Mediterranean Sea
60 miles south of Marseilles

"You lose again, Pietro," Giovanni laughed, tossing his cards down onto the table with obvious satisfaction. "You know what that means," he said, gesturing to the waste bin in the corner.

"Yeah, yeah," Pietro grumbled good-naturedly. "I should know by now not to play with crooks like you."

His companions roared in protest as he shrugged on his coat and pushed his glasses more firmly onto the bridge of his nose. His smile faded when he turned to climb the ladder up to the deck; the hard grey sky flashed with lightning and the rain was driving down on the ocean more fiercely than before. His glasses would be ruined in that mess, he realized ruefully.

Above the cozy, smoky card room the storm's effect on the little boat was much more evident. It threw him against the walls of the inner corridor, and the deck was dark and slick with rainwater; his feet could not quite find adequate purchase as he struggled toward the biting open air.

Pausing briefly to pull his hood over his head, Pietro bent his body into the wind and strode as quickly as possible to the stern. He meant to stay only as long as it took to toss the bin's contents into the roiling water, but then something caught his eye and he stood for a long moment, squinting into the distance. What the hell was that? Like a star, or a tiny spark of lightning blinking, blinking, blinking amid the churning surf.

And then he knew, and, feet sliding every which way beneath him, he scrambled back to the warm card room.

"A man," he spluttered, gesturing upward, outward. His crewmates went silent at the sight of him, gasping and dripping almost as much water as the storm outside. "There's a man—a body in the ocean."

There was one more fleeting instant of stillness, and then everyone moved at once, cards flung aside, chairs scraped harshly against the rough wooden floor, cigarettes stubbed out with hasty fingers.

Giancarlo, the boat's navigator and makeshift doctor, took charge of the effort to drag the body from the clinging waves, shouting instructions and encouragement to the rest of the straining, grunting crew. Finally the body slithered up and over the side, looking absurdly similar to that day's catch; Giancarlo might have laughed, except now they had a dead body on board and nothing to do with it.

Wiping his hands off in disgust, Sergio spat, succinctly, "What a mess."

"You've never seen a dead man before?" someone else quipped, but everyone knew what Sergio meant. The authorities would have to be notified, and where could they store a body without it rotting on them? The fishing trip would have to be cut short, and with it went most of their profit.

And then, suddenly, one of the corpse's hands twitched, and the circle of men grouped around him shrank back in horror. A few murmured prayers; someone hissed a curse; one or two simply stared, eyes wide and dark in chalk-white faces.

"He's still alive," Giancarlo shouted over the storm. "We have to get him belowdecks immediately!"

The other men shifted uneasily, one of them grumbling something he could not quite make out over the sound of the rain, before at last Gilles bent down. The crew's initial reluctance to touch the half-dead man was not lost on Giancarlo, and even after they had dumped him on what had been the card table, no one said anything—just left hurriedly, muttering and shooting suspicious looks over their shoulders.

With a sigh—he would have to address their fears later, after the man had been tended to—Giancarlo turned toward his patient, lying as still and silent as marble on the table before him.

The man had some sort of thick harness strapped across his chest and for a moment Giancarlo wondered if he had been parachuting, if there had been an accident. But surely no one would go parachuting in this weather. He wondered how long the man had been out there, floating like limp seaweed among the treacherous waves. Could it have been hours? Days, even? He had heard stories like that before, of people who survived these kinds of extreme conditions against the slimmest of odds. Perhaps it was so with this man too.

When the harness finally slipped off the man's torso and into Giancarlo's waiting hands, he nearly dropped it in surprise. It was so heavy—deceptively heavy, even taking the many neat rows of mysterious pockets into account. Pausing for a moment, he felt a sudden compulsion to open the pockets up and see what was inside. But, no; his patient required his immediate attention. The harness and its contents would have to wait.

Reaching an arm around the man's back to turn him onto his side, Giancarlo's fingertips brushed across something jagged, an irregularity in the otherwise smooth expanse of the wetsuit's fabric. After checking the man's vitals to make sure that rolling him onto his stomach would not kill him, Giancarlo flipped his patient over and selected a scalpel.

The thick neoprene was difficult to cut, although he kept his instruments as sharp as possible; it was clear that the suit was very high quality, and probably quite expensive. So the man was rich, maybe. Or he had rich friends. It occurred to Giancarlo to wonder where the man's friends might be, and he resolved to listen to the radio broadcast as soon as he finished up here. There might be something about a search party. Maybe a missing yacht.

Then he peeled back the strip of wetsuit he had cut away and, sucking his breath in through his teeth with sympathetic pain, inspected the two bullet holes drilled into the man's back. Not an accident, then, parachuting or otherwise. This man had been abandoned, left for dead in the middle of the wide, cold ocean. No one around to find or help him even if he did somehow survive the gunshots. It was a thorough job. Giancarlo wondered why—what had this man done to warrant an execution? Or perhaps it really had been an accident after all, and whoever was responsible had panicked and thrown the evidence overboard.

Whatever the reason, he reflected as he rummaged through his tools, his patient was incredibly lucky—well, when it came to treating his injuries, anyway. The conditions had been optimal, the bullets self-cauterizing, mercifully remaining where they had lodged, and the icy seawater had cleaned the wounds at the same time that it had primed the tissue around them for immediate removal of the bullets. And the man was unconscious, which meant that Giancarlo would not need to administer any of the boat's supply of expensive anesthetics. A good deal all around.

Delicately, he extracted the first misshapen bullet from the man's back, stopping for one long uncertain moment to watch for any kind of stirring: a groan, a twitch, a flutter of eyelids. There was nothing. His patient lay as still as ever; if Giancarlo had not been able to perceive the slow, slight rise and fall of his chest, he would have worried that the man had died. Removing the second bullet, he hesitated once again to hold the small lump up to the dim light, squinting at it curiously. He was not familiar enough with guns to tell exactly what kind had fired these bullets, but he did understand it had to have been some sort of handgun. Gilles might know, he had been a sailor in the Navy at some point long ago. Giancarlo put them into a tin and set them aside. He would ask later.

He continued to cut away the wetsuit, piece by piece, checking to make sure there was nothing else that needed tending. He found no other fresh injuries, but there seemed to be a disturbing amount of past ones, which had since healed over into a network of pale scars criss-crossing the man's skin. Frowning, he studied a particularly wicked-looking scar that ran in one long clean swipe down the man's lower left arm—Giancarlo did not know guns very well, but he did know a knife wound when he saw it.

Growing impatient with the lengthy process of slicing through the stubborn layer of neoprene, he had resorted to simply tearing it with his hands when his attention suddenly snagged on a different scar. This one was on the man's hip, its shape and location too neat, too deliberate to have been the result of a fight or an accident. Looking closer, Giancarlo thought he could see the outline of something hard and metallic buried just below the skin, almost like a bullet but not quite, thinner and longer—but yes, there was something in the man's hip!

Fascinated, he reached for a clean scalpel and made the shallowest of cuts, following the line of the previous incision; a tiny cylinder slid out in a bubble of blood. He held it up for a moment, turning it over and around, before moving to the leaky sink to rinse it off.

It was silver, with a single black band etched around the bottom quarter of the cylinder, as though it might split into two unequal pieces if he pulled on it, and there was a small red button perched atop the opposite end of the band. Or—no, not a button.

Absolutely perplexed, Giancarlo glanced over at his patient, still unmoving, completely unconscious. Why did this man have a laser-pointer surgically implanted in his hip? Giancarlo wanted to shake the man awake, show him the mysterious harness and the expensive bits of wetsuit and the strange little cylinder, and demand an explanation. Instead, because he was a good doctor, he took out his magnifying glass and contented himself with inspecting the cylinder on his own.

He made a mistake at first by turning the thin lance of light toward his eyes, blinding himself for one painful moment—oh yes, Giancarlo, excellent idea, very intelligent, he chided himself. Then, on a whim, expecting to see only a tiny dot of red light, he turned the laser-pointer toward the wall. To his surprise, there were words there, and a string of numbers:

000-7-17-12-0-14-26
Gemeinschaft Bank
Zürich

Shaking his head in confusion, he clicked the laser-pointer off and stared down at it, wonderingly, for an instant. The Gemeinschaft—he had heard that name before, the name of an important bank that served important clients. Clearly it was located in Zurich, and as for the numbers, well. It must be the man's account number, although Giancarlo could not imagine why anyone could not simply remember his account number instead of having it implanted into his hip.

Still deep in thought, he ambled back into the other room—and immediately halted, taking a single anxious step forward in alarm. The table was empty, except for his scattered instruments and a bloodied rag; his patient was gone, vanished. He had barely had enough time to register the man's inexplicable disappearance, however, when a strong hand gripped the back of his neck and spun him around, shoving him into the wall of the cramped room.

"What the hell are you doing to me?" the suddenly very awake, very mobile man demanded, fury twisting his voice into a growl.

"No, no," Giancarlo protested, whirling around just in time to see his patient stumble into the wall. He didn't have his sea legs yet, his wounds were still open, not bandaged, probably bleeding with the exertion, he was confused and in pain and very well might go into shock—he needed to sit down, to calm down before he caused either of them, perhaps both of them, serious harm, because clearly, Giancarlo realized in that awful moment, he was very, very dangerous.

He threw words at the patient urgently, trying to stop him, to soothe him: "It's okay, please, calm down, I mean you no harm, I want to help, I am helping you, look, I'm a doctor, don't you see?"

But the man merely gave him a blank stare, his eyes wide and wild, and lunged forward to wrap one deadly hand tight around Giancarlo's throat. The older man tried to worm away but the patient pressed his weight down onto him, so that Giancarlo was bent backward, trapped against the sink.

"What are you doing?" the patient yelled again, and the desperation in his tone was absolute.

Frantic, Giancarlo continued to mutter helplessly, the words just barely squeezing out through that unrelenting grip, until his patient spat, "Goddamn it, where am I?" and he realized at last through the darkening haze that the other man was speaking English, not Italian, to him.

"A boat!" The words burst from his constricted throat and, mercifully, the fingers around his neck loosened. "A fishing boat," he continued, seizing his opportunity. He raised his head up, now that he could, to peer into the man's confused face. "You were in the water. We pulled you out."

The patient shook his head, baffled, all of his terrifying anger suddenly gone. "What water?" he asked, looking around as though it might slosh out of one of the surrounding cabinets. His fingers kept loosening around the doctor's throat; he leaned heavily on Giancarlo now, his face covered with a thin sheen of sweat, the pupils of his eyes dilated with adrenaline. He was very close to collapse.

"You were shot," Giancarlo explained, "see? There are the bullets." He gestured toward the table, and his patient's head swung around obediently, confirming his story.

Then the man grimaced, groaning as his recent exertion caught up with him all at once. His hand slipped from Giancarlo's neck completely and the doctor had to catch him, steady him as he stumbled forward with the boat's pitching motion.

"Look," said Giancarlo, holding up the little silver laser-pointer, eager to keep the other man distracted so that that horrifying violence would not return. "There is a number for a bank." His patient grabbed for the tiny cylinder with clumsy fingers, inspecting it but clearly not recognizing it. "Why was it in your hip?" Giancarlo asked, curious, although he knew that the patient would have no answer at this point.

"My hip?" The question was more air than words, and his voice broke over the word hip. Exhaustion, Giancarlo thought. He had to move the younger man back to the table before he fainted, but he did not want to risk upsetting him all over again.

"Yeah, in your hip, under the skin," he insisted. Better to keep talking and wait for the man to come to him, so to speak. He braced himself, watching closely—any minute, now, the legs would give way.

"Uh," the man grunted, still gazing at the cylinder in his left hand as though it held the answer to some crucial, pressing question. He swayed dangerously, muttered a tormented, "Oh, God," and then there he went, tumbling forward into Giancarlo's ready arms.

"You need to rest," the doctor commanded, half-carrying, half-dragging the man back over to the table. "Wait. Please, slow down."

Setting his patient down on the table, he lowered his voice and calmly, firmly told the other man, "I'm a friend. I'm your friend. Huh?"

The patient continued to reel, panting. His eyes were closed with pain and he seemed unable to focus, but Giancarlo knew that he could hear him. It was critical that he establish that he was not a threat. He looked the patient directly in the face. "My name is Giancarlo. Who are you?"

Finally, a reaction: the man's eyes cleared, alert and intensely interested, but he seemed not to fully understand the question somehow.

"What's your name?" Giancarlo clarified. The man's eyes flickered back and forth between his face and the floor as though searching for the answer. He coaxed again, "What's your name?"

The patient let out a tortured noise and finally gasped, "I dunno."

He hesitated, appearing to lock onto the doctor's face at last, and a peculiar look came into his expression. Just like before, he muttered, "Oh, God." Then his eyes rolled back in his head as he passed out, sagging onto the table with a loud thud.

Blinking, Giancarlo stood shocked and silent for a long time, staring down at the unnamed, unconscious man. He was amazed, and not a little frightened, at everything that had just come to pass between them: a living corpse uprooted from the roiling surf, that fateful twitch of one hand to let them know he was still alive, two unexplained bullets, an intricate web of old scars, an account number to a bank in faraway Switzerland, the extraordinary violence of his awakening, the deep and raw confusion at the end.

As he bandaged the wounds on the man's back—open and bleeding, as he had suspected—and covered him with a blanket, a question lodged in his mind, spinning and spinning around in his head like a pebble caught in the ever-shifting tides:

Who and what was this man that they had hauled aboard their ship?