"And now what?" he asked.

"You've seen what I've done. You don't know what I do to keep it."

"And?"

"And when you do-when you know everything that's happened in the last sixteen years-we'll talk. Not until then." And her eyes were on his, and he saw the hunger and the loneliness, and he prayed to a God he'd half forgotten that it wasn't just a reflection of his own.

They flew high over the Pacific. There were no luxuries in this aircraft; Aeneas and Laurie Jo sat uncomfortably in bucket seats over the wing, and Miguel sat far behind them. Neither the pilot nor the air crew paid them any attention. The pilot was not pleased to have them aboard, no matter that the plane belonged to Laurie Jo Hansen.

Two armed jets flew high above them. They bore the markings of Hansen Enterprises and were registered in Mexico; and the bribes required to keep permission for a private air force were as staggering as the cost of operating them,

"Why?" Aeneas asked, pointing to the slim black delta shapes above.

"Pirates," she said. "Each capsule holds a thousand kilos of cargo." She took papers from her briefcase and handed them to him. "Computer chips, four thousand dollars a kilo. Water-maker membranes, six thousand dollars a kilo if we'd sell them. We won't until we've enough for ourselves. Concentrated vitamins, forty-five hundred dollars a kilo. And other things. Chemicals, vaccines. Some not for sale at any price."

The value of each capsule in the current drop was nearly seven million dollars. Even in these inflated times that was enough money to make a man wealthy for life. And there would be no problem selling the cargo…

"But how would pirates find them?" he asked. "You can bring them down anywhere in the world."

"They can be tracked. So can my recovery planes. The NORAD radar system watches us very closely."

"But they don't give information to pirates! Not any more! I put a stop to that sort of thing!"