“What?”

“You may have heard about it. Hillsborough, in Sheffield, England? Twenty-five years ago. I still have nightmares. Do you want to hear about it?”

Dance noted the children were out of earshot. “Go ahead, Dad.”

Chapter 16

He was sure they’d die.

Some of them, at least.

Antioch March was on the turbulent shoreline in Pacific Grove, near Asilomar, the conference center. Off Sunset Drive.

March had been doing reconnaissance for tomorrow’s “event” and was driving back to his room at the Cedar Hills Inn when he’d spotted them.

Ah, yes…

He’d pulled over.

And then wandered to an outcropping of rock, from which he would have a good view of the unfolding tragedy.

Now he was eyeing the cluster of people nearby, surrounded by spray flying over the rocks from the impact of the roiling water. The sun was low. That special time, he’d heard it called by photographers. When light became your friend, something to help out with the pictures, not fight against. March had studied photography, in addition to more esoteric, intellectual topics, and he was good. Many of the pictures on the Hand to Heart website were his.

They’re dead, he reflected again.

The family he was watching was Asian. Chinese or Korean, probably. He knew the difference in facial structure—he’d been to both of those countries (Korea had been far more productive for his work). But here he was too far away to tell. And he certainly wasn’t going to get much closer.

A wife and husband, two preteen children, and a mother-in-law: a bundled-up matriarch. Armed with a point-and-shoot, the husband was directing the kids as they posed on dark brown and red and dun rocks.

Spanish Bay, a tourist twofer with beach and rugged shoreline, is a beautiful coastal preserve featuring everything one would want in scenic California. A mile of sand, surfers immune to the icy water, dolphins, pelicans, dunes, deer, rocks on which seals perched, busy tidal pools.

And sea otters, of course. Cute little fuzzy-faced critters that floated easily on the turbulent surface, smashing shellfish open on rocks perched on their chests

The area was idyllic.

And deadly.

In researching his plans for the Monterey Bay area, March had learned that every few months tourists wandered too far out onto these craggy rocks and, crash, a muscular arm of the Pacific Ocean lapped them indifferently out to sea. Those who didn’t break their heads open on the rocks and drown died of hypothermia before the Coast Guard found them, or breathed their last while tangled in the pernicious kelp. It was near here that the singer John Denver had died, his experimental plane falling from the sky.

The Asian family was now prowling the rocks, getting closer and closer to the end of the bulwark that stretched forty feet into the ocean, two yards above the agitated water. The rosy light from the low sun hit them full.

Beautiful.

He slipped the Galaxy S5 mobile phone from his pocket and began shooting video of the scene around him. Just another tourist. Nothing odd about him, catching the beautiful, rugged scenery in high-def pixels.