Riptide

 

 

 

RIPTIDE

 

D OUGLAS PRESTON

 

AND

 

LINCOLN CHILD

WARNER BOOKS

A Time Warner Company This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the authors' imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1998 by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child All rights reserved.

Warner Books, Inc., 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 Visit our Web site at http://warnerbooks.com A Time Warner Company Printed in the United States of America First Printing: July 1998 10   987654321

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Preston, Douglas J.

Riptide / Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.p.    cm.

ISBN 0-446-52336-4 I. Child, Lincoln.    IL Title. PS3566.R3982R57    1998 813'.52—dc21

Book design by Giorgetta Bell McRee 97-23907 CIP

Lincoln Child dedicates this book to his daughter, Veronica

Douglas Preston dedicates this book to his brother, Richard Preston

Acknowledgments

We owe a great debt to one of Maine's finest doctors, David Preston, for invaluable help with the medical aspects of Riptide. We also wish to thank our agents, Eric Simonoff and Lynn Nesbit of Janklow & Nesbit; Matthew Snyder of Creative Artists Agency; our superb editor, Betsy Mitchell, and Maureen Egen, publisher, of Warner Books.

Lincoln Child would like to thank Denis Kelly, Bruce Swan-son, Lee Suckno, M.D., Bry Benjamin, M.D., Bonnie Mauer, Cherif Keita, the Reverend Robert M. Diachek, and Jim Cush. In particular, I wish to thank my wife, Luchie, for her support, and for her stringent (and sometimes astringent) criticism, over the past five years, of four novels- in-progress. I want to thank my parents for instilling in me, from the beginning, a profound love for sailing and salt water that continues to this day. I also wish to acknowledge the shadowy company of centuries-dead buccaneers, pirates, codemakers and codebreakers, dilettantes, and Elizabethan intelligence agents, for providing some of the more colorful archetypes and source material in Riptide's arsenal. And, lastly, I want to give a long-overdue thank-you to Tom McCormack, ex-boss and mentor, who with enthusiasm and perspicacity taught me so much about the art of writing and the craft of editing. Nullum quod tetigit non ornavit.

Douglas Preston would like to express his appreciation to John P. Wiley, Jr., senior editor of Smithsonian magazine, and to Don Moser, editor. I would like to thank my wife, Christine, for her support, and my daughter Selene, for reading the manuscript and offering excellent suggestions. I want to express my deepest gratitude to my mother, Dorothy McCann Preston, and to my father, Jerome Preston, Jr., for keeping and preserving Green Pastures Farm so that my children and grandchildren will be able to enjoy the real place that figures as one of the fictional backdrops to Riptide.

We offer our apologies to Maine purists for reconfiguring the coastline and moving islands and channels about with brazen abandon. Needless to say, Stormhaven and its inhabitants, and Thalassa and its employees, are fictitious and exist only in our imaginations. Similarly, though there may be several Ragged Islands found along the