Night Diver: A Novel (30 page)

She and Holden nodded. Both of them understood the difference between what happened on plans and what happened underwater. Plans were direct. Reality meandered.

“Divers are human,” she said. “If something catches your eye and you investigate, the amount of allotted time underwater doesn’t change. Some other portion of the dive plan gets shorted or ignored.”

She leaned in for a closer look at the tangle of blue and green lines, then backed off for a different perspective.

“What is it?” Holden asked.

“There are a few weird deviations, like this one, the day before you and I arrived.” She took the mouse and lit up the date, then shifted the mouse. “And this one.” She looked at Volkert. “Change these two to another color or blank out the other lines.”

More hard clacking from Volkert as he chewed loudly. “Highlighting.”

The lines she was pursuing became neon pink, making it easier to see the deviation between the dive plan and the actual dive. The diver had abandoned the plan, crossed several grid squares to the rocky outcrop, and crossed back to his assigned grid. It hadn’t particularly jumped out of the original tangle of dive/planned versus dive/reality tracks, but with the other lines dimmed, the deviation was quite clear.

“Someone went wandering,” Holden said.
Like a bee to a honeypot.

“Volkert, do we have an ID on that dive track?” she asked, even though she was virtually certain who it was.

Mingo.

“Yah, okay. The swaggering one.”

“Mingo,” Holden said, unsurprised.

“Did someone call down a change in dive plan?” Kate asked.

“Don’t remember it,” Volkert said. “But there’s a lot of chatter.”

Or you were chewing too loud to hear anything,
she thought.
Or paid to forget. Same result no matter the reason.

“What made him move that far over?” Holden asked. “Did he want a look at the drop-off? Did he go to tease Benchley? Was gold just jumping out of the ground for him to see?”

A sinking, twisting feeling wrapped around Kate’s throat. “He went there only once on the record, then probably brought something back to another grid and ‘discovered’ it.”

“So he knew there was something to find. A happy welcome aboard, as it were. Mingo carefully removed his loot so that it could be ‘discovered’ in a mostly unproductive area of the wreck, where Larry, as per my orders, has been concentrating ever since.”

“Maybe Larry didn’t . . .” Kate’s voice died.
He had to know. And Grandpa. He as much as told me when he said secrets are impossible to keep on a ship.

I just didn’t want to listen then. I don’t want to listen now, but I will.

No more hiding from savage truths.

“I would give a great deal to question Mingo,” she said with aching calm.

“We can, after a fashion,” Holden said. He looked at Volkert. “Has that watch mounted yet?

Techno beat filled the unnatural silence of the ship. There were no divers reporting to the dive center. No sounds of men working on the stern. No footsteps overhead as someone hurried from one part of the ship to another on a task.

Kate shivered, feeling like she was on a ghost ship as she stared at the computer screen. Even Holden’s nearby warmth wasn’t enough to penetrate a sudden chill.

Because I
am
aboard a ghost ship, waiting to hear from one of the spirits.

“What color do you want Mingo’s dive track?” Volkert asked.

She thought of the brightly enameled door to the diver’s quarters. “Yellow.”

Volkert clacked some keys. “Yah, okay. Here it is.”

Yellow tracks jumped up onto the screen, laid on top of all the others. Many of the yellow traces were simple spot markings. Some were fuzzy, indistinct clouds left by concentrated activity in a single area. Some yellow lines were long slashes, but most of them were simple single-location markings.

Holden calculated where he had been on his own dive, plus the overview of the wreck he had paused to memorize on his way down. “A lot of those aren’t a dive track,” he said.

“Are you sure this information isn’t already on computer records somewhere?” Kate asked.

Volkert shook his head hard enough to make his jowls quiver. “This isn’t your notation structure. Doesn’t match up to any of the coding that Donnelly uses.”

She digested that in silence.

“Mingo’s been busy,” Holden said.

“Mingo’s been making a treasure map,” she said bitterly. “And here, look. He’s been over in that rocky corner a lot.” She pointed at the screen where the markings were clustered around the odd formation. “Holden, you’ve been down there. What’s visible in that grid?”

“Mainly that it’s less a grid than it looks on the dive plan.”

“Could you see it on descent or ascent?”

He thought back past the memory of pain like a white-hot crochet hook digging inside his thigh. “I would have noticed Benchley, but what I saw otherwise was a grid that only looks like neat squares on the plans. The truth is more like a net, pulled here and there to accommodate the reality of the seabed itself.”

“Nothing about the rocks at the edge of the grid jumped out?”

“Not on the descent. On the ascent, I had my mind on . . . other things.” Like breathing through the pain. “Volkert, you have my dive record, do you not?”

“Yah, if you filed it.” More keystrokes and an orange dive track came up.

Kate studied it, then let out a pent breath. “You were in a grid that never even touched where Mingo went off his dive plan. In fact, you were as far away from the outcropping and drop-off as you can be and still be diving the same wreck. All you found was junk.”

And pain,
he thought,
but that’s of no value to anyone, especially myself.

“And that’s all you were going to find,” Kate continued. “Because you were given a dive plan in a dry grid.”

“The gold chain was found near there,” Volkert said.

The keys clacked and violet dots appeared, one for each valuable find. All the recorded dive tracks also appeared with the dots. The screen now looked like an electric rainbow had thrown up.

“The gold chain was almost certainly a red herring,” Holden said neutrally.

“Yes.” She frowned, studying the violent colors.

He saw that her face was a pale mask of revulsion and loss, her few remaining childhood illusions cracking and falling about her feet. He touched her arm, silently telling her that she wouldn’t be alone in this storm.

“Larry made and assigned dive plans,” she said bleakly. “With Grandpa’s input, of course, and whatever information my parents had left that might have been pertinent to this wreck. They researched it for years before they died. Years of dreaming of emeralds and sapphires, rubies and pearls, a woman’s weight in gold and gems . . .”

She shook off the past and its mistakes, the hopes and greed centered on the treasures of the Spanish Main, the past gleaming and flashing as wealth was pulled from a saltwater grave.

“Anything else we should know?” Holden asked Volkert, tapping him on the shoulder.

He cleared his throat. “I’m not looking for trouble.”

“Then don’t make us come back on you when we find something you bloody well should have told us,” Holden said, his voice as hard as his eyes.

The Afrikaner shifted uneasily, making his chair groan. “Yah, okay. I can try to see if there are any old files from before I came.”

Which we have already requested,
Holden thought. He didn’t bother to say it aloud. Volkert knew his ass was in a vise.

“The survey you Brits made is shite,” Volkert said.

“Already noted.”

“Someone must have made a better one,” the man continued, stuffing a cookie into his mouth. “I’ll look for it again.”

“Please do,” Holden said, his request as sardonic as his voice. “And do notify us immediately when you find something or give up.”

When Kate started to say something more, he guided her from the dive center and shut the door behind her.

“All right,” he said. “Tell me.”

“Larry might forget to delete all records of a second survey, but Grandpa wouldn’t,” she said. “And he would keep a hard copy somewhere. That’s just his old-fashioned way.”

“The dive has found a good weight of silver ingots, plus the odd bit of gold here and there,” Holden pointed out.
I’ll bet they went ashore in his valise
.

“The ingots were chemically cemented together by seawater,” she said, her voice empty. “Lifting them would require heavy tackle and the work of several divers. Hard to handle, hard to conceal, hard to sell. As for the rest that we’ve found . . .” She shrugged.

“Pretty little cake crumbs to keep the overlords happy and the dive funded,” he finished for her. “If we check the dates, I’m rather certain we will find that whenever it was time for a dive disbursement, up came the crumbs to placate the overlords.”

“But the rest of the cake is hidden away.”

“Or already eaten by the black market, or both,” he said. “Until we—”

The squawk box in the hallway went off, burying Holden’s words in static.

“Is the captain down there?” Raul asked in a metallic voice.

She went over to the nearest intercom, which was on the wall near the crew’s head. “Kate here.”

“Weather is getting bad. Wind’s steady and strong, and we’re getting some real chop. The period between waves has changed. Cook wants ashore. So do we. Malcolm packed up his speedboat and left.”

Good thing I have the keys to the tenders,
she thought. But all she said was, “I’ll be up to check the weather.”

She disconnected and headed up toward the wheelhouse and Grandpa’s special—and specially hated—weather computer.

G
RANDPA’S COMPUTER DIDN’T
tell Kate anything new. The storm had indeed settled in to throw a tantrum. It was picking up speed faster than had been predicted. The sea had gone from clear to cloudy. Small, chaotic ripples of energy passed through the boat, warning of the storm surge that was coming. The air tasted different, heavier. A smoky mist concealed the horizon.

“This is just the start of it,” Kate said unhappily to Holden as she stepped out of the wheelhouse. “If it keeps up like this, the next twenty-four hours will be quite a ride.”

“You feeling okay?” Holden asked as she looked out over the ocean.

“Aside from being ripped up and lied to, I’m just fine, why?”

“Because you’re looking at the leading edge of a tropical storm while standing as the captain on a ship, and a handful of days ago you were fighting yourself on placid seas belowdecks.”

“The sea is nothing compared to how angry I am right now.”

“Give it some hours,” he said softly. “I may be from the opposite coast and considerably farther north, but when I see weather like this, I begin checking that everything nearby is nailed down.”

“Give me a few more hours like the last ones, and I could stand toe-to-toe with this storm and scream it down.” She blew out a long breath, took in another, blew it out slowly. “It’s over. We’re going in.”

“There’s time for a short dive,” Holden said. “I’d like to take a look at that pile of rocks.”

“Raul is the only diver left aboard. Even if I ordered him to go with you, I doubt that he would. They’re frightened by more than just the storm. And they don’t know me well enough to trust me.”

Holden wanted to argue, but he knew she was right.

The storm will blow out, just as storms have always done,
he told himself.
We can come back when it is calmer and see what is left. Surely that coral-covered lava formation isn’t going to wash away.

I’d very much like to see what Mingo found that was valuable enough to lure him into night diving off the books.

Aware of being watched by the crew, Kate gripped the rail and forced herself to live in only this one moment, not in the lost past or the near future when the last lie would be revealed and she would stand alone and bleeding in the wreckage of her childhood beliefs.

Holden’s arm brushed her, hot and strong and alive, reminding her that she was alone only if she chose to be. She leaned into him for a moment before she faced the crew that had gathered below. They needed leadership and that meant her.

The wind flexed casually and lashed her hair across her face like a thousand stinging whips.

“They’re calling this Tropical Storm Davida,” Kate said. “She’ll make life miserable for anyone on the beach in Venezuela.”

The crew stirred and glanced uneasily at the stormy horizon. Raul crossed himself as the cook cursed loud enough to be heard above the storm. Even Volkert had come out of his cave for a look.

“What about us?” called the cook.

“We’re taking the
Golden Bough
to a lee marina.”