Chapter 30
The Stranger
Walter’s dead. He was ill and helpless. Why would someone kill him?
“Tomorrow’s dive is thermal,” Scott announces. “We focus on testing the Shields in the hotspots we can reach without going too far. Safety is the priority.” He nods to Finn. “Finn.”
“Right. Data collection is still the best tool for determining what we’re dealing with. This is a first step. On each subsequent dive, we’ll push a bit farther.”
Scott gives him a side-eye.
Finn clears his throat and continues. “We’ll dive as far as we can to ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit and then turn on the cooling.”
“We discussed ninety-three. We can’t shed body heat when it gets much warmer,” Scott says.
Finn nods. “The thermal layer cools things down rather quickly when activated.”
“Have you thought about sudden temperature increases?” Jamie asks. “I don’t remember that coming up in the training.”
“The suit’s outer shell provides a brief buffer against acute temperature spikes.
Should the water reach ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit, the barrier gel and coolant veins will activate automatically, regardless of operator engagement.
Short of a sudden rise over five hundred degrees, this remains survivable.
With the gradient factored in once the gel activates, eight hundred degrees is considered the upper bound.
Much beyond that, the suit’s exterior fails. Almost instantly.”
“This is insane,” Jamie says. “I don’t want to go out like a boiled egg.”
“More like a marshmallow, J,” Liam says and chuckles.
“You’re gonna ruin s’mores for me, man.”
“Team, any way we look at this, it’s going to be extremely dangerous.” Scott grimaces. “I can’t guarantee your safety. If anyone wants to step out—you have my blessing.”
No one takes him up on his offer.
“Well said, Scott. Everyone needs to make their own call,” says Finn.
Scott ignores him and continues. “We’ll have three divers on a team. Two in the hot zone and one at the cutoff for safety. On the next dive, we’ll have two dive teams. But only one this time. It’s Finn on data. Nathan is on the line, and I’ll be the safety. We’re taking the Hecate.”
“What time are we meeting at the docks?” I ask.
“Three p.m.,” Scott says. He looks around the room as if he’s memorizing everyone’s face. “Get some rest.”
After eating a light dinner, Crystal and I compared notes on our days. She spent the afternoon at the police station after encountering that same creep who was trying to grab Natalie.
When we discussed the Land Rover’s Washington, D.C. plates, she panicked and told me she’d seen it before—at the dive club. Even before I came back to Maverick Key. This guy has had eyes on my family.
I’m grateful to Wes for hiring protection for Natalie, but I’m still worried about Crystal.
“Maybe you should stay at Mads’s. Take the couch or snuggle in with Natalie?”
She thinks for a moment and frowns. “No. My place is with you, Nathan. I’d rather keep Natalie safe while we figure all this out.”
“Maybe we can convince Wes to hire a second bodyguard?” I’m only half joking.
She smirks, wrinkling her nose. “Uh, that’s a hard no. I’m not sleeping under the same roof with another Ziddo.” She shivers. “Besides…” She smiles coyly, snuggling in closer. “I have you to protect me.”
That should be flattering, but I feel a twinge of uncertainty. Can I protect her? I’m not around her 24/7.
“How long are the Hecate tunnels?”
“We’re not certain, but on sonar it appears to be the longest and deepest passage in Carter’s Drop. Approximately fourteen hundred meters in total length with a depth of over a hundred fifty meters in the deepest branches.”
Our dive plan takes us as far as five hundred meters and to a depth of as much as eighty meters tomorrow.
“Please dive the plan, Nathan. If anything’s off, don’t push it. And watch out for Finn. Leave his ass if he goes rogue again.”
I give her a kiss. “I’ll put safety first, I promise.”
“Your safety.”
“Has there been anything new from the police?”
“They were useless today. They’ve got nothing on who killed Walter or who the Big, Mean Man may be. They pretty much laughed off what happened to me at the press conference. But they said they’d look into it.”
A flash of anger jolts through me as I think about those damn reporters and their ambush at the meeting.
To their credit, the national news focused on the hard news and didn’t air it.
But those assholes at the local station did.
She doesn’t deserve any of this. At some point soon, I’m going to have to agree to a press conference and set the record straight.
“Crystal, I know who Walter is.” She doesn’t hide the shock on her face. “It’s in my journals. He was a colleague of mine, a quantum physicist professor I’d been consulting with not long after I discovered Carter’s Drop.”
“What happened to him? He didn’t seem like he could still be practicing.”
“I’m not sure what happened to him to make him ill.
He wasn’t like that when I knew him. From my notes, we were collaborating on a theory I was working on about the descendants of Atlantis.
Apparently, I’d recently changed my hypothesis, and I didn’t believe that what I was looking for was based on the myth of Atlantis at all. ”
At least not how the stories tell it.
“That’s what most people think, right? That it’s only a myth made up by Plato.”
“My journals don’t say. I just listed the academics I was consulting. My research brought me to Dr. Walter Stanley. And that’s not all.”
She waits for me to continue, her face lined with worry.
“Dr. Stanley and I both knew Finn…”
“And?”
“We didn’t trust him… or his colleagues.”
“Nathan—” She jumps in surprise. “When Maddie found your things, she found coded notes. Mark stole them, and they were taken into police custody for the investigation. But when they returned your belongings, they didn’t have the notes. They claimed they never did. Someone had to take it.”
“Finn.”
“He’s hiding something.”
“He is. And those notes are probably where I documented the details I didn’t want to keep in my journals.”
“We’ve got to confront him and find out what he knows. All this ties together, and it’s a threat to Natalie.”
“I’ll talk to him about this after tomorrow’s dive. We’ll figure out where he stands in all this.” I glance at my watch. “But, right now, you and I have a date with the sunrise.”