Night Diver: A Novel

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Holden smiled and wished it was that simple.

  “So Mingo is finding stuff and yet not finding it,” she said. “As you pointed out, that part would be simple enough, especially as Volkert is stupefied by sound and spends more time opening snacks than watching the screens.”

  “Or he’s on the take. Even simpler.”

  “Whatever. So Mingo is maybe seeing things down below and leaving them there and making off-the-record dives to pick up the goodies,” she said.

  “You can do it for a while,” Holden agreed, “but using different dive computers—or turning off and restarting a single dive computer—bollixes up built-in algorithms, which assume eighteen hours between dives.”

  “So the new or restarted dive computer wouldn’t allow for residual gases in the diver’s blood.”

  “I do love a smart woman,” he said, touching her abused lip with his forefinger. “No matter how you compute it, you must be very careful about the number of dives you make in any given interval of time. It’s not rocket science, but there are some laws of physics you can’t get around no matter how many gadgets you wear.”

  “Like oxygen poisoning.”

  Holden nodded, hesitated, then said, “So you’re pleased with the Mingo-as-rat theory?”

  “Pleased is the wrong word. Yet he managed to pull off trysts with Raul and nobody knew.”

  “There is a difference between ignoring an affair and ignoring someone whose thievery diminishes your share of a dive bonus.”

  Kate fought against going where Holden and her own thoughts kept pushing her, but there really wasn’t any way to ignore the elephant much longer.

  “Okay. Probably someone else in the dive crew, or even more than one, benefited from the high-grading,” she said. “They wouldn’t have been happy when you were called in.”

  “No. They wouldn’t want me aboard, especially at night.”

  She would have liked to ignore the fact that it had been her family who had refused to let Holden sleep aboard, but the elephant just kept getting bigger.

  “There wasn’t any room for you,” she pointed out.

  “Perhaps not a week ago. Since then, there has been steady attrition in the crew quarters. I could have insisted on sleeping aboard, but I didn’t. That is on me. At first I told myself that I was investigating whether you were complicit in anything illegal, which was mostly true. Even after I knew you were innocent, I stayed ashore because you were there and I very much wanted you. I still do, more each time.”

  A gust of humid wind through the porthole did little to cool Kate’s blush.

  “Then there was the chain Mingo conveniently found,” Holden said, as though he hadn’t spoken about his soul-deep need for her, “just when AO was looking for an excuse to shut down the dive. They probably thought I’d pass out commendations and fly back to jolly old England, leaving them to strip the wreck before the storm came.”

  “That would require planning and foresight and . . . planning,” she said.

  Suddenly she felt hemmed in, chest tight. The elephant was getting bigger and she was going to end up under its crushing feet.

  I can see Mingo high-grading and paying off Volkert to look the other way, she thought, but the rest points to someone with real brains and a systematic plan for pillaging a wreck. Mingo is an ad hoc sort of guy.

  Petty thief, not mastermind.

  Breathe. Slow. Easy. Running and hiding doesn’t work, remember?

  But that’s what she wanted to do.

  Holden waited, feeling Kate’s struggle as though it was his own. He couldn’t imagine how difficult it would be to admit that your blood relations were liars and thieves, and uncaring enough to drag you down with them.

  She made a low sound, like someone absorbing a body blow. “Mingo alone doesn’t add up. If there was real treasure in the wreck. That’s a big if.” And my last hope.

  Silently, Holden waited, hoping he wouldn’t have to be the one to rub her face in her rotten family.

  “If the night dives were fairly frequent,” she said in a voice thick with unshed tears, “somebody, sometime, would have noticed lights beneath the water, even little ones ninety feet down under a full moon. Grandpa can’t be the only one who pees off the deck in the middle of the night.”

  A silent breath of relief went out of Holden. She was taking off her I-refuse-to-know blinders. It gave him hope that what was growing between himself and Kate would survive what was to come.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “When did you stop suspecting me?” she asked. “Or have you?”

  “After a few days you went to the bottom of my list. You have many qualities, Kate, but sustained duplicity isn’t one of them. Willful blindness and loyalty when it comes to family, yes. Complicity, no.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them. “I really don’t like thinking about Larry as a crook. Or Grandpa.”

  “As you said, life is rarely about what we like.”

  The probability of Larry’s innocence kept shrinking to the vanishing point and beyond, into the realm of anything is possible, but not at all probable. Holden was watching her with compassionate eyes whose color had changed to sea green shot with gold shards.

  Turning away, she whispered, “What a foul mess this is. I hate it. But it’s better than hiding my head in the sand.” She hesitated. “Isn’t it?”

  He pulled her against him and buried his face in her hair. She let herself sag into his strength for long moments. He felt the shudders that went through her, the warmth of her tears sliding from her face to his arms, and then she straightened, wiping her eyes impatiently. She flicked the watch he was holding with a determined fingertip.

  “Let’s plug this into the dive center,” she said, “and see what we get.”

  CHAPTER 18

  VOLKERT MUST HAVE been watching the door, because the instant it swung open he turned down the Techno.

  “Captain Donnelly,” he said respectfully, “I sincerely hope that you’re down here to tell me in person that we’re pulling anchor and heading back to shore.”

  “We have plenty of time,” Kate said, “and a reserved space in a lee marina. The island might lose a few trees and tourists, but the rest is secure.”

  “Any word about the other Captain Donnelly?”

  “Just a text from him that he’s really all right and they’re running a battery of tests.”

  With a nod, Volkert looked at her as though she was the only one in the room. Holden didn’t take it personally; it was clear that Volkert knew who was buying his crisps and cookies now.

  “I want the dive track of the entire operation,” she said. Whatever doubts she had showed to Holden, she wasn’t showing anyone else.

  “All of it?” Volker asked.

  “Every single one,” she said.

  Holden smiled when the other man went immediately to work. No doubt he was already wishing he hadn’t been so pissy with the pretty lady earlier.

  “Getting it.” Volkert chewed on some jerky that looked and smelled like it had come from long-dead fish. “I’ll just go off the pings from dive comps, since I don’t have the plan entered in yet.”

  “Oh, and we need to know the coordinates in this dive computer and see where, if anywhere, they match up on our grid.” Holden placed Mingo’s watch on the workspace. It hit with a cold, hard sound.

  “Whatever you find doesn’t go beyond the three of us,” Kate said bluntly. “Got it?”

  “Yes, Captain,” Volkert said.

  Holden knew it was too late for secrecy, but he didn’t say anything. Whatever had been happening on this ship had to be an open secret whose occasional leaks were sealed with money or threats. But Volkert wasn’t entirely stupid. He wouldn’t get on the radio as soon as Kate was out of sight.

  “Fortunately, the new units all have USB connectivity.” Volkert fumbled around in a nest of collected cables in a drawer. He then unscrewed the access panel on the watch and pulled it open. “This
is the hardest part. But you have to engineer for real pressure down there, yah?”

  “One would hope,” Holden said.

  “Here. Connect this.” Volkert handed her the cable. “And while we’re waiting for it to mount I’ll try to get the dive logs overlaid.” He leaned over and punched some keys. Then he looked at her sidelong as he turned up his music.

  “Fink you freeeeky and I like you a lot,” cooed an alien female voice.

  “No louder,” Kate said.

  The beat was insistent but not overwhelming, pulsing away as Volkert matched it with the tapping of keys.

  Maybe he uses the noise as a sort of caffeine, Kate thought. Whatever, he works faster with a backbeat.

  Volkert put up a view of the wreck and surrounding seascape that had been patched together from a series of photographs taken by the original survey crew. There were gaps and seams and the whole thing was vaguely murky, though whether that was through lens distortion or compression was unclear.

  “The might of the Empire and that’s the best we could get,” he said scornfully.

  “The Empire has many things to do, aesthetics not being high on that list,” Holden said. “If this happened to be enemy troop movement, you would be able to count the legs on a flea.”

  Volkert grunted. “Yah. Okay, I’ve got dive records that were lifted off the computers and the plans that were filed. I’ll post the filed plans first.”

  A series of lime-green paths snaked across the grid with small white text lines indicating the date and time.

  Silently Kate wondered why the hell she hadn’t gotten something like this the last time she asked.

  Because I wasn’t the captain, she realized, furious.

  And this was no time to lose her temper. Volkert was the quickest way to get the information she needed. She could fire his insubordinate ass later.

  “What’s the oldest track you have?” she asked.

  He moved the mouse so that the arrow touched a path and lit up, showing a date.

  She took the mouse and began passing the arrow over paths at random. As she touched them, they lit up and the date flashed. The more lines she touched, the more her temper slipped.

  “Despite the impressive snarl of lines, I don’t see much more than forty dives here,” she said in a clipped voice. “Two shifts a day, that’s only twenty dives. The Golden Bough was anchored on the wreck while it was cleared. Salvage diving began at least eleven weeks ago. Even if we were only able to do one dive on some days, it doesn’t add up.”

  “Actually it’s forty-three dives,” Volkert said, returning to his natural surly state. “The early survey plus two other passes made after most of the wreck was cleared. That’s all I have. Remember, there was at least one computer dive specialist before I came on board. From what I’ve heard, there were several. Heavy drinkers, if you believe ship gossip. The only records I have are from my tenure.”

  Which began about a week before I arrived, Holden realized. Interesting coincidence. Like the gold chain.

  Pity that I find coincidences so unsatisfying.

  “So we’re missing all of the dive tracks before you came aboard?” Kate asked.

  Volkert lifted one shoulder. “Probably they’re filed under a different protocol or protocols. I wasn’t given any instructions how to proceed when I came on. I was left to create my own protocol and follow it. If there were others used before me, I haven’t had time to dig them out and nobody asked me to until now.”

  Bottom of the employable barrel, Kate reminded herself. You get what you pay for, and we’re paying this lazy ape with bananas.

  Breathe in.

  Out.

  In.

  With a wary eye on Kate, Holden studied the pattern on the screen. At first glance, the grid was being well covered by dive plans, with concentrations on the center, but a lot of activity even at the grid edges.

  “What’s this down here?” He pointed at an area of the map that looked like a jittery mix of pixels. Only one of the early dive paths led across it. “Is that part of the seafloor or is the file bad?”

  “Looks like it’s being left alone,” Kate said. “The early survey done after the overburden was cleared is the only one that went there. Must be a big lump of lava with a coral overgrowth.”

  “Dodgy diving,” Holden said. “A large drop-off is very close by. To cover the area thoroughly, you would have to go more than one hundred feet deep. Unless the slope levels off very quickly, you would find yourself a hundred meters down, or more, before you realized it. The difficulty and expense of recovery goes up with every centimeter you go down.”

  She frowned, remembering long dinners around the galley table with three generations of Donnellys sharing hopes and old maps.

  “Difficult, technical diving, and probably not useful,” she said. “If the ship sank right over that lava outcrop, the wreck would either slide off into the deep blue or bump off the other side and stay on the shallow plain as it rotted and broke apart.”

  “Since the wreck came to rest slightly east and north of that area, apparently intact and in the shallows,” Holden said, “there would be no economically compelling reason to investigate the technical diving territory. A few passes for thoroughness would satisfy most captains.”

  Apparently through with the protein portion of his daily grazing, Volkert opened another bag of cookies. “I can zoom in, but that’s as good as we have. The more the zoom, the more blurred the detail. E1 is mainly coral, rock, and a drop into the black. Nothing pinged, even for iron, at least on the survey I found for you.”

  “Can we see the plans as they were filed off of dive computers, not as they were planned ahead of time?” Kate asked.

  Volkert hammered on the keyboard, cursed, and started over again several times. Finally he found the magic combination of commands. “This is what I have.”

  Cobalt-blue lines now filled the screen, but these were more jagged, uneven, organic. Instead of straight lines or simple arcs, these were less distinct, marked out in a series of line segments, looking almost like lazy lightning. For the most part, there were no surprises here, though they did deviate from the dive plans in places.

  “The green lines are the plans and the blue lines are where the divers actually went,” Volkert said into the silence as he ground another cookie enthusiastically between his teeth. “The white grid hasn’t changed.”

  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 d
own 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.