"Bring Wiley up to speed. Let him know Love is here in Butler. I gotta go." Jake disconnected the call before Fontaine could respond. He pulled into the drive and watched through the rear-view mirror as the BMW passed the driveway. Within seconds the van did the same.
Gun in hand, Jake jumped from the Tahoe, ran to the hedges lining the street using them as cover, and searched for the BMW. In the distance he saw the BMW's brake lights. The BMW made a k-turn, and then he watched as the headlights returned. The van kept going. He lay on his belly, peering through the base of the hedges as the BMW slowed. He readied his grip on the Glock. The BMW cruised past the driveway then accelerated. A minute later the BMW rounded the bend in the road and disappeared from sight. Jake panned back in the opposite direction. The van had turned around and was accelerating. It blew past the driveway, down the road, and out of sight around the curve.
Jake couldn't tell if the van was tailing him or the BMW. Either way, the situation just got a lot worse.
Earlier in the afternoon, Jake had launched the boat and motored it to the dock behind the cabin. He checked and loaded his equipment in the boat for tonight's dive. He needed his truck and since it was still at the boat ramp, he talked a nearby neighbor into driving him the fourteen miles back to the marina to pick up the Tahoe, keeping the conversation focused on the fishing tournament. When the old man dropped him off, he told Jake there was another boat ramp closer to the cabin, less than a half a mile down the highway. Jake thanked him and promised to use the closer ramp when he got ready to trailer the boat.
With the BMW and the van out of sight, he let himself into the cabin and set safety traps on the doors and windows. Traps too small and nondescript for anyone but him to notice unless they knew what to look for. More tradecraft skills he'd learned at The Farm. It was precaution. When he returned from the dive, Jake needed to know if anyone had been snooping around in the cabin. One last check of his messages revealed an urgent message from Elmore Wiley advising him there was a problem, which would delay the arrival of his backup. He was ordered to sit tight and wait for their arrival. Wiley's timetable wouldn't get backup to Butler until almost noon tomorrow. That was unacceptable. He hated to defy Wiley's orders, but too much could happen in the meantime and he couldn't chance the possibility Ashley Regan and her friend would get to the casket and disappear again.
He deleted the message from Wiley, turned off the lights, set the final door trap, and made his way in the darkness to the dock fifty feet below and one hundred feet behind the cabin. The steep steps reminded him of his own cabin in North Georgia. His retreat on Mountaintown Creek in Ellijay was over three hundred vertical feet above the creek. It had a lot of steps. This was nothing in comparison.
A full moon in a cloudless sky highlighted the shoreline guiding him as he motored the boat away from the dock. The vast contrast between the glittering water and land made it easy to navigate through the waters. The small outboard hummed like a sewing machine as the boat sliced through the calm waters of Watauga Lake.
Jake followed his programmed handheld GPS. The unit, customized by Wiley's lab, was precise to within two lateral feet. If Fontaine's coordinates were accurate, he should descend on top of the grave marker of Norman Albert Reese, Jr.
When his GPS beeped, he flipped the windlass switch, which automatically plunged the anchor toward the bottom of the lake while he kept the boat centered over the coordinates. A few seconds later, the anchor line went slack indicating it had hit bottom. He set the anchor so the boat wouldn't drift off while he was underwater, shut off the engine, and waited.
He didn't move for fifteen minutes. Driving a boat in the dark without running lights was illegal and, for the most part stupid. But tonight, stealth was necessary. He had to ensure no one saw or heard him, got curious, and came to investigate. While he waited, he slipped into his polar shell under-suit and then into a dry-suit sealing each with meticulous care.
In the Navy, he'd learned the difference between a dry-suit and a wetsuit. Although both were designed to keep the diver warm, a wetsuit allowed water inside. The water formed a layer between the neoprene suit and the diver's skin. Heat from the diver's body warmed the water inside the suit. A wetsuit was good for cool and moderately cold water only.
A dry-suit, on the other hand, was just that — dry. Gaskets at the neck, legs, and arms were designed to keep the water out and the diver's body dry. When used in conjunction with a polar-shell insulated under-suit, the diver could safely dive in extremely cold waters for long durations.
The water wasn't too cold on the surface, but according to Fontaine, at sixty feet it could be around fifty degrees and upper 40's near the bottom. And that was cold. He knew about hypothermia from his Navy dive training and, most recently, when he had to abandon a sinking vessel off the northern coast of Spain and swim nine miles to shore in the cold waters of the Cantabrian Sea.
That was ten months ago. And it was still fresh in his memory.
Jake lifted the hatch on the bow compartment and retrieved the rest of his dive gear, checked its working condition, geared up, and eased into the cold lake water. He used the low side rails of the boat to pull himself along the side of the boat until he reached the anchor line. He pulled his mask over his face, made a final equipment check, put the regulator in his mouth. With one hand on the anchor line, he deflated his buoyancy compensator and sank into the dark lake.
32
Jake descended in the water using the anchor line and felt the water temperature dropping fast. He was nervous and the cold, dark abyss didn't help. It had been a long time since he had been scuba diving. He felt his chest tighten and his respiration increase. He held his lighted computer closer to his face, 27 feet below the surface. He tightened his grip on the anchor line and stopped his descent. He was sucking air from his tank. He needed to calm down and get his breathing under control. Mind over matter discipline was what the Navy had taught him. The power to control and influence his body with his mind. He closed his eyes and let his mind go someplace calm.
It took him to the infinity pool in the Maldives tree villa with Kyli. He envisioned her smile. Her eyes sparkled. The gentle ocean breeze blowing through her hair. Just the thought of her image seemed tranquil.
His pulse slowed, returning to normal. Breathing slowed.
His tense muscles relaxed, his respiration under control. He was no longer nervous. He relaxed his grip on the anchor line and once again descended toward the bottom. At 35 feet below the surface, he turned on his dive light. The high beam was designed to put out 400 lumens of light for nearly fourteen hours. Much longer than he'd need it, but he had a backup in the boat just in case.
He flashed the beam downward, from side to side and saw nothing. Fontaine had indicated the visibility varied between 15 and 25 feet year round. Not great, but not bad either. At 50 feet below the surface his light beam found a cut off tree trunk. He followed it down with his light. The trunk was brown and blended into the brown mud bottom. Finding the marker might be harder than he had anticipated.
At 62 feet, he hit the muddy bottom, stirring up a slight plume of silt with his fins. It wasn't level. It sloped rapidly to one side of the tree and rose on the other. He'd carried with him a guide rope with one end attached to his weight belt and the other to a carabiner. He slipped the oval-shaped straight gate carabiner onto the anchor line, let out 20 feet of guideline and started making tethered, partial circle search passes to try and locate the marker, a search and rescue technique he learned in the Navy. Essentially the bottom was barren except for the occasional tree stump, which he had to circumnavigate so the tether wouldn't tangle.