Undercurrents

by Pamela Beason

  A sudden pressure on her forearm made her jerk her head up, expecting a carnivore at her elbow. Dan hovered beside her. He raised a thumb toward the surface, signaling that he was ready to go up. She nodded. Their bubble streams cleared the space overhead of fish as they slowly rose, dumping air from their BCDs as the vests expanded with the decreasing pressure. Sam kept a wary eye on the sharks below.

  At thirty-five feet she spotted a crimson-and-white spotted lobster peeking from a hole, and stopped to take a last photo. She needed at least one reminder of the incredible beauty existing side by side with the brutality down here. A low hum throbbed through the water, a different frequency from their panga motor. When she raised her head, she saw the red-and-yellow-striped hull of a small boat slicing through the water, moving away.

  On rising from the lee of the seamount, she missed the buoy chain and was immediately dragged several yards away by the current. Then she had to focus on keeping hold of her camera and kicking hard to rejoin Dan beneath their panga. By the time she surfaced, she was puffing like she’d run a marathon, and the other boat was turning in the distance, though she couldn’t see clearly through her mask in the blinding morning sun. Judging by its speed, it had a powerful motor.

  Eduardo took their tanks and helped them belly flop into the inflatable. As soon as Dan was settled, he asked Eduardo, “Why did you wave that fisherman off?”

  The guide shrugged. “For safety. He could not know there was divers here.”

  Interesting. Eduardo hadn’t denied that the other boat belonged to a fisherman. “You know the owner of that boat?” she asked him.

  Eduardo glanced at her and then at Dan, then seemed to realize that he’d said something he shouldn’t have. “Galápagos is a small community. He is a cousin.”

  Dan’s gaze met hers, and she knew he was thinking the same thing she was. Eduardo’s cousin may have been illegally fishing for sharks here.

  * * * * *

  In spite of the gruesome start to the day, Sam felt ebullient during breakfast back on Papagayo. She and Dan had collected valuable data for the NPF survey and surfaced in good shape. She’d not only faced down sharks, she’d gotten decent video footage of them. Heck, she was Zing.

  “And you’re a marine biologist, too?”

  Sam looked up from her empty plate to the silver-haired woman across from her. Gail? No. Abigail, Abigail Birsky. Wife of Ronald Birsky, the bald gentleman seated next to her. From Nashville.

  “Not marine,” Sam corrected. “By training, I’m a wildlife biologist—mostly land-based critters, like wolves and elk and cougars and such. But there are darn few jobs for us, so these days I’m mostly a freelance writer. I try to focus on nature whenever I can. That’s why this trip is so perfect—the Galápagos Islands are a nature lover’s dream.”

  When Constantino asked if anyone wanted more of the Spanish omelet, both Sam and Dan eagerly handed their plates in his direction. Abigail and Ronald exchanged an amused glance over their still-half-filled plates, and Sam suddenly remembered her manners. “And you two? Do you spend your time touring the world?”

  “I’m a retired minister,” Ronald drawled. The tall man’s neck and shoulders curved into a perpetual stoop. Probably from bending to hear shorter parishioners. Or maybe from accommodating his wife, whose silver head reached only to his shoulder. He leaned toward her now. “Abigail’s my better half.”

  Abigail’s pale blue eyes twinkled as she patted Sam’s hand. “I look forward to getting to know you.”

  Outwardly, Sam smiled; inwardly, she groaned. She’d grown up with constant tsk-tsk-tsks from her minister father and an ever-present circle of church ladies. Dan had already shown the Birskys photos of his pretty wife and precious child. And then Sam had noticed Abigail Birsky’s glance toward her empty left ring finger.

  Hey, I’m in a relationship with a hunky dangerous Latino-Lakota skinhead, she wanted to say, but that would probably not impress the Birskys. Not to mention that she wasn’t sure what the “relationship” part was. Maybe she’d finally have a chance to sort that out in the coming week.

  Constantino plunked down her second serving in front of her and Sam gratefully applied herself to eggs and toast instead of blurting out something she’d regret later.

  Abigail smiled at the server and said sweetly, “Thank you, Tony.”

  Her husband laid his hand atop hers. “His name is Constantino, dear.”

  Abigail’s cheeks pinked. She squinted in Constantino’s direction, saying, “Oh dear, I’m so sorry,” but the server was already halfway back to the kitchen.

  Ronald reassured his wife. “All these foreign names are confusing, aren’t they? I wouldn’t worry; I don’t think he even heard you.”

  Sam’s gaze flitted around the dining area as she tried to recall the names of all these people she and Dan had met on board Papagayo. Maxim, Eduardo’s clean-cut dark-skinned young colleague, was easy to remember. Dressed in the khaki shirt and shorts of the Galápagos Park naturalist guide uniform, he and Eduardo stood out from the tourists and ship’s crew. Jonathan Sanders, she remembered from last night. In daylight, she could see that his pretty wife Paige was much younger than he. Brandon and Ken, the grad students from the lower deck.

  In the booth ahead were the—Robinsons? No, Robersons. From Cabin 5. Jerry was a muscular man with a steel gray crew-cut and a disapproving glare, who looked exactly like the retired policeman he was. He was either a naturally grumpy old guy or he’d taken an instant dislike to half the people on board, Sam and Dan included. He was counterbalanced by his wife, Sandy, a middle-aged bottle blonde with huge parrot earrings and an infectious smile.

  Abigail patted Sam’s hand again. “I can’t wait to go snorkeling this afternoon. Did you see wonderful fish on your dive this morning?”

  “There are always amazing things to see in Galápagos waters,” Dan quickly interjected.

  Sam shot him a glance. Did he think she wasn’t smart enough to keep her mouth shut about the shark poaching?

  “Are you joining us for our hike on Isabela this morning?” Ronald asked.

  Sam shook her head. “Unfortunately, no. Dan and I have work to do.” Today she was on a schedule that was the reverse of the tour group; she’d gone diving at dawn and now worked while they hiked on Isabela near Tagus Cove. Then this afternoon, as they snorkeled, she’d explore the route they had hiked in the morning.

  After shoveling the last bite of eggs into her mouth, she slid to the edge of the seat. “Speaking of work, I’d better get to it.”

  Dan nodded. “Sam’s right. I’d better write my report before I forget what I saw this morning.” He rose from the booth and preceded her down the stairs.

  * * * * *

  Sam carried her laptop and satellite phone to the upper deck. She had the place completely to herself. The crew members were all busy in the kitchen, cleaning cabins, or off shepherding the small tour group on Isabela with Maxim and Eduardo.

  The only drawback to working outdoors was that the sun was intense. She had to tilt the laptop screen forward to see the images. The shark videos and photos looked damn good, if she did say so herself. She selected the most dramatic ones and zipped them into a compressed file.

  Between Papagayo and Isabela’s shore, gulls wheeled and shrieked, arguing with larger black-winged birds. Boobies? Frigatebirds? She couldn’t tell from here. A sea lion briefly surfaced next to the ship, exhaled loudly, slapped the water with a flipper, and then disappeared again.

  Had Charles Darwin enjoyed this exact view from the HMS Beagle in 1835? She could hardly believe that she was here, in the cradle of the theory of evolution, in the famous naturalist’s playground, six hundred miles from anywhere. It felt almost sacrilegious to use a computer in this historic place, to rely on satellite phones and Internet service. Even in the remotest places, people moved closer to machines and farther from the natural world every day. It was kind of sad.

  But she was not a historian. It was her job to te
ll the world what the islands were like now, not in Darwin’s time. She stared at the blank word processing screen for a minute. Where to start?

  She reminded herself that she was supposed to provide entertainment and it needed to be Exciting!! She typed Sharks! Then it all came easily. She wrote about the beautiful leopard shark yesterday and the ghastly scene this morning, segueing briefly to the lobsters and sea cucumbers and then bringing the story back to poaching and the fact that humans were obviously the predators to be most feared in the Galápagos. Dan found her as she’d just finished editing it down to the 700-word-maximum her contract stipulated.

  “Joining us for lunch?” he asked.

  Surprised, she checked her watch. It was nearly one o’clock. The tour group had come back without her even registering their return. And she was hungry again. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  She quickly uploaded Zing’s first post and the shark images and then took her laptop back to her cabin.

  A small heart-shaped box of Valentine’s chocolates rested on her pillow. Chase? No, that was crazy; he didn’t even know where she was staying. Then she remembered that crew members could enter her cabin at any time. Actually, anyone on board could. She took a quick peek into Dan’s room. A box of candy rested on his pillow, too. It felt like they shared a stalker.

  She arrived late to the dining area. Dan had joined the grad students and Eduardo. She ended up seated with the captain and the Robersons. Sandy was enthusiastic about the Valentine gift. “Aren’t the chocolates yummy, Sam? Such a lovely touch.”

  “Nice idea,” Sam agreed, nodding at the captain, embarrassed that she had been suspicious instead of grateful.

  Jerry said little and glowered at her throughout the meal. Sandy chirped about how wonderful their lives were. “We have so much time, now that we’re retired,” she beamed. “We’re going to travel all over the world.” She beamed in the captain’s direction. “Have you traveled far, Captain Quiroga?”

  Quiroga ate European style, with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other. He waved his knife in the air as he told them that although he worked in the islands, his family owned a small company on the mainland. “I hope to return to Guayaquil in five years to take over the business from my father.”

  Sam had switched planes in Guayaquil. From the airport tarmac, the west coast city seemed like a steamy swamp. “You wouldn’t choose to stay in the Galápagos?” she asked.

  “The Galápagos is good for making money; but not for home. The problem is the world.”

  “The world?”

  “Because of Darwin, the whole world believe Galápagos belongs to them.”

  In the last few weeks, Sam had researched the history of the islands. A grandiose statement from the World Heritage Centre website leapt into her mind: World Heritage sites belong to all the peoples of the world, irrespective of the territory on which they are located.

  She forked up the last of the delicious flounder. “What sort of business is your company in Guayaquil?”

  “You like that fish?” The captain pointed his knife at her plate.

  She nodded.

  “Fábrica Quiroga is what you call a cannery.” He smiled, showing startling large white teeth under his thick black mustache. “We preserve the best of Ecuadorian fishes so all can enjoy them.”

  She smiled back uncertainly. Captain Quiroga was in the fishing business? Did he know who she and Dan worked for? Was he trying to tell her something?

  7

  “South of the border, down Mexico way!” Nicole sang off-key at Chase Perez’s side. He swayed with the raucous crowd in time to the music, but his mind was elsewhere.

  “That’s where you be-long, that’s where you should stay!” Protestors around him raised their voices on the last word. Nicole jabbed her elbow into his ribs to remind him he was supposed to be participating.

  The crowd on this side of the street was only half as large as the pro-Latino gathering on the other side. So far the Tucson cops in between had managed to keep the two separate. Raising his American Wages for American Jobs! placard, Chase shouted, “Take your tortillas and go home, goddamn wetbacks!”

  A television camera swung in his direction. Damn. If his parents or siblings saw this footage in Boise, he’d never live it down. But maybe they wouldn’t recognize him in his hairless, tattooed, and pierced state.

  “Yeah, baby, you tell ’em,” Nicole crooned, clasping her hands around his arm. How she managed not to break one of those fancy inch-long lacquered nails was a mystery to him.

  Chase’s scalp felt hot. Had he slathered on enough sunscreen up there?

  What a peculiar way to spend Valentine’s Day. If he’d stayed an accountant, he’d be planning a night of hot sex with his girlfriend instead of waving signs with his married FBI partner at a protest march.

  The news he’d uncovered about the Galápagos gave him heartburn. There had been several violent encounters between poachers and the Galápagos park patrol in the last six months. Worse, he’d found references in Ecuadorian newspapers to a Shark Fin Mafia.

  The pro-Latino crowd on the other side of the street began to chant, and the people around Chase heckled them back. This protest could flash from boring to ugly any second now. Maybe that’s what needed to happen to move this job forward. According to the FBI Internet trollers, the man they were searching for, a leader named Dread, was likely to be at this rally.

  Dread was a name that repeatedly cropped up on websites that celebrated crimes against immigrants in southern Arizona. Dread harped a lot about lost construction jobs and how illegal aliens were drug runners and thieves. He preached that decent Americans needed to take back the country, with bullets if necessary. Plenty of bullets had been found in the four bodies discovered a week ago in the Arizona desert.

  The corpses were those of a teenage girl, two young men sporting gang tattoos, and Liam Cisneros, an undercover DEA agent. If they’d been carrying drugs or weapons, the evidence was long gone by the time their bodies had been reported. All had been shot multiple times. Cisneros had last reported to his superiors that he was traveling with NUC, a gang feared by Homeland Security to have infiltrated the U.S. Border Patrol.

  So many questions surrounded Cisneros’s death that it was hard to know where to start. Were the young people he died with NUC members? Had they been killed by vigilantes who shot all illegals they encountered crossing the border? Was a rival drug cartel picking off the competition? Was the Border Patrol involved in the murders? Evidence of the involvement of Border Patrol officers in both human smuggling and drug smuggling had recently been uncovered, but the identities of the criminals were still unknown. Everything about the Cisneros case was disturbingly nebulous. It was hard to clean up a problem when you had no idea who had caused it or how big it was.

  “This is pure bullshit,” the man to Chase’s right side growled.

  “Amen to that.” Chase turned to look at him. He was African-American and built like a linebacker.

  “Like your shirt.” The guy pointed at the letters cwu printed on Chase’s sleeveless tee. He turned to display the lettering on the back of his own T-shirt. construction workers united.

  Chase grinned. Their advisors had scored on that detail. “Erection Perfection,” he said, reciting the CWU slogan. Behind him, Nicole snickered.

  The guy turned back and thrust out a fist. Chase tapped knuckles with him.

  “Dave Redding,” the black man said. “They call me Dread.”

  At last. “Let me guess.” Chase studied the guy’s bulging biceps. “Roofer?”

  “Stonemason,” Dread spat. “Or at least I used to be, before the goddamn spics took all the jobs at half the wages.”

  “Charlie Perini.” Chase shook Dread’s hand, gripping hard so the other man wouldn’t detect the lack of calluses on his fingers. “Finish carpenter, when I can find it.”

  Dread crooked an eyebrow. “Haven’t seen you around.”

  “Only been in Arizona two week
s,” Chase said, wading into the getting-to-know-you stage. “Just blew in from Florida. You’d think there’d be tons of work down there after the hurricanes, but no.” He jerked a shoulder at the gathering across the street. “Two guesses why, and the first one doesn’t count. I read about some new retirement communities going up here; figured they could use carpenters. But shit, I was wrong again.”

  Dread made a face. “Yeah, shit.”

  “Hey, is there even a CWU hall in this burg?” Chase pronounced it “see-woo” like he’d been instructed.

  The black man shook his head. “Not anymore. They pretty much busted us up about six years ago. Can’t find a union job anywhere in this state anymore.”

  “Hiya, I’m Charlie’s wife, Nikki,” Nicole broke in. She brushed a strand of curly blond hair from her brow and looked up at Dread. “This is just so much pointless crap.” She waved a hand to indicate the crowd around them. “Don’t ya think? There’s gotta be a better way to get the real message across. You know, stop dancin’ around and cut to the chase?”

  Dread studied her for a long moment, like a rattlesnake evaluating a gopher as potential lunch. Finally he said, “There might be a way. If you want to get in on some real action.”

  Nicole grinned. “If we can’t do con-struction, maybe we should try de-struction.”

  Dread glanced at Chase. He shrugged, trying to look nonchalant. “I’ve always enjoyed demolition work.”

  Dread leaned close. “Tomorrow night, there’s a meeting at seven o’clock at the Horseshoe Tavern on Second Avenue. Then we’re gonna take a little ride over to the barrio, if you know what I mean.”