CHAPTER ONE

      THE signature beneath the letter from a leading London insurance company was completely indecipherable, but, thanks to his secretary’s having neatly typed his name, Dyan was able to read that the letter was from Oliver Balfour, the man they were wishing on her throughout the expedition. Dyan had a theory, evolved from years of reading company letters, that the higher up the hierarchical scale a man rose, the less legible his signature became. And on that measure this man must be close to the top.

      Her mouth twisted into a little grimace when she saw the terse command for the highly secret recovery expedition to find the yacht, Xanadu, to start at once, which, although it was put politely, was a definite order. Didn’t these people ever realise that there was seasonal weather and the state of the tides to be taken into consideration, for heaven’s sake?

      The rest of the correspondence about the ill-fated Xanadu was in the file in one of their ‘Top Secret’ metal boxes to which Dyan had been given the key when her boss, Barney Starr, had handed her the project. Before opening it, Dyan had locked herself in her office and pulled down the blind, measures insisted on by Barney who had constant nightmares about industrial espionage. In this case she thought he might be overdoing it, because the Xanadu was only a small vessel as ships went, but when she read the list of missing artefacts sent by the insurance company Dyan gave an incredulous whistle. It seemed that the motor yacht was the luxury toy of a millionaire pop-singer who had been over to Europe on a buying spree. Nothing wrong in that, except that he had been buying old and almost priceless objects: Russian icons, Fabergé eggs, Holbein miniatures, Greek and Egyptian funerary artefacts, a Roman statue…The list seemed to go on endlessly.

      The millionaire had been taking them all back to adorn his new home in the West Indies, but a couple of days before they’d been due to arrive the boat had been caught in the tail end of a hurricane and capsized. The crew and passengers had got off and been rescued safely, but the boat had gone down in the Caribbean Sea. Probably because of the huge waterproof safe that had been built into it to house all the objets d’art, Dyan thought grimly as she studied the plan of the yacht. And raising that safe would be her problem, and that of the team she would pick to help her. Reaching out for the phone, Dyan began to put that team together.

      Three weeks later, Dyan was standing in the airport in Nassau on New Providence island, waiting for the flight from London which was bringing Oliver Balfour to join them. She had worked extremely hard during those three weeks, getting the expedition ready to put to sea, but had done so with maximum efficiency and the minimum of fuss. It was important that no other salvage company should hear about the Xanadu and its cargo, so it was necessary to keep a low profile. She hadn’t even told the crew what they were going after yet, letting them think it was a historic wreck. The only people who would know the truth were herself and the man from the insurers, whose plane, she saw from the Arrivals board, had just touched down on the runway.

      Dyan wondered what he would be like, and didn’t look forward to meeting him. She would much rather have handled the expedition on her own, without some man from the insurers breathing down her neck. From the wording of his letters Balfour sounded to be a typically chauvinistic male, and she could just guess at his reaction when he found out that there was a woman in charge of the expedition. That he hadn’t been told she was a woman, Dyan was all too certain; Barney, the head of the salvage company, had a wicked sense of humour and he always found it extremely entertaining not to tell his customers that they would be dealing with a female. When he spoke to her, or spoke of her to a client, Barney always referred to her as just ‘Logan’, without any prefix, and also conveniently dropped the pronoun. Often she’d heard him on the phone saying, in his broad American accent, ‘I’m putting Logan in charge. One of my best salvors, a qualified oceanographer. Logan will handle it for you.’ A couple of dozen times she’d seen the customers’ smiles of greeting slip into a look of stunned surprise when they’d realised that ‘Logan’ was a female. And not only female but also young, tall and curvy, and with a mass of rich chestnut hair into the bargain!

      The customers’ first impulse—and they were without exception male—was to get on the phone to Barney and demand to know what the hell was going on. They were brusquely told that there was no sexual discrimination in the Starr Marine and Salvage Company, that Logan had been