That's all he'd ever done. He felt he hadn't started his life yet. He hadn't become successful, or made any money, or fallen in love with someone-else. It was always going to happen after he'd finished whatever he was doing and did the next thing. It was the next thing that was going to work.

He paddled in a circle, just looking around casually as you would anywhere you found yourself stuck for a while.

How do you drown? Do you get so tired that you just can't stay up? Since he wasn't swimming, he wasn't exhausted, yet. He was sure he could float like this for another ten or twenty minutes, maybe longer . . . he had no idea. Maybe he could float until daylight and then some yacht would see him. It was always possible. Conserve heat and energy-or should he expend energy, swim a little, to stay warm? That would burn calories, and soon he'd run out of whatever energy he still had.

It didn't matter. Nobody was going to find him. This was it.

You're dead, pal.

He didn't have a watch. How long had it been? Ten minutes, maybe? Half an hour? He looked up at the stars. They were clearer than earlier, when the sky had been hazier. Cold and distant.

He wished he could read-something by Maugham-or Nevil Shute. He'd meant to read more Nevil Shute after The Chequer Board and Round the Bend and A Town Like Alice-he loved Nevil Shute. Read until he fell asleep. Drift off into those worlds that had more shape, made more sense, than his own ever had.

Water filled his mouth. He spat it out, jolted and suddenly afraid, kicking and splashing, as if it had been some animal nipping at him. Was it a little wave or had he sunk under for a moment?

Jesus, was it going to be a sordid struggle, full of fear and pain? A tiny, meaningless struggle under the stars like some roadkill rabbit convulsively kicking by the side of the road long after the car that had run it over had disappeared?

Should he get it over with? Go down and suck water? How do you do that?

He wasn't hopeful-hope doesn't spring eternal, Pansy Clutterbuck knew better-but he wasn't ready to stop thinking. He still had a lot to think about.

That cunt, Fergus. She was bound to leave him eventually-but then what? Would she actually find someone else-someone she loved?

That was Luc's problem: he loved only Aegina. He'd known he'd never love anyone else, not like he loved her-well, he needn't worry about that now.

Luc thought of his mother. He saw her diving overboard again, and his heart swelled with admiration.

How would she take it? What would she do?

Then he realized what she would do.

Eleven.

It was a three-minute drive in Fergus's Range Rover from the port to the Rocks. After jilling about offshore going nowhere for so many hours, it seemed too sudden an arrival.

Szabo, in the front passenger seat, got out first. He waited as Tony, Dolphin's captain, and his haggard and sunburned guests, Fergus, Dominick, and Sarah all climbed out into the mid-morning heat. No one said anything. Szabo turned and led them solemnly through the gate like a defeated general.

From his corner table beside the bar, Cassian saw them trail in. He lowered the book he was reading, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. Hallo, he thought, here blows an ill wind. Szabo's eyes quickly found him.

"Good morning," Szabo said, his face and voice wooden. "Is Lulu here?"

"I'll see," said Cassian. He rose and crossed the patio and went into the house.

A moment later Lulu walked out to meet them. Cassian stood close behind her to one side, as if to take an elbow. She glanced over them briefly. "Where is Luc?" she said.

"I am sorry to say that we are not sure," said Szabo. "He was not on board the yacht this morning. We do not know when or how he left us. This is Captain Clement. He can tell you what is being done."

Tony was brisk. "I've notified the Salvamento Maritimo and they're making a search. I've given them accurate coordinates of our position, but the problem is we don't know when, therefore where exactly, Luc went overboard. We only know he wasn't aboard at breakfast. We did a search of the immediate area-"

"I don't understand," said Lulu. "You only noticed him gone this morning? Then what have you been doing out there since yesterday?"

"Our engine broke down," explained Tony. "We spent the night repairing it. We got a little breeze around midnight and have been tacking up toward the island ever since, and then got the engine going at about four this morning. We didn't miss Luc until around eight o'clock. I started a search back along our track, but he might have been anywhere-"

"Do you mean you've left him out there?"

Sarah began to sob.

"We looked this morning, Lulu," Dominick said. "But we'd no idea when he'd gone, you see. We were almost back here when we discovered Luc wasn't aboard."

Tony said, "The Salvamento Maritimo should be out there pretty soon."

"My dear lady-" Szabo's voice was brimful with solicitude and gravitas.

"Oh, shut up, ridiculous man!" said Lulu. She waved dismissively at Szabo and Tony. "Go away." She gripped Cassian's arm, looked at him and at Dominick. "I need you both to come with me, please." Lulu turned and walked quickly around the house toward the garage. Cassian and Dominick followed her.

"I reckon we need to make a report to the police," said Tony to the remainder of the group.

"Yes, of course," said Szabo, "but you are the captain, it is you who makes the report. I am now going to return to the yacht."

"Well, the police'll probably want everyone's name," said Tony. "I should get those from all of you."

"Right," said Fergus thoughtfully. "But I mean, it doesn't really have anything to do with us, though, does it? If we'd been on a ferryboat or something, we'd just be passengers, wouldn't we?"

"We're not a ferryboat," said Tony. "I shall need your names."

Lulu drove fast, dust whirling behind them along the road above the rocks. They were soon at the port. She drove the SEAT right down to the water and stopped abruptly at the edge of the pontoons where the fishing boats, motor boats, and smaller sailing yachts were moored. She jumped out of the car. Cassian and Dominick followed her as she walked quickly down the pontoon dock.

People were crawling over boats, lying in the sun on their decks, lifting aboard coolers, children, parents-in-law. Motorboats pulled away from the pontoons and grumbled toward the fuel dock.

"What do you want to do, Lulu?" said Cassian.

"We need a boat. Something that goes fast, obviously. Dominick, that's your department."

"Lulu, the coast guard, the Salvamentos-" he began.

"They're as pathetic as the Guardia Civil," Lulu snapped. "We can't leave it up to them. We've got to go get him ourselves. Nobody else will."

Dominick looked briefly at Cassian, who looked back in tacit confirmation.

"Right," said Dominick. While not the yachting sort, uninterested in boats, per se, he liked to rent speedboats to take girls water-skiing. He could tell fast boats from slow boats and he knew how to make them go. "Well, it's short notice-"

"Just find the boat, Dominick," said Lulu peremptorily. "Obviously one with someone on it. What about that one?" She stabbed a finger toward a squat, hulking concretion of scoured white fiberglass, wide in the back, sharp in front, the shape of an arrowhead, enlivened around the sooty exhaust holes in the stern by decals depicting orange flames. A blond man and woman, both deeply bronzed, slim, and tautly muscled, sat in the sun in the cockpit close to the dock.

"Looks fast," said Dominick.

Lulu walked to the edge of the dock, three feet from the couple in the boat. "Do you speak English?" she asked them.

"Yes, of course," said the man, with a German accent. He smiled.

"My son has fallen off a boat out at sea. I'd like to hire your boat to go look for him."

"Oh," said the German. He and wife exchanged a look and then he looked back to Lulu. "I'm sorry. This is not possible for us. We are waiting for our friends. You should tell the police. They can help you-"

"I'll pay you five thousand pesetas an hour. Or whatever you want," said Lulu.

"We don't need your pesetas," said the German, his smile vanishing.

Dominick called from down the dock. "Come on!" He was waving at them. Lulu and Cassian ran toward him. As they approached, a deep, barely silenced roar overwhelmed every noise around them, and a cloud of blue smoke rose from the water and swirled around Dominick. A small wiry man in swimming trunks was already throwing dock lines off a long, narrow, gray, cigarette boat with the profile of an upturned blade of a scimitar. The roar had subsided into a rumbling that sounded as if it came from the inside of a large cave.

"This is Jorge," said Dominick. "He knows me. I've rented boats from Manuel, the man who owns this. He'll take us out."

"Venga, venga," said Jorge, fully alive to the urgency of their task. He took Lulu's hand and led her across a flat space of fiberglass shell to the small, deep cockpit. Cassian followed her. Dominick threw off the dock lines and began crawling forward to the cockpit. Jorge touched a brace of throttles. A roar burst out of a deep cave somewhere beneath them again.

As they passed the end of the breakwater, Jorge's hands closed over the throttles again. He pushed them steadily all the way forward and the long boat leapt as if out of a gate. It seemed to fly over the sea as it planed at fifty knots away from the coast.

Lulu yelled something at Dominick.

"What?" Dominick tried to say, but his mouth filled with wind as he opened it.

Lulu clutched his arm for support and turned her face to him. "Well done!" she shouted into his ear.

Twelve.

After dropping Szabo and Tony back at the port, Fergus drove out of town to C'an Cabrer. Naturally, with Gerald's resistance to installing a phone-ridiculous-he hadn't been able to call Aegina yet to tell her he was all right. Though, from the terrace, she or Gerald might have seen the yacht heading toward port earlier in the morning. She must have been awfully worried about him. Presumably they'd told little Charlie some story so he wouldn't fret. Poor little fellow.

Apart from the fuck on the foredeck engineered entirely by that randy little tart Mireille, it had been excruciatingly tedious. Absolutely the worst thing about it was simply not being able to get off when one wanted to. Fergus couldn't think of another situation where one couldn't say at some point, Thanks, I'm off now. An airplane flight, that was the only other experience he could think of where you couldn't get out of it, get a taxi, a train, plane, whatever was necessary at whatever price, and go home. Now he thoroughly understood Lulu's aversion to going out on boats. They might have been out there for fucking days.

He turned into the drive and engaged the Range Rover's four-wheel drive and shot up the hill fast-they'd hear him.

As the house came into view through the lemon trees, it occurred to him that Aegina might possibly be upset about Luc. They'd had some sort of a thing at some point. As far as he knew, they never saw each other now. Obviously they weren't close. A little shock perhaps, offset by the great relief of knowing that he, Fergus, was all right.

Yes, there they all were on the terrace, little Charlie too, waving at him as he powered up the last few yards. He tooted the horn, and turned into the flat parking area below the house and stopped.

"Hal-lo!" Fergus said breezily as he got out.

"Daddyyyyyyy!" shouted Charlie.

"Hallo, little man! How are you?"

"Good!"

Up inside the house, Fergus lifted Charlie into the air as the boy raced to him.

"We were looking for you all night, Daddy!" Charlie was still full of the sense of freaky misadventure.

"I'm so sorry, my darling. The silly old boat broke down. We had to just sit there for hours. Jolly boring!"

"Thank God you're all right," Aegina said in a low emphatic voice. "We were worried."

"I'm sure you were."

"I went down to Rocks last night but no one knew anything. What happened?"

"Engine broke. Took them all night to fix it. Bloody boat can't sail a foot without it, apparently, at least not in the right direction."

"And everybody's okay?" asked Aegina.

"Luc went missing, somehow."

"What do you mean? Is he all right?"

"We don't know. He may not be all right, actually. He wasn't aboard when we got back."

Fergus was still holding Charlie. Aegina took him and lowered him until he stood on the floor. She looked at her father and said, "Charlie, take Grandpa into your room and show him some of your Legos."

"But I-"

"Charlie, I've got to do some pruning in the orchard," said Gerald. "Can you come and help me?"

"Yes, Grandpa."

Gerald took Charlie's hand and they left the house.

Aegina said, "Where is he, then?"

"Well, he went overboard, we think, at some point. We don't know when. We only know that he wasn't on board the boat this morning."

Yes, there it was: quite a shock, evidently. Her face suddenly very pale.

"You didn't find him?"