Swimming as quickly as she could without straining, she passed through the big cavern and into the channel. Not until she had exited the hole into open water did she pause to check her watch and her gauges. She was doing fine. There was plenty of time for a safe ascent if nothing else went wrong.

Following one of the giant Erector-set legs of the platform, she ascended slowly. As she looked up, she noticed something moving on the surface. When the object came to a stop, she managed to focus on it until she made out the shape of a boat. It looked like Blaine’s boat, but why would he have come back?

After another few feet of ascent, she saw the churning foamy bloom of a diver entering the water. She realized that not only was Blaine back, but he was coming down to make sure she was dead. What other reason could there be?

She reached down instinctively for her knife, but this wasn’t the place to fight.

She checked her compass. Tired as she was, the best thing would have been to go straight up, but with a killer coming down to the scene of the crime, that option was blocked. So instead, she started kicking, turning her ascent into a long angle, heading west. If she could make it to one of the other legs before Blaine noticed her, she could use it as cover.

With luck, he would swim by and never know she was around.

Hanging twenty feet below the surface to rest and let her blood gases even out, she wondered if there might be another reason why he had come back.

Not that it mattered. She was just glad he had been courteous enough to bring her a fast boat. Any other concern would have to be left for later, when there was time to think about what had happened and why this artifact was worth the lives of so many people.

Arthur, Keene, Simon, Paul Trujold, all dead. It’s a miracle that McKendry and I aren’t also among the deceased, she thought as, with a few gentle kicks, she propelled herself to the surface.

26

Blaine rolled into the water and started a quick plummet back to the cave opening. He didn’t take the time to consult a tech dive table, but he was sure that two quick ups and downs at such depth had to be bad.

Besides, this was probably a pointless dive. Unless he could find the object Frik wanted so badly—on Simon, or Peta, or still wedged somewhere in the underwater cavern—the dive would only confirm that Peta was dead. And that Simon was dead. After overstepping his authority so badly, he was sure to join the dead soon himself, if the dive didn’t kill him first.

This must be the way an American death row prisoner feels, he thought, hoping against hope for the governor’s eleventh-hour pardon.

His stomach in knots, he approached the cave opening.

A school of annoying yellowfins hovered there, as if they were thinking about going inside to nibble on something tasty. They dispersed like seeds blown from an aquatic dandelion as Blaine approached, only to reform into a loose school a dozen feet away.

Ready to enter, he adjusted his air mixture. If he kept the oxygen as lean as possible, he might avoid getting bent. One of his tanks scraped along a rocky outcrop with a noise far worse than fingernails on a chalkboard.

He kicked onward, passing into the channel where the walls became smooth and finally widened as he neared the main cavern. As he reached that opening, diver’s intuition told him that something was wrong.

He flashed on the shark.

Had it beat the yellowfins in here? he wondered. Was that why the fish had hesitated? If so, the shark wouldn’t take too kindly to being disturbed while dining.

Entering the cavern, he realized that it was not the shark that had given him pause. It was Simon, who, freed from the weight of his BC vest, bobbed near the top of the cavern above the crazed squiggles.

She was a clever girl, that Peta, using Simon’s equipment to save herself. Frikkie would be happy—overjoyed, even—when he heard that she was alive and that he would have a shot at getting the other piece of the artifact.

That might even get Frik off his back, Blaine thought. He turned slowly and kicked his way out of the cave. Sooner or later he would think about whether it was necessary to deal with the fact that Peta knew he had tried to kill her. Not yet. Not unless she was somewhere up there waiting for him. She was a tough cookie, quite capable, he suspected, of exacting her own justice.

When he had ascended far enough to see clearly where the leg of the oil rig broke through the waterline, now only forty feet above him, he discovered her payback. She was not waiting on the surface to kill him after all. Instead, she had taken his boat and left him with no transportation back to shore. It would be one hell of a surface swim back to San Gabriel.

Resting at fifteen feet for another safety stop, he considered his options.

He could get lucky and flag down a passing fishing boat. That was unlikely, though. The few boats that passed the rig would be piloted by superstitious Trinis who would think he was the Obeahman.

Another option was to pop enough air into his BC to ride the choppy wake of the sea, turn on his back, and kick his way to shore. That would take three hours, maybe more. He would be baked crisp by the sun and easy bait for any passing sharks, but it was not impossible.

Whatever option he attempted to exercise, the real problem was that he would get very thirsty with the hot sun bearing down on him. What was that cliché line from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” that they had taught him in English class back home in Venezuela? Water, water, every where…

Like hooking a billfish, his mind latched onto the answer. The rig would have an emergency radio. He could simply climb out of the water and call Frikkie. He almost laughed into his regulator. She was not so clever after all, little Miss Peta.

His watch told him that it was time to get to the surface. Once there, he shed his tanks, fins, and BCV, and dragged them to the rig’s docking platform.

On the long climb, he thought he could see his boat heading north through the Dragon’s Mouth. It looked like Peta had decided to go all the way home to Grenada, rather than take a chance of running into Frik in Port of Spain.

Reaching the main deck of the rig, he was happy to discover that while vandals had thrown rocks and fired guns at the windows, they had lacked the courage to board the platform for robbery. The emergency radio was intact, and he soon contacted Oilstar’s main dispatcher, who agreed to send a helicopter for him.

Having done that, he called Frik to let him know that Peta was fine. Then, satisfied that he had handled the crisis as well as he could, he reached into his shorts, pulled out the specimen bag, and examined the bizarre object that Frik apparently considered to be worth the life of Simon Brousseau and Abdul, and heaven knew how many others.

The boat rode the choppy sea giddily, a child’s toy bouncing in a giant bathtub. Peta glanced over her shoulder at the rock spires piercing the water behind her.

As soon as she’d passed through the Dragon’s Mouth and moved away from the sheltering effects of Trinidad, the sea had turned rough. She had ridden tramp freighters between Grenada and its southern neighbor many times as a girl, and she recalled how rough the journey could be, even in those relatively large boats. The passage would last more than three hours, even in Blaine’s fast little craft. If she spent the time focused on the ups and downs of the sea, she would soon be leaning over the rail like some land-loving tourist on her first voyage.

To take her mind off of the bumpy ride, she tried to understand what she had just been through and to guess at what made the pieces of that weirdly shaped object so precious that people had to be killed.

She thought of the artifact she had hidden away in the bank vault. It was a match to the one she believed was the reason Arthur had been blown up, and to the one Simon had died to recover. All of the pieces had come from that undersea cavern with its Daliesque wall mural.