Buried At Sea Page 8

  Back to "they?' Jim despaired, as 'Will triggered another of his avalanches of words.

  "I'm waltzing blithely around Bridgetown shopping for fresh vegetables to freeze for our trip. Fortunately, the market—damned good one, too, the best in the eastern Caribbean—is in a tough neighborhood and some boys I know warned me that a big Italian motor yacht had just dropped anchor in Deep Water Harbor." Will mimicked a Barbadian, " 'Say ol' mon, Mr. Spark, dere's folks askin' 'bout ya.' " He barked a rueful laugh. "What a way to go: a shiv in the ribs while haggling for imported parsnips."

  As usual, a slew of details jacked up the likelihood of Will's story. But who was Will trying to convince, Jim wondered. Me or himself?

  "On the other hand, what civilized man would roast a chicken without parsnips?"

  "Will! . . . Who was on the Italian yacht?"

  "Luckily, I was ready to split. I'd been shopping and cooking for days, stocking the freezers. The boat was fueled and at that moment they were just finishing watering her at the Careenage. I arranged for a taxi to meet your plane at Seawell and hired your fishing boat. Then I pretended to sail back to Deep Water Harbor. Instead, I just kept going.

  Wind was blowing up a gale and night fell dark as a bear's belly, so the Port Authority didn't notice me leave without clearance. I thought I was home free. Till you brought them down on us with that phony heart-rate monitor."

  "Bullshit, Will."

  "Thank God and your good eyes we spotted that ship." "Bullshit."

  "Oh, yeah? You want to explain this letter?" Will waved the bell-tolls printout in Jim's face. "Who sent this?" "You just said it was an empty threat."

  "I was trying to protect you from worrying:"

  "Are you saying you know the 'poet'?"

  Will hesitated. "I know what he wants."

  "What's that?"

  "He wants me dead."

  "I still find it hard to believe that legitimate corporations would—"

  "Billions," Will cut him off angrily. "Billions and billions of dollars. There isn't a human being alive that somebody wouldn't kill for billions. Besides, the suits don't pull the trigger. They hire a professional."

  "But even if they killed you, Will, what's to stop your

  `caveman' engineers from implementing Sentinel without you?"

  "Inventing new technology and manufacturing it are two very different things. I'm the only one who has the whole picture. They're still in their caves. Software and hardware don't even talk to each other. So if I'm killed, it's over. The big boys'll catch up in time and cash in. If I can hide out till they do, maybe killing me wouldn't be worth the trouble.

  "

  "Wait a minute. You knowingly put me in the line of fire?"

  "No. No. No. That is not true. When I asked you to join me I thought I had pulled off a disappearing act. I vanished. I just wanted a strong crewman and the company to Rio. I'm too old to sail alone. She's a big boat. I can handle her alone if I have to, but it's brutal on a long passage. I had an Aussie kid crew from Hong Kong to Hawaii and picked up a little girl there, till Panama. When she jumped ship I found an Anguillan—best sailors in the Caribbean and they'll fix anything on the boat. He stayed till Barbados. And then I remembered you. I really thought I was home free."

  "But not when you ran from Barbados."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You thought they were on to you and you let me come anyway."

  Will Spark suddenly looked old. His cheeks caved in as he chewed the inside of his lips.

  "You're right. I should have left you."

  "Why didn't you?"

  "I just wasn't up to the long haul alone. Also, I figured, what if they were following you?

  If I got you aboard, you'd be safe. No one would know we were heading to Rio. How was Ito know you'd let them put the bug on you? So, let's say I half apologize:' He reread the printout of the e-mail threat. "The guy is such a phony," he snorted. " `. . For whom the bell tolls . So just because he can quote poetry means he's not a thug? You know what I say about guys like this? Big balls, little dick."

  He shook his head in disgust.

  "I'll get you out of this as soon as we hit Nigeria. Pal of mine's an oilman on the Bonny River. I'll get him to send a helicopter. Chopper you out to Lagos. Put you on a London flight, first class, then straight to New York." He stuck out his hand and offered a smile. "Action beats an apology, right?"

  Jim took his hand. It was uncharacteristically clammy, and he had to wonder whether Will's paranoia extended to fantasy friends with convenient helicopters and first-class airplane tickets.

  "What's the matter?" asked Will.

  "Nothing. Sounds great." But just in case it wasn't, he vowed that he would continue to learn to sail the boat.

  "Are you sure?" Will pressed. "Something's on your mind."

  "No. I was just trying to remember who said, 'You can run but you can't hide.' Mike Tyson?"

  "Not likely," Will snorted.

  "Muhammad Ali? Mick Jagger? The Eagles?"

  "I believe it was Joe Louis."

  "What are you going to do after you drop me?"

  "Shove off. That's the beauty of owning a boat. . . . Here today, gone tomorrow."

  Which made this boat owner, Jim thought, not the sort of person to stake his life on—and his boat no place for a passenger, much less a novice deckhand.

  Val McVay read the county medical examiner's postmortem report on Andrew Nickels again. She retained a childhood image of the old man: an oversize reassuring presence slipping quietly into rooms, leaning over her father's shoulder to whisper in his ear, then her father's entire body relaxing.

  She reread the second, private autopsy commissioned by the McVay Foundation.

  She read for the fourth time the bulging report from the laboratory that had microsearched Andrew's brain and blood by magnetic resonance imaging and electron microscope, molecule by molecule, finding nothing. The old fixer's brain, she thought with a thin smile, proved as empty as his soul.

  Where are you, Will Spark?

  She had met him only once. She had liked his ideas and liked him.

  She had not liked his penchant for secrecy, however. Science did not flourish in secret.

  That he had erected a Chinese wall between his various engineers made her suspicious.

  But, temporarily blinded by Sentinel's potential, she had allowed her father to overrule her.

  She still couldn't believe she had slept with the man. That he was as old as her father hadn't mattered one whit during a long and memorable weekend. But conventional wisdom would deem it a stupid thing to do in the midst of negotiations.

  She had analyzed her actions thoroughly and concluded that she was blameless. Good sex was a rarity. But it was also an intangible that a disciplined mind would always separate from substance.

  She stepped out on a porch and watched a trainer longe a hunter. The animal resisted the leading rein, but the trainer, a patient Mexican, was implacable. The key to tracing Will Spark was still Jim Leighton.

  She went back indoors and telephoned a private detective in Brooklyn. As always, he answered the phone like a starter pistol. "Vinnie Thomas!"

  "Do you know who this is?" she asked.

  "Not from my caller ID, which you're blocking."

  Val watched her monitor as they spoke. "I see you're trying to get around it again. Stop it."

  "Jesus, what kind of program are you running?" "My program."

  "Yeah, I know your voice?'

  "Turn it off"

  "Okay. I'm stopped?'

  "Both of them."

  "Okay. Sony, I forgot the second one was running." When the monitor confirmed that the detective had

  switched off all his tracers, Val McVay said, "We have another job for the woman you put into that spinning class."

  "You are referring to the health club in Bridgeport, if I remember?"

  "Mr. Thomas, how many spinning classes do you infiltrate?"

  "You'd be su
rprised."

  Her monitor flashed a warning. Vinnie Thomas was trying yet again to trace her telephone number. This time he was using a very sophisticated program some people had been pirating from the National Security Agency. She said, "Mr Thomas, you do understand why I always block your caller ID. You don't learn more about me than you have to. My business remains my own. Your business is paid in cash. You do not invade my privacy. I do not file your earnings with the IRS. In other words, cutouts serve us both."

  She had originally hired the Brooklyn detective years ago to investigate a man she was considering for an occasional no-strings afternoon in the privacy of her Manhattan town house. Thomas had done a thoroughly professional job of confirming that the bored husband and loving father her prospect claimed to be was not a pervert or a fortune hunter. Since then, he'd been occasionally useful in her ongoing battle to stay a jump ahead of her father and Andy Nickels.

  "Cutouts are important," Thomas agreed.

  "You must employ them, too. I'm sure that even your most trusted employees don't know your private home number, much less where you live."

  "Yeah?"

  "Write down this address, Mr. Thomas?" She named a building in Red Hook.

  "Hey! That's my loft. How'd you find—"

  "Now can we get serious on the telephone? Or do you require a visit?"

  IT SAYS HERE. .. . --Jim climbed the companionway, book in hand, and inspected the sails—"if you tighten that"—he pointed at the boom yang, which had slipped loose—"

  then we'll go faster."

  Will, who was wearing a safety harness as he leaned over the back of the boat with a circuit tester, clipping wires to the portside wind generator in an attempt to trace an electrical short, returned an amused smile. "Be my guest. Try it."

  Jim marked his place in Will's Annapolis Book of Seamanship with the dog-eared dust jacket, crawled onto the cabin roof, and pressed the yang sheet back into the jaws of its jam cleat. He hauled on the line; the jam cleat gripped it and the yang pulled the boom down. The result of the effort was to slightly flatten the mainsail.

  Will peered over his shoulder at the knot meter on the steering pedestal. "Almost a tenth of a knot!" He laughed. "Really tramping."

  "I'm not finished."

  Jim studied the mainsail.

  Since he had tightened the yang, there wasn't a ripple in the cloth. The taut triangular expanse pointed at the sky as trim as a spear. But when he looked forward, ahead of the mast, up at the jib, he saw that a small flutter—which hadn't been there before he tightened the yang—marred the trailing edge of the headsail.

  Aware that Will had stopped working on the wind generator and was watching his every move, Jim took a chrome handle from its socket beside the companionway, inserted it in the top of the winch controlling the jib, braced his feet, and threw his weight into a half turn. The winch clicked; the jib sheet creaked with the strain. The fluttering stopped. The boat leaned a fraction and felt suddenly livelier.

  "Half a knot!" Will called. "Good for you:'

  Grinning with satisfaction, Jim took the book back to the cockpit. He might not be a natural sailor, but he was beginning to get at least an inkling of how the boat worked. He reviewed the section he'd been reading, studied the illustrations, and looked up repeatedly at Hustle's sails.

  The boat was headed east and the trade wind was blowing from the northeast, which meant it was coming at them a bit left of straight ahead. A port tack. Hustle was cutting into the wind, and the flatter he had shaped her sails, the more like a knife, the closer she cut into the wind and the faster she sailed.

  "May I?" he called to Will, placing his hand on the winch that controlled the mainsail.

  "Be my guest?'

  He cranked it in. The boat leaned further over. It felt faster. The wind cut sharper and the hull thrust harder into the water. But the knot meter gave him a nasty surprise. The boat had actually dropped speed. He looked back at Will, who was removing the guts of the wind generator.

  "Wha'd I do wrong?"

  "She's heeling too far," Will said. "Leaning over at too sharp an angle. It's not a dynamic stance. You're spilling wind and her hull's fighting the water. Take the wheel a moment.

  . . . Do you feel how it's fighting you? Too much weather helm because she's overpowered. Ease off the main again and you'll see."

  The rope that controlled the mainsail, the "sheet," was wrapped three times around the barrel of the winch. Easing

  off was a matter of letting the rope turns slip around the barrel, which was a tricky operation Jim had yet to master.

  "Get your hand out of that line!" Will shouted. "It'll cut your fingers off. Mitts outside the line."

  The straining sheet made a heavy grunting noise as Jim carefully let it slip.

  "Good," said Will. "Good. .. . Feel her stand up?"

  The boat straightened just a hair and, although it didn't give the impression of moving as fast, the knot meter showed a return to their previous speed.

  That night, Jim wrote to Shannon.

  He was getting the hang of the SSB radio, which allowed him to send her a private letter without worrying about Will's paranoid bitching—"Don't tell anybody we're sailing to Nigeria." The fact was, even if Will's "they" could intercept e-mail they'd have a hard time finding his and Shannon's: Shannon had secreted deep-cover private e-mail addresses into the busy RileySpa website to hide them from her extremely computer-literate, mega-nosy mother.

  I'm beginning to realize that this whole sailing thing is about form. On the bike. when my knees start wobbling I lose speed; when I'm swimming and get tired I start twisting my legs. which wastes energy and creates drag that slows me down. On the boat, when a sail wobbles or flutters—"tuffs" is the correct word—wind energy is wasted and she slows down. So. maybe I'm becoming a sailor in spite of myself.... And how are you? I must say. I've never felt so far away in my life. At the same time. I have to thank you for pushing me to try it. It's a hell of experience—a real "experience of a lifetime." just as you predicted. So, I miss you so far away and I owe you for sending me so far away.

  Best news is, Will thinks we'll hit the Nigerian coast in THREE WEEKS! I'm afraid they'

  re going to feel like years—Omigod, time for my watch. I'm going to practice steering.

  He corrected his typos, then fired it off—slowly on the SSB radio—and ran on deck with five minutes to spare. That night, Will gave him a big vote of confidence. For the first time, the old man slept in his luxurious cabin in the back of the boat, instead of in a hammock slung right beside the companionway.

  Jim passed the first two hours practicing steering manually. Maintaining their compass course was much easier at night. By day, surrounded by the featureless horizon, the compass needle was a tedious guide—like a video game with a particularly lame joystick. By night, Will had taught him to steer by whatever distinctive stars or constellations lay ahead and only occasionally check the compass needle as the heavens wheeled. Easier, but not easy. Looking over his shoulder was a humbling experience: whereas the auto-helm, and Will, cut a trail as straight as a train track, his wake looped whimsically in the starlight, meandering like a country road.

  Finally, tiring of trying to match the wheel to the movement of the water flowing across the rudder, the seas shouldering the hull, and the wind shoving the sails, Jim reengage the auto-helm and experimented with sail trim again, which was a whole different proposition in the dark.

  The night had started uncommonly bright, lit by a sky full of stars. But now, to his right, to the south, and ahead, to the east, the stars had begun to disappear one by one behind cloud, until half were dark. He could still see the telltales—the strips of black cloth that lay flat against the sails to indicate an efficient airflow but danced perpendicular when the wind was being wasted—but he couldn't see the edges of the sails themselves.

  Even the telltales began to disappear as the dark spread across the sky. Blind now, he recalled that Shannon had written,
"What do you hear when you're alone on night watch?

  " So he tried to listen for clues. At first it all sounded the same, a rush of sound like driving with the windows open. But when he strained he began to distinguish fluttering sailcloth from the hiss of waves breaking beside the boat, the smack of the hull cutting the water, and the rush of wind past his ears.

  Suddenly, the boat heeled hard over. He couldn't figure out what had happened. Then he realized that the trade wind,

  which for days and days had cut across the bow at the same angle, blowing always from the same quarter, had abruptly changed direction.

  He let out the mainsail. His instinct was good and the boat responded. He was moving toward the jib winch to do the same with the headsail when the wind shifted again, back where it had been. Hustle lost speed. Again his instincts served and he hauled in the main. But she kept slowing, so much so that the waves she'd been cutting through began batting her off course.

  Baffled, Jim sat alone in the dark, trying to figure out what had changed so drastically.

  The wind. The northeast trade wind, that constant of every waking and sleeping hour on the boat, had stopped.

  The sails went slack. The boat began rocking uncomfortably, pitching fore and aft, which caused the sails to slat and bang. When he looked up at them, he saw that the rest of the stars had vanished. Suddenly, the still air was stirred by a cold breeze.

  Will ran up on deck. "What the—bloody hell, you should have waked me! It's going to hit us like a freight train."

  Now Jim saw what he had missed. A quarter mile off to the right, so bright as to glow beneath the black sky, a heavy, bone-white line was bearing down on them like a huge grin in a dark face.

  "Furl the jib! I'll reef the main!" Will paused only to put Jim's hand on the proper line, reminding him that they were sailing with the roller-reefing jib instead of the enormous genoa he had dropped the day they spotted the ship.

  Then he switched on the work lights—which shone down from the spreaders, illuminating the decks and a patch of sea around the boat—leapt out of the cockpit, and hastily lowered the mainsail halfway down the mast. This time, instead of letting the sailcloth tumble in an out-of-control avalanche, Will kept it in tight control as he made it smaller, tugging on the reefing lines and securing it firmly to the boom, even as he shot anxious looks at the swiftly advancing white line.