The W was distinct. Though it was part of a natural rock formation, it almost looked like someone had placed the big letter there, like God had reached his hand down and set the letter on the shoreline.
“Am I making too much of it?” Angel asked, treading water, trying to contain her excitement. “Am I seeing things?”
I didn’t answer. I just started power-swimming toward it. I’m a pretty good swimmer (my size helps), yet Angel stayed right with me. She was as sleek and fit as a dolphin, gliding fast through the water. I had the feeling that this girl was keeping herself in shape in a big way. Anxious to be accepted, highly critical of herself and a terrible judge of her own worth, she had unknowingly made herself into something remarkable.
It didn’t take us long to get there.
W marked the spot, I kept thinking. It sounded like a line a pirate might say. What will we find when we get there, I wondered, a hidden treasure of some sort?
The W actually formed the opening of a crevice in the rocky shoreline, which was about six or seven feet high here. We pulled ourselves up onto the rocks and went inside. The walls looked the same all over—craggy and rocky. Was there something inside one of the cracks in the walls? We started searching. We searched for a long time. We didn’t really know exactly what we were looking for—though I had the feeling that if I saw it, I would recognize it instantly. But the rocks were so uniform that nothing stood out, the cracks were only inches deep and empty, and the surface was so hard that you couldn’t pry any of it off or break into it to see what was in or behind it. Before long, the sun was getting low in the Caribbean sky. It was no use. We’d have to come back with lights.
We returned to Goldeneye, swimming on our backs, looking at the W and the crevice behind it as we moved away. As we got farther from it, the whole thing became dim and then went out of sight. I began to wonder. Had it really looked like a W or had we imagined it? We couldn’t afford to be wrong. By late tomorrow morning we had to leave Goldeneye. We couldn’t even try to stay here secretly after check-out time. There was just too much security. We’d never get away with it, and any attempt might land us in serious trouble.
The Walther PPK wasn’t the W, this rock formation might be a dead end too, and how could William Stephenson possibly be what or who we were looking for? He was long gone from earth, and I had no tangible evidence to connect him in any way to my grandfather.
I had to look somewhere else for W. But now I was down to my last few hours.
We stayed on our backs the entire distance to the beach. It was a relaxing way to swim, and I needed to try to be calm because I was starting to freak out. My mission had utterly failed. I had spent nearly all the money and only discovered that my grandfather was a horrible human being who had tried to kill me. What would I tell the other guys? Could I harbor such a secret about Grandpa from Mom, from everyone, for the rest of my life? It was mission unaccomplished.
As we reached shallow water, we stood up, gave one last look out across the surface toward the nowvanished W and turned toward the beach.
“Good evening, you two,” said a voice. I recognized the smooth Bermudian tone.
John.