“Jesus,” Jacob whispered.

And that’s when the little piece of hell that was inside him ruptured and a portal to somewhere else—somewhere evil and wrong—opened up and a little noise came scrambling out.

At first Jacob thought that the sinking boat was creaking, some part of its structure giving way, but he was only able to lie to himself for a second before he admitted that it was a human sound. Or an almost human sound. A moan. Soft and fueled by pain.

The man nailed to the wall lifted his head and the light filled his features with detail. His tongue came out, licked his lips. He coughed once and blood drooled out of his nose. He tried to speak but all that came was the sound of air escaping his body, as if it had somewhere else it had to be.

Jacob grabbed the bunk and pulled himself up, toward the man. His feet slipped and he splashed sideways. Fell. Grabbed a railing for balance. Fought his way forward.

The man’s skin was an ethereal blue and the water around him was getting darker with the blood that he had lost.

No wonder that shark was hanging around.

He got to the man, reached up, touched his face. Eyes fluttered open. There was no white to them, only a deep scarlet with single black nails of fear in their centers. “M…m…mio…”

Jacob recognized Italian from his year spent in Florence. “Si?” he said softly and in the cabin it sounded like a hiss.

The man coughed more blood and winced with pain. “Mi…mi…mio figlio,” he said softly, barely above a whisper. My son.

And Jacob went back through his Italian lexicon. “Che cosa?” What?

The man stiffened and his chest heaved once, violently, and he vomited out a rope of blood that spattered into the water. Then his head fell over.

Jacob knew that he was dead. What the hell had he been talking about? His son? What—?

And then he understood. But there was a great groan from somewhere far below the waterline and the boat shuddered and listed a few more degrees. The water in the stateroom boiled up, past Jacob’s nipples, and the dead woman slid off her bunk with a red splash.

Jacob threw open hatches, pulled out drawers. Most of the stateroom was underwater so he didn’t have many options. He hoped he was right—that he had understood the man. The water rose quickly and blood swirled around him, making it greasy. He searched frantically as water filled the compartment in a big gurgling thrust of pressure. He pulled open doors, drawers, and hatches.

The boat was going under. He had a few seconds, thirty at most, before the vessel slid below the waterline and began its descent to the trench, nearly 28,000 feet below.

There was a small box above the main bunk, a closet for pillows and bedding—there was a similar one on The Forger—and Jacob grabbed the handle and yanked it open. It came off in his grip and he flung it aside.

A small child was curled up inside. A boy, no more than three, splattered with blood. Jacob didn’t think—didn’t have time to formulate any thoughts at all—he grabbed the child by the arm and yanked him out of his hiding place.

The boat lurched sideways again and Jacob slipped, fell below the water. He splashed up. The child screamed. Slapped his face. Kicked and bit him. Fear coming out in the only way he knew how to express it.

From somewhere far away Jacob heard Frank yell at him to get out.

Water billowed into the stateroom. Jacob clambered up onto the bunk where the woman had been murdered, the child clamped to his chest like a football. He reached out and tried the hatch. It was locked. He tried the handle. Twisting it violently. It broke, came off in his hands.

And the sea filled up the last pocket of air and the boat slipped under the calm surface of the Caribbean.

There was nothing but black and the greasy feel of blood and the heartbeat of the child held to his chest. Jacob pulled out the Colt, pointed at the porthole, and squeezed off a round.

He kicked up through the jagged hole he had chopped with the slug, child in one arm, the pistol clamped in his free hand. He moved toward the blue sky over the ocean, toward the world above. The suction of the sinking vessel was all around him, an invisible force pulling debris—and him—down with it. He kicked hard, pushing for the surface. He moved a few feet. Then a few more, putting distance between himself and death.

Then something grabbed his foot, tightened, and began to pull him down into the black water along with the boat.

Jacob let go of the pistol, grabbed the knife from his belt, and slashed down in one desperate swing. He had no more oxygen in his lungs, no more fuel in the tank to take him any farther, and he was lucky that the blade arced through whatever had snarled his foot. A vibration thrummed up through his leg, then he was free, kicking for the surface. Up. Toward the light above.

He broke into the sunny Caribbean afternoon and sucked in a great lungful of air. He coughed and hacked and spit but managed to lift the child and swim for the boat. All around him the water churned and bubbled with air escaping the sinking boat.

Frank yelled.

Mia screamed.

He held the boy up, splashed clumsily for The Forger.

His wife screamed again, this time a high-pitched shriek that almost froze him in midstroke. It was a single horrific word.

Shark!

Jacob spun and his hand came up with the knife. He saw the fish, bearing down on him, the single dorsal rising out of the water as it came in to feed.

Jacob lowered the knife to get under the shark if it came in on the surface; if it came up from below, there wouldn’t be much he could do. The fish homed in on him and the child he cradled to his chest like a football. He felt the boy in his arms and had no idea if he was conscious or even alive, but he wasn’t going to let him go, not even if it meant going to the bottom of the planet in the belly of a fish. He held the boy protectively, head over his shoulder, and watched the shark coming.

It was ten feet away when the clatter of Frank’s Thompson split the sky open and the water at the base of the fish’s dorsal exploded. There was a flash of white belly followed by blood. A violent roll in the water. Then the shark banked to one side and disappeared in a widening pool of red.

Jacob paddled to the boat, keeping the child’s head above water. He passed the boy up to Frank, then clambered aboard. While Mia and Frank tended to the little lone survivor, Jacob found the bottle of Johnnie Walker under the wheel. He dropped down into the cockpit, cracked the bottle, and took a long slug, his old army knife still clamped in his fist.

Mia had the boy on his side and pumped his ribs to drive the water from his lungs. He coughed, gagged, vomited up a stream of water, and began to cry. She lifted him up, wrapped him in a towel, and held him close.

Frank turned to his brother. “What happened in there, Jacob?”

Jacob took another swallow of the scotch. “Something bad.” He turned back to where only a few minutes before the boat had hung suspended in the water. Debris floated in a wide patch, bobbing lazily on the gentle swell. “Something very bad.”

56

A jagged crystal of lightning slammed into a telephone pole up ahead, shattering it like a mortar round. The beach was supposed to be one hundred yards to their left but the storm had crawled nearly to the highway and threw up great sweeping swells that smashed at the road. When the waves hit the embankment, a fifty-foot wall of water shot into the air, then crashed down and washed over the pavement in a four-foot drift. Jake couldn’t understand how the road was still there. Or how Frank’s truck made it through.