Thoughtfully he wandered up to his office. He sat in the ancient swivel chair behind his grandfather's massive desk. He hated it worse than ever. When he finally sold the club, perhaps it could get lost.

He scratched a match on its cigarette-scarred surface. From a solid gold cigarette case he drew a brown-papered bruto, a cheap coca-paste street joint. He had started to smoke them long ago to impress weak-stomached subordinates. Over the years he had grown to love them.

He leaned back and thought. The Whiskey Cay airstrip was unlighted and closed at seven P.M. If Newcombe was flying in tonight for dinner in Nassau, he couldn't fly back to Whiskey Cay until tomorrow.

Rico owned two Cigarette speedboats, identical to those of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency Blue Thunder Patrol; they were capable of sixty knots.

He pressed his intercom button. "Alejandro?"

"Si, señor?" answered his bodyguard and valet from the basement cocaine-cutting room.

He sucked in the raw, hard coca smoke and suddenly ruled the world.

"Get the black boat ready for tomorrow. And get el Conejo Grande to my office! Ahora mismo! Now!"

Alejandro and el Conejo Grande together hardly made a single brain, and he had better get them ready, for tomorrow was the day.

***

Mike balanced himself on the fifteen-foot bowstrip, which jutted like a javelin from the bow of Neptune's Folly.

He was barefoot—the better to keep his balance on the tapered spar. With one hand he clung to the headstay, a nine-sixteenths-inch stainless-steel cable from the tip of the bowsprit to the peak of the fifty-foot mast. In the other hand he balanced the old whaler's harpoon.

He had been there twenty minutes and had another ten to go before he would be relieved by Jake. William, muttering about a bad-luck boat, flatly refused to do anything but kibitz from the safety of the forward hatch, muttering dire predictions like a black Greek chorus of doom.

Mike's leg muscles flexed like a skier's as he balanced in the swell. The afternoon wind was rising. The current through Masthead Cut had shifted and was on its way out, meeting the Atlantic breakers of the Outside Passage in a maelstrom at the entrance to Masthead Sound.

He peered through the chop, straight down. Visibility had decreased; he could no longer see the bottom or the wreck. He wondered if the shifting sand had trapped the shark inside the ship with the skeleton.

It had been an expensive morning. A thousand dollars in tanks, regulators, backpacks, and diving weights lay within the wreck beside the hole, and the Whine Bottle, as old as she was, was worth at least ten thousand bucks.

He shuddered. It could have been worse. He wasn't going to dive for anything until they found the shark.

"So long, Secretariat," called Jake, heaving a haunch of meat over the starboard bow. It spiraled into the depths.