Deep Blue (17 page)

Star Gate, the program was called. Each morning, at zero eight hundred, they had met in a dun-colored building that matched the dreary Maryland sky.

God, how Tomlinson hated dancing to military time. Which is
why he'd flubbed enough tests, and pissed off enough stars-and-bars, to be booted out on his joyful ass.

The power to sense human vibes out there in the geosphere, however, had only grown stronger over the years.

He pulled the legal pad close enough to touch his nose to it, then danced his fingertips over the chaos of circles that Ford perceived as an orderly diagram. Slowly, slowly, the chaos reassembled in his brain as an unfolding landscape. The landscape was littered with tangents, albeit important to events, but had nothing to do with the shit storm surrounding his pal.

One by one, using a pencil, he x'd out superfluous influences.

Chinese funding.
Out.

Double agent.
Out.

Havana . . . Freeport and seven other notations.
Out.

When the complicated diagram had been reduced to two primary circles, Tomlinson added a third circle and wrote
Marion
Ford
.

It was just like the biologist to leave himself out of the bigger picture.

That picture was gaining resolution in Tomlinson's mind.

He pushed the legal pad away and concentrated on the nautical chart. When his consciousness was ready, he closed his eyes and floated his fingers over the chart as if touching a Ouija board.

He opened them to see his index finger doodling a circle. The circle encompassed an area in the Gulf of Mexico between the Yucatán and Sanibel Island.

For twenty minutes, his mind drifted among a landscape of open sea.

His cell rang—Ava Lindstrom calling. It gave him a chill seeing her name because he knew something terrible had just happened.

•   •   •

After watching his friend
through the laboratory window for a moment, Ford carried the folder down the steps, through the mangroves to the marina, where Christmas decorations still blazed but only a few shadow people were awake.

It was midnight.

The dog followed him to the docks, where he'd hoped to speak with Vargas. Too late. The Brazilian's yacht was two miles away, just exiting Dinkin's Bay, its running lights a trident of red, white, and green. There was always the VHF, or a cell call, but the business Ford wanted to discuss was too personal. And dangerous.

In the ice maker, he found one of Mack's Steinlager beers, and carried the folder to the picnic table. The printer had recently kicked out 150-some pages, compliments of Julian Solo. What they contained were the tawdry secrets of everyone associated with the marina. The contents had been hacked from nameless computer banks, and some government sources, but mostly from personal laptops owned by people Ford knew and cared about. The information, which included photos and videos, had been parsed, categorized, and, when required, cross-linked with authenticating data such as screenshots.

Atop it all was a list of demands and Julian's unsigned note. The note ended
Clarence. Who feels silly now?

Not silly. Sick. Ford had witnessed nausea caused by anxiety but
had never experienced it. He pressed the icy bottle to his forehead, then opened the folder.

All the major players associated with Dinkin's Bay were there. None were the people they pretended to be, according to Julian and his scavenging robots.

Ford told the dog, “Go swim,” then did what he had to do. Leafing through those pages was the saddest form of voyeurism. No juicy gossip tidbits here. Instead, arrest reports, bankruptcies, medical files, venereal diseases, and photos so graphic that he crushed the photos one by one before they came into focus.

On the picnic table, a pile began to accumulate. He filled a bucket with water and it became a makeshift shredder.

Julian couldn't improvise paper clips, so he'd used formatting and varied typefaces to separate individual files. Names were in boldface italics.

Graeme M. MacKinlay
, who owned the marina, was not Mack's real name. He was not from New Zealand. He was from Tasmania, an island off Australia, where he was wanted for assault, grand theft, and running an illegal carnival show.

A carnival?
Geezus.

Ford skipped the next few pages, which contained more damning evidence against Mack and what might have been a recent medical report.

JoAnn Smallwood.
His lifted his head from the page and found
Tiger Lilly
moored next to Coach Mike Westhoff's boat. The lights were off in the old Chris-Craft; a dozy darkness emanated from the cabin.

“Go to hell,” Ford told Julian and moved JoAnn's dossier to the bottom of the pile without opening it. He did the same with Rhonda Lister, his cousin Ransom Gatrell, and several other names he knew too well to sully them or their families by risking a look.

Ava Lindstrom.

Why the hell include a woman who was only visiting the island?

Because she'd been in his house, Ford realized. That spooked him. Julian's note had included a threat:
I'll
make an example of someone close to you.
Meshed with Tomlinson's claim about addiction and what little Ava had told him about her past, he sensed trouble, so he went through the first few pages. As a teen, Ava had been arrested for possession of drugs, petty theft—several times—and also prostitution.

That was the biggie. All court records had been expunged but were still available, obviously, to a master hacker. After that, aside from stints in rehab, there were no damning details to add about the woman.

Ava fought her way out,
Ford thought.
She stayed strong—good for her.

Three more photos went into the bucket.

Jeth Nicholes and the other fishing guides were there, as well as their wives. All good people. He wanted to maintain that conviction, so he kept going and was soon near the end of the stack.

Capt. Hannah Smith.

The name stopped him. It was because of Julian's threat. But what the hell could he have found on a woman who was as devoted
to her religious precepts as she was to her friends, her family, and her own ideals of behavior?

Beneath Hannah's cover page were only three . . . no, four pages. His fingers hesitated there. He got up, checked on the dog, checked to confirm the Brazilian's yacht had disappeared from the channel, then returned to the folder.

With a thumb, he strummed those four pages . . . and saw the corner of a photo. He plucked the photo out and crushed it. But he saw enough to recognize Hannah's wet hair and knew it had been snapped while she was showering.

There was no way she would have posed for such a shot. A camera had been hidden somewhere in the ceiling vent of the shower on Vargas Diemer's yacht.

Ford slammed the folder closed and looked toward the opening into Dinkin's Bay. “You son of a bitch,” he said.

He called the dog and was dealing with the bucket when he decided he'd better make sure he was right before chasing the Brazilian down and choking him to death.

Another look at the soggy photo proved nothing. Shot from above, it could have been any shower, anywhere. No date stamp. Even so, Vargas was the likely voyeur.

Ford slapped the dog to heel and jogged toward his house. At the very least, he would call Hannah to make sure the file hadn't been uploaded to her own laptop as well.

That possibility scared him more than any threat Julian had made: his friends would be destroyed if Ford didn't cooperate.

Okay. Julian had won. For now.

Ford knew it was true when Tomlinson came running out of the mangroves, saying, “Man, why didn't you answer your damn phone? We gotta go. Ava found something on her computer—I don't know what, but she tried to kill herself.”

On her computer . . .

Ford didn't hear much else until they were in the truck, where Tomlinson explained, “She was hysterical, so I'm not sure about anything, except she took an overdose of something and woke up in the bathroom, bleeding. A slit wrist, I think.”

Later, sitting in the HealthPark ER off Summerlin Road, Ford said to Tomlinson, who was reading through the folder, “I'll kill him.”

“I'll help you,” the Zen Buddhist master replied. “And I know how.”

Unwinding after twenty-four hours of serious spiritual trauma required ceremony.

It was two a.m.

Tomlinson was alone on his sailboat. He lit a candle, mumbled a prayer, and sat in full lotus position, staring at the flame. Twice a day, every day, he meditated unless on a Key West tear, although lately Pensacola had become a fave—the best oysters, and prettier women.

Steady on.
Now was not the time to allow his focus to drift. Concentrate, breathe, cling to no thoughts.

Soon the candle flame displaced all else.

Meditation had saved his sanity. This was a
No BS
truth he never ever joked about and another reason he felt guilty about the pretty
veterinarian. He had sensed her problems but had been too damn stoned to zoom in and realize she was still in trouble.

Meditation might have helped her.

Poor Ava. She'd had no idea what awaited when she stumbled onto Dinkin's Bay. Not that the marina possessed a destructive karma. Just the opposite—it was a place of light and positive ions, but occasionally that light dimmed. Destiny often played a role.

Last night had been one of those nights.

Dr. Ava Lindstrom would live, but she would never return to the marina. Tomlinson had dealt with enough drug people to know how scars were dealt with. She would withdraw into her shell for a while, then pretend to be the person she wanted to project: an accomplished professional, generally happy, always dependable. She would gravitate closer to one or two good friends, who would encourage her to move her clinic from Sarasota to somewhere else—out of state, most likely.

She had no choice. Julian Solo had copied Ava's file to her entire list of clients.

On the bright side—and there was always a bright side—she was, thus far, the only victim. He and Ford had spent the day packing for a trip and nosing around. Mack and Rhonda and the others at Dinkin's Bay were unaware of what awaited if certain demands weren't met.

Julian wanted the drones. His father, Winslow Shepherd, wanted the biologist dead. Well . . . he wanted to meet Ford on an eighth-floor balcony in Mexico. The rest was obvious.

Bizarre.

This was Tomlinson's interpretation of a cryptic, unsigned note.
Julian owed his father a favor, apparently, or the pair had renegotiated the rights to a patent or a software finesse.

Who knew? It was all related to some prior event that had seriously pissed off the math professor.

Ford had remained mum on specifics, but you didn't have to be a Weatherman to read between the lines.

Tomlinson had
been
a Weatherman. That tidbit, no doubt, had been included in the information sent by Julian. He was guessing, because his own file was missing when he opened the folder.

Ford had sloughed that off, too, saying, “Only children and the truly wicked are immune from slander.”

Like Ava, Marion Ford had no choice. He was going to Mexico.

Not good. From the instant of their first meeting, Tomlinson knew the biologist would die in a country not his own and from a bullet or blow from an unseen enemy. It was an insight he'd never shared. Same with the prescient conviction that his own death would be by drowning. This alone suggested their vulnerable asses were better off in a bar or a woman's bed come sunrise.

No way, José. The biologist was a dutiful man.

One or both of them would die or . . . they
wouldn't
. Karma could be a beauteous circle or a bitch with fangs, but
destiny
was not carved in stone.

When he was done meditating, he blew out the candle and opened a slim volume he had read many times:
The Anarchist's Cookbook
. The recipes included how to improvise small bombs, and poisons, and other mayhem designed to chip away at the political scaffolding of an industrial giant.

Ironic.

Around three, he dozed off.

Then came four a.m. A raucous knocking launched him, cat-like, to the ceiling. Worse, it interrupted a mildly kinky sex dream, which was typical after a stressful day.

Sweet Jesus—suddenly, he was tangled on the floor. He threw off the sheet, got up, and hollered, “Who's out there?”

A stupid question, but he flicked on the aft cockpit lights anyway and went up the steps.

“I've got coffee in a thermos and your dive gear's packed,” the biologist said, then winced and looked away. “Christ—get some pants on.”

Back down the steps in a fog, but still lucid enough to inquire, “What time is it?”

“It'll be light in three hours,” Ford replied. “I want to be done by then.”

•   •   •

What Tomlinson didn't understand,
and didn't ask when he stepped down into the biologist's high-tech, rubberized inflatable monster boat, was
Why the hell was the dog aboard?

Pete's yellow eyes glared at him from the seat to the left of the wheel. The copilot's seat.
His
seat, under normal circumstances.

They freed the lines and got under way, Ford saying, “If you have a cell phone, leave it on. For now.”

“Where's yours?” Tomlinson asked. The biologist always locked his cell in a waterproof case on the console.

“I loaned it to someone” was the cryptic reply.

Okay.

It was dark, only a partial moon with stars to brighten the heavy dew and the shimmering presence of the marina. Tomlinson slid past the console, barefoot, and took a seat on the cooler. Forward, under the bow canopy, were vague, washtub-sized shapes covered with a tarp.

The drones.

They idled clear of the basin; then the sudden torque of twin 250 Mercs pinned Tomlinson's hair back. After that, no more talking—not him, while Ford made a couple of inaudible calls on the VHF.

It was chilly this December morn. Tomlinson wore a jacket of red, blue, white, and yellow rags, tied long ago by Seminole women in the Glades. It was a gift from Chief Buffalo Tiger. He'd brought it along for good juju but now pulled it around him for warmth and settled back for the ride. If it wasn't for the dog, he would have curled up among the drones, but Pete had switched places and was asleep. So he slipped around the console to the copilot's seat and made himself familiar with the controls. Lots of toggle switches and glowing screens to learn about, so he asked questions as needed.

Stay on your toes
was the mantra for today.

At Lighthouse Point, they skimmed along the beach past the Tarpon Bay access. There were lights on in one of the Grin N Bare It cottages. Tomlinson glanced at Ford, who nodded and said, “Mack,” loud enough to imply the rest. Meaning Rhonda was probably there, too.

Then the monster boat banked due west toward an orange quarter moon. After a slight correction north, the biologist switched
off all electronics but for running lights. Half an hour later, he killed those, too, and they rode in the rhythmic silence of a winter moon, engines, and stars.

Tomlinson, the celestial navigator, had those fiery star markers embedded in his soul. He stroked his hair and feasted on the winter sky. A few degrees south of the elliptic were Aldebaran and Tau; Betelgeuse framed Orion, a constellation of ancient silver angles. In the west, near the low, setting moon, was Capella. Polaris anchored the universe to the northern pole.

The human fist when extended covers about ten degrees of outer space or one's inner compass. A thumb adds two degrees.

He employed both. They were on a heading of 275 degrees, give or take, on a rhumb line to Mexico, if they had the fuel. Yucatán, and the jungles of Quintana Roo were only 380 miles southwest. A dozen times, he'd made that crossing under sail.

Not tonight, but it was doable, considering who was at the wheel. You could criticize the biologist's lack of imagination and his other nerdy flaws, but, by god, he could drive a boat. With electronics off—no autopilot, no chart plotter, no lights, nothing—he steered an unwavering course. The fact that a night vision monocular was strapped to his eye—an unsettling cyclopean visage—did not lessen the feat.

“It'll be dead-flat calm come sunrise,” Ford said. “That's good. Want some coffee? It's in a thermos under your seat.”

Café con leche, Cubano-style. Not enough sugar, of course, but pretty good for a guy who cooked as if doing chemistry experiments. He poured and passed a plastic cup around.

“Too much sugar,” the biologist commented.

Tomlinson flipped him the bird and continued to root through the cooler. There was a newly cut stalk of dwarf Orinoco bananas, bags of dried fruit, a block of cheese, hot sauce from Colombia, some other stuff, and down on the bottom, under the ice, a six-pack of Genesee Bock Beer.

“Breakfast!” Smiling, he came up holding a bottle.

“Not before I dive,” Ford said, “but go ahead, if you want. You'll stand safety watch with your gear ready. There's no need for both of us to go in the water.”

“Seriously . . . I'm not diving?”

Ford didn't hear the relief in his pal's voice. “I want to make this quick. If you're right about Julian living on a ship of some type, we need you topside. Are you okay with that?”

Damn straight, Tomlinson was okay with that.

After a few incredible bananas and swallows of Bock beer, his metabolism shifted from neutral into a functioning gear. He began to take stock of where they were. It meant calibrating a fist with the halo glow in the east and readying himself when Doc said, “To find this place, I've got to use the electronics, but only for a minute or two, then I'll power off for a while. It won't give you much time to learn how the system works.”

That was okay, too. Tomlinson didn't need electronics. They were both concerned they were being tracked by satellite or being followed by drones or a boat . . . or something bigger that Ford had failed to consider. But why add worry to the man's full plate?

Ford pulled off the night vision monocular and handed it over. “Keep watch for a while. My eyes need time to adjust before I switch on the sonar.”

Through the lens, a billion stars became an infinity of pearls. Satellites appeared and dragged a glowing grid across the void. The moon, half full, shimmered above the western horizon.

No sign of boats afloat or things that fly, so Tomlinson studied the electronics suite when it came to life. According to the GPS, they were 31.89 miles from Sanibel Lighthouse in eighty feet of water.

This was important. They had left the territorial waters of the United States—the twelve-mile limit—far behind. The U.S. exclusive economic zone, however, extended two hundred nautical miles from the Florida peninsula. Maritime law was something he and Ford had discussed because of what might or might not happen if Julian's people showed up.

A bank of glowing LED screens offered more data. The chart plotter indicated it would be 2.2 miles before they should begin a serious search for the Captiva Blue Hole. The bottom was hard sand. On sonar, it showed as a flowing scroll of red. Fish—there weren't many—appeared as series of sideways V shapes. Once, however, a school of bait was so tightly grouped, it scrolled beneath as one giant living mass.

“How do you know it's not just one big damn fish?” Tomlinson asked.

“Stop worrying about that shark,” Ford replied and dropped the boat off plane. “Get the marker ready. I've been out here a couple of times and it's not easy to find.” Then raised his voice to tell the dog, “Stay.”

Pete was a regular little soldier, depending on who gave the orders. Tomlinson had to give the stubborn hulk his due.

Like plowing a field, back and forth they went, while the screens
fed information. The Blue Hole wasn't an address you could punch into a GPS even though they had the numbers. It was a hole in the Earth, not large, and shielded from sonar by a limestone ledge that covered all but a crevice.

Even with the monster boat's high-tech equipage, it took a while.

“You ready?” the biologist called over the engine noise.

Tomlinson held an orange buoy connected to two hundred feet of line and a ten-pound weight. When told, he dumped it over the side. In the glare of a spotlight, the buoy fluttered while the line deployed, then drifted still.

They anchored, drifted back. On the sonar screen, a scrolling red bottom was suddenly breached by a chasm of deepest blue.

There it was: the opening to an archaic spring ninety feet below.

Tomlinson dropped two safety lines, with Cyalume sticks attached incrementally. The sticks throbbed like fireflies until they vanished into the depths. Ford focused on getting the drones ready, then his dive gear, which, for some reason, included a metal ammo box.

“What's in there?”

“Plastic explosives,” the biologist replied. “Don't touch.”

It was an hour before first light—five-fifty a.m. on the seventeenth day of Christmas.