Buried At Sea (22 page)

He went up on deck, looked around at an empty ocean, checked the sails, retrieved a sheet that had fallen over and was trailing the boat like a heavy fishing line, and made sure that the auto-helm was steering their course. Purely from the standpoint of personal safety, Shannon would have to agree, a shipmate who was a thief was better than a shipmate who was a murderer. If a thief was all Will was.

Jim went below and turned on Will's laptop. When prompted for a password, he typed " Cordelia."

Invalid.

Was a silver derringer the kind of knickknack a rich guy kept in his desk? Loaded? Like a gold penknife and an antique watch? The password prompt was blinking. He typed "Cordi."

"In like—" He shot a look over his shoulder, got up, and stepped back to Will's cabin. Out like a light—in like Flynn. Excited, he sat back down at Will's computer and opened his e-mail files, which went back six years.

He skimmed at first for the gist of the letters Will had received. With the exception of the occasional boat business, they were mostly reports from Kin Yiu Lam, Choy Yee, and Pathar Singh. Heavy on computer lingo. Lam, Yee, and Singh sounded like his moletronics genius "cavemen." Lam and Yee addressed Will as "Mr. Spark"; however, Singh, the software engineer, called him "my very good friend." Interspersed among the engineering reports were letters from the Computing College of West Virginia thanking Will for generous gifts to their laboratory fund. Then came a request for Will to serve on the college's endowment committee. Will accepted and soon after funded a not-for-profit moletronics research laboratory. From then on, his letters were written under the heading "CompColl WV."

The most recent e-mail entry leaped off the screen. "Do not send . . ." The repeat of the bell-tolls threats had arrived just before they landed in Nigeria. But Will hadn't mentioned it.

Jim went back to the desk and checked the news clippings. A marked-up Economist article about moletronics caught his eye. Some of the underlined phrases sounded very familiar. When he found science and technology articles from the New York Times, Jim glanced back at Will's ThinkPad lying open on the nav station. What had Will said when he was talking about Sentinel? "If that ThinkPad was represented as one inch tall, I.B.M.'

s new Blue Gene supercomputer would stand twenty miles high." Here it was in a New York Times Thesday science section damn near word for word.

". . Processor-to-memory delays are a drag on highspeed computers. . . . A one-year lead in moletronics is like a century of the Industrial Revolution." Like a rehearsal. For a show. A show for a sucker.

Jim went up on deck and checked the sails and the horizon. The long, low silhouette of an oil tanker he had noted earlier in the south had gone; a heavier one plowed eastbound in the north.

He returned to the e-mail files.

Lam, Yee, and Singh all referred to the microprocessor they were developing as "the project." Their letters were mainly progress reports laced with requests for more research funds. Will's replies were mostly notifications that checks had been deposited in their accounts.

For nearly four years, it appeared that the engineers were making out better than Will was. Jim wondered how long you kept on backing your cavemen before you got nervous. But Will kept on paying, and he kept on contributing to the Computing College of West Virginia. Then a new series of letters started.

Using the name Sentinel for the first time, Will applied for a research grant from the McVay Foundation for Humane Science to fund the moletronics program at the Computing College. He satisfied intricate not-for-profit tax code requirements with his CompColl WV connection.

Money started coming in. But despite claims that Sentinel would revolutionize medicine, for over a year it seemed small-time: Will would apply for a twenty-thousanddollar grant; the grant officer would dole out five or ten thousand. When Will expressed disappointment, the grant officer would apologize, blaming "my lowly position on an enormous totem pole," and promise that one day busy "chiefs who oversee thousands of worthy projects" would take note of Will's.

Suddenly it happened. The foundation's chief grant officer, a woman named Val McVay, pressed Will for specifics about the sources of his software. Will dodged repeated requests, saying that while many engineers and scientists reported to him, "I'm just the man in the middle."

"Good science and hot engineering don't flourish in secret," she wrote. Will did not write back. A month later, Val

McVay's father, the head of the foundation, stepped in, "confident I can assuage any feelings of neglect."

Lloyd McVay apologized for Will's grant applications' "falling between two stools due to the inexperience of a young grant officer who failed to grasp the magnitude of Sentinel. And while my daughter is a brilliant engineer, she is not—shall we say—a man of the world." Perhaps Will would visit the foundation in New Jersey "for a discreet chat about Sentinel's commercial applications and the possibility of a glass of wine." Will dodged that invitation and several others until McVay wrote, "Our attorneys inform me that the Internal Revenue Service casts a scrutinous eye upon not-for-profit laboratories like yours that fail to submit reports to not-forprofit granting foundations like ours. They counsel that you and I informally review our options regarding Sentinel's future."

"Jackpot!" Will had written to the engineer Singh.

Suddenly the numbers were mind-boggling. Will seemed on the verge of reaping hundreds of millions of dollars. But, like his daughter, McVay had pressed for more details about Will's laboratories and engineers. Their exchanges grew terse, the mood cool. Finally, McVay used the word withholding. With that the letters stopped abruptly. A year and three months ago. Right around the time that Will had disappeared from Jim'

s spinning class in the Bridgeport health club.

He checked on Will again. Still sleeping. He made his rounds on deck, started the engine to charge the batteries and freezers, had some soup, and sat down again at Will's desk. The antique watch was beautiful. The lid opened on a face mysterious with dials. It even showed the phases of the moon. He wound it three turns and held it to his ear. A highspeed ticking, an amazingly rich sound for something so small. Turning it over and over in his hands, he noticed what appeared to be a second lid on the back side. Pressing here and there, he got it to pop open. An inscription was etched on polished gold: "For Billy Cole, who 'can cure' what ails."

Another Will.

Saddened by learning more than he had wanted to, Jim closed up Will's desk and put Will's shorts with the key back on their hook. Before shutting down his computer, he sent an e-mail.

Deer Shannon. Try "Billy Cole." I love you.

Jim

He awakened, groggily, with a vague sense of disquiet, a feeling he could not immediately define. But something was wrong. It was light outside. Six-thirty on his watch, the sixth morning under sail. Today, if the wind picked up, he hoped to clear Cape Palmas. When he last queried the GPS, the electronic navigator had indicated that the cape lay some sixty miles to the right. Sixty miles off the starboard bow. Neither the wind nor the waves felt stronger than they had when he had crashed into deep sleep an hour earlier. Yet something was definitely wrong. He catapulted out of the hammock and scrambled up the companionway.

The boat was off course. The rising sun, perched hard and white on the horizon, was throwing daggers of heat from the left, blazing over the port side instead of behind him. The shift of light had awakened him. Or the change in wave action as the swells, which had been rolling from the left, were hitting the bow head-on. The boat had turned toward the south.

He went to the wheel to figure out why the auto-helm had gone wrong.

"Morning, sleepyhead."

JIM WHIRLED TO the voice behind him. And there on the cabin roof, leaning on the boom, was Will Spark, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt that the hot wind molded to a body as wasted as a scarecrow's.

"Jesus, Will. You scared the hell out of me. How'd you get up here?" Will looked as if his flesh had been liposuctioned from his frame. His skin hung in wrinkled, empty folds and stretched tightly only where his bones poked it. It was a miracle that he was standing, much less adjusting the yang that held down the boom—

releasing it, Jim noted, so that the sail bellied rounder.

Will's voice was thin, reedy from disuse. "They used to hang people who slept on watch."

"Are you okay?"

"Hungry. Shaky. Weak. My head's swimming. And I still can't catch my breath—feels like a collapsed lung-but pretty good otherwise. How about you?"

"You've been out for five days. I got a little water into you. I couldn't get you to eat."

"The IV helped; thanks. Made a mess of my arm, though. Look at these bruises." The skin was black where Jim had made repeated attempts to insert the needle. "Well, I'

m glad you're up," he said. "I was going to do another today and I wasn't looking forward to it."

"Neither was I. My arm feels like you were using it for fencing practice."

"How's the shoulder?"

Will's face clouded, and he gave up trying to sound casual. "I don't know. Something's going on in there that I don't like. Damned infection, or something."

"I couldn't get you to swallow the penicillin."

"Yeah, well, I'll be swallowing doubles now."

"Does it hurt?"

"More than it should. That's why I think it's infected. . . . Listen, now that you're finally awake, give me a hand shifting the jib car." He pointed at the pulley attached to a rail embedded in the deck; the angle of the sheet that controlled the jib could be adjusted by sliding it forward or aft. "It's too far forward."

"The sail's been pulling fine for three days," Jim

protested, suddenly proprietary about the cut of Hustle's jib. "The car's too far forward for running downwind. Your

jib's too flat."

"Yeah, well, that's because the auto-helm lost the course. When I bring her back on course she'll be fine." Jim turned to the helm. "And we'll want to tighten that yang again, too."

"Leave it," said Will. "She's on course."

"She is not. The course is west. She's veered south thirty degrees."

"West-southwest is the course."

"What do you mean?"

"She's on course."

"For where?"

"Buenos Aires:'

"What!"

"Buenos Aires. Argentina?'

"No. We're going to Florida. Soon as we round Cape Palmas, we're cutting up to the Cape Verde Islands Strait and across the North Atlantic to Florida."

"We are not 'rounding' Cape Palmas. We are bearing away from Cape Palmas, on a course two hundred and ten degrees west-southwest across the South Atlantic to Buenos Aires."

Dumbfounded, Jim asked, "Why?"

"Because it's my boat?'

Jim stared a moment longer in disbelief. "No," he said finally. "Not good enough. Right now, for all practical purposes, this is our boat?'

"I can see that playing captain has given you some delusions, young fellow."

"You got in trouble, which put me in trouble, too. This boat is our ticket out of Africa—

away from that girl you shot—and this boat is going to Florida, where I'm getting off on safe American territory and flying home."

Will blinked. He looked surprised by Jim's sudden determination. And he looked, Jim noted with no little pride, like he believed him. Indeed, instead of arguing further, Will retorted in a grave voice, "If you make me sail to Florida, I'm a dead man?'

"I don't care. Get this, Will. Get it straight: we're sailing to Florida. And this time, if anybody bashes anybody's head in with a winch handle while they're sleeping, it will be me killing a defenseless wounded sick old man. And throwing his fucking body overboard. And telling anyone who asks that you jumped off one night when I was sleeping."

"You have a short memory for the things I've done for you. Who pulled you out of the drink? I saved your life, Jim."

"I've got a much longer memory for the trouble you've got me into."

"Please, Jim. I am a dead man in Florida. I'm dead almost anywhere. But I've got friends in Buenos Aires." "You had friends in Nigeria. Loved them."

"You don't understand. You just don't—"

"That's right. I don't understand. What could I understand? I have no facts. I don't know what's going on with you. All I know is I'm going home, on this boat, straight to Florida."

"Believe me, Jim. If I go to Florida, I'm dead."

"Spill it, Will. What the hell are you mixed up in?" "You don't want to know."

"You know something," Jim retorted. "You're right. I don't want to know. I know all I have to know. I know I'm sailing to Florida."

He stepped onto the cabin roof and took Will's arm. It was frightening how frail he was. His bones were like sticks in his skin. "Come on, Will. Let me get you into bed." Will pulled away feebly and Jim let go, afraid of injuring him if he held too tight. Will climbed, wincing, sucking air, down into the cockpit and unsteadily walked the several feet back to the helm. He stood behind the wheel, which was moving in the ghostly hand of the auto-helm, and braced himself with a grip on the wooden handrail that formed an arch over the compass. He squinted at Jim as if Jim were a distant obstruction, poorly lit, that the Sailing Directions had warned him to watch carefully and steer around.

"Do you remember what I told you about moletronics?" "I remember a bunch of technobullshit I could have read in the New York limes or the Economist." Will didn't blink. If he got the allusion to his carefully rehearsed high-tech show, he didn't care. "What I didn't tell you about were my partners." Jim almost asked, "Were their names Lloyd and Val McVay?" But he thought he had a better chance of keeping abreast, if not ahead, of Will's machinations if Will did not know that he had access to his computer files. "Partners? I don't want to know about your partners. I don't care about your partners. Come on, let's go below. Get some food in you and some water. A little soup?"

Will started to cough. He let go of the rail, muttered, "Wait a moment," then pressed his hand to his mouth to contain the cough. Jim felt his own body brace, imagining the spears of pain that a racking cough would send tearing through Will's wound. Dead pale already, the old man's face turned as white as the sails. He pointed feebly at Jim's water bottle.