'
'No,' replied Joe, 'Green hooked us up with a bunch of Russians. I should've figured they were mobsters, but Frank assured me they were legitimate. Guess I wanted to believe him. I kept fooling myself until the drug raid.'
'Drug raid!' said Con. 'What did drugs have to do with it?'
'Frank had agreed to work on stimuplants in exchange for the financing,' said Joe.
'Electronic drugs?' asked Rick.
'Hooked up with the right chip, the neural interface made the perfect stimuplant. It was the state-of-the-art high. They were making them right under my nose.'
'And you didn't know?' asked Con.
'No, but tell that to a prosecutor, especially after Frank turned up dead. They said it was suicide, but I'm not so sure. Anyway, I lost my family, the business, and my reputation. The only person who helped me was Green.'
'Green?'
'Yeah. He said he didn't know about the Russians and felt bad about what had happened. He paid for my lawyer and hired me when I got out of prison.'
'That sounds out of character,' said Con.
'He was just getting his hooks into me. I did little jobs at first. Gray stuff. Reverse engineering. Security overrides came later. The deeper I was in, the dirtier the jobs got.'
'Why did you put up with it?' asked Con.
'I was going to leave, and Green guessed I was. One day he picked up Nicole's picture from my desk.
'Cute kid,' he said, 'but it's an old picture.' Then he gave me a new picture, taken with a telephoto lens. Oh God!' cried out Joe, in re-membered anguish and rage. 'My little girl! All the while, Green had on this big grin, pretending he was giving me a gift instead of threatening my baby.'
'And you helped him and Daddy escape?' said Con.
'I did what I had to do,' said Joe.
'But...'
'That's the one thing I won't talk about,' said Joe. 'I have my reasons.'
'Joe...'
'You and Rick are my family now,' said Joe, 'and I'll do anything for you. Except talk about this morning. Please re- spect me on this.'
An awkward silence followed. Finally, Rick broke it by saying, 'We should try to sleep. It'll cool off, and we'll want to be rested when we dig out the plane.' The suggestion excused everyone from further conversation. Con lay still in her sweat-soaked clothes and tried to get some sleep, but it was impossible. It was too hot, she was having hunger cramps, and her mind raced from one fearful scenario to another. Perhaps it was too early to sleep. She had no idea what time it was. It might be only afternoon, although it was darker outside than any night she could remember. The red glow had left the clouds, and there were no stars or moon in the uniformly black sky.
22
AFTER WHAT SEEMED LIKE HOURS OF TROUBLED THOUGHT,
Con drifted into an uneasy sleep. She dreamed of Sara and Pandit. In the dream, Sara wore the dress Con had felt was so shamelessly revealing. She no longer wept. Instead, she was placing strawberries between her teeth and feeding them to Pandit. She turned to smile at Con, red juice running down her chin and on to her breasts. 'I told you,' said Sara smugly. 'You should've stayed on the island.' Con woke up thinking her breasts, too, were stained with berry juice. A sweat-soaked tee shirt clung to them instead. As she sat up, she felt the need to relieve herself. Rick and Joe were both snoring, and she tried not to disturb them as she rose and groped for the door.
The darkness was almost absolute. The only light came from a faint orange flickering in the clouds. She stepped on Joe, but he only grunted. She could not see him, but she heard him move as he changed positions. Even more cau- tiously than before, she felt for the door. After several minutes, her hand touched a raised button. She pressed it, and an opening formed in the plane's fuselage. The smell of smoke immediately assaulted Con's nose. It was strong and acrid and caused her eyes to sting. Fortu-nately, Joe had programmed the door to recognize her, so it would
