Jade turned to Professor. “What do you think?”
He shook his head. “I’m not sure. If we can dive, then she’s right. But I don’t like the idea of pushing forward with a killer on board.”
“Going back now might give the Norfolk Group a chance to get even more men aboard.”
Lee returned before a consensus could be reached. “We’re still searching deck by deck, but it may not do us much good. One of the RIBs is missing.”
“Rib?” Ophelia asked.
“Rigid inflatable boat,” Professor explained quickly. “A Zodiac. Basically a big raft with an outboard.” He faced the captain. “You think our saboteur set out in open water?”
“It looks that way.”
“Could there be another ship shadowing us?” Jade asked.
“Possibly. But we’re not that far from Nassau. He could simply be heading back.”
“Then we should keep going. Make for Great Isaac.”
“Without a functioning atomic clock, we’re not going to be able to accomplish much.”
Jade turned back to Ophelia. “Are you serious about having another clock flown out to us?”
“I am,” Ophelia said. “But there’s something else I’d like to try first.” She glanced at Nichols and Lee, and then in a conspiratorial tone meant only for Jade and Professor’s ears, added, “I need to speak to you privately.”
TWENTY-FOUR
The search of the vessel yielded another vital clue to the identity of the saboteur. In addition to the motor launch, the ship had also lost a crewman — a last minute replacement added shortly before Jade and the others had arrived in Nassau. Nichols came to them in the salon with the news, and assured them that the rest of the crew was above reproach, but that did little to ease their concerns.
“Who hired him?” Jade asked.
“Cliff handles personnel matters,” Nichols replied and then seemed to grasp the subtext of the question. “You can’t think he’s involved in this, too?”
“He did call Ophelia away just before the attack. Almost like he wanted to protect her.”
Nichols swallowed nervously. “I trust Cliff implicitly.”
His tone was not quite convincing, but before he could further protest his subordinate’s innocence, Ophelia dismissed him tersely. “Thank you. We’ll talk about this more in the morning.”
When he was gone, she immediately changed the subject. “I will arrange to have another atomic clock brought to us by helicopter. It should take no more than forty-eight hours. Until then however, I believe there may be something else that can help us find what we’re looking for.”
“The Shew Stone,” Jade murmured.
Ophelia nodded. “We know it has a connection to what we seek. It didn’t show us anything at Delphi, but this close to our goal, close enough that the ship is already experiencing distortions of space-time, I believe we should take another look at it.”
“We don’t know that a dark matter field caused the problem with the GPS,” countered Professor. “In fact, given what just happened, I’d say that the explanation for that is almost certainly much more commonplace.”
Jade’s first impulse was to agree with Professor, but Nichols hadn’t said anything about the cause of the problem with the GPS; only that it had evidently cleared up with a reboot. That seemed inconclusive at best. “We’ve nothing to lose by trying it,” she said, taking the crystal ball out and placing it on the table. “Should we light some candles or something?”
Ophelia reached out for it quickly, greedily, and grasped it between thumb and forefinger. She held it up and peered into its depths as if hoping to see the answer to every question she had ever asked.
“If it’s that easy,” Jade whispered to Professor, “then I guess we don’t need to find the Moon stone after all.”
After a moment, Ophelia set the globe down, her smooth face creased by uncharacteristic uncertainty.
“Did you see anything?” Jade asked.
“I’m not certain. For a moment, I thought I was somewhere else. At our corporate headquarters building in New York. I was in my office, but it…it wasn’t my office. Not the one I have right now. It was my brother’s office, one floor above mine, but somehow I knew that it had become my office.” She shook her head as if trying to clear away mental cobwebs. “What do you think it means?”
“Sibling rivalry rearing its ugly head?” Jade remarked. “I thought you and your brother were two peas in a pod.”
“I love my brother deeply,” Ophelia said, a faint smile touching her lips. “But he thinks he’s better and smarter than me, and as it happens, he’s wrong. I am much better suited to leading our family empire than he, but for many reasons, not the least of which is my gender, he will not admit it.”
“It may be a possible future,” breathed Dorion. “Where you have taken control of your company.”
Ophelia nodded. “I thought the same. This is a sign. If we can find the Moon stone, I will be able to use it to see the future more clearly, and that knowledge will enable me to chart a course that leads to ultimate success. Now I know that we cannot turn back.”
Jade thought it sounded more like Ophelia was misconstruing a wishful daydream as a vision supplied by the Shew Stone, but she said nothing. Regardless of where the images had come from, Ophelia’s “vision” offered no insight into the location of the Moon stone.
“May I?” Dorion asked, and then promptly picked up the crystal orb. Unlike Ophelia, he did not peer into, but instead held it tightly in his fist and closed his eyes.
The seconds stretched into a minute, then two, and the silence was almost unendurable. Jade could feel the vibrations of the ship’s engines, once more turning and propelling the vessel through the Atlantic, hopefully on the right heading.
Dorion had been statue-still the whole time, but after another minute or so, he seemed to relax, as if he had dozed off. Jade glanced at the others, silently telegraphing the message: ‘Should we wake him up?’
Before she could act on the impulse to do so, Dorion’s eyelids fluttered open. His gaze drifted for a moment and then he started, looking about wildly. “I’m on the Explorer?” He took a deep breath then looked down at the Shew Stone in his hand. “I did not lose consciousness, did I? The effect is similar to what I felt at CERN, but not as…”
“What did you see?” asked Ophelia, with the same eager breathlessness.
“I remember things that I know haven’t happened yet.”
“Did you see the location of the Moon stone?”
Dorion frowned and appeared to be searching his anachronistic memories. “I think I did. I remember you.” He pointed to Jade. “You were very excited. You were about to change into a diving suit right on the open deck. That must mean we find it. Perhaps if we get closer to the location, I will recognize it.”
“Then we are on the right course,” Ophelia said with sublime confidence. “Literally as well as…you know what I mean. We will find it.”
Jade’s first impulse was to caution against raising hopes too high, but she could not forget how they had found the stone sphere on Isla del Caño.
Dorion set the Shew Stone on the table. Professor turned to Jade. “I guess it’s your turn now.”
“Maybe you should give it a try?”
He shook his head. “No thanks, I don’t want to spoil the twist at the end. Besides, I think I’ve already caught a peek of the future, and there’s a great big Bootstrap Paradox coming down the pike. You go ahead.”
Now that the opportunity to glimpse the future had come, Jade felt apprehensive. There was a reason that, despite having the Shew Stone in her possession, she had not made a serious effort to test whether it possessed even a very small dark matter field. It seemed quite reasonable that it did. The ferocity with which Roche had pursued Jade, to say nothing of his prescient certainty that she would steal the orb, seemed to suggest that his uncannily accurate predictions were not simply well reasoned guesses. She wasn’t ambivalent about the crystal ball because of a fear that it might not work; quite the opposite in fact.