The Emissary (19 page)

“The thing about seasickness is—the more you think about it, the worse it gets,” Jimbo said. “So stay here with us—we’ll put you right in no time.” Reluctantly, she yielded to Jimbo’s advice. “You get comfortable here, a little TV … Fin right here. Alberto!”

The chef popped out from the galley, where he was preparing dinner.

“Bring some saltines for our guest! Miss Jamie be havin’ the green meanies.”

Alberto came back out from the galley with a dish of saltines and he stood over her, making sure she at least nibbled on one, which she did, and convincing her that she needed to eat at least one or two, if she could get them down. “I made a beautiful
melanzane alla
parmigiana
tonight for everyone—it’s vegetarian, too! You just tell me when you are ready to eat—any time of the night, and I will warm it up for you,” he said.

Eggplant? What possibly could be heavier on her stomach than that? The mere thought of it made her feel like leaning over the railing.

The dinner bell sounded and everyone took a seat at the table, with the exception of Bobby, who was on duty at the helm, and Jimbo, who went to housekeeping to grab a blanket for Jamie. While the others started eating, he wrapped her up in it and stayed with her, making sure she was comfortable. He didn’t want her to run back to the cabin—that was the last place she needed to be. It was at the back of the ship: she would feel the motion even more there and she would be closer to the fumes, even if only a faint trace actually made it up to main deck.

Fin, who at last had calmed down from the frenetic behavior of the day, stayed with her, instead of following Jimbo to the table. They healed each other, just being quiet together. No amount of persuasion from his master would lure Fin away from Jamie; he just lay there, close, holding her in the protective field of his energy, and becoming more calm and relaxed in hers.

Domenico served up Alberto’s delicious fare. Sam was right: in a perfect world, the cooks
are
Italian. Spirits were high and the conversation flowed, with Jimbo always at the center of attention, recounting another one of his famous stories. He had them all in stitches, telling a long tale about getting caught with his pants down, making love to somebody’s wife in a port halfway around the world. They loved him and humored him, knowing that a lot of his stories were mere fantasies and that others were built around secrets that would never be told.

Jamie felt like such an outsider sitting there, bundled up in her blanket. She couldn’t help but notice how much more relaxed
they all seemed without her presence at the table—as if her being amongst them stripped the fun out of their whole dynamic. She knew she was perceived as being different from them and, then again, these were mostly people who had spent so much time together they had formed solid relationships. She was the new entry—still disconnected. There were obstacles to overcome and she knew that it wouldn’t happen overnight.

By the time dinner was over, she was amazed at how much better she felt. The beer and crackers trick worked: not enough to regain her appetite, especially not for eggplant parmesan, but enough to be over the nausea, and she was thrilled for that.

Jimbo joined her, once dinner was done. “The beer, right?”

“The beer did it,” she replied, grateful for his help.

“Don’t forget, Miss Jamie, I’ve got your back.”

One by one, people left the table. Domenico cleared it immediately and then he and Alberto disappeared into the galley, where they still had to prepare to serve the crew in their mess hall.

Brady stood by his dining chair. “Hey, anybody up for some casino action?”

Sam, Liz, Doc, and Philippe all signaled that they were in, while Jimbo excused himself. He retired to the captain’s chair, seated across from Jamie.

“What about Alberto and Domenico?” Brady asked.

“They’re tied up for a while,” Doc said. “They can come in later.”

Everybody sat back down. Brady got out the deck, chips, and a notepad and started divvying up the chips, keeping track of everything on paper. Stakes could get high sometimes, on those long evenings out in the middle of the ocean.

With the game under way, Jamie and Jimbo tuned out the others and got into a deep discussion.

“I hear you spent some time with Sam. All clear?” he asked.

“All too clear.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning Mat forgot to mention that you had weapons-grade sonar equipment on this ship.”

“Weapons? Sonar isn’t a weapon, Miss Jamie.”

“Tell that to the whales and dolphins who are getting their brains blown out of their heads.”

“Aww, now, that’s a little bit drastic …”

“You’re damned right it’s drastic, Captain.” Jamie was intense, and her anguish was palpable. “These are sentient beings.”

“You know what? I’m thinking it must be a real bitch, feeling and seeing all the things you do. I don’t think I’d want the vision you got.”

“You don’t have to be psychic to feel pain. Or to care.”

Philippe overheard them talking from the table. “Deal me out a minute.” He walked over to where Jimbo and Jamie were sitting. “Is this a private conversation?”

“Hell, no!” Jimbo motioned to him to sit down and join them. “Got no private conversations on this ship that I know of.” Jimbo went over to the bar to pour himself a drink.

“So, what exactly is your role here, Philippe?” Jamie said, in a low voice.

“I work for the Canadian Marine Wildlife Preservation Department,” he replied. “Our concern is to study how marine organisms interact with each other and the physical environment—especially as it is affected by human behavior.”

“Do you monitor the effect of sonar as well?”

“We study the overall impact, I guess you could say.”

Jimbo returned with his scotch, and another beer for Jamie.

“And wouldn’t you agree that with a huge Orca sanctuary so close and migration lines cutting through our trajectory, that sonar would be disruptive?”

“Say what?” Jimbo said, listening in.

“We haven’t got enough data to conclude that sonar testing is damaging to the whales,” said Philippe. He looked up at Jimbo, knowing he had to be careful how he talked to Jamie: careful not to get political.

“How much data do you need? This ship can blast out over three hundred hertz—what does that do to them? To their music?”

“Their music?”

“You will agree there are all kinds of musical emissions coming from the Cetaceans?”

“Well, sure. I suppose.”

“And will you admit that a lot of whale and dolphin beachings regularly occur after Navy sonar tests?”

“That could be one of the reasons. We really don’t know for certain.” It was clear Philippe felt pressured.

“With all due respect for our military, there’s no question that they don’t seem too concerned about the effect of their secret weapons on the environment.”

Sam glanced over at them, as he drew a card from the dealer. “Sounds like the conversation is getting a little heavy over there,” he said to Liz, under his breath.

Jimbo bristled. “Now hold on a minute, Miss Jamie. Nobody is going to be talking against the Navy on my ship. I don’t want to hear it. The military is trying to protect the world—not destroy it.”

“Really? They’re doing a pretty bad job so far, I’d say,” she said, standing up to him. “Seems like all the military knows how to do is destroy, Captain. What we need protection from
is
the military—are you sure you haven’t got that backwards?”

“They’re out there protecting the borders, trying to hold things together,” he said, looking into his glass.

“What borders? I thought the term ‘international waters’ spoke for itself.”

“Damn it, Jamie. There is a lot that has to go on to protect against terrorism, let’s leave it at that.”

“Oh yeah, right, I forgot. The terrorists. What is it—one if by land, and two if by sea? And who is protecting us against the protectors, Jim? Who is protecting the whales and the dolphins, whose only borders are the curves and jagged edges of the Earth’s landmasses? Don’t you understand that, for them, there is no escape from sonar weapons?”

Clearly unwilling to get embroiled in a conversation that would find no way to resolution, Philippe got up. “On that note, I’m back in the game. Excuse me.” He walked back over to the table.

Liz threw in her cards. “You’ll have to excuse me, guys … I’m getting a headache. I’m out.” She served herself a cup of tea from the buffet. Sam studied her from behind. She smiled seductively at him as she walked out.

Sam looked at Jamie with the usual air of disapproval. He threw his cards into the pile and asked to be cashed out. “I’m out, too.” He said his goodnights and walked out after Liz.

“You see there?” Jimbo said. “You went and spoiled the party. It serves no purpose talking like that … no purpose whatsoever.”

Doc and Brady tallied up the chips and put things back in the cabinet, just as Alberto and Domenico came out to join the game.

“What happened?” Alberto asked.

Doc, a man of few words, just said, “Game over.”

Jamie leaned closer to Jimbo and spoke straight from the heart, staring him in the eyes. “I do see things, Jim. Some are in the shadows, some are in the light—and it isn’t always the first impression, but I do see behind the curtain. I see the Hidden.”

Jimbo leaned even closer. “That’s cool. You go ahead and see what you need to see … but remember, we aren’t monsters out here. If you want to get along with everybody, you’re gonna have to lighten up and stop preaching. You make it sound like you’re
working against us, instead of for us. We’re all just doing our jobs—just like you. It’s not easy living out on the water for weeks on end. People out here, see, they don’t want to go there.”

She stood up, preparing to walk out. “Who will care about the whales and the dolphins, Jimbo? Who
is
willing to go there?” Lost in her own thoughts, Jamie said goodnight and then left Jimbo sitting there. She walked out, down the hall to her suite, never even noticing that Fin was following not so far behind.

Back in her suite, she couldn’t wait to go to bed and forget the tensions of a difficult day. As she was brushing her teeth, preparing to go to bed, she peered out the bathroom window, amazed to see whales out on the horizon, breaching in the moonlight. She rushed into the bedroom, to her camera, and snapped a picture just in time, before they disappeared from sight, and then she turned off the light, and fell asleep.

Unlike that first night in harbor, it was a fitful, nightmarish sleep, one that had her tossing and turning wildly all through the night. In a vivid dream, Jamie relived the horror of the tragedy back in New Zealand, with the dying whales. She was standing on the wet sand, shivering, in a soaking-wet nightgown. Hundreds of whales and dolphins lay dying on the beach, where the tide had receded, and more kept coming in, throwing themselves onto the sand, dying all around her. She walked up to one of the whales, whose calf was lying there beside her, and implored her to return to the water. The whale looked at her and started crying, and so did the calf—they just looked at her in complete desperation. Jamie pleaded. She implored them to turn back to the ocean and find their way back to living.

She tried to push the whale back out into the water, but of course there was no way she could move the immense body.

She felt the cold of the whale’s death overtake her own body, and a voice uttered the words
“Beware the Ides of March.”
And then,
an enormous explosion sounded, louder than the booming blast of a bomb. Jamie saw blood oozing from the whale’s blowhole. She tried to stop the flow, throwing her arms over the whale, but she was already dead. And so was her baby. The dead whale stared at her from the cold, gray beach, the light in her eyes dimmed forever, with Jamie standing next to her, covered in her blood.

With that horrible image in her waking mind, the memory flooding back from the beach in New Zealand, Jamie woke up, crying. She began to sob uncontrollably, feeling the pain so deep within her she could barely breathe. There was no one to call, no one she could talk to. Surely no one on the ship would understand, and no one seemed sensitive enough to even care.

She got up, afraid of sleep, and took a hot shower, as if she still had the blood on her body—so real was that image. Wrapped in the bathrobe, she searched the suite’s small kitchen, where she found an electric teapot in one of the cabinets. She took a box of herb teas from her bag and made herself a cup, and then just sat quietly on the sofa, hoping dawn was not long in coming. So many thoughts flooded her mind—all sad and despairing. She drank her tea and then crawled back into bed, so tired, trying to calm her spirit.

Jamie reached for her camera to look at the picture she had taken earlier of whales out on the horizon. To her amazement, what was looking back at her in the frame was not distant whales in the moonlight, but rather an eerie close-up of a whale’s eye, looking right at her. She stared at the camera, incredulous. How was it possible? What was she seeing? Was she in a lucid dream?

She sat bolt upright in bed, wide awake—this was no dream. She turned the camera off and back on again, and there it was still—imprinted on the camera’s screen: the eye of the whale.

And a voice that echoed through the hallways of her mind kept repeating and repeating:
Beware the Ides of March
.

Jamie felt caged and restless in the night, waiting for morning to lift her from the burden of a dreamscape filled with death. Despite the luxurious surroundings, she felt uncomfortable, a captive guest, of sorts, on a ship headed nowhere: cut off from the world. She stepped out to the terrace, briefly, peering into the night. She looked out upon nothing but darkness, with not a sound, not a light—only the lapping of the waves, hitting up against the ship. From their position in the great Pacific, with no sight of land in any direction, she felt unbearably confined and restricted. She realized then that a month at sea, aboard
The Deepwater
, was going to be impossible, and that her deal with Mat was ill conceived from the onset. She would have to make amends, but her instincts told her that she would be getting off the ship well before April, as she had originally agreed. Everything about it was wrong from the start: her first encounter with Sam, the tension, her dream, the ominous eye in the camera … and that visceral sense of doom, hovering over her, like storm clouds gathering over dark fog. She tried to shake it, but she could not.