“I take it that piece of fruit didn’t drop from a tree.”

“Superstitious Trini clods,” Frik said, eyes straight ahead.

“May I also assume it’s not Humvees they’re superstitious about?”

“It’s the drill site. They’ve got some local legends about the Dragon’s Mouth. They think drilling into the bottom there will offend the Obeahman and bring bad luck to the island.”

Simon nodded. His years in the Caribbean had taught him a little about Obeah, though it was a much less well-known superstition than voodoo or Santeria. An Obeahman was a kind of sorcerer or shaman who controlled spirits which he could put into objects, like fetishes, and make them do his will.

Simon’s one memorable encounter with an Obeahman was on Jamaica, where a buddy had almost hit one of them walking along the side of the road. The man threw something, which hit the car, and a moment later the engine sputtered and died. No matter what his friend did, the car wouldn’t start. He had a mechanic tear the damn thing apart and put it back together like new, but it still wouldn’t work. Finally, he tracked down the Obeahman and gave him two dozen chickens as penance. After that, the car never so much as backfired.

“Did you know this beforehand?”

“Of course.”

“But you went ahead and drilled anyway.”

“This is the twenty-first century, Simon. About time they moved into at least the twentieth, don’t you think?”

“And you’re going to move them?”

“My civic duty.”

Simon smiled and shook his head. Typical Frikkie logic. If he wanted something, he could always find a rationale for why he should have it. The rest of the picture was coming into focus.

“So that’s why you need me: the local boys say no way, José.”

“I could find somebody,” Frik said. “Haven’t met a superstition yet that’s proof against the right amount of cold hard cash. But I need someone comfortable in deep water. And most of all I need someone I can trust implicitly.”

Simon appreciated the last remark, but he was more interested in the one before it.

“How deep?”

“Not sure. The drill broke into the cavern about seventy feet below the floor, and the floor is an average of one hundred and twenty feet down.”

Simon nodded. That meant an operating depth of two hundred or more, at over eight atmospheres of pressure—just the kind of dive the docs had warned him against. But what did they know? They weren’t divers. He’d done it before.

“I’ll need mixed gases, a tri-mix.”

Frik glanced at him. “What’s that?”

“A deep-diving nitrox mix that lowers your oxygen for the bottom time, and raises the other gases. You have to know what you’re doing, lowering one gas, raising the other. You couldn’t breathe that mix at the surface…. It would kill you.”

“I’ll have all the tanks you’ll ever need waiting on the platform.”

Frik turned off the road and stopped before a heavy wrought-iron gate with “Oilstar” arching above it. The guard waved from his narrow kiosk as the gates swung open, and they were on the move again. He swerved the vehicle to a stop before a row of low white stucco buildings, and led Simon into the first.

After rattling off a string of orders to a male secretary—one of them arranging for tri-mix at the drill site—he motioned Simon around behind his large mahogany desk. A few taps on his keyboard popped an array of thumbnail photos onto his computer screen.

“These are scans and three-D models of the artifacts,” Frik said, clicking on each to enlarge them.

Four objects filled the screen in succession, each more bizarre than the last. The final scan showed all four locked together into some weird-looking shape. Frik hit a key, and the shape began to rotate in three dimensions. Simon didn’t know much about art, but this looked like something Picasso might have pieced together. Or Dali.

“Why scans? Where’s the real thing?”

“The one piece I have of it is under guard.”

“It’s that valuable?”

Frik shrugged. “Not sure yet. I won’t know until I have all five pieces and fit them together.”

“And the fifth is somewhere in an undersea cavern.” He shook his head. “Christ, why don’t you fly me to the Chesapeake and ask me to find one particular oyster.”

“Oh, come now,” Frik said, grinning. “It’s not that bad. This will be a piece of cake for someone like you.”

Simon stared at the rotating assemblage. Something about each piece had bothered him, but the aggregate was even worse. He had a feeling that finding the final piece might not be such a good thing.

15

Simon checked his depth gauge: the arrow lay just a hair to the far side of the 130 mark. Even at this depth he was comfortable in a 1.5-mm dive skin.

He looked around. The light level was decent, typical for this depth, though the true colors of the fish and coral were washed out. Sunlight’s spectrum got pretty well bleached out after struggling through 130 feet of water.

He’d hoped he’d be diving the cavern through the bore hole, much like descending the limestone cenotes in the waters of the Yucatán, but the hole was too small and there was no hope of widening it any further. So he went hunting for the natural entrance to the cavern. He found it, a dark, narrow, anemone-fringed opening in the wall of a rift in the continental shelf. The wall was encrusted with sponges, guzzling the fringe of the Guyana Current as it swept nutrients up from Venezuela’s Orinoco River.

Simon also found the missing diver, Abdul. A rock the size of a Porsche Boxster—loosened by the drilling, perhaps?—had slipped from the wall above the opening and crushed him. The crabs and yellowtails had been snacking on his exposed flesh, but his mask was still fastened around his head, sparing his wide-open, milky eyes. Their empty gaze brought back a few lines he’d just read inThe Tempest :

Full fathom five thy father lies;

    Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes….

Simon shuddered and looked away. A sight like that could make you believe in the Obeahman. Empty sockets would have been better.

The stone had also partially blocked the mouth of the entrance. The opening that remained might admit a child but never an adult, especially one of Simon’s girth.

Which meant the stone had to be moved. And since the local labor pool consisted of himself and one curious green sea turtle, that meant it was up to him.

After a thorough inspection, he found a spot where he could wedge himself between the rock and the rift wall. It meant disturbing some sponges and dislodging some of the smaller clinging sea life, something Simon loathed doing. The Caribbean reefs took enough abuse without his adding to it.

But he had no choice.

With knees bent almost to his chest, his flippers against the rock and his back against the wall, he took a deep breath and kicked out with everything he had. After half a minute of straining, he felt the rock move. Heartened, he found a little extra strength and increased his effort.

Slowly, moving a fraction of an inch at a time, the rock began to tilt away from him. Simon squeezed shut his eyes and, shouting into his regulator’s mouthpiece, pushed even harder.

And then he stopped, gasping as a crushing weight slammed against his chest. He opened his eyes and wouldn’t have been surprised to find that the rock had fallen back on him, pinning him to the wall. But no, the rock was falling away, tumbling end over end in slow motion toward the floor of the rift. The pain was coming from his heart. He could feel that battered old pump pounding out an irregular beat, thudding in his ears as his vision wavered.

He slowed his lungs, taking deep, measured breaths, hoping his heart would follow suit, and cursing himself for being so careless as to have left behind his backup nitros, the fast-acting sublingual tablets for when his angina broke through the extended-release pills.