Buried At Sea (31 page)

"In a minute."

"You have to eat."

"Can I bring you some juice?"

"Get your breakfast. I want to talk to you."

Jim scraped the pan, heated a fresh splash of oil, poured in the second batch of eggs, and scrambled them with slow

swoops of the flexible spatula the way Will had taught him. Then he grabbed a fork and carried the pan to the door of Will's cabin.

"Get a plate, for Christ's sake. You look like a—"

"Jesus, you sound like my mother. I'm tired and I'm hungry and I don't feel like washing another plate when I'm done."

"There are two reasons to use a plate rather than stuff your face from a frying pan. One, order is good for the soul—particularly on a boat, where it is all too easy to turn into a slob with the kind of sloppy habits that can get you killed."

"Next time," said Jim. "What's up?"

"Two, if you eat from the pan, the pan will continue to cook the eggs and your excellently cooked breakfast will turn hard and dry."

Jim went back to the galley, used a spatula to transfer the eggs onto a plate, then returned to Will's cabin. Will watched him eat and waited until Jim was done to speak

"I haven't been totally honest with you."

"I've heard this before."

"Well, you're going to hear it again. It's important. I may have misled you a little if I suggested that you were not in danger."

Jim yawned. "I better catch some sleep so I'm ready for the wind, if it ever comes back."

"You're not listening?'

"Will, you could confess to me all day and at the end I'd know everything but the truth." Will returned a beaten, weary look. "Humor me, please." He sounded frightened. Jim turned his full attention to the old man.

"Do you remember that I asked you to take my body to Buenos Aeries if I die?"

"You're not going to die:'

"If I die, take it to Angela. She knows what to do. There's a list of addresses in the drawer under the chart table. Angela's lab and a safe house in BA and some friends who can help."

"Considering our reception in Africa, I'm not sure I want to meet your friends."

"These are different."

"What if your friends can't or won't help me?"

"If something happens to Angela, bail out and head for the Falklands."

"The Falkland Islands?" The Falklands were a thousand miles from Buenos Aires. So far south that they were practically off the chart.

"There's a woman there, she can help you. Her farm is marked on my Falklands chart."

"And what if this friend can't help?"

"Run south, kid. Run deep south. Don't stop till you hit Antarctica." Jim yawned, not believing they were having this conversation. "What happens in Antarctica?"

"There's a place for the CC Kid—"

"I am not the CC Kid. Not anymore. If I were, you'd be fucking dead already."

"Sorry. From now on we'll call you Cockpit Man. You should see it down there, Jim. The sun lights the icebergs from inside all pearly green—of course, there won't be a sun when you're there. Winter's coming. Dark as a coal mine."

"So what happens when they find me there? I go to the South Pole?"

"No one will find you there."

'Will, we're a thousand miles from anywhere and you look like hell and I'm so tired I can'

t see straight, much less deal with your fantasy. I'm going to sleep. Wake me if we sink."

"I've written my will."

"Will? What are you talking about?"

"It's in the nav station drawer. What it says is when I die you get everything."

"What are you talking about?"

"I am leaving you everything I own."

"You're making me your heir?" Tired as he was, Jim placed his plate at his feet and stood up straight. His mind was swarming with opposites. Will was jerking him around again. Will meant it. Will was rich. Will said he was broke. Will wasn't going to die. Will looked like he had died already.

Will said, "I see I have your attention at last."

"How can I be your heir?"

"I have no kids of my own and I'm sure as hell not leaving anything to my ex-wives."

"This feels a little strange."

"Don't get too excited. There's no real money to speak of. But you can have all my possessions and all my royalty rights—which includes Sentinel." Good luck cashing that in, Jim thought. And then, as if from a distance, like thunder over the water, he heard Will say, "And Hustle."

"You're giving me the boat'?"

"I am willing you my yacht."

Jim looked forward, up the passage to the main cabin. Light was pouring in the ports, glowing on the varnished wood. Pretty to look at and a powerful machine. He could feel her pulse through the bulkhead. She was heeling just enough, shoving surely through the scrambled seas. There were times when he hated being stuck on her, but she was a fine and beautiful object.

No. It was too crazy. Besides, he couldn't afford to run her. He'd seen the bills in Will's desk: thousands a year just to keep her in trim; a rich man's toy. As he had done so often in their conversations, Will read Jim's mind. "You could charter her out. They'll pay a premium for luxury. People go nuts for the workmanship. They want excellent food, first-class accommodations, a pleasant captain, and his beautiful first-mate-slash-wife."

"Sounds great, Will, but I can't. Shannon couldn't do it." "Why the hell not?"

"She can't walk."

"What do you mean?"

"She's crippled, Will. She can't walk more than a few steps on crutches."

"You never said an

ng. . . ." He trailed off, his expression hurt. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I didn't want to talk about it, Will."

"I thought we were friends."

"Well, we were. We are. We became friends. But you're also my boss and I didn't want to talk about it."

"But of all things not to talk about."

"The trip was the time to think about it, not talk." But he did have to ask himself the same question. "I did not want to admit to you that as much as I try to ignore the fact, Shannon's affliction is central to any future we might share."

"That poor kid. Poor both of you. Christ on a—You poor—"

"We're okay," Jim cut in. "It's not like she's paralyzed or anything. We have a sex life—a great sex life—had . . "I'm really sorry, Jim. . . . What happened?"

"She got creamed in a ski accident. Multiple compound fractures, both legs, knees . . . you name it, it shattered."

"Where were you? Oh, I get it. You came later. You were the physical therapist."

"Something like that ... They pinned what they could. She's got more titanium in her than an F-16, but . . . She's a very strong woman, but sometimes she's hanging by strength alone. So I don't see her doing yacht charters."

"Why don't you let Shannon decide what she can and can't do?"

"How could she even brace herself against the roll of the boat?" Jim retorted angrily.

"Decide together when Hustle is yours. If . . ."

"If what?"

"If you put my head in the freezer and deliver it to Angela."

"I told you, I can't do that."

"This is a dying man's last wish."

"You're not—"

•

"I am, Jim. I surely am. Today, tonight, tomorrow. I'm a goner. The infection is rampaging through me. It's burning me up. I'm sailing on fire like a dead Viking." He lunged at Jim and grabbed his arm; there was desperate power in his clawlike grip. " Jim, you must help me undo what I started."

"What are you talking about?"

"The McVays are the last people on the planet who should have the power of my processor. Whatever you do, you must not let them get it."

"I promise you, Will. I'll do everything I can to keep it for myself?'

"Promise you'll take my head to Angela."

"I promise. Now go to sleep."

What Val McVay found most maddening about Will Spark's e-mail encryption scheme—

aside from the fact that she hadn't been able to crack any of the letters she had intercepted—was that the gibberish that covered her monitor made it appear as if her computer had crashed. It made Notes or Domino look like a crossword puzzle, and if you didn't attack it carefully, she had discovered the hard way, it bit back with a virus that took a week to eradicate. It wasn't possible that Will himself had devised it. It was the product, she was sure, of one of his talented Indian engineers.

As a scientist and an engineer, Val held a bred-in-thebone belief that ever-expanding computing power meant that there was no such thing as an undecipherable code. Gang together enough McVay-Hyper workstations and write some hot cracking code and eventually you could decipher anything.

But even Val had to admit that if there was ever going to be an uncrackable, utterly secure secret communication, it would involve developing quantum cryptography coupled to a randomly keyed onetime code similar to the one Will Spark used in his email correspondence with his Sentinel engineers and, just recently, Dr. Angela Heinman Ruiz of Rio de Janeiro.

Having failed to crack e-mails intercepted to and from Will's engineers, Val knew she hadn't a hope of reading the contents of the long messages he had exchanged with the South American doctor. A clue to his destination? Perhaps.

Cross-checking revealed that Dr. Ruiz was a plastic surgeon. But she had practiced microsurgery years ago, before

she went for the money. And although the booming Brazilian economy kept her busy most of the time in Rio, she had a second practice in Buenos Aires. The problem was, Dr. Ruiz was currently in neither of her offices.

JIM WENT UP on deck and trimmed the main and the jib. All he could do was try to make the boat go faster.

To hell with the McVays. They were Will's problem. His problem was simpler, his goal clear: sail Hustle close enough to Buenos Aires to radio a medevac helicopter. A helicopter would save two days in the race to get Will into a hospital. Sail the boat to Buenos Aires. Nurse Will along. Helicopter to a hospital.

The wind was edging west, moving into their teeth, - which meant beating into it, sailing close hauled. Will had shown him a trick of flying a third sail, an inner jib or staysail, from the jackstay, which angled between the foredeck and a point two-thirds up the mast. In theory the boat would go faster with a single big headsail, but Hustle, Will had taught him, didn't always play by the rules.

If he could get the wind flowing just right through the narrow slots between the two headsails and the main, she might go faster. The sail was in the forepeak and the forehatch was dogged down tight, so he had to go down the main hatch again and head forward.

"What's up?" Will called.

"I'm going to try a staysail."

"Wear your harness."

He found the sail. It would be easier to take it up the forward hatch. But the bow was rising and falling and spray was flying heavily over the foredeck. A new sense that from now on he alone would run the boat made him cautious. What if he opened the hatch just as the bow dipped under a big sea? With good luck he'd only get the forepeak wet. With bad luck several tons of seawater would come blasting in. With really bad luck he'd be knocked down and injured so badly he couldn't sail.

Ludicrous. He was thinking like an old man.

Nonetheless, he dragged the bag through the main cabin and up the main hatch into the cockpit, donned his harness, clipped onto the jackline, and dragged the sail forward. He pulled it out of the bag, sorted top from bottom—Will had marked the difficult-to-distinguish head and clew with indelible ink—and shackled the tack to a pad eye set in the deck at the foot of the jackstay. Then he hanked the sail onto the stay with snap hooks and shackled a halyard to its head. He bent two lines to the clew and led them through blocks and back to the cockpit. And with those sheets ready to control the sail, he winched it into the sky.

It slammed around in the wind, crackling and thundering, until he made his way back to the cockpit, where he took three wraps of a sheet around a portside winch and cranked until the Dacron sail was as taut as the main and the forward jib. He eased the main a hair and hauled the jib in two clicks of the winch, and when he finally looked at the knot meter it told him what his body already knew. He'd increased the boat's speed by almost half a knot.

With triumph came sudden hope and the powerful belief that if he just drove the boat hard and true he could keep Will alive until he had sailed him within helicopter range of Buenos Aires.

He fiddled with the auto-helm until he had it responding properly to the additional sail. Then he ducked below to feed Will and get some hot coffee. Will was sprawled on the couch in the main cabin. He thrust his arm toward Jim and pointed at his heart-rate monitor.

"I'll bet you've never seen numbers like these."

Jim looked. His own heart jumped. Will's pulse had fallen to forty beats a minute. Jim said, "I'll radio Angela."

He switched on the single sideband. If he couldn't get Angela, he would broadcast a distress call on 2182. Some doctor somewhere would tell him what to do. Shoot Will full of Adrenalin or something.

Will laughed.

"What?" Jim turned from the radio. There was a finality in Will's tone, a firm sound of resolution, like a solid door swinging shut.

"I just had a wonderful revelation: when all is lost, there is nothing left to lose." Jim leaned toward him.

"You'll love Buenos Aires, Jim. Most hospitable people you've ever met, half Italian, half Spanish, most of 'em speak English, and they'll give you the shirt off their back, only they've got an inferiority complex, so when they ask what you think of Buenos Aires just tell 'em you never saw a city like it. And don't ever talk about the Falklands War or the '

disappeared' the military killed during the dirty, war against the left. Jim, don't forget our deal. Here's the serrated knife."

He extended the scalloped blade. Just as he did, an errant swell smacked Hustle on her port side, staggering the sloop. The knife fell from Will's hand and landed straight up on its rounded point, stuck squarely between two planks of the teak deck. Will peered blearily at the quivering blade. "Amazing," he whispered. "What are the odds?" Swaying, he leaned forward and began to sing,