He took a deep breath of ocean-and-pine-scented air, wanting to remember the moment in detail, to impress its every sight and sound upon his brain so that he could call them up at whim even when he was old and feebleminded and unable to recall his own name. For several minutes before the skiff had appeared, Cobbs had heard the loud revving of its engine from out on the water, but had tried to curb his expectation until he'd actually spotted it through his lenses. And when he did, when he'd seen Dex was alone, well, Cobbs had felt almost like he was going to lift off into the stratosphere himself. Only at that moment, when the suspense had finally ended, had he realized the true fervor with which he'd hated Ricci. Only then too had he learned the whole of his capacity for murder without remorse or fear of punishment, without anything in his heart but gleeful satisfaction.

Now the skiff veered to starboard and came on dead ahead toward shore, its bow riding up high over the chop, the roar of its engine reaching a crescendo that appropriately matched the joy swelling up inside Cobbs as he imagined how Tom Ricci must have suffered in his last, struggling moments of life.

Within seconds after Ricci got his first hint that something might be wrong with his air supply, it became apparent that he had a serious problem. Before a full minute had passed, that problem escalated to a full-blown crisis.

The breath that triggered the warning seemed slightly harder to draw from his regulator than normal, and while it could have been attributable to minor overexertion--he'd been working steadily against strong currents for over an hour--a skeptical voice in his head dispelled that idea outright. He was an experienced diver, and pacing himself underwater was second nature.

He took another inhalation, another. Each came with greater effort than the last, and gave that inner voice an edge of added urgency.

Ricci snapped a glance down at his psi gauge. Its dial told him the cylinder had over 1,000 psi left in it--a full twenty-five percent of its capacity--but his mind and body were telling him something else. Although he had stopped all movement, put himself at rest in the water, his tank was barely complying with his demand for oxygen.

The dial was wrong.

The dial was lying to him.

Ricci cast aside his questions about how that could be, and bore in on his essential predicament. He was running out of air. Running out, and would very possibly exhaust what the tank had left in it within moments.

His heart pounded. He felt panic hatching inside him, and chased it off. He had to hang on and stay calm, take things one small step at a time. If he couldn't think straight, it was time to get somebody to blow taps, because he was good as dead.