PROLOGUE

On a stormy afternoon in December 1932 a two-masted schooner eased from the port of Long Beach, California, into a curtain of rain and fog. The boat, a ramshackle hundred-foot yacht, veered and pitched over rough seas while a small group of people gathered on her port side, holding tight to the railing and listening while a handsome man named James E. Farris shouted through the squalls, delivering a eulogy. The dead man at their feet had been carefully prepared. Dressed in his best uniform, he had been placed in a seagrass coffin and draped in an American flag. Among the mourners was a willowy blond woman, also in uniform. Beautiful though she was, her face was like granite, and intentionally so. Since childhood she had practised the art of obscuring her thoughts and feelings from others. People, she had found, were always demanding, always trying to get something from her. And today was no exception.

Hardly fifty yards away, a dozen men and one woman were clustered at the railing of another ship, watching through binoculars and camera lenses. Supposedly, they were monitoring activities, ensuring that no one tried to escape. Actually, all eyes were on the blond whose name and face were plastered across the front pages of newspapers worldwide. It was a sensational story, packed with everything that sold papers: far-flung settings, world records, beautiful girls, political intrigue, illicit sex, theft, violence, espionage, smuggling, and murder. The only problem was that no one seemed to know which, if any, of the stories were true. Some claimed the woman had driven around the world and discovered tribes in the Amazon. Others insisted that she was a Communist revolutionary or a Hollywood insider or that she’d crossed Africa, scaled mountains, survived jail and kidnapping, escaped civil wars, and worked as a spy. Such basic details as how old she was, where she came from — even her real name — were unclear. Her stage name was Aloha Wanderwell, but beyond that her true story was as murky as the weather that cloaked those two vessels.

As the icy mists turned to lashing snow, Captain Farris shouted a passage from Joseph Conrad: “May the deep sea where he sleeps now rock him gently, wash him tenderly, to the end of time!”1 A bugler rang out “Taps” and the flag was lifted from the coffin. Then, amid sobs and a flurry of flashbulbs from the press, the plank was raised and the coffin slid overboard. A splash, a wash of bubbles, and then nothing. Just the dark sea.

The woman called Aloha Wanderwell bent forward and covered her face. Her life to this point had been a series of open roads, a steadfast journey to some other place, just over the horizon. Home as a fixed address had not existed since her childhood, 1,100 miles north on Vancouver Island and eighteen years earlier. Before she’d circled the world. Before several US government agencies had started tracking her. Before the nastiness and the extortion and the forthcoming trial. Those carefree days before another man’s death had changed her life forever.