“Was Bouchard as good a diver?”
“He lacked the seasoning, but was a trustworthy professional. We send no one down to work at seven hundred meters without comprehensive training and stringent certification.”
“The day those men were lost,” Nimec said. “What went wrong?”
Gunville drank some scotch, lowered his glass to the table.
“A freak calamity,” he said. “They were troubleshooting for the source of a partial system failure and discovered a fault in the cable, a segment that runs along the bottom of an underwater ridge primarily composed of mud and sediment. We believe the damage had been done by sharks. Soon after they tracked it down, there was the apparent submarine equivalent of an earth slide.”
“Anything like that ever happen before? I mean, without your divers getting hurt?”
Gunville shook his head.
“It is what made the incident so shocking. Had it been a massive collapse, I might have perhaps reconciled myself to their deaths… gotten my mind around it as you Americans say… more easily. When you know someone is in a building that has collapsed, you immediately prepare for the worst. But imagine learning a person has been killed after being struck by a few crumbled bricks or something that has fallen from a construction scaffold. In this case two people. The slide was confined almost to the precise area where Cédric and Marius were working.”
“I wonder what touched it off,” Scull said. He raised his eyes from his soup bowl. “Reports I’ve seen all say the fan’s tectonics are real stable.”
Gunville looked at him.
“That is correct,” he said. “Our best guess is that it was progressive erosion. There are natural interactions that can change the features of the undersea landscape even in salutary conditions. Tidal flows, gravitational effects, storms, scavenging or colonizing creatures. This creates nonconformities. Areas of deterioration that may go undetected, particularly if they are small. Over a long period of time an overhanging portion of the shelf was undermined, fractured, and simply gave.”
Scull grunted. He ran his spoon around the inside of his bowl to clean off the last of the tiébou dienn and put it in his mouth.
“Did you have any seismographs taken afterward?” Nimec said. “Would’ve helped rule out any chance there was a minor quake.”
Gunville shook his head.
“Planétaire Systems saw no reason for it,” he said. “Frankly neither did I. The event was localized. Its causes were apparent from subsequent inspection by divers and ROVs. And we were confident of the seismological data already compiled.” He reached for his drink. “You must also understand my own immediate priority was recovering the bodies of my crewmen.”
“Sure,” Nimec said. “We’re not trying to second guess anybody.”
“Still makes sense to do a comparative geological work up,” Scull said. “With all the offshore rigs popping up in the Ogooué, you want to be sure the drilling hasn’t moved things around, loosened them like people sticking their toes into sand castles.”
Gunville looked at him.
“I agree with your suggestion. If Planétaire hadn’t pulled out of the region, it is likely a new survey would have been conducted by my employers at Nautel. Unfortunately, without their finances…”
“UpLink will get one ordered,” Nimec said.
“Excellent.” Gunville sat quietly a moment, then glanced over at the stage. “I hope you will forgive me, but I must prepare for my next set.” He offered the men a courteous smile. “I’m certain we’ll be talking again over the next several days.”
Nimec nodded.
“You bet,” he said. “We’re very grateful for your time.”
Handshakes around the table, and then Gunville was off across the room.
Nimec saw him move toward the blond at the foot of the stage, dawdle there to speak to her.
“Hot stuff,” Scull said, following his gaze. “If I could sing like him, I’d be picking up broads left and right, too.”
“Don’t remember you having trouble on that score when you were married.”
“Which time?”
“I could probably take my pick.”
Scull shrugged.
“That was all before I lost my boyish good looks,” he said.
They were silent a bit.
“Okay,” Nimec said, and pointed his chin in the direction Gunville had gone. “Give me your impressions.”
Scull pointed to Gunville’s half-full scotch glass. “Didn’t finish his drink.”
“I noticed.”
“Sort of left me feeling he gave us the bum’s rush.”
“Yeah.”
“Meanwhile, he’s over there talking to the blond, plenty of time for her.”
“Yeah.”
Their eyes met.
“Can’t figure what it might be, but I think our fucking crooner Romeo’s got something to hide,” Scull said.
Nimec nodded.
“You and me both,” he said.
Port-Gentil. Headquarters Police Gabonaise. Forty-seven minutes past midnight. His shift long concluded, leaving him drained from overwork and nerves, the normally starch crispness of his officer’s uniform gone as limp as he felt, Commander Bertrand Kilana slouched before a computer screen behind his locked office door.
The air in the room was stale with sweat, ground out cigarette butts, and paper cups of cold, half-drunk coffee. One of the cups on his desk had begun leaking from its bottom, but Kilana had not noticed the spreading brown ring of wetness around it. Nor would he until tomorrow morning, when he returned to the office after too few hours’ sleep. By then the coffee would have partly soaked through a stack of his important case documents and the pages of a favorite investigative reference book, then dribbled down to the floor to leave a dark, permanent stain on his rug. Kilana would find the paper cup empty and curse himself for having neglected to dump it.
On Kilana’s monitor now, a live-streaming Internet surveillance video from the Rio de Gabao Hotel showed two of the Americans under observation exit an elevator that had risen to its luxury suite level and return to their separate rooms.
The commander identified them, tentatively, from his matched listing of UpLink personnel and their suite numbers. This information was stored in his computer’s encrypted database, but for the sake of convenience he’d kept a hardcopy on hand beside his keyboard. According to this printout, the men were Peter Nimec — suite 9—and Vincent Scull — suite 12.
He did not know, or wish to know, where they had been tonight — only that they had left shortly before ten, and stayed out for some three odd hours. He did not know their positions with UpLink, though that information could be easily obtained from departmental sources. He did not even know with absolute certainty why he had been instructed to maintain a constant watch over them.
Kilana kept his eyes on his role in the plot and let its other players worry about theirs. It was what he’d been told to do. It was also what was very much safest for him.
Kilana palmed his mouse, moved the cursor to the toolbar of his Internet Service Provider’s browser and clicked FILE ➞ ARCHIVE ➞ SAVE. When the dialogue box opened to request a file name, Kilana typed in the word hibou, followed by the number twelve.
Hibou is the French word for “owl.”
Now Kilana clicked again, and the hidden camera’s real-time images of the men were stored as a high-resolution, compressed audio/video DivX file on his database. He then took a rewritable DVD from the rack on his desk, slipped it into the computer’s burner drive, and returned to the toolbar.