Jim quickly wrote back. He didn't want Shannon to worry needlessly. Will might be a little crazy, thoroughly
paranoid, and maybe he knew some odd types, but by now, despite all Jim's unanswered questions, they had been through a lot together. He had to set Shannon straight about Will.
Dear Shannon,
He killed the girl in self-defense. That doesn't make him dangerous. I know him better than you do, having sailed with him for the past two months now. So don't worry. I think of him as my friend.
He radioed it off, went up to the deck to check the sails, and stayed at the helm until a freighter some miles off finally vanished over the horizon. When he radioed again to check his mail, he found Shannon's reply.
He KILLED her—for whatever reason
He wrote back immediately, realizing how helpless she must feel so far away.
Dear Shannon,
Relax. I know I don't know much about him. Though since he got stabbed I'm a little more inclined to believe his story about being chased—not completely. (For ell I know she was pissed off; I do know she was stoned out of her gourd.) Fact is, he is one tough old bird and smart as hell, and I've grown to like him very much. And don't forget he saved my life when I went overboard. But none of that matters, because as far as my safety is concerned, I'm in charge now.
Even if Will is somehow -bent* or a thief or whatever. he's flat on his back. I'm driving the boat. He can't do anything to me. And frankly, he wouldn't even if he could. To that extent I trust him. We've become shipmates—there's a bond, and he wouldn't break it.
And that's all that matters. So relax. I can handle this and I can handle Will.
Love.
Jim
He radioed it and checked a few minutes later for Shannon's reply.
Dear Jim.
I would really appreciate it if you would just think about what I've said. Your "shipmate"
is possibly a very dangerous man. You knew—or suspected—that before, when he first got paranoid. Now you've seen him kill somebody. And I can't find his name anywhere.
So I just wish you would keep your eyes open and stay alert just in case you're in danger.
Jim fired back.
Wait a minute. First, if you don't like the word shipmate try friend. Second. I didn't see him kill anybody. I didn't see what happened. But I did see the knife in his chest, which I'm taking as a damn clear sign he was attacked. So I would really appreciate it if you would please not make him into something he isn't. I repeat. the main point is, I'm driving the boat to safe American territory in Florida, where I'm going to jump off and get on a plane home.
That evening he found another e-mail waiting for him.
A DAMN CLEAR SIGN HE WAS ATTACKED? The trouble with you, Jim. is you almost never get mad—and never at me--and then when you finally do. you get sarcastic.
Which is really a sign that you get angry more often than you show—because you're afraid to show it. I don't like thinking of you as a coward. But sometimes I think that as strong as your workouts have made your body, the one part you haven't developed is your backbone.
Dear Shannon.
I would like to end this conversation now. If you've got a problem with my backbone. tell me to my face. not in a goddamned letter.
Dear Jim.
And I don't like you treating me like a hysterical idiot.
Shannon knew she had to find some way of putting Jim on guard against Will, some proof that the man he was stuck with alone on a boat was not to be trusted.
She went onto the Internet to PeopleFind. They needed full date of birth or an address.
Will had filled in only the year on his application. She tried Larchmont Yacht Club as his address. No luck. For a criminal records search PeopleFind required a Social Security number in addition to a date of birth, and even if she had that, which she didn't, criminal records searches were restricted to a single county, of which there were over three thousand in the United States.
She went to a Web search engine and typed the search words: "William Spark." Ignoring a banner ad that asked "Striving for a washboard stomach?" she found matching sites for a literary webzine, a fan page for someone named William, a romance author, criticism and fiction of William Dean Howells—a name she recognized from one of Jim's college books—William Butler Yeats, William Tell, the Burlington Police Department, and something about "nakedness and naturalness." There were 674 sites for the name William Spark and not one related to the man Jim had gone sailing with.
She tried other search engines: Google, Hotbot/Lycos, AllTheWeb, and Savvy all yielded nothing. She signed onto the New York Times archives. Will's name produced no news stories.
She drove to the Westport Library and logged onto the DIALOG and DataTimes news services and found nothing under Will Spark. An interlibrary Lexis/Nexis subscription yielded nothing either. She tried variations on Will Spark's name—William Spark, Spark Corporation, Spark Enterprises—no Will.
Maybe she was expecting too much of the news services. But when she tested them by typing in her father's name, she got all sorts of news stories and press releases detailing his government career with the Agency for International Development, from his first assignment in a green revolution farm program in Zimbabwe right through his early retirement and subsequent foray into the health club business.
Jim had mentioned that Will Spark had gone to Yale. She tried various Yale University websites. Nothing. She practiced on Jim. She found his old bike-racing record, his final triathlon entries, a gory article in Fitness magazine about his worst crash, his résumé on the International Personal Trainers Association home page, and, of course, the bio she had written for the RileySpa's website.
Jim,
There's nothing on the entire Internet about him. Like he made up his name or something. Like I sent you sailing with someone who doesn't exist.
JIM LEANED ON Will's doorway, balanced against the ceaseless motion of the boat, and watched him sleep. His sunken cheeks, grizzled with stubble, quivered as he slowly drew in and expelled air.
Was he surprised? He hoped that Shannon was wrong. But how could he be surprised after all the stories, the half-truths, and sudden turnabouts? My pals in Lagos. My pals in Calabar. Old friends. Helicopter to the airport. My good gal loves me. . . .
Access codes blocked the files in Will's laptop. And his teak desk, which was built into the forward bulkhead of the main cabin, was always locked. But there was a brass key on the lanyard that secured his bosun's knife to his shorts.
Jim took the shorts, knife and all, to the main cabin and worked the key into the lock.
The face hinged down, forming a writing surface. Inside, the desk was much deeper than it appeared from the front and riddled with cubbies, slots, and shelves.
Puzzled, Jim stepped forward into the tiny cabin where he had stowed his bags, tapped its aft bulkhead, and suddenly realized that the cabin was so small because the back of Will's desk had been extended into its space.
The cubbies and slots and shelves contained a row of identical green cloth-bound books, scraps of notepaper, magazine and newspaper clippings, micro floppy disks marked as email copies, some exquisitely fine seashells, a red cloth sack of Krugerrand gold coins, a gold penknife, an antique pocket watch, and a silver derringer.
The breech of the derringer—a double-barreled affair, which Will had left hinged open in its safety position—revealed a bullet in each barrel. Jim picked it up. Loaded for a bear.
A very small bear. If only Will had used it on Margaret instead of that damned shotgun.
The "books," as Jim discovered when he pulled one out, were actually hard-bound accordion files in which Will had stowed letters and invoices. Jim riffled through them: paperwork and more paperwork—bills, invoices, faxes—for the endless expenses required to keep Hustle afloat and habitable. Jib-furler replacement in Hawaii; freezer repairs in Panama City; a new wind generator in Barbados; a letter to Hild Sails of City Island requesting that
a replacement jib be shipped to Hawaii, a diesel heater installed in Hong Kong, Gill sea boots from Team One; foul-weather gear; and shackles, blocks, line, oil filters, batteries.
Jim was about to turn his attention to the floppy disks when he noticed that the tropical damp had curled the covers of some of the files. A well-thumbed cover had peeled apart, the cloth separating from the cardboard. It smelled of an odd mix of mildew and perfume. The file was empty. But when Jim picked it up, a folded blue paper hidden between the cloth and the cardboard fell out.
Wondering if he had finally found something personal about Will Spark, Jim unfolded the paper. It was a letter, several pages long, handwritten in green ink. The opening lines told him that it was deeply personal and the fact that Will had hidden it meant it was heartfelt. He didn't want to read it—nor did he have to. The greeting read, "My dearest Billy." That was what Margaret had called him, too. Billy. It was signed, "Yours always, Cordelia." That seemed odd, because her opening lines had sounded like a good-bye.
Big deal. So he'd had a girlfriend named Cordelia
which anyone could have guessed since he'd named a boat after her—and Cordelia called him Billy. Plenty of guys named William were called Billy. But how many Wills were also called Billy? There was a gulf of personality between those two names: Billy, warm and cuddly; Will, patrician and remote.
Jim thought for a moment, listening to Hustle's hull plow its endless furrow. If he were going to put Shannon at ease, he had to read the damn letter, personal or not.
He had guessed right. It was a long, sad good-bye, with a lot of unhappy talk of perfect memories tempered by a firm belief in the right decision made. Cordelia forgave him, she said, for running out on her, and had taken him back more than once, she pointed out.
But she could not forgive his business—"a dirty business," she called it—and so she was saying good-bye. "At the end of the day," she wrote, "were I to stay with you, I would be condoning behavior that falls far, far below the marginal standards I attempt to maintain for myself. Surely, I do not set myself up as an angel, but I cannot knowingly entwine my life with a thief, which is what you are, my dear, even though I know that I will miss you far, far more than the thief will ever miss 'his Cordi.' "
Though Cordelia might be wrong, Jim reflected. WillBilly—had kept her letter and named a boat after her. But what kind of thief? he wondered. Hadn't the poet called Will a thief, too? Was the poet justified?
He went up on deck, looked around at an empty ocean, checked the sails, retrieved a sheet that had fallen over and was trailing the boat like a heavy fishing line, and made sure that the auto-helm was steering their course. Purely from the standpoint of personal safety, Shannon would have to agree, a shipmate who was a thief was better than a shipmate who was a murderer. If a thief was all Will was.
Jim went below and turned on Will's laptop. When prompted for a password, he typed "
Cordelia."
Invalid.
Was a silver derringer the kind of knickknack a rich guy kept in his desk? Loaded? Like a gold penknife and an antique watch? The password prompt was blinking. He typed "Cordi."
"In like—" He shot a look over his shoulder, got up, and stepped back to Will's cabin.
Out like a light—in like Flynn. Excited, he sat back down at Will's computer and opened his e-mail files, which went back six years.
He skimmed at first for the gist of the letters Will had received. With the exception of the occasional boat business, they were mostly reports from Kin Yiu Lam, Choy Yee, and Pathar Singh. Heavy on computer lingo. Lam, Yee, and Singh sounded like his moletronics genius "cavemen." Lam and Yee addressed Will as "Mr. Spark"; however, Singh, the software engineer, called him "my very good friend."
Interspersed among the engineering reports were letters from the Computing College of West Virginia thanking Will for generous gifts to their laboratory fund. Then came a request for Will to serve on the college's endowment committee. Will accepted and soon after funded a not-for-profit moletronics research laboratory. From then on, his letters were written under the heading "CompColl WV."
The most recent e-mail entry leaped off the screen. "Do not send . . ."
The repeat of the bell-tolls threats had arrived just before they landed in Nigeria. But Will hadn't mentioned it.
Jim went back to the desk and checked the news clippings. A marked-up Economist article about moletronics caught his eye. Some of the underlined phrases sounded very familiar. When he found science and technology articles from the New York Times, Jim glanced back at Will's ThinkPad lying open on the nav station. What had Will said when he was talking about Sentinel? "If that ThinkPad was represented as one inch tall, I.B.M.'
s new Blue Gene supercomputer would stand twenty miles high." Here it was in a New York Times Thesday science section damn near word for word.
". . Processor-to-memory delays are a drag on highspeed computers. . . . A one-year lead in moletronics is like a century of the Industrial Revolution."
Like a rehearsal. For a show. A show for a sucker.
Jim went up on deck and checked the sails and the horizon. The long, low silhouette of an oil tanker he had noted earlier in the south had gone; a heavier one plowed eastbound in the north.
He returned to the e-mail files.
Lam, Yee, and Singh all referred to the microprocessor they were developing as "the project." Their letters were mainly progress reports laced with requests for more research funds. Will's replies were mostly notifications that checks had been deposited in their accounts.
For nearly four years, it appeared that the engineers were making out better than Will was. Jim wondered how long you kept on backing your cavemen before you got nervous.
But Will kept on paying, and he kept on contributing to the Computing College of West Virginia. Then a new series of letters started.
Using the name Sentinel for the first time, Will applied for a research grant from the McVay Foundation for Humane Science to fund the moletronics program at the Computing College. He satisfied intricate not-for-profit tax code requirements with his CompColl WV connection.
Money started coming in. But despite claims that Sentinel would revolutionize medicine, for over a year it seemed small-time: Will would apply for a twenty-thousand-dollar grant; the grant officer would dole out five or ten thousand. When Will expressed disappointment, the grant officer would apologize, blaming "my lowly position on an enormous totem pole," and promise that one day busy "chiefs who oversee thousands of worthy projects" would take note of Will's.
Suddenly it happened. The foundation's chief grant officer, a woman named Val McVay, pressed Will for specifics about the sources of his software. Will dodged repeated requests, saying that while many engineers and scientists reported to him, "I'm just the man in the middle."
"Good science and hot engineering don't flourish in secret," she wrote. Will did not write back. A month later, Val
McVay's father, the head of the foundation, stepped in, "confident I can assuage any feelings of neglect."
Lloyd McVay apologized for Will's grant applications' "falling between two stools due to the inexperience of a young grant officer who failed to grasp the magnitude of Sentinel.
And while my daughter is a brilliant engineer, she is not—shall we say—a man of the world." Perhaps Will would visit the foundation in New Jersey "for a discreet chat about Sentinel's commercial applications and the possibility of a glass of wine."
Will dodged that invitation and several others until McVay wrote, "Our attorneys inform me that the Internal Revenue Service casts a scrutinous eye upon not-for-profit laboratories like yours that fail to submit reports to not-forprofit granting foundations like ours. They counsel that you and I informally review our options regarding Sentinel's future."
"Jackpot!" Will had written to the engineer Singh.
Suddenly the numbers were mind-boggling. Will seemed on the verge of reaping hundreds of millions of dollars. But, like his daughter, McV
ay had pressed for more details about Will's laboratories and engineers. Their exchanges grew terse, the mood cool. Finally, McVay used the word withholding. With that the letters stopped abruptly.
A year and three months ago. Right around the time that Will had disappeared from Jim'
s spinning class in the Bridgeport health club.
He checked on Will again. Still sleeping. He made his rounds on deck, started the engine to charge the batteries and freezers, had some soup, and sat down again at Will's desk.
The antique watch was beautiful. The lid opened on a face mysterious with dials. It even showed the phases of the moon. He wound it three turns and held it to his ear. A highspeed ticking, an amazingly rich sound for something so small. Turning it over and over in his hands, he noticed what appeared to be a second lid on the back side. Pressing here and there, he got it to pop open. An inscription was etched on polished gold: "For Billy Cole, who 'can cure' what ails."
Another Will.
Saddened by learning more than he had wanted to, Jim closed up Will's desk and put Will's shorts with the key back on their hook. Before shutting down his computer, he sent an e-mail.
Deer Shannon. Try "Billy Cole." I love you.
Jim
He awakened, groggily, with a vague sense of disquiet, a feeling he could not immediately define. But something was wrong. It was light outside. Six-thirty on his watch, the sixth morning under sail. Today, if the wind picked up, he hoped to clear Cape Palmas. When he last queried the GPS, the electronic navigator had indicated that the cape lay some sixty miles to the right. Sixty miles off the starboard bow.
Neither the wind nor the waves felt stronger than they had when he had crashed into deep sleep an hour earlier. Yet something was definitely wrong. He catapulted out of the hammock and scrambled up the companionway.
The boat was off course. The rising sun, perched hard and white on the horizon, was throwing daggers of heat from the left, blazing over the port side instead of behind him.
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