KURT GLANCED TOWARD THE RESTROOMS, then back at his phone, then back toward the restrooms. He saw the door swing open, read one more line, and stuffed the phone back into his pocket.
He stood and pulled out her chair as she arrived.
“You look so much fresher,” he said, smiling.
“Thank you,” she replied. “Sometimes it’s hard to feel pretty enough.”
Kurt sensed some unintentional truth in what she’d said. He pinned it on a lifetime of competing in a sport that was judged as opposed to one where you scored or you didn’t. Too much subjectivity had a way of making people uncertain of themselves.
“You look stunning,” he said. “In fact, everyone here is wondering why you’re having dinner with a scruffy guy like me.”
She smiled, and Kurt detected a slight blush.
By now the sun had disappeared. They made small talk till the entrées came, and then, after another glass of wine, Kurt decided to reopen the earlier conversation.
“I have a question,” he said. “Why did you dive on that plane alone? You had two sets of tanks on board. Don’t you have a partner?”
“That’s two questions,” she said, again smiling. “I came to Santa Maria with another representative of the government. But he is not part of the Science Directorate. The assignment is my own,” she added. “The tanks came with the boat.”
Kurt guessed that other representative would be a handler of sorts, to watch over her, to keep her both in line and out of trouble.
“Your turn,” he said, taking another bite of the fish.
“I think I might like this game,” she said, then fired away. “You seemed awfully angry when we came up,” she said. “What made you so mad? Was it my violation of your precious ‘exclusivity zone’ or the fact that I never registered in the first place?”
“Neither,” he said. “I don’t like to see people get hurt. You could have been killed down there in that wreck. Another five minutes and you would have been.”
“So Kurt Austin is a man who cares?”
“Absolutely,” he said, offering an intentionally warm smile.
“Is that why you’re in the salvage business?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Any fool can blow up a boat and send it to the bottom,” she said. “But it takes skill and dedication and far greater risks to bring one back up again. I can see you doing it for exactly those reasons: because it’s harder andbecause it’s better. And because you like saving things.”
Kurt had never thought of it quite that way, but there was some truth in what she’d said. The world was full of men destroying things and throwing them away. He took pride in restoring old things instead of tossing them out.
“I suppose I should thank you,” she added. “I’m guessing you dove down to salvage me.”
He hadn’t been sure she was in trouble when he’d gone in the water, but he’d been glad to pull her out alive instead of dead. He considered her motivation for taking such a risk in the first place.
“And you’re a competitor,” he said, taking his turn at amateur analysis.
“It has plusses and minuses,” she said.
“National competitions, world championships, the Olympics,” he said. “You’ve spent your whole life trying to prove to coaches and judges and the audience that you’re worthy of their scores, that you even belong in the arena in the first place. Despite a partially torn ligament, you nearly got the bronze in Torino.”
“I nearly won the gold,” she corrected him. “I fell on the last jump. I finished the program on one foot.”
“As I recall you couldn’t walk for a couple of months afterward,” he said, a fact he’d just read on Joe’s update. “But the point stands. A different skater would have backed down, saved her leg for another day.”
“Sometimes you don’t get another day,” she said.
“Is that what drove you on?”
She pursed her lips, studying him and twirling her fork in her angel-hair pasta. Finally, she spoke. “I wasn’t supposed to medal,” she said. “They almost gave my spot to another skater. Most likely, I would never get another shot.”
“You had something to prove,” he replied.
She nodded.
“And this whole thing — an assignment outside your laboratory — I’m guessing this is new to you,” he said. “You must have people back home to impress, maybe you feel you have something to prove to them. Or you might not get another shot.”
“Maybe,” she admitted.
“Nothing wrong with that,” he said. “We all want our bosses to be impressed. But there are places on this earth where you don’t take chances. The inside of a wrecked aircraft a hundred forty feet below the surface is one of them.”
“Haven’t you ever wanted to show someone they were wrong about you?”
Kurt paused, and then spoke a half-truth. “I try not to worry about what other people think about me.”
“So you have no one to prove anything to?” she asked.
“I didn’t say that,” he replied.
“So there is someone,” she said. “Tell me who. Is it a woman? Is there a Mrs. Austin, or future Mrs. Austin, waiting for you back home?”
Kurt shook his head. “I wouldn’t be here if there was.”
“So who is it?”
Kurt chuckled. The conversation had certainly turned. “Tell me the secret you’re holding, and I’ll give you the answer.”
She looked disappointed again. “I suppose dinner ends as soon as I give you that?”
Kurt didn’t want it to end, but then again… “Depends on the secret,” he said.
She picked up her fork as if she could stall him just a little longer and then she put it down dejectedly.
“Yesterday you rescued a French diver,” she said.
“That’s right,” he said. “The guy had a hundred pounds of weight on his belt. Where you were reckless, he was just an idiot.”
“Maybe not,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“It was a setup,” she said. “While you and your partner were pulling him out of the water, another member of the French team was drilling a four-foot core sample out of the side of that rock. They’ve been bragging about it already.”
Kurt felt an instant burst of anger. He exhaled sharply and then grabbed his napkin and threw it on the table.
“You were right,” he said. “Time to go.”
“Damn,” she said.
He stood, left a handful of bills on the table, and took her by the hand. They headed for the exit.
“But what about your secret?” she said.
“Later,” he said.
With Katarina in tow, Kurt pushed the door open and stepped through. Something moved in the shadows. An object swung toward him from the right. He tensed himself in the instant he had, and then a bat or a club or a pipe of some kind slammed him in the gut.
Despite his strength, the blow jarred Kurt and knocked the wind out of him. He doubled over and crumpled to his knees.
22
PAUL AND GAMAY were rising fast in the Grouper. With all the ballast dumped on the bottom of the ocean, the sub’s nose pointed upward, and, the electric motor churning at full power, they rose at nearly three hundred feet a minute.
As the depth decreased, the pressure decreased. But twenty minutes into the climb they were still ten thousand feet below the surface, and the steady flow of water was increasing.
“The weakest part of the hull is the flange,” Paul shouted, noticing that the water was flowing in where the two sections of the submarine had been joined together like lengths of pipe.
“We have clamps, we can help seal it,” Gamay shouted back.
Paul reached over to the wall and tore down a Velcro-latched covering. Behind it was a set of tools that the sub’s designers thought might be useful to its occupants. Included in that package were four clamps. Large, sturdy, and designed to fit the particulars of the Grouper, they were not that much different from a standard screw clamp that one might have on a workbench at home except they worked on a ratchet system like a jack used to lift up a car. Apparently, whoever had designed the boat realized the flange between the two halves of the sub was the weakest part.