He reminded her of Wilson.
That's it! she thought excitedly. Ashley was drinking because she needed an excuse to hang out with a completely inappropriate man.
Convinced he was a contact, Sydney rose to her feet and trailed him.
The first place he led her was the men's room, where he disappeared behind a closed door. Unable to risk following him inside, Sydney joined the long line for the ladies', hoping he would emerge again before her turn. He did, heading for the bow of the boat. Sydney followed.
Full darkness had fallen on deck now. The rising moon cast a silver glow over the ocean, but the boat was full of shadows. Sydney moved cautiously, hanging back. The driving music from the aft-deck dance floor covered the sound of her footsteps, the occasional laugh or shout carrying clearly on the warm night air. A long section of rail up ahead was deserted. The man stopped there and looked out to sea a moment, then began digging through his pockets. Sydney tensed.
A flame flickered to life and transferred itself to the end of a cigarette. The man leaned casually against the railing, filling the empty night around him with smoke rings.
Sydney hesitated, confused. Had he really come out there to smoke, or had he sensed her presence? Perhaps he was only stalling, waiting for her to make a move.
She was still trying to decide whether to stay with him or return to shadowing Ashley when a panicked scream from the aft deck jerked her bolt upright. The sound sliced through the loud dance music, horrifying in its intensity. And then the music stopped.
Forgetting about the mysterious man, Sydney turned and ran.
Out on the dance floor, chaos ruled. Everyone was talking and shouting, trying to figure out what had happened. At the center of the biggest knot, only feet from the low side railing, Sydney spotted Ashley, babbling frantically to Roxy and two crewmen. People clustered around them, trying to overhear.
Her sense of foreboding growing, Sydney pushed her way through the crowd.
“That girl! You know, that girl!” Ashley kept repeating. “She was right here. I just saw her!”
“Who, Ashley?” Roxy looked scared. “Calm down and tell us what happened.”
“It was a splash! You heard it, right, Roxy? You heard the splash?”
“A splash?” one of the crewmen said apprehensively. “What kind of splash?”
Ashley clawed desperately at Roxy's arm. Her glassy eyes rolled Sydney's way and Sydney's insides froze.
She was no longer certain Ashley was faking anything.
“Her!” Ashley screamed, pointing at Sydney. “It was her friend.”
“Francie? What about Francie?”
Ashley turned away, peering past a fake potted palm and over the edge of the boat. “There was a splash,” she repeated, bewildered. “She was dancing right here. And then . . .”
Sydney's knees buckled.
“Man overboard!” both crewmen shouted at the same time. The words electrified the crowd, who picked up the phase and began shouting too.
“Man overboard! Man overboard!”
The crewmen ran off in different directions. Sydney staggered to the nearest railing and looked down ten feet to the ocean, barely able to breathe. They practice for this. They have drills, she told herself, struggling to fill her lungs. Help is on the way. Francie knows how to swim.
Without making a conscious decision, Sydney climbed up onto the railing, centering her feet beneath her. She crouched a moment, finding her balance, then managed a standing position. The water looked even farther down now, and the moonlight had lost its brilliance. She couldn't see Francie anywhere.
What if Ashley pushed her?
If so, she could have done it a mile back, only now sounding the alarm. The thought made Sydney teeter.
“Hey, you! What are you doing?” someone shouted. “Get down!”
Sydney heard footsteps running toward her. Holding her breath, she jumped.
“Man overboard!”
The cry went up again as she plummeted feetfirst into the water, her arms curled over her head for safety the way she had been trained. Her dress billowed over her face, pushed up by water much colder than she'd expected. She kicked upward, breaking the surface only a couple of feet from where she had landed. The boat was already past her and receding at a surprising rate, moving far more quickly than she'd realized while aboard.
“Francie!” she called, turning her back to the catamaran and swimming along its wake. “Francie, can you hear me?”
A swell hit her in the face, filling her open mouth with salt water. She spit and sputtered as the salt burned her nose and throat. Kicking hard to lift her torso above water, she looked all around for any sign of her friend.
“Francie!” she called again.
The ocean was rougher than it had appeared from above. Every swell that lifted her let her see only the moonlit crests of other swells. In the troughs she saw only darkness.
“Francie!”
No answer. No sound at all, except for her own splashing and the distant hum of the cruising ship's motor. She imagined Francie lost somewhere, cold and terrified, and started swimming again. Stroke, stroke, stroke . . . She'd put her strength into covering distance before she tried shouting again.
Suddenly, the beam of a searchlight exploded around her, so bright she was nearly blinded. The captain had turned the boat around and was coming back for the rescue. She heard a collective shout go up at the sight of her.
“Attention, you in the water! We are throwing out a life sling,” a voice blared over a bullhorn. “Place the sling around your body and we'll pull you up to safety.”
Not likely, Sydney thought, lowering her head and swimming faster. Not without Francie.
She could feel herself getting tired. In the back of her mind, she knew her search was probably futile. But if Francie died it would be her fault. Ashley had to have pushed Francie as a way of getting to Sydney. So if anything happened to Francie . . .
“Attention, Sydney!” Francie's voice came over the bullhorn. “Are you completely freaking nuts? Get in that sling right now!”
“Francie?” Sydney turned to face the boat, squinting into its spotlight. “Francie,” she shouted, “is that you?”
“Of course it's me! Will you get on the boat?”
Sydney stroked to the life sling, totally confused. The crew used a winch to haul her up, her soaked dress clinging in a way that might have been more embarrassing had she been less upset. Her eyes searched out Francie in the crowd, and the moment her feet touched deck she ran to her friend to make sure she was safe.
“What were you thinking?” Francie demanded, wrapping a silver emergency blanket around Sydney's shoulders. “You scared me half to death!”
“I thought you were in the water,” said Sydney, still trying to understand. “Ashley said—”
“I was using the bathroom! I do that sometimes,” Francie interrupted. “If you would have let these guys do their job, instead of diving off the side like Miss Superhero while—”
“I jumped.”
“What?”
“I didn't dive. I jumped,” Sydney corrected her meekly.
“Oh, right,” Francie said sarcastically. “Hardly dangerous at all then. My mistake.”
A crew member touched Sydney's back, interrupting the conversation. “Are you all right?” he asked. He was barely Sydney's age, and his face showed how scared he had been.
“I'm fine,” she assured him. “I'm sorry about all the trouble.”
“You'll still need to see the onboard medic. And help us fill out an incident report. If you don't mind coming with me . . .”
She followed him through a crowd that parted like the Red Sea, two hundred curious pairs of eyes staring openly into hers. Sydney winced. Not only had her rescue attempt been totally pointless, she had broken the cardinal rule of spying—she had called attention to herself.
“Listen,” she said suddenly, grabbing the crewman's elbow. “Ashley said she heard a splash. Was sh
e hallucinating? Did she just make that up?”
The guy gave her a slight, sympathetic smile. “It was probably a big fish jumping. There are plenty of them out there. Your friend had too much to drink and she got confused, that's all.”
“Right.”
But she didn't believe that for a second. Ashley had portrayed the bumbler so cleverly that Sydney had let her guard down. Until that moment she'd been certain that her own cover was secure, that Ashley couldn't suspect her of being a rival spy. Now she knew how cunning the other girl really was.
She must have planned the whole thing to get me to jump overboard—and maybe be lost at sea in the process. If she suspects I've taken Jen's place, then she knows I'm here on a mission. Has she figured out what it is?
Sydney shivered under her blanket.
It has to be tonight, then. No sane person would expect me to go scuba diving after that fun little swim.
To: Aw23i5pl300
From: SisterAct
Subject: Developing situation
I was right—one of our new pledges is definitely on the job. All signs of advanced training verified. Request permission to make this go away.
7
The clock had passed midnight when Sydney finally slipped away, keeping to the shadows. Nobody knew she was sneaking out, and if all went well, no one ever would.
Francie has to be asleep by now, she thought, skirting a streetlight.
Pleading a headache, Francie had gone up to bed as soon as they'd returned to the hotel. Sydney had entered their room only long enough to change into dry clothes and grab the backpack in which she'd secreted her GPS unit, SD-6 cell phone, and a tightly rolled towel, saying she was going to hang out downstairs. Francie hadn't even looked at her as she left, still upset about what she now referred to as Sydney's stupidity on the boat.
What does Francie think? Sydney wondered, wishing Roxy had never booked them aboard that cruise in the first place. That I was out there enjoying myself with the sharks?
She groaned as she slipped around the final corner into the off-site public parking garage where she had parked her rental car. The entire time she'd been in the water trying to rescue Francie, sharks had never once entered her mind. Now, driving out of the garage onto the deserted downtown streets, she knew she'd be unable to forget them. She tried to concentrate on her mission, the prototype, what to do about Ashley . . . but teeth consumed her inner vision. Big, triangular, gnashing teeth, their edges so sharp they could amputate limbs without pain, only the sick, terrifying sensation of an unexpected tug.
No pain, though. That's something.
Sydney rolled down her driver's window, letting the warm tropical air flow over her face in an attempt to calm her nerves. The car flew up the mostly deserted road to Pearl Harbor, and before she knew it she was pulling into the brushy turnoff she'd scoped out that morning. She cut her headlights and let the vehicle roll into the bushes. Climbing out, she checked her black car from every angle, satisfying herself that no one was likely to spot it. Then she popped the trunk and began preparing for her dive.
All the equipment she'd picked up earlier was neatly arranged, ready to go. Skinning off her clothes, she changed quickly into a full-length black wet suit with a neoprene hood. Then she pulled out the underwater scooter and carried it down to the water's edge. The narrow, mucky strip of beach in front of the mangroves looked different than it had in daylight. Wilder, forsaken, eerie . . .
Shivering, Sydney returned to the car, where she strapped the dive knife to her calf, transferred her waterproof GPS unit and SD-6 telephone into her mesh diving bag, and shrugged into the buoyancy compensator vest supporting her air tank. Depth and pressure gauges were suspended from her vest; her dive light, a wide-lens flashlight with a pistol grip, hung from a loop around her wrist. Grabbing her mask and fins, she closed the car's trunk and pushed its key up inside one tight sleeve of her wet suit.
At the water's edge, Sydney spit into her mask, rubbing saliva around the glass to reduce fogging before bending to rinse it out. Cold water lapped over her bare feet, making her shiver again.
Good thing I went for the full suit, she thought, although her decision to cover herself in black had been based primarily on a desire for invisibility. She seemed to have succeeded on that score; in the darkness of the deserted cove, Sydney could barely see herself. The moon that had lit the sea earlier had waned to the merest ghostly glow, reminding her that she stood near a place where over two thousand men had died terribly. If ghosts actually existed, Pearl Harbor ought to be full of them.
I hope they don't mind my coming, she thought, putting on her mask and securing the dive bag to her waist. After all, we're on the same side.
She pulled the battery-powered scooter into waist-deep water, letting it sink lightly to the bottom while she put on her fins. She took the GPS unit from her bag, switched it on, and checked her coordinates. Finally she put the regulator into her mouth, inhaled to make sure it was working, and sank beneath the surface.
Darkness closed around her. She fingered the trigger on the dive light, but decided against turning it on—too visible. Instead, she powered up the scooter, using a Velcro strap to secure the GPS on top where she could see its small glowing display. Gripping the handles on each side of the scooter, she aimed the propeller-driven device out toward the center of the harbor.
She moved slowly at first, unable to see anything in front of her except the GPS screen. When her depth gauge indicated she was ten feet below the surface, she finally flipped on her dive light, pointing the beam forward. Countless tiny particles suspended in the water reflected her light back to her, giving her only a few feet of visibility. Turning the light off again, she increased her scooter speed to two miles per hour, deciding to rely on her reconnaissance of that morning and hope nothing was in her path rather than risk having someone spot a light that was of no use anyway. If she hit anything, the scooter would take the brunt of it.
By the time she reached her mission coordinates, she had grown accustomed to traveling blind, letting the water rushing past her face reassure her that she was still moving. Finally, the correct numbers glowed on her GPS unit. Her waterproof watch indicated that the trip from shore had taken twenty-two minutes. Battery life on the scooter was two hours, and she had at least forty minutes of air left in her tank. So far everything was going like clockwork.
Angling the scooter downward, she cleared her ears and submerged another ten feet, then tried the light again. An organic soup floated past her mask, swallowing the beam so completely that Sydney felt as if she had switched on the bulb inside a closet. Throttling back on the scooter, she glided toward the bottom in a long slow arc, the center of her own tiny capsule of illumination.
She saw the silty bottom only moments before the nose of her scooter would have hit mud. Pulling sharply upward, she avoided the collision but churned up a cloud of sediment that obscured her vision even further. Leveling off, she kept her fins still to avoid stirring up more muck. Within her sphere of light, the bottom was flat and featureless—no coral, no rocks, and definitely no shipwreck. Unfortunately, she could barely see three feet in front of her.
How am I supposed to find anything down here? she wondered despairingly, making a wide circle just feet above the mud. This would be bad enough during daylight. But now . . .
The task seemed impossible. She had always known finding the prototype might be tricky; she had foolishly assumed that finding the wreck would be easy. She wished she were working with a partner, someone to help her choose her next move. If Noah were there, he'd have an idea.
At least she wouldn't feel so alone.
Double-checking her GPS coordinates, Sydney made another slow loop. If the Eagle was there, she ought to be right on top of it.
So where is it already?
Maybe there wasn't even a wreck to be found. What evidence did Wilson really have, other than an unexplained blip on some top-secret remote sensing survey? If a yacht had really b
een rusting at the bottom of the harbor for the past sixty years, wouldn't someone have found it by now?
On the other hand, it was common knowledge that there were downed aircraft still on the bottom somewhere. Not everything lost in the war had been found.
A wreck could still be here, she reassured herself, making another, wider loop. And if it is, I'd better find it.
She checked her watch again, beginning to worry about her air supply.
Suddenly, her light found something. Rising up from the mud, a heavily encrusted wall sloped steeply away from her, its upper edge disappearing into darkness.
Sydney's heart beat faster. Two swift kicks of her fins propelled her forward as she switched off the scooter, then glided upward along the dark surface until it fell off abruptly beneath her. She angled her light downward—and identified the coral-encrusted deck of a ship lying on its side.
Bingo!
Happiness and relief flooded her equally. Leaving her scooter resting in the ninety-degree angle formed by the steeply tilted deck and a wall enclosing the upper cabin, Sydney began exploring the ship.
Rusted metal cables snaked across the steel deck. Evenly spaced portholes were too overgrown to see through, but one had broken out, leaving a small round hole. Sydney shined her light through it and saw a tiny compartment that might have been a berth. What had once been the opposite wall of the room was now the floor. Silt covered everything. She could just make out what appeared to be an open interior doorway, but her light didn't penetrate beyond that.
Leaving the porthole, she swam to the aft end of the ship and shined her light on the stern. Beneath a thick coat of rust and algae, faint letters were still visible: EAGLE.
Yes!
Her heart beat even faster with the certainty that she had the right ship, but she forced herself to calm down, knowing her excitement was increasing the load on her air supply. She was still hovering off the stern, trying to regulate her breathing, when a huge bluish fish flashed through the edge of her light, disappearing with one strong sweep of its tail.
Shark!
She froze, unable to think over the terrified roaring of blood in her ears. Had it gone? Was it coming back?
Sister Spy Page 7