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said Stevens, getting up from the chair and putting the note in his pocket, “I have an idea that we all may really be overreacting. We’ve lived through dozens of alerts like this—hit teams being sent out from the Middle East, psychos waiting to take a shot at the big man in airports, nuts rounded up who’ve written crazy letters—and ninety-nine percent of the time theyturned out to be vapors. Suddenly, a lone woman traveling with a kid shows up on our subcellar screens, and the alarms rattle cages from Jerusalem to D.C. with loud bells in Paris and London. Doesn’t that strike you as a little heavy?”
    “How thoroughly did you read the information I got from London and forwarded to you?” asked the DCI.
    “Very. She’s a psychotic for all the reasons the Freudians expound on, and, without doubt, obsession-oriented. That doesn’t make her super Amazon.”
    “Because she isn’t. A larger-than-life subject is an easier target; he or she stands out. Bajaratt could be the girl next door in Centerville, U.S.A., or the vacuous fashion model on Paris’s Saint-Honoré, or a shy sabra private in the Israeli Army. She doesn’t lead charges, Captain, she orchestrates them, that’s her genius. She creates events, then moves the principals within them toward the predetermined objectives. If she were an American and of a different mentality, she’d probably be sitting where I am.”
    “May I ask …?” The naval officer shifted his feet, breathing deeply, his face growing red as the blood rose to his head. “What I did—oh,
God
, what I
did
—you said it would remain in this room.”
    “It will.”
    “
Christ
, why did I
do
it?” The officer’s eyes were clouded as his body shook. “I killed Tye’s wife …!”
    “It’s over, Captain Stevens. Unfortunately, you’ll live with it for the rest of your life—as I have for over thirty years since the Ho Chi Minh. That’s our punishment.”
    Tyrell’s brother, Marc Anthony Hawthorne—“Marc-Boy” in the Caribbean’s lingua franca—had flown to Virgin Gorda to take over his sibling’s charter. Marc Hawthorne was in several respects the eternal younger brother, slightly taller than the tall Tyrell, quite a bit more slender—very thin to be precise—and with a facesimilar in appearance but without the crow’s-feet or the neutral eyes of his older, more experienced brother. He was seven years younger, and although it was apparent that he held the first Hawthorne son in great affection, it was also obvious that he frequently questioned his brother’s intellect.
    “Come on, Tye!” he said emphatically as they stood on the deserted dock at sundown. “You quit all that crap! You can’t go back, I won’t let you!”
    “I wish you could stop me, bro, but you can’t.”
    “What the hell is this?” Marc lowered his voice to a guttural incantation. “
Once a navy man, always navy
! Is that what you’re saying?”
    “Not at all. It’s just that I can do what they can’t do. Cooke and Ardisonne flew around these islands; I’ve sailed them. I know every inlet, every land mass, mapped and unmapped, and there aren’t too many ‘autoritees’ I haven’t bribed with a dollar or fifty.”
    “But why, for Christ’s sake?”
    “I’m not sure, Marc, but maybe it’s something Cooke said. He said they were the ‘whipped of the world,’ not the enemies we knew before, but a new breed, raging fanatics who just want to destroy everything they believe has kept them in the garbage dumps.”
    “That’s probably socioeconomically true. But, I repeat, why are you getting involved?”
    “I just told you, I can do what they can’t do.”
    “That’s not a
why
, that’s an egotistical quasi-justification.”
    “All right, brother-academic, I’ll try to explain. Ingrid was killed—for one reason or another, perhaps I’ll never find out which—but you can’t live with a woman like her without knowing that she wanted the violence to stop—one way or