“Why me?” he said. “Clayton’s my brother, but we aren’t close. I don’t have any specific skills that might help you out down there.”
“We’ll make a motley pair then, won’t we?” said Al. “What you’re asking, I take it, is why don’t we send down a crew of Special Forces badasses and put things right? We considered it. Dismissed it. First, that current ring made it dangerous to get down until recently. Second, the two men still down there—your brother and Dr. Toy—wield the whip hand now. They’re inside, we’re outside. I’ll give you a full debriefing later, but suffice it to say, the Trieste is fragile. All it takes is one screwdriver—pierce any wall just a fraction and it’s pancake city. So if we head down cocked and locked, well, what do we stand to lose if things go sideways? Everything. Absolutely everything.”
“That’s a cheerful thought. Jesus.”
They passed down a row of low, black, flat-sided buildings connected by linked walkways; they made Luke feel like he was touring a medium-security prison.
“But why you?” Al said. “Good question. You’re as green at deep dives as I am at neutering spaniels, right? The main reason, Luke, is that your brother asked for you.”
“Get out of here.”
She pulled an iPhone from her pocket and thumb-shuffled until she found what she was looking for. “This came through fifty hours ago. You received a call in Iowa City shortly thereafter. Sound file, no video. It stands as our last contact with your brother. We were debating whether to act on it, but the Westlake situation forced our hand.”
She pressed play. Clayton’s voice floated out of the speaker.
“Come home, Lucas. Come down, Lucas. We need you, Lucas. Come home.”
Clayton’s flat, monotone cadence was rendered tinny by the recording. Clayton sounded as if he was asleep; his voice was syrupy and water-warped, like a 45 rpm record playing at a relaxed 33 rpm. That could be a problem with the transmission itself, which had to carry through eight miles of water. Clayton repeated himself again before the message cut out abruptly.
“We need you, Lucas. Come ho—”
“It took a while to figure out who Lucas was,” said Al. “Your brother doesn’t speak about his family. We figured it could’ve been a research associate, a friend, a lover even. Our intel people dug around a bit and figured he must’ve been talking about you.”
“But Clayton doesn’t need me. He doesn’t need anyone. He never has.”
Except for those nights when the sleep terrors descended on him, he thought. The nights when you’d climb into bed with him until he settled down. But that was years ago, when they were only boys.
Yet Clayton had been saying We need you. We. WE. We who?
“Think of him as our pampered rock star whose rider calls for a big bowl of M&M’s, only the red ones,” said Al. “In this case, he’s asking for his brother. We give him what he wants—making every effort to preserve your safety, of course.”
“Why would he want me down there?”
Al cocked her head. “You put people’s minds and bodies under that kind of pressure… Things snap, right? We want to do everything possible to avoid that snap.”
“So that’s what I am, then? A bandage?”
“Think of yourself more as a key.”
Luke couldn’t imagine his brother needing a bandage, anyway. He was armor plated, titanium coated. But that voice… it hadn’t sounded entirely like Clayton. Granted, it had been years since they’d last spoken, but still, something was off about it. The difference wasn’t in the words themselves or the pitch of his voice—it lurked somewhere behind the obvious, sly and scuttling like rats in the walls.
Come home, Lucas. Come home come home come home…
“That’s not my home down there,” he said.
Al said: “It’s nobody’s home. Trust me.”
Two rights, a left, and they came to another dry dock. Three subs were cradled in hammocks. The numbers 2, 3, and 1 lay on their flanks. A workman was filling a seam in one of them with foam that pumped from a sophisticated caulking gun.
“That’s the secret ingredient,” Al told Luke. “Some kind of superfoam that expands or compresses depending on pressure. It can withstand fifty tons per square inch. The Trieste is held together with the stuff. Cost a billion-plus to develop, but it’s worth every dime.”
Luke followed Al across the tarmac. It was like being on the deck of an aircraft carrier—the sky was wide and trackless, the sun beating down from a cloudless sky. It was so hot that the patching tar had softened; it clung to the treads of their boots like Black Jack chewing gum.
Another sub was partially obscured by a pile of pallets; all Luke saw was its back end canted over the water. It sat in moody isolation, its stocky shape banded by yellow tape—the kind that ringed a crime scene.
“The MPs are still investigating,” Al said. “It seems worthless.” She laughed without mirth. “Like investigating a haunting or something.”
The Challenger 4 rounded into view. Luke’s lips curled in an instinctive expression of distaste.
It looked no different than the sub he’d seen earlier, and yet it repelled his gaze. There was something profoundly awful about it. He sensed that Al felt the same way about it—and he imagined it unnerved her just as it did him, because rational minds objected to unreasoned fear.
Perhaps it was because it had traveled so far below the sun’s reach. The pressure had warped it, giving its shape a madman’s hint of those depths. Or perhaps it was what happened within it—in Luke’s head, the sight of it melded with that of Westlake’s tortured corpse. The vessel was hateful in some way he could not accurately distill.
Al approached it, and Luke reluctantly followed. An awful coldness wept off the sub’s metal. Had it carried up that icy chill from the Challenger Deep itself?
Al wrenched the hatch wheel. The muscles trembled up her arms, as if a subconscious part of her rebelled at the act.
The hatch was circular, slightly smaller than a manhole cover, a solid foot of steel. Al let it clunk against the hull.
A smell wafted out. Luke had never inhaled its equal. Raw, adrenal, and profoundly human.
The stink of insanity, Edie, sharp as malt vinegar, as his mother once said.
Luke bent to peer inside. Several deflated bladders dangled down inside the cabin; he could only suppose that they were the equivalent of nautical air bags.
What he didn’t see yet was blood, which was incredible considering what had occurred inside. Maybe the MPs had swabbed it out already?
“You’re gonna need to crane your neck,” he heard Al say. “Look higher.”
He crouched, neck twisted at an uncomfortable angle. Something was written on the far wall. Rust-colored scratches. Messy, frantic.
He dipped lower, aware of the blood-beat in his ears. The scratches resolved themselves into… letters?
And that rusty discoloration.
Blood. There it was. Dried blood.
Letters, but he could make out only their undersides. The bulbous lower swoop of a C; the jagged horizontal slash of an E.
Luke knelt until his knees hit the deck. It was the only way to contort his head enough to see what had been written inside.
Five words. All written in a crazed, spiky scrawl—written in the blood that had momentarily gushed from Westlake’s innumerable wounds. Five words in one string, seven in the other.