“Go ahead,” he said.

Cooper talked for two minutes, providing a detailed set of instructions, then hung up.

Standing behind his desk, Gates set the phone back on its cradle. After another minute or so, he pulled the lid off the coffee, took one last sip, then dumped the remainder on his telephone. He held the overturned cardboard cup above the receiver until the last dark drop slid from the rim and splashed against the phone.

Then he picked up the telephone console and threw it against the wall.

Following a two-minute stare-down with the brown dent he’d made in the white wall, Gates relented, walked around his desk to the guest telephone on the other side of his office, and buzzed Miss Anders.

When she answered, he told her there was a call he would need her to place for him.

When Cooper got back to Conch Bay, the satellite shots he’d ordered via the Peter M. Gates delivery service were waiting for him. Ronnie had deposited the fat enclosure from the diplomatic pouch on his front porch.

Cooper had ordered Gates to send him images captured by various military intelligence satellites during a seventy-two-hour period. The period commenced with the approximate time of departure of the fifty-foot Chris-Craft from the pier outside of Kingston; Cooper knew he could order printouts of another day, week, or more if he needed to.

Looking over the spread of glossy black-and-white prints on the table in his kitchenette, he saw little more than a strangely uneventful voyage by the mystery boat. Each massive print was folded into an eight-by-ten rectangular stack, an oversize version of a folded glove-compartment map, which, when unfurled, blossomed into some thirty-six square feet of high-definition, mostly featureless ocean. Cooper thinking that if you knew how to examine the photos properly-as Laramie surely did-you could find the boat in there with your naked eye. Cooper had to dig out a magnifying glass to see what he was looking for and verify the relevant speck was in fact the boat he was tracking.

He’d ordered shots of virtually the entire Caribbean Sea and adjacent Atlantic but was able to narrow his choices, throwing out one map stack after another as he kept his eye on the boat’s progression. There was little for him to see outside of the unerring course of the boat: a handful of other ships passed within twenty or thirty miles, none close enough to make contact; the boat did not appear to dock anywhere; the vessel simply steamed east-southeast for some eight hundred miles, hove to in calm seas twenty miles east of the island of Martinique, then retraced its course back toward its apparent home port in Jamaica. The odyssey lasted forty-plus hours on the outbound route, and, following a pause lasting about two hours, the boat headed back along the same course. Cooper ignored the remainder of the prints once it appeared likely the boat was destined to return to Jamaica.

It didn’t make any sense. One thing for sure-that boat had some fuel tanks to kill for. Maybe the captain of the boat preferred to eat human steak with his morning eggs; maybe the vessel’s crew had some dirty work to handle and needed some form of slave labor on board. If so, he decided that the only way to learn anything, if there was anything to be learned at all, was to take his own boat along the course he’d just tracked. Follow the coordinates he’d scribbled on the edges of the photographs, sail out to where the mystery boat had turned around, fire off a memory card’s worth of digital photos with his Nikon, and see if there was anything he could find offering some explanation.

He could also ambush the Chris-Craft, check it over, and interrogate the two guys he’d seen on it-but he had a pretty good idea the wino would be nowhere near that boat by now, and as for the guys piloting it, he knew the type. They were hired hands, guys who’ve been told nothing by nobody.

He set out at dawn on his second day back from Jamaica.

It took him three hours, going south, to intersect the course the boat had taken to Martinique. From there it took him another four hours-Cooper’s Apache over three times faster than the mystery boat, even when he was taking it easy. He saw little of interest along the way-nice weather, a few birds, some flotsam. He planed over the rolling swells and crashed down into the ocean on the other side of them. Every two or three hours he would ease up and consult the charts to confirm his course, have a sandwich, or nod off for fifteen minutes.

When he got to where the Chris-Craft had turned around, there was nothing but open sea. Cooper flipped off the MerCruisers and let his Apache drift while he took a look at his charts. He checked his GPS-11, marking his position precisely, examined the relevant blown-up satellite photograph, and cross-referenced the GPS numbers with the notes he’d taken. When he was through with all this there was no question about it: he was exactly where the spy satellite had registered the Chris-Craft at its journey’s farthest point from Jamaica.

Cooper’s depth finder told him the water here was 210 fathoms deep. He cruised around for the better part of two hours, continuing to read the depth finder; the numbers fluctuated between 190 and 220 fathoms, about 1,100 to 1,300 feet deep. There was no shoal or sandbar, no way anyone was out here diving on a reef, Cooper beginning to think he was wasting his time, that he should have shot dead the captain of that goddamn boat and pulled the wino back up the ladder when he’d had the chance.

Since he’d already come all the way out here, he decided to take another look at the navigation charts he kept aboard and see whether it made any sense to nose around. The nearest land was just under four miles to the east, where a small island chain, geopolitically part of Martinique, occupied a ten-mile crescent of sea. The main island lay at the northwest end of the chain, closest to where he now drifted on the open water.

Cooper rode over to the archipelago. It was conceivable, he thought, that the mystery boat had zipped over to one of the islands, then quickly returned between successive satellite photographs, but the positions of the boat in the two shots, taken one hour apart, were virtually identical, and the boat hadn’t shown it could move fast enough to make it there and back in much less than an hour, no matter which neighboring island it went to visit.

He found the chain’s main island to be a steep chunk of land rimmed by cliffs and similarly steep terrain, with dense vegetation spilling from the lip of the cliffs. When he reached it, he was facing the eastern side of the island; there was a fine mist, even in the hot afternoon sun, covering somewhere around two-thirds of the land mass. To Cooper the place looked to contain five or six square miles of forest, maybe more. There was a small dock at the base of one of the cliffs that faced him, but no visible structures above. He made a wide swing around the island, keeping an eye on the depth finder-you weren’t wary of reefs in these parts, your boat would wind up as another underwater home for prowling barracuda and maniacal free-divers seeking to hold their breath like the kids of the South Pacific. As he reached the leeward coast, the depth finder started to bleep-five fathoms, three, two, one. The sand was coming up on him through the clear blue water, and Cooper could see rocks poking at the surface a few meters away.

On this, the western side of the island, there lay, some six hundred yards from his boat, a protected lagoon. Cabanas, a white sand beach, an artificial preponderance of coconut palms amid the indigenous Caribbean forest, a few tourists in the sun. He saw a pair of float planes moored in the lagoon, but no boats, Cooper thinking the planes provided the only access to the shallow lagoon-that no fifty-foot Chris-Craft would be pulling in there. But then again, he thought, there were other ways of getting a mummified wino off a boat and onto an island.