Pitt shook the chairman's hand. "I wish you the best of luck. Perhaps we can do it again sometime."

Cabrillo rolled his eyes. "Oh God, I hope not."

Giordino took one of his magnificent cigars and slipped it into Cabrillo's shirt pocket. "A little something in case you tire of your smelly old pipe."

They waited as the attendants transferred Cabrillo to the gumey and lifted him inside the ambulance. Then the door was closed and the vehicle moved across the dock. They were standing there watching for a moment until it disappeared onto a street lined with palm trees when a man came up behind them.

"Mr. Pitt and Mr. Giordino?"

Pitt turned. "That's us."

A man in his middle sixties, with gray hair and beard, held up a leather-encased badge and identification. He was wearing white shorts, a flowered silk shirt and sandals. "I've been sent by my superiors to take you to the airport. An aircraft is waiting to fly you to Washington."

"Aren't you a little old to play secret agent?" said Giordino, studying the stranger's identification.

"We oldies but goodies can often pass unnoticed where you younger guys can't."

"Which way to your car?" asked Pitt conversationally.

The senior citizen pointed to a small Toyota van painted in the wild colors of a local taxi. "Your carriage awaits."

"I had no idea the CIA cut your budget so drastically," Giordino said sarcastically.

"We make do with what we've got."

They piled into the van, and twenty minutes later they were seated in a military cargo jet. As the plane rolled down the runway of Guam's Air Force base, Pitt looked out the window and saw the senior intelligence agent leaning against his van as if confirming that Pitt and Giordino had departed the island. In another minute they were flying above the often overlooked island paradise of the Pacific with its volcanic mountains, lush jungle waterfalls and miles of white-sand beaches graced with swaying coco palms. The Japanese swarmed into the hotels and onto the beaches of Guam, but not many Americans. He continued staring down as the plane passed over the turquoise waters inside the reef surrounding the island and headed out to sea.

As Giordino dozed off, Pitt turned his thoughts to the United States, sailing somewhere on the ocean below him. Something terrible was in the works, a terrible threat that only one man on earth could prevent. But Pitt knew with crystallized certainty that nothing, except perhaps an untimely death, would deflect Qin Shang from his purpose.

The world may be a place that is scarce of honest politicians, white buffalo, unpolluted rivers, saints and miracles, but there is no shortage of depraved villains. Some, like serial killers, may slay twenty or a hundred innocent victims. But given financial resources they might kill many more. Those like Qin Shang who possessed enormous affluence could hold themselves above the law and hire homicidal cretins to do their dirty work for them. The evil billionaire was not a general who felt remorse over losing a thousand men in battle to achieve an objective. Qin Shang was a cold-blooded sociopathic murderer who could drink a glass of champagne and eat a hearty dinner after condemning hundreds of illegal immigrants, many of them women and children, to a horrible death in the frigid waters of Orion Lake.