Not the End of the World (7 page)

‘And nobody’s home?’

‘Yeah, but that ain’t what spooked him. Come on, I’ll show you.’

Janie led Larry down a gangway to the boardwalk that skirted the water. She traded greetings with two guys tying up a launch as they walked past. They wore the same get‐
up, even the baseball caps. Larry understood what Bannon meant about the shorts. One of those guys really should have been told he didn’t have the knees for joining the Coast Guard.

There were official tapes across the rails either side of the gang plank that led on to the Gazes Also. Janie ducked under, catching her cap on the yellow plastic strips as she did so. She pulled her ponytail free of the hat and gripped it by the skip. Larry stepped wide‐
legged over the tapes and climbed aboard. She beckoned him to follow her down some steps into the cabins below deck. He folded up his sunglasses into his shirt pocket and descended.

‘This is pretty much as was,’ she said, indicating the galley. ‘The trawler captain swears he touched nothing and I believe him. These guys can get very superstitious and I think he wanted off this boat as fast as his legs would carry him.’

Larry looked around him. The stale smell and the sound of flies had made his stomach go rigid as he came down those stairs, a reflex conditioned by years of forced entries into locked buildings where the occupants were in no condition for greeting visitors, and frequently in no condition for open‐
casket funerals either. But there were no such unfortunates here. The stale smell came from the sink, where dinner plates and cutlery lay submerged under a murky fluid that looked eight parts water to one part food detritus and one part resultant scum. There was a ring of the greeny‐
brown matter a couple of inches above the fluid, evidencing days of gradual evaporation. Dead flies floated amid the surface flotsam, reminding Larry of birds caught in an oil slick. The live flies were concentrated around the small, compact dinner table, flanked by an upholstered bench against the wall and lightweight chairs opposite. On the table there were coffee mugs and plastic tumblers on top of place mats around a brandy bottle and a basket of brittle‐
looking lumps of bread, dotted liberally with flies and mould. Two of the tumblers and one of the coffee mugs lay upturned, their contents having dried on the wooden surface to leave contour lines, like hills on a map. The other three still had at least an inch of coffee in each.

‘We flew a guy out on the seaplane to pilot this thing back. It was more than three hundred miles out. Just got back last night.’ Janie picked up some photographs from on top of the microwave oven on a worktop by the sink, handing them to Larry. ‘He took these before moving the boat anywhere.’

Larry flicked through them. The pictures showed scenes of the galley, mostly identical except that all the cups and mugs were upright, there was no spillage on the table and the water‐
level in the sink was higher.

‘It was in case things got choppy on the way home. He wanted to capture the full impact of the scene as upon discovery. As you can see, the trip home was pretty smooth. The spook‐
factor hasn’t depleted much.’

‘Jesus,’ Larry breathed.

Janie pointed above the microwave to a shelf supporting a ghetto‐
blaster.

‘CD player was still switched on too, with a disc in it. The Sex Pistols, for what it’s worth. You just imagine being that trawler guy. I mean, you’re seeing this here in the Coast Guard marina. He found all this shit floating in the middle of the Pacific.’

‘No thank you.’

Janie frowned. Larry could tell that seeing the scene one more time wasn’t helping her make any more sense of it.

‘Civilised little Sunday dinner at sea,’ she said. ‘Coffee, conversation, music and a digestif of brandy. Then they vanish before the coffee’s even cold. Just disappear without trace.’

Terrific, Larry thought. A latter‐
day Mary Celeste. An abandoned boat in the middle of the ocean. Disappearing scientists. No doubt another fucking omen.

‘Nothing disappears without trace,’ he stated. ‘If you vanish in a puff of smoke, you’re still gonna leave a carbon stain on the ceiling. So, you got any theories what happened here, or do you figure the aliens just beamed ’em all up to go meet Elvis?’

Janie arched her brow. ‘Well, if the aliens took them, they would have needed room in their flying saucer for a submarine, because that’s missing too.’

Larry’s eyes widened involuntarily. He thought Bannon had just thrown it in as a figure of speech.

‘A submarine?’

‘Yes indeed. CalORI told us about it when we said we were sending someone out to pilot the boat home. I mean, keep your pants on, it wasn’t Polaris. Still, a real smart craft, from what I’m told. The Stella Maris, it was called. It could go pretty deep, depending on how long the crew could face in decom afterwards. Look, do you mind if we get back on deck? Two more minutes and this smell’s gonna make me puke.’

‘Yeah, sure,’ Larry said. ‘I’ll follow you up in a minute. Just gonna take a little look‐
see. I’ll hold on to these pictures, if you don’t mind.’

‘They’re yours,’ said Janie, with a dismissive wave, her hand then moving up to cover her mouth and nose as she began a hasty retreat.

Larry explored the remainder of the boat. The sleeping cabins were along a narrow corridor from the galley, with stairs to a sub‐
level at the near end. He had a brief glance into each one. Clothes and books cluttered the beds and the tight floorspace. They were uniformly messy, but ramshackle messy rather than ransacked messy. He thought of the post‐
burglary look Sophie could effect in their spacious bedroom and imagined it concentrated. These guys were anal by comparison.

The sub‐
level housed a shower cubicle on one side, and occupying the majority of the area under the galley was what had to be the boat’s nerve centre. Radar screens – wait a minute, that would be sonar, right? – computers, and all sorts of science‐
lab shit. There were worktops on all sides supporting glass tubes of stratified sand, charts, printouts, lumps of rock, jars of what looked like mud, and, like guess‐
who‐
doesn’t‐
belong, a carton of UHT milk.

‘So, apart from a submarine, anything else missing?’ he asked, emerging back on to the rear deck where Janie was leaning against a side‐
rail.

‘Can’t be sure. We don’t have an inventory; need to wait until someone from CalORI can take a look around, which won’t be pleasant for whoever it is. They were all real close, it seems. Big happy family. But it doesn’t look like anything’s missing. Life‐
savers are all in place, so no man‐
overboard scenarios. Sub‐
aqua equipment accounted for – four sets of tanks and wetsuits.’

‘So all that seems to be gone is one submarine and four people.’

Janie nodded.

‘Now, I know I’m a landlubber and all,’ Larry said, ‘but doesn’t it sound a lot like …’

She nodded again. ‘This whole Mary Celeste scenario’s had everybody here freaked out since the trawler captain called it in, but having had time to reflect, and if you’ll forgive the fish reference, I think the abandoned dinner scene could be a red herring. I checked the ship’s log. The last entry says they were taking the sub on a dive, to the slopes of something or other, some undersea location they must have been checking out. The entry isn’t timed, just dated. According to the entries before it, they spent that Sunday doing running repairs, maintenance, odd jobs, ready to get serious again on Monday. Seems possible to me they stuck the plates in the sink, went to bed then got up and made an early start, figuring clean‐
up duty could wait. That could be morning coffee in those mugs, remember.’

‘But the U‐
boat springs a leak, taking everybody right down the “slopes of whatever” and into the sweet by‐
and‐
by?’ Larry offered.

‘Works for me. There are variations on the theme. As you can imagine, it’s been a popular discussion topic round here.’

‘Keep talkin’. Long as aliens ain’t involved.’

‘Okay. First is the “sounds like a great idea after six beers and some brandy” theory. They’re drunk and someone suggests taking the Stella Maris for a midnight spin.’

‘Don’t buy it,’ he said. ‘These guys were pros, not teenagers out on Dad’s fishin’ boat.’

‘Experience can breed complacency and misplaced confidence, Sergeant. I’ve seen it before. But anyway, it wasn’t my theory.’

‘Well forget it. Can you see the coroner’s office telling that to the bereaved families? I can’t. So what other spins did you guys come up with when you “workshopped” this thing?’

Janie looked like she wanted to take offence, but she couldn’t help smiling. She rolled her eyes. ‘All right, well, there’s the “all a big hoax” theory. It’s some sort of stunt. They took off in the sub, rendezvoused with another boat and are lying low while the world gets interested.’

Larry just grinned, shaking his head. ‘Next.’

‘Just one more. The nineteen ninety‐
nine theory.’

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Whatever it was, he knew he wasn’t going to like it.

‘Suicide pact,’ she said. ‘End‐
of‐
the‐
century psychosis combined with cabin fever after weeks on this little boat, plus maybe a bit of depressurisation trauma. They grow real close and real crazy. A last supper, then…’

Larry glared.

‘I mean, it’s not my theory, I’m just …’

‘Let’s pretend we didn’t have this conversation,’ he said in a low, bassy near‐
whisper.

She held up her hands. ‘You got it.’

‘We’ll just stick with the basics. You figure they took off in the sub – let’s stay with that and not dream up any crazy reasons why they took off in the sub, other than they were doing their jobs. You know where the boat was found, so you know where the sub would have set off from. Any chance we can recover this thing?’

Janie laughed drily. ‘Boat was somewhere around Fieberling Guyot. That’s a kind of sub‐
oceanic mountain.’

‘So?’

‘So the sea‐
bed, the foot of that mountain, is about fifteen thousand feet down. If the Stella Maris lost power or hit a turbidity current, Jesus.’ She grimaced, looking away. ‘It would implode on the way down. Crushed like a beer can.’

‘What’s a turbidity current?’

‘It’s kind of like an underwater landslide.’

‘Okay. Okay. But effectively, you’re saying if we take out the spook factor for a moment, we’re looking at a bunch of folks who didn’t do the washing‐
up one night, then went out in the morning and had a real bad day on the job.’

‘In short, yeah.’

‘Well let’s go with that first and see how far the facts carry it. I’ll need to speak to someone from this CalORI place. First one over there to dry their eyes, get them to gimme a call.’

‘Sure thing.’

‘Meantime, I’d appreciate it if we could keep a tight lid on this thing regards the media. If they ask, all we got here is a tragic accident at sea, okay? I don’t want them knowing anything about coffee cups and dinner plates. I’ve already heard the half‐
assed theories your buddies produced. I don’t want to find out what the tabloids’ imaginations can dream up using the same material. The families will have enough to deal with without reading any X-Files crap about their lost loved ones.’

Maria thought the e‐
mail would set her off crying again. That was one of the countless symptoms of her grief – you never knew what trivial or unlikely thing was going to trigger another painfully cherished memory, bring back a part of what was lost for just long enough to remind you of what you were missing. Strangely, it was never the obvious ones, like the sight of their empty desks or the growing piles of unopened letters. Maybe that was because you knew to put up your guard at those times, so it was the sucker punches that got you, the ones you didn’t see coming. Like this e‐
mail. Soon as she saw who it was from, some part of her that hadn’t kept up with current affairs was telling her to look over her shoulder in case Coop or Taylor saw, as it would only give them more ammunition for their dumb jokes. what she wouldn’t give now to be hit with both barrels. The message was from Jerry Blake in the Lebanon, following up on something that had seemed the most exciting thing in the world to her this time last week. It seemed death liked to come along every so often and remind you how little value or purpose anything really had as long as it was ultimately in charge. That the message was to do with archaeology – dead people, dead civilisations – seemed to underline that in red pen. Maria’s interest in the Minoan empire was very much an extra‐
curricular pursuit, hence the jibes from Coop and Taylor when she was indulging it on ‘company time’, but it was an understandable fascination for a seismologist. The Minoans’ native Crete had been ground‐
zero during the most destructive seismological disaster known to man, and in studying it she had become intrigued by the ancient civilisation. Unfortunately, research and evidence were thin on the ground, partly due to the effects of the aforementioned disaster, and partly due to the Minoans having been ‘rediscovered’ by archaeology only at the beginning of the century. Further obscuring this lost culture was the fact that the only surviving documents were written in two as‐
yet indecipherable script forms, known as Linear A and Linear B. The latter had been identified as a very primitive form of Greek, but the former, although having contributed words to Linear B, seemed to be a different language altogether. So although the archaeologists possessed artefacts that gave clues as to the make‐
up of the Minoan civilisation, they were without any first‐
hand depictions of what life in it was like. Until Jerry Blake excavated a site just outside Beirut last year, discovered when developers were clearing the ruins of a bombed‐
out apartment block. A number of scrolls were sealed inside an earthenware jar, written in an early form of Hebrew that instantly dated them from around 1500 BC. The anticipated biblo‐
archaeological feeding frenzy failed to ensue after the first cursory translations of text fragments revealed them to be first‐
person accounts of events not in the Holy Land, but in ‘Kaftor’, the contemporary name for Crete. In the smaller field of Minoan archaeology, however, the find was nothing short of explosive. Questions – and arguments – had already arisen over whether the scrolls might themselves be a translation of original Minoan documents, or whether their author had command of both languages. This issue had important ramifications for the authenticity of what the texts depicted and, Jerry predicted, would be the bloody battleground for many archaeological bust‐
ups. It was inevitable that the scrolls would largely contradict certain established theories about Minoan life, so the scholars who adhered to those theories would have to defend their academic reputations by discrediting the reliability of the new accounts. which was where Maria came in. Contrary to Coop’s relentless innuendo, Maria had never met Jerry Blake – their relationship was purely electronic, her Internet research forays having led to regular correspondence with him on the subject of the Minoans. This had made her one of the first to know about the Beirut find, and initially Jerry had promised to keep her updated about whatever secrets the scrolls yielded, as and when the translations were sufficiently coherent. However, when those translations revealed that the texts included what purported to be a first‐
hand description of the destruction of Thera and its cataclysmic aftermath, her involvement became rather less passive. Jerry recruited her to assess the veracity of the scrolls’ account from a seismological point of view, because if that part sounded like bullshit then it would cast serious doubts over the credibility of the rest. From all she’d seen so far, Maria was satisfied that if whoever penned these scrolls wasn’t around when Thera went bang, then he sure as hell knew a man who was. All that he described, even the most fantastic‐
sounding phenomena, was seismologically and vulcanologically authentic. Events that even Jerry had assumed to be ‘the narrator laying it on pretty thick’ were not only scientifically explicable, but highly unlikely to have been inspired by anything other than direct witness. From the preceding years of earthquakes and lesser eruptions to the insanity of Thera’s last hours, this chronicler was talking about things he simply wouldn’t have known to make up.