'Sorry,' Ali said sadly. Then he brightened as a thought hit him. 'Then you didn't win, either.'
'Au contraire,' Austin said. 'All four of us won the prize for being the luckiest men alive.'
Ali nodded. 'Praise Allah,' he said a second before he passed out.
Chapter 3
Venezuelan Rain Forest
The Thick Canopy of overhanging tree branches blotted out the sun's rays, making the black water in the still pool seem deeper than it was. Wishing that she hadn't read that the Venezuelan government was reintroducing man-eating Orinoco crocodiles into the wild, Gamay Morgan Trout jackknifed her lithe body in a surface dive and with strong kicks of her slender legs descended into the Stygian darkness. This must be how a prehistoric animal felt sinking into the ooze at the La Brea tar pits in California, Gamay thought. She flicked on the twin halogen lights attached to her Stingray video camera and swam down to the bottom. As she passed over the spinachy vegetation that rose and fell in the slight current as if dancing to music, something poked her in the buttocks.
She whirled around, almost more indignant than scared, her hand going for the sheath knife at her waist. Inches from her face mask was a long, narrow snout attached to a lumpish pink head with small black eyes. The snout waggled back and forth like a scolding finger. Gamay unclenched her hand from the knife hilt and pushed the snout aside.
'Watch it with that thing!' The sentence streamed out the regulator as a stream of noisy bubbles.
The thin beak opened in a friendly, sharp-toothed circus clown's grin. Then the river dolphin's face rotated so that it was looking at her upside down.
Gamay laughed, the sounds coming out like the gurgles Old Faithful makes before it erupts. Her thumb pressed the valve that allowed air to inflate her buoyancy compensator. Within seconds her head broke the pool's calm surface like a jack-in-the box. She leaned back into her inflated BC, whipped the plastic mouthpiece from between her teeth, and broke into a wide grin.
Paul Trout was sitting in his ten-foot Bombard semi-inflatable boat a few yards away. Doing his job as a dive tender, he had followed the foamy air bursts marking his wife's underwater trail. He was startled to see her emerge from the black water and nonplussed at her mirth. Lips pursed in puzzlement, he lowered his head in a characteristic pose, as if he were peering up over the tops of invisible spectacles.
'Are you all right?' he said, blinking his large hazel eyes.
'I'm fine,' Gamay said, although clearly she wasn't. Her laughter was rekindled by the incredulous expression on Paul's face. She choked on a mouthful of water. The prospect of drowning from laughter made her laugh even more. She popped the mouthpiece back into her mouth. Paul paddled the inflatable closer, leaned over the side, and offered his hand.
'Are you sure you're okay?'
'Yes, I'm fine,' she said. She regained her composure and spat out the regulator. After a fit of wet-dog coughs she said, 'I'd better come aboard.'
Clinging to the side of the boat, she handed her dive gear up to Paul, who then reached down and easily lifted her one hundred thirty-five pounds onto the raft. With his tan shorts, matching military-style shirt with epaulets on the shoulders, and floppy brimmed poplin hat, he looked like a Victorian fugitive from the Explorers' Club. The large tropical butterfly perched below his Adam's apple was actually one of the colorful bow ties he was addicted to. Trout saw no reason he couldn't be impeccably dressed anywhere, even in the depths of the Venezuelan rain forest where a loincloth is considered going formal. Paul's foppish attire belied a potent physical strength built up from his days as a fisherman on Cape Cod. The barnacle-hard calluses on his palms were gone, but the muscles from hoisting fish boxes lurked behind the razor-creased clothes, and he knew how to use the leverage of his six-foot- eight body.
'The depth finder says it's only thirty feet deep, so your giddiness is not caused by nitrogen narcosis,' he said in his typical analytical way.
Gamay undid the tie holding back the shoulder-length hair whose dark red color had prompted her wine connoisseur father to name his daughter after the grape of Beaujolais.
'Insightful observation, my dear,' she said, wringing the water from her tresses. 'I was laughing because I thought I was the sneaker when I was really the sneakee.'
Paul blinked. 'What a relief. That certainly clears things know what a sneaker is. Sneakee, on the other hand . . .'
She flashed a dazzling smile. 'Cyrano the dolphin sneaked up and goosed me with his nose.'
'I don't blame him.' He leered at her slim-hipped body with a Groucho Marx hike of his eyebrows.
'Mother warned me about men who wear bow ties and part their hair in the middle.'
'Did I ever tell you, you look like Lauren Hutton?' he said, puffing on an imaginary cigar. 'And that I'm attracted to women with a sexy space between their front teeth?' 'Bet you say that to all the girls,' she said, putting a Mae West huskiness into her voice, which was low and cool by nature. 'I did learn something scientific from Cyrano's little love poke.'
'That you have a nose fetish?'
She gave him a no-nonsense lift of her eyebrow. 'No, al though I wouldn't rule it out. I learned that river dolphins may be more primitively developed than their saltwater cousins and more mellow in general than their marine relatives. But they are intelligent and playful and have a sense of humor.'
'You would need a sense of humor if you were pink and gray, had flippers with discernible fingers on them, a dorsal fin that's a joke in itself, and a head like a deformed cantaloupe.'
'Not a bad biological observation for a deep ocean geologist.'
'Glad to be of help.'
She kissed him again, on the lips this time. 'I really appreciate your being here. And for all the work you've done computer profiling the river. It's been a nice change. I'm almost sorry to be going home.'
Paul looked around at their tranquil surroundings. 'I've actually enjoyed it. This place is like a medieval cathedral. And the critters have certainly been fun, although I don't know if I like them taking liberties with my wife.'
'Cyrano and I have a purely platonic relationship,' Gamay said with a haughty elevation of her chin. 'He was just trying to get my attention so I'd give him a treat.' 'A treat?'
'A fish treat.' She slapped the side of the inflatable several times with a paddle. There was a splash where the lagoon opened into the river. A pinkish-gray hump with a long, low dorsal fin cut a V-shaped ripple in their direction. It circled the boat, emitting a sneezing sound from its blowhole. Gamay scattered fish meal pellets, and the slim beak came out of the water and hungrily snapped them down.
'We've verified those apocryphal stories of dolphins coming on call. I can imagine them helping the locals with their fishing as we've heard.'
'You've also proven that Cyrano has done a good job of training you to give him a snack.'
'True, but these creatures are supposed to be unfinished versions of the saltwater type, so it's of interest to me that their brains have advanced faster than their physical appearance.' They watched the circling dolphin with amusement for a few minutes, then, aware that the light was waning, decided to head back.
While Gamay arranged her gear, Paul started the outboard motor and headed them out of the lagoon onto the slow-moving river. The inky water changed to a strained-pea green. The dolphin kept pace, but when he saw there would be no more treats, he peeled off like a fighter plane. Before long the thick jungle along the river gave way to a clearing. A handful of thatched huts were grouped around a white stucco house with a red tile roof and arcade facade in the Spanish colonial style.
They tied up at a small pier, hauled their gear from the boat, and walked to the stucco building, trailing a chattering gang of half naked Indian children. The youngsters were shooed away by the housekeeper, a formidable Spanish-Indian woman who wielded a broom like a battle-ax. Paul and Gamay went inside. A silver-haired man in his sixties, wearing a white shirt with an embroidered front, cotton slacks, and handmade sandals, rose from his desk in the coolness of the study where he had been working on a pile of papers. He strode over to greet them with obvious pleasure.
