In Too Deep (21 page)

T
he dinghy had a hard bottom with inflated sides and a fifteen-horsepower outboard motor. We lowered it from the stern, hunching to stay out of Wayo’s sight. Gracia was the first to climb down the ladder and into the dinghy. Josh and I followed, and Mimi came last with our fins.

I tied a rope to a D-ring at the front of the dinghy and tossed it to Katy, who secured it to the stern of the
Constant Bliss
, leaving us trailing about ten feet behind.

The ocean breeze was mild, but when Nate reengaged the engine, the dinghy bounced forward, spraying us with a cool mist. Josh and I strapped on our fins and waited.

The sound of the cannons grew louder as we bobbed toward the
Aquatic Diamond
and—finally, we could only hope—the Golden Jaguar. All at once the fog was gone, and a golden hue spread across the water’s surface, glittering sparkles into the horizon.

Mimi put her hand on my shoulder and gave me an expression I could only describe as beseeching. “Please don’t get killed.”

Josh laughed once, a burst of sound as though he’d been kicked in the stomach. I exhaled through a forced smile. “I’ll do my best.”

“Seriously, it’s shark season, you know. It’s not uncommon for great whites to come this far dow—”

“Mimi!” Gracia said.

“The Black Card also comes with emergency evacuation services. Just in case. If anything hap—”

“Not helpful, Mimi.” Gracia engaged the outboard motor enough to keep us out of view of Wayo’s boat.

“What? I’m nervous.”

I ignored both of them. I put the regulator in my mouth and breathed as normally as I could, and Josh did the same. I pressed a button on my computer, bringing up the full-color artist’s rendering of the Jaguar to remind myself exactly why I was doing this.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

In.

Out.

Katy reappeared at the stern in what seemed like no time at all. “Okay,” she said. “We’re a hundred feet away. Are you ready for this?”

Josh and I gave each other the okay signal; then we turned and gave it to Katy.

She took off her tracksuit top, revealing a bright orange bikini. She grabbed an empty wine-cooler bottle and said, “I’m up.”

The
Constant Bliss
slowed.

Gracia cut the outboard to nothing more than a crawl. Josh and I pushed ourselves up onto the pontoon sides. Now that we weren’t moving forward as quickly, the waves pitched us from side to side even more, so we grabbed the rope handles for support.

Then we heard yelling. It was indecipherable at first, but the closer we got, the more it sounded like actual words. Irate words.

Nate hollered a drunken “Waahoooo!”

“Hey!” said an angry voice. Not Wayo or Snow. Not Alvarez. “Watch out!”

“Here we go,” Gracia said under her breath.

No matter how much I had been bracing for the sound, the sudden thump of boat against boat still caught me off guard. The dinghy’s momentum would have carried us directly into their line of sight if Gracia hadn’t gunned the engine and spun us off to the side.

“Whooopsie!” This was Nate at the helm, his voice high-pitched and giggly like he was wasted.

The angry voice again: “What the hell?”

Nate yelled, “My bad!”

“Damn it!” This was Snow. And he was livid.

“Now,” Gracia said.

With that, Josh and I leaned back.

The water came around my hood to slap me in the face, cold enough to take my breath away, but I was relieved to discover that I had full range of motion without having tiny daggers of cold water pierce the folds of my wetsuit. These new space-age suits were actually
warm
.

We’d removed all the air from our BCs so that when we hit the water, we didn’t bob back up to the surface, and it took me a moment to orient myself. The galaxy of bubbles disappeared. I saw the keel of the dinghy above me.

Now that we were in the water, a small LED display came to life in the bottom-right corner of my computer-integrated mask, showing me information on depth, time in the water, and water temperature—a brisk sixty-two degrees. And, my god, the rebreather was astonishing. Not only were there no bubbles to give us away, but there was also no raspy in and out like with traditional regulators; my breathing was completely silent.

Josh hovered across from me as if enveloped in a cloud. The visibility was nowhere near as good as in Cozumel, but not bad for here—about thirty feet. I engaged the computer’s touch screen, typed a quick
test
, and pressed the Send-to-Buddy button. I heard a short beep. He looked at his wrist and gave me the okay sign.

I pointed to the hull of Wayo’s boat and kicked toward the stern. Josh followed, and we came to the edge of an underwater forest. Thick towers of dark olive kelp undulated in the waves like gigantic moray eels. When Josh and I were in position, we grabbed on to the bottom rung of the ladder.

I typed:
Ready
.

Josh beeped, but the message wasn’t for him. We held on to the ladder, rocking back and forth with the waves, having nothing to do but stare into each other’s masks while we waited.

He winked at me.

Our wrists beeped with a message from Mimi:
Go!
Everyone distracted.

Yeah, no kidding. I pulled myself up the ladder so that only my head broke the surface. The arguing voices had grown so loud that they almost drowned out the noise of the cannons.

“Iz jus a lil’ scratch!” Nate said.

“You’re getting in the way of the tall ships,” Katy screeched. “The tall ships! We come here every year, and you’re
ruining it
!”

“Calm down!” Snow said.

“Eeew, gross! Stop looking at me like that! You’re a dirty, dirty man.”

Nate said, “Tha’s my sister you’re starin’ at!”

“Gross, gross, gross! I’m calling the cops!” Katy was amazing, I had to admit.

Snow yelled a string of profanities that ran together, and another voice joined the fray.

“Hey, look! It’s Wayo!” Nate hollered.

We knew he’d recognize Nate and Katy, so we figured the only way to deal with that was to freely acknowledge the coincidence. Even if it didn’t fool him for long, it might add to the confusion. And Josh and I only needed a few minutes.

“Oh my god! Wayo!” Katy squealed. “You like cannons, too! I should have known!”

“Wayo! My amigo! Tell yer cap’n to watch what he’s doin’ to my daddy’s boat!”

I noticed that Mimi had clambered back up onto the deck and was hiding behind the cabin, poking her head up for the occasional glimpse. She pressed some buttons on her computer, and my wrist beeped again:
Go!

I slipped off my fins and nestled them on the small platform at the stern. Then I hoisted myself up the ladder. Josh followed quickly.

“In and out,” I reminded him.

Josh opened the cabin door, revealing a long living room with an open kitchen at the far end. I had only made it three steps into the room when I heard my name. And it wasn’t Josh who’d said it.

The voice belonged to Mr. Alvarez.

“Annie?” Alvarez said again. His legs had been roped to a chair, and his hands were tied behind his back. “Annie!”

Of all the things I’d prepared myself for, seeing Alvarez helpless in the corner like that was not one of them. The combination of my surprise and a particularly large wave rocked me off balance, and I staggered into the coffee table by the small couch. It took everything I had not to scream in pain.

“I guess you’re not in on it after all,” Josh said as he lumbered past Alvarez and toward the lower helm controls. He pried off the control panel with the tip of his knife and stabbed at the wires leading to the fuse box.

“What’s going on?” I asked Alvarez as I rubbed a sharp throbbing from my shin.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

“I could tell you the same thing,” I said, finally able to tear my eyes away from him long enough to do my job. I scanned the room for any clues, any information Snow and Wayo might have gathered about the Golden Jaguar.

“Snow said he’d kill me if they didn’t find the Jaguar,” Alvarez babbled in an exaggerated whisper. “Everything we have points to right here, but if they don’t find it, I’ve got nothing else.”

“What
do
you have?” I said.

He nodded toward a table near the kitchen. “Snow was our partner. He’s the one who brought Wayo and me in on the job. We kept hitting dead ends. When we ran out of money, he borrowed from some black market dealers. Mexican Mafia, I think. I don’t know, something bad.”

“And when he couldn’t find it on his own,” I said, “he came back to you.”

The wall above the long table was covered with maps and images of the Jaguar, much of which Josh and I had already seen, but there was some new stuff. The gold disk sat on a pile of full-page color photos, being used as a simple paperweight.

Next to it was a two-foot gold statue I recognized instantly as a replica of Salento’s statue on the headlands above us.

Josh noticed it, too, as he stepped away from the helm controls. “Was that inside the cave on Molokai?”

Alvarez said, “How did you—”

“Primary sources,” I said. “Remember?”

“That’s why—” The sound of Josh unsheathing his knife stopped Alvarez short.

I gasped. “Josh—”

“I’m just cutting him loose.”

“The statue was in the cavern, along with Francisco de Ulloa’s log,” Alvarez said. “But the log was so poorly preserved, it fell to pieces almost instantly.”

I sifted through pictures of the fragments—some containing as much as a sentence or two, some with only a word. One picture showed an entire page of the log, meticulously reassembled as if it had been a shattered china plate.

“The log led us back here,” Alvarez said. “We were able to figure out the rough location based on descriptions of the headlands and the location of the statue—”

“We know,” Josh said. His knife cut through the rope, and Alvarez shook out his hands as Josh freed his feet.

“You don’t understand,” Alvarez said. “These people will kill you.”

Josh scoffed. “Like Wayo tried to kill Annie in the Devil’s Throat?”

I glanced briefly over my shoulder, in time to see Alvarez’s face pale. “What? No. He didn’t.”

“Turned off her air and left her to die.”

I led Alvarez toward the exit door. “Come on. Gracia’s on the other side of the Sugars’ boat. You can swim there.”

“I swear, Annie, I didn’t know Wayo was going to do that. I recognized Snow down on Cozumel; that’s why I knew we had to hurry that night. But it was the first time I’d seen him in months. I had no idea he and Wayo were still working together. I would never have—”

“Does he have anything else on the Jaguar?” I said, pointing to the table.

“The log said ‘three hundred paces beneath his true love’s gaze,’ so the GPS puts it right below us,” Alvarez said. “Let me go with you.”

Josh shook his head. “No time.”

The room rumbled with the loudest burst of cannon fire yet. Alvarez veered to a dry box and opened the latches. Inside was a pneumatic speargun pistol, cocked and ready to go. He wrapped my hand around the holster. “Just in case.”

“In case what?” I said.

“Please,” Alvarez said. “If you’re going to do this, at least take it.”

Josh motioned impatiently. “We have to get moving.”

I grabbed the speargun and strapped it around my thigh. The tip of the spear extended through the holster, past my knee, but I was able to move freely without it stabbing me.

“Go,” I said to Josh. “Get him out of here.”

I sent a quick message to Gracia—
Alvarez coming
back
—and I was about to follow them when I noticed something else on the table. Underneath a large printout of the ocean-floor topography was a file stand with a series of manila folders inside. I recognized the words written on each of the files:
SAN PABLO, MARIA ROSADA, SEÑORA DE BELEN
—all names of as-yet-undiscovered shipwrecks.

Then I gasped. I wobbled a little, whether from the unsteady boat beneath my feet or my suddenly unsteady legs, I wasn’t sure. One of the files was labeled simply
FLOR DO AMELIA
. Bigfoot. The mythical Portuguese ship of gold. My hand trembled as I grabbed the file and looked inside. It was thick with documents and photos, a few data CDs, even a flash drive.

Josh stood alone outside, motioning to me frantically through the tinted window, but I couldn’t leave, not now. I dumped the contents of a small trash bin onto the floor and tore out the plastic bag. I stuffed the file inside and wrapped the rest of the bag around it.

I unzipped my wetsuit and tucked the bag tightly against my damp skin. The Geoprene wasn’t completely watertight, but it was close enough. I zipped the wetsuit up, shrugged under the weight of the rebreather, and went outside just as Alvarez disappeared, swimming around the stern of the
Constant Bliss
. The cannons’ explosions were almost on top of us now.

“Care to explain?” Josh said, handing me my fins.

“Later.”

Our consoles beeped a message from Mimi:
Holy crap.
Nate just went Jackie Chan on Snow. Katy took out cap
tain. Boat is secure but Wayo in the water.

Another beep, this one from Gracia:
Alvarez safe.

Josh and I put on our fins and secured our masks. This was it.

“You ready?” I said, my knees bending with the gentle rocking of our now-disabled boat.

Before I knew what was happening, Josh leaned down and put his lips on mine.

Our masks bumped up against each other, and the waves jostled us back and forth. Josh held on to the railing with one hand for support, and at one point he almost pitched backward into the water. The gear made it impossible for us to hug each other, so we wobbled in our fins, kissing like overweight penguins on an ice floe.

It was fantastically awkward.

“What was that for?” I said when Josh pulled away.

He leaned down again and put his forehead to mine. “In case we don’t make it. No regrets.”

I was overcome by a surge of energy, a sensation unlike anything I’d ever felt before. It wasn’t adrenaline, and it wasn’t happiness; it was just new. Everything was sharper, more brilliant. It was as if I saw things more clearly, as if I felt things more deeply.