The Deep Blue Alibi

Forty-five

Steve somersaulted backward off the dive platform and spent a few moments flutter-kicking along the surface, orange seaweed tangling in his fins. He hit a valve on the buoyancy compensator, deflated his vest, and let the weight belt take him under. Water trickled into his mask, tickling his nose. He exhaled through his nostrils, and the water drained through the purge valve.

Hey, I remember how to do this.

He listened to the sound of his own breathing, felt the bubbles rising around him, let himself relax. He descended to thirty feet, luxuriating in the water, warmed by his own body heat, encapsulated in the wet suit. And there it was, spread out in front of him, what Fowles wanted him to see.

Steve knew all the cliches. Coral reefs were stone castles. Cities beneath the sea. Underwater rain forests. Living animals, millions of them, growing on top of the limestone skeletons of animals that had come before, this reef perhaps twenty thousand years old.

He'd snorkeled the state park in Key Largo. He'd scuba-dived in the Bahamas and off the coast of Grand

Cayman. Could he have forgotten the infinite beauty, or was this reef simply more spectacular than those?

He was mesmerized by the kaleidoscope of colors. Yellow sea fans waved in the current. Angelfish, pulsating with neon blues and greens, darted around mounds of grayish brain coral. Rising from the sand, stately cathedral coral resembled the pillars of an ancient temple in a miniature Atlantis. The tentacles of purple gorgonian whips moved with the current.

Fish everywhere. Hundreds. . no, thousands. Tenants of the coral condos. Sleek parrotfish with the yellows, reds, and greens of a bird's feathers. A school of silvery jacks, staring at him with huge eyes. Smallmouth yellow-striped grunts that are supposed to make a grunt-grunt sound, but Steve couldn't hear anything over his own breathing and bubbles. A moray eel poked its head out of a crevice, didn't like what it saw, then vanished inside.

A large shadow passed over him. The biggest, fattest grouper he'd ever seen. The one called the jewfish, to Steve's consternation. A jewfish bigger than Ariel Sharon and Harvey Weinstein put together. Maybe seven feet long, at least six hundred pounds, with that underslung jaw. It passed, then turned, its tail scattering a dozen smaller fish. Then headed straight for Steve. Not that it was dangerous. More like a fat lawyer, waddling down the courthouse corridor. Taking up his allotted space, and yours, too. Steve didn't know if the fish would swat him with its powerful tail or serve him with a writ, so he moved to one side.

Steve swam deeper along the slope, the water growing cooler, the surroundings darker. He was at sixty feet when it occurred to him.

Fowles. Where the hell was Fowles?

Looking up, he couldn't see the boat. Would he have heard the engines if it had moved?

What if Fowles left me here?

Steve's breathing became louder, heavier. How long had he been down here? How much air did he have left? He checked the gauge. More than two thousand pounds. Plenty of time, unless his heart started racing.

Okay, calm down. Fowles is a good man, remember? You said it yourself. Yes, and you also said he's possibly a murderer.

Nearby, a steel-gray barracuda swept by and looped back, circling him. Steve swam over a stand of staghorn coral that resembled the antlers of a deer. The barracuda followed like a P.I. on surveillance.

Suddenly, Fowles brought the chariot alongside, motioning Steve to hop aboard. Battery-powered, the chariot had approached stealthily. Unheard by German U-boats in the North Sea, unheard by Steve above the reef. Two seats were sunk into its cigar-shaped body, one in front of the other, like the cockpit of an old biplane. Steve climbed into the second seat, his back resting on the ballast tank near the stern.

Fowles eased the throttle forward, and off they went, a two-man human torpedo. They skimmed the edge of the reef and moved deeper. As the water cooled and the light diminished, the coral thinned out, and there were fewer fish. Then, abruptly, they moved along an upward slope into warmer, brighter waters. Spiny lobster crawled along the bottom, and a school of red copper sweepers whisked by. The coral patches thickened again. Whether it was a continuation of the same reef or the beginning of another one, Steve couldn't tell.

No wonder Delia and her crowd want to protect this. C'mon, Fowles, tell me what the hell went down that day. Did you kill Stubbs because Delia wanted to save the reef? Did you do it for love?

Fowles turned around in the front seat and lifted a magnetic slate from a compartment. With a stylus, he wrote something, then held the slate in front of Steve's face: "12 o'clock high. Stay calm."

Steve looked straight up. Four sharks circled twenty feet above them. He couldn't tell a tiger shark from a nurse shark, though he had a pretty good idea these weren't the thick-bodied bulls known for attacking swimmers. He wondered what two guys riding an old metal tube looked like to the sharks.

Fowles erased the slate, wrote something else:

"Nurses. No problem."

Steve appreciated the sea mail. Nurse sharks were usually not aggressive. Fowles released some ballast and brought back the joystick, and the chariot ascended steeply. Straight through the pack of sharks- C'mon Fowles, is this necessary! — but the nurses parted and let them pass.

They surfaced moments later, and both men pulled off their masks and spit out their mouthpieces. Even from the short dive, Steve's jaw ached. He'd been clenching hard as they came up through the sharks.

"Well, mate, what do you think?"

"Spectacular. I see why you love it, why you want to protect it."

"I knew you'd get it. Delia told me."

"She talked about me?"

"Said you were a decent chap but a lousy boyfriend. …I really love her, mate."

"I thought you might."

"You live like I have, hot-tailing from island to island, dallying with a bunch of spunk buckets, when you meet someone like Delia. ." He paused as small waves broke over the bow of the chariot. "I tried to do the right thing for her."

"How, Fowles? What did you do?"

C'mon Fowles. Tell me about you and Delia and Oceania.

But the Englishman just shook his head and said, "You know where we are now?"

It ain't Kansas, Steve thought.

"Right in the middle of Oceania, if it's ever built," Fowles said. "Building Two, the casino, would be right here, with cables running at an angle eight hundred yards thataway." Fowles pointed into the distance. "The cables would fasten to pilings driven four hundred feet into the ocean floor. You know how much drilling and pile-driving that would take, how much sediment would be displaced?"

Steve recalled the diorama in Griffin's house. The hotel and casino were made up of three floating saucers, anchored to the sea bottom. The saucer nearest the reef had underwater rooms with portholes. In the diorama, the fish had been plexiglass. Here, they were living creatures. "Griffin's studies said the prevailing currents would carry sediment away from the reef."

"Sure, best-case scenario. Doesn't take into account storms or oil spills. And Delia's got some contrary studies."

Delia again. Okay, go for it. If you don't take a lead, you can't steal a base.

"Delia lied, didn't she?" Steve said. "You weren't with her that day, eating oysters and drinking sangria, were you?"

For a moment there was no sound but the slosh of waves against the chariot. Then Fowles said: "I didn't want anyone to get killed. I thought, if someone else paid Stubbs more than Griffin was offering, Stubbs would stop Oceania, but it didn't work out that way."

"How did it work out?"

They both heard it then, a boat in the distance. Steve shaded his eyes from the glare of the sun. He could barely make out a craft in silhouette.

"So how did it work out?" he repeated. "Who paid Stubbs to turn him around?"

Fowles squinted into the sun, trying to get a look at the boat. "Headed our way, isn't it?" Sounding like a man trying not to sound concerned.

"You expecting company?"

Fowles looked back toward the Fowles' Folly, anchored maybe a thousand yards away. He seemed to be measuring the distance and time it would take to get there.

"What's going on, Fowles?"

The chariot rose and fell in the gentle swells. With each dip, the approaching boat disappeared. With each push upward, it appeared closer.

"Talk to me, Fowles."

"I'm a little nearsighted." Fowles gestured toward the oncoming boat. "What can you see?"

"Moving fast on a high plane. Long and thin. Built for speed."

Just like the boat on the satellite photos, the one tailing the Force Majeure.

"Should we get back to the boat, Fowles?"

"Wouldn't make a difference. We can't outrun it." His voice was tight.

The roar grew louder. Steve remembered the Force Majeure approaching the beach at Sunset Key. The sound of an avalanche. This was more of a whine, like

a jet engine.

"Jesus, Fowles. What the hell's happening?"

"Shut your gob and listen, mate. We don't have much time. It happened pretty much the way you said. I took the chariot into the Gulf. A Cigarette picked me up, a Top Gun Thirty-eight. Then dropped me off near Black Turtle Key. I stayed in the water till the Force Majeure got there. When Mr. G was pulling up his lobster traps, I climbed aboard. I went down the hatch to the engine room. In a few minutes, I could hear them both through the salon hatch. Mr. G hands over the hundred thou and Stubbs says it's not enough. Someone else has been bidding for his services. Someone who'll pay ten times that if he'll sink Oceania."

Just what Griffin said when he'd finally told the truth.

"They'd both been drinking all day and were bloody snockered. Mr. G demands to know who's the bidder, but the little bugger won't say. There's yelling back and forth. Mr. G must have pulled out the speargun, because Stubbs laughs and asks if maybe he forgot something. Then Mr. G laughs. The gun didn't have a spear. They both settle down and Stubbs says he'll turn down the other guy and take Mr. G's money with another hundred thou every year. That seemed to settle it. Mr. G goes back up to the bridge and heads toward Sunset Key."

Again, just what Griffin told them, Steve thought, looking toward the Fowles' Folly. The speedboat was alongside the dive boat. Maybe the guy at the wheel hadn't seen them yet, bobbing in the waves. "So when Griffin leaves, Stubbs is healthy and breathing," he said.

"But white as a ghost when he sees me coming up through the hatch. I ask Stubbs if he's forgotten he just took forty thousand dollars as a down payment from someone else."

"The money the police found in Stubbs' hotel room."

"Right. Now the fucknugget tells me he'll give it back. Thinks he can return a bribe like a pair of pants that don't fit." Fowles turned and watched the speedboat move away from the Fowles' Folly and head toward them. "I tell Stubbs I'm there to make sure he doesn't back out of his deal or to throw him overboard if he does."

"On whose instructions? Who were you working for?"

"Doesn't matter who. Those were my orders, but I was bluffing. I never would have killed the man."

The speedboat was five hundred yards away and moving straight at them.

"Now the little bugger goes bonkers," Fowles said. "Grabs the speargun, jams a spear in the barrel against the air pressure, but he must not have cocked it right. He's waving the gun around and I grab it. We tussle, and the damn thing fires. Puts the spear right into his chest. I panic. I get the hell out of there and jump overboard. Tread water till the Cigarette picks me up."

"If you didn't intend to shoot Stubbs, you might have a defense."

"Morally, I'm guilty. I killed Stubbs as surely as if I'd pulled the trigger."

They both looked toward the oncoming boat, down off its plane, puttering toward them at less than ten knots. A Cigarette Top Gun 38 with a sleek white hull decorated with orange and red flames. One man was visible standing in the cockpit, a rifle propped on top of the wheel.

"That's the guy who picked you up, right?" Steve said.

"That'd be him."

"Why's he got a rifle?"

"To kill me. You, too, probably."

"Jesus, Fowles! Do you have any weapons?"

"Not even a speargun," the Brit said with a sad smile.

The sound of rapid-fire gunshots crackled across the water.

Steve ducked lower into his seat. "What now?"

"How much air you have?"

"Maybe fifteen minutes. Less if I'm scared shitless, which I am."

Gunshots ricocheted off the steel hull of the chariot.

"Crew, prepare to dive!" Fowles ordered, sounding no doubt like his grandfather in a Norwegian fjord.

Steve pulled down his mask and readied his mouthpiece and regulator. "You still haven't told me. Who is that guy?"

"Name's Conchy Conklin."

Fowles bit down on his mouthpiece, opened the ballast tank, and pushed the joystick forward. The chariot took them under just as another gunshot pinged off the rusty old craft.