Night Diver: A Novel (8 page)

“He hired them.”

“That’s not an answer.”

Grandpa bit down on the pipe stem.

“You’ve worked with divers all your life,” she said. “Are these men honest?”

“As honest as anyone is.” Then he added impatiently, “Larry has been
Golden Bough
’s official captain for five years.”

“Larry is the best first mate you could ask for and an even better diver,” she said. “But after two minutes aboard, I knew he wasn’t the captain in anything but name.”

“I’m an old man, Kitty darling. It was never supposed to be this way. But your father died, you left, and Larry stayed.”

Cold to the soul, tugging at her father’s slack body, screaming “Where’s Mom? When did I lose her? Where’s Mom!”

Nothing answered but the spray of salt water over the workboat’s gunwale.

Nothing ever had answered.

Kate forced memories aside. She couldn’t change the past. She just had to live with it.

“I’ll do what I can,” she said, “but I can’t help if you know more than I do. I think that Holden Cameron is the kind of man who is sent out when his bosses don’t trust the salvage crew.”

“So what? If I had the treasure, I’d have taken it and sold it in Venezuela or any other place that wants to spit in the eye of the West. But I’m here, so I don’t have the treasure.”

“Don’t be so contrary,” she said. “I know you and Larry, but I don’t know the crew. This is serious. Holden was taking pictures of the gold that we just found, as if he suspected it wouldn’t make it up to be cataloged.”

“God-rotting bureaucrats.”

“I’m not happy about being on the god-rotting sea, but here I am.” Then she remembered his house in Florida, his collections, and an explanation she really didn’t want to hear. “Grandpa, you aren’t keeping this dive afloat out of your own pocket, are you?”

He bit down on the pipe stem. Hard.

And ignored her.

“That’s your retirement,” she said, “and Larry’s legacy from our parents. Without it, there is nothing for either of you!”

He looked at the distant horizon where a coy storm was flirting with the future.

She wanted to scream at him, to shake him, to make him listen. But she couldn’t rage at the man whose eyes were so like her dead father’s. She could only do the best she could with what she had right now.

“Come with me,” she said. “It’s time to meet with our very own bureaucrat.”

“I belong up here.”

“We’re at anchor and you have an alarm set,” she said, pointing to the small inset on the nav screen. “If we drag anchor, the whole boat will know it. Stop stalling.”

With that, she turned and opened the wheelhouse door, only to find herself looking into Holden’s startling eyes. He was standing on the narrow walkway just to the side of the door.

“There you are,” he said. “Larry is waiting for us. I told him I would fetch you and your grandfather.”

How long has he been standing here?
she wondered.
Could he hear us?
Then she remembered the open porthole.
Of course he could.

“A boat is too small a place to keep secrets,” Grandpa said behind her.

Holden smiled.

It was nothing like the sexy smile that had startled Kate earlier.

L
ARRY HADN’T MOVED
from where Holden had left him, head propped on his crossed arms on the long wooden table, eyes closed, body slack in one of the swivel chairs that were bolted to the deck around the table. Holden had seen enough soldiers in combat to know that Larry wasn’t done yet, but he was closing in on exhaustion. He was forty-four and diving was a young man’s game.

The old-alcohol smell on Larry’s breath wasn’t helping, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as that of an end-phase alcoholic. If a company deep-sixed every diver who drank, there would be very few divers left.

Grandpa Donnelly sat beside Larry, jostling him awake. Holden sat across from them. When Kate hesitated, he smiled a very different smile and patted the chair next to him.

“I won’t bite,” he said.
Although a bit of nibbling . . . yes, I’d quite like that.

Warily she sat down. The chairs were so closely spaced that she could feel his body heat like a ghostly caress with every breath he took. She tried not to notice it. The others certainly didn’t seem to be aware of the muscular dragon coiled beneath the proper accent, but she could think of little else when he was near.

“Now that I’ve had a chance to do a brief recce, it appears that this dive isn’t as badly off as my superiors feared,” Holden said.
I suspect it’s worse, but until I can prove it, I’m just another British prig. Or as the old man says, a god-rotting bureaucrat.

“Not a total ‘cock-up’ after all?” Larry asked in a gritty voice.

The elder Donnelly snorted.

“Are you here to shut the project down?” Kate asked bluntly.

“Not after we just struck the lode,” Grandpa said. “Right, Mr. Cameron?”

“Not at the moment, no,” Holden agreed. “My employer’s interest, which is very keen, is based on a single coin that was minted in the mid-seventeenth century. The coin was found on a rocky beach not far from here after—”

“A gale ripped through some coral reefs and generally rearranged some sea bottom last year,” Larry interrupted, yawning. “We’re clear on all that.”

“The sea is a fickle bitch,” Holden said. “That coin could have come from anywhere. It could be the first of a hoard or a one-off kicking around on the storm currents. We believed that it would lead to more. The handful of coins and raw metal you have found so far is welcome, but it’s not the weighty kind of proof my superiors expected.”

“And they’re all worried that either they were wrong about diving on this wreck and will be shown up for it,” Larry said, “or that someone on
Golden Bough
is a thief. We’re clear on that, too.”

Kate shifted, wondering if she could kick her brother under the table.

Holden pinned Larry with his unusual eyes. “Antiquities was divided on that very subject. However, after the money chain was discovered, they are quite excited that you are on the right track.”

“How clever of them. Ouch!” Larry gave his sister a look.

She lifted one eyebrow at him.

Holden hoped his own amusement didn’t show. Under other circumstances he probably would have enjoyed Larry, who was a very well-regarded diver and drinking companion. However, the circumstances were what they were and Larry might well be a thief or simply an incompetent captain who drank when the pressure got too intense. In either case the result was the same.

The advance on expenses wouldn’t be made and the dive would be shut down.

“Antiquities is hoping that the treasure isn’t scattered over the entirety of the seafloor between St. Vincent and Grenada,” Holden said. “Again, opinion is divided. I’m told there is quite a lively discussion at the moment. Anything you find will be weighed carefully in the decision whether or not to advance the monies you have requested or invoke the weather stipulation and terminate the dive.”

“Look, this isn’t anything new,” Larry said impatiently. “You come on board and throw your weight around, but you don’t know any more than we do about what’s below. You’re hoping for a big payout but you’re reaching for shadows.”

“Is that what you believe?” Holden asked, switching his attention to Larry’s grandfather.

The old man shrugged. “Nothing’s sure but death.”

“What have you heard about the coin that started this whole scramble?”

“It was gold,” Larry said sarcastically.

Holden kept looking at the real captain, who finally spoke.

“It’s a gold sovereign, no more than an inch across. It was minted in England, not just poured and stamped in Jamaica or made in a Spanish mold from the New World. It’s marked with Charles II’s head on one side.” Grandpa Donnelly’s voice was dry, leathery, whispering of a crossroads where Ireland and Jamaica met. “The other side has the cross and the shields of the four kingdoms. The portrait side had Charles’s long nose pointed to the left. Not many of that particular coin was minted.”

“Which makes them all the more valuable today,” Holden said.

“But you and your god-rotting bureaucrats already knew that, didn’t you? It’s the only reason you offered the salvage contract.”

“Grandpa,” Kate said. “Please remember the difference between honey and vinegar.”

Holden had to work not to show his amusement at her efforts to civilize the old salt.

“They’re English coins and England is trying to recover them,” she said to Holden. “This is hardly a surprise.”

Yet even as she spoke, ghostly fingertips slithered down her spine. There was only one treasure she knew of that was reputed to contain coins minted in England with the portrait reversed. Her parents had died looking for it.

No,
she thought as her heartbeat speeded in dread.
It can’t be.

“They’re far from ordinary coins,” Holden said. “Legend has it that these coins were a shadow currency, used to pay off acts of official treachery and other covert ventures. The story had it that Bloody Green himself was worth a hundred such coins, fully a tenth of the rumored thousand that were supposed to exist. It was the Crown’s bounty on the head of a renegade English privateer, Declan Horatio Smyth-Fothergill, better known as Bloody Green.”

Kate’s nails dug into her palms. When she sensed Holden’s attention, she slowly unclenched her fists. But she could do nothing about the tension that had seized her body and iced her blood . . . the vision of a dead man who was also her father sprawled in the bottom of a dinghy.

Breathe. Just breathe.

One way or another, you’ll get through this.

From the corner of his eyes, Holden watched color slowly return to Kate’s cheeks. He wanted to gather her close again, inhale her unique scent of sunlight and flowers and the underlying woman heat that drew him like a compass needle pointing true north.

“I assume you know the story?” he asked the men across the table.

Larry yawned.

“Which one?” asked the old man, taking the cold pipe from his teeth. “Hero or villain, lover or rapist, privateer or pirate?”

“Agreed,” Holden said. “It rather depends on the point of view of the person experiencing Bloody Green. In the version the Antiquities Office cherishes, the man was no better than he had to be and of great use to the Crown. While pillaging—or helping—a foundered English merchant ship, he risked his own life to rescue a beautiful young aristocrat. Apparently it was love at first sight, as the story goes.”

“My parents,” Kate said hoarsely, then cleared her throat. “They said it was like that for them.”

“That it was, Kitty darling,” her grandpa said gruffly. “It was a blessing they died together.”

Not for me.
But she kept the bitter words to herself.

“In any case,” Holden said, drawing attention away from the shine of tears and terror in Kate’s eyes, “her family was quite furious. Seems they had sent the girl to wed a rich old man who had essentially purchased her. They had enough influence in court to get the Crown to issue the bounty.”

“Hardly the first time titled blood was sold to untitled riches,” Larry said around a yawn. “The part of the tale that my parents loved was that in order to keep the girl and get back into the good graces of the Crown, Bloody Green sacked and pillaged until he had her weight in jewelry and gems. And the bounty coins. Bet he laughed his ass off when he took them. Then he offered everything to the girl’s father for his daughter. The father accepted, the Crown took its cut, and Bloody Green was a citizen in good standing again.”

Holden listened carefully. Larry’s tone was that of someone retelling a story he had heard so often it had become part of him.

“The happy lovers and the treasure set sail for London on the pirate ship called
Moon Rose,
” said the elder Donnelly. “It vanished, as did the
Cross of Madrid,
a merchant ship Green was sailing with. Have we covered the high points?”

“Admirably. My superiors assumed from the name of your company that you were familiar with the legend.”

The old man shrugged. “Around here, everyone knows it.”

“But everyone doesn’t name their company after a pirate ship.”

“Mom and Dad did,” Larry said. “They left a whole trunk of maps and speculation on the location of those ships when they went down. It used to be a family game to trace possible storm tracks and old records and currents.”

“My daughter-in-law was very fond of Bloody Green’s story.”

Holden looked at the old man whose eyes had seen more of the sea and sorrow than most.

And treasure.

“My parents died looking for the wreck of
Moon Rose,
” Kate said flatly. “It’s not my favorite story. Are you telling me that we’re parked over that hulk now?”