It was a different story when he actually met the victims, though. He had to deal with them as human beings when they stood before him, face-to-face, conversing in the queen’s own English. There was nothing to be done about it, then, but to put on a stalwart face and do the job that he was being paid—and very handsomely, at that—to carry off without complaints or needless questions.

  Even so, the faces haunted him sometimes.

  It helped that they were always rich beyond his wildest dreams, a trait that helped set them apart from normal human beings in the travel agent’s mind. And it was better yet when they came off as bloody snobs who didn’t give a damn about the common man, as long as they were able to enjoy their luxuries without restraint. Rich Yanks, at that, most of them. The Americans were worst of all when they had extra money in their hands, unable to resist the urge to lord it over those less fortunate. Loud shirts and too much jewelry, cleavage that owed more to surgery and silicone than Mother Nature. Bloody idiots, the lot of them.

  Good riddance, Morgan told himself.

  And still, he hesitated when it came to picking up the telephone.

  It got a little easier each time, of course, and that was somewhat troubling in itself. The sense of guilt was almost welcome, when he started working with Kidd and Teach. The pangs of conscience had let Morgan tell himself that he was just as much a victim as the rotters who were vanishing at sea. He suffered just as much as they did—more, in fact, because it was his fate to live with guilt and spend his blood money on women, cigarettes and liquor that would surely do him in one day.

  But nowadays, the guilt was fading fast, depriving Morgan of his rationale, the taste of martyrdom that made it possible for him to face his mirror in the morning. Lately, it disturbed him that he didn’t think about the dead as much as he once had; they didn’t haunt his dreams compulsively, but only dropped in on the odd occasion, like a bout of indigestion after he had eaten too much curry down at Singh’s café.

  He sat with one hand on the telephone and thought back to the very start of it. He had been gambling heavily in those days—one bad habit he had managed to get rid of, more or less—and had run up a monstrous debt with certain gentlemen of leisure who were known to settle their accounts with violence when the money they were owed was not available. The night they came for him, Morgan expected them to break his fingers, possibly his legs, as well. He doubted they would kill him, though he couldn’t rule it out entirely. Even so, he had been stunned when one of them—the slugger, Berto something—had informed him that his debt was paid, and that he would be hearing from his nameless benefactor soon.

  Relief had metamorphosed into panic three days later, when a man who introduced himself as Thomas Kidd walked into the Trade Winds office, introduced himself as Morgan’s brand-new business partner and proceeded to describe the scheme that would enrich them both. Kidd was essentially a pirate—hence the name, which Morgan took, and still believed, to be a “clever” alias—who had grown tired of cruising aimlessly among the Windward Islands and decided he would benefit from working with an agent who could tell him when fat targets were abroad, and where they could be found. Morgan assumed that he wasn’t alone in serving Kidd, that there were others like himself in different ports of call, arranging “guided tours” and sending wealthy yachtsmen to their fate.

  It helped, as well, to think that there were others doing what he did, sharing his guilt. Somehow, Morgan believed it would be worse by far if he alone served Captain Kidd. How could he ever hope for absolution if he was the only one involved?

  No matter. He was in too deep to back out now. It would have meant abandoning his home and business, the bizarre but comfortable life he had constructed for himself since he had moved from Kingston, six years earlier, and settled in at Puerta Plata. Unlike Berto and his fellow sportsmen, Kidd and company would not be satisfied to rough him up, if Morgan tried to go back on his bargain. They would kill him instantly, without remorse; of that fact, Morgan had not the slightest doubt.

  He had considered fleeing, simply cleaning out his bank account and running for his life, but there was still the niggling question of exactly where to go. Morgan was pushing fifty, and his best years were decidedly behind him. In his heart, he knew it was too late for him to start again, rebuild himself from the ground up, as he had done so many times before. This time was all or nothing, simple logic telling him that it could come to no good end.

  The good news was that Kidd had always paid him promptly, and in full. Sometimes, he even got a bonus, when the targets he set up were fat enough. Whatever else Kidd and his buccaneers might be, Morgan could never fault them on their generosity.

  It was bizarre, in fact, the way Kidd and the handful of his men whom Morgan had been “privileged” to meet behaved themselves. He knew that they were thieves and killers—more than likely rapists, too, if not a great deal worse—but there was still a kind of Old World pride and honesty about them. On the rare occasions when he spoke to Kidd these days, Morgan couldn’t help feeling that he had to have stumbled through a time warp and been dropped into the middle of another century. The way Kidd talked, the way his mind worked, it was like a glimpse back into history, when sea wolves plied the blue Caribbean at will, and free men rarely worried much about the long arm of the law.

  Morgan dialed the contact number he had memorized. He wasn’t meant to know who picked up on the other end, but he had done a little homework on his own and come up with the name, regardless. It was always the same voice that answered, with its Yankee twang.

  “Hello?” Somehow it always came out sounding like a question, as if Morgan’s contact never quite believed the telephone had summoned him away from whatever he did to pass the time.

  “It’s me,” the travel agent said. No names were ever given on the phone. It was a simple matter of security. “I’ve got another customer, if you have anyone available.”

  “How soon?” his contact asked.

  “This afternoon, if possible.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  The line went dead, and Morgan cradled the receiver, letting out a sigh. Already he could feel himself beginning to unwind. He told himself that it was out of his hands now; there was nothing he could do to change the fate of Mr. Remo Rubble and his pretty little wife.

  And for a moment, Howard Morgan almost managed to believe it.

  The worst part, Megan Richards told herself, was that you really could get used to anything. It made her vaguely ill to think that way, but there was simply no denying it.

  A mere four days had passed—or was it five?—since she had been aboard the Salomé with Barry and the others, lost at sea, and they had seen another boat on the horizon. Four days, maybe five, since Tommy Gilpin told them that the captain of the “rescue boat” had raised a Jolly Roger flag, and men with guns had stormed aboard the yacht, to send her whole life spinning on a crazy detour into Hell.

  When she thought about it, even sitting in the filthy hut, with nothing but an oversize man’s shirt to cover her, it still seemed like some kind of crazy dream. A bad trip, maybe, from the crummy acid you could pick up on the streets of Cambridge, guaranteed to turn your head around, but all bets off when it came down to quality.

  I wish I had a couple tabs of that right now, she thought, but even as the whim took shape in Megan’s mind, she knew that she would need her wits about her in the hours and days ahead, if she intended to survive.

  Survive. The word itself was a joke to her now. She didn’t have a clue where they were being held, except that they were obviously on an island where their captors had no fear of being taken by surprise or running into the police. It was the kind of place where anything could happen—had happened—and no one in the outside world would ever know.

  At first, Meg had supposed her kidnappers—she still had trouble thinking of the men as pirates—had some plan to hold her and the other girls for ransom, but the days kept passing, and no one had yet seen fit to ask their names. That was her first clue that the nightmare could go on indefinitely, while the three of them survived.

  And that had been her short life’s first true moment of despair.

  Meg’s knowledge—that she had been snatched from privileged youth into a life of slavery, pain, humiliation—might have driven her insane, but she surprised herself by calling on a deep reserve of inner strength she had not known she possessed. The others were reacting in their own strange ways, Felicia slipping into something like a catatonic state, while Robin wept and muttered to herself. Four days, five at the most, and Meg could not have sworn that either one of them was still completely sane.

  Whatever they were feeling, though, she guessed that precious little of it had to do with grieving for their dead boyfriends. Megan hadn’t seen Barry die, but knew that he was gone. She had been shocked and hurt, of course, made no attempt to hold back bitter tears, but that part of her grieving had been relatively brief. Before the Salomé had left his riddled corpse a hundred yards behind, Meg was already looking out for number one.

  So much for love. She had suspected that the way she felt for Barry Ward was mostly about sex, mixed up with some kind of infatuation, and the past few days had proved her right. If Meg had truly loved him, surely she would think about him more than once or twice a day, in passing. Even then, she found the image of his smiling face had started to recede, grow vague and hazy in her mind. He was a fading memory, their summer fling no more important now than Meg’s first day at school, her senior prom, the first time she went “all the way.”

  For ten or fifteen seconds, she was moved to wonder what that said about her as a person. How could she have shared her bed with Barry, done so many things with him and let him do so many things to her, and still dismiss him from her mind so quickly when his life was snuffed out by a gang of thugs? The answer was self-evident, so simple that it nearly made her laugh out loud. Disaster had a way of making you grow up. It took you to the deep end of the pool and tossed you in, sometimes with cinder blocks chained to your feet, and you could either fight your way back to the surface or relax and drown.

  Meg had discovered that she was a fighter, and the knowledge startled her as much as anything that she had ever learned.

  Of course, she had to choose her battles carefully if she was going to survive. The first two times that men had come for her, she lashed out at them furiously—kicking, scratching, spitting, cursing them with words she had not even realized she knew but it was all in vain. They beat her down and took her anyway. It was a futile effort, and she quickly learned to stand apart from what was happening, detach herself and get it over with. Immediate survival took priority, ahead of anger, self-respect, fear of disease. Her mind was focused on the next few hours, the next few days. Whatever happened after that was so far in the future that it felt like science fiction.

  “What time is it?” Felicia asked. It was the first time she had spoken in a day or more, and Megan took it as a hopeful sign.

  “They took our watches, stupid!” Robin hissed. “You know that. They took everything!”

  “It’s morning,” Megan said, resisting an impulse to snap at Robin, tell her to shut up if she couldn’t control herself. If they couldn’t help one another in the present crisis, there was truly no hope left.

  “What time?” Felicia said again.

  “For God’s sake—”

  “Quiet, Robin!” Meg was both surprised and pleased when Robin shut her mouth and turned away.

  To poor Felicia she replied, “It’s getting on toward ten o’clock, I’d guess. They haven’t started setting up for lunch yet.”

  When Felicia nodded, it was like a puppet, or like one of those spring-loaded toys you sometimes saw in the rear windows of old people’s cars, heads bobbing up and down. Except the plastic heads were always grinning, and Felicia still looked numb, a blank expression on her face.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome.” Megan waited for a moment, letting the surrealistic moment pass, before she spoke again. “You know,” she said, “the only way we’re ever getting out of here is if we put our heads together and work out some kind of plan.”

  “Get out?” Robin pronounced the words as if they had been uttered in some foreign tongue. “You must be crazy, Meg. They’ll never let us go. They’re having too much fun.”

  “I didn’t plan on asking their permission,” Megan said.

  “Oh, right! There’s only thirty-five or forty of them, all with guns and knives and…Jesus, Meg, you wanna get us killed?”

  Meg answered with a question of her own. “You call this living, Robin?”

  “I’ll help,” said Felicia, speaking in a voice more like her own than Meg had heard her use since they were captured on the Salomé, almost a week before. “Just tell me what to do.”

  “Robin?”

  “Shit, you’re right. This isn’t living. What’s the plan?”

  “First thing,” Meg said, “we have to find ourselves some weapons. After that…”

  The two combatants came together with a clash of steel, grim, sweaty faces close enough to smell each other’s rancid breath if they hadn’t been focused single-mindedly on spilling blood. Each pirate used his free hand, clutching at the sword arm of his adversary, seeking an advantage in the struggle that could easily result in sudden death.

  Szandor was taller, heavier, Flick was lean and quick, making the two of them a nearly even match. It would have been a different tale if they were wrestling, even boxing, but the blades they wielded were the perfect equalizers. The briefest lapse by either duelist could leave him stretched out in a pool of blood.

  It did not have to end in death, of course. A point of honor could be made by simple bloodletting, provided that both parties to the duel agreed. Considering the adversaries, though—both men with fiery, brutal tempers, prone to quarreling at the best of times—it seemed to Thomas Kidd that one of them had to surely die this morning.

  That meant one less crewman for their raiding, one less pair of hands to help around the camp, but Captain Kidd, for all of his authority, couldn’t prevent a righteous duel from being played out to the death if the combatants were agreed. It was a sacred point of law among the buccaneers, and he could violate it only at the risk of sacrificing his command.

  The present quarrel, predictably, was over women—or, to be precise, one woman in particular. Both Flick and Szandor coveted the tall blonde taken from their latest prize, and while the wench was technically available to any man who paid the captain’s price, an argument had broken out as to which buccaneer she favored of the two. It seemed a bit ridiculous to Kidd, grown men imagining a slave girl truly cared a whit for either one of them, but stranger things had happened in the world. Besides, he knew that logic had no place where lust held sway among the sort of men who followed him.

  The challenge had been mutual, duly received and answered. Captain Kidd was not empowered to prevent the duel, although he might postpone it temporarily, in the event all hands were needed for a raid, or to defend their island stronghold. In the present circumstances, though, he would invite a mutiny if he denied the duelists their rights or kept his men of a diverting show.

  Kidd had a ringside seat for the engagement, lounging in his high-backed wicker throne, the cutlass that was both a weapon and his badge of office resting on his knees. There were no rules in such a fight, per se, except that no one else could interfere to help either combatant. If another member of his scurvy crew so much as raised a hand in aid of either Flick or Szandor, it would be Kidd’s task—indeed, his oath-bound duty—to step in and cut down the bastard.

  There was small chance of that occurring, though, when most of the assembled buccaneers had placed bets on one swordsman or the other, and the few not wagering were glad enough to simply cheer on the fighters. It wasn’t often that they had a full-fledged duel in camp—six months since the last one, if his memory was accurate—and everyone enjoyed the show.

  Last time, prompted by an argument about some missing loot, the winner had been satisfied to draw first blood and let it go at that. Kidd had an inkling that this morning’s duelists wouldn’t be so easily deterred from murder, and while he was loath to lose an able-bodied crewman, the matter was out of his hands. As captain of the brotherhood, the best that he could do was to sit back and enjoy the show, keep one eye peeled for cheaters and assume that either Flick or Szandor would survive.

  The captain’s final thought had barely taken shape, when Szandor gave a mighty shout and threw himself at Flick, his sword thrust out in front of him to skewer the smaller man. Flick saw it coming, though, and sidestepped just in time to save himself. His own blade flashed toward Szandor’s face, then dipped aside before his enemy could parry, swooping down to gash the taller pirate’s thigh.

  Szandor recoiled, now limping, and his roar of fury had become a howl of pain. Blood spurted from his wound, but it wasn’t a mortal blow, the artery undamaged. Still, it slowed him and made his footwork clumsy, as his cunning adversary had to have planned.

  There were no time-outs and no substitutions in a duel of honor. If a man was wounded, he could either keep on fighting, or throw down his weapon and beg mercy from his adversary. Sometimes, he who scored first blood was satisfied to see his enemy in pain, and let it go at that. This morning, though, Szandor didn’t throw down his sword, and Flick displayed no evidence of magnanimity.

  The fight went on, and now Kidd knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it would be a battle to the death.

  One leg of Szandor’s torn and faded denim pants was soaked with blood from thigh to ankle, yet he kept on fighting, lurching after Flick like some demented creature from the pit, too stubborn and too hateful to admit defeat or give his enemy the satisfaction of knowing that he hurt. In fact, while he was slowed by the wounded leg, his slashing thrusts still demonstrated the same power that had made him one of Kidd’s most deadly fighters. Flick would be in trouble yet if he allowed himself to fall beneath that flashing blade.