would be calculating how much bottled water and sunblock they would need to last until sunset.
He sometimes wondered how it had come to this. As a boy he had been a neighborhood adventurer, a ringleader of elaborate pranks, even a daredevil. At age ten, to his mother’s horror, he single-handed an eight-foot sailing dinghy the length of Lake Leland—a man-made lake, granted, and only six miles long, but the closest you could get to the high seas in the heart of rural Iowa. By the time he graduated with an MBA from the University of Chicago he had spent his previous three summers bicycling the California coast, backpacking the Pyrenees, and vagabonding the coast of Turkey.
Nor did he look particularly white-bread, thanks to a Greek grandmother on his mother’s side, who lent the bloodline just enough Mediterranean spice to at least let him pretend to feel at home in the world’s sultrier latitudes. That, plus an inquisitive gleam of mischief in his liquid brown eyes, left even his soberest observers convinced that he might yet act spontaneously.
But, alas, he was also the son of an accountant, with bean counting in his genes. And his employer, pharmaceutical giant Pfluger Klaxon, had little tolerance for stuff and nonsense, particularly among auditors, who were supposed to keep everyone else in line. Thus had four years on the corporate fast track subdued nearly all youthful impulse. Whenever opportunity knocked nowadays, Sam checked first through the peephole.
A moist dark hand squeezed his left forearm.
“You want date? Nice happy time?”
A second hand, pale as the snows of the Caucasus, took his right arm. Slavic vowels cooed into his ear.
“You want maybe two of us? Special deal just for you?”
Sam pulled free, smiled politely, and shook his head.
“No, thank you.”
A third woman—Indonesian? Malaysian?—slid close on his right, moving sinuously against his hip.
“No, thank you. Really.”
The offers multiplied anyway, and his head-wagging refusals became pleasantly hypnotic. Too many air miles and too little sleep. The music, so irritating moments ago, now seemed to insist that he at least consider a proposal, if only as a pretext for human conversation, a touch of warmth. Perhaps he could take one of the more hopeless cases aside and slip her a twenty. Or would that set off a feeding frenzy? In these waters, hard currency would be like a bucket of chum.
Maybe the $9 Scotch was getting to him. Watered or not, it was his fifth drink of the night. Only his continuing concern for his wallet tethered him to reality. The tourist guidebooks had warned severely about pickpockets in joints like this, and Sam’s job had trained him to never ignore sensible advice.
Frankly, he was also beginning to worry about the whereabouts of his traveling companion, Charlie Hatcher. Twenty minutes earlier, raffish old Charlie had flashed a lurid grin and vanished down a corridor, hand in hand with a husky-voiced Slav. Charlie was in his forties, and Sam guessed the woman was, too. Up close she had looked far older than her hairstyle and makeup, although the swaying of her sequined rump had produced the one flash of genuine eroticism Sam had experienced since arriving.
He brushed aside yet another arm hold and checked his watch—a real Rolex, to the best of his knowledge. It had now been twenty-seven minutes since Charlie disappeared. Did you really get that much time for your money in a place like this? And where had they gone? The way Charlie explained it in the cab, these women took you to a nearby apartment, or upstairs to a room in the dreary old York International Hotel. Charlie’s had led him straight down a hallway toward what looked like a bank of offices. Were they humping on a fax machine? Squirming atop a pile of interoffice memos that rustled like autumn leaves? Did that cost extra?
The day had been building toward this so-called climax for twenty-one wearying hours, ever since Sam had risen at dawn for a walk on the beach in Jumeirah, a short drive from his hotel. Dazed and blinking, he had stared at the shimmer of the dredge boats as they labored in the sunrise, throwing high jets of sand. They were creating new waterfront real estate for resort islands being built offshore.
He had seen these grandiose projects from the jet on the approach the day before. One was a massive archipelago in the shape of a palm tree, miles across, each frond bearing the spiky fruit of luxury villas and posh hotels. Another