Van Pelt counted heads. “Five!” he shouted. “Who’s missing?”

Eyes flickered toward a closet. Van Pelt nodded at one of his men, who triggered a short burst, shredding the door. The ship rolled and the body of the scientist hiding there tumbled out. Van Pelt nodded again and his men executed the rest.

A burst of gunfire from the quarters on the levels above spoke the end of Amber Dawn’s Filipino crew. Eleven down. Only the captain to go. Van Pelt drew his pistol and climbed the stairs to the bridge. The door was locked and made of steel. He signaled a soldier, who duct-taped a chunk of C-4 onto it. They sheltered halfway down the steps and covered their ears. The plastic explosive blew the door open with a loud bang and Van Pelt vaulted through it.

To the mercenary’s surprise, the captain was not alone. She was sprawled on the deck, a pretty blonde in blood-soaked slacks and blouse. A man was kneeling over her, working with the sure-handed economy of a battlefield medic.

Van Pelt raised his pistol. “Are you a doctor?”

Terry Flannigan was holding death in his hands, and when he looked up from Janet’s riddled chest to the gunman standing in the door he was staring death in the face.

“What kind of doctor?” the gunman demanded.

“Trauma surgeon, you asshole. What does it look like?”

“Come with me.”

“I can’t leave her. She’s dying.”

Van Pelt stepped closer and shot Janet Hatfield in the head. “Not anymore. Get in the boat.”

TWO

221 West 46th Street

New York City

Paul Janson descended a steep flight of stairs to Sofia’s Club Cache in the basement of the Hotel Edison. The curly-haired brunette knockout who took his fifteen-dollar cover charge with the dazzling smile she reserved for new customers saw him as he intended to be seen: an out-of-town businessman hoping that Vince Giordano and his famous hot-jazz Nighthawks would liven up a lonely Monday evening. His navy suit, artfully cut to conceal his powerful frame, looked like a classic soft-shoulder Brooks Brothers sack suit, neither dapper nor expensive. His tailor had seen to that by eliminating bespoke sleeve buttons and bound buttonholes. The creases in Janson’s brow marked a man somewhere past his thirties, and he could have acquired the faint lines of scar tissue playing college sports.

Janson took his change, returned an unmemorable smile, and remarked, like half the people who came down the stairs, “The joint is jumpin’.”

Across the wide, deep low-ceilinged room the tuxedo-clad eleven-piece band of saxophones, clarinets, trumpets, trombone, banjo, piano, drums, and an aluminum double bass was storming through “Shake That Thing.” A hundred people ate and drank at the tables. A dozen couples danced to the music, many with great skill. The dancers older than thirty wore dresses and suits befitting the hot-jazz era. The younger favored T-shirts and cargo pants.

One of the younger, an attractive woman with strong, regular features, high cheekbones, full lips, and spiky brown “bed hair,” was dancing a high-speed 1920s one-step with the intensity and precision of a laser cutting machine. Janson concealed an appreciative smile. Jessica Kincaid demanded of herself, “Go fast till it hurts, then put on some speed and do it better.”

Kincaid shot Janson a glance that mingled fascination and envy. Paul Janson was master of the nondescript, and it drove her crazy. She worked hard at being a chameleon. With adjustments of clothing, hair, jewelry, and makeup she could make herself look twenty-five or thirty-five and pass for a Brooklyn video artist or a good ol’ girl juke-joint bartender or a buttoned-down banker. But she could never look nondescript, and when she tried Janson laughed that “nondescript” and “interesting” did not fit the same sentence.

Paul Janson was just there. Except when he was not there. Janson could hide in plain sight. If he chose to, Janson could fill a room, but he was more likely to enter without anyone noticing—as he had just now—and leave the same way. He even had a trick of shifting his shoulders to make his height look average. She glanced at him again. He returned it this time and drifted toward the stairs.

“Gotta go,” she told her dance instructor. Duty called.

The Town Car looked identical to a thousand black livery cabs in Midtown. But the kid behind the wheel had driven armored security vehicles for tanker convoys in Iraq and the interior lights did not go on when Kincaid opened the door.

“Where we going?” she asked the sturdy shape of Janson in the shadows.

“First stop: Houston, Texas. American Synergy Corporation’s HQ.”

Biggest oil company in the country. Snapped up the richest leases after BP’s Gulf of Mexico disaster. “Then?”

“West Africa is my guess. If we take the job. Home if we don’t. We probably won’t.”

“Why go at all?”

“ASC’s president of global security is an old friend.”

Kincaid nodded in the dark. Janson had lots of them, and when old friends called he ran to them. He passed her a thick towel. “Don’t catch cold.” Soaking wet from dancing a heart-pounding two beats to a second, she was shivering in the AC.

“Y’all telling me I smell?” While a fluent student of several languages and possessing an invaluable gift for mimicking accents, Jessica Kincaid had not entirely erased from her own voice the Kentucky hill twang she had grown up with, particularly when she was alone with Janson.

“That’s why we have a shower on the plane.”

The car caught the green lights up Madison Avenue, crossed over to the Major Deegan, and swung onto the Hutchinson River Parkway. Late-night suburban traffic was light. Forty minutes after leaving the Edison, they pulled into Westchester Airport, bypassed the passenger terminal, and continued on to a fenced-off section with a chain-link gate. A voice on a security speakerphone asked who they were.

“Tail number eight-two-two-Romeo-Echo,” the driver answered, and drove through when the electric gate slid open. An attendant opened a second gate that led to the runways, a vast expanse of darkness dotted with blue, yellow, and green lights marking taxiways and runway edges and thresholds. The car parked beside a silver Embraer Legacy 650 jet with two enormous Rolls-Royce AE 3007 engines in the tail. The pilots were completing their checklists. Janson and Kincaid climbed aboard, retracted the self-contained deployable entry steps that permitted fast exits independent of airfield facilities, and locked the door.

The long-haul executive jet built to carry fourteen passengers had been made extremely comfortable for two. Embraer had reconfigured it to Janson’s specs, outfitting it to deliver two or three operators well rested and fed, suited up, and thoroughly informed for any kind of work anywhere in the world. The galley directly behind the cockpit had been upgraded, and the lavatory and the rearmost of the three seating areas had been converted to a dressing room and full bath. The forward seating areas had been turned into a study and dining room. The middle section had fold-down beds for transocean runs.

The plane had climbed to forty-one thousand feet and their pilot was radioing, “New York center, Embraer two-two-Romeo level at four-one-zero,” when Kincaid came out of the shower wrapped in a terry-cloth robe. Janson looked up from his green leather easy chair, where he was studying a dossier labeled: “ASC—American Synergy Corporation.” A laptop was open on the table beside him and he had a glass of water close at hand. An identical dossier and laptop were waiting beside Kincaid’s red chair along with water and a stack of lemon-lime Camelbak Elixir electrolyte tablets.

Janson peered over the wire-rimmed reading glasses that Kincaid called his innocent old guy specs and said, “If we could bottle the aroma of a woman in a shower we would be rich.”