The strong solution had eaten away the black coating. Now the piece gleamed shiny silver. Even more amazing, the thing was stamped with a design — a worn pattern, perhaps a coat of arms.
Dante was thunderstruck. This wasn’t part of the anchor at all. It was a coin!
He turned to the others. “Guys — is that what I think it is?”
Kaz peered into the glass. “Silver, right?”
“Definitely,” said Star. “It’s pretty crude, but I guarantee that’s some kind of money.”
Adriana stepped forward, eyes alight. “Not just money. That’s a piece of eight!”
Dante stared at her. “A piece of what?”
“Spanish money,” she explained excitedly. “From hundreds of years ago! They have lots of it at the British Museum. In the seventeenth century, this silver piece was the most common coin in the world. Eight reals — a piece of eight.”
Dante perked up. “Is it worth anything?”
“What do you think?” Star asked sarcastically. “It’s a three-hundred-year-old coin.”
“It’s living history,” Adriana amended. “This coin was made from silver pulled out of the mines of South America by descendants of the Incas. You can’t put a price on that.”
“Fifty bucks?” prompted Dante. “A hundred? More? Man, I almost chucked it overboard!”
Kaz’s eyes narrowed. “But Reardon wouldn’t let you. He practically leaped across the boat to get it off you.”
“He knew,” Star agreed bitterly. “And so did Cutter. That anchor wasn’t any movie prop. We found something, and they’re trying to steal it from us.”
“We’ll steal it back!” Dante decided.
“Brilliant,” approved Kaz. “And what about the anchor down there? You can’t just hide that in your underwear drawer. We have to get it on official record that this find is ours. Let’s go to Gallagher.”
When Dr. Geoffrey Gallagher arrived at his office promptly at eight that morning, he found the four teenage interns fast asleep on his doorstep.
“Good morning,” he said loudly enough to startle them awake. He noticed with some annoyance that his cameraman was filming the four as they scrambled to their feet.
Kaz found his voice first. “Dr. Gallagher, we have a problem. We found this coin—”
“A Spanish piece of eight—” Adriana put in.
“An anchor too,” added Dante. “I spotted it first. I thought it broke off the anchor, but it turned out to be a coin—”
Star cut him off. “But Chris Reardon stole it—”
“Well, we gave it away,” Kaz took up the narrative, “but we didn’t know it was a coin then. We thought it was part of a movie prop—”
It was the truth, but it was coming out in a scattered jumble of half sentences and interruptions as the groggy four struggled to give voice to their disorganized thoughts.
Gallagher grimaced in perplexity. At least, he noted, the cameraman had stopped filming these babbling youngsters. It was obvious that they had nothing to add to a scientific documentary.
He pulled himself up to his full six feet. “What you young interns don’t seem to understand is that this institute is actually dozens of independent projects, headed by dozens of different scientists. I make it possible for these projects to function, but I have no authority within the projects themselves.”
They looked blank, so he simplified his language. “Your boss is Mr. Cutter, not me. If you have anything to report, you report it to him.”
“But that’s the whole problem—” Kaz began.
At that moment, Dr. Gallagher noticed that the camera’s red light was on again. He gave his most public smile. “You young people are the future of the oceanographic community. You are an asset to Poseidon.”
And he and his cameraman entered the office, shutting the door in their faces.
Angrily, Kaz reached for the handle.
“Forget it,” grumbled Star. “The guy’s a dolt. All he cares about is looking good on video.”
Discouraged, they straggled back to the dock to retrieve their diving gear.
Dante sat down on a weathered piling. “Some summer this turned out to be,” he growled. “I feel like getting on the next catamaran to Martinique and the first flight home. I should tell them to stick their internship. It’s not like I’m pumping out thousands of great pictures.”
“I’d leave too,” Adriana said quietly, “but there’s nowhere to go. My parents are in Saint- Tropez or Corfu or wherever the in place is to go this year.”
Star folded her arms in front of her. “I’m not a quitter.”
“None of us are quitters,” Kaz retorted. “We’re just talking, okay? Don’t tell me you’re not disappointed with how this internship’s been going.”
“I should be the most disappointed of anybody,” grumbled Dante. “Technically, that’s my coin they ripped off. I’m the one who found the anchor.”
Star looked at him curiously. “There’s another thing I’ve been wondering about. How did you see that? And you spotted the plane too. How come you see things other people don’t?”
Dante looked away. “Maybe I have better eyesight than the rest of you guys.”
“You’ve got terrible eyesight,” Adriana put in. “You think the ocean is purple.”
“No, I don’t,” the photographer defended himself. “That was a darkroom error.”
“Or those scuba tanks,” Kaz persisted. “You thought a red sticker was a green sticker.”
“I got confused—” Dante managed weakly.
“Between red and green?”
When it finally came out, it cascaded from him in an avalanche. “Don’t you get it? To me, red is green, and green is red, and they’re both gray! I’m color-blind! The great photographic prodigy is living inside a black-and-white movie!”
The others were stunned.
Kaz was first to find his voice. “How does that help you pick out an anchor buried in coral?”
“You guys look at a reef and see a billion different colors. But to me, it’s all a super-detailed charcoal sketch. I focus on shading and texture, rough and smooth, raised and flat. To you, that anchor was invisible. But to me, the shape under the coral was as obvious as a person under a blanket. I couldn’t see it directly, but I knew it was there.”
Adriana spoke up. “But why would you take color pictures if you can’t see color? How could you ever hope to get it right?”
Dante shrugged unhappily. “I don’t know. I guess I figured I could learn to fake it or something — connect certain shading to certain colors. But it’s no use. Some handicap for a photographer, huh?”
“That’s not a handicap,” Star said sharply. “That’s a gift. You see what other people can’t. Poor you.”
As they sat on the dock, feeling sorry for themselves, the sound of an approaching engine caught their attention. It was the Hernando Cortés, with Captain Vanover at the wheel. He tooted the horn twice and waved at them.
Adriana raised an eyebrow. “You know,” she began thoughtfully, “Gallagher won’t listen to us, but what about the captain? He always takes us seriously. Maybe we should tell him about the coin.”
“And maybe he’ll steal it from off Cutter so he can keep it for himself,” Dante put in cynically. “Vanover’s nice, but so is Marina. And she lies to our faces. Who knows who you can trust around here?”
“Agreed,” said Kaz. “This is between us and Cutter. We’ll keep it to ourselves.”
The Cortés moved smoothly into its berth, and the hulking figure of Menasce Gérard leaped over the gunwale and tied up the vessel. He did not look in their direction, and they were not sorry.