He checked his phone for messages. There was a pile of calls, but nothing that couldn't wait. He flicked the stereo on, and Oscar Peterson's frenetic piano fingering filled the room. He poured a drink for himself of his best aniejo tequila, opened the sliding glass door and went out onto the deck with the ice tinkling pleasantly in his glass. He listened to the soft, rippling sounds, and breathed into his lungs the misty, flower-scented river air that was so different from the briny scent of the ocean where he spent much of his working days.

After a few minutes, he went back into the house, pulled a book on ancient Greek philosophers from a shelf and opened it to Plato's “Allegory of the Cave.” In Plato's parable, prisoners chained in a cave can see only the shadows cast by puppets on the wall and can hear the puppeteers moving behind their backs. On that slim evidence, the prisoners must decide what is shadow and what is reality. Similarly, Austin's brain was sorting the strange events of the last few days, trying to impose order on his mental chaos. He kept coming back to the one thing he could grasp. The mysterious ship.

He went over to a rolltop desk and powered up his laptop computer. Using the Web site information from Dr. Adler, he called up the satellite picture of the giant wave area. The image showed that all was quiet. He backed up through the image archives to the date of the Southern Belle's sinking. The two giant waves that had startled Adler were clearly displayed on the date the ship had disappeared. The ship itself was shown as a small blip that was there one minute, gone the next.

He zoomed the picture out so that it showed a greater area of ocean and saw something he hadn't noticed before. Four ships were clustered around the area of the sinking. There was one at each point of the compass, equidistant from one another. He stared at the image for a moment, then backed up a few days. The ships were not there. He jumped ahead to shortly after the sinking. There were only three ships. When he went to a day after the Belle went down, no blips were visible.

He was like one of Plato's prisoners in the cave, trying to separate reality from appearance, but he had one advantage they didn't. He could call out for help. He picked up the thick NUMA directory next to the phone, scanned the listings and punched in a number on the phone. A man answered.

“Hello, Alan. This is Kurt Austin. I just got in from a cruise. Hope I didn't wake you.”

“Not at all, Kurt.Nice to hear from you. What can I do for you?”

“Can you make a meeting at my place tomorrow morning around eight? It's quite important.”

“Of course.” There was a pause. “You know what I do?”