He was amazed that his mind was churning on details at a time like this. He felt intensely alive. He stared at the front windscreens and wondered what his skull would look like after striking it.

  McCann pulled the wheel back and eased the throttles forward. The nose rose, and the engines went silent. An appalling second passed, and another. The plane touched water.

  An elongated hiss sounded behind them, and then Matt Reece catapulted forward as a deafening sound rushed at him. The plane dove under the water at high speed and shuddered as if mortally wounded. Everyone screamed. He found himself plastered against the windscreens.

  Abruptly the force of the plane’s dive spent itself, and the fuselage, buoyed by the air trapped inside, jerked upward until it broke the surface. A moment later came a sound of gurgling behind him. His thoughts were clear and disconnected, and he knew from the pitch of the plane that it was sinking tail first. He laughed, not quite believing he was still alive. He felt giddy, his nerve endings thrumming with energy, but he understood the falseness of that feeling.

  Lilikoi seemed dazed, but alive, as was McCann. Like Matt Reece, Kenji flew over the pilot and smashed into the windshield. Kien had also shot forward, crushing Kenji.

  “Christ Almighty,” McCann yelled, “we’re alive! How’s that for a three-point landing? We’re only eighty yards from shore.”

  Kien seemed groggy, but he pulled himself back behind the pilot’s seat. Kenji didn’t move. He could be unconscious or dead.

  McCann popped the cockpit’s emergency exit and swung away a triangular section of windscreen. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” He unharnessed and stood on his seat with his head out the emergency exit. A moment later, he plunged into water and swam for shore. Kien was right behind him.

  Water was ankle-deep and rising fast. Matt Reece helped Lilikoi out of her harness and guided her out the exit. She was fully conscious and swimming with long strokes.

  He placed his fingers to Kenji’s throat and felt a pulse. A moment passed as he considered leaving him there to drown. He could feel Kirby’s growing excitement.

  He slipped his hand into the pocket where Kenji had deposited the flash drive and recovered it. He tucked it into his own pocket. Then he heaved Kenji back and sat him in the copilot seat. He slapped him hard across the face, trying to wake him. No luck.

  “Hasta la vista, asshole,” he said, and climbed through the exit. Outside, a red helicopter hovered well above the wreckage. A wave quilted with froth smacked his face. He swallowed a mouthful of salt water and began coughing, which caused a pure animal panic. His heart rate doubled. The water was cold and seemed to drain the heat from his body, leaving him shivering.

  Slow down, he told himself. If you panic, you die. He scissored his legs, but his shoes were sucking him down, so he reached to his feet and slipped them off.

  He dogpaddled halfway to shore, and with each stroke, he felt his panic growing. He stopped to look back. Eruptions of air billowed from the cockpit. Without making a conscious decision, he swam back.

  The cockpit overflowed, and Kenji was floating with his face in the water. It was relatively easy to pull his stepfather free of the wreckage. He glanced ashore. Lilikoi was lying on a pebbly beach. There was no sign of McCann or Kien. He wrapped an arm around Kenji’s neck and scissor kicked, all out.

  “C’mon!” Lilikoi shouted. “It could blow any minute.”

  An explosion was the least of his worries. Enough time elapsed since the crash that he was convinced there was no danger. In fact, he now believed there was no bomb, because a landing that jarring would have set it off. Not being a natural swimmer, his only fear now was drowning. He was slow and clumsy, gagging on mouthfuls of salt water.

  His feet touched ground. When Lilikoi didn’t rush out and help drag Kenji in, he realized something was wrong. He hauled Kenji up a slope and came back for her.

  “Took your sweet time,” she said. “Did you stop for coffee and doughnuts?”

  “We were never in any—”

  A thrashing explosion interrupted him. White water and sections of fuselage rocketed into the air. A section of wing landed only a dozen feet from where they crouched. Water and debris rained down. A wave rushed to shore and spilled over them.

  “You have to hand it to Songoree,” she said. “He never did anything half-assed.”

  He wanted to laugh, but he noticed a fragment of metal lodged in her side, the shape and size of a hunting knife. It may have been part of the throttle controls in the cockpit, he thought, or it could have been a projectile from the explosion. He ripped open her shirt to expose the wound.

  Her face took on the color of chalk. She drew in air, enough for life but not enough to fully expand her lungs. He knew then it had either punctured the lung or was pressing against it. Either way it was painful. She glanced down at it. “I guess I’m fucked.”

  “I’ll get you to a doctor.”

  Her body went limp, as if in a faint; her lips parted and her eyes half closed.

  “Pull it out,” she whispered.

  He looked around for someone who could help. The beach was empty. He waved his arms at the helicopter. It moved farther away, down the beach. “I’ve got to find help.”

  “Just pull the damned thing out,” she said, her voice tinged in agony. She coughed, and blood came from her mouth. The shaft jerked in her side, and her face emptied of life. Her head fell back, unconscious.

  Quick, he thought, pull it out before she wakes up.

  He grasped the end of the projectile and tried to ease it out. It didn’t budge. He braced himself against her, set his teeth, and pulled with all his strength. It came free with a gush of dark blood. The purple wound in the brown flesh opened and closed with her breath. He ripped the shirt off his back, folded it twice, and pressed it to the wound.

  Her eyes opened. She glanced at the fragment lying beside her. “Thank you—” Then her head sagged, and she went still.

  He pressed his finger to her throat and found a pulse. He exhaled, overcome with relief. He jerked his head up to see Kenji standing up the bank. “Help us!”

  Kenji walked down and crouched beside them. Matt Reece used the sleeves of the shirt pressed to her wound to secure the bandage to her side. He looked around and nodded at the section of wing laying several feet away. “We’ll use that as a litter.”

  Kenji rose to his feet, and Matt Reece assumed he was about to retrieve the wing, but as he looked up, he saw a handgun in Kenji’s fist hurling toward his face. He was caught off guard with a solid blow to the side of his head. He jerked back, falling into an oncoming wave. He felt a kick to his ribs, causing coils of pain to shoot through his belly. Then he drifted in a sea of blackness.

  Chapter Fifty-one

  A THOUSAND feet above the sea, Randall sat in the helicopter’s copilot seat, while Souad, Landau, Jessup, Vishal, and Patrick clustered in the passenger compartment. On their way to Miyajima Island, they passed over three police boats converging on the isle. As they passed over the verdant landscape, they spotted a private jet coming in from the southeast, dangerously low over the water.

  “That’s got to be them,” Landau said, pointing at the jet.

  Randal argued into the microphone, using rifle-hot Japanese while gesticulating.

  A few minutes later, Jessup’s heart leaped into his throat as the plane crashed into the sea. The copter descended to a hundred yards over the crash site. He breathed easier as he watched people scramble from the cockpit and swim toward shore. They were too far away for a positive identification, but relief washed through him.

  He yelled to Randall, “Land this damned thing,” just as a tower of water and debris shot out of the sea, tumbling in on itself with a roar. The copter veered sharply to the left. It felt like riding a bucking bronco. But Jessup kept his eyes glued to the people on the beach. Now that they were on land, he identified his son. He was alive, attending to a girl who appeared to be injured. Jessup sat helpless as he watched Kenji attack Matt Reece. It looked like Kenji was trying to kill him.

  When the copter regained control, they dropped to a cleared spot of beach less than a quarter mile from Matt Reece and Kenji. As the copter doors opened, Jessup saw the girl lift what looked like a knife and stab Kenji in the thigh.

  Jessup sprang from the copter and ran, closing the distance between them. Vishal shot past him and reached Matt Reece moments after Kenji fled into the trees above the beach. Vishal fell to his knees beside Matt Reece and cradled the boy’s head in his arms, trying to revive him. Jessup held his breath, waiting to see if his boy was still alive.

  Patrick dropped beside the girl. “Lilikoi! What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Maybe a more appropriate question is, am I all right? And the answer, in case you’re interested, is fuck no! I’m bleeding from a hole in my side, and I’m probably going into shock from surviving a plane crash. So are you going to help me or just sit there with that stupid look on your face?”

  Patrick didn’t move. He seemed to be the one going into shock.

  “Don’t stare at me like that,” she said. “You may be batshit crazy yourself someday.”

  He wrapped his arms around her and hugged her. “Christ, why did you leave me?”

  “Only you would think about yourself in this situation. Seriously, you think this is the best time to discuss why I left?”

  He simply stared at her.

  “Okay, I left you because you get every girl you want, and I needed to be the exception to that rule.”

  He kissed her, briefly but firm. When he pulled back he waited, as if he assumed she would slap his face. But rather than a slap, she leaned her head to his shoulder. He lifted her in his arms, and he stood.

  “We need to get Lilikoi to a hospital,” Patrick said. “Is Matt Reece alive?”

  HIS BODY was too traumatized to feel anything. As his awareness grew clearer, he realized that he lay in a fetal position, caught in a rhythmic wash of gushing liquid. His eyelids crept open, and light burned his eyes, blurring everything into a cold white haze. As his vision cleared, he realized that he lay in the surf under a morning sky, watching turquoise water lap over his limbs.

  He glanced up into a brown face, surrounding benevolent-looking eyes. This must be the face of God. Through his numbness he could feel fear tweaking his vagus nerve.

  The face lowered until those beautifully formed lips touched his. His mind, caught in a membrane freeze, struggled with the shock of being kissed by God. He glanced up at God’s face again, noting his unblemished coppery skin and an expression of joy that seemed comical. God cradled his head like a newborn, smiling at him—a smile that warmed his chest and spread out to his limbs, as if he were suddenly firing on high octane.

  Instincts took over, and he tested his body: legs stretched, back arched, fingers clenched into fists and relaxed. Every part of him obeyed his mental commands, yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that all this was an illusion, that he must be dead.

  And then came recognition. It was Vishal, not God, holding him. But Vishal was dead. So perhaps it was God, and how fitting it seemed that God would look identical to his true love.

  “Hey, cowboy, are we gonna to go through this routine every time we meet? I mean, there are easier ways to get me to kiss you.”

  Matt Reece wanted more than anything to believe what was happening, but everything he’d known for the last several weeks was screaming against it, and that sound was Kirby’s voice—a voice of outrage.

  “We’re dead.”

  Vishal curved his body around and rolled, bringing Matt Reece to rest on top of him. Vishal let out a tender, almost placating laugh before their lips met in a meaningful kiss. Kirby’s voice silenced as Matt Reece’s passion ignited, and he knew this was no dream.

  Vishal withdrew, lips lingering and eyes gazing up at him.

  “It’s time I took you home, cowboy.”

  Matt Reece rested his head against his lover’s chest. Through his feelings of numb shock, one thing became certain: he was ready to go anywhere with this man, even back to the ranch, especially back to the ranch.

  He noticed other men standing over him, and one of them was his father. Jessup helped Vishal haul him to his feet and then half crushed the life out of him with a bear hug. Jessup was too choked up for words, but so was Matt Reece. He wanted so much to explain how sorry he was for everything. But it somehow seemed pointless.

  They carried him and Lilikoi to a helicopter, and he was up in the clouds again, this time flying over a massive city.

  Vishal held him, and across the aisle, Patrick held Lilikoi. The numbness of his body began to give way to pain, and he remembered being beaten by Kenji. He endured several kicks to the head and gut before blacking out. But why did Kenji turn on him? Then he knew. He reached into the pocket of his tweed pants and groped for the flash drive. It was still there. Whatever drove Kenji away did so before he could retrieve the formula.

  Chapter Fifty-two

  LANDAU, SOUAD, Jessup, and Randall retrieved an equipment bag before the copter lifted into the air and rocketed toward the city. Randall assured them it would only be a ten-minute flight to the hospital’s helipad. As soon as the bird was away, Landau pulled a Glock from the bag, checked it, and slipped it into the holster. Souad and Randall did the same. They clipped the holsters to their belts at their backs and slid back into their jackets. Much as Jessup wanted a weapon, they only had three. He wasn’t sure he could shoot Kenji anyway, and at least this way he wouldn’t need to find out.

  “Expect anything,” Landau said. “Kenji had a lot of time to plan this. If Jurassic Park dinosaurs fly out of his ass and eat us alive, I want you to have expected it.”

  Souad chuckled. “An attempt at humor? Praise Allah, I think you may be human after all.”

  “You’re only warming up to me because you’ve been away from your wife for too long.”

  Souad howled. “Give me a hug, sweetheart.”

  Even Jessup could see Souad’s excitement had grown to a dangerous level. Landau needed to calm him down, but he didn’t wait for that. He said, “Cut the crap. We’ve got a job to do.”

  Randall said, “If the police see these weapons, our asses are hash. So only draw them in a life-threatening situation.”

  Landau said, “The girl confirmed Kenji is armed, and she stabbed him in the leg. A wounded animal is desperate and therefore more dangerous.”

  Landau pointed at Randall. “You’re here as an interpreter. No heroics.”

  “No worries. I’m a coward at heart.” As if to prove it, he fished a roll of antacids from his pocket and popped two in his mouth.

  Jessup held out his hand, and Randall dropped two in his palm.

  Landau led them into the woods. They had studied maps of the island the night before, and he knew where to find the temple they were sure Kenji was heading for. His suspicions were confirmed when he found a trail of blood any novice could follow.

  They moved up a steep hill where age-old pines, elms, and maples were easily navigated because there was no underbrush. They stayed in a tight group and hiked a brisk two miles before they came to a wooden gate twenty feet tall with a shingled roof protecting two statues on either side. Beyond it, a stone staircase rose up the hillside. There were drops of fresh blood spattering the steps. They passed under the gate and climbed.

  At the top of the stairs, they saw the Daisho-in temple grounds. The main temple stood at the center, a two-story wooden building covered by a sloping roof with the tiers built with the corners upswept in the Chinese style, and an expansive front entryway with thick, unadorned columns. The structure was light and elegant, a masterpiece of twelfth-century Zen architecture. Around this temple were several buildings, including a three-story pagoda, shrines, and a dormitory for the monks. The place, as Jessup expected, was immaculate and projected a feeling of harmony with nature. The simple beauty of the grounds made him, momentarily, yearn for the tranquility of his ranch.

  The police arrived, flooding into the courtyard from the opposite end. Five cops gathered at the door of the dormitory, and each officer held an automatic rifle and wore a helmet with built-in goggles and a headset. They waited for a signal. Another six were about to storm the two-story prayer hall.

  Landau panted from the climb. Souad was wild-eyed, juiced. Landau pointed to the officers at the dorm. “Souad and Randall, follow them. Jessup and I will take the temple.”

  Jessup and Landau rushed to the main building. As they ran up the stone steps, Jessup noted spots of red leading up to the double doors. He pointed them out to Landau, who nodded and then flashed his credentials at the officer in charge. The man, whose name tag read Sergeant Jingoro, nodded and then waved an arm at the other officers. The doors flung open, and the officers moved into the hall and spread out across a spacious room with their rifles at the ready. They quickly began to search the hall. Jessup and Landau followed.

  A monk sat at a low table before a shrine where a statue of a bronze Buddha towered to the rafters. It was a smaller copy of the great Kamakura Buddha. A multitude of candles flickered around the platform. The man gave no sign of anything being abnormal.

  A door at the back of the hall opened, and a head peeked out. One of the cops pointed his rifle at it, and the door slammed. Sergeant Jingoro led the group through the main hall, dropping a search warrant onto the table where the monk sat staring.

  At the back of the hall, they found the door locked. One officer used his shoulder as a battering ram. The door smashed open with a splintering thud. Jessup hung back, following a few feet behind. The only thing he found odd was the calmness of the monk sitting at the table. He made a mental note to return and question this man.