Penny Glenn only slept for four-and-a-half hours, and then not very well. When she awoke, and decided she wasn’t going to get back to sleep, she lay in sheets tangled by her restlessness and listened to the muted thrum of the diesel engines. The slight pitching of the yacht told her that the seas had gotten heavier during the night.
Two things bothered her and kept her from the sleep she had promised herself to make up.
First, there was Dane Brande. She had been completely surprised by her visceral reaction to him. As soon as she had stepped on the deck of the research vessel and seen him, deep inside, her stomach had begun doing flip-flops. She couldn’t remember a time in her recent history when she had been so nervous. She was sure her agitation was apparent to everyone, especially to Kaylene Thomas who acted as if she had some claim on him.
Glenn had had a number of minor infatuations in the past, always with a partner that she felt she could control, and always short-lived. Her affairs had each ended, she knew, less because of her need to dominate than as a result of her focus on her career and her goals. Social and personal diversions, she didn’t need.
But her initial reaction was that Brande could be different. First of all, she knew from her first meeting with him that he was an independent. He wasn’t the kind to be intimidated by her money or her status, if he was even entirely aware of either. That made him the kind of challenge she relished. Secondly, some instinct told her that, with Brande, she might actually lose focus for hours at a time. Years had gone by without her once losing sight of where she was going.
Sitting in that booth in the Orion’s wardroom with him, it had been difficult for her to concentrate. In one dimension of her mind, their conversation had lasted hours. In another, it had been milliseconds.
She intended to meet him again and spend more than milliseconds with him. No matter what claim the Thomas woman thought she had. Like the manganese, this was a lode worth pursuing.
Conversely, there was the other bothersome aspect that had disturbed her sleep.
She threw the covers off, slipped her legs over the edge of the bed and stood up. Rummaging through her closet, she selected jeans, a black pullover, and fleece-lined, rubber-soled half-boots. Judging by the movement of the yacht, the coming day wasn’t going to be tropical.
Glenn climbed the short companionway to the salon. The lights were on, and Darryl Metcalf was already at work, picking up magazines and dusting the teak coffee and end tables belonging to the twin sofas.
He looked up at her. “Did I wake you?”
“No. I’ve got work to do.”
“You want some breakfast.”
“Sure do, Darryl. Scrambled eggs and toast. And lots of coffee.”
“Coming up.”
He went to the galley, and Glenn crossed the deep carpet to the navigator’s desk built into the salon’s aft bulkhead. She sat in the pale brown leather chair and selected the third handset hanging on the wall. It was labeled “SECURE,” and the circuitry included an encryption device that scrambled voices before transmitting them over the satellite communications network.
The top officers of AquaGeo did not have individual telephone numbers for their cars, boats, offices, or homes. Each person was assigned a separate, single number, and the computers in the Sydney offices hunted for the person attached to the number.
She keyed in the number for Paul Deride and waited almost two minutes before he was located. A blinking light on the wall panel told her that he didn’t have a scrambled phone available, and she switched the encryption circuit out.
“Deride,” he said.
“Uncle Paul, where are you.”
“Washington, D.C. I’m at the Mayflower Hotel.”
“You know Dane Brande, right?” He had leased some search robots from MVU, but she wasn’t certain whether or not he had ever met Brande.
“I do,” Deride said. “I’m buying a heavy-lift robot from him.”
“Funny he didn’t mention it.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I met him last night.”
“You did? Where?”
She told him about chasing down the research ship and going aboard.
“That’s a bloody odd place to run into him.”
“That’s why I’m calling. He said they’re working on a government contract.”
“In those waters, at this time of year?”
“He didn’t say exactly where they were going, but that was my thought, too, Uncle Paul. It would have to be an important contract to initiate an exploration project at this time of year.”
“What was their heading?”
“I’d guess it at around two-eight-zero degrees. It was almost due west.”
“You don’t suppose your activities have aroused any interest?” he asked.
She knew he was being circumspect because of the unsecured channel.
“I shouldn’t think so, not in any way that would alarm anyone. The United States government wouldn’t add to its deficit by chasing down speculative rumors,” she said.
“The taxpayers are worried about the deficit; the bureaucrats are not.”
“Oh, damn. I suppose I’d better go back.”
“That’s probably a good idea, Penny.”
The research vessel was holding position in five-foot seas with the autopilot linked into the NavStar Global Positioning system. At least three of the eighteen satellites in the system were feeding data to the navigational computers on board, telling them precisely where she was located on the surface of the earth. Within a few feet, anyway.
The autopilot continually compared the coordinates it was programmed to maintain with the information transmitted by NavStar and made adjustments accordingly. To the uninitiated, it was often disconcerting to hear the diesel engines rev up and ebb apparently on their own as they directed power to the cycloidal propellers deployed beneath the twin hulls.
The sun had risen bright with the dawn, but within the hour, Brande expected it to be blurred by an increasing overcast. The slow front moving in on them from the northwest appeared unfriendly.
By seven-thirty in the morning, the center of activity aboard the ship had focused on DepthFinder. Following checklists compiled by Brande and Dokey, the people assigned to deployment activities had powered up the submersible’s systems and run them through diagnostic checks. The checklists were followed religiously; no step in the process, any of which could affect safety, would be inadvertently omitted.
DepthFinder had been declared operational at eight-twenty and the assigned crew members had retired to their cabins to suit up. Brande dug into the drawers under the bunk for his subsurface wardrobe. He pulled on woolen long johns first, and then topped them with the blue jumpsuit with the yellow MVU logo over the breast pocket. After donning two pairs of wool socks, he slipped his feet into soft-soled running shoes. Over the jumpsuit, he wore one of Dokey’s custom sweatshirts — this one proclaiming the formation of a working shark’s union. The logo was that of a Great White with a crunched boat called the Orca in its teeth. He found two sweaters and a pair of gloves to add insulation as the depth increased.
It got cold down there.
He had just folded the spare sweaters when Thomas opened the door, slipped into the cabin, and then closed the door and leaned against it.
“Be careful,” she said.
“You know me.”
“Redundancy is acceptable when it comes to safety.”
“I preach that,” he said. “You still mad?”
“She wants your body. Your mind, too, I think.”
“What?”
“It’s true.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions, Rae.”
“Inescapable conclusions.”