Douglas Preston: Riptide

Hatch looked at the document without touching it. It was a simplified financial report, notarized, indicating that a company named Thalassa Holdings Ltd. had raised a sum of money to form the Ragged Island Reclamation Corporation. The sum was twenty-two million dollars.

Hatch glanced from the paper back to Neidelman, then began to laugh. "You mean you actually had the nerve to raise this money before even asking my permission? You must have some pretty pliant investors."

Once again, Neidelman broke into what seemed to be his trademark smile: reserved, self-confident, remote without arrogance. "Dr. Hatch, you've had every right to show treasure hunters the door for the last twenty years. I perfectly understand your reaction. They were underfunded and underprepared. But they weren't the only problem. The problem was also you." He leaned away again. "Obviously, I don't know you well. But I sense that, after more than a quarter century of uncertainty, maybe at last you're ready to learn what really happened to your brother."

Neidelman paused for a moment, his eyes still on Hatch. Then he began again, in a tone so low it was barely audible. "I know that your interest is not the financial reward. And I understand how your grief has made you hate that island. That is why I come to you with everything prepared. Thalassa is the best in the world at this kind of work. And we have equipment at our disposal that your grandfather could only have dreamed of. We've chartered the ships. We have divers, archaeologists, engineers, an expedition doctor, all ready to go at a moment's notice. One word from you, and I promise you that within a month the Water Pit will have yielded up its secrets. We will know everything about it." He whispered the word "everything" with peculiar force.

"Why not just leave it be?" Hatch murmured. "Why not let it keep its secrets?"

"That, Dr. Hatch, is not within my nature. Is it within yours?"

In the ensuing silence, the distant bells of Trinity Church tolled five o'clock. The silence stretched on into a minute, then two, and then five.

At last, Neidelman removed the paper from the desk and placed it back in his portfolio. "Your silence is sufficiently eloquent," he said quietly, no trace of rancor in his voice. "I've taken enough of your time. Tomorrow, I'll inform our partners that you have declined our offer. Good day, Dr. Hatch." He rose to go, and then just before the door he stopped, half turning. "There is one other thing. To answer your question, there is something that makes us different from all the rest. We've uncovered a small piece of information about the Water Pit that nobody else knows. Not even you."

Hatch's chuckle died in his throat when he saw Neidelman's face.

"We know who designed it," the Captain said quietly.

Involuntarily, Hatch felt his fingers stiffen and curl in toward his palms. "What?" he croaked.

"Yes. And there's something more. We have the journal he kept during its construction."

In the sudden silence, Hatch fetched a deep breath, then another. He looked down at his desk and shook his head. "That's beautiful," he managed to say. "Just beautiful. I guess I underestimated you. After all these years, I've heard something original. You've made my day, Captain Neidelman."

But Neidelman had gone, and Hatch realized he was talking to an empty room.

It was several minutes before he could bring himself to rise from the desk. As he shoved the last of his papers into his briefcase, hands still trembling a little, he noticed that Neidelman had left his card behind. A telephone number had been scribbled across the top, presumably the hotel he was staying in. Hatch brushed the card into the wastebasket, picked up his briefcase, left the lab, and briskly walked back to his town house through the dusky summer streets.

At two o'clock that morning, he found himself back in the laboratory, pacing before the darkened window, Neidelman's card grasped in one hand. It was three before he finally picked up the phone.

Chapter 3

Hatch parked in the dirt lot above the pier and stepped slowly from the rented car. He closed the door, then paused to look over the harbor, hand still grasping the handle. His eyes took in the long, narrow cove, bound by a granite shore, dotted with lobster boats and draggers, bathed in a cold silver light. Even twenty-five years later, Hatch recognized many of the names: the Lola B, the Maybelle W.

The little town of Stormhaven struggled up the hill, narrow clapboard houses following a zigzag of cobblestone lanes. Toward the top the houses thinned out, replaced by stands of black spruce and small meadows enclosed by stone walls. At the very top of the hill stood the Congregational church, its severe white steeple rising into the gray sky. On the far side of the cove he glimpsed his own boyhood home, its four gables and widow's walk poking above the treeline, the long meadow sloping to the shore and a small dock. He quickly turned away, feeling almost as if some stranger was standing in his shoes, and that he was seeing everything through that stranger's eyes.

He headed for the pier, slipping on a pair of sunglasses as he did so. The sunglasses, and his own inner turmoil, made him feel a little foolish. Yet he felt more apprehension now than he'd felt even in a Raruana village, piled with corpses infected with dengue fever, or during the outbreak of bubonic plague in the Sierra Madre Occidental.

The pier was one of two commercial wharfs that projected into the harbor. One side of the wharf was lined with small wooden shacks: the Lobsterman's Co-op, a snack bar called Red Ned's Eats, a bait shack, and an equipment shed. At the end of the pier stood a rusting gas pump, loading winches, and stacks of drying lobster pots. Beyond the harbor mouth there was a low fog bank, where the sea merged imperceptibly with sky. It was almost as if the world ended a hundred yards offshore.

The shingle-sided Co-op was the first building on the pier. A merry plume of steam, issuing from a tin pipe, hinted at the lobsters that were boiling within. Hatch stopped at the chalkboard, scanning the prices for the various grades of lobster: shedders, hard-shelled, chickens, selects, and culls. He peered through the rippled glass of the window at the row of tanks, teeming with indignant lobsters only hours removed from the deep. In a separate tank was a single blue lobster, very rare, put up for show.

Malin stepped away from the window as a lobsterman in high boots and a slicker rumbled a barrel of rotten bait down the pier. He brought it to rest under a quayside winch, strapped it on, and swung it out to a boat waiting below, in an action that Malin had watched countless times in his childhood. There were shouts and the sudden throb of a diesel, and the boat pulled away, heading out to sea, followed by a raucous crowd of seagulls. He watched the boat dissolve, spectrally, into the lifting fog. Soon, the inner islands would be visible. Already, Burnt Head was emerging from the mists, a great brow of granite rock that leaned into the sea south of town. Surf snarled and worried about its base, carrying to Hatch the faint whisper of waves. On the crown of the bluff, a lighthouse of dressed stone stood among the gorse and low bush blueberries, its red and white stripes and copper cupola adding a cheerful note of color to the monochromatic fog.

As Malin stood at the end of the pier, smelling the mixture of redfish bait, salt air, and diesel fumes, his defenses—carefully shored up for a quarter of a century—began to crumble. The years dropped away and a powerful bittersweet feeling constricted his chest. Here he was, back in a place he had never expected to see again. So much had changed in him, and so little had changed here. It was all he could do to hold back tears.