‘So, within a couple of days, everyone had scattered. Except for the Rhino and myself. After the cops seized the yacht, and pretty much everything on it, apart from a few trinkets and baubles I managed to stash away to pay off the Gurkhas, I was broke. The Rhino was no better off, so we talked it over and agreed to go into the . . . er, salvage business.’

Pappas grinned at the euphemism.

‘We’d got lucky with Greg Norman’s yacht,’ she continued, ‘and figured there might be some more easy pickings like that out there. Had to have been a couple of thousand vessels affected by the Wave, just drifting on the ocean.’

‘And how’d that work out for you?’

‘Not nearly as well as I had imagined,’ she admitted. ‘It took us a couple of weeks to organise passage back across the Pacific, and by the time we’d done that it was too late. The place was swarming with pirates who’d come up from the south. Anyway, to cut a long and dreary story short, after the Wave lifted, we decided to try our luck back on shore. That ended with us in New York, having our arses pulled out of the fire by a couple of US Army Rangers and Commando Barbie . . . Well, actually, we got the Rangers’ cocks off the chopping block, and they paid us back with a helicopter ride. For a slice of our profits, which turned out to be one-tenth of one-per-cent of fuck all.’

Now Pappas regarded her with a quizzical look, which may have been questioning her judgment, or even her sanity, in having gone to New York in the first place. Or maybe it was in reaction to her and Rhino having welched on a deal with a couple of heavily armed special operators. She shrugged.

‘The Rangers were cool. We ran into them about a week later. Told them what had happened. They were somewhat pissed, but then they would’ve been dead if we hadn’t stuck our noses in their business in the first place. We called it even.’

Shaking his head, as though he were having trouble keeping it all straight, Nick Pappas checked his digital recorder to make sure he still had disk space.