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the phone to George Leeds, his voice calm and low as
they discussed the finer points of the deal she’d made for the
capture of Pablo Lopez, the notorious Filipino pirate who was
making a career out of stealing cargoes belonging to members of the
Somerset Shipping Federation. Two weeks earlier Mr. Lopez had not
bothered with unloading the cargo. He’d simply helped himself to
the whole ship and put the
Callander’s
crew overboard. The
Somerset people had decided to put a bounty on the brigand and to
call in a bounty hunter. They had asked Leeds to contact the one
bounty hunter they had all agreed could bring Mr. Lopez in
alive—Cooper Daniels.
    He was good. He was the best. One of the
articles she’d printed off the data bases had mentioned an American
company run by two brothers that was building a reputation for
hunting down pirates. The article was five years old and had been
published in a European shipping-trade magazine. A more recent
article in an American business publication had referred to a West
Coast company working with London’s International Maritime Bureau
to clean up the coast off West Africa. Neither of the articles had
mentioned Cooper or Daniels, Ltd. by name. They hadn’t needed to.
If she’d had any doubts about whom they were talking about—and she
hadn’t—George Leeds had made it clear why the bounty figures Cooper
had scribbled in his notes were considered a fair price by the
Somerset people.
    Her employer walked toward the windows, and
Jessica let him wander out of sight. Her pounding head wasn’t up to
dealing with the rare London sunshine streaming through the glass.
When he walked back into her line of vision, he turned and faced
her, and her cheeks suffused with color. She lowered her gaze,
intent on smoothing nonexistent wrinkles out of her skirt.
    She had been ready to show him up all right,
she thought, to show him “think on your feet” and “roll with the
punches.” All she’d actually shown him was how well she could hold
her liquor and how to execute a classic self-defense move. She was
sure he hadn’t been impressed. Businessmen did not pay Stanford
prices for skills easily mastered by an eighteen-year-old with a
sturdy constitution.
    On the other hand, her last lingering
perception of Cooper Daniels as a businessman had vanished about
five minutes after meeting George Leeds. She’d taken one look at
the man’s salt-and-pepper ponytail, the multitude of earrings in
his ear, and had thought she was dealing with an aging hippy. Then,
as they had shaken hands, she noticed the snake head tattooed on
the back of his wrist. When she’d looked farther, she’d seen where
the snake’s tail came out of his collarless shirt and wrapped
around his neck.
    Despite her decision to handle these
negotiations and figuratively wipe the smirk off Daniels’s face,
she would have turned and run on the spot, but George had had too
strong a grip on her. Spread sheets and bond yields, stock prices
and bottom lines were her milieu, not dragons and snakes. When he’d
released her, she still would have run, if her hand hadn’t
immediately been taken up by another man. She’d been so overwhelmed
by George Leeds, she hadn’t noticed his companion. When she’d
turned to the quiet, impeccably dressed Oriental man, much of her
initial panic had dissipated. Mr. Zhao Ping, as he had been
introduced, was more the type of person she had expected to be
dealing with—professional, polite, well-spoken, and without
earrings and tattoos.
    “Ms. Langston,” Cooper Daniels said, drawing
her attention back to the present. He held the telephone receiver
out to her. “George would like to speak with you . . .
personally.”
    The inflection he gave the last word wasn’t
lost on her, and she wished George hadn’t asked to talk with her.
The two of them had gotten into enough trouble.
    She stood to take the phone. “Good morning,
Mr. Leeds,” she said, maintaining a verbal distance and resisting
the