Buried At Sea

by Paul Garrison

  Suddenly the loud-hailer clacked on—Will was doing his "me hearties" voice. "Now hear this. All hands to the galley.

  Them that helps bake apple pie gets a slice. Them that don't, starve."

  Jim stayed on the bow long enough to preserve his dignity, then joined Will below, tempted less by food than by the prospect of any break in the routine. Will did his cooking at night, when the boat was the coolest.

  "Hey, there you are," Will greeted him. "You start the crust. Sift two cups of flour into the big mixing bowl. Put the bowl in the sink. Remember what I told you: your only friend in a rolling galley is the sink."

  Jim put the bowl on the counter instead and immediately regretted it. Will helped mop up the spilled flour. His crust, Will promised Jim, contained no unhealthy hydrogenized oil and only half a stick of butter for the whole pie. "We're here for apples, not butter." He showed Jim how to cut the butter into the flour with two knives. "Utensils only. Piecrust likes an icy touch." He put half the pastry aside in the cooler.

  "Now I'm going to let you in on a secret. Never trust a woman, or a man, for that matter, who covers an apple pie with a top crust. A top crust steams the apples—ruins them.

  Now I know what you're going to say: your mom makes a little chimney in the middle of the crust, or she pricks it with a fork. Sorry, Mom, you can't vent the steam with pricks and chimneys."

  "My mother bought pies at the Grand Union."

  "And I suppose your old man never taught you how to change a tire."

  "He called Triple A."

  "You'd have been better off in a foster home. Your parents robbed you of a hands-on life. It's never too late to change—I told you, you did a good job crimping that head stay.

  "

  "It was like working on the bike."

  "Just remember you're dealing with a thousand times the

  loads—all right, half the dough we'll roll out for our bottom

  crust. The other half, we'll put aside for our crumb topping."

  A wine bottle served as Will's rolling pin. He flattened

  the dough between sheets of waxed paper. "Note, we're not

  handling it too much, not pummeling it over and over, so we

  don't make it tough. Find the apples in the freezer—righthand side, halfway down. In and out quick as you can—save the cold—use the flashlight?'

  Jim pawed through the Ziploc bags of fresh chickens Will had washed and salted before he froze them, dry-aged strip steaks, pork chops, cooked veal and sausage stews, and legs of lamb. Halfway down on the right he found a plastic bag of sliced apples, brown sugar, quince, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, allspice, and nutmeg—one of a dozen Will had prepared before he set sail.

  The weather fax machine in the nav station beeped. "Check it out?" said Will. "See what'

  s coming our way."

  Jim picked up the paper flowing from the printer. Superimposed across the weather map for the eastern equatorial Atlantic were three lines of computer-generated block print.

  NO MAN IS AN ISLAND, NOT EVEN A CLOD ON A YACHT. COMMUNICATE.

  BEFORE WE CATCH A THIEF.

  "What the heck is this?" He recognized the fractured John Donne from Ren Lit. But how had it gotten into a public broadcast of the weather report?

  "Will, look at this."

  Will scanned it. "Son of a bitch?' he whispered under his breath. Then he read aloud, affecting nonchalance. " `No man is an island, not even a clod on a yacht.' Oh, very clever."

  "Who's it from?" asked Jim.

  "A poet who didn't know it." Will crumpled the sheet and climbed halfway up the companionway to toss it to the wind.

  Jim stared at him, wondering whether Will's explanation about why he couldn't call the cops was bullshit. Was Will the criminal? Were the mysterious "they" the law?

  "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but faxes will never hurt me." He slid his hand under the waxed paper, placed the pan upside down over the rolled dough, and flipped it into the pan. Quickly he fluted the edges of the crust, shaping the dough between his thumbs and index fingers.

  "But how did that message get into the weather fax?"

  "I told you, they are powerful. If it can be done, they can do it. How? Either they hacked their way in or they bribed some underpaid technician to look the other way. Pie filling, please."

  "What do they mean, 'communicate'? Could it be an offer to negotiate?"

  "If we were to slip this pie in the oven for an hour, we could build an appetite with a spinning class." "Communicate or else?"

  "Empty threat," said Will. "This poet who doesn't know it is stuck behind a PC

  somewhere and we're safe in the middle of the ocean—as long as we keep our eyes peeled for ships. Ships are a threat. They've got their hooks into the big shipping companies, the Russian merchant fleets, the oil company tankers, offshore towing outfits, Taiwanese container ships, the Dutch, the—"

  "Every ship in the world?"

  "The fleets, where they know the owners. That's why we're keeping our eyes peeled.

  Spinners on deck, Herr Instructor. Mach schnell!"

  They showered the sweat off under the fire hose—pumping warm, salty seawater over each other on the foredeck. The pie, with Breyer's vanilla ice cream from the freezer, tasted like no pie Jim had ever eaten: the apples seemed like an impossible combination of tart and sweet, and the crust was crisp and airy.

  I'm like Shannon's cat, he thought. All good things come from Will. If Will opens the door and fills my food dish, I eat. If he freaks out and jumps overboard, I drift until I sink. I either starve or have to go hunting on my own. That's where the analogy breaks down. I don't know how to hunt.

  "Where'd you learn your table manners?"

  "What?"

  "You know how to use a knife and fork. I don't meet many thirty-year-olds who do. Our '

  gold rush' economy spawns frontier manners. You have ... habits."

  "My mother was a nut for properness. Drove me and my dad nuts with it. 'We may not have money, but we use a proper linen napkin.' That sort of thing."

  "Sounds like an old-fashioned upbringing."

  "They were older and I think my mother, at least, thought things had been better in the past."

  "What did your father think?"

  "He didn't say. . . . He thought it was bullshit, but he went along. . . . He was an old hippie. Love and peace at any cost."

  "Sounds like Mom was a force to be reckoned with." "Shannon says she was a control freak at home because she couldn't make it in the real world."

  "What do you think?"

  "I'm still too close to it. But I think Shannon's right. Underneath all her demandingness, my mother was very, very needy." He smiled, suddenly happy. "You won't be surprised to hear that she and Shannon can't stand each other—I'm going to check my e-mail."

  "Why not? Maybe Shannon's changed her mind." "Maybe 'they' have changed their minds."

  Dear Jim,

  Your shark-and-flipper experience sounds a little weird. Is Will a little weird?

  Dear Shannon,

  Weird, I don't know. Maybe Will was a little cold-blooded, but maybe cold-blooded is what makes him so cool and collected when something goes wrong with the boat.

  I have to admit that if it happened again, I hope l'd keep my eyes open long enough to really see what's going on before I freak out.

  Lloyd McVay, a tall, stooped man in a glen-plaid suit and florid bow tie, telephoned ports up and down the coasts that rimmed the Atlantic Ocean. His reach extended from Brazil to the island of Antigua in the Caribbean, to Miami on the American mainland, to Dakar in Senegal on the great bulge of West Africa; in Freetown, Lagos, Gibraltar, the Azores, and Bermuda, bankers, importers, shipping agents, oilmen, diamond merchants, and diplomats took his calls, eager to please.

  Val McVay, his daughter and chief grant officer of the McVay Foundation for Humane Science, worked across from him on the other side of their partners desk, e-mailing yacht clubs and marinas on
those same coasts. She was a pale woman, dressed all in black; her face was as white as paper, her close-cropped hair was ash-blond, and her wide-open, wide-set eyes were dark. The goals list she kept on a pad beside her included polling a score of charter yacht captains she knew from her sailing days and a hundred scientists, engineers, and academics beholden to the foundation.

  Raised a lone child among adults, she had learned early to read faces and eyes: their assistants—three recently minted MBAs in dark suits, white shirts, and bow ties defer-entially imitative of her father's signature neckwear—were experiencing real terror; even her father was feeling pressed.

  The disaster was writ large on the jumbo high-resolution flat-panel display that showed an electronic chart of the Atlantic Ocean. The red line that marked Will Spark's voyage from Barbados ran out abruptly midocean. The icon that had represented the fast ferry Barcelona was beached, as it were, in the Cape Verde Islands, where Andy Nickels had disembarked. Except for the useless red line and the ferry icon, nine million square miles of seawater depicted on the chart were empty. The enormous circle of blue that marked how far Spark could have sailed in the past week already encompassed an area larger than Europe.

  A dozen smaller monitors displayed CNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, and a range of science and engineering websites. The only decoration in their large, windowless office was a vintage poster for the movie Fantastic Voyage—her father's idea. Their desk was littered with telephones and computer monitors. A printer sighed in a corner, attended by an MBA. A second MBA was whispering into a phone. The third was

  poised to retrieve paper files from a bank of cabinets.

  Lloyd McVay said, "I should speak with someone in the oil business, in the event Spark heads for his old stomping grounds in West Africa."

  "Richard Hood at Shell," suggested Val. "We gave his brother a lab grant."

  "Dick's an accountant, for goodness' sake. Bob Hunt oversees security."

  Val's grandfather had founded McVay Radio, building transceivers for the air force in World War II and microwave generators for the then-new radar. After a long stint with the CIA, her father had taken over, renaming the company McVay Microwaves in time for the Vietnam War and the NASA moon project, and developing transmitters and laser generators for the Defense Department, NASA, and private industry. He had made a second fortune by jumping down from elite technology into PCs for ordinary people.

  With the company catchphrase, "There are more of them than us," McVay Computers sold cheaper and cheaper computer chips by the billions.

  After graduating first in her class at Stanford, Val had joined him in the race to design high-speed browsers for the Internet. But here they stumbled. Their technically brilliant effort was steamrollered by Microsoft at the cost of much money and most of the McVay prestige. Silicon Valley now knew the tall, stooped patrician Lloyd McVay as an older businessman who managed the benevolent-sounding, nonprofit, tax-exempt McVay Foundation for Humane Science, and his reclusive daughter as one of the legion of thirty-something women left in the cyber dust.

  In fact, the McVays had regrouped in New Jersey horse country and, under the cloak of their foundation, set their sights on a third fortune that would dwarf the first two. It meant being first on-line when the fifty-year-old electronics mantra "smaller and faster"

  transformed the Internet by linking ultra-miniature microprocessors to the world's data-base.

  Dispensing grants to an array of engineering projects, Val and her father had devoted the past six years to launching the

  next great Internet breakthrough. They had finally found it in Sentinel—one of hundreds of developments the foundation had financed. But first they had to find Will Spark, who had stolen it.

  "Merchant ships should watch for them offshore. Can you call Vassily Nikolin?"

  "The man authenticates with relentless enthusiasm the cliché of Russian dipsomania."

  "Whom do you suggest?" she shot back. She hated playing catch-up. It went against her grain. She was willing to accept that plenty of people were smarter than she, but no one was better organized or worked harder.

  "Admiral Boris Rugoff," her father replied. "And, obviously, I'm already in touch with the towing companies that service the oil fields."

  "And fishing fleets?"

  "You know perfectly well that we're thin on the ground there," her father snapped.

  "I know that there are thirteen hundred European Union trawlers licensed around the world."

  "Well, unless you've become intimate with some fishermen I've yet to meet—"

  "What about the navy?"

  "It goes without saying that I've already had a preliminary conversation with Fleet Ocean Intelligence."

  Val checked her goals list. Yacht clubs, merchant ships, work boats, fishing fleets, and the possibility of enlisting the U.S. Navy had all been covered.

  For her, the worst part of this catastrophe was that she had come aboard late. When it first hit—which was to say, when Will Spark first screwed them—they had decided that she would take care of day-to-day affairs, freeing her father to devote his full time to managing the crisis. It was he, after all, who had always handled the dark side of the business—assisted by old Andrew Nickels—when lobbying had to be augmented by the well-placed bribe, dirt had to be dug up to smear a persistent rival, a critic was to be silenced, a security breach plugged, or an enemy punished.

  But when Spark suddenly disappeared and Andrew Nick-

  els killed himself, Val, with her entire future at stake, had had to step in. She had discovered that her flair for conceiving and managing long-term projects was suited to fighting deceit with deceit. Coupled with her technical expertise, she had the powerful feeling that she could play the dark games even better than her father. Proof was her idea to trace Spark by bugging Jim Leighton's heart-rate monitor. An opportunity that Andy Nickels, her father's latest protégé, had squandered.

  She watched an assistant slide an open folder onto Lloyd McVay's desk. Another handed him a wireless telephone. McVay ran his finger down the dossier and glanced at the nine-

  by-twelve glossy photograph of the oil company executive.

  "Bob Hunt! It's been too long since we've heard from you. . . . How's that tennis game going? Elbow still giving you trouble?" His finger traced columns of print. "Estelle is well, I trust? Must be wrapping up that nanotech book by now. . . . Still at it? . . . No thanks are necessary; we prefer to support better causes than the Internal Revenue Service—though you might remind Estelle that we like to see our projects completed on time. . . . Now, Bob, we've gotten a hint of trouble in your patch . . . over the transom as it were. It's possible—not yet a certainty—that Greenpeace is targeting your offshore operations in the Niger Delta. . . . A two-lantern coming, if you get my meaning. . . . By sea. Under your radar on a sailboat. . . I'll send a man around with a description of the boat and crew. . . . You're welcome—but there is one thing, Bob. We have first dibs on them. ... That's exactly what I mean." McVay's voice was abruptly drained of good nature. "They severely injured the captain of one of our research vessels with their shenanigans and we intend to bring charges. We'll take them off your hands the instant you get them. . . . That's right, Bob. No skin off your nose."

  A message from a receptionist crawled across Val's monitor: a geology team from Cambridge was still waiting to present their final report on earthquake predictors. She forwarded "I'll blow them off" to her father's screen.

  Exiting their private office, she opened double-locked foyer doors with her thumbprint, then hurried out of the mansion she shared with her father, descended the granite front steps, and crossed the winter-bleak gardens on a path of crushed slate.

  The McVay Foundation for Humane Science presented its public face in a former fifty-stall brood barn—a huge stone structure converted into numerous offices, conference rooms, and a great hall that could be used for presentations and formal dinners. The Cambridge scientists were waiting in the reception room, leafing thro
ugh the foundation'

  s four-color annual reports and making the rounds of the many framed photographs of her father, who was pictured shaking hands with presidents and grinning at disadvantaged children who had benefited from McVay generosity. They leapt to their feet when Val strode in.

  "Ladies. Gentlemen. Mr. McVay is disappointed he will not be able to greet you in person. He looks forward to reading your report and we will get back to you in due course. The limousines will take you back to New York. Thank you for coming."

  "But we brought slides," said a long-haired geologist.

  "We'll look at them," said Val, and then, with a hazy realization that the scientists were not happy, she added, "Of course we'll look at them. We paid for them."

  She hurried back to the house and her desk. A new file was being presented to her father along with a telephone.

  Val, who vastly preferred the bluntness of e-mail to the chitchat required on the telephone, turned to her keypad to send blind copies to every yacht captain in her address file:

  Have you seen the fifty-foot. one-off sloop Hustle? Center cockpit. high aspect rig. Hong Kong registry. new teak decks. distinctive wooden spoked wheel, white hull.

  Val brought a file of research vessels up on her screen and began e-mailing McVay grant recipients aboard those currently at sea. Across the desk, her father was describmg Hustle to the chairman of a Taiwanese container fleet.

  Will Spark had contrived to lose himself on a big ocean. But for the owners of a foundation that underwrote research and development with grants and incubator money, disbursed first-class travel expenses to conferences and retreats, and lobbied congressmen and military officers with studied generosity, the big ocean was surrounded by a very small world.

  SECOND-DAY PIE tastes better than first-day pie, because pie needs time to steep. So real wealth," said Will Spark, "would be the means to employ servants to eat your first-day pie."

  He chewed slowly, savoring a forkful. "I mean real wealth."

  "Who are 'they,' Will? Who's chasing you?"