And the third time, the not-in-the-flesh time, had been when I’d been snooping on Imogen’s computer and seen a photo of her father just after he’d won an election.
The man who had been holding up her father’s hand was this man. Yes, a much younger version, but it was him all right.
Suddenly three separate beings became this one man.
‘If it wasn’t for Art here,’ said E Lee Marx, releasing me from his bear hug, ‘we wouldn’t even have known that you were gone.’
Friday
The Cove
‘So you reckon you know where this treasure is?’ said Sal, in that direct manner she had.
‘Well, put it this way – I’m pretty sure it isn’t where you were looking,’ I said.
Sal chewed her bottom lip, and gave me what almost seemed like a look of gratitude.
‘So you’re not angry with me any more?’ I said.
‘Not as angry,’ she conceded.
‘And your mum?’
‘She’s okay,’ she said. ‘She flew back to Italy.’
‘And now you’re supposed to be my minder or something?’ I said.
‘Why did you jump into the ocean like that?’
‘I didn’t jump, you idiot!’
‘That’s not a considerate thing to call another human being.’
Salacia was right, it wasn’t a considerate thing to call another human being, especially not one who was supposedly the goddamn Goddess of the goddamn Sea.
We were in her cabin, which looked exactly the same as the cabin I had been in, except for the pictures everywhere.
Pictures of dolphins, dolphins and – you guessed it – dolphins.
She was in one chair, I was in the other.
‘Okay, I take it back,’ I said. ‘But I didn’t jump, I was just leaving my room and I slipped.’
Again Sal chewed some lip for a while, which, I soon realised, was what she did when she was giving something serious thought.
‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘you just can’t wander anywhere you like on the Argo.’
‘So I’ve noticed,’ I said.
‘Some parts, I’ve never even been to,’ she said. ‘And it’s my dad’s ship.’
‘Do they lock you in, too?’ I said.
‘You heard – Dad said that was an accident.’
I wasn’t sure how you could accidentally lock a door, but I also didn’t think it was E Lee Marx who had done it. Either that, or he was a very good actor, because he had seemed genuinely shocked when I’d told him.
‘So you just sit in your room and watch DVDs?’ I said.
‘And I write in my journal. And I do drawings,’ she said. ‘Do you want to see some?’
‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘They’re of dolphins?’
I was right, they were of dolphins, but they were really good drawings and I couldn’t help but be impressed.
‘Have you ever seen The Cove?’ she said.
‘Has it got Indiana Jones in it?’
‘I doubt it, it’s a documentary.’
I checked my watch: we had five more hours of steaming until we reached the area of Reverie, at which time, E Lee Marx had promised me, I would be able to be part of the action.
So why not watch The Cove, the Indiana-Jones-less documentary, while we waited?
We actually watched it three times; well, two and a half because I feel asleep during the third screening.
I have to admit, the first time I was more fascinated by how they managed to film at the Cove; it was a sort of dummy’s guide for gung-ho ecological activism.
But the second time I watched, it was all about the dolphins, and by the end I had tears splashing down my cheeks.
The third time, it was a bit of both.
But I must’ve nodded off, because I was woken by somebody shaking me gently.
I blinked my eyes open, and it was Imogen, saying, ‘Wake up, we’re there.’
‘Imogen?’ I said.
But as soon as I said her name the spell broke and Imogen’s face became Sal’s face.
I felt a stab of longing: I wanted Imogen to be here; and an even bigger stab of guilt: I hadn’t even replied to her texts.
But the here-and-now asserted itself – we were there, back in the world of sunken treasure, the world of untold !@#$%^&*.
Even though I knew about the ROVs, I was still imagining a ship where the decks were bustling with activity, with divers wetsuiting up, even with Castor and Pollux getting readied for extreme underwater action.
‘Dad says we can go up to the control room,’ Sal said.
Control room!
This was more like it!
Excitedly I followed her down a corridor, up some stairs, and into a room. One whole wall was a bank of flickering screens.
On one I could see the now-familiar contours of the Reverie Island coastline, and a shiver, no, a tremor, passed through me.
Yamashita’s Treasure was down there somewhere!
E Lee Marx was sitting on a swivel chair, a microphone on a stalk at the level of his mouth, and another man, who was obviously the tech guy, was sitting in front of an enormous console, like something out of an aeroplane on steroids.
It was seriously sci-fi, and so far removed from the last time I’d been in these waters that I had trouble getting my head around it.
‘Welcome to the nerve centre,’ said E Lee Marx proudly, with a sweep of his hand. ‘This is Felipe, number-one treasure hunter.’
Felipe, with his V-neck cashmere jumper, and his comb-over, and his paunch, looked so different to my, admittedly Indiana-Jones-influenced, idea of a treasure hunter that I had to stifle a laugh.
I stood there for a while.
Screens flickered.
Felipe tapped at the keyboard a couple of times.
E Lee Marx said some stuff into the microphone, stuff like, ‘Okay, we’re drifting a bit to the left.’
After what seemed like quite a while, but was probably only a few minutes, I said, ‘So when do you send down the ROVs?’
E Lee Marx and Felipe exchanged smiles, and immediately I knew I’d said something so stupid it would probably go viral on Facebook in about five minutes.
‘Not for a while yet,’ said E Lee Marx and then launched into an explanation of what we were doing.
Apparently the Argo was presently towing something called a towfish, which was bouncing a series of acoustic pulses off the sea bottom. The resulting sonagram showed any difference in texture or material of the sea floor.
E Lee Marx pointed to one of the many screens and said, ‘That’s pretty much what’s under us now.’
The screen was a sort of uniform metallic grey.
‘So there’s nothing exciting there?’ I said.
‘Silt, I would say,’ said E Lee Marx. ‘And a lot of it. Pretty much an archaeologist’s worst nightmare.’
He then told me that the Argo was following a searching algorithm based on the coordinates I’d given him, and when it was finished all the sonograms would be stitched together to make a map of the sea bottom in this area.
‘Once we have that,’ he said, ‘all the experts knock heads together and see what we’ve got. If there’s anything we think warrants further investigation, we drop the towfish deeper, get a more detailed sonogram. And then if it still looks promising we might go in with the ROVs.’
‘How long does all this take?’ I said.
‘Felipe?’
Felipe checked the screen in front of him.
‘Well, we’re about 0.24 at the moment, so that would be approximately another thirty hours for the first map.’
Now I totally got all the DVDs.
And wondered why they didn’t have Xboxes, PlayStations and Nintendos as well.
We stayed in the nerve centre for half an hour more and Sal said, ‘I’m going back to the room.’
‘I might stay a bit longer,’ I said.
That bit longer became a lot longer, because it was sort of captivating watc
hing the continually changing sonogram of the sea bottom. Mostly it was that same sort of uniform metallic grey, but occasionally there would be another feature.
‘Is that something?’ I would say excitedly, but neither E Lee Marx nor Felipe would get too excited.
‘Probably a bit of rubble,’ they would say.
‘Or just a small reef.’
This went on for another half-hour or so.
‘Do you ever miss the old days?’ I eventually asked E Lee Marx.
It was a pretty rude sort of question, but he took it in his stride.
‘Of course, all old men like me miss the old days. But that’s not what you’re asking, is it? Do I miss the old way we used to hunt for treasure?’
I nodded, because I was sure he was going to say yes.
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘The old ways were too dangerous, too many good people died. Yes, this is a bit boring, but it is much, much safer.’
Now I felt like a complete tool.
When E Lee Marx left the room I took the opportunity to bother Felipe with further questions.
Despite the V-neck cashmere jumper, he was a pretty cool sort of guy.
‘So what’s that screen there?’ I said.
‘That’s a magnometer readout,’ he said. ‘It measures ferrous metals and we use it if we find something interesting on the sonogram.’
‘What about the one next to it?’ I said, pointing to a screen that looked as if it had been more recently installed than the others. There didn’t appear to be any output on it, though, just a single unwavering line across its centre.
‘Okay, that’s a bit hush-hush and I probably shouldn’t be talking about it, but put it this way: it could revolutionise the whole science of marine remote sensing.’
‘It could?’ I said, keeping my voice low, buying into both his enthusiasm and his sense of secrecy.
It worked, too, because he kept going.
‘We’re going to be trialling a new sort of transducer, one that can transmit both acoustic waves and electromagnetic currents simultaneously.’
‘Wow!’ I said.
It wasn’t much, but it was enough to keep him going.
‘And apparently if we get the calibration right it will exclude lower-density sedimentary material from the final image.’
Again I went with an all-purpose ‘Wow!’
‘What really spins me out,’ he said, ‘is that this transducer was supposedly adapted from some sort of high-end telecommunication device that never even hit the market.’
‘Cerberus,’ I said, the oh-so-familiar word slipping from my lips.
It was now Felipe’s turn to be surprised. ‘How the hell did you know that?’
It was a question I didn’t really have an answer to, not one that didn’t involve a lot of explanation, so I borrowed a technique from every slippery politician I’d ever heard interviewed on TV and asked a question instead.
‘So when’s it coming online?’ I said.
It worked, too.
‘The hardware boys keep running into compatibility issues.’
‘Ah yes, compatibility issues,’ I said knowingly.
Suddenly, it was if the adapted Cerberus transducer was privy to our conversation and, ashamed of its compatibility issues, decided to do something proactive about it.
The screen flickered to life, and for the briefest of seconds there was what looked like an incredibly clear photo-like picture of the ocean floor, what it looked like under all that silt.
But then it was gone.
‘See what I mean, compatibility issues,’ repeated Felipe.
E Lee Marx came back into the room then to tell me it was dinnertime.
I thought this would be my opportunity to meet the rest of the crew: the salty skipper, the hardware boys, the gung-ho divers, the engineers in their oily overalls.
I was wrong.
E Lee Marx, Sal and I ate in Sal’s cabin.
The food was amazing: lasagne and a salad with this really tangy dressing. As we were eating dessert, my phone went crazy, downloading about twenty messages.
‘We must’ve just got a signal,’ I said.
‘Happens like that when you’re at sea,’ said E Lee Marx.
I gobbled down my dessert, excused myself and went to check my messages. There were a couple from Mom saying what a great time she was having in Beijing. How she missed all us kids. No ‘make sure you brush your teeth’. No ‘make sure you change your undies’.
So I guessed that Dad hadn’t told her anything about my little cruise.
There was one from Dad: keep me posted!
There was one from Imogen: dom, I really need to talk to you about this thing.
There was one from Telstra.
And there was one from Zoe Zolton-Bander.
you dog
Zoe, I knew, was actually a lover of dogs, but I knew that was not exactly what she meant.
Dog, as in traitor, as in snitch.
On the one hand I didn’t care what she said – I’d done the right thing, the right thing for me, Dominic Silvagni, and the right thing as far as finding Yamashita’s Gold went; those incompetents were never going to bring it to the surface.
But on the other hand I knew she was absolutely right: I was about as dog as a dog could get.
Because Zoe and her brother and his father had done all the hard work as far as keeping the treasure hunt alive, turning the myth into a reality once again.
‘You up for another movie?’ said the Goddess of the Sea.
‘Why not?’ I said, thinking of the thirty agonising hours that were needed for the search pattern to finish.
First, though, I had to send a text to Imogen. It failed – no signal. So much for the marvels of modern communication.
‘This movie’s about sharks,’ said Sal.
What you have to understand about Sal was that when she said ‘movie’ she actually meant ‘documentary’. Yes, generally it was a movie-length documentary, but it was a documentary nonetheless.
We watched the one about sharks, which actually made me feel sorry for them, especially when fisherman cut off their fins – to be used in shark fin soup – before letting them go again.
Afterwards I said goodnight to Sal and went to my own cabin.
But this time I did a thorough inspection of the lock on the door and then felt really embarrassed that I’d resorted to climbing through the window, because there was really nothing to it – I could’ve picked it in no time.
I’d never spent the night on a boat before, and I thought I would have trouble going to sleep.
The opposite was true.
As soon as I put my head on the pillow and felt the rocking of the boat, the distant thrum of the motor, I knew I was going to have no trouble getting to the wonderful land of Nod.
Saturday
The Nerd Centre
I was back in the water, the anchor tied to my gear.
Plummeting deeper and deeper.
But I couldn’t untie it; the more I tried, the tighter the knot seemed to get.
Deeper and deeper I went.
My gauge said empty.
I sucked, but nothing came.
Deeper and deeper.
And no air to breathe.
Deeper …
I woke with a yell. ‘No!’
And it took me a while to remember where I was.
When I checked the time on my iPhone I noticed that I also had two more messages from Imogen.
when can we talk??? said the first one. i really need to talk to you, said the second.
Again, I tried to send her one back. Again it failed.
Feeling claustrophobic, I had to get out of the cabin. I tried the door; it was unlocked.
The corridor was well lit, and I couldn’t see anybody. I followed it until I came to the door of the room I’d been in earlier, the nerve centre or ‘nerd centre’, as I’d rebadged it in my mind.
I knocked.
No answer, so I pushed
it open.
It was exactly the same as before, with that bank of flickering screens, except there was nobody here, and on one of the screens was the familiar shape of Reverie Island.
That’s weird, I thought. But then I realised it wasn’t so weird at all.
The Argo was following a search algorithm, the towfish was sending out waves, the results were being recorded somewhere.
As E Lee Marx himself had admitted, an operator wasn’t needed for any of that.
I sat in the same chair that the world’s most famous treasure hunter had sat in, and watched the sonogram.
It was the same featureless metallic grey.
Firstly making sure the microphone was definitely turned off, I gave some commands in a mock English voice.
‘Move a little to the left, please, old chap.
‘I say, there appears to be a rather large treasure down there. Shall we stop?
‘U-boat! U-boat. U-boat on the starboard bow! Prepare the depth charges!’
But then I noticed something: the top monitor, the one that supposedly showed the output from the reconfigured Cerberus, had started working.
Not only was it working, the image it was showing was extraordinarily detailed and clear.
It was actually like looking at a video of the ocean floor. I could see every rock, every crevice.
I remembered what Felipe had said, that this would revolutionise marine remote sensing, how it would exclude lower-density sedimentary material.
I sat in the swivel chair, entranced.
It didn’t seem possible that between me and what I was seeing on the monitor was more than sixty metres of saltwater. A metre or so of silt.
And then I saw it, a fleeting image on the screen.
No, it can’t be!
I searched the console for some sort of rewind, some sort of recall button, but there wasn’t one. Not one I could recognise, anyway.
Maybe you imagined it, I told myself.
No, you saw it.
I turned the microphone on and spoke clearly into it.
‘This is Dominic Silvagni in the nerd … sorry … nerve centre and I’ve just seen Yamashita’s Gold!’
Saturday
Yamashita’s Gold
A man barged into the room or cabin, or whatever you call it, two minutes later.
Yamashita's Gold Page 20