She emerged from the jungle and turned right, then began to move along the beach as quickly as her legs would carry her. She stayed close to the tree line, walking on sand to give her lacerated feet a rest, still close enough to cover that she could vanish in a heartbeat if she saw trackers in front of her or heard them behind her.

In the sunlight, growing brighter by the moment, she possessed a stronger, clearer sense of time. Her watch was long gone, with the other jewelry and cash aboard their yacht, and while she had no fixed idea of what time she had fled the camp, she knew it had to be coming up on 6:00 a.m. by now. Each moment with the sun above her multiplied her odds of being spotted, run to ground, but it was still her only chance, as slim as it might be.

The woman guessed she had been following the island's coastline for an hour and a half, at least, before she struck the river. It was small, as rivers go-more of a creek, in fact-but it supplied fresh water, and she fell to hands and knees once more, burying her face in the sweet, cool current, splashing water over her hair and the back of her head with cut and bleeding hands. She drank deeply, unmindful of old movies she had seen, in which parched travelers were warned to sip a little at a time to ward off some calamity never specified. She filled her belly with the sweet, fresh water, taking it in place of food, to stop the growling in her stomach, feeling it revive her like a draft from the mythical Fountain of Youth.

And when she raised her dripping head, to shake it like a dog's, she spotted the canoe.

It wasn't native craftsmanship. If anything, in fact, it looked like something from an old Sears catalog that had been roughly used for years, perhaps for decades, and abandoned on the rough bank of this island creek. A paddle was lying in the old canoe, with scars around the blade, its handle satin smooth.