He turned to glare at Manny.

“We need her alive, remember,” Manny said. His voice was very quiet. “She has to tell us where Frik’s artifact is.”

McKendry remembered that Manny had been a friend of her father’s, and that he had known Selene since she was a little girl. He remembered, too, that he was not a killer. Not like this. Shooting someone—man or woman—in the back in cold blood.

He looked back at the boat, which continued to drift. As he watched it, he saw a bloodied hand emerge from the inside and grasp the edge.

He shoved past Manny Sheppard. Ignoring the ladder, he leapt from the hut to the floor of the jungle and wove his way through the underbrush. He knocked branches away and splashed through shallow rivulets.

His headlong rush came to an abrupt halt when he tripped over José’s still-warm body. The Venezuelan had taken a bullet straight through the forehead. His knife, small protection against a pistol no matter how accurately thrown, was nowhere to be seen.

Helluva marksman, McKendry thought, remembering Selene’s raised arm. He stood still and stared into the impenetrable darkness, in the direction her boat had taken.

Behind him in the camp, a few scattered shots rang out before the gunfire ceased completely.

By dawn, after searching through the caños and the islands in the vicinity of the camp, Manny found the bloodstained boat. It was still drifting downstream, but there was no sign of Selene Trujold, or her piece of the artifact.

33

For three months after his idyllic afternoon with Selene, Joshua had worked with the members of Green Impact to scrounge weapons, ammunition, and explosives. He and Selene went over and over the plans of theValhalla until they both knew them by heart. Finally, the day after his birthday, he took off with a Warao guide to see if he could get more information and supplies in Pedernales.

It was his first trip out of the jungle since the night on theYucatán .

They took a boat for some twenty winding miles from the jungles to Pedernales, where he had been told he could safely gather additional information and equipment for the operation against theValhalla platform.

The town lay at the tip of Punta Tolete, where a confluence of delta streams emptied into the gulf. While apparently the closest thing to a town within reasonable distance, it was really not much more than a supply stop. Any hope he had of finding more than basic survival necessities was crushed upon his arrival.

The hub of civilization in the Delta Amacuro, the settlement had grown from nothing half a century ago, when oil exploitation on the adjacent Isla Cotorra had brought the petroleum business to the continent’s edge. Enough traffic and business and people came to the area to set up a town and create a booming local economy.

By the mid-1970s, however, the oil fields had been played out, and the operating firm had abandoned the wells and pulled up stakes, leaving the locals to fend for themselves. The town’s economy crashed, most of the transplanted people departed, and only empty, dilapidated buildings remained. In recent years, speculators had reopened the operations, squeezing hard until crude oil began to flow yet again.

Pedernales was reborn, but it remained a sickly child at best.

Since the locals had not seen Keene in the area before, he was able to move around without fear of being recognized or asked inconvenient questions. For all the villagers knew, he was another one of the yuppie ecotourists who came to the delta, traveling by motorboat up the caños to look at the birds and the wildlife before returning to their expensive homes and fancy restaurants to talk about their “dangerous jungle ordeal.”

Except for a side trip to Isla Cotorra, Keene spent his time in Pedernales bartering for necessary supplies and trying to gain the confidence of the locals. He did not come close to finding what he wanted, but he did discover that he would have to make do with whatever resources Green Impact could scrounge. On the South American coast, he would have no access to the truly high-tech materials he preferred.

He was not particularly perturbed.

Sometimes it was less efficient—and less satisfying—to rely on fancy gizmos. TheMission: Impossible routine, he thought, didn’t work nearly as well in practice as it did in concept.

After almost a week away from the encampment, and Selene, Keene grew anxious to get back.

“Time to say good-bye to the big city,” he told his guide. Though sure that his sarcasm was lost on the man, Keene offered to buy him a meal and a drink in a seedy seaside cantina that appeared to be the center of the town’s entertainment. They started out at the bar, where, with a great stroke of luck, Keene found several disgruntled oil workers who had been fired from theValhalla rig.

Without the prospect of continuing paychecks, the rig workers were perfectly happy to talk with a man who would buy them as many cervezasmás frías as they wished to imbibe.

Keene’s Spanish was good enough that he quickly put them at ease. He discovered that, after theYucatán incident, Oilstar had hired one bastard of a new security chief who had overhauled all the rig procedures, cracked down on booze and drugs and cigarettes, and enforced discipline with no exceptions. A veritable military commander.

Sipping his beer, Keene nodded sympathetically. His commiseration was genuine. From what he had seen while sneaking aboard theValhalla with Terris, the previous procedures had been laughably lax, but he wouldn’t have gotten along well with such rigid rules himself.

By the time the evening was over, the men had told Keene more than he had hoped to discover, and an overall plan gelled in his mind. Given a few lucky breaks and a lot of determination, he was quite convinced, he could succeed in his plan to force Frik to sit up and take notice. He had never trusted Frikkie Van Alman, and now he understood why. The Oilstar man had much to answer for. Not that Selene was an angel. She was an expert manipulator with plenty of blood and blame on her own hands, but Paul Trujold’s daughter was just a minor player compared with Frik.

Leaving at dawn in their inflatable boat, Keene rode back through the caños with his guide, a silent man who spoke enough Spanish to be understood, but chose not to speak much at all. Keene talked for his own benefit, but soon gave up expecting a response from the Indian. Painfully aware of how much he missed McKendry, he made himself as comfortable as possible and began the kind of mental gyrations that had proven useful in the past.

He had acquired some supplies, though not enough, and a few luxuries, including a well-wrapped package of chocolates that the trade-post owner had sold him for an exorbitant amount of money. Chocolate was common in Venezuela, but these were imported from Belgium. Why anybody would want to do such a thing baffled Keene, but what did he care as long as they earned him extra Brownie points from Selene.

She gave him a sense of purpose, which he needed more than ever. Since the fateful night on the oil tanker, he had felt lost and empty without his partner and best friend. Life had seemed to be one continuous string of adventures when they were together.

Not, he thought, that what he was doing now was dull.

The whole truth was that he was the sort of man who needed to have a driving goal, even if it drove him over a cliff. Still, if not for the ministrations of Selene Trujold, he would have been unlikely to pick this particular obsession.

He thought back to the night on theYucatán . Again, in his mind’s eye, he watched McKendry get shot twice and catapult backward off his bicycle onto the equipment-strewn deck…before he himself was hurled overboard in the grenade explosion.

He sought to find something amusing in the image of himself hitting the water, but without McKendry as his audience and straight man, nothing seemed funny. Perhaps someday his cocky good humor would return. It sure had gone AWOL since his recovery and time in the jungle.