“And when Stevie gets here, he’ll want a little space.”
“Stevie Wonder?”
“No.” Simon lowered his voice further. “Spielberg.”
“Ohmygod!” Her pale blue eyes widened as her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh! My! God!”
“Shhh!” he whispered, glancing around again and taking the pen and napkin from her. “Mum’s the word.” He scribbled something that might pass for “Brian Keith” on the napkin and passed it back to her. “Here. Write your name and number on the corner there and I’ll give you a call when I get back in a couple of days.”
“Sure.” Her hand trembled as she wrote. She tore off the corner and handed it to him. “Really. Call me.”
He glanced at the scrap, then gave her a lopsided grin. “Will do, Lori. Talk to you soon.”
At the end of the dock he found Frik waiting by an idling dark green Hummer. “Who was that?”
“Just another of my many fans.” He feigned astonishment as Frik slipped behind the wheel. “What? No driver?”
“Like with my boats, I prefer to drive my own cars,” Frik said. “And besides, with no extra set of ears around, we can talk.”
“Can it wait? I’m not in the mood for talk right now.” The potent Bloodies had relaxed him into a deliciously dreamy haze.
The Afrikaner nodded, and Simon leaned back into his seat to watch Port of Spain’s squares, parks, and surreal mix of Catholic churches, Muslim mosques, and Hindu and Jewish temples slip past the window. By the time they drove into the wooded uplands, he had tugged his cap down over his eyes and leaned back in the seat for a little siesta.
He awakened with a start as a loud thump was followed by Frik’s shouted curses and the feel of the seat belt cinching across his chest. The Humvee jerked to a stop.
“Goddamn bastards!”
Simon straightened himself and looked around. They were on the outskirts of a little village. The reason for the sudden braking was splattered all over the hood and windshield. At first he thought they’d hit a small animal, but he soon realized what the yellow-orange pulp dotted with black BB-sized seeds really was. Someone had pelted them with an overripe papaya.
The Hummer’s heavy-duty wipers and windshield washers made quick work of the mess, and soon they were on their way again. As they roared through the village, Simon noticed an occasional raised fist and more than a few angry looks.
“I take it that piece of fruit didn’t drop from a tree.”
“Superstitious Trini clods,” Frik said, eyes straight ahead.
“May I also assume it’s not Humvees they’re superstitious about?”
“It’s the drill site. They’ve got some local legends about the Dragon’s Mouth. They think drilling into the bottom there will offend the Obeahman and bring bad luck to the island.”
Simon nodded. His years in the Caribbean had taught him a little about Obeah, though it was a much less well-known superstition than voodoo or Santeria. An Obeahman was a kind of sorcerer or shaman who controlled spirits which he could put into objects, like fetishes, and make them do his will.
Simon’s one memorable encounter with an Obeahman was on Jamaica, where a buddy had almost hit one of them walking along the side of the road. The man threw something, which hit the car, and a moment later the engine sputtered and died. No matter what his friend did, the car wouldn’t start. He had a mechanic tear the damn thing apart and put it back together like new, but it still wouldn’t work. Finally, he tracked down the Obeahman and gave him two dozen chickens as penance. After that, the car never so much as backfired.
“Did you know this beforehand?”
“Of course.”
“But you went ahead and drilled anyway.”
“This is the twenty-first century, Simon. About time they moved into at least the twentieth, don’t you think?”
“And you’re going to move them?”
“My civic duty.”
Simon smiled and shook his head. Typical Frikkie logic. If he wanted something, he could always find a rationale for why he should have it. The rest of the picture was coming into focus.
“So that’s why you need me: the local boys say no way, José.”
“I could find somebody,” Frik said. “Haven’t met a superstition yet that’s proof against the right amount of cold hard cash. But I need someone comfortable in deep water. And most of all I need someone I can trust implicitly.”
Simon appreciated the last remark, but he was more interested in the one before it.
“How deep?”
“Not sure. The drill broke into the cavern about seventy feet below the floor, and the floor is an average of one hundred and twenty feet down.”
Simon nodded. That meant an operating depth of two hundred or more, at over eight atmospheres of pressure—just the kind of dive the docs had warned him against. But what did they know? They weren’t divers. He’d done it before.
“I’ll need mixed gases, a tri-mix.”
Frik glanced at him. “What’s that?”
“A deep-diving nitrox mix that lowers your oxygen for the bottom time, and raises the other gases. You have to know what you’re doing, lowering one gas, raising the other. You couldn’t breathe that mix at the surface…. It would kill you.”
“I’ll have all the tanks you’ll ever need waiting on the platform.”
Frik turned off the road and stopped before a heavy wrought-iron gate with “Oilstar” arching above it. The guard waved from his narrow kiosk as the gates swung open, and they were on the move again. He swerved the vehicle to a stop before a row of low white stucco buildings, and led Simon into the first.
After rattling off a string of orders to a male secretary—one of them arranging for tri-mix at the drill site—he motioned Simon around behind his large mahogany desk. A few taps on his keyboard popped an array of thumbnail photos onto his computer screen.
“These are scans and three-D models of the artifacts,” Frik said, clicking on each to enlarge them.
Four objects filled the screen in succession, each more bizarre than the last. The final scan showed all four locked together into some weird-looking shape. Frik hit a key, and the shape began to rotate in three dimensions. Simon didn’t know much about art, but this looked like something Picasso might have pieced together. Or Dali.
“Why scans? Where’s the real thing?”
“The one piece I have of it is under guard.”
“It’s that valuable?”
Frik shrugged. “Not sure yet. I won’t know until I have all five pieces and fit them together.”
“And the fifth is somewhere in an undersea cavern.” He shook his head. “Christ, why don’t you fly me to the Chesapeake and ask me to find one particular oyster.”
“Oh, come now,” Frik said, grinning. “It’s not that bad. This will be a piece of cake for someone like you.”
Simon stared at the rotating assemblage. Something about each piece had bothered him, but the aggregate was even worse. He had a feeling that finding the final piece might not be such a good thing.
15
Simon checked his depth gauge: the arrow lay just a hair to the far side of the 130 mark. Even at this depth he was comfortable in a 1.5-mm dive skin.
He looked around. The light level was decent, typical for this depth, though the true colors of the fish and coral were washed out. Sunlight’s spectrum got pretty well bleached out after struggling through 130 feet of water.
He’d hoped he’d be diving the cavern through the bore hole, much like descending the limestone cenotes in the waters of the Yucatán, but the hole was too small and there was no hope of widening it any further. So he went hunting for the natural entrance to the cavern. He found it, a dark, narrow, anemone-fringed opening in the wall of a rift in the continental shelf. The wall was encrusted with sponges, guzzling the fringe of the Guyana Current as it swept nutrients up from Venezuela’s Orinoco River.