Night Diver: A Novel

by Elizabeth Lowell

  The crew filtered back to wherever they had come from.

  Holden barely noticed. He had been watching Kate from the corner of his eye since she had appeared to check out rumors of gems spreading through the ship’s grapevine. She was watching Farnsworth as he closed the raw emerald in a bag and set it in the pail with the other bits that had been collected from the barrel.

  “Gold, jewelry, gems, and other valuable items should be entered into a written and photo log immediately,” Kate said. “Then they should go to the ship’s safe and only be removed by someone who signs a receipt for the items.”

  Grandpa Donnelly didn’t even bother to answer, but Farnsworth said, “If Holden agrees, I’ll take care of the extra work.”

  Holden nodded. “Now that we’ve found a real gem, AO will be reassured by the extra steps.”

  “Larry isn’t going to like being awakened to open the safe for every bit of gleam we pick up,” Grandpa Donnelly said. “And I’m not going to leave the barrel until the siphon is off and the bed is empty.”

  Kate thought about it, then nodded, rubbing absently at her cheek. Her fingers left a smudge on her skin. “Put everything valuable in one pail and make certain the pail is in the camera’s view at all times. That way we’ll have a record and Larry will get to sleep.”

  Farnsworth took an empty pail, put it in the camera’s field, and transferred the plastic packages with valuable goods inside to the pail one at a time, ensuring that each was recorded.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll work with Larry on some protocol to sign things into the warehouse ashore. I don’t want anyone to doubt that what comes up from the dive goes directly to our British partners.”

  Holden heard the emphasis on the last word and hid a smile.

  He left Farnsworth and Donnelly to their work and followed Kate down to a storage area where tanks of various compressed gases waited to be used. From the looks of the deck and storage racks, it had a been a long time since the place had had a good scrubbing.

  “I’m surprised your face is only a bit smudged,” Holden said.

  Like everything else below the deck, the quarters were close and tight, smelling of brine, grease, and sweat in equal parts. Even on tourist vessels, keeping places like this spotless was hardly a high priority. On a working vessel, such areas got wiped down when there was literally nothing left to do.

  Holden looked at the grimy lightbulb that barely illuminated the area.

  “A good cleaning sounds great,” she said. “You volunteering?”

  “I’m not an ensign.”

  “And here I thought you were perfect.” She turned away before she grabbed him with dirty hands and pulled him close enough to bite.

  Holden surveyed the row of five tall canisters of pressurized gas—oxygen, helium, and nitrogen—waiting to be mixed and locked in scuba rigs. Then he looked at her. He wanted nothing more than to pull her against him and breathe in her scent, feel her soft heat against his body. The hunger burned up the back of his neck and spread across his body.

  “How is the inventory going?” he asked, his voice too deep.

  She stared back with a hunger that equaled his. “This isn’t inventory. This is damage control. Tanks are low, particularly the nitrogen and oxygen, but really all of them.”

  “Leaky valves?”

  “Lazy bookkeeping. People haven’t bothered to log out each time they use the tanks. And that helium is expensive.”

  “Maybe Volkert’s sneaking up here for a giggle.”

  Her lips curved at the thought of Volkert squeezing into the storage room to get high on gas mixtures. “The idea has comic possibilities.”

  He smiled slowly. “I don’t envy you sleuthing after missing helium—colorless, odorless, and near weightless. Even Sherlock Holmes would be baffled.”

  She watched the line of his lips and remembered how he had looked in the tropical sun by the siphon, with the light from the water rippling off his bronze skin. He was beautiful down to his bones, and his eyes were more compelling than any gem. She wanted to sink into them, into him.

  “Kate?” he asked softly, wondering where she had gone in that intelligent mind of hers.

  She realized she was holding her breath. She let it out in a soft rush.

  “I can’t get the dive hours to jibe with the remaining gas in the storage cylinders,” she said.

  “A fair amount of heavy salvage has been floated to the top with cables and balloons,” he said. “Cannons aren’t light. Neither are ingots of metal.”

  “If the divers are using expensive air mixes to float iron, I’m going to tear strips off their hides. We have a compressor aboard with a long hose we use to blow up floats for the big stuff. Or we use the balloon lifts that are self-inflating. At least we used to.”

  Frowning, she tapped out a quick note on her computer to check with Larry. She hated to bother him, but someone had to keep an eye on supplies, especially the expensive ones. Since no one else was doing it, she would.

  A random larger swell caught the ship, changing its motion.

  Holden watched Kate closely. Beyond the automatic adjustment of her body to keep the computer stable, she didn’t seem to notice the ship’s motion. No sudden pallor, no tightening of her mouth or shoulders, nothing but a supple shift to accommodate the changed motion.

  He smiled.

  “What?” she asked, looking up.

  “The first day or two aboard, you flinched at every unexpected shift the Golden Bough made.”

  She looked confused.

  “You’re getting past your fear,” he said, touching the smudge on her cheek.

  Before she could answer, the light in the storeroom went out and the familiar grumble of the generator went silent.

  “Bugger,” he said, dropping his hand. “There goes the power again.”

  “Grandpa will fix it.” Even as she spoke, the siphon shut down. “See? He’s on his way.”

  “Is he a proper ship’s engineer?”

  “For the Golden Bough, yes. He could probably take it apart and reassemble it in his sleep.” Which is very close to what I’d like to do to the lickable man with the dragon eyes.

  Her cheek still tingled where he had touched it. Her nipples wanted his touch, too. Not to mention his mouth. She wondered if his nipples were sensitive. Not every man’s were. In fact, most men just went for the finish line like there was a prize for the fastest orgasm.

  Male, of course. If the female couldn’t keep up, well, that was her problem.

  And I’d better stop thinking about sex.

  “ . . . work by flashlight?” Holden asked.

  She blinked, had an image of them in the dark, naked, laughing and grappling for possession of the flashlight’s revealing beam. She fought a blush and tried to drag her thoughts away from how Holden’s every movement made her want to find out if his follow-through in bed was half as good as his looks.

  Or even a third.

  “Flashlight,” she said, her thoughts racing furiously. “Um, I didn’t think to bring one. Did you?”

  He shook his head.

  She stretched stiffly. “Grandpa will probably fire up the starboard engine to top the batteries off and keep the operation going. Expensive as hell, but at least the lights will work.”

  “Take a break and come to the dive center with me,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  She blinked. “Point to the gentleman. Assuming you are one.”

  “In the right circumstances I can be very gentle. Thorough, too.”

  Heat shot through Kate. “Not touching that.”

  “Pity. We’ll talk more about it at supper—dinner.”

  A big engine fired up, adding a pulsing rumble to the air.

  “You’re prescient,” he said.

  “Experienced on this ship,” she corrected.

  “Come to the dive center with me. Your back must be cursing you.”

  “What do you want at the
dive center?”

  “Volkert’s cooperation. With you along, I’m less likely to have to resort to kicking his lazy arse.”

  “I doubt it. He made an offer and I declined.”

  “A hard offer?” Holden asked sharply.

  “There’s not a hard inch on that man.”

  Holden smothered a smile. “Don’t be too sure.”

  “Gak. Mind bleach.” She shuddered. “I’m sure some women lust for his type, but I really don’t want to think about it. He goes through junk food faster than divers go through oxygen. His snacks are all imported because he hates the cook’s food. And if the dive logs have been updated in the last week, I haven’t found them.”

  Holden’s black eyebrows lifted. She sounded ready to tear a strip off Volkert.

  Maybe she’ll let me help. Or at least watch.

  “Okay,” she said, stretching again, “let’s go see what Volkert has on the screens.”

  “While we’re watching, I have a few questions about previous scans done by metal detectors,” Holden said.

  “I’ve been curious about them too, but there are things a lot higher on my to-do list.”

  Holden really hoped he was one of them. He gestured for her to precede him out of the storeroom.

  She tried not to take any extra time brushing by him, but it felt so good she wanted to linger. Every step of the way to the dive center, she could feel him watching her rear.

  So she put an extra little swing into her stride.

  The narrow hallway was alive with the thrum of power, sending vibrations through every surface. The bulkheads and walls were so close that the sensation of life rushed through them, like resting a palm on the heart of a sleeping dragon, raw power coursing.

  Like Holden, she thought, then tried very hard to think about something else.

  Kate opened the door to the communication room, bathing them both in the flickering glow of the dive screens. The insistent thump of electronic music poured out the open door.

  The smell of stale food and sweat clung to the room like a bad reputation. An iPod plugged into a small speaker was the source of an incessant electronic beat with a sweet-sinister girl-voice winding through it like a snake.

  “Dial it down,” Kate said loudly. “You may be deaf but I’m not.”

  Volkert either didn’t hear her or ignored her.

  “What in hell is that noise?” Holden asked roughly.

  The electronics phased into a hammering digital drumbeat, all bass. Then more singing over it, the words in Dutch or German.

  “Die Antwoord,” Volkert said without looking up. “You should get out more.”

  “Why? The English invented that electro-pop you’re deafening yourself with.”

  “Pity that you English don’t sing in Afrikaans. What do you want?” Volkert crunched on some more chips.

  “I’m having trouble syncing up my computer map with the ship’s daily dive record,” Holden said loudly.

  “Geen woord gevind nie.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Afrikaans for ‘I’m so terribly sorry.’ A bad habit. I used to work tech support for a company based in Johannesburg.”

  “Can you get me connected?” Holden asked impatiently. “I’m already on the network, but I keep getting shunted off.”

  “Yah, sorry, we got some new procedures that I’m catching up with. And doing my normal job. And trying to fix the mess I found when I came aboard.”

  Kate wanted to put her fingers in her ears. Volkert’s whine cut right through Techno-pop and put her teeth on edge. That and the fact that he was ignoring her like grease on the deck.

  “The new procedures,” she said clearly, “are the accepted standard for entering and cross-referencing digital files. Remember? It was in your job description.”

  Volkert ignored her.

  She leaned over him and shut off the iPod. “Maybe that will help you concentrate.”

  He gave her a cold-eyed glare. “What do you want?”

  She looked at Holden and said, “You first.”

  “I have a few questions about the metallurgic scans you’ve been working from,” Holden said. “It appears to me that the data you’re using is rubbish.”

  Volkert sighed and pushed a meaty arm across the keyboard. The main screen went from a view of Mingo’s camera to the five-by-five grid of the whole wreck area. Overlaid was a false color map, showing small concentrations of red and yellow here and there, but mostly a faint scattering of blue. “This data?”

  “Precisely. Is it current?”

  Volkert shrugged. “Current as I’ve got. You should know. It’s the map that the Brit survey team provided us.”

  “I recognize it, and its limitations. Why aren’t you running your own surveys?”

  Volkert stared at Holden as if he had a flower growing out of his nose. “You Brits are running the show. If you couldn’t be arsed to get a better survey to us, then you’re going to get what’s coming to you.”

  Holden stiffened, shirt tightening across his shoulders. He had had enough of the insufferable Afrikaner.

  Kate decided that her peacekeeping act was in order now. After all, they had deprived Volkert of his noise cocoon. “What Holden meant to ask is if the divers had done informal surveys based on this original scan. In other words, is there better information in the digital file?”

  Holden flexed his lean fingers, but kept quiet.

  Volkert stared at both of them with eyes that were almost lost in the curves of his face. “One of the advantages of being a fungus is that I sit in the dark and am fed bullshit. I see what the divers are doing when the cameras are running. That’s it. If you want, I can get you an overlay of everywhere the divers have gone and you can put it over whatever other information you can pull out of the files. But it will take a time.” He turned back to the screen. “I should be watching the divers and taking notes. Someone has suggested that we tighten up.”

  “Someone who is your boss,” Kate reminded him tightly.

  “You didn’t hire me.”

  “You can bet your next bag of cookies on that. But I can fire you.”

  He ignored her.

  Holden started forward.

  Kate beat him to it. She leaned over and got right in Volkert’s face. “Listen, you miserable pile of grief, you will look at me when I’m talking to you and do your job.”

  He glanced at her blazing turquoise eyes and shrank back against his seat. “I’ve been here less than two weeks. It’s not my fault the people before me were incompetent.”

  “Check the records for the most recent metal scan,” she said flatly.

  “All I have is what I was given. The guy before me told me to do it the same way he had—no instructions. I’ve barely learned the system.”

  “Not good enough. If anyone has been waving a metal detector around on that grid, the findings are recorded somewhere. Ferret them out.”

  “Well, yah. I guess. If they wrote them down or entered them into their dive boxes.”

  “Go through all the reports that you’ve gotten and search for anything about metal deposits. Send the result to me.” Kate stood up, having had enough of the smell of his sweat. “Got that?”

  Volkert nodded rather sullenly. “When do you need those records?”

  “Before you open your next sack of chips.”

  “It will be at least an hour, probably two. Mingo’s been streaming up data faster than I can chew it down.”

  “Pretend the data are cookies and get me that report.”

  Holden watched as she pushed away from Volkert and walked closer to the bank of monitors. For a moment she was a stark female silhouette against a shifting glow. Her shorts and shirt were stuck to curvy parts of her by the heat and humidity.

  “Anything else you need?” she asked Holden.

  Oh, love, I want you to ask me that question again in the dark.

  Volkert glared into the monitors and hammered his fingertips over the keyboard. Noisily. />
  “Some of the files are ready now,” he said, looking at Holden. “Do you want them in your inbox?”

  “Just leave them in a public folder. Mark them clearly.”

  More clicks. “Done and done. But I can’t promise the information isn’t shite. This isn’t what I would call a tight ship.”

  “Then do what you can to tighten it up,” Kate suggested.

  Holden watched the screens where the divers were working their way through the decompression stages.

  “Looks like they have full bags,” he said, referring to the mesh bags divers used to carry small finds.

  Silence, then openmouthed crunching as Volkert chewed.

  “What did they find?” she asked.

  Volkert chewed and looked at her, giving a great view of a mouth full of mush. His expression said he knew how little she liked it.

  Holden waited, understanding that Kate had to live in a man’s world on board the ship. If he stepped in, it would be worse for her the next time she gave orders to a crew member. Now, if I could just stop imagining how delightful it would be to mash that fat toad’s mouth all over his face . . .

  “Gold jewelry,” Volkert said, the words almost buried in half-chewed chips.

  “Intact?” she asked.

  He swallowed. “A few small pearls left. They’re junk.”

  She wasn’t surprised. Once a pearl left the oyster’s protection, it began degrading. Salt water acted like a slow acid on the natural gems.

  “A collector or a museum will overlook that,” she said, “if the piece is unusual enough. Anything else?”

  “Such as?” he mocked.

  “Emeralds,” she said, “diamonds, sapphires, rubies, money chains, coins, ingots of gold or silver. The usual stuff of a treasure diver’s dreams. But then, you wouldn’t know, would you? You aren’t a diver. Tell me about significant finds or I will fire your ass right now and run the dive center myself.”

  Volkert looked at Holden.

  “I hear she’s quite good at your job,” Holden said, his voice indifferent.

  Volkert turned to Kate. “Some coral that grew around a purse of coins, silver. Five earrings, no stones.” He looked down at the notes he had made in Afrikaans. “In fact, it looks like Bloody Green pulled out almost every gem and stored it separately. If he was true to type, he had some chest or chests locked in his own quarters.”