Carla smiled. "Thanks, Ellen, but it's getting to Mike. Anyway, Hoagie's daughter just ran free. Pretty girl. She was all over Nassau, in the clubs. Hoagie heard about it and finally resigned his commission to come home and straighten things out. But she disappeared before he got here."

"Oh, no!" That was why she had seen the sadness in his eyes. "Where'd she go?"

"Nobody knows. The police just sort of shrugged."

"But that's so sad."

Carla nodded. "Hoagie blamed the wife. The wife blamed Hoagie and took off for the Mediterranean. With her minister, no less! Hoagie came apart. He drank too much, gambled away what he had, and then he started flying for this charter outfit."

"And now Mike thinks he's in drugs? That's ridiculous!"

Carla joined her at the window. "Ellen?"

"Yes?"

"Philippa thinks he is too."

She couldn't believe it, wouldn't. "And you, Carla?" she asked heatedly. "Do you think so too?"

Carla grinned. "Do you think I'd give you a hundred bucks to take a traficante on a date?"

Ellen took the chip from her pocket and regarded it. On the front was a stupid bunny face, on the back a cottontail. She flipped it and it rose, whirling in the sunlight streaming through the window.

"Heads, yes—tails, no." She clapped it on her wrist and looked. She saw the bunny face.

"Heads," she announced.

"The gods," said Carla, "have spoken. Go with them."

***

Mike cruised the Whine Bottle along an endless plain of snow-white sand, occasionally banking away from Masthead Reef, riotous with clown fish and guppies. He was en route to Masthead Cut.

In a secret meeting at the Ministry of Tourism, they had been chartered to tag the shark and follow it, at least until after the Whiskey Cay Junkanoo on Tuesday. First they needed their transmitter back from the conch that had kidnapped it.

Jake's voice growled from the speaker on the sub's panel: "Steady as you go, man. The conch are congregated near the wreck."

Now that the sonobuoys were set out and charted, Jake could triangulate and send him the locations of the conch from the pilothouse. They had done it many times before. It saved the submersible's batteries, because when you knew where the conch held their meetings, you didn't have to search.

When he recovered the BPST and they tagged the shark with it, they'd be able to follow him as if he were a conch.

He saw the ghostly tan mass of the Leta wreck taking form before him. "Neptune's Folly," he called, "I'm a hundred feet south of the wreck now. Estimated current through the cut is maybe a knot and a half. Crabbing into it... I'm going to park this coffin and bail out."