Riptide

reached Hatch's ears a moment before the scent of Turkish latakia.

'No sign of the coroner, then?' Neidelman asked.

Hatch's silence was answer enough. They had wanted to bring Wopner to the mainland, but the coroner, a fussy, suspicious man who had come down all the way from Machiasport, insisted on moving the body as little as possible.

The Captain smoked in silence for several minutes, the only evidence of his presence the intermittent glow from the pipe bowl. Then he laid the pipe aside and cleared his throat.

'Malin?' he asked softly.

'Yes,' Hatch replied, his own voice sounding husky and foreign in his ears.

'This has been a devastating tragedy. For all of us. I was very fond of Kerry.'

'Yes,' said Hatch again.

'I remember,' the Captain went on, 'leading a team working deepwater salvage off Sable Island. The graveyard of the Atlantic. We had six divers in a barometric pressure chamber, decompressing after a hundred- meter dive to a Nazi sub loaded with gold. Something went wrong, the seal of the chamber failed.' Hatch heard him shifting in his chair. 'You can imagine what happened. Massive embolisms. Blows apart your brain, then stops your heart.'

Hatch said nothing.

'One of those young divers was my son.'

Hatch looked at the dark figure. 'I'm very sorry,' he said. 'I had no idea . . .' He stopped. I had no idea you were a father. Or a husband. In fact, he really knew next to nothing about Neidelman's personal life.

'Jeff was our only child. The death was very hard on both of us, and my wife, Adelaide—well, she couldn't quite forgive me.'

Hatch fell silent again, remembering the stark outline of his own mother's face that November afternoon they learned of his father's death. She had picked up a china candlestick from the mantelpiece, polished it absently with her apron, replaced it, then picked it up and polished it again, over and over, her face as gray as the empty sky. He wondered what Kerry Wopner's mother was doing at that moment.

'God, I'm tired.' Neidelman shifted again in his chair, more briskly this time, as if to force himself awake. 'These things happen in this business,' he said. 'They're unavoidable.'

'Unavoidable,' Hatch repeated.

'I'm not trying to excuse it. Kerry was aware of the risks, and he made that choice. Just as we all did.'

Despite himself, Hatch found his eyes straying involuntarily to the misshapen form under the sheet. Dark stains had seeped through the material, ragged black holes in the moonlight. He wondered if Wopner really had made the choice.

'The point is'—the Captain lowered his voice—'we must not let this defeat us.'

With an effort, Hatch pulled his eyes away. He sighed deeply. 'I suppose I feel the same way. We've come this far. Kerry's death would be even more pointless if we abandoned the project completely. We'll take the time we need to review our safety procedures. Then we can—'

Neidelman sat forward in his chair. 'The time we need? You misunderstand me, Malin. We must move forward tomorrow.'

Hatch frowned. 'How can we, in the wake of all this? For one thing, morale is rock-bottom. Just this afternoon I heard a couple of workers outside my window, saying the whole venture's cursed, that nobody will ever recover the treasure.'

'But that's exactly why we must press on,' the Captain continued, his voice now urgent. 'Stop the malingering, make them lose themselves in their work. It's not surprising people are rattled. What would you expect after such a tragedy? Talk of curses and supernatural folderol is a seductive, undermining force. And that's really what I'm here to discuss.'

He moved his chair closer. 'All these equipment troubles we've been having. Everything works just fine until it's installed on the island, then inexplicable problems crop up. It's caused us delays and cost overruns. Not to mention the loss of morale.' He picked up his pipe. 'Have you thought about a possible cause?'

'Not really. I don't know much about computers. Kerry didn't understand it. He kept saying there was some kind of malevolent force at work.'

Neidelman made a faint sound of derision. 'Yes, even him. Funny that a computer expert should be so superstitious.' He turned, and even in the dark Malin could feel his stare. 'Well, I have been giving it a lot of thought, and I've come to a conclusion. And it's not some kind of curse.'

'What, then?'

The Captain's face glowed briefly as he relit his pipe. 'Sabotage.'

'Sabotage?' Hatch said incredulously. 'But who? And why?'

'I don't know. Yet. But it's obviously someone in our inner circle, someone with complete access to the computer system and the equipment. That gives us Rankin, Magnusen, St. John, Bonterre. Perhaps even Wopner, hoisted on his own petard.'

Hatch was secretly surprised that Neidelman could talk so calculatingly about Wopner with the programmer's broken body lying only six feet away. 'What about Streeter?' he asked.

The Captain shook his head. 'Streeter and I have been together since Vietnam. He was petty officer on my gunboat. I know you and he don't see eye-to-eye, and I know he's a bit of an odd duck, but there's no chance he could be the saboteur. None. Everything he has is invested in this venture. But it goes deeper than that. I once saved his life. When you've been at war, side by side in combat with a man, there can never be a lie between