The two who would kill him were on opposite ends of the boat, one up front with the captain, the other at the diving platform in the rear, making jokes with a young woman who was trying to seduce him. They motored for twenty minutes, until they came to an island even flatter than the one they had just left.
"We are now at Little Bonaire, the best diving island in the world. The fish you are about to see represent the highest concentration of reef fish found anywhere," announced the dive instructor. He mentioned that there was a pair of giant French angelfish that would eat from the hands of divers. He warned about moray eels. He had seen them many times, and one of them was even named Joseph.
"But he doesn't answer to his name," the instructor said with a laugh. Remo laughed too. He laughed while looking at the man in the rear of the boat, who was also laughing. The man had a big gold tooth right in the front of his mouth and he was looking at Remo.
The diving instructor, on the other hand, did not look at Remo. Thus, Remo thought, men differed in the way they approached their victims.
The diving instructor was sure to give Remo the third tank from the right. Remo let them strap it on and listened to all the talk of how to operate the air-demand valve, assured them he had done this before, which he had, but did not mention that he had forgotten all of it. None of it mattered.
With the tank on his back and flippers on his feet, he put the mouthpiece in his teeth and dropped into the glass-clear waters of the Caribbean. He allowed himself to sink, down as far as a man, then a story down, then a frame house down. Ten stories down into the deep ravine, he snapped the air hose to let air slip from the tank in goblet-size bubbles to imitate the breathing of a man. They rose like slow white balloons toward the great silver-white covering of air above him.
The other divers followed, more slowly, checking their gauges, equalizing the air pressure inside their lungs with the water pressure outside their bodies, counting on gauges and dials to do what Remo let his body do better. Man had come from the sea, and blood was basically seawater. Remo felt his pulse level drop as he let his body attune itself to the sea, feeling a harmony in a thin body a hundred feet beneath the sea, still as a cave shark: part of the sea, not just in it.
Two yellow fish swam up to this strange creature who moved as if he belonged here, and then swam away as if conceding that he did. Remo saw them quiver as they passed through his air bubbles. Then they convulsed in crazy circles and floated up, out of control, to the surface.
The air tanks held poison gas, he realized. Given that, he should be dead by now, so he let his arms float loosely, opened his mouth to release the breathing device, and floated like a corpse, slowly up toward the surface like the two yellow fish.
His two killers grabbed his wrists, as if assisting him, but slowly they stopped his ascent and then tugged him down with them, eleven stories, thirteen, sixteen, almost two hundred feet down, where the surface was just a memory in the hazy darkness of this clouded world.
They tugged him to a dark opening in a volcanic hole, wide as a door and tall as a doghouse, and pushed him through. They followed to make sure he got through all the way, then pushed him upward in dark waters broken by sudden sharp lights from their flashlights.
Remo heard the water break and felt the water drain from his body. It must be an underwater cave with a trapped pocket of air, he realized. The two men pushed his body along on a rocky ledge, but they did not take off their scuba mouthpieces while doing it. Remo realized why. He could feel it on his skin. There was death here, rotting human bodies in a cave beneath the sea, a stench like sour soup. He continued to hold his breath.
This was where all the bodies that disappeared from Bonaire went. This was where the dope smugglers put them. One of the divers' flashlights shone on a pile of bales in dark blue plastic, all of them sealed tight. Those were the drugs. The drug storehouse was in the body storehouse.
They left Remo's body on the ledge, food for the fish and the eels, and took one of the blue bags of drugs. But as they were about to leave, they felt something on their wrists.
Remo had them.
Before they could slip back under the water to exit from the cave, they heard Remo say: "Sorry, boys. Not just yet."
In shock, the man with the gold tooth opened his mouth. His mouthpiece dropped out and he tried to breathe without it but caught a lungful of stench without much oxygen. He gagged and vomited and tried to breathe, then reached under the water for his artificial air. Remo helped push him under. The rapid bubbling showed the he hadn't found his mouthpiece. Soon there was no more bubbling.
Remo said, very softly, to the diving instructor's two fear-widened eyes, visible through his mask, "You and I have a problem. Do you agree?"
The mask nodded with incredible sincerity, especially after Remo tightened his grip on the man's wrist.
"You see, my problem is if I stay here, I get bored," Remo said as he threw off the tank with the poison gas in it. "Your problem's different," he said. "You stay here and you get dead."
The instructor nodded again. Suddenly a knife flashed out from his leg sheath. Remo caught it easily, like a very thin Frisbee, and flipped it over onto the rock ledge, where it would not again interrupt their conversation.
"So how do we solve our problems?" Remo asked. "Your life and my boredom?"
The diver shook his head, indicating he did not know. He noisily sucked the air from his mouthpiece. "I have a solution," Remo said, raising a forefinger in the air for emphasis. "You tell me your employer." Tears formed inside the diver's mask. The sound of his breathing became louder.
"You're afraid he'll kill you?"
The man nodded.
"I will kill him. If I kill him, he will not kill you." The diver made a motion with his hand that could indicate many things.
"Is that one or two syllables?" Remo asked. "Sounds like ... ?"
The diver pointed in despair.
"You'll tell me everything on the surface?"
The diver nodded.
"And you will be a witness against the survivors?"
The diver nodded again.
"Then let's get out of here. This place has nothing to recommend it. It's even more boring than the island." Back on the boat, it looked as if the diving instructor had rescued Remo by sharing his mouthpiece and air after Remo had lost his tanks. Remo did nothing to change anyone's opinion, but after they left the cruise boat, they went down to the beach for a nice quiet chat.
The diver's employer was in Curacao, a neighboring Dutch island, a piece of quaint Holland in a warm azure sea.
Remo went there and visited four very important businessmen who had suddenly become very rich. Remo wanted to inform them in person that first, their bodyguards and fences were useless; second, their careers in the commerce of the islands was over, since they had been dealing in drugs; and third, since they had killed American agents and other law-enforcement people, their lives were over. He explained that they wouldn't be needing their windpipes anymore, so he would take them with him and feed them to the beautiful ocean fish. He did and they died.
Later, he had one last favor to ask the diver who had led him to the four main drug smugglers.
"We've been together only a day now, yet I feel we're real friends," Remo said.
The diver, who had been held two hundred feet beneath the sea by a man who needed no air, by a man who seemed to melt over fences and virtually through radar beams, and who took out the throats of powerful men as though plucking fleas from a dog, expressed his desire that they should always be such friends. A barroom of drunks on Christmas Eve never felt such true depth of friendship.