“I know her name. I’m making spaghetti tonight.”
“One of the articles was about how they found Peter’s thieving CPA-the one that took him for two million-and a lot of other people as well-handcuffed to the steel railing in front of the police station with a sign around his neck.”
“Pretty amazing.”
“And your name is?”
“Sam.”
“Sam…?”
“Sam of the Silverwind.”
“Well, obviously I’m pleased to meet you. You’re brave, Sam of the Silverwind, and I’m alive because of it.”
He cleared his throat. “I neglected to mention that in the drawer of the forward stateroom-the same place you found the scrapbook-you’ll find a brush, makeup, that sort of thing.”
“Sounds good.” She rose and disappeared while he pulled out the spaghetti pot and began cleaning up. There was going to be an issue here.
“How can I get out of this bay? Back to civilization?” She had returned with the brush, trying to draw the tangles out of her hair.
“How did you get here?”
“In a seaplane.”
“Well, then, tomorrow we find a seaplane.”
“I really have to go, and I’m going to need your help. It might not be safe here in the open.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know. Call it intuition.”
“You could swim to that beach, on Sonoma Island, get hypothermia, and warm yourself inside a bear’s gut.” He grinned. “Just intuition of course.”
“Come on,” she said. “Be nice. You know that New York traffic is more dangerous than the bears.”
“Absolutely. You’re much more likely to be eaten by the cold, and then the crabs, but eaten just the same. The dinghy and emergency life raft are both gone. There is no good way ashore and then no place to go should you happen to make it to the beach. Unless you know something I don’t.”
“Or we could stay here, is that it?”
“The beach is not practical. So a delightful evening with me and my spaghetti is really the only option.”
“Now you’re trying to make the bears sound good,” she joked as she walked toward him. “Look. I can’t talk about my situation. You apparently have lots you can’t talk about either. But we could trust each other.”
“Who was the guy who walked off and left you?”
For a split second she looked troubled. “What guy?”
There was a story here. For her sake he hoped nobody in the media found out. Stars magazine would pay a fortune for this piece, BACHELOR ON SAILBOAT SAVES BIG STAR AFTER MYSTERY MAN LEAVES HER TO DIE.
He wanted a smoke.
“What is your last name, Sam?”
“I’m just Sam. Here’s my card.” He handed her a neatly embossed, gold-lettered card. It read “Sam of the Silverwind,” with nothing but an e-mail address.
“People usually have a last name.”
“Yes, indeed. But then when someone is fleeing for their life they usually talk about it.”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions.”
“Okay. Tell me what happened so I can understand the desperation to get out of here.”
“Do those toiletries you told me about belong to anyone in particular?”
“Yes. My mother.”
“She travels with you?”
“Occasionally.”
“She’s the one who put together the scrapbook. Probably forgot it.”
Sam shrugged.
“I need to get off.”
“You know a lot more about what’s going on here than I do. So why don’t you enlighten me?”
“Look, I know this is strange. And you did save my life. And I’m very grateful. But please trust me. We both need to get off this boat.”
“We’ll trust each other, and we can begin by you telling me what we should run from.”
She shook her head no. Sam could see that she was anxious, but he needed to know why she wanted to leave. Running was often more dangerous than waiting. There was a dry suit on board that he hadn’t mentioned, and he could start the motor and proceed more or less aimlessly to the beach, where he could ground the boat on one of many rocks perhaps fifty yards from shore. A less expensive alternative would be to use the dry suit and tow Anna to shore. There was a kid’s blow-up boat that would hold two adults maybe, half submerged and totally soaked with this chop and the wind. With one adult it would be just as wet but not as deeply submerged. But keeping her on the boat, or seeming to, was the only leverage he had to get her to talk. Unless he knew the why of it all, he couldn’t make a good plan.
Outthinking ill-intentioned people had been Sam’s calling in life-all kinds of criminals, but sometimes the worst of the worst, those who by natural gift were uncommonly intelligent and by some means, natural or unnatural, had become twisted and/or nearly conscienceless.
Those with no conscience were less a problem for businesspeople or celebrity types because they were psychopaths devoted to killing people they encountered in their daily life. They remained the province of homicide detectives who worked long hours under the influence of black coffee and nervous politicians.
Sam’s company worked both in the private sector and under government contract. Powerful people, celebrities, and governments paid small fortunes for his skill and the cold logic of a silicon beast called CORE (an acronym for Common Object Repository for the Enterprise), affectionately christened “Big Brain” by Grogg, the man who helped conceive her according to Sam’s vision.
Sam’s greatest asset was a strong mind, housed in a near-perfect tabernacle tainted only by the occasional doses of cigarette smoke that he perpetually swore would end. Scholarships at Yale and MIT-specialty: computer science-had enabled him to create a so-called “expert system” that revolutionized data analysis using a programming method known as forward- and backward-chaining heuristics.
His skills had forged for him a unique occupation, a job that kept him in high demand, a job that he had found profoundly satisfying until recently, when he’d left it altogether. It was a line of work that required he keep an extremely low profile, something that, even in premature retirement, Sam did not intend to abandon.
Anna Wade was no exception: Unless she became a client, she could know nothing of him or the exotic trade he had once plied.
“I’ll make the spaghetti sauce. Relax. You have been talking about both of us leaving the boat Somewhere along the line you decided I must leave too. Why?”
“I was going to get you accepting my exit and then drag you along.”
She walked back to the forward stateroom and closed the door, obviously disappointed. He was acutely aware that she hadn’t answered the question.
Sam went to his stateroom, took out night-vision equipment, and went topside. It was uncomfortably cold in the wind. He looked to the near shore, then out across the channel behind him to Windham Island. A small island called Double Island that lay off the shore of Sonoma Island formed the shelter for their secluded anchorage. There was no one and nothing that looked like trouble. It didn’t appear that anyone else was anchored in the bay, not surprising since this place made sailors nervous even when the tide was slack. The rocky channel was a little tricky to negotiate-high tide at slack water was definitely the preferred time. No bilge alarm was sounding so it was unlikely that he was taking on water. The next high tide was many hours away, and it would be dark. Without a rudder they would run aground if they attempted to weigh anchor and leave.
He considered whether he should just leave with Anna and trust her judgment. Anchoring overnight or longer with no one aboard would require putting more scope on the anchor, so he went topside and released more chain.
