Tentacles

by Roland Smith

  “What’s up?” Wolfe asked from behind a large desk cluttered with nautical maps. His prosthetic leg was leaning against the desk with its size-fifteen deck shoe attached.

  “I need to use the head,” Theo said, and walked into the bathroom as if he had used it a dozen times before. He closed the door.

  Wolfe looked at Marty. “Is there a problem?”

  “I’ll wait for Theo,” Marty said. “He has an interesting question to ask you.”

  “Theo always has interesting questions,” Wolfe said.

  “He also has homicidal tendencies,” Marty said. “He just tried to kill me by pushing me overboard.”

  A look of alarm crossed Wolfe’s face. “Are you sure you were pushed?”

  “Duh du jour, and I would have been in Davy Jones’s locker if I hadn’t managed to grab the scupper on my way down.”

  “Tell me everything,” Wolfe said.

  Marty did.

  “It does sound like you were pushed,” Wolfe said when he finished. “Which is very bad news. It also sounds like you were very lucky that Theo happened by when you fell.”

  “I have a different theory,” Marty said. “Like I said, I think Theo was the pusher. When he saw that he had blown it, he pulled me back up to make it look good.”

  The bathroom door opened.

  The man who had walked into the bathroom was not the man who walked out. He looked like a model who had just finished a photo shoot for a men’s sporting magazine. He had short blond hair, blue eyes, no facial hair, and he wore a crisp polo shirt, jeans, and Birkenstock sandals.

  “What the —”

  The man cut Marty off, looking at Wolfe. “I assume Marty filled you in on what happened.” Smiling with perfectly white teeth, he glanced at the flabbergasted Marty. “Or what he thinks happened.”

  Theo Sonborn must still be in the bathroom, Marty thought.

  “He told me,” Wolfe answered. “Did you see anyone?”

  “No, I was —”

  “What’s going on?” Marty shouted. “Who is this?”

  “I’m sorry,” Wolfe said. “I’d like you to meet my partner, Ted Bronson.”

  Marty stared at the man. He’d expected Ted Bronson to be a geek in a stained lab coat and thick glasses held together with duct tape. The man in front of him looked like a movie star action hero.

  “You’re joking.”

  “No joke,” Ted said.

  “What’s with the Theo disguise?”

  “I’ve used it for years. It’s a good way to get out of the QAQ and see what’s going on in the real world. Theo is short for Theodore, my given name. And Sonborn is an anagram — my last name scrambled around. Not very clever, but no one’s ever figured it out. The disguise helps.”

  “Do Phil and Bertha know about the disguise?”

  “Yes, and so does Al, but they’re the only ones.”

  This explained why Bertha and Wolfe hadn’t been concerned about Theo and the eggs, but it didn’t explain everything.

  “Why were you such a jerk in the galley? Why did you ask me about the dinosaur eggs?”

  “We’d better sit down,” Ted said. He cleared maps and papers from a couple of chairs. “I’ve been watching you ever since you arrived on Cryptos, Marty … well, off and on when I could.”

  “Why?”

  “At first I was just curious. But then I noticed that you have something that few people have.”

  “What?”

  “For lack of a better word, audacity. A visceral, or gutlike, intelligence. I’ve never seen it in someone your age. In fact, I started to doubt my observations. I decided to subject you to a rigorous scientific inquiry to test my observations.”

  Marty was flattered by the comment about his gutlike intelligence, but he wasn’t sure if he liked being part of Ted’s rigorous scientific inquiry without being asked.

  “Grace is the genius,” Marty said. “Not me.”

  “I didn’t say you were a genius,” Ted pointed out. “And there’s no doubt that Grace is brilliant. But she’s smart in a different way than you are. Your intelligence is more physical, driven by lightning-quick thought processes. For instance, when you fell out of the jet over the Congo you saved yourself, Grace, and even PD in a free fall. Ninety-nine point nine percent of humans would have either passed out from fear or their minds would have simply shut down in terror.”

  “I was scared to death,” Marty said. “When I landed I puked my guts out.”

  “Most people’s guts would have been smeared all over the jungle floor,” Ted said. “Here’s another example: You figured out how to lure Bo onto the Coelacanth. Impressive.”

  “It wouldn’t have worked without Luther, and he sure didn’t think it was impressive.”

  “If Luther hadn’t been there you would have thought of some other way to get her on board. And then there’s the most recent example: Somebody pushed you overboard. Most people would not have caught that scupper. They would have hit the water hard and been sucked underneath the ship.”

  “Did you push me as part of your experiment?” Marty asked sharply. He wasn’t sure that he liked Ted Bronson any better than he liked Theo Sonborn. And he was absolutely sure that he didn’t like being a guinea pig.

  “I did not push you,” Ted said. “But you were pushed. I just sent a video of the incident to our mainframe computer. But we won’t be able to see much because of the light and the angle.”

  Wolfe hit a few keys and a bird’s-eye view of the deck appeared on a monitor. Ted was right; it wasn’t very clear. The camera caught a shadow of Marty walking across the deck. He looked up at the sky for a moment, then he leaned over the rail. A couple of seconds later something large, dark, and blurry rushed up behind him, then hurried off as quickly as it had appeared.

  All Marty could tell from the video was that whoever had pushed him was bigger than Ted Bronson and Bo. “Wait a second,” he said. “I thought you pulled all the cameras?”

  “Not all of them,” Ted said. “And I’ve already taken a look at the tracking tags. You were alone up there until I showed up.” He looked at Wolfe. “Right now the only people without active tags besides you and Marty are Grace, Luther, Ana, and Laurel. None of them pushed Marty over the rail.” He looked back at Marty. “I would have gotten to you sooner, but I was down at the Moon Pool. I was too afraid to even slow down and make a radio call. To tell you the truth, I thought you’d drop before I got there.”

  Wolfe picked up his encrypted radio and keyed the mic. “Al?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Do we have anyone on board who’s taken off their tag in the past half hour or so?”

  “Negative. We haven’t had anyone take off their tag since we left Cryptos. Why?”

  “I’ll get back to you.” Wolfe cut the connection and looked at Ted. “Looks like we have a stowaway.”

  “A nasty one,” Ted said. “One of Blackwood’s.”

  “Probably.”

  “How do you want to play it?”

  “Quietly,” Wolfe answered. “If he knows we’ve discovered him, he’ll go to ground and we’ll never find him. And I suspect he’s had some help aboard.”

  “He might even have a Gizmo,” Ted said. “We lost one of them a few weeks ago.”

  Wolfe swore, then got on the radio. “Al? Have you been monitoring Gizmo email?”

  “Negative. I didn’t think it was necessary since everyone with a Gizmo is on our side, and no one else aboard has email access.”

  “Not anymore,” Wolfe said. “I’ll explain later. Start monitoring all incoming and outgoing Gizmo email.”

  “Done,” Al said.

  Wolfe looked at Marty. “New rules. You, Grace, and Luther are not to go anywhere without a guard until we find this guy. I’ll go down to tell them personally. If he doesn’t have a Gizmo, he certainly has a two-way like everyone else aboard. Who knows, he might even have an encrypted radio like Al and his crew and I are carrying, although it wouldn’t do him much good
without the code.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Marty asked.

  “Stick with Ted. You have a lot to discuss.”

  Wolfe strapped on his leg and hurried out of the cabin.

  “What do we have to discuss?” Marty asked, still a little annoyed with Ted for experimenting with him.

  “For one, you asked about the cameras….” Ted pulled a Gizmo out of his pocket and quickly released a bot-fly, which he proceeded to pilot expertly around Wolfe’s cabin before landing it on the ceiling. Ted’s bot was translucent, making it almost invisible as he flew it around the room. It blended in with every color and would be nearly impossible to spot.

  “Obviously I’m not the only one who can navigate the bot-fly,” Marty said.

  “You don’t think I’d invent something I couldn’t operate, do you?”

  “I guess not.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, you and I are the only ones who can fly it. And I actually like dragonspy better than bot-fly. If you don’t mind, I’d like to use your name for it when we apply for the patent.”

  “Fine,” Marty said. “But why did you give me the dragonspy in the first place?”

  “To see how you’d do with a million-dollar bug. I had no doubt you would figure out how to fly it, but what I really wanted to know was if you’d follow the rules. No pun intended, but you passed with flying colors when Luther asked if he could fly it and you told him no.”

  “You overheard that conversation?” Marty asked.

  Ted nodded. “My dragonspy has been with you since you got back to the island.”

  “Any other tests?”

  “The galley,” Ted said. “Two dinosaurs hatch, and instead of being allowed to take care of them you get KP. Not only didn’t you complain, you turned around the terrible food situation I had intentionally created.”

  “You are a lousy cook.”

  “Actually, I’m a better cook than Theo Sonborn, but not by much.”

  “Where’s all this going? Why have you been testing me?”

  “I’ll show you,” Ted said. “Let’s go down to the Moon Pool.”

  * * *

  Grace undid the two latches on the old trunk, then paused.

  “You are being ridiculous!” she whispered. “Do you expect a skeleton to jump out? Open the trunk!”

  She lifted the lid.

  Inside was a jumble of manila envelopes, file folders, and dozens of Moleskine journals just like the ones Grace used. Buried beneath the mess was the Frankenstein Monkey. She remembered what Marty had said: “It’s probably packed away somewhere you haven’t looked yet.” She untangled Monkey and pulled him out, happy to have him aboard, but mad at Marty for hiding him in the place she was least likely to look.

  With Monkey in her lap, she picked up the top envelope and carefully undid the clasp. Inside were photographs of her mother when she was young. Marty had told her about the photos, but she hadn’t really believed him until now. Her mother, Rose Blackwood, looked exactly like Grace had when she was that age. The same robin’s-egg-blue eyes, the same curly black hair … It was true: She and her mother could have been twins.

  There were photos of her mother holding tiger cubs, riding a zebra, feeding an ostrich … And in every photo was a beaming, younger Noah Blackwood. He didn’t look at all like the evil person she knew him to be. He looked like a happy, doting father. But there was something very important missing from every photograph…. A wife. Rose’s mother. Grace’s grandmother.

  Where was she?

  Who was she?

  What happened to her?

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Come in,” Grace said, trying to get the photos back into the envelope, but not before Wolfe walked in with a worried look.

  “Thank God you’re all right,” he said. “I was just down at the lab, and Laurel and Luther said you were in here alone.”

  “I spend a lot of time in here alone,” Grace said.

  “Not anymore. I’m having Laurel move in with you.”

  “Why?”

  Wolfe filled her in on his conversation with Marty.

  “Is Marty okay?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “Do you have any idea who the stowaway is?”

  “No, but it’s certainly one of Blackwood’s men, and whoever he is, he had help getting onto the Coelacanth, so we’re dealing with more than one person. I think the stowaway is operating in the open, posing as someone he isn’t. Hopefully Al will be able to figure out who he is and who’s helping him. Until he does, you, Marty, and Luther aren’t to go anywhere alone. The only people you can trust are me, Bertha, Phil, Al and his men, Laurel, and Ana Mika, whom I don’t think you’ve met yet, but you will. As soon as she’s feeling better she’s going to help with the hatchlings. Everyone else aboard is suspect. I thought our quick departure would keep us a step ahead of Blackwood, but it looks like he’s caught up with us. After what happened to Marty tonight, we know he’s coming at us hard.” Wolfe paused. “Ted and I knew it would come down to this one day.”

  “What really went on between you and my grandfather?” Grace asked.

  “It’s been going on for so many years,” Wolfe said. “It’s hard to know where to start. Your grandfather was a friend of my father’s. I’ve known him since I was a kid. My father and Noah had a falling-out, but not before I learned more about him than I ever wanted to.”

  “Then why did you catch the great white shark for him?”

  “You’ve heard the saying, ‘Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer.’”

  Grace nodded.

  “It works both ways. Ted and I needed money to fund his inventions. I needed money to start eWolfe and to get Rose away from Blackwood. Noah hired us because we were the only people with the technology to get the job done, but that wasn’t the only reason. He wanted to keep me close so he could keep an eye on me. I knew a lot more about him than he wanted me to know. And he recognized Ted’s genius. He wanted that, too. Ted and I knew this going in, so we took precautions. Noah has met Ted, but he really doesn’t even know what Ted looks like.

  “When we caught the great white, Ted disguised himself as an absentminded geek.” Wolfe smiled. “Believe me, Ted is anything but a geek. He did it because we knew from the very beginning that Noah Blackwood was going to come after us eventually. When you don’t trust someone and consider them a future adversary, it’s best to have them underestimate your capabilities. This way they’ll base their decision to hurt you on who they think you are. In other words, underestimating you weakens their attack.”

  Grace was confused. This was a side of Wolfe she’d never seen. He didn’t sound like a biologist. He sounded like a general waging a war, or a spy. “How do you know all this?”

  “That’s a long and very complicated story, which I’d prefer to save for another time. For now let me tell you about the great white shark.”

  “All right,” Grace said. “But only if you promise to tell me the long, complicated story soon.”

  “Cross my heart,” Wolfe said, sounding more like the father she knew.

  “I’ve told you what Ted and I knew before we caught the great white. After we caught it, we knew we weren’t going to give Noah the shark box we’d built, no matter how much money he offered to pay us for it. We also knew that we weren’t going to catch a second great white for him after it died, which of course it eventually did. We knew that as soon as we had the money in hand for catching the shark, I was going to marry Rose and take her away from Noah. Rose and I knew that we were going to find every cryptid we could and protect them from her father and stop him from adding them to his ghoulish collection.” Wolfe paused and tears came to his eyes. “Then I got Rose killed.”

  “That wasn’t your fault,” Grace said.

  “In Noah Blackwood’s eyes it was totally my fault. And there’s something else….”

  “What?” Grace asked quietly.

  “After my father di
ed, Noah took me under his wing. He didn’t do it out of affection. He did it because I was very good at finding things that were supposed to be impossible to find, but that doesn’t matter. In his eyes I betrayed his trust. Ted and I are the only two people on earth who have survived that sin. The time has come to pay the devil his due.”

  Wolfe looked at the manila envelope in Grace’s hands. “You opened the trunk.”

  “Just before you came in,” Grace said. “These are old photo-graphs. Mom and I look just like each other.”

  “You certainly do.”

  “There don’t seem to be any photos of my grandmother … at least that I’ve seen yet.”

  “I don’t think you’ll find any.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s another question Rose was trying to find an answer to. Blackwood told her that her mother had died when she was a year old, but Rose didn’t believe him. There are photos of her when she was just hours old. Her mother isn’t in them. Rose didn’t even know her mother’s name. Blackwood refused to tell her. He told her that her mother’s loss was too painful for him and that she was never to bring it up.”

  “She didn’t even know her mother’s first name?” Grace asked.

  Wolfe shook his head. “The only person who knows who your grandmother was is Noah Blackwood. Rose was convinced that Noah kept it a secret because her mother was still alive. With a name, even just a first name, Rose might have been able to track her down.”

  “Have you ever looked through the trunk?”

  “Rose showed me some of the photos, but I never went through it on my own. She never said that I couldn’t, but I considered the trunk her private domain. There was an unspoken agreement that I shouldn’t. After she was killed and I lost my leg, the trunk was the least of my concerns. I needed to get you back to the States and situated with my sister so Blackwood couldn’t get his hands on you. I thought about the trunk from time to time. I could have gone back for it, or had Masalito ship it to me.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t want to dredge up old memories. I was afraid.”