Balaton shuddered against her accusations. “No... stop. It’s not true. I’m president of a Fortune 500 company.”

The bluster, the arrogance were gone, but Ashley felt no twinge of sympathy: he still had the gun. “You know the rest, don’t you?” Her voice was deadly quiet. “The real András Balaton became the orült szerzetes, the mad monk, after his family was murdered... and then a farmer, Bartholomew Wakefield, the man who raised my brother and me.”

Balaton’s eyes were barely focused. “He tried to destroy me.”

“I can hardly blame him. Even if you kill him—and me—the photographs will be released and the story of the Balaton jewels told. And the others will talk. Mac Stevens, Lillian Parker, Jeremy Carruthers, my brother. You can’t kill us all to save yourself.”

“Can’t I?” He rallied, giving a raw, pathetic smile. “It would all be blamed on your Bartholomew Wakefield.”

“I doubt that. In any case, the Coast Guard will be here any second. You won’t be able to escape. Why exacerbate your situation?”

The man who for thirty years had pretended to be an aristocrat, a count, shut his eyes against the rationality of her words. Ashley didn’t dare move. She knew she had him...hoped, prayed.

Then a golden-haired woman was jumping from the shadows of the trees along the edge of the runway. Tears streamed down her face as she staggered toward Balaton. “It’s not true,” she sobbed, tearing at her hair. “Tell me it’s not true...Daddy!”

Sarah Balaton, Ashley thought, sagging. Had she heard everything?

“Sarah...” Balaton mouthed his daughter’s name and looked at her. He swallowed, visibly pained. “This...this has nothing to do with you.”

Her face was blotched from crying. “It has everything to do with me. Oh, Daddy, tell me what she says isn’t true. I won’t believe it if you tell me....”

Ashley knew that feeling all too well. If she had been presented with the kind of incontrovertible proof she had against the president of Crockett Industries, would she have believed Barky capable of such heinous crimes? But it was an unfair question: Barky wasn’t capable of those things. Balaton was. Somewhere, sometime, in some small way, he had to have indicated that to his daughter.

“My Sarah,” he choked out. “I love you.”

He was crying, too, and in his despair he lowered his gun. Ashley thought he’d given up the struggle, but she couldn’t take that chance. She lunged forward.

At the same time, the prone figure on the ground leaped up, and together she and Barky knocked down the broken, dispirited man and took away his gun. They watched him roll over in the mud and cry uncontrollably, calling his daughter’s name.

Sarah Balaton knelt beside him, but although he was her father, she didn’t touch him. She stared at him as if he were a creature she had never seen before and didn’t understand.

Breathing heavily, bruised and shaken, Barky leaned against Ashley for support. “Forty years I have waited for this moment,” he said.