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piece, BACHELOR ON SAILBOAT SAVES BIG STAR AFTER MYSTERY MAN LEAVES HER TO DIE.
    He wanted a smoke.
    “What is your last name, Sam?”
    “I’m just Sam. Here’s my card.” He handed her a neatly embossed, gold-lettered card. It read “Sam of the Silverwind,” with nothing but an e-mail address.
    “People usually have a last name.”
    “Yes, indeed. But then when someone is fleeing for their life they usually talk about it.”
    “You’re making a lot of assumptions.”
    “Okay. Tell me what happened so I can understand the desperation to get out of here.”
    “Do those toiletries you told me about belong to anyone in particular?”
    “Yes. My mother.”
    “She travels with you?”
    “Occasionally.”
    “She’s the one who put together the scrapbook. Probably forgot it.”
    Sam shrugged.
    “I need to get off.”
    “You know a lot more about what’s going on here than I do. So why don’t you enlighten me?”
    “Look, I know this is strange. And you did save my life. And I’m very grateful. But please trust me. We both need to get off this boat.”
    “We’ll trust each other, and we can begin by you telling me what we should run from.”
    She shook her head no. Sam could see that she was anxious, but he needed to know why she wanted to leave. Running was often more dangerous than waiting. There was a dry suit on board that he hadn’t mentioned, and he could start the motor and proceed more or less aimlessly to the beach, where he could ground the boat on one of many rocks perhaps fifty yards from shore. A less expensive alternative would be to use the dry suit and tow Anna to shore. There was a kid’s blow-up boat that would hold two adults maybe, half submerged and totally soaked with this chop and the wind. With one adult it would be just as wet but not as deeply submerged. But keeping her on the boat, or seeming to, was the only leverage he had to get her to talk. Unless he knew the why of it all, he couldn’t make a good plan.
    Outthinking ill-intentioned people had been Sam’s calling in life—all kinds of criminals, but sometimes the worst of the worst, those who by natural gift were uncommonly intelligent and by some means, natural or unnatural, had become twisted and/or nearly conscienceless.
    Those with no conscience were less a problem for businesspeople or celebrity types because they were psychopaths devoted to killing people they encountered in their daily life. They remained the province of homicide detectives who worked long hours under the influence of black coffee and nervous politicians.
    Sam’s company worked both in the private sector and under government contract. Powerful people, celebrities, and governments paid small fortunes for his skill and the cold logic of a silicon beast called CORE (an acronym for Common Object Repository for the Enterprise), affectionately christened “Big Brain” by Grogg, the man who helped conceive her according to Sam’s vision.
    Sam’s greatest asset was a strong mind, housed in a near-perfect tabernacle tainted only by the occasional doses of cigarette smoke that he perpetually swore would end. Scholarships at Yale and MIT—specialty: computer science—had enabled him to create a so-called “expert system” that revolutionized data analysis using a programming method known as forward- and backward-chaining heuristics.
    His skills had forged for him a unique occupation, a job that kept him in high demand, a job that he had found profoundly satisfying until recently, when he’d left it altogether. It was a line of work that required he keep an extremely low profile, something that, even in premature retirement, Sam did not intend to abandon.
    Anna Wade was no exception: Unless she became a client, she could know nothing of him or the exotic trade he had once plied.
    “I’ll make the spaghetti sauce. Relax. You have been talking about both of us leaving the boat Somewhere along the line you decided I must leave too. Why?”
    “I was