Shuttered Sky

love, comfort and surprise between husbands and wives whose departures had been years apart. There were also wails full of the agonized loneliness of those who had no one to comfort them in this all too brief hiatus from eternity.

“Yitgadal V’yitkadash sh’mei raba . . . ' Elon began. It was the mourner’s kaddish—the Jewish prayer for the dead. He said it without the required minyan of ten. He said it alone, with the same conviction he had afforded his parents, his sisters. Loved ones who died old, and those who died before their time. He intoned the holy words with reverence, and respect. And when he was done, he could no longer hear their voices. The dead were dead once more.

When he looked up, he saw half a dozen spectators across the street, keeping a safe distance from the armed men. None were close enough to know who, or what they saw.

“What languages do you know?” he asked Davitt.

“English . . . German.”

Tessic tried to hide his distaste. German would actually work to his advantage. “Go to those people. If any of them have cameras pull out the film. Tell them to leave—but do it in German. Everything must be done in German.”

Davitt accepted his orders, and took two men with him.

Tessic could only assume that the intelligence of every nation now knew that Dillon had escaped. When the authorities came, these townsfolk would tell of an unmarked helicopter, a man in a dark suit—and a SWAT team spouting German. The trajectory of blame wouldn’t even come close to Tessic.

Satisfied, he strode back toward the helicopter which would deliver Dillon, Maddy, and himself, out of harm’s way.

20. Tango In False Light

Lourdes was certain she had suffered a stroke; that her hedonistic lifestyle of excess had hemorrhaged an artery in her brain. Darkness enveloped her peripheral vision, and although she never actually felt her legs give out, the bruising slap of the deck against her face told her that she had collapsed. Her senses all but gone, she awaited fearfully a lapse of consciousness, and the moment when the darkness would close in, her heart would heave itself still, and her life would end. But it did not happen. Instead her heart pounded so force­fully it sent veiny streaks of lightning across her imploded vision, beat after beat. Pain in her eyes and ears crested with every pulse. Then the pain found a home in the base of her neck, and radiated from there to her temples, and out to her extremities. She lay like this in throbbing paralysis for at least ten minutes. Then gradually her vision began to return, and her muscles began to obey her commands. She brought a hand to her face, feeling the pressure of blood swelling the bruise, then pulled herself up into a sitting position. Her body felt heavy and pon­derous, as it had in the days when she was obese. She had to look around to remind herself where she was; her private sun deck of the Blue Horizon, overlooking the pool deck. Up above the cloud-speckled sky was the same, but she knew something had fundamentally changed about the world; something intangible that she chose not to consider right now. At this moment just getting to her feet took enough of her concentration.

To her right were a pair of grossly overweight crewmen that had been waxing the wooden railing of her private deck. One struggled to his feet, the other still lay on the deck, not moving at all. A god-awful sound pulled her attention to the left, where her latest boy toy crouched on all fours. He was a twenty-year-old blond, unencumbered by a brain—an Adonis she had taken to her bed, if only to prove to herself that she wasn’t looking for a harem of dark-haired Michael Lipranski look-alikes, as Winston had claimed. Now her blond boy hunched on his knees, retching up what looked like pulverized crab meat. The sight of it quickly removed him from her list of lovers.

She stood, gripping the guard rail for balance, and looked to the pool deck below. At the far end of the deck, the breakfast buffet had been in full swing, but now it looked like a blast zone. Her frightened, moaning passengers hauled themselves to the nearest chairs, not even concerned with the plates that had broken on the ground. It was dif­ficult for Lourdes to discern whether this devastating event had hit all of them, or if it had only hit her, and the others aboard were just mimicking her own physiological response.

A few feet away, the conscious crewman checked the pulse of his fallen crewmate, then turned to Lourdes, his eyes a study in terror.

“Esta muerto!” he said, and glanced again at the dead crewman in disbelief.

Although Lourdes was no stranger to death, neither did she wish to linger with it. “Entonces llevalo para abajo,” she said, not sure where down below the body should be taken, only that it should be taken there. She assumed someone would deal with it, and it would cease to be her problem.

“Por favor . . . necesita un sacerdote,” the crewman said.

A priest? Lourdes had neither time nor capacity for such compas­sion. “Llevalo!” she ordered.

The man obeyed without further word, dragging the body out of sight, and out of mind.

What happened to you, Lourdes? Winston’s words and that doleful expression on his face came back to her, like the hint of a conscience crawling back from wherever she had banished it to. She knew full well a conscience came with heavy baggage of regret, and she was determined to regret nothing, not now, not ever. She suppressed thoughts of Winston, until they, too, were out of mind.

Shielding her eyes from the sun, she looked at the shores around the ship. By the look of it, they were in a lake larger than the first lake they had encountered in the canal, but the sea was nowhere in sight. She put in a call to the bridge, and demanded to speak with the canal pilot, whose job it was to shuttle them to the Atlantic.

“Three more locks, senorita,” the pilot told her with a tremor of fear in his voice. “But the . . . the fainting spell, it set us a little off course. We need to reposition the ship before we bring her though the Gatun Locks.”

Lourdes signed, exasperated, and told him to get to it. She had grown accustomed to the open sea, and found the canal to be con­stricting and claustrophobic, even at its widest points. Now that sen­sation of being closed in was even stronger, and she was anxious to reach the Atlantic.

She left the open deck, returning to her suite. Although her cabin stewards stumbled over one another to assist her in her slightest needs, she waved them off. Her head pounded too much for her to bother with anyone right now.

Only after she had lain down on her bed and tried to relax did her thoughts settle enough for her to parse from the pain what had hap­pened.

The more she considered it, the more she was certain; there was no mistaking the signature of the psychic wave that had floored her. The three performers from her dreams had left the stage, taking their act on the road.

Not my problem! she told herself, summoning up a healthy dose of protective anger. Dillon set this all in motion—let him struggle with it; I’m on vacation.

Twenty minutes later, she was informed that a pilot ship was ap­proaching from Gatun station. For some reason, a new canal pilot was requesting permission to come aboard.

“One pilot,” Lourdes asked the captain, “or three?”

The captain apologized, and explained that it was only one pilot, but that, for some reason, he was bringing his family along with him. “Shall we let them on?” the captain asked. After more than two months he had fully accepted Lourdes’s authority over him, and deferred to her on everything.

Lourdes gave permission for the new pilot and his escorts to come aboard, knowing that the Gatun locks would not be setting her free until she faced her trio of players.

* * *

The S.S. Blue Horizon left the queue of ships anchored in Gatun lake, and Lourdes put on her most festive party dress. She received her visitors in the observation lounge, overlooking the bow of the ship. She made sure the lounge was well populated and full of chatter, de­termined to maintain the atmosphere of a party throughout her con­frontation with the three. Their meeting would be a simple chat on an ordinary cruise. She would not let it intimidate her.

When they arrived, and were shown to her table, she almost laughed. They were not even close to what she