He couldn’t look back. That would slow him down too much. But he could not stop thinking about the men below him with their metal spears and the fact that his most tender parts were out in the open, right above their heads, literally daring them to take a shot.

“Shit!” He’d reached over a large rock to get a good handhold, and his hand had come down on a bed of cactus unseen behind the stone. He held his palm up and saw it was covered in a pale blond fur of tiny needles.

“There!” he heard a shout below him.

Using the side of his hand, cradling the injured palm, he pulled himself up over a dirt ledge and rolled. He sprang to his feet and saw he had come to a flat and narrow plateau on the top of a razorback. He assumed he would start the climb down the other side, but when he ran to the edge of the precipice, he saw that the cliff fell away straight down to the dark sea. The water stretched unruffled to the distant horizon marred only by the white sail of a single boat.

He took several steps back from the edge, and from behind him came the huffing and chuffing of his pursuers. One of them was nearly to the top. The cliff looked straight, even undercut, eaten away by centuries of storms. The water below was inky blue, not the pale turquoise of the shallows.

He made his decision and started running back the way he had come. The black-hooded man looked startled when he crested the ridge and saw a naked man running straight at him, flailing his arms in the air, and whooping like a Hollywood Indian. The hooded man made it to his feet and began to lift his spear gun at the very moment Cole reversed direction.

Cole Thatcher saw a metal spear fly past his right shoulder just as he took a running leap off the cliff and into the air.

CHAPTER THREE

At sea off Guadeloupe

March 25, 2008

11:05 a.m.

Seated on the cabin top, in the shade of the mainsail, Riley cradled the sextant in her left hand, recorded the numbers off the dial into her logbook, then leaned back out of the shadow. She lifted her face to the sun and closed her eyes. The corners of her mouth drew up in a small smile.

Sighing, she sat up straight and glanced down at the instrument she held in her lap. It was secured to a small tether she wore around her neck. She considered celestial navigation a painful necessity. Like her father’s nursing home insurance, it was something you hoped never to use, but if you needed it, you’d be glad you had it. Sure, she had GPS, but on days like this one, when the wind was light and the water was flat in the lee of the island, she dragged out the sextant to get in a little practice. She’d learned that in the service. Drill, drill, drill.

She checked her watch and then ducked under the sail to squint up at the sun again. Her boat was drifting off the southwest coast of the island of Guadeloupe, and she was waiting for the morning sun to rise high enough — and for her boat to sail far enough south — so she could get a more accurate shot with her sextant. She swiveled her head around the horizon checking for boat traffic. Earlier that morning, she had sailed past an empty Boston Whaler flying the red and white diver down flag, but other than one sportfishing boat anchored close to the island, she now had the sea to herself.

Her father, Richard Riley, was the one who had taught her celestial navigation back when he had been posted to the U.S. Embassy in Barbados. She was ten and her brother Michael a year and a half older. The Bajan kids there had been as cruel, teasing her older brother about his small stature and the thick lenses that magnified his blue eyes like the bulging eyes of a grouper.  Their father, who always talked of his youth sailing out at the Cape, had bought a Bequia boat there, the first of a long line of boats named Bonefish. She and Mikey ran home every day, both to enjoy the lively little boat and to escape the taunts of the street. In time, her father taught her to sail the boat alone – and to use the sextant.

“Those were the good years, eh bro?” she said aloud and winked at the light breeze passing under the mainsail. “Captain Maggie and first mate Mikey, the twin terrors of the Caribbean.”

That was one of the best things about sailing single-handed – there was nobody around to hear her when she spoke to her dead brother’s ghost.

God, she was glad to be out here. Alone. Away from the stench of exhaust that flooded in their DC townhouse windows and the pissy smell of her father’s Depends. His doctors said dementia wasn’t deadly, and he could last another ten years, though it had already got to the point where he didn’t recognize her most of the time. A better daughter perhaps would have stayed and wiped his ass every day whether he recognized her or not. She couldn’t. Not after what happened. If her father hadn’t forced Michael to go to Yale, her older brother would be alive today. Every time she looked at her father, the pain of losing Michael hit her all over again. She had gone home to mend her wounds, not to break open old ones. Besides, Mrs. Wright was taking good care of him, and he wouldn’t miss a daughter he didn’t even recognize.

Her computer chimed below to signal an incoming email. “Shit,” she said aloud, then reminded herself of her resolution to stop swearing. The civilian world didn’t look favorably at a woman who could swear like a sailor — even if she was one.

With her satellite hook-up, she’d been able to send and receive email throughout most of the islands. It wasn’t cheap, but her work depended on it. A mug with the remains of her morning coffee stood on the table next to her MacBook laptop, obscuring her view of the computer screen. She assumed the email was from the Mercury Security Group, her employer. Mercury’s home office was in DC, but they were sending her to design a system of cameras and alarms for a perfume factory on the island of Dominica where she had an appointment next week.

And if she didn’t finish with this celestial practice and get her boat moving, she wouldn’t make it to Point-à-Pitre tonight. She’d fall behind on her itinerary and miss her Monday appointment, or worse yet, miss her “date” tomorrow night — the one several years overdue. As important as the work was, the real reason she was headed to Guadeloupe’s capital city was to meet up with the Ivy League son of a bitch who had walked out of her life down in Lima, just disappeared without a word. Call it crazy, or call it closure. She wasn’t sure, but she had agreed to meet him. When the email had come from out of the blue after more than two years of silence, she had not hesitated. She wanted some answers.

Riley lay back on the cabin top and looked up at her clean white sail curving against a sky so blue, the beauty of it made her dizzy.

She didn’t feel like talking to anyone or even reading her email at the moment, didn’t want contact yet with that complicated world. Life was simpler out here. The overnight sail across the channel from Antigua had been spectacular with a moon just past full lighting the island of Montserrat, the dome of that island’s very active volcano trailing wisps of white smoke in the strong trade winds, and Bonefish charging along at seven knots under a reefed main and jib. She sighed, closed her burning eyes, and felt the growing heat of the morning sun wrap around her like a soft blanket.

Flames consumed the bodies that danced and writhed in front of her while the foul smoke filled her nostrils and burned her lungs. Hot, so hot. She could hear their cries, see their mouths, great yawning holes of black as the lips around them curled into ashes, dropped off and floated to the ground. She flung her arms out, reaching, yet she could not touch their flames. She tried to run forward to help them, but it was as though she was on a treadmill floor. She could make no progress. Running, flat out, screaming through her parched throat, she never moved one inch closer to the dying men.