Wild Card

THREE

“Can you believe that airport down there?” Annie said from her window seat.

Belted in for landing, Nimec hadn’t noticed the view. A stickler for punctuality, he was checking the time on his WristLink.

“Mhmm,” he said. He’d taken an aisle seat aboard their Continental Airbus flight out of San Francisco, which, according to the analog watch display he’d selected, was right on the mark for its scheduled noon arrival.

Annie turned to him.

“Dear me, such enthusiasm,” she said. “How will I ever manage to keep up?”

Nimec felt like a killjoy. He supposed Annie would agree that he ought to.

“It’s nice,” he said a touch guiltily, looking past her out the window. “I think it’s a very nice airport.”

“Pete, when you told me Los Rayos was a bona fide destination for international passenger flights, I wasn’t sure what to expect,” she said. “But this just knocks me out… I’ve been to cities back home with fields that aren’t anywhere close to its size.”

Nimec scanned the rows of interconnected terminal buildings and warehouses, the sometimes parallel, sometimes converging bands of service roads and runways below. An airport, and a largish one, yup. Nice, nice, very impressive, and yet he couldn’t muster too much excitement. Still, he should have figured it was the sort of thing Annie would be keen on. Between her dad having been a pilot, and all those years she’d spent with the Air Force and NASA, she’d been around planes and runways forever. Earned a license to fly when she was, what, seventeen or eighteen? Whatever the minimum legal age might have been in Kansas. Hard to fathom, but she was a special case. He’d been different. The opposite, really — a slow starter. The highest Nimec had gotten off the ground before leaving South Philly to enlist in the service was a tenement rooftop, and he supposed the pigeons he’d flown out of the coop up above Boylston Street might have had a broader outlook on the world than he could have formed at the time.

Now he felt the thump of the Airbus’s deploying wheels, quietly sat back for its descent, and five minutes afterward was on the taxiway waiting for the call to disembark, along with the handful of other passengers bound for Los Rayos. The rest would presumably fly on to Piarco in the Trinididian capital, the plane’s final destination.

Annie leaned down and slid her carry-on from under her seat. It was an old — she proudly called it vintage — Samsonite leather train case her mother had brought to San Jose with her, passing it on to Annie as a functional keepsake.

She snapped open its lid.

“Here,” she said, reaching inside. “You might want to stuff this into your computer bag.”

Nimec glanced over at her, happily saw that she’d fished out his Seattle Mariners baseball cap.

“Hey, thanks.” He snatched the cap from her hand. “Guess I forgot to pack it.”

Annie nodded.

“That’s how come I remembered,” she said, and shut her case with authority.

The cabin intercom crackled out a pleasant thank-you-and-enjoy-your-stay, and then they were shuffling past the air crew and flight attendants into the jetway.

Nimec had expected to be met at the arrivals lounge by Henri Beauchart, the director of resort security, but they were instead received by his subordinate while looking for someone that matched the ex — GIGN chief’s description. A slight, dark-haired, olive-complected man who spoke with a faint British accent, he introduced himself as Kalidas Murthy (“Please feel free to call me Kal.”), and explained that his boss had gotten unavoidably detained at the last minute.

Nimec found this annoyed him, and got the sense Murthy had picked up on it.

“I offer a sincere apology on Mr. Beauchart’s behalf, madam and sir, and convey his desire that you might be his personal guests at dinner tonight,” he said, looking straight at Nimec as he addressed them. “Meanwhile, you must be eager to settle into your villa after what I hope was a good trip.”

He waved over a skycap to take their suitcases and then guided them through the terminal’s entrance, where a driver stood waiting by a gray stretch limo. As he opened the trunk for their bags, Nimec paused in the hot sun to admire the car’s gleaming body.

“A Jankel Rolls-Royce,” he said. “Pre ninety-eight.”

Murthy smiled.

“You know your automobiles.”

“Some,” Nimec said. “This one’s a classic.”

“It’s been refitted with the latest modifications and vehicle technology,” Murthy said with a nod. “You should enjoy chatting with Mr. Beauchart, who is quite an afficionado, and can better discuss its features… but come, I see your luggage is in the boot.”

They climbed into the limousine’s rear, Annie first, then Nimec, Murthy following to take the jump seat opposite them.

“I hope you won’t mind my pointing out a scenic highlight or two as we go along,” he said, another smile flashing across his dark Asiatic face.

Nimec leaned back without response. Although his irritation at being stood up by Beauchart had faded under the bright tropical sun, he wasn’t really in the mood for sightseeing. But what could he say? He was going to be here awhile and wanted to be courteous.

“Above all else, our planners have made it simple to orient oneself on the island,” Murthy was explaining. “This road leads north from the airport, as the signs generally indicate, and will take us beyond our commercial shipping facilities into the resort areas. The area to our south, over a third of the island, is an environmental preserve and wildlife refuge… forty miles of mangrove forest, coastal plain, and tidal waterways explicitly prohibited from development by the national government’s land use charter.”

“Does that mean no guests allowed?” Annie said. She smiled. “I like to explore.”

“Their safety requires that access be restricted… a decision that ownership left to our security team. But we understand its appeal to nature lovers, and have worked with the recreational staff so that they can conduct guided boat and walking tours,” Murthy said. “It may interest you to know there are active sugarcane fields and fruit groves at the jungle’s fringes. These belong to local growers descended from freed African slaves who have an economic reliance on the crops. Their claims to the land are also protected by law.” He paused a moment. “The villagers of Umbria tend to be reserved and mistrustful of outsiders, but in recent years a significant number have come to Los Rayos seeking employment opportunities, and their initial opposition to sharing the island with us has eased.”

Listening to him, Annie seemed intensely fascinated.

Nimec, meanwhile, had studied the interior of the Rolls with a more measured sort of interest before he turned to look out at what clearly had to be the island’s main harbor — a bustling complement to the airport. As they drove by, he could see four long quays and a great many smaller docks reaching out over the water. There were ramps, bridges, floating cranes, storage and handling areas with enormous freight containers stacked like building blocks, a lighthouse tower at the channel entrance, and all kinds of barges and ferries coming and going, or in the process of being loaded or offloaded by dock personnel.

The heavy activity surprised Nimec a little at first, although after a moment’s consideration he guessed it shouldn’t have. A resort the size of Los Rayos would have supplies flowing in continuously, and generate a high volume of waste that he assumed accounted for much of what was hauled off on the ships. Some of the produce grown by those local villagers Murthy had brought up might also leave the island by way of the harbor. Seemed pretty likely, in fact.

Though tempted to ask him about it, Nimec decided the timing wasn’t right. He’d been thinking about Megan’s mysterious e-mail informant, and felt it would be best to sit on his questions about the harbor traffic for a while.

He watched in silence as they left the docks behind and began driving past some of the island’s far more attractive visitor spots.

As threatened, Murthy called attention to them like an enthusiastic tour bus operator.

He pointed out a golf course that came up on the left side of the road, elaborating that it was one of two eighteen-hole championship greens available to guests. He pointed out tennis courts and horseback riding paths, casinos and nightclubs, cabanas and oceanside swimming pools. And he pointed out beach after sweeping beach as the road striped up along the ocean shore.

Nimec gazed out at the shiny white sand and emerald water, quietly succumbing to the serene beauty of the place… and the funny thing was that the deeper this almost hypnotic calm settled in, the more he realized how hard he’d been trying to resist it.

“Look, Pete.” Annie tapped his arm to get his attention, then motioned to her right. “That’s fantastic!”

Out beyond the shore, a tanned, toned couple attached to colorful kiteboard sails was riding the wind with happy abandon.

“I thought about giving that a shot once,” Nimec said. “Had to be fifteen years ago, before I got too busy.” He shrugged. “The job, you know.”

Annie had kept her hand on him.

“We should do it together,” she said, rubbing his shoulder. “It’s really a kick… a lesson or two should be enough for you to get your wings.”

His forehead creased with surprise. “You’ve done it before?”

“Sure,” she said. “In Florida. When we’d have downtime at Canaveral, I’d try to find ways for my training groups to unwind.”

Nimec grunted, still looking out at the airborne couple. Then he saw something else against the blue sky, much higher and further off, a sleek flying object that reflected bright sparkles of sunlight as it needled south toward the harbor and airport.

“That an Augusta one-oh-nine?” he asked, turning to Murthy.

For a moment the security man’s expression almost seemed startled. “You have an eye for both air and ground vehicles.”

“I’ve seen a few of those choppers… UpLink’s designed avionics for some of the custom Stingray versions,” Nimec said. “The body’s pretty recognizable. With how its nose is so sharp, and that frame kind of flaring out between the doors and tail boom.”

Murthy produced another smile.

“We have a fleet of four in constant operational readiness,” he said. “At least one patrols our airspace round the clock and, your alert eye aside, their fly patterns are charted out to be inconspicuous.” He paused. “The goal at Los Rayos is to make our guests feel secure without their being conscious of security, if my meaning is clear. These are men and women who run nations, global business empires. They come here to escape and relax. To temporarily step free of the lifestyle constraints that go hand-in-hand with their positions, and at the same time have confidence they and their families are well protected. To create this environment requires a delicate balance. Our vigilance must be constant and multilayered. It also must be unobtrusive or the island will seem to them like an armed camp.”

Nimec tugged his ear. He’d noticed that the chopper had sped out of sight.

“I can see how it’d be a challenge,” he said. “The Augs… how’ve you got them configured?”

“Variously.” Murthy said. “Here again, I’m not one for technical specifications. I know they are fast and mobile, but will defer to Mr. Beauchart’s thorough expertise for the rest.” He looked at Nimec, his smile grown bigger than ever. “I’m increasingly certain you and he will find no lack of conversation at dinner tonight.”

Nimec guessed that was Murthy’s politely professional way of suggesting they move on to other subjects, and couldn’t blame him. It would be up to his boss to decide which of their trade secrets to share, the details of how their choppers were loaded among them.

Whatever Murthy’s reason or reasons, Nimec didn’t want to be pushy.

He fell silent, and after a minute or two realized Annie had taken easy hold of his hand on the seat between them, her fingertips so light against his palm it kind of tickled. She really seemed to be enjoying herself as they viewed the passing sights, and that made him glad.

Then the Rolls turned onto a drive branching off from the seaside road, and slowed, and Murthy pointed ahead at what he announced was the villa that had been reserved for them.

Annie’s fingers squeezed Nimec’s hand more tightly. There beyond a courtyard lined with palmettos was an expansive, Spanish-looking structure — all railed balconies, wide columns, arched windows, and sunwashed adobe under a red tile roof. Nimec saw a swimming pool at the end of a fieldstone path on one side of the place, and spread across the grounds, spacious gardens with bright exotic flowers and thick green hedges.

“This location is rather secluded, as we thought you might prefer,” Murthy was saying. “We hope you won’t hesitate to let us know if anything fails to meet your satisfaction.”

Nimec looked over at Annie, saw the barely contained excitement on her face, and then turned back to Murthy.

“I think it’ll be perfect,” he said.

Andrew Reed Baxter had dreaded checking his morning voice mail. Three days in Palm Springs had notched the term long weekend into a depressing context for him and he’d known there would be a carryover before leaving for the office… shit, one stiff hand after another, how much cash had he lost? He didn’t need a certified accountant to tell him it was a whole fucking lot — no wonder his reflux was giving him a terrible time this morning. It was doubling down on those soft counts that had killed him, screw those variations; he should have just played his usual game. Next time he’d remember that before deciding to take anybody’s so-called expert advice about systems and strategies, stick to what he knew and watch the dealer go bust.

Next time, for damned sure, he’d bring his winning game to the table.

Baxter sat with the phone’s handset cradled between his neck and shoulder, listening to the beep-beep-beep of the stutter dial tone that indicated he had messages. Then he reluctantly keyed the access number and spoke his password, bringing his antacid mints out of a desk drawer, peeling open the foil wrap with his thumb.

His ex-wife’s screeching message was the first to come up.

Shit, shit, Baxter thought, and popped a couple of the peppermint antacid tablets into his mouth.

She was, predictably, calling to remind him the alimony check was late. With her it always started out with a complaint about the alimony. Then the rest of the litany would follow. Alicia’s school in New York City had contacted her. The tuition was overdue, why hadn’t it been paid? Forty-four thousand dollars a year to keep the kid on an LD track; Baxter knew he should have insisted on being the one to decide where to send her. Failing that, he should have had his lawyer insist on rolling the cost of Alicia’s education into his child support, let her mother have to budget it from the blanket payments. Maybe then she’d have found a special ed program that didn’t bleed him dry. He’d heard there was a boarding school right next door in Virginia that cost half what he was laying out — why not that one? Everybody knew who ran things down there in New York. Fucking kike moneygrubbers. They didn’t nail you to the cross, they hung you from it by your purse strings.

Baxter listened about halfway through her message and then pressed the keypad button to skip to the next one. No break from his misery here; it was old man Bennett—“King Hughie”—on a harangue of his own about the new investment deal Sedco’s partners in that Kazakhstan project were negotiating with Beijing. The Chinese, he reminded Baxter, were set to import twenty million tons of oil a year from that Caspian pipeline; how much more were they going to gobble up? Western Europe was already starting to get paranoid about their out-of-control acquisitiveness and consumption, even rumbling about economic sanctions if they didn’t curb their appetite. And then there were Dan Parker’s opponents in the senate race batting the issue around on the Sunday news shows, wondering aloud where the hell he’d been when the Chinks made their move to buy up those stakes. King Hughie didn’t intend to see Sedco’s reputation, or his favorite son’s election campaign, besmirched with charges that he’d gladhanded former Soviet pawns to the detriment of America’s traditional allies. He wanted to call a special meeting of the company’s directors and major shareholders, insisting they would have to put on the brakes or else.

If King Hughie only knew the reality of what was happening in his own boardroom, Baxter thought. The old man could still bark with the loudest of them, but he wasn’t the watchdog he used to be.

Baxter crunched down his antacids, put a couple more onto his palm, and tossed them into the chute. His eye had been on the Caribbean operation, what he’d gotten going there over the past year. But he knew Parker had been involved with behind-the-scenes talks to rebuff the Chinese proposal and convince the Kazakhstanis it wasn’t in their long-term interest to feed another hungry giant on their borders. They were accustomed to handling things quietly in that part of the world and Parker hadn’t wanted to throw pie in the faces of his working contacts… though the general public wouldn’t appreciate these subtleties, would just see Parker having to defend himself over and over against accusations they barely understood. And Baxter hoped he went ahead and knocked himself out. Whenever he heard some politician or other talk about the wisdom and sound judgment of the average American voter, he’d wonder how the son of a bitch didn’t bust a gut in midspiel. Man for man, woman for woman, the average American voter was a half step from brain-dead.

Baxter jabbed at the keypad button again to cut off King Hughie’s inflamed rant. It was followed by a series of relatively innocuous messages — a PR assistant with questions about Sedco’s latest corporate media packet, the president of a greenie advocacy group who wanted to discuss the impact of offshore wells on the Louisiana crawfish population, those contractors he’d hired to renovate his Chesapeake beach house letting him know they’d prepared a final estimate. Baxter paid the least possible attention to them, thinking emptily about that last night at the casino… actually the last hand he’d played on the last night. He’d been at the no limit table, three hundred grand’s worth of chips in the circle, holding a soft fifteen — an Ace and a four — with the dealer showing five up. His instincts had been to stand pat, but instead he asked for the hit and caught a deuce.

The dealer had stood on a soft seventeen, and that was that for Baxter. He’d been beaten, and badly, according to house rules. Three hundred thou to their coffers, added to the six hundred thousand they’d taken from him earlier in the weekend… a loss of almost a million dollars.

The realization slapped him hard.

Baxter had headed for the elevator almost as his cards were being swept off the table, weak in his knees, a little faint, afraid he might be physically sick right there in the casino’s gambling room. This was yesterday, Sunday, just hours before his flight back to D.C. The previous night he had taken an even bigger loss, but it hadn’t seemed that discouraging when he got back to his room. Not once he’d phoned out for that blonde, a couple bottles of wine, and a tin of expensive Petrossian caviar. By morning he had cleared out the negativity and was full of restored optimism, sure he would be able to recoup, or better yet head home a triumphant winner. And he still believed he would have if he’d done a gut check and stuck to his customary game.

Next time, Baxter promised himself. Next time it would be the tried-and-true, and with any luck a different fucking outcome…

He suddenly heard Jean Luc’s recorded voice in the earpiece and sat up straight. What was that he’d said?

He punched in the playback code and listened. The time/date stamp told him the call had come in Friday afternoon. Then, again, the terse message:

“We need to talk about the deleted file, Reed. The one that almost crashed our system. Get in touch with me as soon as you can.”

Baxter sat behind his desk a moment, unsettled. Those words had shot through his thoughts like bullets, propelled by the level but unmistakable urgency of their tone.

He hit the phone’s disconnect button, started to key in the country code for Trinidad from memory, and then reconsidered. Although the office telephone line was supposed to be secure, Baxter wasn’t so much the gambler that he’d bet his entire future on it.

Reaching into the inner pocket of his suit jacket for his handheld satphone, he placed the call on it instead.

“Hello?”

“Jean Luc,” Baxter said. “It’s Andrew.”

“Reed, I’ve been wondering when you’d get in touch.”

“I was out of town.”

“So your admin informed me,” Jean Luc said. “I’d hoped you might check your messages remotely while you were gone.”

Baxter cleared his throat.

“I took a long weekend and I’m back,” he said. “Tell me what’s happening.”

“How openly can you speak?”

“We’re on a crypted line, but I’m at the office, so take that for what it’s worth,” Baxter said. “I need to know about the file you mentioned.”

Silence.

“There was another attachment,” Jean Luc said after a moment. “One that wasn’t wiped.”

Baxter felt his stomach tighten.

“You didn’t know about it?” he said.

“We didn’t know of its connection to the original,” Jean Luc said. “By the time that became apparent we’d lost it.”

“Jesus Christ.” Baxter thought about those crates that had arrived at the Florida airport. It had been all over the news. The human remains found in them were unidentifiable… but still, he didn’t need something like this on his head right now.

“Listen to me, Reed,” Jean Luc was saying. “There’s no cause to be too concerned right now.”

“No?”

“Not to where either of us overreacts. We aren’t positive what’s in the other file. It might not contain anything that could cause further damage. Very likely, it doesn’t. And in any event, it’s bound to turn up. We’ve got our top men working to trace it.”

The tightness across Baxter’s middle became a hot coil of pain.

“Goddamn it, Jean, I warned you,” he snapped. “How long ago? Months? Years? Hire those fucking jungle bunnies and situations like this are inevitable.”

Another silence ensued. It dangled across the thousands of miles between them.

Baxter wished he hadn’t let his temper get the better of him.

“Jean, look, I apologize. It’s early and I’m feeling a little raw—”

“Never mind.”

“You sure? I shouldn’t have jumped down your throat.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay, good… I’d hate to think you clammed up because you’d gone PC on me,” Baxter said with a strained chuckle. His chair creaked as he leaned forward to reach for his antacids. “The file you’re tracing, does it have a name?”

“We all have names,” Jean Luc said. Whatever that meant. His tone remained oddly chill; Baxter guessed he was still a little annoyed. “This one’s called Jarvis Lenard. He’s a groundskeeper from the village.”

Which in Baxter’s mind meant trouble, no doubt about it, considering how those people stuck together. This time, though, he didn’t allow himself to get frazzled.

“Eckers is on the job?”

“I told you we were going with our best.”

“That you did.” Baxter put a mint in his mouth, decided to add another. Clearly Jean was miffed. “Look, I’ll take it on faith you’ve got this covered, and figure you’ll keep me posted on any new developments. What do you say?”

“I think that’s a sound option,” Jean Luc said. “And while I’m offering advice, here’s another piece… wherever you’ve been, it’s not healthy for you. Take it from a friend, Reed. Next time you decide to get away for a few days, consider going someplace that gives more than it takes.”

Baxter frowned, not sure how to reply. But then the click in his ear rendered that moot.

Jean Luc had hung up at his end of the line.

In his study at the Bonasse estate, Jean Luc held the telephone’s cradled receiver in his fist a moment, then slowly relaxed his grip and stood from behind his desk. Probably he’d gotten angrier at Reed than his comments warranted; the man was what he was. The penultimate WASP, inescapably cloistered and ignorant despite his Ivy League education, a hopeless product of his genealogy and upbringing who couldn’t see past the tip of his patrician nose.

Expelling a long breath, he went across the wainscoted room to the side table on which the cubical walnut-and-glass display case had rested for as long as he could remember… his first look at it, in fact, had come while he was perched on his father’s shoulders. Even older than the case, the antique table dated from the early colonial period and had a blend of stylistic influences in its design — the curved, graceful elegance of its legs showing the hand of a Basque artisan, its ebony marble surface distinctly French in its proud Old World solidness.

Here on the islands things had always mixed together, until their origins almost couldn’t be sorted out.

With its clear top lid, clear glass front and side panes, and mirrored back, the case allowed the flintlock pistol it contained to be viewed from many angles. It was a striking weapon, passed down through the generations of his family from male heir to male heir… Jean Luc’s was a strongly patriarchal bunch, one in which women had often been seen as property, acquired to serve the needs of the men whose beds they readied with their hands and warmed with their bodies.

He looked down at the pistol nestled there in its fitted dark blue velvet riser, carefully preserved for almost two and a half centuries. The chased and engraved gold cartouches along its long nine-inch barrel, the cocking mechanism shaped like a gape-jawed serpent or dragon, the grinning gold demon’s head on the pommel — these had not dulled in the slightest with the years, surpassing in durability the lineage of the man who had first possessed it, and given it to his fourth great-grandfather as a seal of alliance.

On occasion when Jean Luc studied the weapon, he would find himself overtaken with visions of wooden pirate ships with broad sails and skull-and-crossbone banners, of naval battles with dueling cannons. Now it took him several minutes to become aware that his eyes had moved from the gun to center on his own reflection in the mirrored backing.

Reed was what he was, yes. In all his effete, degenerate weakness.

And he… he himself was passing. Always had been passing.

Jean Luc Morpaign did not want to look too deeply into his heart to ask which of them carried the greater freight of shame, or was the uglier within.

Hidden in the reeds, he watched the fowl from perhaps a yard away, grateful the thick, lazy air was without any hint of a breeze to carry his scent toward it.

He recognized it as a female whistler, plump with a wide black beak, long neck, reddish breast, dabs of white around her middle, and dark rump and tail feathers. When the tide had gone out and dusk lifted the afternoon heat, he had seen her venture a short distance from her nest among the mangrove roots, wading through the weeds to the brackish water on stilt legs, standing there in position and occasionally bobbing for small fish, crabs, and insects.

He stood perfectly still and watched, his bare brown feet in the cloying mud, his fingers clenched around a heavy wooden stick that measured about four feet from end to end. He had fashioned the stick from a tree limb, snapping it off a large drooping bough and cleaning the rough bark of spindly branches and leaves with a flat, sharp-edged stone. His shell windbreaker had been folded and knotted into a kind of improvised waterproof sling sack for holding the food supplies that he meant to bring back to his shelter. He wore this against his side, its sleeves tied together at the elasticized wrist openings to form a strap that looped around his neck. Right now it was lightly filled with the plants and such he’d gathered for tonight’s supper. There were young cattails and bulrushes he had uprooted from the mud, stripped of their tough, fibrous leaves, and cut down to their edible shoot stems with the same stone tool that had yielded his heavy stick. There were patches of green moss and leathery rock tripe he had soaked in the channel to cleanse them of the toxins that might otherwise wrack him with explosions of vomiting and streaming diarrhea. There were some clusters of wild berries, and even cockle leaves from the thorny clumps that grew in the drier soil inland. The leaf stalks, though bitter on the tongue, were said to ward off the fevers and skin infections with which a man could be stricken in the marshes, and would be more palatable once he peeled away their rinds.

He had survived on slim pickings before, though this particular assortment of food was a lower mark than he could remember.

In the deep poverty of his childhood, the mainstay of his diet had been pap, a thin, simple porridge of stale bread or cornmeal boiled in water. At breakfast his grandma, who had raised him and his two younger sisters since the death of their mother, would sweeten it with honey, or brown sugar, or the pulp of guava or pawpaw or coconut. When the family came together for their evening meal, the pap would be heartened with turnips and carrots and boiled bits of fish or chicken and their broths, and seasoned with the herbs grown in the tiny plot of a garden beside the single-room shack they all occupied. As he approached his teenage years and took on a variety of jobs for the well-to-do — quick to learn how to bring in a wage, he’d worked as a repairman, groundsman, whatever he could do with his hands — they had been able to improve their housing conditions and expand on the staples of their daily meals. And though Grandma Tressie had passed on long ago, he had continued sharing a portion of his income with his sisters after he went to live and work at Los Rayos, setting aside their money for his regular visits to the village.

Whether or not he had made his final visit… that was the difficult question, right and true.

Now he saw the whistler make a sudden jab at something she must have spotted in the shallows, her bill coming up quickly, a lump sliding down the sinuous tube of her neck. She would stay only a short time, not journeying too far from the nest she had built in the tangle of mangrove roots on the riverbank behind her, ready to defend her newly hatched ducklings against raiders. The best chance to steal up on her would be as she dabbled for food, dividing her attention between the shapes that flitted past her keen eyes below the water’s surface and the sounds that came from the direction of the nest. Should he fail to take her by surprise, the likelihood was that the bird still would not allow herself to be sundered from her young. She would fight to protect them from him, as from any threat, rather than attempt to flee.

This would make his task easier if no less regretful, for Jarvis Lenard hated to kill any living, breathing creature.

He moved toward her, threading a silent path through the eight-foot-tall reed stalks. Jarvis was a Spiritual Baptist by upbringing who, while not a churchgoer, considered himself a man of deep Christian faith. He had, though, sometimes joined friends and relatives at nyabinghis, ceremonies of music, religious philosophy, and politics organized by the mainland’s Rastafarian community — drawn to these at first by the reggae, the lovely girls with whom he would laugh and dance, and, in his younger years, the free and easy abundance of ganja. At these gatherings the Rastas had introduced him to their ideas about livity, a natural way that forbade the eating of flesh, eggs, or dairy in favor of a vegetarian diet, and it had taken hold in his mind and soul. He had come to believe that it was against God’s will, even parasitic, to sustain his own body with the meat of animals the Almighty had brought onto the earth, or with anything that carried their lifeblood inside it.

But Jarvis Lenard was a practical, reasoning man as well as a spiritual one. Already today the helicopters had made three passes of the wetlands and bordering jungle — just an hour ago one of them had flown above the wall of trees outside his shelter, blowing a tempest of foliage through its entrance — and their attempts to close in on him would not end when a heavy curtain of darkness fell over the island and they could put their nightseeker equipment into play. The sky would be patrolled day and night, as would the ground. And the village would be watched, and searched, and watched some more, and searched again with sinister, devious eyes.

Jarvis was unsure how long it would be before he might get to a safe place, or even where such a place might be. In the meantime he would need to hide for what could be days, perhaps weeks, and could not be falling short of food. It would hardly be enough for him to scrounge lichen and berries and the pulp of cattails. However much it troubled him, he would have to resign himself to killing if he meant to keep his strength.

He moved on the fowl with two hurried strides and, as he raised his stick with both hands, saw it snap its head up from the water to look around at him. Its display of aggressive defiance was instantaneous — a shrill cry, a puffing out of feathers, a spreading and flapping of wings. Jarvis took another step forward and brought the stick down on it with a hard swing, trying for the long neck or head. But the whistler partially eluded him with a shrieking, fluttering hop and was instead struck on its right flank at the base of the wing. It fell onto its opposite side and slushed about in the marsh, the one broken wing dangling with shoots of bone sticking up through the skin at its base, the other thrashing like a paddle in the water, flinging up clumps of mud.

Jarvis Lenard clubbed the body again, felt the crack of ribs transmitted to his fingers through his stick, saw bright blood splash from underneath its plumage. The crippled bird dragged on its side with its good wing still paddling and scooping mud, and Jarvis stood over it with his stick up over his head for the deathblow. But then his teeth clenched at its dying cries and he knew he could not take a chance that it would not finish the job. The creature had suffered enough.

He lowered the stick across his chest and, gripping it at either end, bent to press it down against the base if the whistler’s skull. Then he put one knee heavily on the stick to hold it firm, snatched the bird’s legs into his fists, and pulled back with a hard jerk to break the neck apart from the spine as he had seen Grandma Tressie do to the live chickens she would occasionally bring home from market.

The bird quivered as if with a surge of voltage and kept beating its one unbroken wing into the muck for almost a full thirty seconds before its nervous system shut down and the twitches stopped.

Jarvis took his knee off the stick and rose, lifting the warm carcass, standing there a little while as some of the blood and water dripped off. He felt tired, desperate, and sorrowful.

“I beg your forgiveness, little mother, and am deeply obliged for yer sacrifice,” he said. His arm and voice shook. “Doan’t know if yah would care why I done as I ’ave — an’ need yet do — but there are those who must be held accountable fer what’s goin’ on t’ruout this island, and my intention’s ta stick around and see justice done fer a fact.”

Jarvis waited another moment, silent and thoughtful, drops of blood and water spilling from the limp bird in his hand. Then he put it in his makeshift sack and turned toward the mangrove thicket where he had spotted its nest.

Without their mother to feed and protect them, the hatchlings would face either starvation or eventual discovery by predators.

He could do no less in his guilt and gratitude than give them the mercy of a faster end.

It was half past noon when they met as planned at the Valley Fair Mall on the border of San Jose and Santa Clara.

Megan Breen had exchanged a Louis Vuitton Suhali handbag that she’d purchased the week before, her eye having discriminated a flaw in the stitching of an inner zipper compartment once she got it home. At the price she paid for the bag, this seemed a shameless crime.

Julia Gordian had come for an advertised sale at the aromatherapy and herbal cosmetics boutique. She liked using the tea tree antioxidant facial scrub, lavender and ylang oil body lotion, and rosewater skin restoration gel with “bio-intrinsic essences,” whatever that meant. All she really knew was that the products made her feel fresh and clean out of the shower and didn’t contain too many artificial ingredients, or so their labels said.

Now Megan sat keeping an eye on their shopping bags and other personal articles at the table they had pulled up to in the mall’s big, sunshiny food court after doing their errands. In front of her were two cranberry scones, a paper cup of dark Italian roast coffee, and a stack of napkins. The coffee was piping hot and tasted good and had been served with one of those cardboard sleeves that slid around the cup so you didn’t have to double it.

She sipped and looked around for Julia, whom she’d last seen getting in line behind her for a garden salad. Then she located her in the crowd of shoppers, leading with a plastic tray as she pushed toward the table. On it was a flat mini-pizza box and some paper plates.

“Sorry it took me a while.” Julia said, putting down the tray. “Hot stuff.”

She sat opposite Megan. Her black hair cut short and deliberately mussed, she wore avocado-and-cream striped lowrise bellbottoms, a black midriff blouse, and white lace-up Keds sneakers. The blouse was loose and sleeveless with a flared lapel and some kind of complicated sash tied above her exposed navel. On the right lapel was a silver marcasite brooch shaped like a gecko. On her left shoulder was a small dark blue tattoo composed of a pair of stylized kanji ideographs: Ji, which means “oneself,” and Yuu, which roughly translates into the word “reason” or “meaning.”

Together they form the traditional Japanese symbol for liberty and freedom.

“Changed your mind about that salad, I see,” Megan said.

Julia got comfortable at the table, flapped open her pizza box, and pointed inside. The pie was cut into four slices and topped with a huge pile of onions, peppers, mushrooms, and sausages.

“Wrong,” she said. “I just decided it would look better on runny mozzarella, hot tomato sauce, and crust. A nice, thick carbohydrate-ridden crust.”

Megan looked into the box.

“No arugula?” she said, straight-faced.

“Or sprouts.” Julia smiled. “Those little pieces of spiced ground pork stuffed into intestinal lining do more to zest it up.”

Megan cocked an eyebrow with amusement. She had come from the office in a charcoal gray blazer with the Chanel logo on its penny-colored buttons, a matching skirt, an ice blue blouse, and gray mid-heel dress shoes.

“I can’t believe you intend to consume that whole pie,” she said.

Julia shrugged. She reached for a napkin, put it in her palm, took a wedge of pizza out of the box, put it on the napkin, and bent it slightly along the middle to form a sort of runoff channel for the excess grease. Careful not to lose any of the topping, she tipped the slice down to let the grease drip onto the foiled cardboard liner that had been underneath it. Then she pushed the pizza box toward Megan.

“Mangiare bene,” she said. “Take one.”

Megan shook her head.

“I already bought these scones.”

“Eat ’em afterward.” Julia pushed the box closer to her. “Go on, be a lioness.”

Megan smiled.

“No, thanks, really,” she said. “I have a conference at three o’clock and would rather not belch my way through it.”

Julia gave another shrug. “Your loss,” she said, starting in on the pizza.

Megan carefully broke a piece off her scone and looked over her business suit for stray crumbs. At the table to her right, a plump woman shopper and her tyke-ish, buddingly overweight daughter had reached the conclusion of their fast-food pit stop. As the little girl started gathering their crumpled waxed wrappers, empty paper cups, and used napkins into the tray between them, Mom admonished her to leave it, somebody who worked in the mall would clean up. Megan saw them stroll away out the corner of her eye, wondering if the kid also caught heat for scrubbing her teeth before bedtime.

“Things moving along okay with your exhibition?” she said to Julia.

“They’d better be.” Julia shrugged. “I’ve got a week to go before the opening, thirty pieces left to hang, and a thousand rapidly multiplying butterflies in my stomach.”

Megan took a bite of the scone.

“Still plan on sticking to watercolors?”

“Mostly,” Julia said. “I’ve decided to take your advice and go with a limited mixed media presentation.”

“So you included the batiks.”

“That abstract series you like, yeah,” Julia said. “I brought a few to the gallery yesterday, and have the rest set to go for tonight, which should just leave me needing to drive over my oils.”

“Those two great big canvases.”

“Right.”

“Think they’ll fit into the Celica?”

Julia shook her head.

“Not unless I plan on strapping them to the roof.” She paused and briefly lowered her glance. “It almost makes me wish I hadn’t gotten rid of the old SUV… but, hey, you’re followed, kidnapped, and almost murdered by professional assassins, you wonder if maybe you ought to appease the gods and trade in the vehicle you were driving that day.”

Megan had seen Julia’s eyes flick downward as she spoke. It was the same, or nearly the same, whenever she mentioned what happened to her. She would leave it out there, the remembered terror thinly wound in defensive humor, making it difficult to know how to pick up on it, or whether that was even something she wanted.

Julia would talk about it one of these days, Megan thought. Eventually she would need to talk about it in an open way. But the timing was hers to decide.

Megan ate another piece of her scone. A couple of high-school-age boys with McDonald’s bags sat down at the table vacated by the round and purposefully untidy mother and daughter. They swept the rubbish and dirty tray that had been left behind to one side of the table, took a bunch of hamburgers from their bags, and plowed into them with enthusiasm.

“I’d be glad to help with the paintings,” Megan said. “Far as your transportation problem, though, my car’s smaller than yours.”

Julia made a swishing don’t-worry-about-it gesture.

“Dad’s got me covered,” she said. “He’s coming over tomorrow in the Land Rover.”

Megan scrunched her forehead. “Roger?” she said.

“He would be my one-and-only father, right.” Julia gave her a puzzled look. “Why the funny face?”

“I didn’t know I made one.”

“That’s because you couldn’t see it from here,” Julia said, and tapped her side of the tabletop.

Megan lifted her coffee to her mouth, sipped. “Guess I was wondering about your handsome curator friend,” she said.

Julia frowned slightly.

“Richard is an assistant curator,” she said. “One among several at the museum.”

“Uh-oh. This already sounds ominous.”

Julia sighed.

“We’re over,” she said.

“Over?”

“And done,” Julia said. “I broke things off last weekend.”

“Wasn’t that your first date with him?”

“Second, if you feel the need to count,” Julia said, chewing her pizza. “Take it from a divorced woman, Meg. It’s better to recognize a dead-end street before turning into it, because those U-turns can be absolute murder.”

“Do tell.”

“You really want to hear about it?”

“I would.”

Julia looked at her, expelled another sigh.

“Last Saturday night, Richard asks me out to dinner, my choice of restaurants,” she said. “I suggest Emilio’s, you know it?”

“Sure,” Megan said. “That Italian place in Santa Clara with the courtyard in back. Very romantic.”

“Which is the reason I picked it… that and the cuisine,” Julia said. “Easy question, okay? What’s Italian cooking supposed to be except this”—she gave the pizza in her hand a demonstrative little shake—“or some kind of pasta dish? Fettuccine, ravioli, lasagna. Maybe veal scallopini. A basket of homemade bread or rolls on the side, a cannoli for desert, nothing too creative. Am I reaching some unreasonable level of expectation yet?”

“Not to me.”

“Bam!” Julia said, doing a fair impression of Emeril Lagasse. “In Richard’s world, asking a date to choose a restaurant doesn’t necessarily mean she’s also entitled to choose her own dish. Most especially not if it contains repulsive, unfashionable carbs.”

“Uh-oh.” Megan had to grin. “He’s one of those?”

“Hold the bun,” Julia said with a nod. “You know how I am, Meg. The reigning Miss Individuality. If he says so right off, no sweat, I find another restaurant. I’ve got nothing against him believing a certain diet works, but don’t foist it on me with a lecture about unburned calories.”

Megan was shaking her head. “Did he happen to notice you’re in pretty fantastic shape?” she said.

“Not the way he might’ve if he hadn’t blown his chances that night, let me tell you.” Julia frowned. “I walked out on him, Meg. Left him right there at the table and hailed a cab home.”

Megan’s eyes widened with surprise and amusement. “No.”

“Yes,” Julia said. “He kept insisting I eat the lobster or grilled fish. And he talked over me—overruled me — when I tried making my preference of Ziti al pomodoro clear to the waiter.” A frown. “That was the last unbearable, embarrassing straw. I’ve only answered his phone calls once since, and that was to tell him to forget my number.”

Megan threw her head back and laughed. “God,” she said. “And I thought my history with men was a road littered with wreckage.”

Julia looked at her.

“Goes to show there’s always a person waiting to outdo you,” she said, laughing a little, too.

They ate quietly. Megan worked away at her scone as Julia got through eating her slice and then reached into the pizza box for another.

“Enough about my life,” Julia said after a bit. “What’s with yours these days?”

Megan shrugged, sipped.

“Work,” she said.

“No play?”

“No time.” Megan sighed. “It’s taken everything out of me just trying to settle into the new position. And lately our projects with Sedco have developed some speed bumps. The Caribbean fiber deal sticks out… Do you know about it?”

“Some,” Julia said. “I heard my father mention it once or twice when Dan Parker was still on their board. He’s like a member of our family. Almost a god-uncle to me.”

Megan nodded her awareness. “There’s a guy that replaced him on the board of directors, A. R. Baxter — that’s Andrew Reed, great-great-grandson of the famous privateer — FYI. He’s constantly wanting to reevaluate and clarify points of contractual agreement. He’s a stubborn pain, and it makes for long, hard days of meeting with our own lawyers and executives.”

“Is Baxter the reason for your conference this afternoon?”

Megan shook her head.

“That’s a different can of worms,” she said. “I felt we needed another huddle to work out a plan for making nice with the Pentagon.”

Julia looked at her. “Because of what Tom Ricci did in New York,” she said.

Megan nodded, sipped away at her coffee. Again, the subject of the abduction hung unaddressed between them. Ricci had assembled the Sword task force that had tracked Julia to the cabin in Big Sur. He had pressed the search and gotten her out himself and left the man who’d led the hostage-takers dead. But Ricci alone knew exactly how that man died. Ricci alone was in the room with him, behind a locked door, in the minutes before he died. And what Megan wanted to say now, and didn’t, was that whatever occurred behind that door had seemed in some indeterminate way to spiral out into what took place those many months later in New York City.

“Tom’s name is bound to come up, sure,” she said instead, trying with her even tone to reduce his importance as an issue, make it sound as if he wasn’t at the very center of things. “We’ll have to decide what to do about him when Pete gets back from the islands.”

“Has anybody been in touch with him since he was suspended? Anybody from UpLink, that is.”

Megan regarded Julia for a few seconds, struck by the too-light, almost singsong quality of her voice right then, thinking maybe more than one of them here wanted to downplay the matter.

“Pete’s tried calling him,” she said. “Not with any success, though. At least these past few weeks.”

“He doesn’t answer his phone?”

“Doesn’t answer, doesn’t return messages, won’t give us a clue what’s going on with him.”

Julia tilted her head curiously.

“That seems kind of odd,” she said.

“Come on.” Megan couldn’t hide her skepticism. “Tom Ricci being incommunicative?”

Julia was looking at her.

“I mean Pete not going to see him where he lives,” she said. “I’d always heard they were tight.”

The expression on Megan’s face went from skeptical to just plain blank. She was unsure why that hadn’t entered into her thought processes. But it hadn’t. She didn’t know what to say, and found herself glad to see Julia reaching for slice number three, apparently satisfied to let the whole thing ride. Besides, a quick glance at her watch told her it was almost time to get going.

She drank some more coffee, ate some more scone, examined herself for crumbs again, discovered a few tiny specks on her skirt, and was brushing them off when she noticed that one of the burger-munching teenagers at the nearby table had turned to watch her, his attention glued to her hand as it moved over the lap of her skirt.

She drilled a cold stare into him and he snapped his eyes away.

“Did you get a load of him?” she said, looking aghast at Julia.

Julia chewed a mouthful of pizza, swallowed.

“That’s amore,” she said.

Megan made a face. “What?” she said. “Getting ogled by a high school kid with acne on his cheeks?”

Julia shrugged.

“At least he didn’t hold the bun,” she said with a sly grin.

Devon’s nightly set at Club Forreál would begin with a shadow dance.

A minute or two before she made her entrance, the DJ would key up something with a heavy beat and a smooth walking bass, and the lights would pulse in rhythm over and around the empty stage. Then she would step from the wings in a slight, clingy bikini top and sarong that gave her an illusion of nakedness in silhouette.

She was limber and acrobatic getting into her dance. As the men around the stage watched her slink out in front of the screen, they would realize she wasn’t all skin, and that would build on the tease while her movements became more explicitly sexual. The stage was large, with a couple of runways, and she was skillful at using every inch of it.

Most nights Devon’s set went two songs. The opening song would be the longer of them, giving her a chance to warm up the crowd with her bit behind the screen, and then come out and strip off her bikini top while dancing in the swell of lights and music. She called that her first reveal. At the pole Devon would work her flesh hard, sliding, pumping, swinging her body.

The second number in her set would have a quickened tempo, and midway through she would peel away the sarong.

Club Forreál had booze on its menu. This meant the house dancers could go topless but not nude. Under California law, nightclubs that entertained with full nudity were restricted to serving nonalcoholic drinks. The men who came to watch Devon and the other girls weren’t happy about it, but the alcohol loosened them up for a good time, and Devon, when she writhed free of her sarong, would leave little to the imagination in a G-string that was almost invisible, and that made for an easy tradeoff.

At his table in the third row from the stage, Tom Ricci finished his Chivas and water, caught the eye of his waitress, and made a pouring gesture over the glass, holding his thumb and forefinger apart to indicate he wanted his next one heavier on the scotch. She smiled her understanding and waggled toward the bar in her racer shorts.

Ricci turned to watch Devon emerge from behind the screen.

He had seen her dance perhaps twice since the night they had met here, when her name was still Carolina to him. Carolina was her professional alias. It was posted on the schedule outside the club’s entrance, and above her gallery photos on its elaborate Web site, and announced from the DJ booth as the music got cranked for her set. It was also the name that customers used when they tapped the maître d’s shoulder to request a private dance with her. Ricci had once asked how she had chosen it, and she’d told him it was borrowed from the state where she had grown up. She did not specify whether that was North or South Carolina, and he hadn’t pursued the subject. Their involvement was a fair give-and-take that sometimes relieved the emptiness inside each of them. But she gave away nothing extra, and neither did Ricci.

Now the waitress came over with his fresh drink. Ricci paid, tipped, noticed her lingering by the table. He raised the glass to his lips and swallowed. The scotch was warm in his mouth and then going down his throat. She’d done okay with the proportions, he thought, and nodded.

She smiled at him and left and he turned back toward the stage and watched Devon heat up her set.

The sarong in which she was costumed tonight was a dash of metallic fabric with black and blue horizontal bands and long, shiny fringes that would flap over her left thigh. In her bellybutton was a silver serpent pin, its tiny jewel-eyed head dangling downward. Ricci guessed between sixty and a hundred other men had their eyes on her as she slowly untied and shed the wrap. That didn’t bother him much. The woman up there in the colored lights almost could have been anybody. She seemed unsolid, a projected image. Only in glimpses could Ricci see Devon in her. Something she did on stage would remind him of something she had done when they were in bed together — a toss of her head, a contortion of her waist, a wanton curl of her lips — and Ricci would wonder whether it had been practiced even during their sex, and if it came from the inside out or the outside in.

Mostly that was the extent of his feelings as he watched. A curiosity rather than jealousy or possessiveness. It was an emotional remove not so different from what he felt toward Devon when they were together. The stage just seemed to frame and accentuate things for him.

He sat and drank more of his scotch.

Club Forreál was a garish island of neon and stucco outside Santa Clara on Highway 101, El Camino Real. For real, Ricci thought, and found himself having to smile a little at that. He had the sense that nothing in the place was what it seemed. Or if it was, that it wasn’t what he ought to be going out of his way to seek. He neither liked nor disliked watching Devon perform, and she seemed to pretty well match his indifference. He had no idea whether she had noticed him at his table, but he hadn’t intended to make a secret of it, or surprise her for any reason. He wasn’t even sure why he’d come. He’d simply gotten into his car and driven here intending to sit awhile, and it was all the same to him if she knew about it or didn’t. Either way, he would probably leave before she was ready to head out with him.

It was a working night for Devon, and the place was packed; she would want to stay on shift for several hours yet.

Ricci wondered if A.J. ever popped in without letting her know beforehand. He held onto the thought a minute, tried to picture what A.J. looked like, and glanced randomly at some of the men around him, their faces turned toward the stage, staring at Devon as they were swept by the crayon colors of the disco strobes. Any one of them might be A.J. All Ricci knew about him was that he had a wife and kids and a high credit line and, Devon had once casually mentioned, a boat that he liked to launch out of Monterey. It was a waste of time trying to figure out who was the strongest candidate, but so was a lot else.

Ricci played the game with himself awhile longer, grew tired of it, and drank. Then he heard a loud squall of laughter from a nearby table and turned to see what had provoked it. There were four men at the table. They were young, maybe in their early twenties. A look of hang-jawed arousal on his features, one of them had pushed himself back from the table’s edge and was getting a chair dance from a blonde who had finished her set right before Devon. His friends seemed boisterously amused and elated by the whole thing.

Ricci watched her bump and grind between his outspread legs, bare-breasted, wearing only a red sequined thong and high heels. Here again the law would have something to say about how far she could go. But while it prohibited physical contact between performer and client, and house rules declared they could come no closer to each other than six inches, nobody was holding a tape measure between the blonde and the guy at the table, and she seemed more than open to some occasional rubbing up against him.

The good money for dancers at Club Forreál was in chairs. Elsewhere in a room its owners called the VIP Lounge, the better money was in couches. Their maroon velvet cushions lined two of its walls, and the men who sat on them could get a private dance that was supposed to have the same restrictions on touching as the dances in the main hall. But the doors of the VIP Lounge were kept closed, and watched from the main room by security guards on the lookout for vice cops, and the girls inside the lounge, who would start out a couch dance straddling a customer’s lap, would bend the hell out of both legal and house regulations if the price was right.

Devon had told Ricci she preferred doing chairs to couches. They didn’t bring in nearly the same cash but let her stay within eyeshot of the bouncers at the front entrance, who would step in when guys got too touchy. She had told him she followed the six-inches-of-separation rule to the letter in the main room and, on the rare instances she worked the VIP, gave the rule just enough slack for her customer to feel “nice” about his experience. She had said that she could identify the ones who would be trouble and was careful to steer away from them. She claimed to likewise recognize the ones who were okay, and she looked at every situation from the perspective of whether it would let her stay in control.

Ricci hadn’t been certain if she honestly believed that. He knew the power of female sexuality but also understood the power of men with money. And he always gave an edge to the men when they kept their clothes on and paid women not to for their pleasure.

Once he had asked Devon exactly what she meant by control, and by a customer feeling nice, and she had remained quiet for a long while.

“Do you really want to know?” she’d said at last.

He’d told her he did.

“I’ll come down as low as they want, for as long as they want,” she’d said, her hesitation suddenly gone. “But their hands stay off me.”

Three rows from where Devon was deftly bending herself around a pole, Ricci took a deep breath and lowered his empty glass to the tabletop. He felt a kind of soft grayness settling over his thoughts and guessed he was a little drunk. Not too drunk to drive, but he could see how that might be a biased opinion. If he went for another refill, he might have to dispute it himself.

He stood up and pushed in his chair. Devon was almost through with her set and he’d decided to leave before she got off stage. He didn’t want to know if she’d spotted him. He didn’t want to know if A.J. was in the house. He didn’t want to see her go one-on-one with any of the customers who’d watched her dance, or make her feel as if she shouldn’t because he was here. He wanted nothing except to leave.

He turned and strode between the tables in the main room, and past the cashier’s counter, and then past the hulking bouncers in black pants and T-shirts at the door, giving them a nod as he walked outside.

The night was cool and breezy with mist that carried the salt smell of the bay across the parking lot. Ricci stood on the neon-splashed sidewalk before the entrance and took it in for a moment. He felt steady enough on his feet and told himself he’d be okay behind the wheel.

He stepped off the sidewalk into the parking lot and went around back toward his Jetta. The lot was illuminated by high overhead sodiums, but the club’s rear wall largely blocked his aisle from the glow of the lights. Though he had a decent recollection of where he’d left the car in the solid row of vehicles, he had to pause and search the darkness for a minute or two to locate it.

Ricci finally saw it about a dozen cars up ahead and moved on.

That was when he noticed a shadowy figure crossing the lot from its perimeter fence opposite the club. The man cut through several aisles of vehicles, momentarily slipped out of sight between two cars, and then emerged into Ricci’s aisle three or four yards in front of him. He wore a raincoat — a trench — belted at the waist and flowing well down below his knees.

Ricci’s guard raised itself a notch. You were alone in a dark place and saw somebody appear out of nowhere, you would be a fool in general not to be alert. He had met some dangerous people in his time at UpLink. And before that, and after — if his life as it was proved to be after.

And there was the coat. And the smooth, almost gliding way the man moved in it.

Ricci couldn’t dismiss the association they brought to mind.

He suddenly felt the absence of his weapon under his sport jacket. His suspension had not up until now cost him his carry permit, but the bouncers who wanded everybody who passed through the club’s door didn’t worry about permits, they worried about men with too much testosterone and alcohol in their bloodstreams acting like they were in some Dodge City saloon, and thinking they would get into it over the dance hall girls. Coming here tonight, he’d had to leave his apartment without his FiveSeven.

Ricci walked a little further through the aisle, stopped. The man approached to within a couple of feet of him and did the same, hands in the pockets of his coat.

They studied one another with quiet recognition in the darkness and fog.

“Lathrop,” Ricci said.

“Surprise, surprise.”

Ricci stood there watching him. Lathrop’s hands being out of sight in his coat pockets made him more acutely conscious of his own lack of a weapon.

“How’d you find me here?”

“Doesn’t matter.” A shrug. “I’ve managed to find you in all kinds of places.”

“Super,” Ricci said. “Now lose me.”

Lathrop was quiet, seeming to notice where Ricci’s gaze had fallen, his lips parting in a kind of smile.

“You think I came to take you out,” he said.

Ricci shrugged.

“I don’t know why you came,” he said. “Wouldn’t waste my time worrying about it.”

Lathrop slowly slid his hands out of his pockets and let them drop to his sides.

“This better?” he said.

Ricci just looked at him and shrugged again.

“Seems to me,” Lathrop said, “you could use a cup of strong coffee.”

Ricci remained silent. The breeze had picked up strength and he could feel the drifting mist on his cheeks.

“What the hell do you want?” he said after a while.

“My car’s back near the fence.” Lathrop nodded slightly in that direction. “Let’s go for a ride.”

“No, thanks.”

“We need to talk.”

“No,” Ricci said, edging past Lathrop and up the aisle.

“Ricci,” Lathrop said in a calm voice. “Not so fast.”

He kept walking.

“You owe me, remember?” Lathrop said from behind him. Again calmly, softly. “Big time.”

Ricci took another couple of steps forward, slowed, and finally halted. He stood there for almost a full minute, his back to Lathrop in the deserted parking lot. Then he turned around to look at him.

“Damn you,” he said. “God damn you.”

Lathrop smiled his enigmatic smile.

“I’ll buy the coffee,” he said, his long coat ruffling around him as he led the way off into the deeper shadows.