Wired Kingdom Page 25

  With sails tight as drum heads, Anastasia’s ketch flew across the channel, passing several larger sailboats on the way to the popular island. To Tara, watching the Blue’s feed on a wireless netbook connection, it wasn’t fast enough.

  She placed a call to Branson. “You have a boat on the Blue?”

  “We have an unmanned drone boat on site, and guys in the air.”

  “What good’s the drone?”

  “It lets us stay with the whale even though we’re not there, give warnings to anyone approaching it, and it’s taking video.”

  “How are—”

  “We’ve got a high-speed inflatable boat en route now. Should be there in about fifteen minutes. Dive team’s on that.” Tara couldn’t suppress a twinge of disappointment. After all she’d been through for the case, she probably wasn’t even going to be there when the whale’s video was recovered.

  “Where are you, Shores?” Branson asked, breaking the silence. “What do I hear in the background?”

  “Those are sails, sir. I’m about halfway there in a sailboat piloted by Dr. Reed.”

  “Shores, you were supposed to be maintaining watch at Dr. Reed’s data feed.”

  “What you told me, sir, was to keep you informed of the whale’s coordinates. I’ve done that—am doing that. When the web site came back online with working GPS, there was no longer any reason for me to remain in Dr. Reed’s lab, since I knew you’d be made aware of that.”

  “Listen, Shores, I appreciate your effort—we all do—but now I need you to let the team do its work out there.”

  “Of course, sir. But I thought it wouldn’t hurt for me to be on site with an expert marine mammalogist on standby.”

  “Okay, Shores. Just stay clear of the whale. You’ve had enough action in the last two days.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tara ended the call and stood up in the small but nicely appointed cabin. Standing, she found she had a couple inches of headroom. The walls and furniture of the compartment were blonde tropical hardwood. Framed posters like “Whales of the Pacific,” a map of Baja California, and “Creatures of the Kelp Forest” adorned the walls. A smaller framed print above the miniature stove showed Anastasia as a child with her parents. She was at the wheel of a sailboat, her father, George, with his arm around her, pointing at something unseen out on the water.

  Tara exited the cabin and stepped out on deck, where Anastasia minded the helm. “So you’ve been sailing for some time?”

  “Yeah, my father started teaching me when I was eight. I bought this ketch as a present to myself when I got my first professorship. It’s great for quick getaways. You should come with me up to Santa Barbara one weekend.”

  “Look, Dr. Reed, there's something I need to get straight with you.” She didn’t know how to put it delicately. “I am not lesbian, or bisexual. My interest in you is strictly professional as it relates to this case.”

  Anastasia smiled. “Relax. I won’t bite. You’re not married. I don’t see a ring on your finger. You have a boyfriend? Are you seeing anyone at all?”

  “Not at the moment, no. I've been caught up with my work lately. I'm sure you understand.”

  “Yes, but I've found that people make time for what's really important. At our age, most women are involved with someone.”

  “Well I'm not, okay?”

  “Detective, correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems as though you're harboring some kind of stereotypical resentment against lesbians.”

  Tara shrugged. “What happens between consenting adults is their business. It’s what happens among non-consenting adults that usually becomes mine.”

  Anastasia nodded while she scanned the seas ahead of them.

  “How much longer?” Tara asked, wanting to reiterate her all-business persona. A faint, mountainous outline was visible to the west.

  “About an hour. How’s the Blue?”

  “Being circled by a robot boat sent to keep an eye on her until the dive team arrives.”

  “Robot boat?”

  “Yeah. Dropped from a cargo plane. Autonomous, but can also be controlled from a plane or boat, like a life-size radio-controlled toy.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got a lot of resources on this murder case. With all the hype surrounding the show, how did you manage to convince them it was real?”

  Tara’s respect for Anastasia crept up a notch. At least she recognized a key investigative difficulty surrounding the case. “It wasn’t easy, but after those divers were seen on camera, it was obvious that the video was extremely important to somebody.”

  “And now you think that somebody is my father.”

  Confident the gesture wouldn’t be misinterpreted, Tara put a hand on the boat captain’s shoulder. “Anastasia, he admitted to being involved with the victim. So he had a motive. Any law enforcement officer would have brought him in for questioning.”

  “How’s being involved with someone in and of itself a motive?”

  “He was having an affair. Sometimes in affairs both partners are not in agreement about a breakup. People act on emotions without thinking. I see it all the time.”

  “And so that’s it? Because he had an affair he gets prosecuted for murder?”

  “He’s not being prosecuted for murder, at this point. There were other factors.”

  “Such as?”

  “He owns a large boat, the Prime Time, capable of making the trip to where the murder occurred, so he had the means. Motive and means. We’re looking into his opportunity now. Apparently your mother says he was home at the time of the murder, so he does appear to have an alibi. But we’re going to get the video, and if it shows conclusively that it wasn’t him, he’ll be vindicated.”

  Anastasia fell silent, her glum expression fixed on the outline of Catalina looming ever closer ahead of them.

  CHAPTER 40

  OFF THE CATALINA ISLAND COAST

  Héctor approached the Blue’s coordinates, which were fed to him by his man in the back seat with a satellite-linked notebook computer. The precision that the GPS afforded was unneeded, however, since the ring of boats now visible around the whale gave away its position.

  “Ready,” he announced. The two divers prepared their gear. In addition to their full-face masks and underwater communications equipment, each man carried a snub-nosed speargun and multiple knives strapped to various places on their gear.

  Héctor raised Pandora’s Box over a secure marine channel.

  “PB here,” Eric Stein’s voice came back.

  “PB this is Seahawk. We have reached the target. Now preparing two divers for entry. What is your position and velocity? Over.”

  Stein relayed his position, speed, and heading.

  “You’re making better than expected time.”

  “We found a way to mount the outboard from our tender vessel. We should be there in thirty minutes. Get your divers in the water. We’ll see how things look when we get there. Buena suerte.”

  “Good luck to you, too, my American friend,” the pilot said. And he meant it more than he knew Stein would ever believe. He signed off, and his satellite-phone rang just as he spotted the Blue’s surface activity on the water. He noticed one boat in particular circling tight around their quarry. He turned around and faced his divers.

  “It is time to go.” The divers gave him the OK sign.

  Héctor answered his sat-phone.

  “Hello—hold on, please,” he said into the mouth-piece without listening.

  He wanted to take the call—it might be his client—but right now he needed to focus on bringing his plane in for a smooth landing. He needed to be far enough away from the crowd of boats so as to have sufficient open space to land, but not so far that his divers would have a time-, air- and energy-consuming swim to reach the Blue.

  Héctor didn’t know what to do about the closely circling boat; that would be his divers’ problem. But the cargo plane he now saw plodding into view ahead was definitely his concern.

&n
bsp; Into the phone, he spat, “One moment, please,” before guiding his plane down for a landing.

  The plane up ahead had distracted him, and he landed at a higher than usual speed. The seaplane bounced once, then dug a wingtip in the water, which wrenched it onto a new course, sending it skipping directly toward the Blue—and the assemblage of boats.

  His men shrieked at him to turn. Héctor leaned on the steering column and gave it full rudder. And for a moment Héctor thought the plane would surely flip. A vision of his daughter lying in the hospital bed passed before him. But soon the aircraft settled into a familiar rhythm and he knew the landing would be only a near-disaster, not an actual one.

  When the engines fell to an idle, however, the sound of angry voices told him he’d come much too close to the boats.

  “Idiot!”

  “What’re you doing!”

  “Trying to kill somebody?”

  Héctor looked to the two-o’clock position from his windshield and saw the Blue roll over and raise an immense pectoral fin as if in greeting. Sheets of water cascaded down the outstretched appendage.

  One of his divers opened the rear door facing the whale.

  “Go, go, go!” Héctor commanded.

  The scuba men hit the water just as the drone boat completed another oval circuit around the whale and headed for the plane.

  The pilot threaded his way between two cabin cruisers, seeking open water. After a wobbly taxi and a false start, where he almost clipped the tuna tower of a large sportfisher, he was airborne once more. Merely being in the air wasn’t enough to escape his problems, however.

  Héctor remembered the satellite-phone and snatched it up. “Bueno,” he said, doing his best to sound to his boss as though everything was under perfect control. He was greeted instead by the sound of his wife’s sobbing. Before she uttered a coherent syllable, he knew. It was a moment he had hoped would never come, but had been half-expecting for a long time.

  He asked her to slow down and tell him. His daughter. In the hospital. Pronounced dead an hour ago.

  “Rosa,” Héctor whispered, crossing himself. The sky seemed to dissolve around his plane. Nothing made any sense. For several seconds, the plane was functionally pilotless. A frenzy of hysterical radio chatter brought him back enough to address his wife. He told her he loved her and that he was on his way home. There was nothing here for him anymore. The money had lost its significance. He needed nothing—he had nothing—except his wife and the simple life they had once lived.

  Héctor felt little loyalty toward his men. They were nameless, unknown to him before their current mission. He and his wife would quickly and quietly relocate to mainland Mexico, where they could live out their lives in peace. Besides, the pilot rationalized as he set a course due south, the loco environmental gringos would be arriving soon in their sailboat with the rest of his men. They would pick up the divers.

  These new thoughts coursing through Héctor's mind now guided him just as the instruments on the dash guided the plane. The only thing standing in the way of these best-laid plans was a C-130 Hercules cargo plane bearing down on his single-engine Cessna. Héctor ended the satellite call with his wife and concentrated on the stream of irate chatter that continued to burst forth from his radio.

  The FBI co-pilot in the cockpit of the Hercules identified himself yet again to the seaplane.

  The fleeing pilot said nothing. Héctor was now running, running from everything—from the men he’d hired to do a job for him, from his boss, from the American FBI and, he supposed, from the death of his only child. Then his mind wandered back to that moonlit rocky beach on Santa Rosa Island to the north. He heard his feet crunching on the gravelly sand as he made his way to the foliage-shrouded plane. Inside, Guillermo lay dying as his hands snuffed the life from his body. Your share of the money will go to your family. They will be taken care of for the rest of their lives. I promise you, I promise you that, he had said.

  This was the only thing which gave him pause. Would he be able to live with himself after not delivering on a promise made to a man he had killed?

  He wasn’t sure.

  Momentarily Héctor considered suicide, kamikaze style. He cackled as he imagined pointing the nose of his plane straight down and barreling full speed into the Blue’s back. Obliterating the tracking device would be satisfactory to his boss, allowing him to accomplish a last mission, a last piece of work in his life that was useful to someone. But then he thought of his wife, so utterly alone right now, waiting for him to return home.

  He had just steeled his resolve to fly back to Baja when the FBI plane buzzed him, close. His only consolation was the fact that they probably wouldn’t want to shoot him down over such a crowded coastal area.

  “Cessna seaplane, there is an airport on Catalina. Approach 127.4 at altitude 1,500 feet. We are ordering you to land there, now. Repeat . . .”

  Catalina’s Airport in the Sky was an asphalt landing strip with a restaurant, souvenir shop, and taxi service. Occupying a grassy plateau atop Catalina’s highest point, it was the only place for planes to land on the island.

  Héctor struggled with the decision to land and be detained, or continue flying south and hope they didn’t shoot him down. He was nearing a panic state. He felt the way he thought drivers attempting to run from police cars felt as they drove and drove, unsure of what to do next, but also not ready to stop and confront the consequences of their actions.

  AVALON PLEASURE PIER,

  CATALINA ISLAND

  The submarine Deep View was taking on a full load of paying passengers at the end of the Avalon Pleasure Pier. Ernie collected hefty cash-only payments for what the sub’s captain, Walter Johnson, described as an “off-the-books specialty dive,” meaning that his business partners who had invested in the sub would not have to know about it unless it was a success. To the passengers, the ride had been billed as an underwater whale watch.

  Ernie had no trouble raising sufficient interest. Shortly after his talk with Walter in The Pelican’s Nest, he’d run home to shave, gargle mouthwash, and put on a mostly clean T-shirt. Then he had raced his battered and hastily repaired golf cart down to the waterfront where he began soliciting vacationers for submarine rides to see the wired whale. Yes, that’s right, my island friends, the adventure of a lifetime leaving right now!

  Enjoying an eight-beer buzz, his gregarious demeanor aided his rapport with potential customers. In fact, the sub was presently at its licensed maximum passenger capacity of sixty-four, with a long line of eager tourists still clamoring to be let aboard.

  Walter, who had been readying the sub in its control cabin below, stuck his head up through the crew’s entrance at the bow of the craft. Normally the sub carried a crew of four—pilot, co-pilot, and two cabin crew. For this trip, however, it was only Walter and Ernie, the latter of whom had never even been in the sub, much less worked on it. With Walter’s regular crew abroad, they were short on time to get a full crew ready, yet wanted to maximize profits.

  Walter scrambled up on deck and trotted over to Ernie. “We’re full down there, buddy. We’ve got to turn the rest away for this trip.”

  Ernie looked at the long line of families and couples stretching down the pier, seeing lost opportunity. “Aye aye, Captain. Go ahead and start her, I’ll get the lines and the hatch.”

  Walter leaned in closer to make sure no one else would hear. “You sure you know how to close the hatch, Ernie? You remember how I showed you on the diagram? Make sure it’s—”

  “I remember. Don’t worry.”

  Walter gave Ernie a hard stare, then smiled as he looked up at the waiting passengers. He could hear excited talk emanating from the main cabin. Those already on board were catching their first glimpses of marine life as bright orange Garibaldi—California’s state marine fish—darted past the portholes and around the pier pilings.

  “Okay, Ernie, let’s rock and roll.”

  Ernie gave Walter a thumbs-up and watched him until he ha
d retreated back down into the control cabin. Then he turned back to the waiting line. “Folks, we’re about full at this point, but we do have standing-room-only space available, at a reduced ticket price, of course. If you’re interested, the first twenty with the money get the spots.”

  There was a minor stampede as those who didn’t understand what it would actually be like to stand for an hour in an understaffed, overcrowded metal tube stepped forward. Ernie let twenty more people on before informing those remaining that they may be able to make the second trip, provided the wired whale was kind enough to stick around.

  Then he clamped down the hatch as he had been instructed, hopped up onto the pier to undo first the stern and then the bow lines, and finally descended the bow ladder into the control cabin. Though Ernie had just closed the main cabin hatch, Walter insisted on securing the control cabin’s hatch himself.

  After asking Ernie four times if he’d closed the other hatch correctly, Walter activated the sub’s thrusters.

  CHAPTER 41

  OFF THE CATALINA ISLAND COAST

  With the excitement of a seaplane plowing through their midst, most people on the boats failed to notice the two divers now surface-swimming toward the Blue. As the divers prepared to descend, the drone boat completed another lap around the whale and headed toward them.

  Instead of veering off on its course around the Blue, the ASV careened straight toward the divers, who attempted a rapid descent. One of the divers managed to submerge just deep enough to avoid the oncoming boat. But the other was struck, his skull smashed by the prow of the robotic sentry. The sound of the impact was so loud in the surviving divers’ headset that he was rendered temporarily deaf. He couldn’t force himself to look away from the body of his friend slowly turning in a spreading cloud of blood just beneath the surface. Then he broke his gaze and spastically propelled himself into the depths to avoid the same fate.

  High above him in the Hercules, a technician seated inside the ASV’s control van smiled to himself as he used a joystick to take the drone on another pass around the Blue.