as the southern mouth of the Red Sea. Ordering the yacht’s running lights turned on, he upped his speed to seventeen knots and settled in behind the steering wheel.
It was an ideal night for traveling; the early moon had set and the stars were coming out. The weather was clear with hardly any wind.
The sea was like glass.
* * *
THE PLAN FROM here was for The Immaculate Perception to sail up the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean and then on to Italy where Emma Simms was to begin shooting her next movie. The film’s production company was already in place in Rome, set construction was finished, her costars were rehearsed and waiting. All they needed was for Emma Simms to arrive.
However, she’d just completed a whirlwind publicity tour of Africa. In the span of forty-eight hours, she’d visited an AIDS hospital in Kenya, dedicated another in Cameroon, cut a ribbon at a girls’ school in Liberia, read to blind children in Botswana and visited an orphanage in Nigeria. She’d posed for so many pictures and done so many interviews, she’d lost count.
After the colossal two-day media blitz was finished, she’d declared herself too stressed to fly directly to Italy. She’d opted instead to lease the enormous mega-yacht out of Oman and sail up to Rome instead, a trip of seven days. It would be a relaxing way to spend the week, plus she would arrive fashionably late for her first day on set, something that made her high-powered publicists very happy.
Such was life for the person People magazine had christened “the world’s favorite movie star.” Emma was gorgeous; that was beyond dispute. Just twenty-six years old, five-foot-five and nicely shaped, she was impeccably blond, redhead or brunette depending on her mood. Her image regularly graced the covers of every celebrity magazine on the planet. Her movies were hits everywhere; they’d already grossed more than a billion dollars worldwide, and that included dirt-poor places like Yemen where she was extremely popular. Her celebrity spanned religious, ethnic and cultural barriers. Though thoroughly American, she was considered a citizen of the world. Her Facebook page received a million hits a day and millions more around the globe followed her every move on Twitter. She was a certified international phenomenon.
But being Emma Simms was not easy. She spent five hours every day in the gym working with her personal trainers. Another three hours were devoted to creating new hairdos and makeup schemes with her stylist. Her life coach took up another two hours, as did her personal spiritualist and her nutritionist. Hundreds of millions of people adored her, so all the hard work must have been paying off.
Still, she could be demanding. Her morning toast had to be exactly 76 degrees Fahrenheit or she would not eat it. Bad for digestion, her nutritionist had told her. She had to have exactly five one-inch-square ice cubes in every glass of Bavarian spring water she drank, as anything less would not provide the optimal temperature for proper skin hydration. The clothes closets on the rented yacht—which she insisted undergo a $100,000 redesign overnight before she agreed to step on board—were organized in four distinct categories: day of the week, time of day, disposition of the moment and strength of aura as calculated by her ever-present shaman.
Anywhere she traveled, the hired help were told not to look at her directly—after all, that’s how auras were stolen. The help also had to be white, or at least not too dark. She’d told the mega-yacht’s owners that after her recent tour, she’d “had enough of Africans for a while,” leaving them to scramble to find fifty-three Caucasian maids, cooks, butlers and crewmen on just a few hours’ notice.
Her own lily-white entourage numbered in the dozens, and her luggage consisted of more than a hundred suitcases, many filled up with her extensive collection of sunglasses, which simply had to go with her wherever she went. And to keep herself centered at all times while on the yacht, whatever outfit she was wearing up on deck, all the pillows and cushions within her line of sight had to be of the same color or they damn well better be made up of complementary hues.
There had already been a couple of tirades about this, and heads had rolled.
* * *
EMMA SIMMS WAS intensely sure of herself. She had more balls than any of her leading men. She rarely forgot her lines. She could play happy just as well