Undercurrents

by Pamela Beason

  Schwartz said something in Spanish without averting his eyes from her.

  Eduardo stammered, “A doctor who studies . . . dead people . . . will check the body. In Puerto Ayora. He is on his way there now. And then he will be sent home.”

  They had a coroner in Puerto Ayora? Good. She would go there tomorrow. But first, she would visit Darwin Station. She desperately needed someone whose advice she could trust. Surely there’d be an English-speaking conservationist among the scientists there.

  “And what about me?” she asked Schwartz.

  He replied in Spanish.

  Eduardo gave her an apologetic look. “He says what do you have to do with this matter?”

  She was fairly certain the police officer meant that to be some sort of trap. “Daniel Kazaki was my colleague and my friend.” She stared into Schwartz’s icy blue eyes. “And you have my passport.”

  More Spanish. Eduardo echoed, “It is safe at police headquarters in Puerto Ayora.”

  “When can I get it back?”

  Again Eduardo translated. “We are still investigating. You are not scheduled to leave for three more days.”

  Her tropical vacation would continue, then, whether she wanted to stay or not. Would she be better off to jump ship and get a hotel room in Puerto Ayora?

  That is, if she could get a room. She remembered the way she and Dan had been thrown out of the hotel there, which reminded her to call Mrs. Vintner, the manager, and ask the woman a few questions about that.

  She looked up at Schwartz. “Am I in danger?”

  “Why should you be in danger?” Eduardo asked a second after Schwartz replied in Spanish.

  Was it standard cop treatment to respond to questions with questions? The technique was annoying. Were the Ecuadorian fiscalia serious professionals who would search for the truth, or did they intend to sweep this unpleasantness under the carpet?

  She abruptly realized that Eduardo hadn’t translated her responses into Spanish. Clearly Schwartz knew enough English to understand her statements. Why, then, did he refuse to speak to her?

  How many Ecuadorians thought the Natural Planet Foundation was an enemy? Even the woman from the consulate had seemed suspicious of what she and Dan had been up to.

  She noticed she was wringing her hands, and forced herself to sit down in front of her computer again and place them quietly on the table. Mercifully, her laptop had gone into screensaver mode, obliterating the image of Dan from the screen.

  Finally, Schwartz was done studying her. He turned to Eduardo and made a demand, to which Eduardo replied in Spanish, gesturing toward the stairs. Schwartz and the naval officer followed him out the door, closing it with a thud.

  Dan was now officially dead. She stared at the back of the door, trembling, until her computer chimed. The incoming urgent email message from the Seattle office reminded her of the scheduled chat sessions tonight.

  She called Seattle and asked for Mike Whitney. He had left for the evening. She had to settle for Tad Wyatt, the last person she wanted to talk to right now.

  “I can’t do the chats,” she explained when he finally came on the line.

  “Why not? Have you gone blind?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Can you type?”

  He obviously was not going to let her ease into the information. “Dan Kazaki died.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t make me say it again.”

  “He died, just now?”

  “Actually, it was yesterday, but it was confirmed just now.”

  “You’ve had this story for two days? Why didn’t you call immediately? Why didn’t you mention this in your posts?”

  As if he had the right to know first. She tried to swallow her anger. “They just now found his body.”

  After a second of silence, Wyatt said, “We need the who-what-where-when from you online within a half hour.”

  “I don’t have that.”

  “Where did they find the body?”

  She told him what little she knew. “Look, Wyatt . . . Tad, we should be delicate about this. A good man died here. His family will be in mourning.”

  “Think the rest of the press will be ‘delicate’? At least we can make the man out to be a hero. Our hero.”

  He had a point. The press was rarely diplomatic, and if Out There could get a jump on the story, they could at least tilt public opinion in the right direction.

  “Send me what you’ve got ASAP,” he ordered. “Then you can discuss details during the chat sessions. Ten o’clock, East Coast time.”

  Even though the islands were far out in the Pacific, the Galápagos kept the same time as mainland Ecuador, which was on Eastern Standard Time. She checked her watch. It was nearly nine thirty. She quickly typed up the few facts she knew about Dan’s death and sent them.

  She opened Out There’s home page. The articles she’d submitted yesterday were headlined there with thumbnail photos: Wilderness Westin’s giant tortoise and iguanas; Zing’s sharks. But the main feature was a photo of Dr. Daniel Kazaki in his wetsuit with the NPF logo clearly displayed. The words Mystery Death were emblazoned above the photo. Wyatt had already gone public with the story.

  One minute to airtime. She clicked the chat room icon and a blue window opened, partitioned into neat rectangles. Live, from the remote Galápagos Islands: Wilderness Westin!

  She put her mind into wildlife biologist mode. Hi, she typed, it’s 74 degrees F here. The air is filled with the calls of black-tailed gulls and barking sea lions. Today I explored Floreana Island, rich in Galápagos history and exotic birds like flamingos. What’s up out there?

  She had a few fans from her previous exploits online, and was pleased to see that some of them had found her and joined the conversation. NiniGr8 from Tulsa said they were in the middle of an ice storm. FarmerJane chimed in from rural Kansas, amazed to find Sam in the Galápagos.

  Sam smiled—Jane, the thirty-three-year-old daughter of Reverend Mark Westin’s new wife, was one of Sam’s new “sisters” by marriage. It was good to know that some friends were keeping track of her. Her housemate was online, too—BlakeTheBest said Hi and told her that FB man had called and that the roof was leaking over the front hallway. Chase had called her home? Ah, yes, that’s how he’d gotten her cell number.

  As specified in her contract with Out There, she kept the conversation focused on her expedition. MarcGen reported they had two feet of snow in Cincinnati and mentioned how much he loved the dancing bird video. He asked all sorts of technical questions about how she’d filmed and put it together. She skirted around the details, but took care to specify all the proper names of cameras and software to keep the sponsors happy. She highly suspected MarcGen was Tad Wyatt.

  EdtheGuy101 suggested that she had to be lonely down there all by herself, demonstrating how little most readers knew about where and who she actually was.

  SanDman wrote, As predicted, trouble. Will B a gr8 ride, tho. A great ride? What the hell was he referring to—Dan’s death? This guy—at least she assumed the writer was male—had a lot of nerve. She ignored him.

  MayaHiya wrote, Hi Sam, which Sam fervently hoped would escape notice of all the other readers. Mst B swt 2 B n trpcs nw, Maya wrote, and then asked, Vlntr @ otwd bnd cascades 8/13?

  Huh? Something in the Cascades in August? WildWest replied that she was enjoying the sunshine here in the Galápagos and that August and the Cascade Mountains were both far away, but she looked forward to discussing it more with MayaHiya later. Whatever it was.

  ZenYoga99 from Utah told her he or she was going skiing tomorrow, which made her think about Chase. Where was he? Desert? Mountains? Was he safe?

  She started to reply to ZenYoga99 that she would be diving tomorrow, then remembered she was WildWest and changed the message to hiking and hoping to see a flightless cormorant.

  JDoe1001 wanted to know why WildWest was spending her time chasing after stupid animals when Dan was dead and Zing was getting all these
threatening comments—what kind of a team player was she, anyway? Good question, Sam thought grimly. She typed a painfully cheery ending to the session: Get the latest on our Galápagos Expedition at Out There tomorrow!

  The screen redrew, announcing Zing’s session. The model’s photo occupied the upper right corner. Sam straightened her spine and flexed her arms, hardening her biceps. She pictured herself tall, red-haired, twenty-five. Afraid of nothing.

  The Online rectangle was packed with names of those logged on. She didn’t recognize any friends in the list, but then, where would Zing have picked up friends? The character was only a few days old. She’d been down this road before. Just as it had a couple of years ago, her job was devolving from wildlife reporting into writing about the sordid details of a heinous crime. The main difference was that this time Adam Steele was not fueling a media storm from behind a television desk, and she was more or less incognito as Zing.

  Because Out There made Dan’s death sound like a mystery, most of the audience wanted to know the clues. There’s no prize, she wanted to shout. A real man, a husband, a father, a friend, a scientist, is gone forever. He leaves a hole in the world!

  Her head throbbed as she struggled to find the right words. Several people speculated that Dan had been attacked by sharks. Maybe held under by an octopus until he drowned? Died from the bends? Killed by terrorists? And one crackpot thought Dan had been murdered as part of the global corporate conspiracy.

  A chilling message suggested that Dan had been killed because he was actually an Asian poacher illegally harvesting in the area, which brought Roberson’s anti-Japanese rant to mind. She explained that Daniel Kazaki was an ardent conservationist and as American as she was. Well, she assumed Zing was American; nobody had told her otherwise.

  Another message hinted that Dan deserved to die because he was a foreigner butting into the affairs of another country. She reiterated that he was only an observer doing an underwater survey, and that as yet nobody knew the circumstances of his death.

  By the end of the session, tears were streaming down her face. When the digital clock on the laptop flipped to 10:59, she gratefully typed, Time’s up—visit us tomorrow at Out There!

  She closed her laptop and tried to sort out the feelings clanging against each other in her head. First and foremost was guilt. For her part in making Dan’s death a media event. For not being with Dan when the unthinkable happened. She felt trapped, suspended in time. Stuck here, in the back of beyond. A victim of circumstances over which she had no control. Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe. She ran out of her cramped stuffy cabin.

  Her footsteps echoed hollowly along the exterior metal walkway and down the stairs as she rushed to Papagayo’s stern. Her kayak was lashed to the railing at the side; she unhooked it and let it fall, keeping the bowline in her fist. The boat hit the water with a splash.

  As she slid into the cockpit, a crewman leaned over the railing. “No, miss, you cannot—”

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she said to his silhouette.

  She swiftly paddled away from Papagayo. When she had traveled far enough that she could no longer hear voices or the throb of the generator, she laid the paddle across her lap. The kayak glided to a stop. The ocean swells were small this evening, gently lifting and lowering, rocking her. Overhead, the stars were brilliant. The spangles of light were reflected in the black satin surface of the sea.

  She dipped her hand in the water, watched the glow of luminous diatoms stirred up by her fingers. Microscopic comets moving through watery heavens. She flicked the saltwater from her fingertips and watched the splashes sparkle.

  Nature had always been her refuge. As a child, while her mother wasted away from Lou Gehrig’s disease and her father assuaged his sorrow by ministering to his parishioners, she climbed trees to perch with birds and crouched among her grandmother’s currant bushes to commune with butterflies and bees.

  As an adult, she bought an old house in the woods to be near the deer and the raccoons and the evening grosbeaks. She met Chase while reporting on cougars. She’d taken this crazy assignment to be close to Nature. Nature was at times brutal, but it always kept its dignity, its wonder. Its beauty.

  A splash sounded a short distance away. A turtle? Dolphin? Penguin? Ray? She wished she had the eyes of an owl and could see the creatures sharing the night ocean with her. The breeze whispered softly against her face. Planet Earth was breathing.

  She had always dreamed of visiting the Galápagos. For conservationists and naturalists, it was a mecca of sorts. The cradle for Darwin’s theory of natural selection. A magical living laboratory. These islands were supposed to be a sanctuary for all creatures.

  Someone had to tell the truth about what was happening here, and continue to shout it until the world listened. Today she surveyed one of the dive sites on Dan’s list. There were only two to go, although the last one was up by Wolf Island, far off Papagayo’s route. She had no idea how she was going to arrange a trip up there. But she had to find a way.

  “Dan,” she whispered to the soft darkness. “Be at peace. I will finish the job we started.”

  14

  The next morning, Papagayo’s second panga, loaded with Sam, Jerry and Sandy Roberson, Tony, and Eduardo, snaked through the boats anchored in crowded Academy Bay. They were following the first panga, which was loaded with the four other tour members, plus Maxim and the Sanderses, who sat in the bow looking like the royalty Sam now knew they were.

  During her Internet research, she discovered that Jonathan Sanders was not a typical tourist. Neither was he an aging movie star as she had guessed, but he was a celebrity of sorts, at least in the business world. His full name was Francis Jonathan Sanders III. His business empire apparently stretched around the world and included all sorts of enterprises, including one called SunSel Tours, which was listed as a yacht rental service with offices in the Caribbean and the Pacific. She hadn’t been able to find any specific boat names, but she suspected that Papagayo was among his fleet of ships. It made perfect sense that Captain Quiroga and the crew would be deferential to the owner. No wonder Sanders had been curious about why there were two mysterious divers on board his boat. And now one had been killed. He couldn’t be happy about the bad press that would bring.

  Her panga threaded its way between two new-looking white vessels with Parque Nacional de Galápagos painted on their sides. They rested at anchor, their hatches closed and padlocked.

  Eduardo noticed Sam studying them. “Ranger boats,” he said as if to head off her question.

  “Shouldn’t they be on patrol out in the reserve?” she asked.

  “The Navy must give permission.”

  He had to be kidding. The Navy chauffeured the Galápagos police around; did they control where all the local authorities went? “The park rangers have to get permission from the Navy to go on patrol?”

  “Go, Navy,” murmured Jerry Roberson from her other side. He was probably trying to rile her; she pretended she hadn’t heard.

  Eduardo shrugged, and then glanced toward the boats again. “Today, no permission. Tomorrow, maybe.”

  “It must be nice for the park rangers to get a day off,” Sandy chirped.

  Beside his wife, Jerry rolled his eyes. Both Tony and Eduardo noticed and stifled smiles. Then the dinghy bumped up on the rocky beach, and they climbed out to join the others.

  “This morning, all are on their own,” Eduardo reminded the group. “Those who want to take the additional bus tour, meet at Darwin Station entrance at one p.m. Dinner is also on your own this evening. We will all meet here on the beach tonight at eight to return to Papagayo.”

  The group scattered like cockroaches under a bright light. Most headed for the closest shops. Sam strolled toward the main street.

  Free from a diving schedule for a day, she finally had the chance to explore Puerto Ayora. The town was a happening place, at least for the Galápagos. A handful of hotels and a smattering of restaurants overlooked Aca
demy Bay, which was wall to wall with boats of all kinds. People seemed to be stacked on top of one another. It hadn’t seemed so bad the first night she’d been here, but after three days in the quiet reserve with only a few other boats on the horizon, the jumble of multistory buildings, paved streets, and billboards seemed glaring and intrusive. Ancient cars deposited clouds of black exhaust in the air, and the low rumble of motorbikes lent a bass track to the overall din.

  As she walked toward Darwin Station, her hand protectively draped over her camera, she passed dozens of T-shirt vendors. I ♥ boobies! seemed to be the most popular souvenir slogan from the Galápagos.

  “Miss!” “Welcome!” “Visit my shop!” Overly cheerful voices beckoned from doorways as she approached, to be replaced by “Later, yes?” and “This afternoon!” as she passed. She spotted Ken and Brandon in one outdoor stall. They seemed more enthusiastic about the selection of beach towels than they had about the unusual wildlife they had witnessed over the past few days.

  She turned down a path toward the Charles Darwin Research Station. Although it was not yet nine o’clock in the morning, at least a hundred tourists crowded the sprawling complex of buildings, tortoise pens, and plots of native plants. From her backpack, her cell phone chimed. Chase? She eagerly pulled it out and answered.

  “Way to go, WildWest!” Tad Wyatt shouted.

  She jerked the phone away to save her eardrums, and then had to bring it back to say, “What?”

  “We’re number one in the rankings for the Kazaki story today!” he chortled. “Wilderness has almost four hundred comments and Zing’s already over a thousand. And everybody’s liking and friending Out There.”

  Had Wyatt forgotten the reason for the attention? “Nothing like death to bring ’em in,” she said bitterly.

  “Got that right!” His enthusiasm made her nauseous. “A San Diego television station picked up the story, too. They showed our website on the late news last night.”

  San Diego? Sam could guess which station it would be, and which anchorman. She’d been on a television news roller coaster ride once before with Adam Steele.