by Nora Roberts
“Thanks, Ray.” Matthew offered a hand. “For everything. Mostly it was a hell of a summer.”
“Mostly it was. There’ll be other summers, Matthew. Other wrecks. The time might come when we’ll dive for one together again. The Isabella’s still down there.”
“With Angelique’s Curse.” Matthew shook his head. “No thanks. She costs too much, Ray. The way I’m feeling right now, I’d just as soon leave her for the fish.”
“Time will tell. Take care of yourself, Matthew.”
“Yeah. Tell . . . tell Marla I’ll miss her cooking.”
“She’ll miss you. We all will. And Tate? Anything you want me to tell her?”
There was too much to tell her. And nothing to tell her. Matthew only shook his head.
Alone at the bar, Matthew shoved his beer aside. “Whiskey,” he told the bartender. “And bring the bottle.”
It was his last night on the island. He couldn’t think of one good reason to spend it sober.
PART TWO
PRESENT
The now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
—James Joyce
CHAPTER 11
T HERE WERE TWENTY-SEVEN crew members aboard the Nomad. Tate was delighted to be one of them. It had taken her five years of intense year-round work and study to earn her master’s degree in the field of marine archeology. Friends and family had often worried, told her to slow down. But that degree had been the one goal she felt she could control.
She had it. And in the three years since, had put it to use. Now through her association with the Poseidon Institute and her assignment with SeaSearch aboard the Nomad, she was taking the next step to earning her doctorate, and her reputation.
Best of all, she was doing what she loved.
This expedition was for science as well as profit. To Tate’s mind that was the proper and only logical rank of priority.
The crew quarters were a bit on the spare side, but the labs and equipment were state of the art. The old cargo vessel had been meticulously refitted for deep-sea exploration and excavation. Perhaps it was slow and unhandsome as ships went, she mused, but she’d learned long ago that an attractive outer layer meant nothing compared to what was within.
One summer of naive dreams had taught her that, and more.
The Nomad had a great deal within. She was manned by the top scientists and technicians in the field of ocean research.
And she was one of them.
The day was as fine as anyone could ask for. The waters of the Pacific gleamed like a blue jewel. And beneath it, fathoms deep where the light never reached and man could never venture, lay the side-wheeler Justine, and her treasure trove.
In her deck chair, Tate settled her laptop on her knees to complete a letter to her parents.
We’ll find her. The equipment on this ship is as sophisticated as any I’ve seen. Dart and Bowers can’t wait to put their robot to use. We’ve dubbed it “Chauncy.” I’m not sure why. But we’re putting a lot of faith in the little guy. Until we find the Justine and begin to excavate, my duties are light. Everybody pitches in, but there’s a lot of free time just now. And the food, Mom, is incredible. We’re expecting an airdrop today. I’ve managed to charm a few recipes from the cook though you’ll have to cut them down from the bulk necessary to feed almost thirty people.
After nearly a month at sea, there have been squabbles. Family-like, we snipe and fight and make up. There are even a couple of romances. I think I told you about Lorraine Ross, the chemist who shares a cabin with me. The assistant cook, George, has a major crush on her. It’s kind of sweet. Other flirtations are more to pass the time, I think, and will fade away once the real work begins.
So far the weather’s been with us. I wonder how it is back home. I imagine the azaleas will bloom within a few weeks, and the magnolias. I miss seeing them, and I miss seeing you. I know you’ll be leaving for your trip to Jamaica soon, so I hope this letter reaches you before you ship out. Maybe we can mesh schedules in the fall. If things go well, my dissertation will be complete. It would be fun to do a little diving back home.
Meanwhile I should get back. Hayden’s bound to be poring over the charts again, and I’m sure he could use a little help. We don’t have a mail drop until the end of the week, so this won’t go out until then. Write back, okay? Letters are like gold out here. I love you.
Tate
She hadn’t mentioned the tedium, Tate thought as she took the laptop back to the cabin she shared with Lorraine. Or the personal loneliness that could strike without warning when you were surrounded by mile after mile of water. She knew a great many of the crew were beginning to lose hope. The time, the money, the energy that was tied up in this expedition were extensive. If they failed, they would lose their backers, their share of the trove, and perhaps most important, their chance to make history.
Once inside the narrow cabin, Tate automatically scooped up the shirts and shorts and socks scattered over the floor. Lorraine might have been a brilliant scientist, but outside of the lab she was as disorganized as a teenager. Tate piled the clothes on Lorraine’s unmade bunk, her nose twitching at the musky perfume that haunted the air.
Lorraine, Tate concluded, was determined to drive poor George insane.
It still amazed and amused her that she and Lorraine had managed to become friends. Certainly no two women were more different. Where Tate was neat and precise, Lorraine was careless and messy. Tate was driven, Lorraine was unapologetically lazy. Over the years since college, Tate had experienced one serious relationship that had ended amicably while Lorraine had gone through two nasty divorces and innumerable volatile affairs.
Her roommate was a tiny, fairylike woman with a curvy body and a halo of golden hair. She wouldn’t so much as turn on a Bunsen burner unless she was wearing full makeup and the proper accessories.
Tate was long, lean and had only recently let her straight red hair grow to her shoulders. She rarely bothered with cosmetics and was forced to agree with Lorraine’s statement that she was fashion-impaired.
She didn’t think to glance in the full-length mirror Lorraine had hung on the door of the head before she left the cabin.
Turning left, she proceeded to the metal stairs that would take her to the next deck. The clattering and wheezing above made her smile.
“Hey, Dart.”
“Hey.” Dart came to a red-faced halt at the base of the stairs. Unlike his name, he was anything but slim and sharp. Pudgy, with all his edges softly rounded, he resembled an overweight St. Bernard. His thin, sandy-brown hair flopped into his guileless brown eyes. When he smiled, he added another chin to the two he habitually carried. “How’s it going?”
“Slow. I was going up to see if Hayden wanted some help.”
“I think he’s up there, buried in his books.” Dart flipped his hair back again. “Bowers just relieved me at Ground Zero, but I’m going back in a couple minutes.”
Tate’s interest peaked. “Something interesting on screen?”
“Not the Justine. But Litz is up there having multi-orgasms.” Dart referred to the marine biologist with a shrug. “Lots of interesting critters when you get down below a couple thousand feet. Bunch of crabs really got him off.”
“That’s his job,” Tate pointed out, though she sympathized. No one was fond of the cold, demanding Frank Litz.
“Doesn’t make him less of a creep. See you.”
“Yeah.” Tate made her way forward to Dr. Hayden Deel’s workroom. Two computers were humming. A long table bolted to the floor was covered with open books, notes, copies of logs and manifests, charts held down with more books.
Hunkered over them and peering through black horn-rims, Hayden ran fresh calculations. Tate knew he was a brilliant scientist. She had read his papers, applauded his lectures, studied his documentaries. It was a bonus, she thought, that he was simply a nice man.
She knew he was roughly forty. His dark-brown hair was sprinkled with gray and t
ended to curl. Behind the lenses, his eyes were the color of honey, and usually distracted. There were character-building lines that fanned from his eyes and scored his brow. He was tall, broad-shouldered and just a little clumsy. As usual, his shirt was wrinkled.
Tate thought he looked a bit like Clark Kent approaching middle age.
“Hayden?”
He grunted. As that was more than she’d expected, Tate took a seat directly across from him, folded her arms on the table and waited until he’d finished muttering to himself.
“Hayden?” she said again.
“Huh? What?” Blinking like an owl, he looked up. His face became quietly charming when he smiled. “Hi. Didn’t hear you come in. I’m recalculating the drift. I think we’re off, Tate.”
“Oh, by much?”
“It doesn’t take much out here. I decided to start from the beginning.” As if preparing for one of his well-attended lectures, he tapped papers together, folded his hands over them.
“The side-wheeler Justine left San Francisco on the morning of June eighth, 1857, en route to Ecuador. She held one hundred and ninety-eight passengers, sixty-one crew. In addition to the passengers’ personal belongings, she carried twenty million dollars in gold. Bars and coins.”
“It was a rich time in California,” Tate murmured. She’d read the manifests. Even for a woman who had spent most of her life studying and diving for treasure, it had boggled her.
“She took this route,” Hayden continued, tapping keys on the computer so that the graphics mirrored the doomed ship’s journey south through the Pacific. “She went into port at Guadalajara, discharging some passengers, taking on others. She pulled out on June nineteenth, with two hundred and two passengers.”
He pushed through copies of old newspaper clippings. “ ‘She was a bright ship,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘and the mood was celebrational. The weather was calm and hot, the sky clear as glass.’ ”
“Too calm,” Tate said, well able to imagine the mood, the hope. Elegantly dressed men and women parading the decks. Children laughing, perhaps watching the sea for a glimpse of a leaping dolphin or sounding whale.
“One of the survivors noted the brilliant, almost impossibly beautiful sunset on the night of June twenty-first,” Hayden continued. “The air was still and very heavy. Hot. Most put it down to their nearness to the equator.”
“But the captain would have known then.”
“Would have, or should have.” Hayden moved his shoulders. “Neither he nor the log survived. But by midnight on the evening of that beautiful sunset, the winds came—and the waves. Their route and speed put them here.” He took the computer-generated Justine south and west. “We have to assume he would have headed for land, Costa Rica by most accounts, hoping he could ride it out. But with fifty-foot swells battering his ship, there wasn’t much of a chance.”
“All that night and all the next day, they fought the storm,” Tate added. “Terrified passengers, crying children. You’d hardly be able to tell day from night, or hear your own prayers. If you were brave, or frightened enough to look, all you would see would be wall after wall of water.”
“By the night of the twenty-second, the Justine was breaking apart,” Hayden continued. “There was no hope of saving her, or of reaching land in her. They put the women, the children, and the injured in the lifeboats.”
“Husbands kissing their wives goodbye,” Tate said softly. “Fathers holding their children for the last time. And all of them knowing it would take a miracle for any of them to survive.”
“Only fifteen did.” Hayden scratched his cheek. “One lifeboat outwitted the hurricane. If they hadn’t, we wouldn’t even have these small clues as to where to find her.” He glanced up, noticed with alarm that Tate’s eyes were wet. “It was a long time ago, Tate.”
“I know.” Embarrassed, she blinked back the tears. “It’s just so easy to see it, to imagine what they went through, what they felt.”
“For you it is.” He reached over and gave her hand an awkward pat. “That’s what makes you such a fine scientist. We all know how to calculate facts and theories. Too many of us lack imagination.”
He wished he had a handkerchief to offer her. Or better yet, the nerve to brush away the single tear that had escaped to trail down her cheek. Instead, Hayden cleared his throat and went back to his calculations.
“I’m going to suggest we move ten degrees south, southwest.”
“Oh, why?”
Delighted she’d asked, he began to show her.
Tate rose, moved behind him to view his screens and his hastily scribbled notes over his shoulder. Occasionally, she laid her hand on it or leaned closer to get a better look or ask a question.
Each time she did, Hayden’s heart would stutter. He called himself a fool, even a middle-aged fool, but it didn’t stop the hitch.
He could smell her—soap and skin. Each time she laughed in that low, carelessly sexy way, his mind would cloud. He loved everything about her, her mind, her heart, and when he let himself fantasize, her wonderfully willowy body. Her voice was like honey poured over brown sugar.
“Did you hear that?”
How could he hear anything but her voice when he was all but swimming in it. “What?”
“That.” She pointed overhead, toward the sound of engines. Planes, she realized, and grinned. “It must be the food drop. Come on, Hayden. Let’s go up top, get some sun and watch them.”
“Well, I haven’t quite finished my—”
“Come on.” Laughing, she grabbed his hand and pulled him to his feet. “You’re like a mole in here. Just a few minutes on deck.”
He went with her, of course, feeling very much like a mole chasing a butterfly. She had the loveliest legs. He knew he shouldn’t stare at them, but they were the most incredible shade of alabaster. And there was that enchanting little freckle just above the back of her right knee.
He’d like to press his mouth just there. The thought of doing it, of perhaps being invited to do it, made his head swim.
He cursed himself for being an idiot, reminding himself he was thirteen years her senior. He had a responsibility to her and to the expedition.
She was onboard the Nomad due to his agreement with the recommendation that had come straight from Trident through its Poseidon arm. He’d been delighted to agree. After all, she’d been his best and brightest student.
Wasn’t it wonderful the way the sun gilded the flame of her hair?
“Here comes another one!” Tate shouted and cheered along with the other crew who had gathered as the next package splashed off the stern.
“We’ll eat like kings tonight.” Lorraine, her lush little body stuffed into a snug halter and shorts, leaned over the rail. Below, crew were manning a dingy. “Don’t leave anything behind, boys. I put in a request for some Fume Blanc, Tate.” She winked, then turned to flutter her gilded lashes at Hayden. “Doc, where have you two been hiding out?”
“Hayden’s running new figures.” Tate leaned over the rail to shout encouragement as the dingy putted out to retrieve the supplies. “I hope they remembered the chocolate.”
“You only eat sweets because you’re repressed.”
“You’re just jealous because M&M’s go straight to your thighs.”
Lorraine pursed her lips. “My thighs are terrific.” She ran a fingertip along one, slanted Hayden a sly look. “Aren’t they, doc?”
“Leave Hayden alone,” Tate began, then squealed when she was grabbed from behind.
“Break time.” Bowers, tough and sinewy, scooped her up. While others applauded, he dashed to one of the ropes they’d rigged. “We’re going swimming, babycakes.”
“I’ll kill you, Bowers.” She knew their robotics and computer expert loved nothing better than to play. Still laughing, she struggled weakly. “This time I mean it.”
“She’s nuts about me.” With one muscled arm, he snagged the rope. “Better hold on, honey child.”
She looked down as his
eyes rolled in his glossy ebony face. He bared his teeth, made her giggle helplessly. “How come you always pick on me?”
“ ’Cause we look so fine together. Grab hold. Me Tarzan, you Jane.”
Tate gripped the rope, sucked in her breath. With Bowers’s wild Tarzan yell ringing in her ears, she pushed off with him into space. She screamed, because it felt good. The wide, wide sea tilted beneath her, and as the rope arched, she let go. The air whisked over her, the water rushed up. She heard Bowers cackling like a loon an instant before she hit.
It was bracingly cool. She let it bathe her before kicking her way to the surface.
“Only an 8.4 from the Japanese judge, Beaumont, but they’re picky devils.” Bowers winked at her, then shaded his eyes. “Oh Christ almighty, here comes Dart. Everybody out of the pool.”
From the rail, Hayden watched Tate and his associates play like children freshly released to recess. It made him feel old, and more than a little stodgy.
“Come on, doc.” Lorraine gave him her quick, flirtatious smile. “Why don’t we take a dip?”
“I’m a lousy swimmer.”
“So, wear a flotation, or better yet, use Dart as a raft.”
That made him smile. At the moment, Dart was bobbing around in the Pacific like a bloated cork. “I think I’ll just watch.”
Keeping her smile in place, Lorraine shrugged her bare shoulders. “Suit yourself.”
More than three thousand miles away from where Tate frolicked in the crystal Pacific, Matthew shivered in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic.
The fact that he headed the salvage team was a small point of pride. He’d worked his way up in Fricke Salvage over the years, taking on all and any assignments that paid. Now he was in charge of the underwater dig and hauled in ten percent of the net profits.
And he hated every minute of it.
There wasn’t a nastier cut to the pride of a hunter than crewing a big, ugly boat on straight metal salvage. There was no gold, no treasure to be discovered on the Reliant. The World War II vessel was crusted with the icy mud of the North Atlantic, its value solely in its metal.