"No, she's missing at sea. I'm trying to contact her family."
"Sorry. Wish I could be of help. I'll check the records, just to be sure — in case I've had a ministroke that killed the part of the brain that remembers fine bottoms."
"Thanks."
"Good luck, Clay. My best to Quinn."
Clay cringed. It turned out he really wasn't up for bearing bad news. "Will do, Marcus. Good-bye." Clay hung up and resumed staring at the phone. Well, he thought, I knew absolutely nothing about this woman that I thought I knew. Libby Quinn had already called (sobbing) to say that they should have some kind of joint service at the sanctuary for Nate and Amy, and that Clay should speak. What was he going to say about Amy? Dearly beloved, I think we all knew Amy as scientist, a colleague, a friend, a woman who showed up out of nowhere with a completely manufactured history, but I think, because she saved my life, that I came to know her better than anyone here, and I can tell you unequivocally, she was a smart aleck with a cute butt.
Yeah, he'd need to work on that. Damn it, he missed them both.
Clay decided to kill the day by editing video: time-eating busywork that supplied at least an imaginary escape from the real world. The afternoon found him going through the rebreather footage he'd taken on the day the whale had conked him, for the first time going past the point where he was unconscious, just to see if the camera picked up anything usable. Clay let the video run: minutes of blue water, the camera tossing around at the end of the wrist lanyard, then Amy's leg as she comes down to stop his descent. He cranked the audio. Hiss of ambient noise, then the bubbles from Amy's regulator, the slow hiss of his own breathing through the rebreather. As Amy starts to swim to the surface, the camera catches his fins hanging limply against a field of blue, then Amy's fins kicking in and out of the frame. Both their breathing is steady on the audio track.
Clay looked at the time signature of the video. Fifteen minutes when the motion stops. Amy making her first decompression stop. On the audio he hears the chorus of distant singing humpbacks, a boat motor not too far off, and Amy's steady bubbles. Then the bubbles stop.
The camera settles against his thigh and drifts, the lens up, catches light from the surface, then Amy's hand holding on to his buoyancy vest, reading the data off his dive computer. Her regulator is out of her mouth. On the audio there's only his breathing. The camera swings away.
Ten minutes more pass. Clay listens for Amy's breathing to resume. The motion from her hooking into the rescue tank on the rebreather should move the camera, but there's just the same gentle drift. They move up. Clay guesses maybe to seventy-five feet. Amy is doing another decompression stop, doing it by the book, despite the emergency. Except he still can hear only one person breathing.
She pulls him to more shallow depth. The frame lightens up, and the camera swings around, the wide angle showing Clay's unconscious form and Amy kicking, the regulator out of her mouth, looking at the surface. She hasn't used the bail-out tank on Clay's rebreather, and she hasn't taken a breath for, as far as Clay can tell, forty minutes. This can't be right.
He listens, watching until the time signature shows sixty and the tape ends — the entire thing having been dubbed to the hard drive. He rewinds it on-screen, slowing down when the camera shows anything but blue, listening again.
"No fucking way."
Clay backed away from the monitor, watching as the video ran out again and froze on the image of Amy holding him steady at twenty or so feet down, no regulator in her mouth.
He ran out the door, calling, "Kona! Kona!"
The surfer came shuffling out of his bungalow in a cloud of smoke. "Just tracking down navy spies, boss."
"Where did you guys put the rebreather? The day they took me to the hospital?"
"She's in the storage shed."
Clay made a beeline for the bungalow they used to store dive and boat equipment. He waved Kona after him. "Come."
"What?"
"Did you guys refill the oxygen or the bail-out tanks?"
"We just rinsed it and put it in the case."
Clay pulled the big Pelican case off a stack of scuba tanks and popped the latches. The rebreather was snug in the foam padding. Clay wrenched it out onto the wooden floor and turned on the computer that was an integral part of it. He hit buttons on the display console and watched the gray liquid-crystal display cycle through the numbers. The last dive: Downtime had been seventy-five minutes, forty-three seconds. The oxygen cylinder was nearly full. The bail-out air supply was full. Full. It hadn't been touched. Somehow Amy had stayed underwater for an hour without an air supply.
Clay turned to the surfer. "Do you remember anything that Nate showed you about what he was working on? I need details — I know in general." Clay wasn't sure what he was looking for, but this had to mean something, and all he had to fall back on was Nate's research.
The surfer scratched the dreadless side of his head. "Something about the whales singing binary."
"Come show me." Clay stormed through the door and back to the office.
"What you looking for?"
"I don't know. Clues. Mysteries. Meaning."
"You gone lolo, you know?"
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Deep Below, Bernard Stirs
About the time that Nathan Quinn had started to master his nausea in the whale ship's constant motion (four days on board), another force started working on his body. He felt an uneasiness come over him in waves, and for twenty or so seconds he would feel as if he needed to crawl out of his skin. Then it would pass and leave him feeling a little numb for a few seconds, only to start up again.
Poynter and Poe were moving around the small cabin looking at different gobs and bumps of bioluminescence as if they were gleaning some meaning from them, but, try as he might, Nate couldn't figure out what they were monitoring. It would have helped to be able to get out of the seat and take a closer look, but Poynter had ordered him strapped in after he made his first break for the back orifice. He'd nearly made it, too. Had dived at it just like he'd seen the whaley boys do, except that only one arm had gone through, and he ended up stuck to the floor of the whale, his face against the rubbery skin, his hand trailing out in the cold ocean.
"Well, that was phenomenally stupid," said Poynter.
"I think I've dislocated my shoulder," Nate said.
"I should leave you there. Maybe a remora or two will latch on to your hand and teach you a lesson."
"Or a cookie-cutter shark," said Poe. "Nasty bastards." The whaley boys turned in their seats and snickered, bobbing their heads and blowing the occasional raspberry, which could inflict considerable moisture off a four-inch-wide tongue. Evidently Quinn was a cetacean laugh riot. He'd always suspected that, actually.
Poynter got down on his hands and knees and looked Nate in the eye. "While you're down there, I'd like you to think on what might have happened if you'd been successful at launching yourself through that orifice. First, we're at — Skippy, what's the depth?" Skippy chirped and clicked a number of times. "A hundred and fifty feet. Beyond the fact that you'd probably have blown out your eardrums almost immediately, you might think on how you were going to get to the surface on one breath of air. And should you have gotten to the surface, what were you going to do then? We're five hundred miles from the nearest land."
"I hadn't worked out the whole plan," Nate said.
"So, actually, I might be looking at success, right? You just wanted to test the outside water temperature?"
"Sure," said Nate, thinking it might be best to stay agreeable.
"Can you feel your hand?"