Buried At Sea

by Paul Garrison

  The shift of light had awakened him. Or the change in wave action as the swells, which had been rolling from the left, were hitting the bow head-on. The boat had turned toward the south.

  He went to the wheel to figure out why the auto-helm had gone wrong.

  "Morning, sleepyhead."

  JIM WHIRLED TO the voice behind him. And there on the cabin roof, leaning on the boom, was Will Spark, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt that the hot wind molded to a body as wasted as a scarecrow's.

  "Jesus, Will. You scared the hell out of me. How'd you get up here?"

  Will looked as if his flesh had been liposuctioned from his frame. His skin hung in wrinkled, empty folds and stretched tightly only where his bones poked it. It was a miracle that he was standing, much less adjusting the yang that held down the boom—releasing it, Jim noted, so that the sail bellied rounder.

  Will's voice was thin, reedy from disuse. "They used to hang people who slept on watch."

  "Are you okay?"

  "Hungry. Shaky. Weak. My head's swimming. And I still can't catch my breath—feels like a collapsed lung-but pretty good otherwise. How about you?"

  "You've been out for five days. I got a little water into you. I couldn't get you to eat."

  "The IV helped; thanks. Made a mess of my arm, though. Look at these bruises."

  The skin was black where Jim had made repeated attempts to insert the needle. "Well, I'

  m glad you're up," he said. "I was going to do another today and I wasn't looking forward to it."

  "Neither was I. My arm feels like you were using it for fencing practice."

  "How's the shoulder?"

  Will's face clouded, and he gave up trying to sound casual. "I don't know. Something's going on in there that I don't like. Damned infection, or something."

  "I couldn't get you to swallow the penicillin."

  "Yeah, well, I'll be swallowing doubles now."

  "Does it hurt?"

  "More than it should. That's why I think it's infected. . . . Listen, now that you're finally awake, give me a hand shifting the jib car." He pointed at the pulley attached to a rail embedded in the deck; the angle of the sheet that controlled the jib could be adjusted by sliding it forward or aft. "It's too far forward."

  "The sail's been pulling fine for three days," Jim

  protested, suddenly proprietary about the cut of Hustle's jib. "The car's too far forward for running downwind. Your

  jib's too flat."

  "Yeah, well, that's because the auto-helm lost the course. When I bring her back on course she'll be fine." Jim turned to the helm. "And we'll want to tighten that yang again, too."

  "Leave it," said Will. "She's on course."

  "She is not. The course is west. She's veered south thirty degrees."

  "West-southwest is the course."

  "What do you mean?"

  "She's on course."

  "For where?"

  "Buenos Aires:'

  "What!"

  "Buenos Aires. Argentina?'

  "No. We're going to Florida. Soon as we round Cape Palmas, we're cutting up to the Cape Verde Islands Strait and across the North Atlantic to Florida."

  "We are not 'rounding' Cape Palmas. We are bearing away from Cape Palmas, on a course two hundred and ten degrees west-southwest across the South Atlantic to Buenos Aires."

  Dumbfounded, Jim asked, "Why?"

  "Because it's my boat?'

  Jim stared a moment longer in disbelief. "No," he said finally. "Not good enough. Right now, for all practical purposes, this is our boat?'

  "I can see that playing captain has given you some delusions, young fellow."

  "You got in trouble, which put me in trouble, too. This boat is our ticket out of Africa—away from that girl you shot—and this boat is going to Florida, where I'm getting off on safe American territory and flying home."

  Will blinked. He looked surprised by Jim's sudden determination. And he looked, Jim noted with no little pride, like he believed him. Indeed, instead of arguing further, Will retorted in a grave voice, "If you make me sail to Florida, I'm a dead man?'

  "I don't care. Get this, Will. Get it straight: we're sailing to Florida. And this time, if anybody bashes anybody's head in with a winch handle while they're sleeping, it will be me killing a defenseless wounded sick old man. And throwing his fucking body overboard. And telling anyone who asks that you jumped off one night when I was sleeping."

  "You have a short memory for the things I've done for you. Who pulled you out of the drink? I saved your life, Jim."

  "I've got a much longer memory for the trouble you've got me into."

  "Please, Jim. I am a dead man in Florida. I'm dead almost anywhere. But I've got friends in Buenos Aires." "You had friends in Nigeria. Loved them."

  "You don't understand. You just don't—"

  "That's right. I don't understand. What could I understand? I have no facts. I don't know what's going on with you. All I know is I'm going home, on this boat, straight to Florida."

  "Believe me, Jim. If I go to Florida, I'm dead."

  "Spill it, Will. What the hell are you mixed up in?" "You don't want to know."

  "You know something," Jim retorted. "You're right. I don't want to know. I know all I have to know. I know I'm sailing to Florida."

  He stepped onto the cabin roof and took Will's arm. It was frightening how frail he was.

  His bones were like sticks in his skin. "Come on, Will. Let me get you into bed."

  Will pulled away feebly and Jim let go, afraid of injuring him if he held too tight. Will climbed, wincing, sucking air, down into the cockpit and unsteadily walked the several feet back to the helm. He stood behind the wheel, which was moving in the ghostly hand of the auto-helm, and braced himself with a grip on the wooden handrail that formed an arch over the compass. He squinted at Jim as if Jim were a distant obstruction, poorly lit, that the Sailing Directions had warned him to watch carefully and steer around.

  "Do you remember what I told you about moletronics?" "I remember a bunch of techno-bullshit I could have read in the New York limes or the Economist."

  Will didn't blink. If he got the allusion to his carefully rehearsed high-tech show, he didn't care. "What I didn't tell you about were my partners."

  Jim almost asked, "Were their names Lloyd and Val McVay?" But he thought he had a better chance of keeping abreast, if not ahead, of Will's machinations if Will did not know that he had access to his computer files. "Partners? I don't want to know about your partners. I don't care about your partners. Come on, let's go below. Get some food in you and some water. A little soup?"

  Will started to cough. He let go of the rail, muttered, "Wait a moment," then pressed his hand to his mouth to contain the cough. Jim felt his own body brace, imagining the spears of pain that a racking cough would send tearing through Will's wound. Dead pale already, the old man's face turned as white as the sails. He pointed feebly at Jim's water bottle.

  Jim thrust it toward him. Will dropped it. Jim scooped it

  off the cockpit sole, opened the nipple, and gently squirted some water between Will's lips. Will swallowed, moaned, and sagged to the cockpit bench, bent over like a half-empty laundry sack.

  "Whew . . . Sorry. I can't breathe. . . . I'm trying to say—"

  "Drink more water."

  "Right. Thanks."

  Jim watched Will fumble the bottle to his mouth. "Let me help you below. You've got to lie down in your bunk and sleep. And you have to eat something. I'll bring you some soup."

  "In a minute. Just hang on a minute. . . . Look, I'll admit that I've been less than truthful with you, Jim."

  "About little things like your name being Will Spark instead of Billy Cole?"

  Will blinked. "Where'd you learn that?"

  Jim had blurted more than he had intended to. Keep it simple. Keep it simple. He said, "I broke into your desk." "You broke into—"

  "I should have done it sooner. You would have:'

  Will nod
ded. "Okay. I understand. Don't worry about it." "I found your watch? 'For Billy Cole'?"

  "Oh, that." He shrugged. "It was not so much lying as just trying to keep it simple. Trust me, it doesn't mean anything."

  "So what's your name?'

  "Will Spark—do you recall Sentinel? My microprocessor?"

  "Sentinel. Faster than a speeding bullet, years ahead of the competition. The one that's going to put all the chip factories out of business so they're going to kill you."

  "Yes, it will put them out of business. But no, that's not who's going to kill me. You were right, of course. Legitimate businessmen aren't going to kill me. It's my business partners. My former partners. They want to kill me."

  Jim sighed. "If I listen to this, will you promise you'll go below and rest?"

  "Shut up and listen," Will shot back fiercely. "listen!

  There is a powerful foundation that believes I possess the prototype of a superminiature, ultrafast microprocessor."

  "The McVay Foundation for Humane Science. I know. I read your file."

  "They're the 'they.' What do you know about molecular diagnosis?"

  "Only what I read in the New York Times and the Economist."

  "Such speed on such a tiny scale—coupled with the Internet—offers a total revolution in medicine. A watchman of the body—which is why I named it Sentinel. Goddamned Sony already had Watchman. . ."

  He stared at Jim. Jim, intrigued by the Sony aside, gave up for the moment on getting Will back in his bunk. "How?"

  "Sentinel offers medicine's Holy Grail. Diagnostic sensors small enough to sail the human bloodstream."

  "I rented the video. Fantastic Voyage."

  "This is real! It's a diagnostician's wet dream. With Sentinel, a doctor—doctor, hell, a minimum-wage technician—can inject you with a molecular microprocessor that will cruise through your entire body and check it out for the earliest signs of anything wrong.

  Anything. The first cancer cell. The earliest chemical imbalance. The initial bulge of a stroke, the microscopic narrowing of an artery. Okay?"

  "Okay," said Jim.

  "Twice a year. Even once a month. It runs through you, reporting and cross-checking any problems against every data bank in the world via the Internet. Say you've got a parasite and there's one case of it in Africa—Sentinel's search engine makes the match. You've got an aneurysm forming in your brain—the software pinpoints exactly where. You've had a stroke—it shows what's got to be rewired. No problems? See you next month. Ten dollars, please. Okay?"

  "Okay."

  "I should have realized it. But I was so stupid—so anxious to swing a deal—that I didn't see it coming. . . . "See what coming?" asked Jim.

  "You know, greed will make even the smartest man stupid. It never occurred to me until it was too late that what the

  McVays really wanted was to use my breakthrough to destroy the entire medical establishment: doctors, hospitals,

  HMOs, insurance companies." "why?"

  Y•

  "So they could build a new system and put themselves in the middle of it."

  "But wasn't that your goal?"

  "No. I wasn't thinking on such a cosmic scale. I just saw Sentinel as a major discovery that could make me very rich. Nor did it occur to me until after the several outfits I was underwriting had produced the various hardware and software components of a Sentinel prototype that my partners would

  have to kill me."

  "why?"

  "I would be the one man who could blow their cover. They had to kill me to silence me."

  "That doesn't make sense. You must have done something else."

  Will stared at him.

  Jim stared back. There was a pattern to Will's e-mails that had led to his exultant "

  Jackpot!"

  "Would it be safe to say," he asked, "that the thing you were trying to get money for succeeded in a much bigger way than you thought it would? And maybe you switched from trying to rip them off in a small way to ripping them off in a big way?"

  Will laughed.

  "What's so funny?"

  "Not funny. I'm very impressed. You've been listening." For a long moment he regarded Jim with genuine pleasure. Then he dropped his eyes. "You're right. Of course I did."

  "What?" For the first time, Jim thought he was going to hear the truth.

  "I kept Sentinel for myself. I'm going to bring it to market myself."

  "You cheated your partners."

  "Before they could cheat me—I would have been lucky to see one percent out of it."

  "So you stole it."

  "Call it what you will. I was walking dead, Jim. The McVays wrote the book on ruthless."

  "You wrote the book on larcenous."

  "I don't kill people."

  "They're not killers, they're scientists?'

  "Where'd you get that idea?"

  "You had the foundation's annual report in your files?'

  Will rolled his eyes at Jim's naiveté. "Lloyd McVay is ex-CIA. His old man got rich bribing congressmen. He got richer bribing senators and generals, not to mention tin-pot dictators all around the world. They made their fortunes selling weapons. You sell weapons by bribing the buyers and destroying your competitors."

  "I read they were high-tech."

  "High-tech weapons. They know the military-industrial complex inside and out. They are the military-industrial complex. Or were. They know where the money is and where the bodies are buried. And when they shifted into consumer technology they bribed their computers into half the schools in the nation."

  "But now all they have is a nonprofit foundation?'

  Will turned red in the face. "It's a goddamned tax-dodge front for stealing new technology from gullible fools like me. Lloyd McVay is a poetry-quoting, Ivy League, white-shoe thug."

  "You really don't like him."

  "Not at all. He represents the worst of the unearned-privileged class."

  "What about his daughter?"

  "Val?" Will ran his hand through his hair. "Val's a somewhat different case. I sort of liked her, actually. She used to be a sailor—big time. Raced in the Southern Ocean. We talked boats at first. . . . Strange woman, pale as a vampire, smart as hell—Jesus, was she smart—smarter than the old man. I could never figure out how she could stand being under the thumb of that manipulative old bastard. . . . But Val's complex . . . full of contrasts—shy, arrogant, utterly sure of herself. And like all sailors ashore, you can sense that nagging in the back of her soul. Wondering."

  "Wondering what?"

  "Why aren't I out there, sailing under the Milky Way?' "Did you make it with her?"

  "That's not a gentleman's question, Jim."

  "Forgive me if I don't apologize, sir. I was hoping in my crude, ill-mannered way that we might have a friend in that `powerful foundation' that's trying to kill us."

  Will answered him seriously. "I suspect that Val is as vicious as her father. The difference is that old Lloyd is vicious for the fun of it—the power trip; he likes to feel superior. Val knows she's superior. She would be vicious just to get the job done."

  "A thuggette?" Jim asked with a smile.

  "No joke, Jim. Those two took a very public shellacking in the Internet market. They lost money, they lost status, they lost the kind of New Economy power—the billions—that had vaulted them above everyone, even the government. They were slapped back down to the level of 'old money.' These days, 'old money' has to scramble like the rest of us to hold on to it. The McVays will do anything to claw their way back on top.

  "Thanks to me they are homing in like cruise missiles on the biggest, richest prize in the world. Three trillion dollars a year. That's how much Americans and Europeans alone spend on health care.

  "Lloyd and Val McVay will kill for the power of Sentinel. And the glory, too. Starting with the Nobel Prize for Medicine. They've hired the worse gangster scum you could imagine to do their dirty work. And the smartest. That's who's hunting me."

  Will
placed a trembling hand on Hustle's helm. Jim let him steer. The old man was about to collapse and the few miles he might eke out of his fantasy course wouldn't matter.

  SHANNON RILEY FOUND Billy Cole through the Connecticut State Interlibrary Nexis newspaper connection. But when the headline first leaped off the screen, Shannon got confused. It seemed like another World Wide Web wiggle where oblivious computers tossed out weird links to Yeats and William Tell.

  "CanCure.com Medical Stock Fraud Will Spark Aggressive Prosecution" read the headline.

  But she was searching for Billy Cole.

  Then it hit her. Could this headline have given him a joke idea for a new name? Very funny. But when she read the article it was clear that he had needed one. Billy Cole's CanCure.com rip-off had taken Seattle investors for millions.

  As Jim had known it would, the effort to steer the big sloop proved exhausting. Will soon slumped to the cockpit bench and let the auto-helm do the work. But he refused to go below. Jim brought him some soup and saltines, which he devoured hungrily.

  That should put him to sleep, Jim figured, at which point he would return Hustle to her proper course. But Will started

  talking again. "I had to stall finishing Sentinel until I could get away from the McVays."

  "If they're that ruthless and that smart, how'd you get away?"

  "I got lucky." Will dipped his good shoulder in a weary shrug.

  "Their hitter—the chief of security, a fixer named Andrew Nickels—was a really twisted hypochondriac. I got to know him pretty well—drinking together—and learned he was a total nutcase, afraid he'd catch germs by shaking hands, like Howard Hughes.

  With an extremely paranoid imagination. But a truly cruel bastard. He gives me a deadline to turn over Sentinel and he tells me to have another drink. And while we're drinking, he flips on a video he had made of one of his victims being tortured."

  "Tortured?"

  "With electricity. Hooked electrodes to this poor guy's sensitive parts. Top-quality video, crisp picture, professional sound. The guy was screaming for mercy. It went on forever.

  . . . Near the end, he was just begging to be killed."