Deek drove out to the resort and went to the ballroom. It had almost fully morphed into an exhibition hall for The Great American Boat Show. A week of standing in a boring booth, handing out leaflets and stickers. No one really cared about the Department of Transportation or what they did. They would only care if the department wasn’t there.
A UPS guy arrived with a trolley load of boxes and Deek signed for them. He placed the boxes of brochures behind his curtained table and then erected the popup banners at the back of the space. There really wasn’t a lot more to do. The corporate event would start the following day and the people around him looked so excited. They didn’t know what Deek knew.
He was no use to anyone here. There was a terrorist on the loose and Deek was the only one committed enough to track him down. Şeytan was out there, boating around, scoping out the territory, blowing things up.
“To hell with this,” said Deek. He ripped open a box of brochures and placed a stack on the table, then he did the same with the stickers. There was a box of beer koozies that he left under the table—they felt like hot commodities. Another box was marked pens, so he threw a stack of those out too, and put a couple in his pocket. You never knew when you might have to jot something down.
Deek looked around the exhibition hall, then he turned and walked out of the hotel and back to his car. He needed a boat. And he knew just where to get one.
* * *
Angler puttered down Pine Island Sound under the cover of a Tampa Bay Buccaneers ball cap and souvenir shop knockoff Ray-Bans. The day remained clear with a few clouds out over the Gulf, and the sparkle off the water made the sunglasses mandatory. He motored back toward the mouth of the river but this time instead of banking toward the resort, he eased the jon boat to starboard around Little Shell Island and made for Iona Cove.
He passed a peninsula with apartment-type buildings on it that his map told him was a retirement village and slowed before he reached the canal that cut into the naturally protected marina of the St. Charles Yacht Club.
After killing the motor, Angler slowly let out the anchor. It didn’t go far. The depth could have been no more than six or seven feet. The water was a murky copper color but he wanted to know exactly what conditions were like under the surface.
Angler glanced around to see if anyone was watching but he had selected his position well. He was five hundred feet off the shore that was nothing more than mangrove scrub. He was sheltered from the view of the retirement village by the curvature of the cove and from eyes to the east by Iona Point.
He dropped his sunglasses in his hat and tucked them into the bow, pulled on some fins, and then hoisted the air cylinder onto his back. The harness was old and neither were much to look at, but Angler wasn’t concerned. The dive shop on Pine Island where he had stolen it clearly kept their old gear in decent repair, and this was not deep-water diving. He checked the regulator and made sure everything was functional. The pressure gauge was ancient but he wasn’t planning on being down for long, or any deeper than he could easily surface in one breath.
Angler pulled the mask over his head and then swiveled around into the water—he feared a back flip might hit bottom. His feet landed on the mud, and he stood with his shoulders out of the water, no more than four feet deep. The shallow water was warm enough to go without a wetsuit, and his chart suggested it wasn’t going to get a lot deeper other than in the boating channel.
He didn’t want to draw attention so he didn’t use a diving flag, instead just finning down and away from the boat. Visibility was poor. He couldn’t see his hands out in front, surrounded by dense brown atmosphere as alien as any far-flung planet. He had to work at staying low enough in the water for his tank to not protrude like a dorsal fin.
Twenty minutes in the murk told Angler that the sand banks and zero visibility would make it hard to navigate without breaking the surface. He cut across the cove toward a tight channel that led from the main river in toward the yacht club. He popped up and found the markers, and seeing no traffic eased into the channel.
It was deeper but narrow. Either side the depth dropped sharply from about four feet to fifteen. Visibility wasn’t much better but he found he could use the channel walls to navigate. He made his way out into the main river and then came up at the edge of the channel when he heard the increasing hum of motorboats around him.
As his head broke the water he realized the channel took a crazy turn—perhaps around some underwater impediment—and he found himself toward the middle of the new section. He heard the sound of the speedboat and kicked around to see the white hull hurtling toward him. He had figured the speed limit would be low to no wake but this boat was planing across the water like he was on open water.
Straight at Angler.
His instinct was to not be seen so he didn’t try to swim out of the way. He dove hard, kicking toward the channel floor. He pumped his legs and heard the outboard motor roar toward him. He was diving into darkness when the boat hit his fins. The hull clipped the tips and pushed his legs down out of the way of the prop, and for a moment Angler thanked his luck.
Then the wake hit him. The props caused more turmoil below water than they did above, and Angler was flipped over and tossed around as if in a washing machine. As the boat passed and the thrashing died down, Angler was disoriented. Was he facing up or facing down? He didn’t know. He put his hand to his mouth to make sure the regulator was still in place and touched his lips. Then he realized he was holding his breath, the mouthpiece having been knocked out.
He didn’t panic. He reached for his octopus and found it had unclipped from the harness. Both hoses were floating somewhere around him, possibly behind his head where they attached to his tank.
Angler could feel himself sinking. He had the sense that his kit was dragging him down. The brown atmosphere looked lighter in front of him, so he decided that was the surface. That was up. And he was done diving.
He unclipped his harness and slipped out of it, letting the cylinder drag the rest of the equipment to the bottom. A couple of quick pulses with his fins and he was headed up, and a couple of seconds later he broke from the copper-colored water into the bright blue of a Florida day.
He turned to look at the speedboat zooming away, the wide wake spreading across the cove. After a quick 360 to confirm there were no further boats and no watching eyes, Angler spotted his boat a couple hundred yards away. He kicked toward it, keeping his nose just above the surface like an alligator.
When he reached the jon boat he crawled into it, ripped off his T-shirt, and used a towel he had taken from the safehouse to dry. Then he donned his ball cap and glasses and started the motor, thinking that the copper water made scuba no fun at all, but it also made him harder to find, provided he could stay below the surface. He eased onto the throttle and motored away, looking across the water toward the resort, his mind whirring with possibilities.