PART TWO Right from Wrong

Night

3°11′ S, 14 °13′ W

Forty thousand feet above the South Atlantic Ocean

TWELVE

Why don’t we do this more often?” Jessica Kincaid whispered.

They always started slowly, like swimmers wading toward deep water in starlight. And they celebrated rituals: Inspection of Bruises. Healing Hands. Kiss to Make It Better. Now she lay on top of Paul Janson with her breasts pressed to his muscled chest, their lips brushing, legs intertwining, breath growing short, hearts racing.

The Embraer growled through the night sky. She thought Janson hadn’t heard her over the drone of the engines. “Why—”

“Because my entire carcass would implode from an excess of pleasure?”

“No lies.”

“What is the penalty for lying?”

“No evasions. Answer the question, Paul. Why don’t we do this more often?”

“We’re afraid,” Janson whispered into her mouth. He cupped the back of her head with one hand and ran the other slowly down her spine.

“Of what?” she demanded, departing from his lips with a flick of her tongue to string kisses down his neck.

“We’re afraid that one day one of us will come home from a job alone.”

He had stolen a march on her. The hand behind her head had materialized between her thighs. “I’m not afraid,” she whispered.

“Good. I wish I could say the same.”

She crouched on her knees and straddled him. He rose to join her.

“Give me your hands,” she said.

He held up both hands. With them balanced palm to palm she planted her feet on the bed and began to move. “I cannot believe we will ever be alone.”

“At this moment,” Janson gasped, “I’m inclined to agree with you.”

“Boss?”Mike, the pilot, spoke on the intercom. “Awful sorry to bother you.”

“What?” The cabin microphones were voice activated.

“Quintisha is calling on the sat phone. She says it’s major.”

* * *

QUINTISHA UPCHURCH WAS general operations manager for both CatsPaw Associates and the Phoenix Foundation. She was the only person in the world who could find Paul Janson anywhere, day or night.

“Switch it here, Mike, and turn off your end.”

Breasts heaving, eyes blurring, Jessica stared down at Janson. “What the hell time is it? Doesn’t that woman ever sleep?”

Janson said, “Hello, Quintisha.”

“You didn’t answer your sat phone, Mr. Janson.” It occurred to Janson, not for the first time, that her honeyed, resonant voice combined the primness of a deacon’s daughter with the steely resolve of a night court magistrate.

“Yes.”

“Jessica didn’t answer, either.”

“I am under the impression that Ms. Kincaid is taking the evening off. What’s up?”

“Douglas Case of American Synergy is in a state. He said to tell you, quote: ‘The doctor flew the coop.’ ”

“What?”

“Mr. Case used extreme language demanding your private numbers. I hung up on him, of course, but as we’re expecting five million dollars from ASC I thought it best to telephone the airplane.”

Janson thought hard.

Quintisha Upchurch said, “We could use the five million, Mr. Janson. That airplane does not come cheaply.”

“Tell Mr. Case I will deal with it.” He spoke Mike’s name. The voice recognition system routed him back to the cockpit. “Mike, have you passed your point of no return?”

The point of no return was not the middle of the ocean. Whether the Embraer could return to Africa or had to keep moving ahead to South America depended as much upon weight and wind resistance as distance already flown. It weighed less, thanks to burning off fuel, so it needed less power to maintain speed. Turning westerly headwinds into tailwinds would also allow Mike to fly with throttles pulled back. The math was complicated. Pilots like Mike did their “PNR” in their heads, minute by minute, as automatically as breathing.

“Twenty-nine minutes to point of no return.”

“Hang a one-eighty. Back to Porto Clarence.”

“One-eighty back to Porto Clarence—soon as I get clearance.”

Jessica spoke up. “Mike? When you get clearance, be gentle.”

“Say again?”

“Take it easy turning the airplane,” said Janson. “We don’t want anything falling off back here— Over and out.”

They were still holding hands, palm to palm, and steadied each other when the Embraer banked.

“Don’t you want to call your friend Doug?”

“Not before we know what happened.”

“Which we won’t know until we get to Porto Clarence.”

“Which won’t be for three hours.”

“Time to reach a point of no return?”

“Time to reach several points of no return.”

THIRTEEN

I’m afraid I was a bit short the other day with your Ms. Upchurch,” Doug Case apologized on the sat phone.

“She understood you were under pressure,” Janson said.

From the windows of the front room of Ferdinand Poe’s hospital suite he could see the Presidential Palace across the Porto Clarence harbor and a broad gray-blue swath of the Atlantic Ocean to the east and north. Isle de Foree’s flag—a gold, green, and black horizontal tricolor slashed by a diagonal band of red—had been raised in place of Iboga’s yellow banner. It stirred spasmodically in the intermittent breeze.

That same breeze had cleared the usual equatorial sea haze.

Janson could see for miles. An enormous vessel was growing slowly larger on the northern horizon. He had been watching her for the past hour, while waiting for Doug Case to return his call. She was too slow to be a cruise ship or an oil tanker.

Doug Case said, “I’ve had time to cool down. It’s not your fault the doctor lit out. Your check’s been cut. We’ll overnight it.”

“Don’t.”

“What?”

“Hang on to it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Send the check when we send the doctor.”

“We’re talking about five million bucks, Paul.”

“But not ours, yet. Don’t worry; we’ll run him down.”

He had nailed his first lead within minutes of landing at the airport. Poe’s audacious spy, Patrice da Costa—joking that he was now “temporary security chief” of “temporary president Poe’s temporary presidential guard”—took Janson to interview the madam of the brothel to which he had steered Flannigan the night before. The frightened woman acknowledged that the doctor had been there, although she did not know when he had left or where he had gone. In retrospect, Janson realized that Flannigan had not trusted him and had meant to run at the first opportunity.

“And when I do,” Janson promised Doug Case, “I’ll march him directly into your office.”

Case said, “Don’t worry about it. ASC did everything we could to help and you got him back to civilization safe and sound. If the man ran, that’s his problem; he’s on his own. I mean, we both did the right thing.”

“Why did he run?”

Doug Case answered with a chuckle, “Turns out the doctor is something of a swordsman. It’s very likely he was running from a pissed-off husband.”

“In Porto Clarence or Houston?”

“Either or both, from what I’ve heard— Look, a medical beach bum like Flannigan is not the biggest loss. His type kicks around from job to job.”

“From what I saw, he was thoroughly professional and totally committed to his patient.”

“I’m not accusing him of being a drug addict or alcoholic banned from practicing in the civilized world. I’m just saying we’ll get along without him. Let him go, Paul. We’ll send a check. Fax an invoice when you get a chance.”

“You’ll get my invoice along with Dr. Flannigan,” Janson retorted. His word, his credibility, and his professionalism were at stake. But he had another reason to keep the door open at ASC.

“If you insist,” Case said dubiously. “But we’re willing to call it a day.”