Robert piped in with a suggestion. “Let’s go with an old Chinese standby. We’ll call it the IAS Project.”
Luke did a double take. “What does IAS stand for?”
Robert giggled. “It’s A Secret. IAS, pronounced like ‘ice.’ ”
Luke turned to Mr. Wu. “What do you think, sir?”
Mr. Wu barely stifled a chuckle. “I have no objections to bad puns; you can call it anything you like. You can call it Porky Pig for all I care, but let us hope the ghost of Zhou Man is not sitting in opposition to our best intentions. Otherwise, I leave the IAS Project in your capable hands, but keep me informed at all times. I will send down my purchasing agent to see you next Thursday. Give him a list of the equipment you will need. Whatever it is, I can arrange for the best possible prices, no matter where it’s made. And what we can’t buy, we will lease.”
———
AS SOON AS POSSIBLE AFTER takeoff, Luke got the thumbs-up from the Lear’s captain and began texting his old roommates in Virginia. He asked for the names of the best programmers in northern California. Luke got an immediate response and was told to search out the website for the Flying Rodriguez Brothers of San Jose. He was informed that they were verifiable computer geniuses.
When Luke texted back inquiring about their lateral computer qualifications, his friends informed him that the preeminent Flying Rodriguez Brothers could reprogram a duck to give six pints of milk every day, and if that wasn’t lateral enough, then Luke would have to look elsewhere. Luke contacted and made an appointment to meet with the Rodriguez brothers even before they landed in Monterey.
Mr. Wu was as good as his word, and within three weeks Luke and Robert had the IAS Project up and running. They had rewired the north wing of the Atherton house to handle the increased power needs of their computers and other equipment. They installed a phone bank and rented all the office furnishings that seemed necessary. Soon they were masters of a very impressive array of powerful new computers and large-format scanners.
Luke began petitioning every possible source for topographical submarine maps of Monterey Bay and the coast of California a hundred miles north, west, and south of a line plotted between Monterey and Santa Cruz. In that regard, Luke’s association with Hopkins, Stanford, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium were extremely helpful. As soon as any material came in, it was coded and put into a custom program designed by the Rodriguez brothers. It created a kind of multidimensional effect.
Maps from the turn of the century indicating sunken ships and other submarine hazards were layered with recent radar and sonar scans, which were then again layered with satellite radar images, and Navy and NOA topographical scans. The Rodriguez brothers even scanned a number of early Spanish and English maps of the bay. Then they layered in the tidal and current tables for the past one hundred years, which was an easier job than Luke might have surmised. He happily discovered that maritime records were the most assiduously preserved of all documents.
AFTER EIGHT WEEKS, PACO RODRIGUEZ informed Luke that they now possessed the most comprehensive data field on Monterey Bay in existence anywhere, and more information was becoming available every day. His brother, Esteban, suggested that it was about time to bring in a top CAG specialist to meld the whole data bank into a complete and comprehensive virtual 3-D map. Paco wrote out a list of talented candidates and Luke hired the most promising: a young Vietnamese woman named Francoise “Skipper” Nuygen. She ultimately proved to be the hardest-working and most creative member of the team.
But it was at night, after everyone had left, that Luke and Robert did their own work on the computers. Luke focused on current and tidal charts for the period, while Robert dealt with the artifacts as agreed.
From the very first Luke was amazed by how much garbage littered the bottom of Monterey Bay. If he was going to get his computers to do a comprehensive search, he would need to know a great deal more about the missing steam launch. He found all kinds of links that gave him designs and dimensions, but they were mostly Edwardian lake or river steamers. What Luke needed was a picture of the boat itself, and through the clever auspices of a talented Monterey historian, Kent Seavey, a photograph was soon found in the Hotel del Monte historical archives. Luke hit the keyboard and traced backward to find that the Billings and Joyce Boat Works had built several passenger steam launches in their Oakland yards. In 1885 they specifically took an order from the Hotel del Monte. Luke thought the name sounded familiar. It was called the Del Monte Princess. Unfortunately, the famous hotel burned to the ground in April of 1887, and the vessel was sold as a local mail and passenger packet to service Big Sur.
Luke’s search eventually coughed up the exact designs for the launch, its dimensions, its displacement, the weight of the engine and boiler, and every other pertinent fact he could conceivably wish to have, including the costs charged to the owners of the Hotel del Monte. Because the clients demanded that only the best materials be employed to impress their guests, the elegant fifty-nine-foot steam-screw launch came down the shipway at a whopping fourteen thousand dollars. And it proved a great success for the hotel before the fire.
Thanks to the generosity of the Rodriguez brothers and Skipper, Luke found he was discovering more about complex computer programs than he ever thought possible. Under their guidance he practiced maneuvering through the numerous programs, and soon found he could navigate around the submarine topography with considerable dexterity. He learned to code in specific GPS coordinates and watch the program instantly take him to that location on the virtual 3-D map. The layout also included all known sunken vessels and other foreign debris, so Luke could cruise in a leisurely fashion, like a sounding whale, loitering at points of interest and then moving on. It was like flying underwater, and Luke began to enjoy the process for its own sake.
And that wasn’t all Luke enjoyed. As much as he loved Monterey, Luke found life at the mansion in Atherton quite to his liking. He had the use of a new Lexus, his salary was more than generous, his commute to work was all of eighty-five feet, and the food was always exceptional. Plus the location had the advantage of being closer to Rosie, though he had to admit that she was now so heavily preoccupied with leaving for Duke that their time together became more infrequent, and somewhat strained.
Working on his own programs, Robert had accomplished his reconstruction of the stone artifacts, complete with all three texts and ancillary decorations. The next step was to have three-dimensional models carved on a computerized milling machine, but there was one problem: they needed more computer enhancements to make the engraved texts stand out on the model.
The Rodriguez brothers had pretty much finished their work after three months, and only came in now and then to tweak a program here and there, or to layer on a new update. Skipper was now of far more use to the project than anyone else, and Luke and Robert debated whether to bring her into their confidence full-time, or just conditionally, telling Ms. Nuygen the least critical part of the story. They decided to clue Skipper into the fact that they were designing a broad and comprehensive submarine search program that required the best graphics available in the industry. To prove the program viable, they had decided to try to target a small wooden steam launch that had gone down between Monterey and Santa Cruz in 1906. So far no one had been able to find the target, so it had naturally been chosen as a perfect test subject. If, using only their multiprogram-generated maps,
