Chapter 6 #2
"Silas. He bought books third from the left off the shelf. Never looked first. Said the first two are what the shop wants you to buy."
She held the wheel through a bad one and came out the far side of it.
"Okay," she said. "Okay, that's good. That's a good one. Give me another."
So I gave her another, and then another, all the way out, fifty-eight minutes of a dead man in a boat in a gale, and by the time we saw their lights I had said more about Silas Pham out loud than I had in two years, and I hadn't noticed I was doing it, which I think was the point, and which I think she planned.
At five-ten we came up on the Argos Reach's tender in our own lights.
It was a good boat. Better than ours. Two men on deck in orange and a third in the house, and a hose over the side and a shot line down, which meant they'd already put a man down at some point and pulled him.
Nerissa put the Halcyon fifty feet off their beam in a six-foot swell, which is not a thing that should be possible, and hit the horn.
A man came out with a light.
"You're too close!"
"YOU'RE ON MY MARKER," she yelled.
"Claim's contested!"
"Yeah, it's contested, that's why it's got a marker on it, you illiterate — " She caught herself. Put the hailer up. "You are moored to a permitted survey buoy registered to Kwon Salvage. You will vacate."
"We're at anchor."
"You're at anchor on my float."
"Talk to our lawyers."
I clipped in.
Nerissa saw me do it and her hand came off the wheel.
"Torren."
"Twenty minutes," I said. "I'm going to eighty. I'm not working. I'm going to look at their shot line and I'm coming up."
"Why."
"Because if they've already had a man down, I want to know what he did." I pulled the mask down. "And because if there's a lift bag on that case, it's coming off."
"That's the part you should have led with."
"I know."
"Four's trouble," she said.
"Four's trouble."
Under the surface the storm just stopped.
That's the strange mercy of it. Six feet of chaos on the lid and at thirty feet it's a long slow rocking, like a room in a house where somebody upstairs is moving furniture.
Their shot line ran down to the cut.
I followed it.
At seventy feet I could see their weight, and I could see what they'd done, and it was worse than I thought and also much stupider.
They'd rigged the copper case.
Two lift bags, strapped, uninflated, with a line running up to the surface — set and ready, so that at first light one man could go down, hit two valves, and put two hundred years of state secrets on the surface in ninety seconds without ever documenting a thing about where it sat.
No grid. No tags. No photographs.
They were going to rip it out of context like a page out of a book.
I got a hand on the first strap.
And that's when the light came down the shot line.
He was young. Maybe thirty. Good gear, better than mine, and he came down fast and confident and put his light in my face, and he had a pry bar in his other hand, which is a tool, and is also not a tool.
We looked at each other at eighty feet.
Here's what I've learned about a man in the water.
You can tell in about four seconds whether he's dangerous, and it has nothing to do with size. It's the breathing. Watch the bubbles. A dangerous man breathes slow.
His bubbles were coming up in a boil.
He was scared, and he was young, and he had a pry bar, and somebody on the surface had told him to go do something at night in a storm that no reasonable person would do.
So I did nothing.
I let go of the strap. I put both hands out flat where he could see them. And then I turned my own light around and put it on the case, on the rigging, on the tags that weren't there, and I held it there.
Slate out. I wrote four words on it.
NO GRID. YOU KNOW.
I turned it around.
He read it.
He hung there in the water for maybe fifteen seconds.
Then he wrote on his own slate and turned it around, and it said:
NOT MY CALL.
And I wrote: IT'S YOUR HANDS.
He didn't answer that. He put the pry bar through a loop on his harness — which is the whole story, right there, the pry bar going away — and he floated backward maybe four feet.
I cut the lift bags off.
Slowly. Where he could see every stroke. Not the straps around the case, which would have disturbed it. Just the bags, which came away in my hand like laundry, and I clipped them to my own harness.
He watched me do it.
Then he pointed at me, and then at the surface, and then made a flat sweeping motion with his hand — go, both of us, done — and I nodded, and we went up his line together, side by side, at thirty feet a minute, doing a stop at fifteen with our lights off, two men in a black ocean waiting out a decompression schedule they'd both been taught by somebody who cared about them.
At the surface, in the swell, with the boats' lights going, he pulled his regulator out.
"You Iron Compass?"
"Yeah."
"Figures." He spat salt. "You cut my bags."
"I did."
"I'm going to have to say that."
"Say it," I said. "Say all of it."
He looked at me for a second.
"What's your name?" he said.
"Torren Vale."
"Wexler," he said. "Danny Wexler."
Then he swam for his own ladder, and I swam for mine, and Nerissa hauled me over the transom with a grip like a winch and said, into my ear, over the wind, in a voice that was not the one she uses on the comms:
"Don't ever do that again."
"Okay."
"I mean it."
"Okay."
"You're not okay," she said. "You're shaking."
"That's the cold."
"It's eighty-one degrees, Torren."
I sat down on the deck of that terrible, knocking, beautiful boat with two dead lift bags still clipped to my harness, and I laughed, out loud, once, like a cough.
"They're going to lose," I said.
"What?"
"The kid on the bottom knew it was wrong," I said. "And he told me so at eighty feet in a storm. They've lost. They just haven't been told yet."