The cockpit was a tighter fit inside than his father’s old E-type Jaguar coupe. O’Malley pulled the door shut, scrambled into the pilot’s seat, and started flipping switches. The engines rumbled and the plane began to roll forward smoothly. “We have extra tanks for extended range and new engines with the latest upgrades. And nothing on it can be traced back to me. Still, it’s going to be a bitch to dump this thing.”

He grabbed the microphone and spoke rapidly into it as he looked up into the sky in one direction and then the other. Through a speaker a voice demanded to know who he was. They were taxiing rapidly now, past ground vehicles and a large twin-engine turbojet and an MD-80 moving toward the runway. Merrill always got anxious before taking off, but now his thoughts of Amy transferred the anxiety to her. The spot in the sky had become smaller than a no-see-um as O’Malley pushed the throttles to the firewall and the speed of the little plane built. He kept searching the sky and the voice from the speaker yelled louder, in a panic, as the tar strips between slabs of pavement slammed the little plane ever faster until finally O’Malley pulled back on the wheel.

And they were up.

The island fell away and they were out over water that was dark blue in the afternoon, the low-lying, heavy, billowing clouds of the tropics edged bright pink in the waning sunlight. O’Malley switched on the radar, and on the screen a blip showed the other plane still climbing.

“They’re going upstairs,” O’Malley said. “We can watch them from down here.”

“Who are they?”

“Polish mercenaries. Part of a whole generation of young men who didn’t get a war to die in, superfluous males, the bottom of the social and economic ladder, young bulls absolutely worthless in a paper pushing world. According to the AARP, these particular assholes have been working for the past four or five months for a guy named Chino.”

“AARP?”

“American Association of Recycled Pushers. Guys from the old days who got out of the funny business alive. There are more of us than you might think.”

“Tell me about Chino.”

“When I heard he was involved, it knocked my socks off. He owned the Ghost. I watched the whole thing on television, including the hearings on C-Span, waiting to hear his name. The one thing that didn’t come out was what Chino was doing with that boat with all the crap on it. What the hell was he up to? What did they tell you?”

“This is the first time I’ve heard his name.” Merrill was watching the radar screen as if he expected to see Amy inside it.