He reached out and slid open the bedside drawer and removed a slim volume: Selected Poems of W. H. Auden. Turning the well-thumbed pages, he arrived at the poem titled “In Praise of Limestone.” He did not need to read the poem; he knew it by heart; but still he took a measure of comfort from the printed words.
After a long time of reading and re-reading the poem, he laid the book aside and rose from the bed. Once again he went to the window and breathed in the sea air, and then, tightening the belt of his dressing gown, he put on slippers. He went to his desk, took a spare flash drive out of a drawer, slipped it into his pocket, and quietly left the room.
It was one forty-five: almost two hours into the midnight watch. The ship was quiet, motionless, all but the watch sleeping. He made his way noiselessly down the corridor, up a set of stairs and down another, until he arrived at mission control. It was locked, but he had the key. The room was, as he’d hoped, empty. Going to the central station, he flicked on the main screen, pulled up a series of menus, hit some additional keys. Moments later a video started: the feed from Gideon’s mini sub as it entered the Rolvaag’s hold. He fast-forwarded to the point where the deck plates and pipes were cut away—and the DSV’s headlights illuminated the corpse of the captain. Sally Britton.
He stopped the video, inserted his flash drive into a USB slot, typed in a few commands, then resumed the video as he copied it to the drive.
There it was again: that swirl of blond hair; the body’s arms thrown out as if in surprise; the uniform, still neat and clean despite years in the water. Slowly the face turned to him once again, those sapphire eyes wide open, the lips parted, the neck and throat so real, so white, so life-like…
He abruptly stopped the video. The download was complete and he removed the flash drive and made his way back to his cabin. Lying down again on the bed, he pulled his laptop over, inserted the USB stick containing the video, and replayed it, slower this time, and then again, frame by frame, finally freezing the image as the face turned to the point where the eyes were looking straight into the camera. He stared at it for a very long time.
He was still staring at it when the blood-red light of the rising sun speared through the porthole into his stateroom, signaling the start of another day.
Now he closed the notebook, pulled out the flash drive, and went to the porthole window. He stood there a moment, watching the day rise out of the calm ocean, and then took the flash drive and flung it as far as he could into the deep-blue water, where it made a tiny splash. And then something incredible happened: one of the many seagulls hanging around the ship swooped down and grabbed it from the water before it could sink and flew away with it, growing smaller and smaller until it vanished into the brilliant orange sky.
23
AT EIGHT AM, Gideon knocked on the door to Prothero’s marine acoustics lab with a feeling of foreboding. He had managed little more than an hour or two of sleep the night before—if it could be called sleep.
His instinctual dislike of the sonar engineer had only deepened after the man’s galling comment about the “knight in shining armor”—a comment made all the more offensive by Alex’s death.
“Door’s unlocked,” came the muffled voice within.
Gideon eased it open and was greeted by a wave of electronic heat and a fantastical jumble of electronic gadgetry. There, in the corner, he could see Prothero in a torn T-shirt, hunched over a circuit board with a soldering iron. It was exactly as he imagined the lab would look, a god-awful mess, and Prothero himself was utterly predictable in his shabby T-shirt and disheveled contempt for civility. There was nobody else around; the tall Asian woman who had been at Prothero’s side during the earlier briefing had not yet, apparently, reported in.
He waited while Prothero continued to work.
After a long silence Prothero said, without turning: “Be with you in a sec.”
Gideon looked around, but there was no place to sit. Every chair and table was covered with electronic crap; the very walls were invisible, hidden by racks and shelves of exotic equipment. Even Gideon, who had advanced computer skills, did not recognize some of it, especially the stuff that looked jerry-built. But it was clear enough that much of it—the speakers, microphones, and oscilloscopes—involved acoustics.
Prothero finally gave a loud snort of annoyance, straightened up, put away the soldering iron, and swiveled around on the office chair. He came toward Gideon, still seated, pulling himself along with the heels of his feet, the casters of the old chair creaking.
He came to a halt a foot in front of Gideon. “What is it?” he asked.
“We had an appointment?”
A grunt. “Okay.”
And now Gideon had the distinct feeling Prothero didn’t even recall the appointment.
“I wanted to chat with you about the, ah, last transmission from Alex Lispenard.”
Prothero ran a hand over his limp, longish black hair, combing the greasy strands back with his fingers. He rubbed his neck. He looked like he’d been up all night; but then, he always looked like that.
“Have you managed to figure out the glitch?” Gideon asked.
Prothero rotated his head on his scrawny neck, getting the kinks out. “There is no glitch.”
“Of course there’s a glitch, or some other sort of technical problem. I mean with the timing.”
“Just what I said. No glitch.”
“I saw the mini sub crushed,” said Gideon. “I witnessed it. Then five seconds later, her voice came through the hydrophone. If there was no glitch, then obviously there was some sort of delay in the transmission, some kind of time lag.”
“No delay.”
“Come on. What are you saying?”
“What your hydrophone picked up was a direct acoustic sound coming through the water, at that moment.”
“Impossible.”
A shrug from Prothero; some scratching of his arm.
“So you’re saying a dead person spoke,” Gideon pressed on.
“All I’m saying is, there was no glitch.”
“Jesus Christ, of course there was a glitch!”
“Ignorance combined with vehemence doesn’t make it so.”
Gideon tried to hold down his anger. He took a deep breath. “You’re telling me that Alex spoke when, a, she was dead, and b, she was inside the creature?”
“I haven’t gotten far enough to draw those conclusions. Maybe it wasn’t her speaking at all.”
“It was her. I know her voice. Who else could it have been?”
Another maddening shrug.
“Besides, a person can’t speak underwater anyway. You’re telling me someone was able to speak a sentence clearly through four hundred yards of water? Of course there’s a technical issue here. Whatever she said somehow got stuck in an analog conversion algorithm, or whatever, and took a few seconds to come through to my sub.”
“Hey, Gideon?” Another round of neck rotations. “Why don’t you just get the fuck out of here?”
Trembling with rage, Gideon forced himself not to utter his next, escalating comment. This was getting nowhere—and he realized it was partly his fault. He had come in here with a chip on his shoulder; he was way too emotionally invested in the outcome; and he was letting this jackass get under his skin.