Night Diver

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “On the Golden Bough they call me Captain.”

  Holden’s black eyebrows rose. On paper, it was grandson Larry who had that title. Reality, however, was often different from paper. It was that difference which gave Holden a job.

  “I trust you will have time for a chat with me after I’ve checked out the dive center,” Holden said, again as much a command as a request.

  “I’m here.”

  “Yes, I rather imagine that is preferable to being in court fighting to hold on to various treasures,” Holden said blandly.

  “Bloodsucking governments are worse than insurance companies. You don’t see any of them risking their pampered arses on a dive, do you? I research, I dive, I risk, and sometimes I pull up treasure. Me, not your god-rotting bureaucrats. By the law of the sea, what I find is mine.”

  “At one time, yes,” Holden agreed. “Unfortunately for you, that time is past.”

  “God-rotting, gut-eating vultures.”

  Holden didn’t take it personally. He had read files where Patrick Donnelly had been quoted at length in court records and the less formal pages of newspapers. At one time Donnelly had been seen as a kind of folk hero for spitting in the eye of various governments and lawyers. But since the turn of the twenty-first century, that respectability had ebbed.

  Not that Patrick Donnelly had changed because of it, Holden thought. Nothing will change that crusty old bastard except death.

  Silently Kate watched as Grandpa Donnelly looked away from Holden to the eastern horizon. With a faint grimace he headed inside the wheelhouse once more.

  She let out the breath she had been holding without realizing it. From where she stood, it was obvious that Larry had been relegated to bit player in the drama of the Golden Bough. Grandpa and Holden were shouldering each other for the lead.

  Poor Larry. Grandpa’s contempt for any point of view but his own can be really hard to live with.

  But somehow her brother managed. He always had.

  “I’ll see the dive center first,” Holden said, looking at Larry.

  The other man didn’t move. If his mottled skin color was any indication, he was struggling to keep his temper leashed.

  “Have you changed the location of the dive center since Dad was in charge?” Kate asked her brother.

  He shook his head. “Everything is pretty much the same, but more crowded. We’ve stashed supplies and replacement parts everywhere aboard to minimize trips ashore. Fuel is expensive. Which reminds me . . .” He called out to the first crewman he saw, “Unload the tender.”

  “Apparently I’m the designated tour guide,” Kate said as she turned to Holden, trying to keep her voice level.

  It was bad enough being on the Golden Bough again. Going belowdecks was much, much worse, memories clawing at her. With a deep breath she opened the salt-rimed door and stepped into the relative darkness beyond.

  She had manned the dive center often, but what raked her guts with fingernails of ice was the memory of the last time she’d stood in this doorway.

  The green glow of the dive cameras recorded that the divers were coming up from the bottom far too fast, not even pausing at the decompression stations that were clearly marked on the weighted line hanging from the dive buoy.

  “What’s wrong? What’s wrong! Answer me, Dad!” she yelled into the mic.

  At first he didn’t answer.

  Then he didn’t have to.

  Obviously something had gone wrong with her mother’s dive gear. Her mother’s figure was slack as her father finned his way at reckless speed to the surface.

  “Oh, God. No. Dad, the bends!”

  If he heard her, he ignored her, his whole being intent on getting his wife up to the air.

  Holden was the only one who noticed Kate’s unnatural stillness. He eased off his sunglasses as he moved through the door and shielded her from her brother’s view. With a gentle touch to her cool cheek, Holden pulled her out of her trance.

  She shivered convulsively as he touched her. His unusual, shattered-crystal eyes yanked her out of memories of terror.

  “Ready to go to the dive center?” he asked in a low voice.

  “Your eyes . . .” she whispered. “So beautiful. Dragon eyes.”

  Then she came fully into the present with a start. A flush crawled up her pale cheeks.

  “Ready,” she said, lying without a pause. She had to be ready. Everything depended on it. “You, too, Larry,” she said in a carrying voice. “I’m sure our guest will have more questions than I have answers.”

  “In a minute,” Larry called from the deck. “I want to make sure the crew gets those supplies stowed properly.”

  Once her eyes adjusted and she got a better grip on her nerves, she stepped farther into the belowdecks opening. Just inside and to the right, a steep stairway—more a ladder with wide rungs—led up to the main deck. The sight of it sent memories breaking over her in cold waves.

  Scrambling up the pitching ladder, more desperation than judgment.

  Screaming . . .

  Launching the tender in an awkward rush. Sweeping the stormy sea and darkness with a heavy light.

  Screaming . . .

  Trying and trying and trying to haul them into the tender despite the wild ocean and lightning scoring the sky, thunder like body blows.

  Screaming . . .

  Her mother sliding out of sight beneath the water. Her father convulsing in the final stages of the bends as she hauled him aboard and searched the dark storm waters for her mother.

  Screaming. . .

  “I’m sorry, Mother. I’m sorry, sorry, sorrysorrysorry!”

  “Kate,” Holden said softly, touching her clammy skin. “Easy, Kate. Come back. You’re safe.”

  Without realizing it, she leaned closer to the comfort she had so badly needed when she was seventeen and hadn’t been able to save either of her parents. There had been too many hours alone in the storm searching for her mother’s body while her father grew cold in the bottom of the tender.

  Her mother had never been found, just one more body taken by the ravening sea and the cursed wreck called Moon Rose.

  Strong arms came around Kate, rocking gently, a deep voice murmuring reassurances into her ear. She wrapped herself even more tightly to his warmth, holding on, just holding on, until the sound of her brother shouting something at the crew cut through the moment.

  Hastily she straightened and stepped back from Holden.

  “Just getting my bearings,” she said without looking at him. “I haven’t been aboard this ship since I turned eighteen.”

  “Of course,” he said, his voice gentle, his tone saying that he knew she was telling only a part of the truth—the most unimportant part.

  And he would have all of the truth.

  Holden could have told himself that it was only business that drove his curiosity, but he knew better. With a final touch on her cheek, he released her and stepped back just moments before Larry appeared at the door, still yelling orders over his shoulder.

  Looking straight ahead, Kate walked toward the dive center, ignoring the brightly painted doors on either side of the narrow hall that led to crew quarters. One door was ajar, showing unmade bunks. The odor of stale alcohol competed with the usual smells of engine and sea.

  Holden paused, looking into the small room. He couldn’t be certain, but what appeared to be an empty bottle of rum had been tossed into a corner with some dirty clothes. Obviously alcohol was either uncontrolled or ignored aboard the ship.

  She knocked at the last door and was told to “Open the damn door yourself, I’m busy.”

  The voice was flat, nasal, and impatient. The accent was more Dutch or German than English.

  Kate shoved the metal door wide and gestured for Holden to follow her inside. He saw her glance lingering on his eyes and mentally sighed. It always took people time to get accustomed to his colorful eyes.

  Deliberately he looked past her at the dive center.

  No o
ne made any introductions. The crew member manning the dive center didn’t even look over his shoulder to see who had come in. Holden decided not to take it personally. When a diver was working on the bottom, he deserved full attention from the liaison up top.

  Because the dive center was in the bow of the ship, the space was shaped like a funnel with the wide end toward the entrance. At the narrow end, a curving bank of pale, flickering screens dominated the small room. On the screen just to the operator’s right side, the seabed was mapped out in a series of green topographical grids, waiting for a diver to appear or simply focused on a part of the dive area that wasn’t under active exploration at the moment.

  Holden sized up the piles of electronic equipment—some with leads exposed and running together to tangle like a nest of snakes—that lined the walls. From what he could see, the nerve center of the dive ship had been cobbled together using everything from the streamlined black cases of modern Japanese consumer styling to snarls of coiled wires and green motherboards that would have been at home in a tech museum.

  The mismatched equipment obviously did a satisfactory job. Video feed from a diver filled the main screen. The wreck was deep enough to be in the twilight zone, where everything was a watery gray blue except in the swaths cut by dive lights. There, corals showed their true colors in rainbow array.

  Most of the heavy work of removing the overburden of sand and silt from the wreck had already been done by directing the wash from the ship’s propellers through tubes, literally hosing off loose material on the bottom. Because the process took a lot of expensive diesel to run the main engines, only the areas deemed most likely to reveal treasure had been uncovered. The rest waited, still laden with the accumulation of centuries of debris.

  The delicate work of going through cracks, crevasses, and other areas where heavy metal had slowly sunk through the loose sea bottom to the hardpan beneath—sometimes many, many feet beneath—was left to divers. One of the divers was presently sifting through sand left in the lee of a clump of coral. With each motion of his hand, sand floated up like a slow, silent echo.

  Holden was familiar with the strange disconnect divers encountered their first few times down. For humans, the water beneath the surface was a slow-motion world, rather like the old videos of men on the moon. Everything seemed to take place with a time delay.

  He remembered that unearthly feeling of diving, an alien ballet that took place when gravity was largely subtracted from the equation. Largely, but not entirely. Heavy objects could still fall and pin unlucky divers, and nobody moved as fast underwater as they could on land.

  Not nearly as fast as the shrapnel from an exploding underwater mine, Holden thought, rubbing his thigh absently. His blood had been a muddy green until he was hauled out of the water and put in a decompression chamber with a doctor in attendance. In the air his blood had been scarlet drying to black.

  From the corner of his eye, Holden watched Kate’s reaction to being in the crowded space belowdecks. She had a faint sheen of sweat on her face, but that could have been due to the minimal ventilation in the room. Her face was calm, her hands still. She looked good. Beautiful, in fact.

  I’m going to have to check very carefully into her background. I wouldn’t be the first investigator caught in the net of a sexy thief.

  The pragmatic part of him hoped she was indeed part of the family scam; it would be so much simpler. But the part of him that sensed she was as honest as she was compelling knew that his life had taken a complex, unexpected turn.

  The diver’s wrist-mounted dive computer’s face flashed as it reflected the spill from the dive lights. The compact lightning drew Holden’s attention. Gray-green sea fronds danced lazily in the twilight, undulating to a rhythm all their own while neoprene-gloved fingers whisked like a clumsy broom over the bottom. The motion made sand lift in lazy curls that bent toward a nozzle off to the right side of the screen. An invisible, man-made current siphoned off the sand as it slowly settled into a low, eerie cloud around the diver’s black-clad hand.

  A big tiger shark swept into view with the ease of a supreme predator. Holden tightened instinctively. So did Kate. Larry scratched his cheek with a total lack of interest.

  The diver ignored the shark.

  As for the dive center operator, he was too busy reaching into a bag of fried pork rinds to react to anything, including the people behind him. From the look of his fleshy neck and cheeks, he spent a lot more time eating than exercising.

  Not a diver, that one, Holden thought. Far too much body fat. I’ve seen bored divers go through thousands of calories, but they burn it off as soon as they get back to work.

  Crunching sounds filled the room as the operator shoved in some more crispy bits.

  “Goddam, Volkert,” came a voice over a loudspeaker. “Sounds like you be eatin’ right in my ear.”

  “It’s bloody boring up here,” Volkert said indifferently.

  “You think it be better here? You say you put me in the right place this time,” the diver said in a long-suffering tone, “but I not be findin’ a shaggin’ thing and the tank be runnin’ on fumes.”

  The diver’s accent was Spanish, but with the lilt of the Caribbean dancing through the words. Then the man added a few more phrases in blistering Spanish.

  Holden looked at Kate.

  Sensing his attention, she gave him a wry smile and said softly, “I was raised around divers. I could swear in three languages and five dialects before I was four. As long as the cursing isn’t directed at me, I don’t really notice it.”

  Holden had worked alongside women in the military who had the same attitude. They were every bit as competent as the men and could be as blunt in their language.

  “Hullo,” came a new voice over a different speaker. “Hullo, Golden Bough.”

  The London accent was unmistakable to Holden.

  “This is Malcolm on board,” the voice said. “Someone pick up, please.”

  Volkert pushed his mouthpiece aside and reached for an intercom handset. “Got you, Malcolm. Go ahead.”

  “Oh, good,” Farnsworth replied, as if having things working was something unexpected and delightful. “I’ve got the latest lot entered and cataloged, ready for our overlords in Britain. Should I expect anything new from down below or am I sitting on my hands for the rest of today?”

  The only British overlord within hearing raised winged black eyebrows.

  “And when is it that the bloody busybody arrives?” Farnsworth continued. “Tomorrow morning?”

  Larry laughed.

  Volkert turned, reacted to his first look at Holden’s startling eyes, and drew the obvious conclusion.

  Holden held out his hand for the unit.

  After a glance at Larry, who was yawning wide enough to swallow a fist, Volkert handed over the com set.

  “Farnsworth, is it?” Holden asked, clipping each word like the well-educated Brit he was. Although he spoke several languages, plus various English dialects—including American English—he found that this particular accent worked best with most English speakers. It radiated upper crust and intimidation. “It seems that your overlords have stolen a march on you. The ‘bloody busybody’ is already present.”

  Air noise filled the connection. Then Farnsworth cleared his throat. “Nothing personal, mate. It was just a bit of a lark. Dives can be boring.”

  “You don’t say. Are there any further notable acquisitions beyond the report that you filed on twenty-three August?” Holden asked.

  “The next report isn’t due until—”

  “That wasn’t my question,” Holden cut in.

  “Yes, of course. I, ah . . .” There was a quick clacking of keys on a computer and some rustling papers. “Just a moment. Hold on. It’s right here.” More rustling.

  Holden imagined the man rummaging about a messy cabin, trying to find the daily dive reports. Apparently Larry wasn’t the only one on the operation who disliked proper filing.

  “Ah, h
ere we are,” Farnsworth said. “Yes. Oh, excellent. Very nice. Silver ingots, marked M23 to M56. That’s 7.65 kilograms, give or take. We won’t know until all the corrosion is cleared.”

  Holden did a quick conversion in his head. “Roughly forty-eight hundred pounds sterling. At today’s silver prices, that is hardly a fortune to dance and shout about, especially considering all the costs on the debit side of this operation’s ledger.”

  “There might be some additional value from the metallurgic or historical perspectives,” Farnsworth pointed out.

  Holden recalled the very succinct orders he had been given. “Do remember that this is the Crown’s silver, and the Crown wants it back in circulation, not lining a museum vault.”

  Kate looked at him sharply. He might have been talking about scrap metal for all the passion or avarice in his voice.

  He isn’t like my parents, captive to the lethal lure of treasure. Or like Larry, in love with the sea itself and treasure just an excuse for doing what he would do anyway.

  Or like Grandpa, driven by the need to prove that his only child’s death wasn’t in vain.

  “Indeed, Mr. Cameron,” Farnsworth said. “Quite correct. Would you care for an accounting of the pottery and porcelain finds?”

  “Intact artifacts?” Holden asked.

  “Ah, no. I would have filed a special report on such a find. Just as I shall for the silver ingots,” he added hastily.

  “By tonight,” Holden said. “Copy to my e-mail, of course.”

  “Of course, sir.” A subdued Farnsworth signed off.

  “So your real job,” Kate said, “is to rummage between couch cushions for loose change.”

  “That is your brother’s job,” Holden said. “Mine is to ensure that all the change makes it to the piggy bank.”

  “Larry wouldn’t—” she began.

  “What the hell?” her brother said over her. “Just because we haven’t found a lot doesn’t mean we’re stealing!”

  “I didn’t even imply that,” Holden replied. “However, since you’ve opened the subject, in the past some people working on contract have found more than has been reported. That will not be happening on my watch.”