Wild Card

ONE

“Seems to me you’ve probably got a couple’a leakers,” said Hendricks, a big, burly, florid-cheeked guy in his middle fifties wearing a dark blue uniform with a U.S. Customs patch on the upper left breast of its shirt. He shook his clipboard at a skid truck parked on the nearby tarmac. “Better come see them for yourselves.”

Three of the four men standing in a semicircle around him seemed disinclined to budge an inch. They were also in uniform, albeit of a type that represented no government agency or legal authority. Still, their green jumpsuits, orange Day-Glo vests, yellow hard hats, and Sun West Air Transport employee ID tags did help get across the message implicit in their balky expressions — namely that this was not their specific responsibility, not by any interpretation of airline procedures, being they were only cargo handlers whose job pretty much began and ended with clearing out the DC-9’s transport hold, which was precisely what they and the rest of their crew had done minutes earlier. It was obvious they’d seen all they would have preferred of the questionable freight, and didn’t intend to see any more unless and until they were told to move it over to the terminal. Either that or they heard from their boss, Tom Bruford, the other man outside the jet representing Sun West, that they would need to put their aching arms and backs toward doing something else with it… though they hadn’t the foggiest idea what that something might be.

“A couple, well, I don’t know. It seems pretty unusual,” Bruford said now. An assistant transport manager with the freight forwarder, he was short, thin, tired-eyed, thirtyish, and in his blazer and tie, the only one in the group to be sporting ordinary business attire. “They’re stacked one on top of the other, right? I’m guessing it’s just spillage on that bottom crate.”

Hendricks gave him an irritated frown.

“I used the word ‘probably’ for a reason,” he said. “Do we really need to argue?”

“I wasn’t arguing.”

“Whatever you want to call it.”

“I’m just trying to explain something about the fish crates.” Bruford sighed. “They’re required to have Styrofoam liners, absorbent pads for drippage—”

Hendricks held up a hand to stop him.

“Before you raise more of a fuss,” he said, “you might want to remember the shipment’s got six containers in total listed on your manifest, and I’ve got them all sitting on that truck over there, and won’t have any choice except to reject the whole goddamn skid load for likely contamination if you won’t cooperate.”

Bruford opened his mouth to answer, decided he’d better snap it shut for his own good. In his sound and objective critical estimate, the inspector was a hump of the first order. Wait and see, in a minute he’d claim he had cut Sun West some kind of break by conducting his spot check out here on the runway instead of routinely waiting till the crates got inside the Customs building — which happened to be right next door to the freight forwarder’s international reception terminal, a hell of a lot more convenient location for everybody involved.

“Got to be spillage, but I’ll go have a look,” Bruford said, and turned toward the skid truck.

Hendricks tagged along with him.

“They’re pushed a little over to one side,” he said. “I had them separated from the rest, see?”

A Hump with a capital H, Bruford thought. “I can see that, right, thanks…”

Dropping back about a foot, Hendricks glanced at the documentation on his clipboard.

“Trinidad,” he read aloud in a sour tone. “I noticed that’s the shipment’s country of origin.”

“Right.”

“You ask me, whoever carries imports or exports from over there is only looking for trouble,” Hendricks said. “Its national health regs, oversight procedures, airport security… they’re all a joke.”

Crouched over the supposed leakers, Bruford was thinking he didn’t remember having asked the fat leprechaun for his opinion about that or anything else. In fact, he’d have gotten along just fine and zipa-dee-doo-dah dandy without it.

As he’d started telling Hendricks, the rugged three-hundred-pound-capacity wooden crates his men had offloaded onto the truck were a standardized type the Trinidadian client, an international seafood wholesaler, always used for moving large fish. Each ordinarily would have three sides pasted with the requisite stickers marking out its point of departure, weight in pounds and kilos, exact contents, and other important information. The contents code labels on these half dozen boxes in particular read “YN/THU-NALBA”—an abbreviation used industry-wide for yellowfin tuna, scientific name thunnus albacares.

A quick examination of the skid load Hendricks had cited did reveal evidence of a leak in the topmost crate, and irrespective of his feelings about the inspector, Bruford couldn’t deny it looked fairly serious. Most of the spillage was at the lower left-hand corner, where he saw a wet, dark red slime that appeared to consist of blood, mucous, and maybe some water from melted packing ice. The heavy goop had run onto the lid of the crate underneath, and then gone dripping down over the crate’s side panel, soaking through most of the adhesive markers there and causing a couple of them to warp and peel away at the edges.

That, Bruford decided, was the discouraging part. On the positive flip side, he didn’t notice any visible damage to either of the crates, which meant that the problem in all likelihood could be attributed to the upper container’s load exceeding its weight limit rather than a break in the wood or insulating material during transport — that second possibility a worst-case mishap liable to spoil the fish inside.

“That fluid’s been seeping out so fast you ought to be glad I held back the crates,” Hendricks commented from behind him now. “If I’d let them stay together with the rest of your freight, sent ’em ahead to check-in, there’d be botulism and God knows what other germs crawling on everything off the plane. It’d leave you open to all kinds of financial liability.”

Bruford had to bite his lip in annoyance. Yeah, right, he thought. Such big-hearted concern. Hendricks breaking his chops was bad enough. Hendricks chumming up to him, freely offering his sage advice, took the prize cake. As if the guy was doing anybody here a favor. As if he didn’t have the slightest inkling freight forwarders were indemnified against that sort of thing. And as if it made more sense from a public health standpoint to keep the boxes sitting out in the baking Miami sunlight than to have them segregated inside the terminal’s enormous cool room, where their perishable contents could be refrigerated while awaiting inspection.

Bruford sighed, rose from his knees. “You want both crates opened?” he said resignedly.

Hendricks nodded.

“Be safest for everybody involved,” he said.

Bruford raised a hand and beckoned over a couple of his waiting freight handlers, one of whom had already pulled a crowbar from his leather tool-belt holster. “The inspector would appreciate a peek inside these two,” he said, motioning toward the crates.

The handlers looked at him unhappily.

“Right here, huh?” said the guy with the crowbar.

“Yeah,” Bruford said with a commiserative nod. “Here.”

The handlers turned toward the skid truck and got to work.

For a minute Bruford stood watching them start on the top crate. Then he turned to Hendricks, figuring he’d see how his theory about excess weight had gone over.

“Suppose the crate’s leaking because it was overpacked,” he asked. “We going to need to put it on a scale for you?”

Hendricks shrugged.

“Look at it from my position,” he said. “There’s a big enough difference between its declared and actual weight, it could be an intentional duty violation.”

“Or an honest mistake.”

Another shrug. “Subject to enforcement either way.”

Bruford frowned. He was guessing his question had been answered with the closest equivalent of a solid yes available in this piss-pond bureaucrat’s lingo. He was also wondering what cosmic sin he could have committed to merit God’s having punished him with the ridiculous crap being squarely dished out on his head today. But maybe there was no cause-and-effect explanation. Maybe sometimes you just had put it down to a hump being a hump to his core.

Bruford expelled another breath. Behind him the fish crate creaked and squealed in protest as its lid was wedged upward with the flat end of the crowbar.

He had started turning toward it again to check on his men’s progress when the most awful scream he’d ever heard tore through the air from that same direction, shredding through the loud turbine roar of planes that were landing and departing on the airport’s busy runways.

His skin erupting into gooseflesh, Bruford whirled around the rest of the way to discover the brawny six-footer who’d been working at the crate howling his lungs out, shrieking like a terrified little kid. He had his back to the skid truck and was pressing his fists into his temples, the crowbar he’d been using dropped heedlessly on the tarmac beside the box’s displaced lid. Meanwhile the other handler had remained by the crate, staring into it, his eyes so wide Bruford could see their bulging whites from where he stood.

He rushed forward, thinking maybe he shouldn’t be too eager to find out what inside those boxes could have sent a pair of grown men into crazed and seemingly unashamed fits of hysteria, but letting his feet take him over to the skid truck anyway, moving up to it with three or four long, hurried strides.

And then he was standing there looking down into the crate, feeling his stomach seize with horror and revulsion.

There were body parts inside. Instantly recognizable human body parts. Bruford’s disbelieving eyes picked out a headless torso with white knobs of bone protruding from its arm sockets. Then another beneath it, partially exposed under torn plastic wrapping and a scattered layer of freezer gel packs. One of them had belonged to a light-skinned person. The other to someone with skin that was a very dark shade of brown.

Both looked like they were male to Bruford, though he couldn’t be sure. He had also had no way to be positive the severed limbs packed in the crate belonged to the same two people. The only thing he did know before recoiling in shock and aversion was that there was a hacked-up anatomical jumble crammed against the container’s bloodstained foam liner. He could see everything, everything, wedged into every possible space, awash in a soup of gore. Arms, legs, feet, other pieces of human beings he either couldn’t or didn’t want to identify…

Everything but the heads, and the hands.

He turned away from the horrible sight, clapped a palm over his mouth to fend off an attack of nausea. He was aware of Hendricks behind him now, peering over his shoulder at the gross butchery inside the crate. His radio up against his ear, the inspector was calling out for assistance in a cracking, excited voice — either from airport security or the police, Bruford was too far out of his skull to tell. He heard a response squawk from the Customs inspector’s handset, jerked his head around, and knew at a glance that Hendricks was struggling with the same kind of paroxysms he’d managed to subdue a moment before.

Their eyes met for an instant. The color had drained from Hendricks’s cheeks until they turned an ashen gray.

“I told you,” he gasped hoarsely, wringing the words through livid, contorted lips. “Fucking Trinidad!”

Then he covered his stomach with his hands, doubled over, produced an awful retching noise, and threw up all over his shoes.

“Hey, you!” said Marissa Vasquez without slowing her jog in the sand. “Watch it!”

Felipe, who’d fallen a step or two behind Marissa, reacted about the way she would have expected and ignored her. Of course her zippy tone wasn’t what she might have called high in the intimidation factor…

“Ouch!” she said, feeling him pinch her rear end again. “Thought I warned you to quit—”

Before she could finish protesting, Felipe caught up to her, hooked an arm around her waist, and drew her into his embrace.

“Sorry.” He gave her a slyly playful smile. “Tried to check myself.”

Marissa threw her hands around his neck and stood facing him on the beach in the chill early morning breeze.

“You’re hopeless,” she said.

He shrugged and pulled her gently but irresistibly closer.

“You’re also fouling up my pace,” she said.

Felipe pulled her still closer, kissed her in the middle of her forehead.

“Bringing me down off my targeted heart rate,” Marissa said. And who did she think she was kidding? She fell into his arms, her heart racing right along, her increasingly short breaths having more to do with what Felipe did to her — on and sometimes before contact — than the exertion of their run along the shore.

He kissed her again, lightly, his lips touching her left brow, her right, her eyelids, the tip of her nose, then brushing down over the corners of her mouth, and further down to her neck as his hand glided up and up over the front of her running jacket.

Marissa felt ripples of warmth. “Felipe…”

He tilted his head back, a glint in his dark brown eyes.

“I think you’re heartbeat feels just fine,” he said, putting his hand right there, cupping it over the firm swell of her breast.

“Felipe…”

“Fine as can be,” he said huskily, and raised his other hand to her cheek, stroked her hair back behind her ear with delicate fingertips, a few strands at a time, and then guided her mouth to his mouth, and kissed her long and fully and deeply.

Her lips parted wide, hungry for him, Marissa felt his hand slide under her jacket and pressed herself against him to make it clear he could keep right on doing what he was, all the while surprised and further excited by her utter lack of modesty and self-consciousness. The early hour aside, this little beach on the Miller-Knox shoreline was a public place, and before Felipe Escalona entered her life that would have her made her far too uptight to carry on like a teenager having her first heavy make-out session. But this was what he did to her, and was how it had been for her since they’d met here almost a month ago to the hour, both out for Sunday morning jogs on the weekend before Easter.

They were yin and yang, opposites attracting, choose your favorite advice column canard for two very different types of people who seemed to make an ideal fit.

The only child of a Latino entrepreneur who ran a large San Francisco construction and real-estate development firm of his founding, Marissa was a few months shy of her twenty-first birthday, which would roughly coincide with her graduation from UC Berkeley, where she’d studied toward a BA in business administration and a minor degree in political science. Felipe, who was five years her senior, and whose trace of an accent hinted at his Mexican origins — he’d told her that his parents had immigrated from Guadalajara when he was a boy, and that he’d spent a couple of years in his native country earning a master’s in Spanish language and literature — made his living as a freelance writer of bilingual educational materials, and was presently contracted with a software designer called Golden Triangle to work on a program meant for high school classrooms. Easygoing and spontaneous, his tongue partially in cheek (or so Marissa assumed), Felipe insisted the key to his happiness and productivity was wearing sweatpants in his home office, and claimed the prospect of having to put on a suit and tie five days a week canceled out whatever lure a guaranteed wage might present.

By sharp contrast Marissa was pragmatic, sober, and normally controlled to an extreme, traits she believed came straight from her father, a man of strict discipline who had raised her as a single parent since she was ten, when terminal uterine cancer had claimed a still-youthful Yolanda Vasquez to deprive Marissa of a mother’s affection. All her life Marissa had found that her success within ruled social and scholastic lines had been the surest way to please him, and pleasing him remained as important to her now as it ever was. She felt the need to channel her considerable energy and intelligence within the structure of an imposed routine, thrived in the academic grid of scheduled classes and exams, and could not envision a career without organizational security and a regular weekly paycheck. On entering the employment market after commencement, she hoped to expeditiously find a position with one of the corporate multinationals that would utilize her specialized academic skills.

In her amorous affairs Marissa’s patterns of behavior always had been much the same — partitioned and ordered so as not to upset her normal balance. She’d cared for her two previous lovers and enjoyed the physical aspects of those relationships, but in each case the divide between their sexual intimacies and Marissa’s reserved expressions of emotion had left both partners ultimately dissatisfied, and made her wonder if she suffered from an irremediable personality glitch. Yet from the very beginning with Felipe, their sex had been a sort of catalytic conversion, an act of abandon binding her heart and body to his in a wholly fulfilling way she had never believed she would experience.

Still Marissa knew that she and Felipe were really, essentially different from one another in many ways… just as she undeniably knew she’d fallen in love with him. For three of the past four weekends they had spent together, she had continued to allow that it might be simple infatuation, albeit with a giddy extra charge. But lying drowsily wrapped around Felipe at her Oxford Avenue apartment Friday night, her thoughts getting into a relaxed flow after they had exhausted their passions in bed, Marissa had found it impossible to conceive of losing what he had brought out in her, or sharing it with any other man, and acknowledged then that it was time to release whatever emotional reins she’d persisted in holding onto.

Being who she was, however, letting go of her emotions did not mean she could simply have them bolt the fences. Marissa needed a framework within which to display and share them, and sought unambiguous definition for her relationship with Felipe if she was to feel altogether comfortable with it. If the two of them were not yet a mutually and openly declared, exclusive, official couple, then maybe what they were having was just a disruptive sidetrack in the well-coordinated progress of her life, a fling that — like the others that had preceded it — would lead nowhere in the end. In those moments late Friday night after he’d brought her to unprecedented pleasure and gratification, taken her as far out of control as she had ever been, Marissa had drifted off to sleep thinking she wanted to take the next step toward romantic legitimacy and introduce him to her father, whose stamp of approval she strongly desired, even while worrying more than a bit that she might be rushing things. But to her relief Felipe had met the idea with enthusiasm when she broached it the next morning, and, seeing no point in further delay, she’d arranged for them to meet for brunch up at the family home in San Rafael later on today.

Right now though… right now Felipe was once again making it hard to think about later on. Or about anything.

Not with what he was doing to her.

He kept his eyes open while they kissed, as did Marissa, their gazes locked, remaining that way until after their mouths came apart.

“We should quit,” she said, taking a breath, “before we do something against the law.”

“I won’t snitch.”

“Somebody might see us.”

“There’s no one else around.”

“This is a public beach.”

“No one’s around,” he repeated. “It’s six A.M.”

“Right about the time it was when we met.”

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

“I know where,” he said. “Let’s go back to the car.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

Marissa’s heart pounded. And those tingles coming from all the way down inside her…

“Felipe, this is crazy, we aren’t through with our run,” she said, her last bit of resistance sounding unbelievably lame to her own ears.

He slid his hand from under her jacket and T-shirt now, wrapped both arms around her waist, and pulled her hips against him, held her so close their clothes hardly seemed to give them any separation.

She gasped, swallowed.

“Omigod.”

Felipe nodded.

“Forget about running,” he said. “Let’s go while I can still walk.”

She understood perfectly what he meant.

They had driven down from Marissa’s place near the Berkeley campus, leaving her Outback in a sandy access road east of the tunnel that cut through the hills below Richmond Plunge. Tucked into a cove past the marina, the beach was a fairly secluded cul-de-sac pocketed in on its landward side by the split and crumbled remnants of an ancient cliff face, with the road where Marissa parked about midway along its irregular curve on the bay shore. Her usual habit was to trot to the cove from the vehicle and then start her laps in earnest, running to one end of the beach, then the other, and then doubling on back toward the access road to wind things up. She and Felipe had been in that final stage of their run when he had gotten to her with his bottom-pinching seduction, and they could see the road through some waist-high beach grass a short distance ahead to their right.

Her pulse raced as they walked toward it, holding hands. Felipe had gotten to her all right, gotten her weak-kneed with eagerness. Reaching the foot of the access road, she could feel whatever was left of her inhibitions sailing off toward the white gulls and cloud puffs overhead like helium balloons snipped from their strings.

Which made the unexpected sight of another parked vehicle a wholly frustrating comedown.

It was a Saturn wagon, one of those sporty new models designed to resemble sleeked out minivans, and it had been angled onto the side of the road opposite her car a few yards closer to the beach. Standing by the closed rear hatch with his back to them was a guy in a windbreaker, jeans, sneakers, and an army green field or baseball cap. He was bent over one of those large red-and-white beer coolers as if reorganizing its contents.

They paused at the foot of the road and exchanged looks.

“So much for us being alone,” Marissa said, thinking Felipe seemed especially out of sorts. She sighed, let go of his hand to slip her water bottle from its pouch in her runner’s belt, and took a long gulp. “Better have some,” she said and handed him the bottle. “It’ll cool you down.”

Felipe lifted the water to his mouth and drank without a word, still seemingly unable to quite grasp the idea that there might be more than two early birds roaming the beach in the state of California.

He was passing the bottle back to Marissa when the guy behind the Saturn straightened from rummaging around in his cooler and turned to look at them.

His appearance caught Marissa by surprise. For whatever reason — his posture, or the way he was dressed, or maybe because of that oversized two-tone beer cooler — she had assumed he would be a youngish man, but the face under the bill of his cap was far from youthful. In fact it was incredibly ancient. Lined and wrinkled, its cheeks sagging in loose folds of flesh, the slits of its eyes peering at her from above a vulturous nose and scowling lips, it was also infinitely unpleasant…

Then Marissa noticed what he was holding in his right hand. What he’d drawn out of the cooler, keeping it briefly hidden from sight by his body as he turned. And all at once her surprised reaction jolted up to one of surpassing shock and fear.

Not at any point in the waking nightmare to come would Marissa be certain whether she realized the man was wearing a mask before she actually saw his weapon, what might have been an Uzi, or something like one. But she knew what was happening the instant she did see it, knew it was her fault, all hers… and knew that none of the protective structures she’d built to contain her orderly little world had kept the truth from breaking through at last.

The man raised his gun in front of him, and then the rear doors of the station wagon were flying open, and more men were exiting both sides, three of them spilling from the doors, sprinting across the sand toward her and Felipe with miniature submachine guns also in their hands and obvious disguises pulled over their heads — a bearded pirate, a devil’s head, a grinning skull.

Tears began to flood Marissa’s eyes, further distorting the grotesque Halloween shop faces, but she held them back, checking them almost on reflex, refusing to succumb to panic. This was a public beach, hadn’t that been what she’d insisted? A public beach, where any break in the quiet would stand out. Her voice would carry, and someone might be close enough to hear her scream. Driving, walking, on a bicycle. Close enough to hear.

Make some noise, she demanded of herself. Come on, make some noise, scream your head off—

But it was too late, the men from the wagon were on her in a flash, surrounding her, a hand clapping over her mouth to stifle her rising cry for help. “Entra aqui! A prisa!” the one with the old man mask shouted to the others in Spanish, telling them to hurry up. And an instant later she was grabbed by the arms and shoulders and hustled toward the car with the metal bore of a gun sticking into her back. Alongside her, and then slightly ahead of her, Felipe was also jostled forward at gunpoint, stumbling a little as they pushed him toward one of the wagon’s open back doors.

He turned his head toward her, eyes wide, and started to call out her name, but was punched hard across the face by the man in the pirate mask before it could fully escape his lips.

They shoved Felipe into the rear of the station wagon as his legs crumpled underneath him, and moments later jammed Marissa through the same door, a gunman climbing into the backseat on either side of them, the others rushing around into the front.

This is my fault, she thought again mutely. It’s true, it’s my fault, I should have known.

And then the wagon’s motor came to life, and Marissa was jerked back in her seat as it kicked into reverse, cut a sharp turn away from the beach, and went speeding off in a cloud of spun-up sand.

“Trinidad,” Megan Breen said to Nimec.

“What?”

“And Tobago,” Megan said. “With Annie.”

“Huh?”

“Annie, your lovely and beloved wife.” She regarded him across her desk with mild amusement. “The place I mentioned… on Tobago, not Trinidad… is called Rayos del Sol. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.”

Nimec sat with a blank expression on his face.

“Testing one-two-three, Pete,” Megan said, and pointed to her ear. “Can you read me, or is it cochlear implant time?”

Nimec frowned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about your hearing. I’ve noticed it seems to conk out whenever I ask you to do something that conflicts with plans you’ve already locked in on.”

His frown deepened.

“I sat here listening to your Caribbean project update for half an hour,” he said. “You want me to run every detail back to you, I’ll be glad to oblige.”

“Which I guess would make your deafness selective.”

Nimec crossed his hands in a time-out gesture.

“We going to talk straight?” he said.

“I’d be peachy with that.”

“I’m not getting shipped out to Trinidad. Not with Ricci on our front burner.”

“Then we’ll shift burners.”

“That isn’t fair.”

“To him or us?” Megan said.

Nimec shrugged.

“Both, I suppose,” he said. “Our lead field op being on indefinite suspension is the kind of thing that leaves everybody betwixt and between. UpLink’s stuck without a replacement, Ricci can’t move on with his life.”

She looked at him, her large, intelligent green eyes holding steady on his face. Nimec braced for a difficult contest. He’d been in this spot with Meg before, or in similar spots, and didn’t see any easy give in her right now.

“I’m prepared to occupy a solitary corner of limbo for a while,” she said. “In a sense, we’ve been in it for over a month. Tom Ricci’s got us in a bind with all three branches of government and every major law-enforcement agency you can name. Even our best friends at the Pentagon have started to distance themselves, which puts our pending defense contracts at risk. And you know the table’s set for us to become the target of a public furor the moment any information about his one-man road show on the East Coast is declassified.”

“Figure the people whose lives he saved from those terrorists might be a few million exceptions to popular opinion.”

“And if it had gone the other way, I don’t know that even God in all his mercy could forgive us,” Megan said. “Ricci’s secretive actions could as easily have made those people casualties, Pete. But that’s over and done. He took us out of the decision-making loop by going it alone. Now it’s his turn to wait outside it while we deal with the consequences.” Megan paused. “You need some physical and mental distance from San Jose. A chance to order your thoughts before making a comfortable decision on whether he stays or goes.”

Nimec held his silence. Behind Megan, her office window gave a curiously smog-bleared view of Mount Hamilton away to the north. He remembered its rugged flank as everlastingly vivid and imposing from Roger Gordian’s office, which was just catercorner up the hall. But then, Meg’s window was just that, a window. Gord’s occupied an entire side of the room from floor to ceiling… really, it might be considered a glass wall. With that much light pouring through, Nimec supposed you would see well into the distance regardless of hazy environmental conditions. Anyway, it was impossible to make comparisons. And unfair. Gord was more or less retired. Megan had gotten a deserved promotion in rank to CEO and was more or less in charge of UpLink International’s corporate affairs. The outlook from her office was the one Nimec had here before his eyes these days, and it remained consistent with the view he’d always appreciated next door. How could Meg be blamed if it wasn’t as impressively crystal clear?

The simple fact was that, little by little, things had changed. And he’d have to accept it.

“Bottom line,” he said after a moment, “you’re telling me I need a vacation.”

Megan shook her head.

“Wrong,” she said. “Though I was afraid you’d see things that way.”

“How am I supposed to see them?”

“It goes back to the project update you can supposedly recite back to me by heart,” she said. “We’ve finished wiring Sedco Petroleum’s deepwater rigs for fiberoptics. Within a month to six weeks we should be finished laying our submarine cables between Monos, Huevos, and Chacachacare—”

“Those islands in that strait over there?”

“Boca del Sierpe, right,” Megan said. “The Serpent’s Mouth. It separates Trinidad and Venezuela.”

“Colorful name.”

“Give due credit to Christopher Columbus,” she said. “Anyway, we have to get on with some logistical decisions and I don’t think we should wait too long… for our own sake, and because we owe it to the Trinidadians, who’ve done everything within their political and economic capabilities to make us feel welcome.”

“As in footing a chunk of the bill for our fiber network.”

“And hammering out that bargain rate government land lease for our base.” Megan smiled wryly. “It’s nice to know you really and truly were paying attention to me before.”

Nimec shrugged in an offhand way.

“So we’re looking at either converting our temporary hq on the southern coast to something permanent, or moving the facilities inland and closer to a developed area,” he said. “I got that part. I realize there are different security issues depending on which site we choose…”

She flapped a hand in the air.

“Your turn to hit the pause button, Pete,” she said. “Security could determine our choice, and that’s the part I may not have stressed nearly enough. By this date next year we’ll have upwards of a thousand employees living and working on that base, a substantial number of them with their families. You know, and I know, that what’s convenient in terms of transportation, getting supplies in and out, those sorts of things, don’t necessarily dovetail with what’s safest for our personnel… and their well-being’s my top concern.” She paused. “I want your eyewitness perspective on which site makes the most sense. If you say we ought to stay put, fine, give me a list of suggestions on how existing security systems can be upgraded to the highest possible level. If you think changing locations would be best, I’d like your reasons laid out in a nice, bulleted report I can hand the board of directors along with my proposed budget.”

Nimec considered that.

“I might’ve been sold on the trip if it wasn’t for the vacation pitch,” he said. “It’d take three, maybe four days for targeted inspections with Vince Scull’s risk assessments in my hip pocket. But I can’t see how to justify two weeks away from here.”

Meg smiled, combed her fingers back through a long, thick sheet of auburn hair. “Pete, you’ve got to be the only man on this planet who’d fight to avoid this assignment. And you still haven’t heard me say ‘vacation.’ ”

“You call staying at some tropical resort work?”

Megan looked at him.

“Pull teeth all you want, I can stand the pain,” she said. “You don’t need me to tell you Rayos del Sol isn’t just another getaway. It’s an exclusive resort that caters to the world’s most powerful individuals… including our own past and present heads of state. It’s spread across an entire island in the Serpent’s Mouth and has its own international airport and ocean harbor. And lest we forget, it has a security force that’s been assembled by a former head of the French GIGN, Henri Beauchart, who would very much like to personally compare notes with our security chief.” She looked at him. “We should also keep in mind that its controlling owners include members of the Trinidadian parliament who have ties to Sedco, and are highly supportive of UpLink International’s regional presence. They’re eager to put their lush native paradise on proud display for us.”

There was another pause. Nimec thought some more, tugged his earlobe, leaned forward.

“I’ve been waiting for you to mention those e-mails you got a couple weeks back,” he said.

“My intention was to save them for a last-but-not-least.” Megan shrugged a little. “Every aspect of this deal’s been written about in the financial press, including the Rayos del Sol/Sedco connection. To be perfectly honest, I’d dismiss the messages as a nasty prank… somebody’s bush league attempt at throwing a wrench into things… if it wasn’t for that. Vague claims of accounting, inventory, and shipping irregularities at Rayos del Sol with nothing to back them up. Our nameless whistle-blower didn’t see fit to specify which inventories or shipments are supposed to be questionable, or even explain why he or she would choose to make the allegations to an UpLink executive.” She gave another shrug. “As I said, it’s all so insubstantial I’m tempted to ignore it. But it’s probably worth checking out while you’re there.”

“On vacation,” Nimec said.

Megan’s eyes were on him again.

“Repeat the word a hundred times, I still won’t understand why you find it so abhorrent,” she said. “Nor will I concede it’s even applicable. You have legitimate professional reasons for making the trip.”

“And for bringing along my wife, some fresh cabana shirts, and maybe a jug of suntan lotion.”

“No crime, Pete,” Megan said. “Your job’s taken you to some very unfriendly places. That doesn’t mean you’d be cheating your responsibilities by visiting a hospitable clime for a change. This isn’t the sort of opportunity that comes around very often. Enjoy it on the company’s tab. Bring Annie so she can enjoy it, too, I guarantee it’ll do both of you a ton of good—”

Nimec shook his head.

“We’ve got Chris and Linda,” he said. “They’ve got school.”

“They also have a grandmother to see they get there and back every day.”

He gave another head shake. “Annie’s mom lives in Kansas City.”

“And she just might be available,” Megan said. “In fact, she’d probably love the chance to come visit the kids and spoil them rotten.”

Nimec started to say something, stopped, at a sudden loss.

“What makes you sound so sure?” he said after a moment.

Megan held her hands out and wriggled her fingers.

“A mildly psychic hunch,” she said, smiling.

Nimec felt as if he was looking at a good-natured hijacker.

He smoothed a hand over his hair, slightly grown out from his preferred brush cut at Annie’s insistence. What was it she’d said the other morning? Her remark had come out of the blue — or so it seemed to Nimec at the time — when he’d been readying himself for work, their bathroom’s skylit brightness washing over him as he knotted his tie in front of the mirror.

“Ricci’s Field,” she’d said from over his shoulder. “Oh how does your garden grow.”

Nimec had glanced questioningly at Annie’s reflection, noticed the sobriety in her smile.

“This gray patch,” she’d explained, and fondly scratched the side of his head. “We should dedicate it to Tom Ricci. Post a little handmade sign that says how much we really owe him for putting it there.”

Looking himself over in the mirror, Nimec hadn’t managed to smile back at her.

Now he sat opposite Megan in silence, his eyes returning to the blurry view of San Jose that filled her window. He thought about all the opinions of Ricci he’d heard, more than he could accurately recall. Sometimes he would hear a single person give contradictory opinions in what almost seemed to be the same breath. A lot of them seemed to have equal or nearly equal merit. But only three voices counted in deciding whether Ricci had become an unsalvageable liability. Meg had already gone down on record that she’d had enough of him. Rollie Thibodeau had been cagier about his sentiments, which was pretty uncharacteristic for someone who normally had no trouble expressing himself. But he’d always disliked and distrusted Ricci, and seemed resentful of sharing the title of global field supervisor with him. He also normally aligned with Meg on important decisions involving the company’s security arm. That, Nimec mused, left him straddling the fence alone. If a vote were taken that very morning, he was betting it would come out two-to-one in favor of Ricci’s permanent dismissal. A delay might be his only shot at a different result, and Nimec wasn’t too sure he could find a totally honest and unbiased rationale for why Ricci would deserve it. Or that Ricci, who’d returned none of his phone calls for the past several days, would even want to stick around, which might prove to be the real kicker in the end.

Nimec looked out at the somewhat indistinct contours of the mountain a while longer, turning things over in his mind. There were decisions and there were decisions. Some were tougher than others, and with good reason. When you had one that couldn’t be reversed and worried endlessly about the consequences of getting it wrong, Nimec guessed that ought to be reason enough to rank it high on the difficulty scale. And maybe knocking a week or two off the calendar was exactly what he needed to get the decision ahead of him right.

Another full minute of silence passed before he brought his eyes back to Megan’s face.

“Hope you’re okay holding down the fort while I visit Shangri-la,” he said with a relenting sigh.

“Fret not,” she said. “I’ll keep our stockades guarded round the clock.”

“You and Gramma Caulfield?”

Megan smiled, reached across the desk, and gave his wrist a fond little pat.

“Leave it to us womenfolk, pardnuh,” she said.

Jarvis wanted to believe the chopper wasn’t out searching for him. Even as he opened the motorboat’s throttle to push it faster downriver than any boat piloted by a sane man should be moving in the pitch darkness, he was wishing he could convince himself they would not do so drastic a thing, send a helicopter into the air after him, a small and unimportant person in their big, important world. Someone who’d not taken so much as an unearned cent from them, and did not let his eyes stray far from the grounds he kept in nice, trim shape for his weekly paycheck. And why not think he’d be found deserving of a fair turn? An honest, hardworkin’ gardener is Jarvis Lenard, we’ll make an exception an’ let him be, they might have said. Save some trouble, ya know. Leavin’ aside that bad seed family relation of his, what have we to fear from the man?

Jarvis had to smile grimly at the thought. And right so. The bird might be whipping over that southern shore for some purpose other than to track him down. Just as the Sunglasses might’ve come poking around the employee commons for a reason besides his connection to poor Udonis. If he were to give his imagination a stretch, Jarvis supposed he could come up with an explanation that didn’t involve his cousin for the Sunglasses having asked about him in that menacing way of theirs, wanting to know this and that and the other thing from anyone they could seek out that knew him. Surely he could, and no doubt his words would find an accepting ear… but the truth would remain the truth all the same. His mother hadn’t raised any fools under her roof, and it was too late in the day to eat a plate full of lies and nonsense, especially those served up raw by his own brain. Not after hiding for almost a week in the bush with only the few supplies he’d taken from his cabin. Not since spending every dollar he’d saved over these past years, every dollar and more, to grease the hands of a bald hair parasite for use of his flimsy little seventeen-footer. And most especially not at this moment, while he was shooting along the channel at — what was his speed just now? — Lord Almighty, sixty miles an hour, sixty on a moonless night, heading out to the open sea.

The truth was the truth. Right so, right so. It was there in the sky above that Jarvis Lenard had his evidence.

The copter was out prowling the night for him. The Sunglasses never gave up. Sinister, menacin’ bastards, yeh. Weren’t going to quit until they found him, caught him trying to reach the mainland. And Jarvis knew that if they did, he would come to the same bloody end as his cousin Udonis and those men out of Point Hope he’d hired to bring him away safe.

Jarvis glanced over at the left side of the channel, where a forest of mangrove trees had crept toward the water’s marshy bank, their air roots groping out over the mud and rushes like slender, covetous feelers. Though the helicopter was not yet in sight, he could tell it was close upon him from the loud knocking of its blades, and didn’t need to check the GPS box on the motorboat’s control console to know there was a long way to travel before he reached the inlet. Probably his bow lights would be enough to guide him — bright new kryptons, they were, he’d received that much good treatment from the bloodsucking waterfront leach in exchange for emptying his wallet — and Jarvis supposed he could have found his course through the river’s many twistings and turnings by second nature after having lived his whole thirty-five years on earth near its shores. But say he reached the Serpent’s Mouth before daybreak? What lay ahead of him then? A journey of many miles around the cape, with a chance he would be coming into Cedros Bay against the tidal current, all depending how fast he could navigate.

Could be it would have been none the worse if sweet Nan hadn’t given him a heads-up and he’d stayed put, just waited for the Sunglasses to come for him. Could be. But why bother his mind with second guesses, eh? There were times when you had to make your choice and to stick to it whatever the outcome.

Jarvis darted along the curving waterway, his bow high, heavy sheets of spray lashing against the outboard’s windscreen as he breasted the surface. Still he was unable to leave the noise of the chopper behind… indeed the sound of its blades seemed closer than before. Holding steady as he could, he once again flicked a glance over his shoulder toward the south bank.

That was when he got his first fearful look at it, a sleek black shadow which might have blended seamlessly into the night except for the tiny red and blue pricks of the running lights on its sides and tail. The helicopter whirred in over the mangroves he’d just left behind, a spotlight in its nose washing the treetops in sudden brilliance. Jarvis saw them churn from its rapid descent, their interwoven branches beaten into wild contortions by the downdraft of its rotors.

The long shaft of the beam sliced ahead of the oncoming bird, roved over the trees and across the reeds to the water. It made a quick sweep over and past Jarvis, and then reversed direction and locked on his speeding craft.

Jarvis kept his eyes raised for only a moment before he brought them back to his windscreen, blinking as much from fear and agitation as the somehow otherworldly glare. His hands clenched around the butterfly wheel, he shot into high gear and poured on speed, pushing the outboard to its max, holding onto that wheel, feeling its jerky resistance and holding on tight, certain the wheel would tear free of his grip if he loosened it the slightest bit, spin right out of his fingers and send the boat careening onto its side.

The helicopter attached its trajectory to him even as he struggled to retain control. Cutting across the shoreline to the river, it veered sharply west and then swooped down low at Jarvis’s back, came down in pursuit like an enormous predatory nighthawk, the fixed, fierce eye of its spotlight shafting him with brightness. And the noise, Jarvis had never heard anything like it. The knock-knock-knock of the copter’s rotors beating the air had transformed into a deafening roar as it drew closer and closer, and the sound that assaulted him now seemed to outwardly echo and amplify the accelerated pounding of his heart.

And then, out of that clamor, a voice from the bird’s public address system: “Bring the boat to a halt! We mean no harm! I repeat, Jarvis Lenard, we mean no harm!”

Jarvis raced around a looping bend in the channel, hoping to buy whatever thin slice of time he could, aware that separating himself from the helicopter would be almost impossible.

He felt no surprise when it stuck to his tail as he took the turn, then gained on him, pulling practically overhead, its spot blazing down like the noonday sun.

“We want only your cooperation!” the voice blared over its loudspeakers. “I repeat, we want only—”

Jarvis squinted, trapped in the lights, struggling to stay his course while barely able to see what lay ahead. Cooperation, no harm, was that what they’d told Udonis and the rest when they caught them? As if the Sunglasses would find someone like him worthy of their attention, bother to dig up his name, ask his whereabouts of every acquaintance whose path he might have crossed lately, and then send a helicopter into the air after him — a search helicopter in the hours between midnight and dawn — without harmful intent. And was there any chance they had sent the bird up alone?

No, no, Jarvis thought. The Sunglasses, they did not operate so. Others from the fleet would be headed his way, he knew. Closing in at that very moment, launched off their pads or turned from patrols elsewhere on the peninsula, all of them summoned over their radios by the helicopter that had picked him up. And while no proof had ever been given to him, he’d heard talk among the employees that they carried electronic eyes that could penetrate the darkness, guide them straight to him in the night, make an image of a man by reading the heat that came off his body.

Cooperation. No harm.

Jarvis again considered those words with a black and stinging sort of amusement — and all in an instant had an idea. Perhaps it wasn’t so bad that they expected him to give up trying to scram with a simple, trusting smile on his face. Jarvis Lenard’s mother hadn’t raised any fools, no she hadn’t. But if the Sunglasses were expecting to find one tonight, he would be right glad to oblige and give them a peek at what they wanted.

A peek and nothing more, though.

His hand on the shift, Jarvis throttled back hard, cutting the engine with a jolt that nearly sent him overboard. He held onto the wheel, swaying to and fro, afraid the lightweight boat would capsize from its abrupt power-down.

The helicopter, meanwhile, came gliding straight on from behind and pulled to a hover not thirty feet above his head, hanging there almost like a toy dangled on a string, its blades churning the water to make the boat pitch even more violently. A hand over his eyes to shield them from the aircraft’s bright light and blasting wind, Jarvis craned his head back and saw two helmeted crewmen behind its bubble window.

“Remain calm, Mr. Lenard, you’re doing fine,” the voice from inside the chopper called out. “We’re sending down a rescue basket, and will give you instructions on how to exit the boat once it’s lowered.”

Bathed in the unremitting brightness of the spots, Jarvis finally had to break into a grin. He could not help himself, ah no, not after having heard that voice speak the word rescue. The men up there had gotten a look at a fool out here, surely he’d given it to them… but looks could deceive, as the old saying went.

Jarvis saw a hatch open in the belly of the chopper, watched the basket begin to descend at the end of its line, took a very deep breath, and held it.

Then, his lungs filled to capacity with oxygen, he tore his knitted dread bag from his head, cast it into the wind of the blades, and plunged headlong over the side of the boat into the river.

Jean Luc watched Tolland Eckers emerge from the field office and knew he was about to receive word that wasn’t good. The security man’s stiffly erect walk and hiked up shoulders said it all; he seemed to be overcompensating for the urge to hang his head as he approached.

“I’ve got that update you ordered from Team Gray-wolf, sir,” Eckers said, his voice raised above the thrum of the oil pumps. “It’s disappointing, but their search operation is still at an early stage.”

Jean Luc leaned back against the Range Rover, holding the protective helmet he’d worn for his inspection at his side. Besides the doffed hard hat with its goggle and earmuff attachments, he had on jeans, tan mocs, and an open-collared indigo linen shirt that was perhaps a half shade darker than the strikingly blue eyes that regarded Eckers from under his tanned brow.

“I want the simple details, Toll,” he said.

“Would you prefer hearing them now or on the drive back—?”

“Start right here,” Jean Luc said. “Just be kind enough to spare me the excuses.”

Eckers took a cautious look around from behind his Ray-Bans while a truck rumbled slowly past on the dirt road to their left, ferrying a group of roughnecks toward the wells.

“The man in that boat’s been positively identified as our groundskeeper,” he said after a moment. “It took a while to confirm this from our photos — bad angle. The bird didn’t pull overhead until right at the last minute, and he was wearing a dread bag that made it difficult to see his features.” He paused. “A dread bag, that’s one of those knitted caps some of the locals wea—”

“I was born and raised on this island,” Jean Luc interrupted. “My time away didn’t result in severe loss of memory.”

Eckers didn’t speak. A warm mid-morning breeze ruffled his loose-fitting guayabera shirt.

“I think we were already clear about who was out there,” Jean Luc said. “A man doesn’t head full-tilt for the open sea at two A.M. without some pressing reason. Not from where he did, and not on a crap motorboat.”

Eckers stood there uneasily another moment, then nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

“We know it was Lenard, and we know he took a dive out of the boat… to everybody’s surprise but mine,” Jean Luc said. “The question is, Toll, can we say what happened to him afterward?”

Eckers shook his head.

“I’m sorry, sir, we can’t with absolute certainty,” he said. “Our general feeling is that he drowned, though. The current’s pretty strong over near the lower tip of the peninsula. There’s soft riverbank — a mix of clay and sand — for a stretch that runs several miles up and down the channel from the point where Lenard abandoned the outboard. Vegetation’s weeds and cattails, some scrub growth. Our trackers are familiar with this kind of surface geography, and they’d have likely discovered evidence if he made it ashore. Footprints in the mud, bent or snapped rushes, something of that nature—”

Jean Luc cut him off. “I assume the scuba teams are on this.”

“Since last night.”

“And they’ve found nothing? No sign of him?”

Eckers hesitated. Jean Luc looked at him, waiting.

“The dread bag was retrieved from the water about a half mile down from where the son of a bitch took his plunge,” Eckers said. “That’s it.”

“The dread bag.”

“Right.” Eckers inhaled. “Again, the search is in its initial stages. We’ve got experience with this sort of thing and the resources to back it up.”

There was a brief silence. Jean Luc’s eyes remained steady on Eckers.

“Lenard’s from that village,” he said.

Eckers nodded.

“I see what you’re thinking,” he said. “Those people know their way around the island. And they’re protective of their own.”

“Aren’t they?”

“As far as that first goes, without a doubt,” Eckers said. “They’ve been there for generations. But a lot of them live in poverty or near poverty and won’t need much incentive to give up what they know.”

Jean Luc watched his face another moment. Then a smile crept across his strong, full-lipped mouth.

“Take me back to Bonasse,” he said, and reached behind him to open the Rover’s passenger door. “We’ll talk more on the way home.”

They got in, Eckers behind the wheel, and drove along the dirt vehicle path across the production fields to the Southern Trunk Road. On their left, pump rods moved up and down over the established wellheads in steady rhythmic fashion. On the right, enormous derricks soared above the newer drill sites, their various mechanical systems powered by humming diesel engines and generators. Beyond these were the storage and refinery tank farms, and further to the northeast the delivery terminals on the Gulf of Paria, barely visible now in the bright blue-green reflectiveness of Caribbean morning sunlight and seawater.

Jean Luc sat in the Rover’s comfortable air-conditioning and waved a hand toward the fields as they bumped along.

“You know, when I look out at all this, it would be easy to see two hundred and fifty years of family accomplishment,” he said. “But it isn’t my perspective. It wasn’t my father’s, or my grandfather’s, or great-grandfather’s. I’m a now kind of person. I focus on each opportunity as it’s presented. That’s how I was raised, a sensibility that’s been instilled in me. It’s how I run my life and business.” He gestured out the window again. “What I see out there are separate parts of a whole, individual projects at distinct, ongoing stages of development. I look at a well that’s ten, fifteen years old, ask myself whether it’s almost tapped out, or peaking, or somewhere in between, and then ask whether its efficiency can be improved. I see a thumper rolling over a particular location, or possibly a rig going up, and make a mental note to have the latest seismological and core sample data on my desk toot suite… Can you appreciate where I’m coming from, and how it relates our current problem, Toll?”

Eckers made a quick turn to put them on the main route.

“You’re saying not to lump sum it,” he said, nodding.

Jean Luc looked across the seat at him and grinned.

“Nicely put,” he said. “And right on. Experience is always helpful, but you can be lulled by past success. What we need is to reset our priorities, focus on today instead of”—his grin widened—“our master plan, if you’ll pardon my being cute.”

Eckers gave another thoughtful nod.

They rode in silence for the next forty miles, crossing the peninsula on the Trunk, a smooth multilane blacktop that dipped inland from the constellation of industrial towns around the petroleum fields and then swung southwest through undisturbed woodlands toward the beaches, sugar plantations, and fishing villages of Cedros.

Just short of an hour after they had left oil country behind, Eckers made the long, curving turn off the road that brought them within sight of the estate grounds and, high on a hill behind a spread of cedar copses, topiary, and ornamental gardens, the grand Colonial mansion with its witch’s hat turrets wrapped in balconies of stone.

“I’ll reset and reorganize the search,” he said, passing through the electronic entry gate. “See that our men — our assigned specialists—understand Lenard has to be their first priority.”

“As if our world stands or falls on finding him,” Jean Luc said. “In the meantime, I’d better massage our partners at Los Rayos. With their having gotten confirmation that the visitor from UpLink will be coming, this episode’s bound to have made them uptight.”

“Beauchart’s given them his reassurances.”

“They’ll want to hear from me anyway,” Jean Luc said. He paused. “Suppose I might as well make a call to Washington while I’m at it.”

Eckers glanced at him.

“Are you surprised?” Jean Luc said.

Eckers shrugged a little.

“Some,” he said. “I wasn’t sure you’d need to do that.”

“I don’t. Not absolutely. Not yet. But there’s the history. The connection between our families. Respecting it’s another of my ingrained traits.” Jean Luc paused again; Eckers’s silence betrayed his reservations. “No fear, Toll, I haven’t contracted the honesty bug… I suppose you could say fair’s fair between Drew and myself, though,” he said. “If I expect him to play by my rules of the game, I have to respect his.”

Eckers looked as if he was about to say something, but then moved on without another word. He went up the drive to where it rimmed the mansion’s front court, pulled over to the low curb, and stopped the vehicle.

“Do you want me to stay on the grounds?” he said as Jean Luc got out.

Jean Luc leaned his head back in the door and shook it once.

“That’s okay, I’d prefer you get back to the hunt,” he said. “And don’t forget our chat. Take one thing at a time, Toll. One thing at a time and we’ll be fine.”

Eckers nodded and became very still, staring out the windshield through his dark lenses again. Jean Luc studied him a moment, withdrew his head from the Rover, pushed the door shut, and turned up the courtyard toward the house.

A moment later Eckers spun away from the curb and started back down the drive to the gate.

Tom Ricci knew as he awoke that he was hung over. It was the dry graininess in his eyes, the sour taste on his tongue, the headache and burning stomach. This wasn’t his first time, not by far, and he knew.

He stretched out a hand, found the other side of the bed empty, and lay back in the morning light eking through the window blinds. He remembered her drawing them shut while he’d started to undress her, tugging at the cord as he worked on her blouse from behind. The pile of clothing had built up fast. Hers first, then his — they’d made a bet at the bar and he’d won. Ricci had gaps in his recollection of the night before, but that was among the parts that had stuck. There were enough of those, especially of what they’d done when they got back to her place, even if he couldn’t recall what their bet had been over.

He remained very still, his head on the pillow, not bothering to look around for her. She was in the kitchenette; he could hear her through its Dutch doors, opening and closing the cabinet, moving things around. Her apartment was small, a studio — hard to get lost in here for very long.

A minute or two passed. Ricci listened to her in the kitchenette, holding out the slim hope that she’d put up some coffee. But he didn’t hear the maker gurgling and supposed he’d have caught whiff of a finished pot.

He pulled off his covers, sat up naked on the edge of the bed, felt his brain slosh against his skull. He was slower leaning down to check for his holstered FiveSeven, making sure it was there underneath the bed where he’d left it.

Devon appeared from the kitchen entrance wearing a short robe of some silky black material and carrying a black melamine serving tray in both hands. She collected Melmac and vintage Ray-Bans and body jewelry, bought them through online auctions. With only two closets and a single cupboard over its half-height refrigerator for storage, her apartment became easily cluttered, but she kept the place neat and planned to start looking for a bigger one soon. The sunglasses were professional accessories, she said. For her costumes when she danced. She’d had the strategic piercings done for work and play, but keep it quiet from the IRS, she said. Melmac was strictly a hobby, and she liked the black pieces best. Black was her favorite color, and “black velvet” was the hardest shade of Melmac to find, she said.

Ricci supposed he’d learned a few things about her that weren’t in the basic course requirements.

She crossed the room to the bed in her bare feet, a bottle of Drambuie and two crystal cordial glasses on the Melmac tray, their drinks already poured. She set the tray down on the nightstand, picked up the glasses, carried them over to him, and held his out.

Ricci looked at her fingers around the glass. Their nails were long and carefully painted and manicured. She paid a lot of attention to her appearance and he supposed some of that would be for professional reasons, too.

“Hair of the dog,” she said.

“Maybe we ought to try those morning-after pills.”

Devon kept his glass between them without lowering it, gave him a slight smile over its rim.

“I already took one, just a different kind,” she said, and wobbled the glass. “Come on. My arm’s getting stiff.”

“No,” he said.

“I thought we weren’t supposed to use that word.”

“Who says?”

“You,” she replied. “Last night.”

Ricci looked at her. The two of them hadn’t done a lot of sleeping, and her large blue eyes were a little bloodshot. In the timid light coming through the blinds, with her makeup off, he could see faint dark crescents under them.

By tonight, when she danced under the bright lights, she would have erased or covered up the dark spots, made sure she was looking fresh for her admirers. Keeping up that appearance.

“We’ve been drinking too much,” he said.

She put the Drambuie in his hand, reached for her own glass, and sat close beside him on the bed, her legs crossed yoga-style, the hem of her robe brushing up their bare thighs.

“Here, here,” she said.

They clinked and drained their glasses and sat holding them in silence. Ricci felt the warmth of the sweet, powerful liqueur spread through him.

“It’d be good if we went out for a walk,” he said. “Got some air, put something solid in our stomachs.”

She moved closer to him, put a hand on his shoulder.

“It would be better if we stay right here and mess around,” she said.

Ricci glanced at the display of his WristLink wearable. Nice that they hadn’t made him turn it in with his Sword tag.

“It’s almost noon,” he said.

“I’m not due at the club till five o’clock.”

“Happy hour.”

“Maybe for the regulars.” Devon shrugged her shoulders. “We’ve got all day.”

Ricci looked at her. “What about A.J.?”

Devon shifted her body a little but stayed there close against him.

“You didn’t have to mention him.”

“He might decide he wants to see you.”

“That’s what answering machines are for,” she said. “He never shows up without calling first.”

“And you won’t care about the phone ringing. Or him leaving messages on the machine.”

“I’ll turn off the ringer, and you can distract me from the blinking light.” She paused. “A.J. doesn’t decide who I will or won’t fuck.”

Ricci looked at her.

“Kind of obvious,” he said.

They studied each other awhile. Then Ricci lowered his eyes to his empty glass and smiled a little.

“What’s so funny?” she said.

Ricci shrugged.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Maybe something about my sitting here with no clothes on, and talking about us having an affair behind your married boyfriend’s back.”

Devon massaged his arm with her fingertips.

“Since when does it bother you?” she said.

Ricci shrugged a second time, leaned across her, reached for the open bottle of Drambuie on the nightstand, and refilled their glasses.

“Bottoms up,” he said.

They drank and sat quietly on the bed. Then Ricci took the glass from her hand, put it on the tray alongside his own.

When he turned back to her, she had loosened the sash of her robe, let the robe fall partially open around her body.

He looked into her eyes. They were still a little red and also overbright now from the alcohol. Probably his weren’t any different.

He kept his gaze on hers without saying anything, and reached out, and tugged her robe the rest of the way open a bit roughly, and holding it like that moved his eyes down to her breasts, and let them linger there before taking a long look at the rest of her, and then slowly brought them back to her eyes. He was aware all the while of her touch on his leg, her hand probing, taking hold of him as greedily as his eyes had taken in her body.

“We don’t have any shame,” Ricci said.

“Like you said, we drink too much.”

Ricci looked at her, his head swimming.

“That our excuse?”

“If you need one,” she said, and then shrugged out of the robe, and fell into his arms.

He kissed her, and she tumbled onto her back with her mouth against his, biting his lower lip, running her nails over his shoulders, and down his back, and down, digging them into his skin.

The smooth silk of the open robe bunched in his fist, his face tightened into what almost might have been a look of pain, Ricci moved over her, a hard thrust that she arched her hips to receive.

“What about our walk?” she said, the words coming out in a broken moan.

“We’ve got all day,” Ricci said.