard him. Then: “You really were going to stab him.”

She was looking straight ahead.

Jason bit back a retort and said, “Maria, we don’t know that he was alone. I’d suggest we not hang around to find out. Where to?”

She shook as though the words had shocked her back into reality. “To? Your hotel, I guess.”

Jason was turning the car around, stopping only to allow a blue-and-white police car, siren wailing, to pass, headed in the direction from which they had come.

“Not a good idea. If that guy knew where to find us, he — or one of his pals — must have followed us. They know my hotel. Next time they might get lucky. Where are you staying?”

She turned to look at him, the hint of a nervous smile tugging at her mouth. “I thought I had heard every come-on there was, but this is the first for ‘I need to stay with you tonight because someone is trying to kill me.’ ”

“Delighted to have exhausted another possibility of human experience,” Jason said. “I might remind you that truck driver was perfectly willing to kill you, too. Which way?”

Her eyes grew large. “Me? He had no reason to want to run me over!”

“You want to bet your life on that? Which way?”

She pointed. “Right, up the hill past your hotel.”

They were quiet for a few minutes until she said, “I think it is only fair to warn you: I do not do sleepovers with men whose real names I do not know.”

He nodded, keeping his eyes on the serpentine road but taking his right hand off the wheel to extend it. “Jason. My pleasure.”

She shook it. “Certainly not mine. Nearly getting killed is hardly my choice of a date. This sort of thing happen to you often?”

He was steering around a hairpin turn to the left. “Often enough. Comes with the job.”

“Which is?”

“Now a job description’s a prerequisite to staying at your place, too?”

“Okay, so I can guess.” She looked out over one of the turns. The town below was a handful of jewels. “You really were going to kill him, were you not?”

Jason nodded. “Someone very like him and his pals killed someone very dear to me, along with about three thousand other innocent people, all in the same morning. They’re terrorists, Maria, just the same mind-set as any other bunch willing to kill to achieve their political or religious aims. Civilization as we know it can’t coexist with people like that.”

“ ‘Civilization as we know it’? Don’t you think you are being a little extreme?”

He took his eyes off the road just long enough to give her a questioning glance. “Extreme? I don’t think so. There’s only one way I see of solving the problem: exterminate them like any other vermin.”

“I take it your business involves just that.”

“You could say that.”

“Surely there are good people with extreme ideas.”

“Ideas are free. It’s when someone is willing to kill anyone who doesn’t share them that the trouble starts. Not to put too fine a point on it, but General Sheridan could have been speaking of fanatics, religious or political, when he defined a good Indian: a dead one.”

“Turn right here.” She pointed to a barely discernible path leading away from the road. “You don’t really believe that.”

He was squinting, trying to make sure he stayed on the dim track. “Let’s say I believe most beliefs have their good and bad people. Culling one from another is the problem.” A small building took shape in the headlights. “That it?”

She nodded. “The government rents it for staff when we are working at Aetna. There is a spare bedroom.”

He turned off the lights and ignition. “Lucky me.”

She looked over her shoulder as she reached for the door. “Lucky you, indeed. Believe me, it always was the spare room or the foldout.”

Jason got out and shut the door. “And here I thought my charm, wit, and good looks would prevail.”

She produced a set of house keys from her purse. “I am almost as allergic to violence as I am liars. I would say we have a real personality conflict.”

She opened the door and flipped on the light. From behind her, Jason saw her body stiffen as she emitted a frightened squeak. In a step he was beside her, the SIG Sauer in his hand.

The single living room/kitchen/dining room was a wreck. Drawers had been pulled out, emptied, and left on the floor amid their contents. Drapes lay in heaps or thrown over chairs or a sofa from which the cushions had been removed.

Weapon in hand, Jason searched the two adjacent rooms.

“ ’Fraid they’ve been tossed, too,” he said, putting the gun away.

Tears were running down Maria’s face, whether from anger, fright, or both, Jason couldn’t tell. “Who… What did they want; what were they looking for?”

Jason righted a chair and picked up what looked like the matching cushion. “If I had to guess, I’d say they were looking for the samples I gave you.”

She was still gazing around the room, dazed. “I left them at the portable lab, not here. But why would they…?”

Jason slowly raised his hands, nodding toward the still-open door. “I’m afraid we’re about to find out.”

On the threshold stood a tall, bald man, the one Jason had seen in the photograph, Eglov. He held what Jason recognized as a Colt M733, a true submachine gun not much larger than a pistol. Delta Force had used them in the jungles of Asia.

Jason’s eyes cut toward a window.

“Don’t bother, Mr. Peters,” the intruder said in almost accentless English. “I’m not alone.”

“Jason,” Maria asked in an unsteady voice, “who are—”

“You can bet they’re not among the ‘good’ idealists we were talking about.”

The man with the weapon made a motion, and Jason heard a rear door crash open, making Maria give another frightened squeak. Rough hands grabbed Jason from behind, and he felt the weight of the SIG Sauer being lifted from his belt while a hand groped into his pockets.

A voice behind him spoke in Russian that Jason couldn’t follow.

“Who are you? What do you want?” Maria had regained enough composure to start getting angry.

In a step, the man with the Colt was beside her. He slapped her with the back of his hand hard enough to send her staggering backward.

“Silence! You’ll find out soon enough!”

Instinctively, Jason started to move toward her until he felt the jab of a gun’s muzzle in his back. Maria slid down a wall, sitting splay-legged on the floor.

The man who had hit her motioned to whoever was behind Jason. The gun muzzle moved, and another man, this one with a mustache, carrying an AK-47 with a full clip, walked over to a table and deposited the contents of Jason’s pockets along with the SIG Sauer.

“Okay,” Jason said. “Now that you’ve made yourselves at home, exactly what is it you want?”

Eglov smiled, showing one shiny steel front tooth. “Allow me an introduction. My name is Eglov. Aziz Saud Alazar was a friend and business associate. You have caused considerable inconvenience, Mr. Peters. But I what I want is information. We will start with why you have consulted Dr. Bergenghetti.”

“Consult?” He shrugged. “She’s an attractive woman. I like attractive women.”

A nod from Eglov sent Mustache over to where Maria was still sitting on the floor. She screamed as he yanked her to her feet by her hair. Transferring his rifle to his other hand, he ripped away the top of her dress and roughly grabbed her bra. Maria whimpered in pain and fright.

“Perhaps you will be amused watching my friend enjoy the woman,” Eglov said. “I can assure you she will not find it pleasant. Or perhaps you will slice to the chase, eliminate the cow excrement.” There was no warmth in his smile. “You see, I have mastered your American idiom.” The smile vanished. “The information I seek, Mr. Peters. Or the woman suffers.”

Jason sighed his resignation. “Let her go and I’ll tell you what you want.”

“Do you take me for a fool, Mr. Peters? I let the woman loose and the place swarms with police like angry bees defending a hive.”

“You don’t let her go and she dies here after you’ve learned what you want.”

Eglov shrugged. “She lives; she dies. It is a matter of your choice.”

“Yours, not mine.”

“You are not in a place to argue, Mr. Peters. The degree of her suffering is in your hands. Now, why are you here?”

Jason had no illusions that either he or Maria was going to walk out of this house.

Unless…

“Look, leave her alone. The information you want — it’s all on the BlackBerry.” Jason was pointing.

Eglov stepped over to the table, picked the device up, and handed it to Jason. “Summon the data you say is here.”

Jason punched a series of keys and scrolled up the beginning of a paragraph before handing it back.

Eglov scowled. “It is encrypted! Do not play games with me, Mr. Peters. You will have ample time to regret it.”

Jason pointed again. “Those coins that came out of my pocket. One of them has the decoding key.”

Alternating quick glances at Jason, the Russian used the hand not holding the Colt to sort through a dozen coins. “The American quarter?”

“That’s it.” Jason held out his hand. “Let me have it.”

Once he held the twenty-five-cent piece, Jason turned it heads up, offered the closest thing to a prayer he had said in years, and pressed Washington’s head. Pretending to concentrate, he said, “Look closely at the screen now.”

Eglov brought the BlackBerry nearer to his eyes. “I see nothing but—”

What happened next was a phenomenon Jason knew well from combat: the brain’s slowing things down to better comprehend what was happening. It was like watching a film in slow motion, where every movement was as deliberate and sluggish as though performed underwater, and there were one hundred twenty seconds to the minute.

With more of a whoosh than an explosion, a sound like a stove’s gas ring catching, the BlackBerry erupted. A single yellow flame blew the front of the device into Eglov’s face.

Between the detonation and the Russian’s howl of pain, Jason had the SIG Sauer in his hand.

Mustache never had a chance.

Before the man could let go of Maria’s bra and raise the rifle, Jason fired off two shots close enough to sound like one. The AK-47 flew across the room as though levitating on its own as Mustache slammed into the wall. He stood openmouthed before his head bent down as if he were contemplating the two bright red splotches that were blooming on his shirt.

He muttered something and fell face-forward to the accompaniment of Maria’s terrified screams.

The other man had a chance but not enough of one. A third shot from the SIG Sauer doubled him over. No longer interested in combat, he staggered outside.

Less than a second had passed since the BlackBerry had blown up. Jason whirled to take care of Eglov. The machine gun, along with a puddle of blood on the floor, was all that remained. Other than Jason and Maria, the room was empty of life.

Jason dove through the open door into the darkness outside rather than present an illuminated target. Even before his eyes became completely adjusted to the dark, he heard hurried feet moving unevenly on the pebbles of the driveway and saw a form moving at a staggering run away from him.

He took two quick steps in pursuit and stopped. There was no way to know how many others might be out there, nor whether there would be another attempt made on Maria and him that night. He wanted little more than a chance to finish Eglov then and there, but prudence told him getting out of the area was the wiser move.

But where?

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Maria had said nothing since Jason had draped a blouse from the closet around her bare midriff and bundled her into the Explorer. Tears she made no effort to wipe away coursed freely down her face, leaving trails that glistened in the light from the dashboard. Jason had been primarily occupied with the rearview mirror, making sure they were not followed, but the only traffic at this hour of night was trucks availing themselves of the deserted four-lane to make good time to their next destination.

He had left the house occupied by Mustache’s body and whatever other evidence the police might find. Sanitizing the scene would have taken more time than he was willing to risk in case Eglov had others nearby. Leaving additional firepower behind was contrary to any training Jason had, but he elected to leave the AK-47 where it had fallen. Should he be stopped, he wanted no part of explaining to authorities, who would take a dim view indeed of an unregistered, fully automatic weapon in the hands of an American traveling under a false name.

For the first time, he noticed that Maria was shivering in the warm Sicilian night. A chill or the onset of shock? Reaching an arm around her shoulder, he gently pulled her against him, sharing body heat. She made no effort to resist, nor gave any acknowledgment of the gesture.

“You okay?” he asked.

She gave the bare minimum of a nod and snuggled closer.

He was slowing down for one of the numerous automated tollbooths when she finally spoke. “Where are we going?”

“For the moment, as far from Taormina as I can get. The ferry from Messina to Calabria runs twenty-four hours a day.”

“And then?”

“I’ll surprise you.”

“In other words, you do not know.”

“Let’s say only that I’m not yet sure.”

She pulled away to sit up straight. “I think I want to go back to my office and volcanoes.”

Jason pulled out to pass a lumbering truck. “I wouldn’t recommend it. You saw what those guys were willing to do to you.”

She turned in the seat to face him. “You are saying I need to stay where you can protect me? I am not helpless, you know.”

Jason simply gave her a wordless look.

“Okay, okay, so we stay together for a while. I will call in to take leave.”

She put her head back on his shoulder. In minutes she was snoring gently.