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agency that specialized in guiding people with stratospheric credit ratings to very exotic, very off-the-beaten path locales around the world. The more money a certain type of person had, the more they yearned for rare and unusual experiences.
    Very often, those experiences involved the outright breaking of international and sovereign laws. Kavanaugh knew the world’s back alleys, the places most people wouldn’t think of visiting, even if they knew they existed.
    Crowe could sail any kind of vessel, from a tugboat to a three-masted schooner. He had made his living piloting motor sailers through the Panama Canal to the Caribbean and back again. Several times he’d brought craft over from the Shanghai and Singapore boatyards.
    In the Krakatoa , Crowe escorted seekers by sea and in a second-hand Cessna, Kavanaugh conveyed them by air. Sometimes they combined the modes of transportation. The Upper Amazon, the Himalayas, the Congo and even the interior of New Guinea—no place was beyond the reach of Horizons Unlimited, as long as it was not out of the reach of a client’s bank account.
    One of Horizon’s repeat clients was Howard Flitcroft, a man who had amassed several fortunes through real estate development. Even while on vacation, the man was always tuned in to the opportunity for profit.
    When the tsunami decimated coastlines along the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, Kavanaugh and Crowe turned their skills and vehicles to delivering aid on behalf of several international relief agencies, coordinated by Howard Flitcroft and his companies. During that period of chaos and suffering, Kavanaugh made the acquaintance of the beautiful Bai Suzhen, a former nightclub owner turned representative of the White Snake triad, one of the twenty-four affiliates of the United Bamboo Society.
    As he had with Flitcroft, Kavanaugh found enough commonalities on which to build a friendship of sorts. Although Bai Suzhen could not have been more different from Flitcroft than if she had fallen from another planet, the two people shared a disquieting similarity in their ability to sniff out rare business opportunities.
    Kavanaugh and Crowe fervently wished they possessed the same talent. After the tsunami, all they thought about was money and ideas of how to make more, but they were fast running out of both.
    Then, when a storm squall drove Kavanaugh’s Cessna far from the shipping lanes, instead of thousands of empty miles of ocean waiting in the darkness, he'd found the rarest of business opportunities. Flying over a pair of islands all jungle green with occasional black outcroppings of volcanic stone, Kavanaugh and Crowe realized they had rediscovered what was the left of the Tamtungs, originally charted nearly three centuries before, but never explored.
    He wasn’t overly surprised to find the islands. He knew that many clusters of tropical mud heaps existed between the Celebes and Sulu Seas. There were hundreds, maybe even thousands of them. No one really knew how many.
    Kavanaugh piloted his plane over the deep-shadowed valleys of Big Tamtung, and although the scenery was beautiful, he wasn’t inclined to linger—not with a cargo compartment full of perishable and exceptionally valuable antibiotics.
    Then, as the treetops streaked by beneath the shadows cast by the Cessna’s wings, he glimpsed another pair of wings. Huge and leathery, they were attached to a body that for an insane instant reminded Kavanaugh of a plucked turkey, but the creature didn’t look like a turkey in any other particular.
    The long beak that snapped at his passing plane was spiked with a mouth full of sharp, conical teeth and he knew he looked at a pterosaur, flapping down an unmarked back alley of the global village. He also realized he looked at a fortune.
    Upending the glass, Kavanaugh drained it of bourbon. Thunder rumbled faintly in the distance, but he didn’t see lightning reflected on the surface of the sea. On some nights he painfully felt the