"A man obsessed with chicanery, skulduggery and connivery; in short, a rip-off artist." Giordino was in his element and on the verge of getting carried away. "Have you noticed his bulging stomach?"

"A poorly positioned pillow?"

"Exactly," Giordino exclaimed as if it were a revelation. "Then there are the scars on the face and the flattened nose."

"Poorly applied makeup?" Pitt asked innocently.

"There's no fooling you, is there?" The driver's ugly face twisted in a scowl through the rearview mirror, but there was no stopping Giordino. "Of course you caught the hairpiece floating in pomade."

"I most certainly did."

"How do you read his tattoos?"

"Inscribed by pen and ink?" offered Pitt.

Giordino shook his head. "I'm disappointed in you, Mr. Pitt. Stencils. Any apprentice remote viewer would envision them being stenciled on the skin."

"I stand rebuked."

Unable to remain quiet, the driver snapped over his shoulder. "You two pretty boys think you're smart."

"We do what we can," said Pitt lightly.

Having done their dirty work and advertised the fact that they had not fallen off a pumpkin wagon, Pitt and Giordino remained silent as the van drove onto a pier of a shipping terminal. Smith dodged around huge overhead cranes and stacked freight, finally stopping opposite an opening in a railing along the pier's edge. Without a word of instruction, he stepped from the vehicle and walked toward a ramp leading to a launch that was tied to a small floating dock. The two NUMA men obediently followed and climbed into the launch. The sailor standing at the helm in the stern of the boat was a concert in black—black pants, black T-shirt and black stocking cap pulled down over the ears despite the tropical heat and humidity.

The launch eased away from the wooden pilings and turned her bow toward a ship that lay anchored about two-thirds of a mile from the terminal. Around her were the lights from other ships waiting for their turn to load or unload cargo under the great cranes. The atmosphere was as clear as cut glass, and far across Manila Bay the colored lights of fishing boats sparkled like gemstones against the black sky.

The shape of the ship began to rise in the night, and Pitt could see that she was not the typical tramp steamer that plowed the South Seas from island to island. He correctly identified her as a Pacific Coast lumber hauler with clean, unencumbered holds and no amidships superstructure. Her engine room was in the stern below the crew's quarters. A single stack rose just aft of the wheelhouse and behind it, a tall mast. A second, smaller mast rose from the forecastle on the bow. Pitt guessed her at somewhere between four and five thousand tons with a length of just under three hundred feet and a forty-five-foot beam. A vessel her size could have carried nearly three million board feet of lumber. Her time had long come and gone. Her sister ships, which had carried the product of saw mills, had settled into the silt of the boneyard almost fifty years earlier, having been replaced by more modern towboats and barges.