water. Thought of how good, no, how
“It will only take ten minutes.” She said this out loud and headed for the cenote. At its edge she dropped her pack, removed her boots and socks, stripped off the filthy caving suit. She took off her red long underwear and, wearing only a sport bra and panties, walked to the pool’s rocky lip, and dove straight in, entering with barely a splash.
It felt every bit as good as she had imagined it would.
She did a quick surface dive and swam straight down for twenty feet, then thirty, the light dimming, feeling the pressure. She equalized her ears continually, the action automatic from having done so much scuba diving. She turned toward the surface and pulled up as fast as she could, bursting out of the water and falling back with a loud splash and a barely stifled cry of joy.
God, it felt good. And it felt good to move in water. She knew of no better therapy for a sore body. She also knew that she was going to have to get out and carry on soon. But just a couple more minutes wouldn’t hurt. She turned over on her belly and began swimming with a slow, graceful crawl, gulping a bite of air over her shoulder with every other stroke, long arms pulling at the water. Ten feet short of the cenote’s far wall, with unbroken forest looming up just beyond the edge, she pulled up and treaded water.
And then she saw the floating cigarette butts.
FORTY-TWO
“PULL!” SAID BERNARD ADELHEID.
A steward pushed a button and the cage’s spring-loaded top flew open. A ruffed grouse exploded out of the cage, soared up and away from the yacht’s fantail, a dark slash across white clouds. Adelheid swung his Purdey shotgun right to left, smooth as an artist stroking paint on a canvas. The shotgun roared once and the grouse’s flight ended in a red burst of feathers and blood. Adelheid broke the Purdey, withdrew the spent shell from its smoking breech, reloaded. “Your shot,” he said to Nathan Rathor.
Nathan Rathor had no love of yachts or oceans. He wasn’t prone to seasickness, had always been blessed with a strong stomach. What he found nearly unendurable was being at the mercy of an uncontrollable force like the sea. But he also knew that there was nothing like a boat and vast expanses of open water for communications security. Unless someone managed to bug your vessel, of course, but no one was likely to get a bug into any boat that carried Bernard Adelheid.
Standing next to Adelheid while the man was holding a loaded shotgun would not have been one of Rathor’s first choices of places on earth to be. But when the man called, you came, and when he wanted to shoot, you shot. Rathor had shot skeet before, of course, though always with clay pigeons, and that was what he had expected to be shooting at this sunny afternoon on the Atlantic, twenty miles east of Cape May, New Jersey. But Adelheid had said, “There is little sport in shooting dead things, would you not agree? These grouse are legendary, one of the most difficult wing shots on earth.”
Rathor had done a little upland hunting himself, so he knew that grouse had advantages in the field they did not enjoy here. Hunting without dogs once in Maine, he had walked within ten feet of a grouse and had not seen it, so perfectly did the bird blend with its surroundings. Then he took another step and the grouse flushed, bursting twenty feet straight up from cover, its wings drumming so loudly that he started and nearly fired his gun by accident. At the height of its rise the bird hurtled off into the darkness of the far woods and he did not have time even to raise his shotgun, let alone make a decent shot. It was very different here, but he said nothing about that to Adelheid. Rathor was curious about something, however. “What happens to the ones we miss?” he had asked.
“They fly until they cannot fly anymore. They fall into the ocean and die. Fish eat them.” He’d shrugged. “Better than polluting the sea with toxic ceramics, don’t you think?” he’d added, referring to clay pigeons.
Now Rathor stood holding a Purdey over-and-under that was the matching twin to Adelheid’s, who had said there must be no advantage to either gunner. The Purdey’s stock was Turkish walnut. Its gold side plates were the background for scenes of mounted knights carved from solid silver. Rathor was not a gun lover, but he knew the price of wealth’s trappings. Adelheid—or whoever owned this boat, which might or might not belong to Adelheid— would have paid $300,000 for this pair, maybe more.
The yacht was a 164-foot oceangoing Benetti, but the deck still moved beneath Rathor. He shouldered his gun, bent his knees, and braced his feet. Finger on the Purdey’s front trigger, he shouted, “Pull!”
The game cage went
Rathor pulled the gun’s brass trigger and its stock punched his shoulder. The grouse flew on, intact. Rathor found the rear trigger and discharged the gun’s lower barrel and missed with that one, too. Shooting like this was hard enough on steady dry land. Trying to hit a moving target from the rising and falling deck of a yacht—an impossible thing. Yet Adelheid had shot a dozen times and had hit each bird with the first barrel. Rathor had hit one bird and knew he had been lucky to do even that.
“Oh, my,” Adelheid said, though Rathor thought he detected more irritation at Rathor’s inept shooting than sympathy in the other’s voice. “Perhaps enough of this for now. Let us go forward.” An attendant materialized and took the shotguns. Another appeared with flutes of Dom Perignon. Rathor followed Adelheid through the yacht’s interior to its foredeck, with white leather banquettes and mahogany tables. They had made a slow turn and were now heading for the mainland at a stately pace. They would not be back until after dark, but that suited Rathor quite well.
They stood at the bow, warm in sweaters and jackets, and drank the icy champagne without talking for a few moments. Then Adelheid said, “I am beginning to feel good about our venture. Cautiously so, but good.”
That surprised Rathor. In his experience, Adelheid was almost invariably gloomy. Rathor himself was not feeling so confident. “We’re a long way from the goal line, I’m afraid.”
Adelheid smiled thinly, shook his head. “The goal line. You Americans and your athletics. But, you see, I know something that you do not.”
“And what might that be?”
“Not long ago I heard from Gray. He believes that our team in Mexico has met with success.”
“He does? What happened?”
“I am not in possession of full details yet. Apparently the environment there is not secure for lengthy transmissions. But there was a prearranged signal that could be sent as a single data burst. Gray’s people received that signal.”
“I don’t know,” Rathor said. “I won’t be comfortable until we have that substance from the cave in our hands.”
“Gray’s people do not make mistakes,” Adelheid said, and Rathor detected another trace of irritation in his voice.
“I understand that. But all the same—”
Adelheid fixed Rathor in his stare. “With the other two problems accounted for, there is less cause for concern, would you not agree?”
Rathor wasn’t sure, but he did know that differing too often with Adelheid was unwise. “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “I can be overly pessimistic at times.” He tipped his flute and finished the champagne. In an instant a white-jacketed waiter appeared with a full glass. When Rathor turned halfway around to accept his new drink, he
