And now I could not help looking for a diver. As Walter and Tolliver continued to examine the cage, I finned over to the edge of the reef to get a better field of view.
Nothing.
I was just turning to return to the cage when something caught my eye.
It was an abnormality in the reef rock.
Was that what I thought it was?
The reef was volcanic — the kind of rock created when erupting lava meets cold water and quickly cools, an extrusive basalt that solidifies so quickly that molecules in the lava do not have time to form visible crystals.
The abnormal rock was sprinkled with well-defined whitish crystals.
I flicked my light back and forth, from reef rock to abnormal rock. It was like looking at twins — nonidentical twins whose appearance is quite similar but not exactly the same.
The color was the same, the fine-grained texture was the same, but those telltale crystals made the difference.
The abnormal rock was a fake. Somebody had made a fake rock and prettied it up.
My heartbeat ramped up, equal parts excitement and unease.
I gave two kicks and anchored directly beside the fake. With one hand I grasped a knob of real basalt and with the other I grasped a knob of the crystalled fakery. It felt wrong. I fisted my hand and knocked on it and it rang hollow. Some kind of plastic. Like a fake boulder in a playground.
Only this was no playground.
Tolliver and Walter noticed me, joined me, and I pointed out the abnormality.
The rock was about the size of a melon and when I laid hands on it I quickly found a small hollow beneath one edge. I crooked three fingers into the hollow and found a lever, and the abnormal rock opened like the top of a hatch.
We crowded to look underneath.
There was a thick black cable snaking out of a small fissure and down a hole into the reef.
We'd found more than we came looking for.
The fissure clearly ran beneath the reef rock in the direction of the instrument cage. We swam back over there and — knowing what we were looking for — found the cable exiting the fissure and connecting to the Sound Link cylinder at the base of the cage. Connecting to the acoustic modem, the communications link to the surface.
Tolliver drew his knife.
And then he hesitated.
Cable too thick and heavy to cut?
Bad idea to cut a cable when you don't know what it's going to turn off, or on?
Walter shook his head.
Tolliver sheathed his knife.
Whatever was going on up here on the reef, something more was going on down there, down where cable ran.
We returned for another look under the open fake-rock hatch cover, where the cable snaked out of the fissure and down into the hole, but there was nothing further to be learned here.
We hovered a moment, grasping knobs of basalt to hold us in place against the current, the three of us looking at one another, expressions unreadable behind face masks and regulators.
And then Tolliver made a fist, thumb extended downward. Let's go down.
We took the obvious route, over the edge of the reef and down, where the reef dropped off into a descending wall. A short distance down the wall, a small ledge jutted out like a pouting lip.
It was an overhang. Back where it met the wall, there was a tunnel.
We found handholds to anchor against the upwelling current, at the tunnel mouth.
Hovering again.
Considering again.
I considered the lay of the land. Quite clearly this tunnel ran into the reef beneath the hole up top. Somewhere in there, where the tunnel ran, the cable might exit.
Connecting to what? For what?
At the tunnel entrance the open-water light, dim as it was, penetrated. We added our lights, painting the walls. The tunnel was large, tall and wide, and unremarkable until Walter's light caught on something. It looked like a diver, plastered against the wall
I had seen him before.
At least I'd seen his wake, that sheath of deformed water, and then he had disappeared and now here he was — a diver, not a sea lion. He must have seen our lights as he dove. He must have made his way in stealth, through the kelp and over the edge and along the wall, keeping an eye out, and then finding shelter in this tunnel. Hiding, still, from us.
Tolliver drew his knife and reached across to Walter and tapped the knife on Walter's tank.
The metallic ringing reverberated through the tunnel.
The diver jerked away from the wall.
We pinned him with our three lights and he was revealed by the red hood of his wetsuit.
Red as the red beanie worn by Lanny Keasling in honor of his beanie-wearing hero Jacques Cousteau.
I glanced at Walter and Tolliver, who had not seen Lanny's entrance into the water and so were no doubt even more shocked than I was.
Tolliver, ever at home down here, knew what to do. He swept his light across our faces, identifying us, and then he crooked his fingers at Lanny, motioning for him to come forward.
Lanny shook his head.
We made no move to go get him. I waited for Tolliver to signal us back to the surface — get to the Breaker and phone for his cop divers and the Coast Guard to come here and take care of whatever was in there, at the end of the tunnel. Take care of Lanny, if he needed taking care of. I thought of his stubborn refusal night before last to admit that he had stolen and then hidden the red float, his refusal to explain the 'devil moons' which the next day turned out to be devils indeed. I thought of his refusal to acknowledge the instrument cage with the yellow floats, the very cage that sat on the reef up above us. I thought of him on the Keasling beach with the poisoned diver, whispering I broke it.
Damn it Lanny what did you break?
And why should we follow you into this burrow to find out?
Lanny turned and fled — but not before our lights caught the writing on his tank, the big black marker letters that read Lancelot Keasling.
Even as he swam away I stared after him in amazement.
Lancelot. I had never given a thought to his full name. Sweet slow stubborn Lanny carries a name leaden with myth and knights and quests. Carries it on the quiet. But writes it on his tank.
It was too heavy a name, I thought. He's just Lanny, who carries fennel seeds for the unprepared and the seasick.
That was enough.
CHAPTER 40
Walter grabbed his slate and wrote something and turned it to show Tolliver and me.
Lanny = hireling
We got it. Lanny was a hireling of Fred Stavis, who couldn't dive due to a burst eardrum, whose company Dive Solutions did the grunt work for Oscar Flynn, who had once saved Lanny from drowning, to whom Lanny owed some kind of twisted life-debt.
Flynn or Stavis or the both of them had sent Lanny down here to do a job and that told me all I needed to know — this job was bad news.
We checked our dive time on our wrist computers and Tolliver gave the okay sign. He unclipped the guideline reel from his BC and tied off the line on a knob of rock and then, without dissent, the three of us nosed into the tunnel.
I took note that Lanny hadn't set a line. He surely knew the basics, diving for Stavis's company. He surely knew how to make a safe entrance in an overhead environment. I guessed he hadn't wanted to leave a breadcrumb trail for us to find.
Too late for that.
We swam into the tunnel with controlled frog-kicks. We hardly needed to kick at all, thanks to a mild inflowing current.
The light zone did not penetrate far and so we relied on our torches, sweeping them back and forth to illuminate the way ahead. There were not likely to be more surprises pressed against the walls because the walls were fairly smooth and offered no crevices in which to hide.