by Orca Various
I wondered what she would do. She marched over like someone steeling herself to take an “I-dare-you” dive off a steep rock and grabbed a white one with thin spaghetti straps on the top and a belt on the bottom. She went into the change room and tried it on, put her sweats back on over it and came out. “It’s fine,” she grunted. “I look ridiculous.”
“I’ll meet you at the beach,” I said, then added, “It’ll be fine.” She looked away as I paid for the suit.
I went back to our room and put on my trunks. I wondered if she’d really do it, if she’d actually show up on the beach. I felt kind of guilty that I’d pushed her a bit. But I just wanted her to have some fun.
When I hit the beach, I couldn’t see her anywhere. Then I looked out to the water and saw a head out there—just a head. But I could tell it was her, totally immersed in the water, probably standing on her tiptoes.
I motioned to her to come forward. She motioned for me to move toward her. I took a few steps, then beckoned for her to take a few too. She made a motion with her head like she was rolling her eyes. She moved forward, her neck and collarbones above the surface. I moved toward her again. Most of her face was usually hidden behind her hair. She’d left her shades on the beach and she’d had her head underwater, so her hair was slicked back, looking, actually, very cool, and showing her whole face for the first time. I almost took a step back. She looked different. I couldn’t believe it was even her. Her fully exposed eyes were almond shaped, and her cheekbones high. I smiled at her and gave her a thumbs-up. That was when she truly started emerging from the water. It was also when I almost collapsed on the beach. She was moving steadily toward me, bashful, head partially down, blue eyes like the sea looking straight at me. The water fell from her shoulders and down her chest and along her slender waist to her hips and strong legs until she was fully visible in her racy white bikini.
Angel Dahl was…was stunning.
That was Bad Adam thinking. Or was it?
But wherever that thought came from, it was true.
Then…she tripped. But it didn’t matter. When she raised herself up and smiled sheepishly at me, she looked even better.
I had been frozen on the spot on the sunny beach. But now I walked toward her (staggered might be a better word), and she came right up to me.
“Wow,” was all I said, barely above my breath, but she heard it. I think my mouth was hanging open.
She tried to keep back her smile. “Don’t tease,” she said. “I look gross.” With that she turned and ran into the waves, and I ran after her (what else could I do?), spraying water at her while she sprayed it back. We frolicked for a while, laughing and grabbing each other, throwing one another down into the blue blanket that was the warm Goldeneye water.
In the back of my mind, I kept wondering, Did Angel really think she was unattractive? Was she that modest and that worried about her looks that even her figure looked bad to her? Maybe some girls are like that—they have no idea how beautiful they are. Or did she know how spectacular she looked? Was she playing me? Was there more to learn about her, another side, maybe a darker Angel?
But being with her out there was so much fun that I stopped thinking about all that. We kept moving farther and farther out into the water, well beyond all the other swimmers. At one point, I picked her up and put her on my shoulders, somehow keeping both of us afloat. She felt light. As she screamed, I fired her into the air like a bullet out of a Walther PPK. She went headfirst into the waves in a spectacular crash. When she came up for air, her back to me, she was facing the shoreline out past the Goldeneye beach, well beyond the swimming area. The resort’s guests weren’t supposed to go there.
“W!” she suddenly cried out.
“What?”
“W!” She was pointing toward the out-of-bounds shore. “Look!”
There was water in my face. I swept it off and squinted into the distance.
I couldn’t believe it. Over on the shoreline in the direction she pointed I saw the clear shape of a W in the rocks!
SEVENTEEN
W?
The W was distinct. Though it was part of a natural rock formation, it almost looked like someone had placed the big letter there, like God had reached his hand down and set the letter on the shoreline.
“Am I making too much of it?” Angel asked, treading water, trying to contain her excitement. “Am I seeing things?”
I didn’t answer. I just started power-swimming toward it. I’m a pretty good swimmer (my size helps), yet Angel stayed right with me. She was as sleek and fit as a dolphin, gliding fast through the water. I had the feeling that this girl was keeping herself in shape in a big way. Anxious to be accepted, highly critical of herself and a terrible judge of her own worth, she had unknowingly made herself into something remarkable.
It didn’t take us long to get there.
W marked the spot, I kept thinking. It sounded like a line a pirate might say. What will we find when we get there, I wondered, a hidden treasure of some sort?
The W actually formed the opening of a crevice in the rocky shoreline, which was about six or seven feet high here. We pulled ourselves up onto the rocks and went inside. The walls looked the same all over—craggy and rocky. Was there something inside one of the cracks in the walls? We started searching. We searched for a long time. We didn’t really know exactly what we were looking for—though I had the feeling that if I saw it, I would recognize it instantly. But the rocks were so uniform that nothing stood out, the cracks were only inches deep and empty, and the surface was so hard that you couldn’t pry any of it off or break into it to see what was in or behind it. Before long, the sun was getting low in the Caribbean sky. It was no use. We’d have to come back with lights.
We returned to Goldeneye, swimming on our backs, looking at the W and the crevice behind it as we moved away. As we got farther from it, the whole thing became dim and then went out of sight. I began to wonder. Had it really looked like a W or had we imagined it? We couldn’t afford to be wrong. By late tomorrow morning we had to leave Goldeneye. We couldn’t even try to stay here secretly after check-out time. There was just too much security. We’d never get away with it, and any attempt might land us in serious trouble.
The Walther PPK wasn’t the W, this rock formation might be a dead end too, and how could William Stephenson possibly be what or who we were looking for? He was long gone from earth, and I had no tangible evidence to connect him in any way to my grandfather.
I had to look somewhere else for W. But now I was down to my last few hours.
We stayed on our backs the entire distance to the beach. It was a relaxing way to swim, and I needed to try to be calm because I was starting to freak out. My mission had utterly failed. I had spent nearly all the money and only discovered that my grandfather was a horrible human being who had tried to kill me. What would I tell the other guys? Could I harbor such a secret about Grandpa from Mom, from everyone, for the rest of my life? It was mission unaccomplished.
Then it got worse.
As we reached shallow water, we stood up, gave one last look out across the surface toward the now-vanished W and turned toward the beach.
“Good evening, you two,” said a voice. I recognized the smooth Bermudian tone.
John.
EIGHTEEN
VILLAIN
“Had enough play time?” he asked.
“Hi, John,” said Angel, trying to sound normal and cheery, as if the two of us had simply decided to come to Goldeneye for some vacation time.
“Looking for something out there?”
It was time to lay our cards on the table. He kind of had us anyway. And we were getting nowhere on our own. I needed to involve John, even if he was the enemy. Maybe he’d say something incriminating.
“W,” I said.
He laughed as if he was relieved.
“I have to tell you, Mr. Murphy, I have no idea what that is all about. Why do you keep saying that? What does the letter W have
to do with anything? You’ve seen too many James Bond movies. Ah, the secret clue, the secret letter! I will be totally honest with you. The letter W plays absolutely no role in any of this. Honestly.”
He was poker-faced. He didn’t swallow or blink. It was almost too good. What if he wasn’t lying? What if W indeed meant nothing? But it had been on the gate, on the envelope, and, most importantly, Grandpa had said it over and over to himself in the mirror when he didn’t know that Angel was listening. I told John all three of those things, laid out the case for W.
“First of all, he knew you were listening to him, Angel.”
“He did?”
“Yeah. He’s more skilled than you will ever be.” Yes, I thought, but he underestimates her. We all do.
John went on, “Mr. Know is a strange man, very eccentric, but he doesn’t mean you harm.”
I thought I caught the telltale swallowing, but he went on quickly.
“I told you before, I’m one of the good guys—or at least I’m on their side.”
“So you aren’t going to kill us?” asked Angel.
He laughed. “No.” His face turned more serious. “But I am going to watch you. If you don’t go home now, you could indeed be in danger. You shouldn’t be here. You told me you weren’t coming. You both lied.”
I thought of Huckleberry Finn. John was lying too, about something. I was sure of it.
“I understand that you are leaving tomorrow. That’s a good thing. I will watch you and then escort you out of here. This time, Adam, you will go home and not come back.” He turned to Angel. “As will you, my dear.”
“I’m not your dear!”
“We found something,” I said.
When he turned back to me, his mouth had become a straight line. “What?” he asked.
“Out there.” I pointed out toward the water. “Marked by a W.”
“Out where?” he said. I could see his hand moving toward his gun holster.
“On the shoreline, just outside the resort property.”
His face broke into a grin, and his hand moved away from his gun. “On the shoreline? A massive W, was it? What, are you pirates looking for hidden treasure now?” He laughed out loud.
“I’ve got to get changed,” said Angel and began marching toward our villa. John, to my surprise, let her go.
“My, my, Angel,” he said, “you are certainly all grown up.” He was eyeing her up and down as she walked away. I wanted to slug him. I caught up to her and took her hand. John followed us.
“Creep,” said Angel under her breath.
At the villa, he started issuing orders, telling us to stay indoors that night and be prepared to meet him at noon where the shuttles gathered so he could accompany us to the airport. Then he asked to see the envelope. I supposed it couldn’t do any harm, so I let him have it. He sat at the desk and examined it for a while, holding it up to the strong light of the lamp, chuckling at the words on it saying that my grandfather was a traitor and that he deserved to die. Then he started looking at the W. He examined it for the longest time. Then he grinned.
“Come here,” he finally barked at me. He pointed at the envelope. “That’s not just a W. If you look very, very carefully, you’ll see there is an h right beside it, barely perceptible. It’s the beginning of a word. How many words start with Wh in the English language, my boy? Quite a few, and very common ones, wouldn’t you say? You were simply looking at the first two letters of another word, not a W!”
I examined it closely. I could see the h now, barely visible but there. He was right! That letter on the envelope was not a standalone W. I had just wanted to see it that way to make things fit. Maybe we’d been on the wrong trail all along.
After John left, Angel said, “He’s up to something, something bad.”
“There weren’t people in Jamaica waiting for us, were there?” I said. “He lied about that. That was a real stretcher.”
“A what?”
“Nothing. But he’s hiding something, you’re right.”
“And maybe we need to find out what that is?”
“I have the feeling that we shouldn’t get on the shuttle with John tomorrow. I don’t think it would be good for our health.”
I looked out a window. It was dark outside, though a bright moon illuminated the beach.
“I don’t think he’s watching us at all.”
“Do you think he might come back when we are asleep and…?” She didn’t want to finish the sentence.
“Let’s get out of here.”
“But where should we go?”
“Let’s stay with Ian Fleming tonight.”
Ten minutes later, Homer Johnson was greeting us at his door. It was loud inside.
“Hello, Leon and Shirley!” he cried, a martini in his hand. It was probably “shaken, not stirred.” He sounded a little tipsy. “Have you come for the party?”
“We’d like to take you up on your offer and stay the night, if that’s okay,” said Angel. The Goldeneye brochure had said that Ian Fleming Villa could accommodate eight.
“Ah, getting that James Bond vibe, are you? Of course—the more the merrier.” He opened the door wide and we could see that a party was in full swing, though lots of the partygoers looked old and very unhip—lots of ugly shorts and flowery shirts, lots of ponytails…on the men. They were playing sixties music, though not the Beatles or the Stones. It was early-sixties stuff, Shirley Bassey at first and later on, Burt Bacharach, which I recognized as something my grandfather used to play, kind of jazzy and apparently cool in its day.
We stepped inside.
“I’ll give you the 007 suite,” he said, winking at us. The music was so loud that he had to shout.
Angel didn’t bat an eye. She thanked him, said we were tired and took my hand and led me to the bedroom. Bad Adam was getting pretty excited. I was frantically thinking about Shirley.
The 007 suite was a big room with a low bed and lots of pillows. I immediately took them and laid them out on the floor, so I’d have a place to sleep. You idiot, said Bad Adam.
“You’re the idiot,” I responded.
“Pardon me?” asked Angel. She looked a little shocked.
I’d said it out loud! “Nothing!” I said quickly. “Uh, sometimes I talk to myself, say strange things, that’s all. I have a side of me that asks me to do stupid things. I have to fend him off.”
“Bad Adam?”
I almost fell to the floor.
“What?” I asked.
“I have this side of me that I call Bad Angel. It’s a pretty big side, but it’s not really me. I have to fight her off too.”
I couldn’t believe it. We were a perfect match.
“That’s weird,” I said and tried to laugh it off. Inside, I was trying very hard to think of Shirley.
Angel got into bed, clothes on. I got down on the floor on the pillows, clothes on.
Half an hour later I was wide awake, and I knew she was too.
“Angel?”
“Yes?” she answered quickly.
Something had dawned on me.
“We need to get out of here. When I told John that we found something out there, he was pretty upset. He only calmed down when I said exactly where we looked. I think John has something to do tonight out there somewhere—something sinister. That’s why he was cautioning us to not come to Goldeneye; that’s why he told us to stay inside tonight.”
“Which means we need to go outside.”
“Exactly. Whatever he came here to do, I want to know what it is.”
We got up and slipped out of the suite. Because Homer had given us the tour earlier, we knew there was a back entrance. We sneaked to it, our exit covered by the noise of the swinging sixties sounds. In the vestibule at the back door was a bunch of black wet suits and scuba-diving equipment. We both seemed to get the same idea at once.
The black wet suits would perfectly camouflage us in the night. We could sneak around better with them on. The scuba tanks and masks
might come in handy too. Maybe we could swim out to the W again and get a closer look at things with no one nearby.
Moments later we were on the beach in the wet suits, carrying the scuba-diving equipment. The suits were skintight, and I couldn’t believe how great Angel looked in hers. Or at least Bad Adam couldn’t. But that wasn’t what intrigued me the most as I walked beside her onto the Goldeneye beach. Someone was standing at the far end of it. He was dropping his possessions against the short stone wall that ringed the area as he pulled on a wet suit and scuba tanks. We could see him in the bright moonlight.
It was John.
We ducked down behind a small table and umbrella.
He stood up and looked around. Then he headed into the water.
We followed. Angel had told me she knew how to dive, and I had dived before (I’d had my maiden scuba adventure just a few months earlier, with Mom and Dad in southern Florida), so we had no trouble keeping up. The problem was, we had to stay fairly close to him. We could see for some distance in the moonlight, but not very far.
We moved along, terrified that he might turn around and spot us at any moment. We’d carried our bags with us and dropped them on the beach, not far from John’s things but out of the way, so he couldn’t spot them in the dark. The gun was back there too. I had put Homer Johnson’s bullet clip in it, six bullets, ready for action. I’d even attached the silencer. It wouldn’t do me any good underwater.
As we swam I worried about what I’d do if he turned and attacked me and, more important, how I’d protect Angel. I had to look after her.
We kept moving, a long distance. I started worrying that he had some sort of underwater weapon, perhaps a mini-harpoon or something. He might suddenly kill us. Maybe he was drawing us far out into the water on purpose. A spy would do something like that. It would be perfect. He could murder us and we would just disappear. If anyone noticed our stuff on the beach, they’d assume we’d drowned on a late-night romantic swim, perhaps alcohol fueled. Bleeding far from shore, we’d be food for sharks.