‘This claim has been strenuously denied by the White House, and the United States government has repeatedly reiterated expert opinion… that the destruction of marine life in the vicinity of REZ375 has been caused by a mysterious, but nevertheless entirely natural, effect. At the same time, it has taken extraordinary diplomatic efforts on the part of the US and the UK to quell the concerns of the other three permanent members of the Security Council. I have on the line from Moscow Professor Dimitri Karasov from the Soviet Institute of Natural Sciences…’
Lou flicked off the radio impatiently. He was growing sick of the whole story. It was obvious to any idiot the incident was caused by something entirely of human doing. All this talk of mysterious natural effects was pure spin. He gazed to his right seeing shearwaters diving for fish and the breakers on the beach, the white foam like chintz curtains draped over a turquoise silk. The road skirted the sand and then weaved inland a few hundred yards before descending towards a rocky peninsula, surveyed by hungry seagulls. He started humming an old tune, called something like ‘Photograph of You’, by some eighties band whose name escaped him, and from the jeep he could see the clutch of tin-roofed, white stone-walled buildings that constituted the team’s work base and lab.
He’d been here in Bermuda three months now; him, his team leader, Kate Wetherall, and a group of six technicians. And, as much as he loved this beautiful island, he was missing his one-bed apartment in Hampton, Virginia, a mile from the Institute of Marine Studies. He also pined for the cozy lab he shared with Kate at the institute. He knew that when this assignment was over, he would hanker after the constant tropical sunshine, but in exchange he would once again have reliable broadband, live baseball, a lab he did not have to share with herons and lizards, and, most crucially, he could give back the jeep and slide into his pride and joy, the 1959 T-Bird he had spent five years restoring.
He pulled the jeep into the car park of the lab — a level concrete rectangle as big as a football pitch twenty yards from the road along a narrow gravel lane. A path led down from there to the buildings close to the top of the rocky outcrop protruding from the cliff face. Pulling to a stop on the ocean side of the car park close to the precipice, Lou yanked the keys from the ignition and snatched up his worn brown leather satchel from the passenger seat. He descended the fifty-seven stone steps cut into the rock face and strode into the outer prep room of the lab. Through a huge glass window facing north, he could see the sweeping ocean and sky.
He still got a thrill from this purest of vistas. He still loved the smell of this makeshift lab, the feel of his chair tucked under the workbench in the section of the lab where he spent most of his time, and, above all, he loved, absolutely loved, the job itself — every damn moment of it.
Admittedly, it had all been a bit rocky to start with. It had nothing to do with the work, he had been fine with that. With a degree in archaeology and a PhD in marine science, he was more than qualified for the post. Indeed, he had spent his entire life fascinated by marine archaeology, the romance of the shipwreck, the mystery of doomed voyages. What could be learned from these relics told the researcher so much about bygone centuries, about the ordinary, everyday lives of ordinary, everyday people.
No, none of this had been a problem for him; the problem had been Kate, Kate Wetherall, Kate and him. They had fallen for each other almost instantly. It had been a really freaky thing. He had never experienced anything like it before. He had walked into his interview a week before starting the job, and that was it. The two other interviewers behind the table had faded to insignificance; all he could focus on was the woman in the middle of the three, the Head of Research. He’d been headhunted from Massers Marine Research Facility in California. The post was to work with her, to be her number two.
Later, post-coitally, Kate had told him that she had tried her damnedest to have her way in vetoing the choice of the other two interviewers — both board members who controlled the purse strings of the institute. She knew he was the best qualified for the job, but she also knew he would be trouble, because she had reacted to him in exactly the way he had to her. The sparks had been almost visible. He had never met anyone like her.
Kate had only lived in the United States for three years. She was a Brit, from an academic family, very stoic, tough, straight down the line. Her mother, Geraldine, had been a biochemist who died of breast cancer at fifty-one. Kate’s father, Nicholas Wetherall, had a been a world-class evolutionary biologist, an Oxford don and later Emeritus Professor at Princeton. He had also died young, from a brain tumour when Kate was fourteen.
Kate, Lou knew, was a damn fine marine archaeologist. At the same time, she was overmodest and self-deprecating, and possessed a sense of humour he could not fathom half the time. She was so utterly different from him. It wasn’t until they had been together for a month that Lou had wheedled out of Kate that her grandfather had been a super-wealthy industrialist and she had been educated at Benenden — Princess Anne’s alma mater.
But that was all now in the past. They had shared a beautiful, if overheated, relationship that had lasted six months. It had almost destroyed their ability to work together, disrupted the team and had driven him into depression. He had pulled himself back from the brink at the last moment and salvaged his career. With Kate’s help, he had brought their relationship to a new,healthier place.
Lou burst through the doors to the lab and was surprised to see that Kate had got there before him. She was seated at one of the computer monitors so absorbed it took her a few seconds to acknowledge Lou’s boisterous arrival. She had a large lab beaker filled with cereal in one hand, a plastic spoon in the other.
He strode over to where she was sitting. ‘And good morning to you!’ he said.
She kept watching the screen, flicked a strand of her shoulder-length blonde hair behind her ear and lifted the spoon to her mouth without moving her head. ‘Have you seen this?’
‘What?’
‘This film shot by the fishermen on that Canadian trawler.’
‘Oh, God, this is so tedious!’
She turned from the screen. ‘Why are you being so negative?’
‘It’s obvious the navy has screwed up. There’s been some sort of accident with a nuclear sub, or a cargo vessel has dumped something they shouldn’t have.’
‘Directly above the Titanic? Bit of a coincidence, Lou.’
‘Yes, it is. But, honey,’ and he smiled sweetly, ‘what was that famous song by Elvis Costello, “Accidents will Happen”?’