"But you and the husband, you are not old friends. In fact, it seemed to me that he does not like you at all. That tiresome frown, and those big black bags under his eyes. He looks like he had a nuit blanche."
"A what?"
"A nuit blanche. A—how do you say it?—a sleepless night. For one reason or another." She smiled wickedly.
Instead of replying, Hatch picked up his fork and tried to busy himself with his lobster.
"I can see you still carry her torch," Bonterre purred, with a cheerful smile. "Someday you must tell me of her. But first, let me hear about you. The Captain's mentioned your travels. So tell me all about your adventures in Suriname."
Almost two hours later, Hatch forced himself to his feet and followed Bonterre out of the restaurant. He had overindulged ridiculously, obscenely: two desserts, two pots of coffee, several brandies. Bonterre had matched him enthusiastically, order for order, yet she did not seem any worse for wear as she threw open her arms and breathed in the crisp night breeze.
"How refreshing this air is!" she cried. "I could almost learn to love a place like this."
"Just wait," Hatch replied. "Another two weeks, and you won't be able to leave. It gets in your blood."
"Another two weeks, and you will not be able to get out of my way fast enough, monsieur le docteur." She looked at him appraisingly. "So what do we do now?"
Hatch hesitated a moment. He'd never thought about what might happen after dinner. He returned the gaze, warning bells once again sounding faintly in his head. Silhouetted in the yellow glow of the streetlamps, the archaeologist looked captivatingly beautiful, her tawny skin and almond eyes bewitchingly exotic in the small Maine village. Careful, the voice said.
"I think we say good night," he managed to say. "We've got a busy day tomorrow."
Immediately, her eyebrows creased in an exaggerated frown. "C'est tout!" she pouted. "You Yankees have had all the marrow sucked from your bones. I should have gone out with Sergio. He at least has the fire in the belly, even if his body odor could kill a goat." She squinted up at him. "So how exactly do you say good night in Stormhaven, Doctor Hatch?"
"Like this." Hatch stepped forward and gave her hand a shake.
"Ah." Bonterre nodded slowly, as if comprehending. "I see." Then, quickly, she took his face in her hands and pulled it toward her, letting her lips graze his. As her hands dropped away from his face caressingly, Hatch could feel the tip of her tongue flick teasingly against his for the briefest of moments.
"And that is how we say good night in Martinique," she murmured. Then she turned in the direction of the post office and, without glancing back, walked into the night.
Chapter 24
The following afternoon, as Hatch came up the path from the dock after treating a diver's sprained wrist, he heard a crash resound from the direction of Wopner's hut. Hatch sprinted into Base Camp, fearing the worst. But instead of finding the programmer pinned beneath a large rack of equipment, he found him sitting back in his chair, a shattered CPU at his feet, eating an ice-cream sandwich, an irritated expression on his face.
"Is everything all right?"
Wopner chewed noisily. "No," he said.
"What happened?"
The programmer turned a pair of large, mournful eyes toward Hatch. "That computer impacted with my foot, is what happened."
Hatch looked around for a place to sit, remembered there was none, and leaned against the doorway. "Tell me about it."
Wopner shoved the last piece in his mouth and dropped the wrapper on the floor. "It's all messed up."
"What is?"
"Charybdis. The Ragged Island network." Wopner jerked a thumb in the direction of Island One.
"How so?"
"I've been running my brute-force program against that goddamn second code. Even with increased priority, the routines were sluggish. And I was getting error messages, strange data. So I tried running the same routines remotely over on Scylla, the Cerberus computer. It ran lickety-split, no errors." He gave a disgusted scoff.
"Any idea what the problem is?"
"Yeah. I got a good idea. I ran some low-level diagnostics. Some of the ROM microcode was rewritten. Just like when the pumps went haywire. Rewritten randomly, in bursts of a regular Fourier pattern."
"I'm not following you."
"Basically, it's not possible. Follow that? There's no known process that can rewrite ROM that way. And on top of that, in a regular, mathematical pattern?" Wopner stood up, opened the door to what looked like a refrigerated corpse locker, and slipped out another ice-cream bar. "And the same thing's happening to my hard disks and magneto-opticals. It only happens here. Not on the boat, not in Brooklyn. Just here."
"You can't tell me it's not possible. I mean, you saw it happen. You just don't know why yet."
"Oh, I know why. The frigging Ragged Island curse."
Hatch laughed, then saw Wopner was not smiling.
The programmer unwrapped the ice cream and took a massive bite. "Yeah, yeah, I know. Show me another reason, and I'll buy into it. But everyone who's come to this goddamn place has had things go wrong. Unexplainable things. When you get right down to it, we're no different from the rest. We just have newer toys."
Hatch had never heard Wopner talk like this. "What's gotten into you?" he asked.
"Nothing's gotten into me. That priest explained the whole thing. I ran into him at the post office yesterday."
So Clay's been talking to Thalassa employees, now, spreading his poison, Hatch thought, surprised at the strength of his anger. The man's an irritant. Someone ought to squeeze him like a sebaceous cyst.
His thoughts were interrupted when St. John appeared in the doorway. "There you are," he said to Hatch.
Hatch stared back. The historian was dressed in a bizarre combination of muddy Wellingtons, old tweed, and Maine oilcloth. His chest was heaving from exertion.
"What is it?" Hatch asked, rising instinctively, expecting to hear that there had been another accident.
"Why, nothing serious," said St. John, self-consciously smoothing down the front of his sou'wester. "Isobel sent me to bring you to our dig."
"Our dig?"
"Yes. You probably know I've been helping Isobel with the excavation of the pirate encampment." Isobel this, Isobel that. Hatch found himself mildly annoyed by the historian's familiar attitude toward Bonterre.
St. John turned to Wopner. "Did the program finish executing on the Cerberus computer?"
Wopner nodded. "No errors. No luck, either."
"Then, Kerry, there's no choice but to try—"
"I'm not going to rewrite the program for polyalphabetics!" Wopner said, giving the ruined CPU a childish kick. "It's too much work for nothing. We're running out of time as it is."
"Just a minute," Hatch said, trying to defuse the argument before it started. "St. John was telling me about polyalphabetic codes."
"Then he was wasting his breath," Wopner replied. "They didn't become popular until the end of the nineteenth century. People thought they were too error-prone, too slow. Besides, where would Macallan have hidden all his code tables? He couldn't have memorized the hundreds of letter sequences himself."
Hatch sighed. "I don't know much about codes, but I know a little about human nature. From what Captain Neidelman's been saying, this Macallan was a real visionary. We know he changed codes halfway through in order to protect his secret—"
"So it stands to reason he would have changed to a more difficult code," St. John interrupted.
"We know that, dummy," Wopner snapped. "What do you think we've been trying to crack for the last two weeks?"