Undercurrents

by Pamela Beason

  So he was upset at Zing’s post about shark finning. “But the quantities are strictly limited, right? And—according to Zing—there were so many remains, and most of them were missing only the fins—”

  He picked up her spare napkin and began to shred it into confetti. “How would Americans like it if someone wanted to kill their jobs?”

  The word kill brought Dan to mind. Maybe it was her second beer or the fact that Santos had produced no weapon, but she was feeling braver by the minute. Not to mention angrier. “If my job was destroying an ecosystem, it would be right to end it.”

  He stopped shredding for a minute to meet her eyes. “Americans do not have the right to control the rest of the world.” His voice was low and calm. He sounded eminently reasonable.

  “Americans have nothing to do with it. The Galápagos were declared a World Heritage Site in 1978. This area has been protected for decades.”

  He picked his sunglasses up from the table and slid them back onto his nose, obscuring his eyes. “The sea wasn’t off-limits until people like Zing started butting in.”

  His dark eyes had at least seemed human. The mirrored sunglasses seemed hostile. “Zing is simply describing the current state of affairs,” she said. “I wish she was here, because I’m sure she would like to learn more about the local fishing issues.”

  “Issues?” His tone was taunting.

  “We’ve heard about problems here. Didn’t fishermen take over Darwin Station, threaten to kill scientists and tourists? Didn’t they hack up some tortoises with machetes? Didn’t they threaten the director of Galápagos National Park?”

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “Who tells you this?”

  In his mirrored lenses, she watched herself shrug. “Zing heard stories from some people around here.”

  He stood up, raised his beer glass to his mouth, and drained it.

  “Zing would like to know if the fishermen here still sell sea cucumbers and lobsters and shark fins to Asian ships. Do you still threaten scientists?”

  “We never killed anyone.” He wiped a finger over his mustache again.

  “Until now?” She knew she shouldn’t have said it, but she was so damned tired of these games. Zing wasn’t here to grill the man. Sam Westin needed answers.

  Santos slammed his empty beer glass on the table. “Maybe some people deserve to die,” he hissed.

  A prickle of fear crawled its way up from her ankles toward her throat. Way to go, Westin. She’d pushed him too far. The guy could have a switchblade in his pocket. The tables around them were vacant. The cook and the child waitress watched from inside the kitchen. Would they intervene if Santos decided to stab her?

  Over Santos’s shoulder, Sam saw a familiar stocky figure passing in the street. “Eduardo!” she shouted.

  Eduardo didn’t hear her. He wore jeans and T-shirt and held the hand of a tiny dark-haired girl. With the tour group from Papagayo exploring the town, it was a free day for the naturalist guides. Eduardo lived here.

  Carlos grabbed her forearm. “You tell Zing what I said,” he growled. “You tell Zing that fishermen had nothing to do with that cientista’s death.”

  Eduardo was almost past. She half rose from her seat. “Eduardo!”

  His head swiveled in her direction. She waved frantically. Eduardo pulled the child in the direction of the café. The two of them stepped up onto the cement patio beside Sam’s table. When Eduardo caught sight of Santos’s face, he stopped, swallowed, ran his fingers through his unruly hair. Then he knelt at the child’s level, tilted his head toward Sam, and said, “This is Señorita Westin, Marisela.”

  Sam smiled. “Mucho gusto, Marisela.”

  The girl removed a finger from her mouth long enough to chirp, “Mucho gusto,” and the finger went right back in. Then the little girl’s face turned toward Carlos Santos, and her eyes darkened with uncertainty.

  Eduardo straightened. “Marisela is my granddaughter. We are on our way for helado—ice cream.”

  “Helado!” the little girl chirped.

  “See you in a few hours, okay?” Eduardo said to Sam. The little girl tugged on his pant leg. He picked her up, and turning to leave, finally acknowledged the presence of the other man with a curt nod. “Santos.”

  Carlos Santos bumped Eduardo’s shoulder with a fist. “Duarte.”

  Eduardo gave the fisherman a strained look, then turned to go.

  Don’t leave, she wanted to shout at Eduardo’s retreating back. Santos continued to glare at her, standing with his feet and hands tensely held outward. Sam tucked more than enough money to cover the bill under her beer glass. “Well, I should be going.”

  “You be careful.” He smiled and displayed his perfect teeth. “We love our visitors. We have already lost one. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”

  As she passed, he whispered softly, “Enjoy the rest of your tour on Papagayo, WildWest.”

  16

  Sam hired a speedboat that sported a taxi sign to ferry her back to Papagayo, paying the driver extra to zigzag among the craft in the bay so she could film the sea lions using dinghies as personal rafts.

  When the water taxi bumped up against Papagayo’s stern platform, a crew member materialized on the upper deck. She waved. He returned the gesture and then disappeared back to whatever he had been doing. The ship was silent and mostly vacant, with only a few hands on board. Instead of feeling claustrophobic now, her cabin seemed peaceful and almost cozy.

  The day had not gone anything like she had hoped. She hadn’t retrieved her passport. She hadn’t recruited a single ally. Instead, she’d met an enemy. But at least she could now match a face to a threat: Carlos Santos.

  Maybe some people deserve to die. Had Dan known that he was in danger from the fishermen? Had NPF known about the threat? She booted up her laptop, then retrieved Dan’s flash drive from its hiding spot and plugged it into the USB port.

  She sorted through Dan’s email to and from NPF. The messages were mainly business details about travel arrangements and dive sites to survey, but one from Karl@npf.org was intriguingly labeled “Rumor Confirmed.”

  Just recd confirmation of rumor re planned resort project in Villamil: Chinese delegation scheduled to arrive Puerto Ayora on March 16, will attend parade & celebration on March 17. Local government eager to impress. It’s crucial to make study results public well before so Chinese will factor them into their decision, but do NOT reveal prior knowledge of visit or our source could be endangered. Numbers will speak for themselves. Let Out There provide commentary.

  The Chinese planned to invest in Villamil? The word resort was ominous in itself. Food and drinking water were shipped into the Galápagos towns from the mainland each week; how much would a resort require? More ships, more tourists, more flights . . . Dan had mentioned unpunished encroachments into the park around the town of Villamil. Did the developers plan to build this resort on protected land? Would the resort include a waste treatment plant, or would it, like many existing Galápagos enterprises, dump raw sewage into the marine reserve? She experienced a brief ugly mental image of sea turtles swimming through unspeakable muck.

  No wonder Dan had felt this survey was urgent to complete. No wonder Santos was so alarmed about Zing’s reports. Had Dan been killed because of a planned resort?

  Her conversation with Santos had made one thing clear: she needed to keep Wilderness Westin completely separate from Zing. But now that she was pissed off, Wilderness was no longer content to be the blithely happy tourist she had been up to this point.

  Sam decided her post would compare the growing human population in the islands with the sea lions in the harbor. She wrote about the thuggish beachmaster sea lions and threw in her video clips of sea lions on sinking dinghies, as well as a photo of crowded Academy Bay. Neither the people nor the pinnipeds intended to sink the perch on which they had chosen to land, but that was likely to be the ultimate result.

  To keep Out There from completely freaking abou
t her anti-tourist slant, she ended by saying that if readers wanted to see anything close to the original Galápagos environment, they had better book a trip soon. The editors would happily link that comment to Key’s travel site. She proofread and sent the text and visuals, then turned to the more complex problem of Zing’s post.

  Carlos Santos’s smirk danced in front of her eyes as she stared at the blank word processor window.

  The hell with him. She typed, I came here to publish the truth, factual observations, and statistics. For that, I have received threats from a local fisherman who accosted my colleague, Wilderness Westin. Was Daniel Kazaki killed simply because he was collecting data on the state of the Galápagos?

  She decided to include the first underwater photo she’d taken of Dan with the sea cucumber, as well as the photo of him topside. Let the readers see that he had been a kind, valuable person.

  I will continue to report everything I observe here, she wrote. Today, Wilderness went to Darwin Station and the headquarters of the Galápagos National Park Service, in hopes of finding support for our team.

  Speaking of the Park Service, hadn’t there been a photo of park rangers on the page of the local paper? She pulled the Gazeta Galápagos out of her day pack and unrolled it. Naturally, the text was Spanish. She scanned the front page, found a website URL listed in the upper-right corner, connected to the Internet, and brought up the paper’s website. Luckily, it contained the same article and photos. She copied the article address and pasted it into an online translator, then clicked Spanish to English.

  And presto, the article reappeared, now in the mangled English that the Internet translation program provided. The two rangers were father and son, as she had guessed; the son was just entering the service. The father had served for nearly a decade and was famous for having been shot three years ago when he had stopped to investigate a fire on a remote island. There was a confusing paragraph about illegal camping and hunters and giant tortoises that burned to death.

  These might not be current events, but the article was proof that the islands had a troubled history. Even Carlos Santos couldn’t blame her for reporting a story that had already appeared in the Gazeta Galápagos. Well, of course he would, but he’d be blaming Zing.

  She added links to the Gazeta’s web page to Zing’s article, along with brief explanations of the events. Park guards shot. Burned islands, dead galápagos. The trouble in paradise had started long ago and continued to this day. She added a tranquil-looking photo of the sunset from Puerto Ayora. a pretty façade disguises trouble, she labeled it. She bit her lip, remembering Dr. Guerrero’s request, and then added some text about how the Darwin Station personnel and park rangers were doing the best they could under extremely difficult conditions, but that they weren’t in control.

  Which begged the question—who was in control? And where did the fiscalia stand in this mess? With the conservation community? With the locals? Hell, the police were locals, weren’t they?

  She was scheduled to depart in three days. Would they let her? In five days, she was supposed to meet Chase at the ski lodge in Utah, no matter what. Would either of them show up for their rendezvous? Or would they still be stuck thousands of miles apart, playing their endless game of voicemail tag?

  She sent Zing’s post, hoping Out There would not notice Zing had no dive footage this time. Then she downloaded all her email. Wilderness’s folder held a few messages. One from the elusive SanDman said, “Tell Zing sometimes the better part of valor is discretion.”

  “Tell her yourself, asshole.” What was that supposed to mean, anyway? In Zing’s email folder, detractors were nearly as numerous as supporters. Several messages were in Spanish, all with a lot of upside-down exclamation points in the subject line, and there was a nasty one in English—Butt out, bitch! She didn’t bother to read any of them.

  There was no email from Chase in any folder. She checked her phone for the hundredth time. Nothing from Chase. She punched in his home phone number just to hear his voicemail message. Hi, you’ve reached you know who and you know what to do.

  The beep screeched in her ear. “Hola, querido,” she said. “I know I can’t call you, Chase, but I really want to talk to you.” She hesitated a second, then forged ahead. “By now you probably know that things aren’t going so well down here. Dan Kazaki is dead; I think he was murdered.” Her voice broke and she had to take a deep breath before continuing. “The police took my passport, and now they have my earring, found at the site where Dan’s body was located. I don’t know what that means, but I don’t think it’s good. I’m not going to let them win, though; I can’t allow Dan to have died for nothing. I’m going to finish the job we started.” There wasn’t anything more to report. “I wanted to say that I love you and I’m thinking about you and I still hope to meet you on the twenty-second. Stay safe, mi salsa picante.”

  She ended the call, wiped her brimming eyes, and stood up to stretch. Outside her door, she heard footsteps and the voices of Brandon and Ken, then the Robersons. Various clanks and thumps. The tourists were back on board.

  Her phone bleated from its resting place on the desk. Finally! She picked it up and flipped it open. “Chase!”

  “Sam.” It was more of a statement than a greeting. The voice belonged to a woman. Dan’s wife.

  Guilt overwhelmed Sam. “Elizabeth, I’m so, so sorry. I should have called you the instant that I knew—”

  “Are you okay?”

  How could this poor widow be worrying about her when her own husband had just died? “I’m all right,” she said, swallowing around the lump in her throat. “How are you and Sean?”

  “Shocked.”

  “Of course. We all are.” The vision of Dan’s dead eyes behind his flooded face mask wavered in front of her gaze. Sam shut her eyes to make it go away.

  “What happened?”

  Should she tell Elizabeth the story of finding Dan’s body two days before the consulate informed her of his death? Should she tell her about the bad air at the beginning of the trip? No. She needed to make some kind of sense out of the whole chain of events first.

  She said, “We’re still trying to figure that out, Elizabeth.” Who the heck were the others in this mysterious “we” she kept mouthing? As far as she knew, no one else in the Galápagos was even looking for answers. “What did they tell you?”

  “Just that there was a terrible accident and he drowned. He’s on a plane now. I mean, his—” She sniffed and then Sam heard a muffled sound as if Elizabeth had pressed the phone against her body. After a few seconds, she was back. “You weren’t with him?”

  Why did that question make her feel so guilty? “I was out hiking, Elizabeth. It looks like Dan decided to go diving alone. I had no idea he might do that.”

  The other end of the connection was quiet except for a few sniffs. Elizabeth was either crying or trying not to. Did Dan’s wife have any other information? “Did Dan say anything to you about the way the trip was going, or what he thought about the survey he was doing?”

  “Dan rarely told me much about his work.”

  A long uncomfortable silence followed. As it dragged on, Sam pondered several expressions of sympathy, but they all sounded insincere in her imagination. Nothing was adequate for Elizabeth’s loss. Nothing was equal to her own guilt. Finally she began, “If there’s any—”

  “I want you to know that I don’t blame you,” Dan’s wife interrupted. “He knew that underwater research was dangerous; but he loved it. He always told me”—Sam heard a soft sob at this point, but then Elizabeth continued—“that if he died on a trip like this . . . he died a good death . . . doing important work . . . in a place he wanted to be.”

  Hot tears blurred Sam’s vision. She choked out, “Dan loved you, Elizabeth. He loved Sean.” God, this was awful. Nobody should have to talk this way over thousands of miles, over a telephone. This sort of conversation should be face to face, crying onto each other’s shoulders. Although Sam had known Dan onl
y a few days, she and Elizabeth would be forever connected by this horrible event.

  If only she had her father’s faith and easy assurances that Dan’s death was justified by some heavenly blueprint. Dan’s in heaven. God called him; it’s part of a grand plan. You’ll see him again someday. She couldn’t bring herself to say any of that.

  “You take care, Sam,” Elizabeth said softly.

  “I’ll do my best,” Sam said. “And I’ll let you know everything I find out.”

  A soft click ended the call from Elizabeth’s end. Sam sat on the bunk staring out the porthole for a moment, seeing Dan raise a beer, seeing him show the Birskys his photo of Elizabeth and Sean, seeing him smile as he said, “I refuse to have a peon for a partner.”

  She took a deep breath and wiped the wetness from her cheeks. “I will find out what happened, Dan.”

  As she brushed her teeth, she heard the anchor chain rolling up from the depths. She stepped up on her lower bunk, preparing to crawl into the top one, and then she heard footsteps descending the stairs. They stopped right outside her door.

  Sam froze, both feet on the bottom bunk, hands clutching the top bunk frame. Did she hear breathing, or was that her imagination? After a minute, the steps backed away, and she would have sworn she heard the door to Cabin 4, Dan’s cabin, open and then close. Who the hell—were the fiscalia back on board? Or was that a crew member? Tony or the captain? Maybe Jon Sanders, the owner? It couldn’t be Santos. But it could be someone who worked for Santos. Why the hell didn’t these rooms have an interior lock? She stepped down and jammed the desk chair under her doorknob.

  Feeling shaky now, she climbed into her bunk. As Papagayo plowed through the water, she saw the waves lapping below the porthole. No good-omen dolphin appeared this time. There was just endless dark water.

  17

  The next morning, Sam awoke determined to finish the job as quickly as possible. She wanted to find Eduardo before breakfast and make a plan about how to survey the last two sites on Dan’s list.