**Your breathlessness — have you ever been claustrophobic before?** Is that what it is? **Great time to find out.** I shudder and my heart tries to flutter away.
**We're in as much danger if we stay down here as if we surface ** she announces. **Come on. Slowly.** Still locked together, we finger-and-toe our way up the narrow chimney in the rock, feeling ahead for rough bumps and the joints between concrete castings. As we rise, the nightmare awareness of my own death begins to fade. All too soon we reach the grating at the top, a cold wall of rusty iron.
I tense up and try not to give in to the scream that's bubbling up inside. **Can you lift it?** I ask.
**On my own? Shit.** I feel her straining. **Help me!** I brace my legs against one wall and my back against the opposite and raise my arms; Ramona leans against me and puts her back into it, too. The roof gives a little. I tense and shove hard, putting all my fear of drowning into it, and the lid squeals and lifts free above us. **Turn!** I start twisting, rotating the rectangular lid so that when we let go it won't settle back into place. There's a roaring in my ears. I can hear my pulse. And suddenly I'm choking underwater with a lungful of air: we've lost skin contact and I'm going to have aching muscles tomorrow — if there is a tomorrow — and I can't get enough oxygen, so I kick out in near panic and the lid slides away and I kick out again, rising nightmarishly slowly towards the silver ceiling high above me, with my lungs on fire. Then I'm on the surface, bobbing like a cork in a barrel and I breathe out explosively and start to inhale just as a wave comes over the top of the reef and the platform and breaks over me.
The next few seconds are crazy and painful and I'm coughing and spluttering and close to panic again. But Ramona's in the water with me and she's a strong swimmer, and the next thing I know I'm on my back, coughing up my guts as she tows me towards the shallows like a half-drowned kitten. Then there's sand under my feet and an arm round my shoulders.
"Can you walk"
I try to talk, realize it's a bad idea, and nod instead. A sidelong glance tells me her glamour's back in place. "Don't look back. There's a dive boat just over the far side of the reef and they're looking out to sea. I figure we've got maybe two minutes before they check their tracker ward and see you're showing up again. Have you got any smoke screens on that fancy phone of yours?
Think fast. I try to remember what I've loaded on it, remember the block I put on the car, and nod again. I'm not certain it'll work, but if it doesn't we're fresh out of options.
"Okay." We're about waist-deep now. "Blanket's over there. Think you can run"
"Blanket — " I start coughing again.
"Run, monkey-boy!"
She grabs my hand and tugs me forwards. At the same time there's a ghostly sensation in my chest: she starts coughing, but I feel a whole lot better. Moments later I'm the one who's tugging her along through knee-deep water across a silvery beach, sunlight blazing down on my shoulders. I feel horribly exposed, as if there's a target painted on the small of my back. The towel is just ahead, up a gentle rise. Ramona stumbles. I get an arm round her waist and help her up, then we stagger on up the beach.
Towel. Trunks. A little pile of everyday tourist detritus.
"This ours"
She nods, gasping for breath: she's swallowed my water, I realize. I fumble under the towel and find the sealed polythene bag. Fingers shaking, I unseal it and pull out my Treo.
The damn thing seems to take half an hour to boot up, and while I'm waiting for it I see heads bobbing to the surface near the boat on the far side of the reef. They're tiny in the distance but we're running out of time — Ah. Scratchpad. "Lie down on the towel. Make like you're sunbathing," I tell her. Squinting at the tiny screen, I shield it with one hand so that I can see the schematic. A circuit design, I need a circuit design. But we're on a beach, right? Sand is porous. And about fifty centimeters below us there's a layer of conductive saline. Which means — I squat on the sand and start drawing lines on the beach around us with my fingertips. I don't have to go all the way down to the water, I just have to reduce the resistivity of the layer of insulating sand above it in a regular pattern. Divers are crawling back into the boat as I finish the main loop and add the necessary terminals. Phone, phone... the bloody thing has gone to sleep on me. I'm about to poke at the screen when I realize there's sand on my fingertips. Silly me. I wipe them on the towel beside Ramona's hip and carefully wake the Treo up, stroke it into life, and hit the upload button.
Then I sit down next to her and wait to learn if I've rendered us invisible.
About half an hour later, the divers give up. The boat turns, its outboard engine spouting a tail of white foam, and it slowly motors around the headland. Which is just as well because we don't have any sunscreen and my shoulders and chest are beginning to itch badly.
"You okay?" I ask Ramona.
"Pretty much." She sits up and stretches. "Your trick worked."
"Yeah, well. Trouble is, it's stationary: I can't take it with us. I figure our best bet would be to head back into town as fast as possible and lose ourselves in the crowd."
"You really got them stirred up. And their surveillance net is disturbingly good." She looks at me. "You're sure it was just Marc you were pushing on"
"Yes." I look at her closely. "Marc, and his unfortunate habit of supplying single female tourists to friends with a boat and an unlimited supply of Charlie." Her expression doesn't change but her pupils tell me what I want to know.
"Virgins aren't necessary, if this is what I think it is. But they have to be healthy and relatively young. Ring any bells"
"I didn't know you were a necromancer, Bob." She looks at me calculatingly.
"I'm not." I shrug. "But I do countermeasures. And what I see here is that the island's defenses aren't worth jack shit if you've got a scuba kit and a boat. Someone's buying up single women, and they're sure as hell not shipping them to brothels in Miami. There's a surveillance net centered on Billington's boat, and it's tied in to your friend Marc." I stare at her eyes. "Are you going to tell me it's a coincidence"
She bites her lower lip. "No," she admits. A pause. "Marc wasn't a coincidence."
"What, then"
"It centers on Billington but it's not all about Billington." She looks away from me and stares out to sea, morosely. "He's got his own ... plans. To expedite them, he had to hire a bunch of specialists with eccentric tastes and needs. His wife — she's not harmless. She's scum." If looks could kill, the wave crests would be boiling into steam under her stare. "And she's got retainers. Call it a tactical marriage of convenience. She's got certain powers and he wants to make use of them. He's got shitloads of wealth and more ambition than — well, she likes that because it buys her immunity. Eileen ... her predecessor Erzabet was probably framed by a rival, a duke who wanted her lands and her castle, but Eileen is the genius who figured out there was a skincare program in the old legend productized the hell out of it, and sold it as Bathory(TM) Pale Grace(TM)[9 Pale Grace(TM), Pale Grace(TM) Skin Hydromax(R), Pale Grace(TM) Bright Eyes(R), and Pale Grace(TM) Number Three(R) [reference footnote 13] are registered trademarks of Bathory(TM) Cosmetics Corporation: "It'd better be bloody worth it at this price."] Cosmetics, with added ErythroComplex-V. It's basically a mass-produced level one glamour. She sources most of the wholesale supplies from commercial slaughterhouses and leftover blood bank stock, and on paper she's clean, but you still need a better than homeopathic quantity of the real thing to make it work.