“This is Dragon Lady. We're coming out.”

“Dragon Lady,” said Pitt. “Is that the best you could dream up for a code name?”

The dove-gray eyes gazed at him as if he was thick between the ears. “It fits,” she said simply.

If Qin Shang's paid killers had any plans of following the Duesenberg and blasting its occupants at the first stoplight, they were quickly laid to rest as two unmarked vans fell into a convoy behind the big car.

“I hope they're on our side,” said Pitt.

“Peter Harper is very thorough. The INS protects its own with specialists outside the service. The people in the vans are from a little-known security force that supplies teams of bodyguards on request from different branches of government.”

“A great pity.”

She looked at him quizzically. “Why do you say that?”

“With all these armed chaperons watching our every move, I can't very well take you to my place for a nightcap.”

“Are you sure a nightcap is all you had in mind?” Julia replied in a sultry voice.

Pitt took one hand off the wheel and patted her bare knee. “Women have always been an enigma to me. I had hoped you might forget you were an agent of the government and throw caution to the winds.”

She moved across the leather bench seat until her body was pressed against his and slid her hands around his arm. She found the muffled roar of the engine and the smell of the leather sensual. “I went off duty the minute we walked out of that scumbag's house,” she said lovingly. “My time is your time.”

“How do we get rid of your friends?”

“We don't. They're with us for the duration.”

“In that case, do you think they'd mind if I took a detour?”

“Probably,” she said, smiling. “But I'm sure you'll do it anyway.”

Pitt went silent as he shifted gears and drove the Duesenberg effortlessly through traffic, watching in the rearview mirror with a touch of pride at seeing the vans struggle to keep pace. “I hope they don't shoot out my tires. They don't come cheap for a car like this.”

“Did you mean what you said when you told Qin Shang you'd hired a team of hit men to kill him?”

Pitt grinned wolfishly. “A big, fat bluff, but he doesn't know that. I take great satisfaction in tormenting men like Qin Shang who are too used to having people jump at their beck and call. Do him good to stare at the ceiling nights and wonder if someone is lurking outside waiting to put a bullet in him.”

“So what's with the detour?”

“I think I found the chink in Qin Shang's armor, his Achilles' heel if you'll pardon the cliche. Despite the seemingly impenetrable wall he's formed around his personal life, he has a vulnerable crack that can be pried open a mile wide.”

Julia pulled her coat tightly around her bare legs to ward off the late-evening chill. “You must have divined something from what he said that escaped me.”

“As I recall, his words were, 'My life's most passionate desire.' ”

She looked curiously into his eyes, which never left the road. “He was talking about a vast cargo of Chinese art treasures that vanished on a ship.”

“The same.”

“He possesses more wealth and Chinese antiques than anyone else in the world. Why should a ship with a few historical objects be of serious interest to him?”

“Not a mere interest, gorgeous creature. Qin Shang is obsessed like all men down through the centuries who have searched for lost treasure. He won't die a happy man no matter how much wealth and power he's accumulated until he can replace every one of his art replicas with the genuine pieces. To own something no other man or woman on earth can own is the ultimate fulfillment to Qin Shang. I've known men like him. He'd trade thirty years of his life to find the shipwreck and its treasures.”

“But how does one go about searching for a ship that vanished fifty years ago?” Julia asked. “Where do you begin to look?”

“You start,” Pitt said casually, “by knocking on a door about six blocks up the street.”

PITT STEERED THE BIG DUESENBERG OVER A NARROW DRIVE-way between two homes with brick walls entirely blanketed with climbing ivy. He stopped the car in front of a spacious carriage house that fronted an expansive courtyard that was now roofed over.

“Who lives here?” asked Julia.

“A very interesting character,” Pitt replied. He motioned toward a large bronze knocker on the door cast in the shape of a sailing ship. “Give it a rap, if you can.”

“If you can?” Her hand reached for the knocker hesitantly. “Is there a trick to it?”

“Not what you're thinking. Go ahead, try to lift it.”

But before Julia could touch the knocker, the door was swept open, revealing a huge, roly-poly man dressed in burgundy paisley silk pajamas under a matching robe. Julia gasped and took a step backward, bumping into Pitt who was laughing.

“He never fails.”

“Fails to do what?” demanded the fat man.

“Open the door before a visitor knocks.”

“Oh, that.” The big man waved airily. “A chime sounds whenever someone comes up the drive.”

“St. Julien,” said Pitt. “Forgive the late visit.”

“Nonsense!” boomed the man, who weighed four hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce. “You're welcome any hour of the day or night. Who's the lovely little lady?”

“Julia Lee, may I present St. Julien Perlmutter, gourmet, collector of fine wines and possessor of the world's largest library on shipwrecks.”

Perlmutter bowed as far as his bulk allowed and kissed Julia's hand.

“Always a pleasure to meet a friend of Dirk's.” He stood back and swept out an arm, the silk sleeve flapping like a flag in a stiff breeze. “Don't stand out there in the night. Come in, come in. I was just about to open a bottle of forty-year-old Barros port. Please share it with me.”

Julia stepped from the enclosed courtyard that once served to harness teams of horses to fancy carriages and gazed enraptured at the thousands of books that were massed over every square inch of open space inside the carriage house. Many were neatly spaced on endless shelves. Others were piled along walls, up stairs and on bateonies. In bedrooms, bathrooms, closets, they were even clustered in the kitchen and dining room. There was barely enough room for a person to walk through a hallway, they were so thickly stacked.

Over fifty years, St. Julien Perlmutter had accumulated the finest and most extensive collection of historical ship literature ever assembled in one place. His library was the envy of every maritime archive in the world and second to none. What books and ship records he could not possess, he painstakingly copied. Fearful of fire or destruction, his fellow researchers pleaded with him to put his immense archive on-line, but he preferred to leave his collection in bound paper.

He generously shared it all without cost to anyone who came to his front door seeking information on a particular shipwreck. As long as Pitt had known him, Perlmutter had never turned down anyone who sought his extensive knowledge.

If the staggering hoard of books wasn't a colossal sight, Perlmutter was. Julia gazed openly at him. His face, turned crimson from a lifetime of excessive good food and drink, barely showed under a curly mass of gray hair and a thick, heavy beard. His nose under the sky-blue eyes was a little red knob. His lips were lost under a mustache twisted at the ends. He was obese but not sloppy-fat. No flab hung. He was solid as a massive wood sculpture. Most people who first met him thought he was probably much younger than he looked. But St. Julien Perlmutter was a year past seventy and as hearty as they came.

A close friend of Pitt's father, Senator George Pitt, Perlmutter had known Dirk almost from the time he was born. Over the years they had formed a close bond to the point where Perlmutter was like a favorite uncle. He sat Pitt and Julia down around a huge latticed hatch cover, reconstructed and lacquered to as high a sheen as a dining table's. He offered them crystal glasses that had once graced the first-class dining room of the former Italian luxury liner the Andrea Doria.