Sea of Greed

Reaching up, she stretched out of the water as far as possible and pressed the device against the flat skin of the aircraft’s tail. It bonded instantly. In thirty seconds, it would be impossible to pry off without a crowbar.

Dropping back down into the water, Priya disappeared beneath the surface without a splash. She swam beneath the aircraft, using only her arms to pull her along, before reactivating the dive suit.

She swam past the nose, made a half turn and set course for home. With a great sense of accomplishment, she left the amphibious aircraft behind.

• • •

AS PRIYA SWAM away from the Monarch, Tessa Franco was in her office on the aircraft’s upper deck, dealing with her chief engineer.

“I’m not talking to your investors again,” Brian Yates informed her. “Not if you’re going to have me lie about the state of our technology.”

Yates was a genius designer and brilliant chemist, he was also stubborn and had very few interpersonal skills. If he hadn’t been so highly regarded by the tech community, Tessa wouldn’t have trotted him out in front of her possible benefactors.

“They’re not my investors,” she said. “They’re our investors and we won’t have a company without them.”

“We won’t have a company with them,” Yates countered. “Not the way things are going.”

“What are you saying?”

“Exactly what I’ve been saying for months,” he snapped. “The fuel cells don’t work. Certainly not as well as you’re representing. And they never will, not without extensive design changes. They’ll also cost twice as much to manufacture as you’re claiming. You realize there will be no profit at all on the final product. And, I’m not going to stand up in front of a bunch of investors who trust me and tell them otherwise. I have a reputation to protect as well.”

Tessa realized Yates had an overinflated view of his importance, to the point where she’d caught him referring to the fuel cells and the company as if he were the driving force.

“Listen to me, Yates, and listen to me carefully,” she said. “It’s your job to fix that. I’m protecting you, not the other way around. Everything you’ve worked for, everything you’ve been promised, it all goes away if the world suspects there might be a problem with what we’re building. Do you understand?”

Yates was undeterred. “There’s a difference between keeping it quiet and lying. I’m not going to lie anymore. You can find someone else to be your mouthpiece. The next time someone asks me about the system, I’m telling them the truth.”

As Tessa stared, Yates took his conference ID badge and tossed it at her feet.

She ignored the tantrum, her blood running cold instead of hot.

Yates seemed disappointed. He turned his back on her and walked out. She allowed him to reach the hall before pulling out a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .380 automatic.

“Mr. Yates,” she said coldly. “I will not allow you to ruin me.”

Yates turned, saw the pistol but never got the chance to retract his resignation.

Tessa fired repeatedly, hitting him four times squarely in the chest and sending him to the deck in a pool of spreading blood.

The gunshots echoed through the aircraft and the commotion brought Woods down the corridor.

He stopped and stared at Yates’s body. “What…?”

“Don’t ask,” she said. “Just get rid of him. Take him out to sea and dump him.”

Woods looked at the body and shook his head. “Fine,” he said. “But, we have another problem.”

“Seems to be the night for them,” Tessa said with a sigh. “What is it now?”

“A diver,” Woods said. “A woman, by the looks of it. She swam underneath the plane and then back out into the harbor. We caught sight of her on one of the underwater cameras. She attached something to the fuselage near the tail. I have one of the men checking it out.”

“Tell me you tracked her,” Tessa said.

“We didn’t have time to get a swimmer in the water, but I tracked her with one of the underwater drones. She swam back into Great Sound at a fairly rapid pace. We trailed her to a yacht named Lucid Dream.”

“That’s Hatcher’s yacht,” Tessa growled.

“The investor?”

Tessa shook her head. Things were going from bad to worse. “Something tells me he’s not an investor. Get your men together. Get rid of Yates, then I want Hatcher and this woman brought back here.”

“And if they don’t want to come?”

Tessa glared at him. “I’m not sending you to deliver an invitation.”

39

LNG CARRIER, AT A DEPTH OF ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY FEET

KURT OPENED the watertight door to the control sphere with deliberate caution. There was no hiss of air, which told him the two spheres were kept at equal pressure and that there was also no one directly on the other side.

He stepped through onto the same type of metal grating that had been used in the docking sphere. Ahead of him stood racks of equipment and machinery, all connected by a maze of pipes that ran overhead. Pumps and cooling units could be heard humming, while a stack of the orange and gray fuel cells he’d seen on Tessa’s plane ran along the left side of the sphere.

“No shortage of power,” he whispered.