Several sharp beeps drew her attention away from the images. She looked around, afraid that someone else might be attacking, and realized that the sound was coming from Simon’s dive watch.
Time to get out of here, she thought. She had to let the regulator slip from her mouth as she slid her arms into Simon’s considerably larger vest. Putting the mechanism back in her mouth, she took another slow, steady breath. She had to stay calm, not breathe too fast.
It occurred to her that she wasn’t entirely sure what she’d find when she did escape this cave. Would Blaine be waiting in his boat to see if she made it out? What about Simon’s pilot? What would she do if there was no boat up there waiting for her?
None of those questions had answers now. She had to keep her focus. The first task was to get out of this cavern and back to the surface.
She looked ahead to the cave opening, then around at the other walls, their surfaces as smooth as glass. What this place was, she had no idea. She did know that if she stayed here much longer looking for the answer, she wouldn’t live to tell anyone.
She took one last look around the domelike cave. About to turn away, she spotted something she hadn’t noticed earlier: a hole, low to the ground on the other side of the cave. Another way out, perhaps. A good thing, given that she didn’t know what Blaine might have left for her on the path they’d used to come in.
Swimming over to the second passage, she got her head down low to shoot her light inside. The dim light didn’t reveal much. She hesitated for a moment, and went in.
This channel was much narrower, barely large enough for her body and tanks. The walls were even smoother than in the first cavern, glassine and iridescent, silky to the touch.
Half a dozen feet in, the tube opened into a small chamber, a circular passageway with three other thin tubes shooting off in different directions. The chamber was big enough for her to kneel and look around.
On the wall behind her, she saw what looked like a shape. While she watched, it seemed to move—a dark blue-black shimmer. Tiny plankton floating in the water gave the shape a hazy, blurry outline, and she guessed that the apparent motion was a result of the light reflecting on the strange surface, like the inside of the shell of an oyster. The image of an oyster reminded her of the strangest aspect of this cavern: there should have been fish and crustaceans making this nice deep-water pocket home, but she saw nothing alive. Nothing at all.
She heard a series of high-pitched beeps. Her own dive watch this time. She looked at the maze of other channels ahead leading to other chambers, other secrets. They might lead to another way out, but she didn’t have time for errors. She would have to leave the way she’d come in.
Swimming as quickly as she could without straining, she passed through the big cavern and into the channel. Not until she had exited the hole into open water did she pause to check her watch and her gauges. She was doing fine. There was plenty of time for a safe ascent if nothing else went wrong.
Following one of the giant Erector-set legs of the platform, she ascended slowly. As she looked up, she noticed something moving on the surface. When the object came to a stop, she managed to focus on it until she made out the shape of a boat. It looked like Blaine’s boat, but why would he have come back?
After another few feet of ascent, she saw the churning foamy bloom of a diver entering the water. She realized that not only was Blaine back, but he was coming down to make sure she was dead. What other reason could there be?
She reached down instinctively for her knife, but this wasn’t the place to fight.
She checked her compass. Tired as she was, the best thing would have been to go straight up, but with a killer coming down to the scene of the crime, that option was blocked. So instead, she started kicking, turning her ascent into a long angle, heading west. If she could make it to one of the other legs before Blaine noticed her, she could use it as cover.
With luck, he would swim by and never know she was around.
Hanging twenty feet below the surface to rest and let her blood gases even out, she wondered if there might be another reason why he had come back.
Not that it mattered. She was just glad he had been courteous enough to bring her a fast boat. Any other concern would have to be left for later, when there was time to think about what had happened and why this artifact was worth the lives of so many people.
Arthur, Keene, Simon, Paul Trujold, all dead. It’s a miracle that McKendry and I aren’t also among the deceased, she thought as, with a few gentle kicks, she propelled herself to the surface.
26
Blaine rolled into the water and started a quick plummet back to the cave opening. He didn’t take the time to consult a tech dive table, but he was sure that two quick ups and downs at such depth had to be bad.
Besides, this was probably a pointless dive. Unless he could find the object Frik wanted so badly—on Simon, or Peta, or still wedged somewhere in the underwater cavern—the dive would only confirm that Peta was dead. And that Simon was dead. After overstepping his authority so badly, he was sure to join the dead soon himself, if the dive didn’t kill him first.
This must be the way an American death row prisoner feels, he thought, hoping against hope for the governor’s eleventh-hour pardon.
His stomach in knots, he approached the cave opening.
A school of annoying yellowfins hovered there, as if they were thinking about going inside to nibble on something tasty. They dispersed like seeds blown from an aquatic dandelion as Blaine approached, only to reform into a loose school a dozen feet away.
Ready to enter, he adjusted his air mixture. If he kept the oxygen as lean as possible, he might avoid getting bent. One of his tanks scraped along a rocky outcrop with a noise far worse than fingernails on a chalkboard.
He kicked onward, passing into the channel where the walls became smooth and finally widened as he neared the main cavern. As he reached that opening, diver’s intuition told him that something was wrong.
He flashed on the shark.
Had it beat the yellowfins in here? he wondered. Was that why the fish had hesitated? If so, the shark wouldn’t take too kindly to being disturbed while dining.
Entering the cavern, he realized that it was not the shark that had given him pause. It was Simon, who, freed from the weight of his BC vest, bobbed near the top of the cavern above the crazed squiggles.
She was a clever girl, that Peta, using Simon’s equipment to save herself. Frikkie would be happy—overjoyed, even—when he heard that she was alive and that he would have a shot at getting the other piece of the artifact.
That might even get Frik off his back, Blaine thought. He turned slowly and kicked his way out of the cave. Sooner or later he would think about whether it was necessary to deal with the fact that Peta knew he had tried to kill her. Not yet. Not unless she was somewhere up there waiting for him. She was a tough cookie, quite capable, he suspected, of exacting her own justice.
When he had ascended far enough to see clearly where the leg of the oil rig broke through the waterline, now only forty feet above him, he discovered her payback. She was not waiting on the surface to kill him after all. Instead, she had taken his boat and left him with no transportation back to shore. It would be one hell of a surface swim back to San Gabriel.
Resting at fifteen feet for another safety stop, he considered his options.
He could get lucky and flag down a passing fishing boat. That was unlikely, though. The few boats that passed the rig would be piloted by superstitious Trinis who would think he was the Obeahman.