Deep Waters

weeks.
    All he had to do was walk out of Keyworth's office right now. It would be so easy.
    "You've got five minutes, Winters. Say what you have to say. I've got a meeting at eleven-thirty." Garrick leaned back against his gray leather executive chair. He toyed with the expensive inlaid pen that he held in one beefy hand.
    The hand did not go well with the elegant pen, Elias thought. For that matter, Garrick Keyworth did not go very well with his own office. He clashed with the sophisticated ambience the designer had created.
    He was in his mid-fifties, a bulky, burly figure in a hand-tailored suit that could not camouflage the thick ness of his neck.
    Elias met Garrick's shrewd, predatory gaze. It would be such a simple matter to bring him down, now that every piece on the chessboard was in place.
    "I don't need five minutes," Elias said. "One or two should do it."
    "What the hell is that supposed to mean? Damn it, Winters, stop wasting my time. The only reason I agreed to see you is because of your reputation."
    "You know who I am?"
    "Hell, yes." Garrick tossed aside the pen. "You're a major player in the Pacific Rim trade. Everyone here in Seattle who is in the international market knows that. You've got contacts, and you've got the inside track in a lot of places out in the Pacific where no one else can get a toehold. I know you've made a killing consulting for off-shore investors." Garrick squinted slightly. "And word has it that you're also a little weird."
    "That pretty well sums up my life." Elias got to his feet. He set the envelope carefully down on top of the polished surface of the wide desk. "Take a look inside. I think you'll find the contents—" He paused, savoring the next word with bleak amusement. "Enlightening."
    Without waiting for a response, he turned and walked toward the door. The knowledge that Hayden Stone had been right closed around him like the icy waters of a bottomless lake. Years had been wasted. Years that could never be recovered.
    "What is this?" Garrick roared just as Elias reached the door. "What game are you playing? You claimed you had something important that you had to tell me about my Pacific business operations."
    "It's all in the envelope."
    "Goddamn it, people are right when they say you're strange."
    Elias heard the sound of tearing paper. He glanced back over his shoulder and watched as Garrick yanked the five-page document out of the envelope. "There's just one thing I'd like to know."
    Garrick ignored him. He scowled at the first page of the report. Anger and bewilderment twisted his broad features. "What do you know about my business relationship with Kroy and Ziller?"
    "Everything," Elias said. He knew that Keyworth had not yet realized the import of what he held in his hand, but it wouldn't take him long.
    "This is confidential information, by God." Garrick raised his head and regarded Elias with the kind of stare a bull gives a matador. "You have no right to possess information about these contract arrangements."
    "Do you remember a man named Austin Winters?" Elias asked softly.
    "Austin Winters?" Astonishment and then deep wariness appeared in Garrick's eyes. "I knew an Aus tin Winters once. That was twenty years ago. Out in the Pacific." His eyes hardened with dawning comprehension. "Don't tell me you're related to him. You can't be."
    "I'm his son."
    "That's impossible. Austin Winters didn't even have a wife."
    "My parents were divorced a couple of years before my father moved to NihiliIsland."
    "But no one ever said anything about a boy."
    The knowledge that his father hadn't even talked about him to his friends and acquaintances was a body blow. With the discipline of long practice, Elias con cealed the effects of the direct hit Garrick had unwittingly delivered.
    "There was a son. I was sixteen years old when you sabotaged my father's plane. I arrived on Nihili the day after they recovered the wreckage. You had al ready left the island. It took me a long time to learn the truth."
    "You can't blame Austin Winters's death on me." Garrick heaved himself to his feet, his florid face working furiously. "I had nothing to do with the crash."
    "You cut the fuel lines, knowing it would take months to get replacement parts from the mainland. You knew that Dad only had one plane and that if he couldn't fly, he wouldn't be able to fulfill his freight contracts. You knew his business would collapse if it was put out of action for several weeks."
    "A pack of goddamned