The only time they’d been apart was when Chloe worked her way up the ladder to become a fully fledged saturation diver. A few years spent as a tender—a term for an apprentice who assisted the bona fide divers—paid off, and she was one of the few women who made it into this small, elite group of professionals.
Perhaps her one mistake was not being there for Gordon, right when he was on the cusp of adulthood. Her younger brother slowly got into heavier drug use until he finally got caught. Gordon spent a few months in jail as Chloe poured the hard-earned money she made as a saturation diver into his legal defense. The lawyer she got was a good one, and Gordon got out on a technicality. After that she kept him ever closer, even getting him into the same dive school she’d graduated from.
Her undying faith in him ultimately paid off. Gordon turned his life around, and under her close guidance also managed to make it as a saturation diver. The day she heard about Gordon taking off his tender’s hardhat and making his first official dive to weld a pipeline beneath one of the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, Chloe sat down and cried herself silly.
In time she moved on, hooking up with one of her former dive partners to form a company that built submersibles for commercial and recreational use. She now owned a house at the posh Hill Section of Manhattan Beach, right in one of the most expensive areas in Metropolitan Los Angeles. Chloe was also married for a time, but her work driven attitude ultimately caused the relationship to flounder, and she was back to being single again.
Gordon had seemed to be doing fine, until tragedy struck just a few months ago. An explosion occurred on the work boat while he was doing a saturation dive and almost killed him. His partner and close friend Jesse Gemmel didn’t make it, and now Gordon was plagued with posttraumatic stress. Chloe had decided to give her brother a place to stay, while he worked off the demons plaguing his mind.
With his thoughts slowly coalescing back to the here and now, Gordon gave her an apologetic look. “I’m sorry I shouted out like that. Did I wake you?”
Chloe shook her head. “No. I was already awake.”
“At this time? Why?”
“I couldn’t take my eyes off the news,” Chloe said. “And today is Sunday so I can stay up as long as I want.”
“Morgenstern again?”
She nodded. “New updates coming out from that artificial island off of India.”
He stood up and let out a pained groan as he stretched his arms. “Since I can’t get back to sleep, would you mind if I go downstairs and watch the news with you?”
Chloe laughed as she too got up, reached sideways and ruffled his unkempt head of hair. “You don’t have to ask. Mi casa, su casa. You want me to make you some coffee, or maybe hot chocolate? I’ve got the ones with the marshmallows in them, just like what we had when we were kids.”
“I’ll take coffee, thanks. Black and bitter. Just like my soul.”
“Oh, stop being so dark.”
3
CHLOE HAD AN ESPRESSO machine sitting behind the mini-bar of her kitchen, and she was working on getting them both a cup when Gordon made his way down the stairs after washing up. The large, wraparound windows of the living room still showed semi-darkness, with only the streetlights illuminating the wine dark sea beyond the beach outside.
The large, flat panel TV had been attached to the side wall facing a pair of black Italian leather sofas and a long coffee table made of glass. Gordon placed himself on the soft cushions while reaching for the remote control to pump up the volume.
It was a repeat of an earlier broadcast. The cable channel showed an animated map of the island accompanied by narration from one of the newscasters for the prime time news hour. “Sources close to the US Embassy have expressed frustration over repeated refusals by the Indian government to allow FBI forensic investigators access to the artificially built island of Lemuria. According to the US ambassador, Indian billionaire Mukesh Dhar, who had partnered with the Morgenstern Group to finance and build the island resort, is exerting enormous pressure to keep the ongoing investigation a purely local one.”
Chloe walked over and placed two small cups of espresso onto the coffee table before sitting down beside him. “You sure you don’t want any sugar?”
“Nah,” Gordon said before reaching for his cup and taking a sip. The hot, bitter taste of concentrated coffee gave him an almost instant jolt.
“With the confirmed deaths of at least three American citizens, the US Justice Department is weighing heavily on a formal protest to include the FBI in the ongoing investigation, but India has not budged on its insistence that the police from the southern province of Kerala will continue the investigation on their own,” the newscaster said before the program cut into a commercial.
Chloe let out a deep breath. “A whole family got slaughtered by something terrible, and those Indians just seem to be covering it up. Unbelievable.”
“Not all of them died,” Gordon said. “I heard a kid somehow survived, right?”
She nodded. “Yeah, just a young boy out of a family of four. So totally traumatized that he couldn’t even talk about it. I feel so sorry for the poor child.”
“I heard he’s been taken to a mental health facility right here in the Southland.”
Chloe nodded. “He was. They ran a segment on him just an hour ago. One of those shady paparazzi somehow managed to get inside the clinic and tried to interview him. The poor kid couldn’t stop screaming apparently.”
Gordon rubbed his grizzled chin. “I wonder what it was that killed all those people. The Indians said it was a shark, right?”
“That’s bull,” Chloe said. “A lot of the witnesses who survived reported being attacked on land. The company spokespeople are saying a tiger got loose from Morgenstern’s estate, and then they also said there was a shark in the area. Goddamn liars.”
“I can’t say anything bad about my employers,” Gordon said. He happened to be part of the dive crew with Morgenstern Oceanic, one of the subsidiaries of the conglomerate in question.
“Well I don’t work for them so I don’t have to kiss their ass unlike you,” Chloe said. “You can say bad things about them here since they’re not listening in, you know.”
“They treated me okay,” Gordon said. “Can’t complain.”
Chloe hissed. “Yeah, they paid for your medical bills after they caused the damned accident in the first place.”
“The investigation is still ongoing.”
“Okay, if you want to keep defending them then it’s up to you. I think that damned company is cursed.”
“Don’t say that, Chloe!”
“Sorry.”
The news now switched over to a stock market graph. “With the apparent failure of the Lemuria resort, shares in Morgenstern also took a nosedive, with much of the company losing more than twenty percent of its total market cap since the news first broke of the tragedy six months ago.”
Chloe got to her feet and gathered up the empty cups. “You want some more?”
“Yeah, another cup, please,” Gordon said. “I could use something to eat too.”
“I got sliced turkey from the deli in the fridge. You want cheese with it?”
“Please. And mustard, lots of mustard. The good kind.”
“You got it.”
“With the island now evacuated and cordoned off by Indian authorities, many questions still remain,” the newscaster said. “There have been a number of rumors about a team of scientists who may have been on the island, led by the disgraced former genetics researcher Dr. Lauren Reeves, but there has been no confirmation as of yet. Other rumors, such as the reported death of Emeric Morgenstern, whom despite denials from corporate representatives that he was anywhere near Lemuria, have been in question due to the sighting of his personal powerboat tied up alongside the dock at the private section of the island.”