“We’re not going back,” Torkelsson said curtly. “You know I can’t.”

“To Honolulu then. You’ll be safe there, and you can take a plane anywhere. We can lock in-”

“Claudia.” With his uninjured hand he reached across to stay her arm. “They’ll be looking for me there, too. If we land in Honolulu it’ll be the end of me.” Pleading didn’t come naturally to him, and he seemed to realize it. His clutch tightened, grinding her wrist bones together, an old man’s claw. “And I’ll see to it that it’s the end of you, too. I promise you that. I’ll tell them everything.”

But threats weren’t his style either, and with a grunt of embarrassment he let go of her arm. “It’s not something I want to do,” he said. “You know that. But so help me, God, if you drive me to it. ..”

“Okay, okay,” she said grimly and found her original bearing-what she hoped was her bearing-again. On to Tarabao Island.

Just as the Torkelssons had given her back her life, they could take it away again. It had been Magnus Torkelsson who had first seen something in her four years before, when she was a neurotic, dope-addled twenty-one-year-old on the fast track to self-destruction. What she was doing in Hawaii, exactly how or why she had come there from East Texas, she didn’t know-literally could not remember-but someone had gotten her a seasonal job clearing brush at Hoaloha, the Torkelssons’ big cattle ranch, and the rugged outdoor work had suited her. She was a big, strong girl who knew a little about ranching, a willing worker with a mechanical bent, and inside of a year she was on their year-round windmill and pump maintenance team. Then, when their regular pilot started talking about moving on and she had expressed some interest in flying, they had sent her to flight-training school in Hilo. For a while she had shared piloting duties with one of the Torkelsson nephews, but when he got tired of it she had taken the job over completely, flying somewhere, usually just to another part of the island, three or four times a week. She’d enjoyed it, too.