The Deep Zone: A Novel (43 page)

She did a quick surface dive and swam straight down for twenty feet, then thirty, the light dimming, feeling the pressure. She equalized her ears continually, the action automatic from having done so much scuba diving. She turned toward the surface and pulled up as fast as she could, bursting out of the water and falling back with a loud splash and a barely stifled cry of joy.

God, it felt good. And it felt good to move in water. She knew
of no better therapy for a sore body. She also knew that she was going to have to get out and carry on soon. But just a couple more minutes wouldn’t hurt. She turned over on her belly and began swimming with a slow, graceful crawl, gulping a bite of air over her shoulder with every other stroke, long arms pulling at the water. Ten feet short of the cenote’s far wall, with unbroken forest looming up just beyond the edge, she pulled up and treaded water.

And then she saw the floating cigarette butts.

“PULL!” SAID BERNARD ADELHEID
.

A steward pushed a button and the cage’s spring-loaded top flew open. A ruffed grouse exploded out of the cage, soared up and away from the yacht’s fantail, a dark slash across white clouds. Adelheid swung his Purdey shotgun right to left, smooth as an artist stroking paint on a canvas. The shotgun roared once and the grouse’s flight ended in a red burst of feathers and blood. Adelheid broke the Purdey, withdrew the spent shell from its smoking breech, reloaded. “Your shot,” he said to Nathan Rathor.

Nathan Rathor had no love of yachts or oceans. He wasn’t prone to seasickness, had always been blessed with a strong stomach. What he found nearly unendurable was being at the mercy of an uncontrollable force like the sea. But he also knew that there was nothing like a boat and vast expanses of open water for communications security. Unless someone managed to bug your vessel, of course, but
no one was likely to get a bug into any boat that carried Bernard Adelheid.

Standing next to Adelheid while the man was holding a loaded shotgun would not have been one of Rathor’s first choices of places on earth to be. But when the man called, you came, and when he wanted to shoot, you shot. Rathor had shot skeet before, of course, though always with clay pigeons, and that was what he had expected to be shooting at this sunny afternoon on the Atlantic, twenty miles east of Cape May, New Jersey. But Adelheid had said, “There is little sport in shooting dead things, would you not agree? These grouse are legendary, one of the most difficult wing shots on earth.”

Rathor had done a little upland hunting himself, so he knew that grouse had advantages in the field they did not enjoy here. Hunting without dogs once in Maine, he had walked within ten feet of a grouse and had not seen it, so perfectly did the bird blend with its surroundings. Then he took another step and the grouse flushed, bursting twenty feet straight up from cover, its wings drumming so loudly that he started and nearly fired his gun by accident. At the height of its rise the bird hurtled off into the darkness of the far woods and he did not have time even to raise his shotgun, let alone make a decent shot. It was very different here, but he said nothing about that to Adelheid. Rathor was curious about something, however. “What happens to the ones we miss?” he had asked.

“They fly until they cannot fly anymore. They fall into the ocean and die. Fish eat them.” He’d shrugged. “Better than polluting the sea with toxic ceramics, don’t you think?” he’d added, referring to clay pigeons.

Now Rathor stood holding a Purdey over-and-under that was the matching twin to Adelheid’s, who had said there must be no advantage to either gunner. The Purdey’s stock was Turkish walnut. Its gold side plates were the background for scenes of mounted knights carved from solid silver. Rathor was not a gun lover, but he knew the price of wealth’s trappings. Adelheid—or whoever owned
this boat, which might or might not belong to Adelheid—would have paid $300,000 for this pair, maybe more.

The yacht was a 164-foot oceangoing Benetti, but the deck still moved beneath Rathor. He shouldered his gun, bent his knees, and braced his feet. Finger on the Purdey’s front trigger, he shouted, “Pull!”

The game cage went
spang!
and another grouse flew out, rising on a right-to-left trajectory. Rathor knew what he was supposed to do to hit the thing—
don’t aim, just point and swing like you’re sweeping the sky
. He tried to imitate Adelheid’s effortless technique, done so quickly that the leading and firing seemed to happen almost in the same instant.

Rathor pulled the gun’s brass trigger and its stock punched his shoulder. The grouse flew on, intact. Rathor found the rear trigger and discharged the gun’s lower barrel and missed with that one, too. Shooting like this was hard enough on steady dry land. Trying to hit a moving target from the rising and falling deck of a yacht—an impossible thing. Yet Adelheid had shot a dozen times and had hit each bird with the first barrel. Rathor had hit one bird and knew he had been lucky to do even that.

“Oh, my,” Adelheid said, though Rathor thought he detected more irritation at Rathor’s inept shooting than sympathy in the other’s voice. “Perhaps enough of this for now. Let us go forward.” An attendant materialized and took the shotguns. Another appeared with flutes of Dom Pérignon. Rathor followed Adelheid through the yacht’s interior to its foredeck, with white leather banquettes and mahogany tables. They had made a slow turn and were now heading for the mainland at a stately pace. They would not be back until after dark, but that suited Rathor quite well.

They stood at the bow, warm in sweaters and jackets, and drank the icy champagne without talking for a few moments. Then Adelheid said, “I am beginning to feel good about our venture. Cautiously so, but good.”

That surprised Rathor. In his experience, Adelheid was almost
invariably gloomy. Rathor himself was not feeling so confident. “We’re a long way from the goal line, I’m afraid.”

Adelheid smiled thinly, shook his head. “The goal line. You Americans and your athletics. But, you see, I know something that you do not.”

“And what might that be?”

“Not long ago I heard from Gray. He believes that our team in Mexico has met with success.”

“He does? What happened?”

“I am not in possession of full details yet. Apparently the environment there is not secure for lengthy transmissions. But there was a prearranged signal that could be sent as a single data burst. Gray’s people received that signal.”

“I don’t know,” Rathor said. “I won’t be comfortable until we have that substance from the cave in our hands.”

“Gray’s people do not make mistakes,” Adelheid said, and Rathor detected another trace of irritation in his voice.

“I understand that. But all the same—”

Adelheid fixed Rathor in his stare. “With the other two problems accounted for, there is less cause for concern, would you not agree?”

Rathor wasn’t sure, but he did know that differing too often with Adelheid was unwise. “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “I can be overly pessimistic at times.” He tipped his flute and finished the champagne. In an instant a white-jacketed waiter appeared with a full glass. When Rathor turned halfway around to accept his new drink, he said, “Where did they come from?”

Seated on a banquette were two of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. They must have come out while he and Adelheid were facing forward, talking. Both looked to be in their mid-twenties. One had shining, shoulder-length red hair. The other was blond, her hair in a shorter blunt cut. Their faces were different in details but alike in the beauty those details combined to create. Adelheid turned around then.

“Magic,” he said.

“Magic indeed,” Rathor agreed. Both women wore silk blouses, one pale blue and the other lime green, and white linen walking shorts. They were barefoot, and Rathor noted that their perfect tans extended all the way to the tips of their toes. He was struck by how perfectly the tailored blouses revealed the contours of their breasts, neither hanging loose nor stretched lewdly tight. Rathor thought himself a connoisseur of women, and these two, he knew, were rare jewels. His heart quickened just looking at them. Taking his elbow, Adelheid guided him to the table, where the women sat drinking champagne and nibbling sashimi.

“Erika and Aimée, may I present our guest for the evening.”

“Hello,” Erika, the woman with red hair, said.

“Enchantée.”
Aimée’s accent was heavily French.

The touch of their cool hands, one after the other, set off a buzzing in Rathor’s chest.

“Erika and Aimée will be joining us for dinner,” Adelheid said.

Nathan Rathor was not often at a loss for words, but just now he could not find the right ones. Finally he said, “You are a man of many surprises.”

“Indeed? It is good to be surprised, would you not agree? Otherwise life becomes”—he shrugged, appearing to search for just the right word—“unlivable.” He raised his glass in a toast. The women raised theirs, and so did Rathor. They settled deeper into the banquette’s cushions, sipping champagne, Adelheid doing most of the talking, the yacht rolling along with agreeable small swells that eased its landward passage.

Astern, the sun became a shimmering red globe sinking into the edge of the darkening ocean. The light began to go blue, and attendants placed candles in windproof crystal holders on the table. They were served oysters on beds of crushed ice with crescents of lemon. Rathor noted that Adelheid and the women ate noisily and with great relish.

Adelheid seemed to have no desire to talk more about their venture.
Instead, he led them into discussions about medieval art, the planets, evolution. To Rathor’s surprise, Erika and Aimée held their own, and it must have shown on his face because Adelheid said, “Erika and Aimée are both graduates of excellent colleges.” He looked at Erika.

“Kiev University,” she said.

“Sorbonne,” Aimée said.

“Without intelligence, we do as the animals do,” Adelheid remarked. “For the greatest reward, we must bring intelligence to all in our lives. Including the taking of pleasure.”

“Of course,” Rathor said. “Otherwise we’re just like … like a bunch of rutting hogs.”

Adelheid blinked, coughed. “Perhaps not how I would have phrased it, but the thrust is correct.” Adelheid glanced over his shoulder at the sunset, just then completing. “I believe we will have dinner now, but let us move inside.”

They all got up and went into the yacht’s saloon, a glittering cave of leather and marble. The two women excused themselves. “To dress for dinner,” Erika said.

“Just so.” Adelheid nodded.

Rathor needed to use the bathroom—the head, as Adelheid called it out here—and went there. It took him a while to get things working with the deck moving underfoot, but finally he did. When he returned to the yacht’s dining salon, Adelheid and the two women were already seated at a rosewood table long enough for twenty. Adelheid had donned a black blazer and put on a pale rose ascot for the occasion. Erika and Aimée, Rathor saw, had also changed for dinner, though not as he might have expected. Both had removed their blouses and now sat across the table from him bare from the waist up, shoulders back, sipping champagne with insouciance. Their tans, he noticed, were complete. Both smiled when he caught their eyes, but they might have been fully clothed, for all their poise. He swallowed.
What promises here?

“Is there anything more exciting,” Adelheid said, “than anticipation?
I think not. And what is anticipation but the sweet pain of self-denial? To be in the presence of great reward and endure an ordeal of delay. It is”—he gazed at the women—“an exquisite thing.”

Teasing
, was how Rathor put it to himself. But he had to agree with Adelheid that by the end of a leisurely dinner with Erika and Aimée displayed this way, his pent need would be like the water held behind a great dam.

Adelheid raised his glass of champagne and said something—a grace or benediction, perhaps. Rathor had heard him say it before, had thought it sounded somewhat—but not exactly—like German. He had never asked what it meant, and Adelheid had never offered to explain.

Adelheid picked up a fork, but before starting to eat he said, “In case you were wondering, they are both for you. I have my own.”