by Rachel Lee
He shook his head. “I told you because I wanted you to have something to live for.”
“Well, now I do. It’s all I have. So let me do it.”
“I don’t want you to be disappointed.”
As if anything could ever disappoint her the way Larry had disappointed her. She laughed bitterly and turned her back on her father, effectively ending her conversation with him. If he said anything, she would hear vowels. Just vowels. Unintelligible. If she could even hear him over the roar of the air conditioner.
She was angry with him, and had been ever since he’d told her about the mask. Her mother had died when she was five, and Veronica had grown up with a great big hole in her life. Discovering that her father had concealed her mother’s obsession with the mask from her had infuriated her because it was such an important part of her mother’s life. For twenty-five years he’d painted her mother in a light that was not her mother at all. She felt betrayed and cheated. Even more, she felt he had betrayed her mother, by hiding an essential part of her as if it were something of which he was ashamed.
Worse, she was angry at herself for being angry with her father. It seemed so wrong to be unable to forgive him when he was so close to death. Yet she couldn’t find it in herself to do so. Not after he had steadfastly lied to her all these years.
Sometimes, merely looking at him filled her with an almost uncontainable rage . . . and the rage was always followed by self-loathing.
He touched her arm, causing her to jump, forcing her to look at him.
“Veronica, please. You need to know. Just sit down and listen to me, please.”
She battled down her anger, burying it under the cold lump of lead in her heart, and sat in the chair by the window. It wasn’t a very comfortable chair, but she didn’t care about that. She felt tense, irritated, ready to fly or fight. Over what? The fact that her father wanted to caution her? For every bit of help he’d given her with research over the past months, he’d also given her warnings. She continuously felt as if he were urging her forward with one hand and holding her back with the other.
He took the other chair and faced her, taking her hands in his. The rumble of the air conditioner drowned out his first words, and she had to ask him to repeat himself. She hated that. God, how she hated that. She hated every single reminder of her disability.
“You need to be careful,” he said more clearly. He’d said it a thousand times since she’d undertaken this quest, but he’d never told her why. She was getting sick of the warnings without explanations.
“Why?” she demanded. “You keep saying that, but you never say why.”
“Because sunken treasure is valuable,” he said. “Men will do anything for gold. Because . . . because . . .”
She watched him look away, unsure if he’d said any more than that, if his words had been lost when he turned his head. Before she could ask, he faced her again.
“Honey,” he said, “your mother died under suspicious circumstances.”
“She fell off a boat and drowned!”
“Your mother could swim like a dolphin.”
“She hit her head.”
“Maybe. That’s what the coroner thought. I’m not so sure.” His face tightened, and his eyes darkened. “Just be careful. The artifact’s value is greater than gold.”
Indeed it was. Far greater. Because so few of the golden artworks of the Native American cultures had survived the Spanish plunder. So much had been melted down into gold bars for transport back to Spain, so much had been turned into coinage used to pay the armies of conquest. Very little of the beauty remained. But the mask was even more important because if it were found, it would be the only surviving artifact from a lost culture, a people whose passing had left almost nothing of archaeological value, a people whose culture was known only as a few footnotes in the journal of MesoAmerican conquests. A people without a name.
Veronica was not about to be deterred by vague warnings. “I’ll be safe, Dad. How could I be anything but? It’s kind of hard to sneak up on a boat on the open sea.”
“People don’t have to sneak up at sea, Veronica. They come as bold as you please, because there’s going to be no one around to protect you.”
She shrugged and looked away, letting him know she didn’t want to discuss this anymore.
So he changed the subject, which forced her to look at him again. “What did you think of him?”
“Of whom?” she asked, having missed the first part of what he said.
“Gallagher.”
“Him. Oh.” What did she think of him? She let her gaze wander back to the window, but found the night had grown dark and all she could see was her own reflection in the glass. “I don’t know. Drew was sure about him.”
He touched her hand again, drawing her attention back to him. “Drew’s a fairly good judge of character. How did he know Gallagher, anyway?”
“They went to Harvard together.”
Both of Orin’s bald eyebrows raised. “Harvard? Gallagher’s a Harvard man?”
She nodded. She was getting tired from the effort of talking with her father, tired from the battery of noises coming through her hearing aids. “MBA, apparently.”
Orin said something and shook his head, but she was through listening. Pulling out her hearing aids, she put them back in the container, letting him know that she was done conversing for the evening.
There was one advantage to being deaf, she thought bitterly, even as her own petulance bothered her. She could bail out of a conversation in an instant, and nobody could force her to listen.
But she couldn’t silence her own thoughts. Her father’s question, What did she think of Dugan Gallagher, followed her into the quiet.
What did she think of him? She hadn’t been particularly impressed to find him lazing back in his chair with his feet up on the desk on a business day. On the other hand, she had colleagues who assumed exactly that pose when they were thinking, so maybe she shouldn’t hold it against him.
She hadn’t liked his lack of manners, though, and she found the cluttered mess of his office distasteful. Bottom line, she hadn’t really been impressed with him. She was even less impressed by the thought that someone with a Harvard MBA was wasting himself on a small diving business.
But her friend Drew Hunnecutt, an oceanographer whose idea of a holiday was to dive the reefs off the Florida Keys, had recommended him highly. “His barrel may be a little bent,” Drew had said, “but he’s a straight shooter.”
And a straight shooter was exactly what she needed. She needed someone she could count on to tell her the truth, because there was so much she didn’t know about this whole treasure-hunting business that she could get into serious trouble. She needed someone she could rely on not to steal or conceal their finds. If they made any.
Drew had been a great help to her, studying the ocean currents in the area where Nuestra Señora de Alcantara had probably gone down, and had done some extensive computer modeling of how the wreck might have drifted over nearly three hundred years. He’d targeted a relatively small area of seafloor out toward the Marquesas as the likeliest place for a discovery.
She knew perfectly well his models could be all wrong. She knew she might never find a thing, not even some ballast. She was willing to live with that. What she wasn’t willing to live with was never having tried.
As for Gallagher . . . she could control him. After all, she was paying for him, his boat, and his time. Besides, she trusted Drew, and if Drew thought she could rely on Gallagher, she probably could.
But she had no doubt that it was going to be a bumpy ride.
Night was settling over the mountains of Venezuela. Emilio Zaragosa sat on his patio, awaiting his dinner, and watched his garden turn into shadows and shades of gray. In a little while his wife would call to him, and he would join her in a repast fit for a king.
Emilio lived well. He had grown up the hard way on the streets of Caracas, in the gutters basically. Hungry, half-nake
d, and unwanted, he had learned life’s lessons well. He had learned that if he wanted something, he had to take it. He had learned that the only thing he could rely on was his wits. He had learned a man could never be too wealthy.
And he had learned that it was a man’s responsibility to provide for his family. These days, Emilio Zaragosa had family. A great deal of family. He had six daughters and two sons, four of them married, and seven grandchildren. If Emilio had anything to say about it, not a single one of them would ever go hungry as he had.
So now he was in his fifties, a proud man with the fortune of Croesus, all of it made by dealing in antiquities from all over the world. He had a good business in producing fake artifacts that tourists loved to buy all over Spanish-speaking America, but he also had a healthy and very illegal trade in the priceless relics of ancient civilizations.
Wealthy men were acquisitive, he had discovered, and had a particular taste for forbidden things. He was more than willing to pander to their tastes because they were more than willing to pay generously for their pleasures.
But he had developed a certain acquisitiveness himself over the years. Maybe because he didn’t entirely trust currencies, stocks, or bonds. But the value of ancient artifacts never fell, and as they became increasingly difficult for private hands to obtain, they became increasingly priceless. So he had a collection of his own, a hedge against the ills that could befall a man who put all his eggs in one basket. A hedge against years in which he might not find some new artifact to market.
His caution did well by him. He could have retired at any time and still been sure his children and grandchildren would have been well provided for. But that was not his way. The memory of hunger dogged his heels like a ravening wolf.
So when he heard that a Tampa archaeologist was searching for the lost mask of the Storm Mother, he put his ear to the ground, so to speak. He’d heard of the mask once before in his early days, a rumble on his network of informants. A Tampa archaeologist had been looking for it then, too, and a great many acquisitive people had been bidding for it even though it was unlikely to be found.
But all the furor had interested Emilio in the mask, and he’d looked into what little he could learn about it. And what he had learned had whetted his appetite considerably. How rare indeed it would be to have the sole surviving artifact of an extinct culture. A golden artifact.
He had never been able to learn where the mask might be found, and the Tampa archaeologist had been murdered by one of Emilio’s competitors, who mistakenly thought she had found the mask. But now someone else was searching, and Emilio was never one to overlook a possibility.
He always paid attention to the permits issued by the state of Florida for exploration for ancient wrecks. The contents of those wrecks, after all, were his bread and butter. He had a Florida state employee who kept him advised of all applications and grants, and Emilio made it a habit to check out all of them. Most he discarded as pipe dreams.
But this one was different. This one had given him a gut-clenching thrill when he learned of it. Not just because of the mask.
No. Because the new archaeologist was the daughter of the one who had been killed. Emilio had always suspected there was some knowledge there that wasn’t shared by the world at large. Now he was sure of it.
The letter in his hand confirmed it. Dr. Veronica Coleridge had left for Key West. She believed she knew where the mask was.
And Emilio Zaragosa was going to keep a very close eye on her.
He was just deciding which of his informants to put in place when his wife called him for dinner. When the glass door opened as she stuck her head out, he could hear the laughter of his grandchildren.
The sound hardened his resolve. He would let Veronica Coleridge do the hard work, then he would step in and take what he wanted as he always had. Because those children inside his house were never going to be hungry or homeless.
Not while Emilio Zaragosa lived.
Veronica woke up from a nightmare, and momentarily felt frightened and disoriented. She didn’t recognize the shadows in the room where she slept, and her deafness struck her afresh, offering her no cues to her whereabouts.
Adrenaline coursing through her, she searched frantically for a light, and finally found a small lamp on the night table. As soon as she switched it on, she knew where she was. In the cottage in Key West. The cottage she was renting from a friend of Drew Hunnecutt’s. Her father, she recalled, was sleeping in the loft above.
Throwing back the covers, she climbed out of bed. The air was still and warm, and she imagined the air conditioner must have turned off. Making her way barefoot into the kitchenette, she turned on a light and poured herself a glass of milk. Then, sitting at the bar, she pulled out the papers where she had listed all the things she needed for her exploration.
But she couldn’t concentrate on it, because she was aware of the crushing silence around her. At night there were no sounds to pierce the cocoon of her deafness. There was nothing to orient her in the world, and she might have been adrift in a vacuum.
And that night it was even worse, because in her dream she had been hearing. She had been on a boat on a sunny sea, listening to the waves lap against the side of the vessel. She’d been standing at the bow, watching waves roll toward her, listening to the ceaseless whisper of the water. Listening to the wind hum in the rigging behind her.
Listening to the wind hum in the rigging.
That detail surprised her. Where had her mind drawn that sound from? She had sailed on small boats, with small sails, and she knew the sound of wind in canvas. But this had sounded bigger, much bigger, and her mind had insisted that she was on a large boat sailing swiftly before a strong wind.
But they had been sailing into a dark cloud. A black cloud. As she had stood at the bow, rising and falling on the waves with the sound of wind power behind her, she had watched the black wall of cloud grow larger, darker, denser, until it filled the sky. And with its growth had come the terror that had awakened her, every instinct shrieking for flight.
The dream, she told herself, was the result of all the warnings her father had been giving her, and nothing else. His uneasiness about her quest had begun to make her uneasy.
She forced herself to look at her lists and notes. Underwater metal detectors, the best brand made. A magnetometer, absolutely essential for finding the areas to dive and sweep. Buoys to mark those areas. A Global Positioning System so she could record and return to interesting positions. The list was, to her way of thinking, surprisingly short. But, upon reflection, she realized that the exploration part was relatively uncomplicated. Use the magnetometer to detect iron deposits, dive to check them out, and sweep the immediate area with metal detectors. Simple enough.
The hard part was locating the wreck. Despite what Dugan Gallagher might think, she wasn’t deluded about the difficulty of the search, or about the vast areas that might need to be covered.
Information about where old wrecks had gone down was unreliable at best. Survivors rarely knew the exact position of the vessel at the time it broke up or sank. At best they knew the last measured position—and that might have been taken hours before the disaster occurred, and might well have been inaccurate.
In this case, there had been only two survivors, one of them an infant. The conquistador who had managed to save himself and his child had washed aground on some unnamed island. There he had made a boat to carry himself and the child island to island until he made the mainland of Florida, where he then spent more than a year hiking his way up the coast until he reached St. Augustine. He thought the ship had gone down in the Straits of Florida. But a few things in his description had led Veronica’s mother and now Veronica herself to believe the boat had been seriously off course at the time the hurricane had hit. In fact, Veronica was so sure of it that she was prepared to sink a lot of money into her own theory that the boat had gone down somewhere southeast of the Marquesas.
She had left the conquistador’s o
riginal account, faded ink on parchment, safely locked up in her bank, but she had a translation copy with her, something she had typed up without identifying the source. The document itself was a family heirloom, a treasure she would never risk losing.
Juan Bernal Vasquez y Maria had been an old man at the time he wrote the account, which had passed down to Veronica. She allowed for the fact that he might have misremembered some of the details of his arduous journey with a two-year-old child through the wilds of Florida at a time when mosquitoes and Indians were both deadly threats. He might also have exaggerated greatly. Memory and time had a way of enlarging things.
But what she didn’t doubt was his description of the island where he washed ashore with the child, nor of the length of the journey he took from that island to the next. And while he might indeed have washed up on any of the Keys that ran along the Straits of Florida, she was willing to give Juan Vasquez credit for being able to tell the direction of his travel by the stars.
If the ship had gone down where the legajos her mother had found in the archives in Spain had suggested, then Juan Vazquez couldn’t have traveled as far east as he claimed without being lost in the Atlantic. Her mother, Renata, had believed the legajos were more accurate than Bernal’s account, and had concluded that over the years the conquistador had exaggerated the length of his journey. Veronica believed otherwise. The legajos had no accurate information about what had happened to the ship after it departed port, whereas Bernal had been there. Playing jury, she had decided the eyewitness was probably more reliable than the official records.
Combining his description of his journey with a map, it hadn’t taken all that long for Veronica to conclude that the ship had gone down somewhere between the Marquesas and Key West. Nor was it completely unlikely that the ship had gone so far astray from the Straits, not with the cloud cover that had existed for two days before they were caught in the edge of the hurricane that had caused the ship to founder.
The fact that the ship had foundered, rather than broken up on reefs, added to her conviction that the vessel hadn’t been in the Straits when it went down.
