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  He grabbed his bag and slipped away. If KAT and her colleague—or colleagues—hadn’t figured out he wasn’t in Playa del Carmen, they soon would.

  The question was, should he run? Or sidestep the trap and kill the bait?

  • • •

  At ten p.m., security lights dimmed when the resort’s generators switched to eco mode. Ford headed for the bayside marina, indifferent to the few vacationers who roamed the docks where yachts and trawlers were moored. His tourist disguise consisted of baggy shorts, sandals, a wristband fashioned from tape, and a golf visor, even though he didn’t play golf and hoped he never would. The effect was as expected: security guards and guests ignored him.

  Near a boat ramp where Jet Skis and paddleboards were stacked, a sign read

  PARASAILING ADVENTURES

  CONTACT OUR RECREATION SPECIALISTS!

  Ford allowed the sign to lure him closer to the twin-engine go-fast boat that was empty but uncovered, afloat in a sheen of oil. A storage shed was nearby, door ajar: a room crammed with parasails and rope. Atop the mess, rolled into a ball, was the scarlet canopy he’d seen earlier. The parasail’s harness, however, was still on the boat, looped over a winch that held several hundred yards of yellow braided nylon.

  Ford didn’t risk stepping aboard. There were rope samples enough in the shed.

  His attention moved to the Jet Skis, then the stack of paddleboards. None of the boards approached the quality of his own favorite, an 11-foot carbon fiber Avanti, but there was a decent touring board hidden off to the side that was probably used by instructors. Ford claimed it with his eyes and did the same with a paddle.

  He waited. From the direction of the pool bar came laughter and the tentative notes of a steel drum. A party was getting started.

  Good timing.

  When the docks emptied, he traded his tourist disguise for khaki shorts and paddled the board to his little dugout, anchored two hundred meters off the beach. He secured the board lengthwise, with barely room to sit.

  The cayuca had a quiet little two-stroke kicker. A simple crank start, like an old lawn mower’s, but powerful enough to rocket him back to camp through the silence of stars.

  Behind, in the boat’s wake, reggae music thrummed. The resort became a balloon of light that gradually deflated and was soon consumed by nightfall in Quintana Roo.

  • • •

  Ford’s base camp was miles from his spotting post—a cave of buttonwoods and palms up a winding creek where the Maya had quarried limestone.

  In the morning, when the sun was high enough, he carried snorkel gear into the creek to an abrupt drop-off and spent half an hour exploring the walls and bottom—uniformly fifteen feet deep, squared like a box. He saw pottery shards and at least one unbroken bowl that, beneath a film of algae, was decorated with designs of deepest azure. It had been a thousand years, perhaps two thousand years, since a human hand had made contact. Tempting, but he left the bowl and pottery shards undisturbed.

  What he could not resist was retrieving what had been recorded in KAT’s cottage last night. He dialed a thirteen-digit number, entered a code, and stared into the ancient quarry while the data was downloaded onto his phone. Ironic, the contrast in time and place and technology.

  KAT had not brought the man in the white dinner jacket home, but she’d made a phone call. Perhaps to him, but maybe not. Ford listened to the one-sided conversation several times. It was only a minute long, but packed an emotional punch.

  “Bitch,” he said as he put the phone away. It was a word he seldom used.

  Using the broad edge of a pencil, he shaded the sheet from the notepad he’d taken from the woman’s cottage. Words began to emerge, amid much doodling, and sketches that might have been self-portraits.

  Winslow Shepherd 802

  Okay. This was proof. The man in the white dinner jacket was the Australian who’d supposedly been executed.

  Pieces were taking shape.

  • • •

  Breakfast: wild bananas, instant coffee, and military lasagna from a box of MREs. While his jungle hammock and clothes dried in the sun, he experimented with the laser and lengths of rope he’d stolen the night before. What was the maximum distance a six-watt tactical laser would burn nylon? How long would it take?

  After that, there was time to rig the paddleboard for an extended trip and hide it. He hoped the board wouldn’t be necessary, but success favored those who devised options in advance of need.

  The wind was of constant interest. At first light, it had freshened from the northeast, steady and dependable. Far out to sea, though, perhaps over a coral bank, or some unknown island, clouds of violet threatened rain before the day was done.

  A storm would change everything, but it was pointless to fret. Around noon, he puttered to an isolated cenote; a black hole in the Earth sealed beneath luminous turquoise. The water was so clear, he tensed when he nudged the dugout over the lip of the crater, as if gravity would suck him downward.

  He felt the same pleasant tension when he slipped over the side and jackknifed toward the bottom, but there was no bottom, only carousels of fish—barracuda, giant pompano, amberjack. They parted with predatory indifference to reveal limestone walls that spiraled into the inner blackness of the Earth.

  At twenty feet, Ford latched onto a chunk of rock and gauged its weight before dropping it into the abyss. The rock tumbled in slow motion, with the resonance of skulls colliding, and started a brief landslide.

  He looked up and imagined the little boat’s anchor hooked to a larger boulder, the bitter end lashed to a dead but buoyant body. How far would the boulder tumble? At what depth, and for how many days, would a man’s body dangle in suspension before predators reprocessed protein into fuel?

  Adrift at the edge of the cenote was the largest predator thus far. It was a translucent blob the size of a garbage bag rooted to the tide by venomous strands, some of them twenty feet long. To sailors, it was a Portuguese man-of-war, but only a “jellyfish” to those who had not experienced the animal’s sting. Each drifting filament was an arsenal of microscopic harpoons. They fired upon contact with living tissue, injecting doses of neurotoxin.

  Sea jellies of all types were common here: bell domes and thimble-sized dwarfs called sea lice, because they could slip under a swimsuit and cause a maddening rash. The animals—and they were animals—had no head, heart, eyes, brain, or ears; they were seawater-fueled by hunger and light, all highly efficient hunters. Man or beast, if sufficiently entangled, would soon be consumed.

  In the afternoon, Ford dozed, or tried to, with the bug jacket pulled to his knees, hood drawn with only his nose protruding. Heat was a vaporous weight. It herded insects into the shade, so he zipped himself into his jungle hammock. His fear of being without reading material bordered on phobia. He had allowed himself only one sodden paperback, Sea of Cortez, by John Steinbeck. When he skipped to the part about biologist Ed Ricketts, a swatch of onionskin paper dropped free. Unfolded, he saw that it was a page written by his boat mystic pal, Tomlinson, who, apparently, had used it as a bookmarker. The man’s elegant nineteenth-century penmanship was unmistakable.

  What a goofball, Ford thought. The page was from the original manuscript of Tomlinson’s best-known book, One Fathom Above Sea Level. The book had earned his pal an international following and a limitless supply of fawning devotees, many of them the bespectacled, pottery-throwing Berkeley types who were prone to sunburn yet seldom wore bras.

  Ford had time on his hands. It wasn’t his kind of book—he’d tried to wade through it before—but, what the hell?

  He read:

  My inner voice tells me I have no worth beyond the kindness I show strangers. It claims I make clown faces, and have no power to escape the puppeteer’s strings.

  Bullshit. The truth is this: my inner voice lies to me. The same is true if yours whispers that you are
not worthy of happiness, or sufficiently attractive, or smart enough, or lack the strength to live without fear.

  All lies.

  Deep in the brain is a coward’s crevice that values safety above all else. Why try? Why bother? Why risk any small success if failure is guaranteed?

  Our silent voices are more trustworthy guides—bell note sounds that favor action over inactivity, and a life fully lived rather than a life of gray complacency.

  How do I know this? Three weeks in an insane asylum have erased all the murky lines regarding life, death, shit, and Shinola. Thus I take rubber pencil in hand . . .

  Enough. Ford slapped a mosquito; yawned while refolding the page and stored it in a hammock pocket provided for personal items. Another high-tech anomaly in this ancient place was googling the name Winslow Shepherd.

  There was much to learn.

  He broke camp long before sunset and policed the area until he was certain no modern spoor was left behind.

  The little motorized boat—or the stolen paddleboard—would be his last base camp before he fled Mexico.

  Without a hood, the man identified as David Abdel Cashmere had the face of a bird; delicate, predatory, and vaguely reptilian, eyes framed by black hair. Surfing shorts, and shirtless, too, contrary to religious tenets, yet his pale ears signaled a devotion to modesty. In his adopted home of Indonesia, he would have worn a cap beneath a prayer scarf, a keffiyeh.

  Quite a change for a failed actor from Chicago who had killed children with bombs and cut off human heads.

  Yesterday, KAT had sent several candid snapshots for Ford to study. It was the same man, but was it the right man? This guy looked bigger, stronger, than in the videos. Maybe a substitute target was part of the setup, too.

  Ford steadied the binoculars and messed with the focus. He was looking into the sun; glare blurred details. Aboard the towboat, the same Mexican crew was strapping the suspected assassin into a parachute harness. Also aboard were three Asian men, probably Chinese. This made sense if Cashmere and his group were here to secure funding. For decades, China had been quietly buying property—and loyalty—in third-world countries while the other major powers squabbled nose to nose.

  Arming terrorists would be a solid investment in China’s future.

  With the Chicagoan, or whoever it was, kneeling on the launch deck, the boat idled into the wind. Ford focused on the boat’s captain while the captain focused on the weather. Miles away, the squall, after building all afternoon, had grounded itself to the ocean with tentacles of rain. In high cumulus towers, lightning popped in silence. A slow, freshening wind rumbled ashore with the scent of tropic rain.

  Ford knew what the captain was thinking: ocean squalls can linger for hours, then sprint landward. If you can see lightning, it can kill you. The trip should be canceled, but that would mean no pay, no tips. The captain probably had a family to support, and his boss would be pissed. Might even fire him for doing what was right instead of returning with smiling clients and a chunk of cash for the resort.

  Ford empathized with the guy. He swung the binocs to the Asians, none of whom were smiling, nor did they appear aware of the squall. They were busy snapping photos of a jungle sunset, a ginger backdrop infused with jade. There was the illusion of osmosis; a siphoning of light. Slowly, the bay separating Ford from the resort was filled with a phosphorescent glow while the Earth darkened.

  He scanned the beach, where a few vacationers, mostly couples, strolled. Nearby, he suspected, KAT and Winslow Shepherd were also watching. Perhaps with other confederates, but where and how many?

  Down the shoreline, a rock jetty led into the harbor. Three men on Jet Skis were there in a tight little pod. Not moving, just sitting, as if enjoying the sunset. But they weren’t there for the scenery. Their attention darted from the go-fast boat to the string of islands that separated the deep water from the bay where Ford waited. Serious, their manner, if not their expressions. The distance was too great for detail.

  He let the binocs hang and cleaned his glasses. It was too late in the day for tourists to be on rental Jet Skis. Hell . . . it was too late in the day for parasailing, for that matter. Not with a squall building.

  They’re baiting me, he thought. Or they want David Cashmere for themselves.

  He argued it back and forth. In any environment where there’s a potential for danger, instinct is a more reliable guardian than intellect. If something doesn’t feel right, it’s not right. Ford knew this was true . . . sometimes, at least. Yet, he distrusted any behavior driven by emotion, and his uneasiness bore striking similarities to fear.

  Vanity played a role, too. Last night, before midnight, KAT had told someone on the phone: “Mission scrubbed—you believe that? Whoever they sent is just another old-world hack; a dinosaur without a clue how things have changed. So”—the woman’s laughter was irksome—“we’ll just keep on keepin’ on. His type is always so predictable.”

  Ford thought, We will see.

  He focused the binocs on the man in the chute harness, who was still on the launch platform, a tad wobbly in the gusting wind, even with the mate helping to steady him.

  A decision had to be made. Was the man actually the killer or some innocent bastard being served up as a target?

  The captain gave a sudden thumbs-up and hit the throttle. The parasail blossomed huge over the boat and swept the man upward in a graceful arc. Ford didn’t hear the familiar warbling cry, but he saw it: David Abdel Cashmere, mouth open, sailed high into the sky with his tongue fluttering.

  In the video, the assassin had done the same while lofting a severed head.

  Ford shouldered the bag and bulled through the mangroves to his boat, where he stopped long enough to cup his ears and listen. Wind freshened in gusts; mangrove leaves clattered, while, offshore, the squall rumbled.

  No noisy Jet Skis, though.

  He motored three hundred yards downwind to an island he had chosen earlier and dragged the cayuca out of sight.

  • • •

  From this new vantage point, he couldn’t see the resort, or the beach, or even the towboat. But the parasail was there; a scarlet blossom in the twilight sky, high above the trees where Ford waited, the Vertx tactical bag at his feet.

  A tree provided a leaning post. He braced the laser, snapped open the peep sight, and found the dangling appendage that was the Chicagoan-turned-terrorist. The rope linking Cashmere to the boat was a gray thread on a gray-green sky. Even at this distance, almost a quarter mile, the laser’s beam would have permanently blinded the man if it swept across his eyes.

  That was an option.

  Ford lowered the laser and looked at the ground to confirm the weapon he’d selected was there. It was a twelve-inch sliver of wood from a black mangrove or lignum vitae tree that had been crystalized by salt and sunlight. No coroner would question how it had punctured the brain of a man who’d fallen from the sky.

  Ford, wearing gloves, secured the stake in his belt and used the binoculars.

  The parasail was still laboring into the wind. He could tell by the angle. It moved toward the squall clouds that sailed landward; black towers fulminant with rain and the day’s last green light. After several seconds, lightning popped. Cashmere, in his harness, saw it, or maybe heard a sudden sizzle that spun his head around. Long seconds later, the thunder reached Ford, who took pleasure in the man’s scared-shitless reaction. The failed actor began a frantic waving, motioning for the captain to bring him down.

  Ford retrieved the laser and got ready.

  The parasail appeared to pause. It tilted briefly, lost altitude as if threatening to collapse, then ballooned round and taut. This indicated the towboat had turned and would soon cross abeam the wind like a sailboat on a long reach.

  The captain was preparing to reel in his client. First, he would have to circle into the wind and gradually slow while the boat’s mate
did the grunt work. It was a process that required several careful minutes because running across the wind put a tremendous strain on the chute’s tackle.

  Ford released the laser’s safety lock, pressed the activation switch, and used the tree to steady his aim. Instantly, he was linked to the parasail by a needle-thin beam of light that was the same luminous green as the sky. A Star Wars character with an infinity sword—that image came into his mind.

  Using tiny sawing strokes, he painted an area midway between Cashmere’s feet and the water below. Even with the peep sight, there was no chance of cutting the rope. Ford was well aware of this fact. That’s why he had packed to leave in advance. But if he got lucky, if the megawatt laser melted only a few nylon strands, then the combined force of wind and engine torque might do the rest. If the laser failed, nothing was lost. He would retreat unnoticed, undiscovered, and, hopefully, allowed to pursue terrorist converts—and KAT—another day.

  But it happened. One instant, the parasail was aloft . . . the next instant, it was a deflating balloon that spiraled crazily toward the peep sight while Ford’s eyes widened in surprise.

  Holy shit.

  He grabbed his bag and started through the mangroves toward where he guessed the parasail might impact. Foliage blocked his view, but the escalating sound of slapping canvas and Cashmere’s screams kept him on track. Halfway across the island, limbs suddenly exploded en masse.

  Ford stopped. An instant later, the tree canopy parted, as if cleaved by a plow, and the sky was displaced by a scarlet cloud that was the parasail. Tied to the end, like the tail on a broken kite, was David Cashmere.

  Christ—still fifty yards to go. He confirmed the wooden stake was in his belt and charged ahead, while wind bubbled beneath the chute and dragged the man inland, where the rigging finally snagged. When it did, the guy suffered a hell of a jolt, then he hung there, legs dangling, dazed but conscious enough to hear someone crashing toward him.

  The look on Cashmere’s face when he saw a human being coming to his rescue—shock and child-like hope. He even managed a smile when he yelled, “Praise be to God—help me, brother.”