PART 6: THE COORDINATES

PART 6: THE COORDINATES

Elena almost deleted the message.

She sat in her little boat with the satellite phone in her hand, the sunrise turning to full morning around her, and her thumb hovering over a single line of coordinates followed by four words: "There is another ship." It could be a trap. It was almost certainly a trap. But forty nautical miles away, if those coordinates were real, another secret was sleeping under another hull, guarded by another colonel with another price on his head. She thought about the eleven openings on Voss's lock. She thought about how many locks there might be in the whole ocean.

She started the engine.

The coordinates led her to a gray supply ship anchored alone in a bank of sea fog, a vessel officially decommissioned and sold for scrap two years ago. No flag. No crew on deck. No sound at all, except the slow slap of water against steel. Elena circled it once at a distance, the way a shark circles, reading the ship the way other people read faces. It was too clean for a wreck. Its waterline was too honest for a ship that was supposed to be empty.

She went into the water without a sound.

Twelve meters down, habit took over: her palm gliding along the cold plating, counting distance the way she had counted it a lifetime ago. Seventy meters. Ninety. One hundred and ten. Her hand stopped. The compartment was here, in exactly the position she would have chosen, because the people who built it had copied her own design, rivet for rivet, secret for secret. Her heart pounded so loudly she was sure the whole ocean could hear it.

But something was wrong. The panel was already open.

The chamber inside was empty and scrubbed clean, without a single trace of the case it had once held. In the center of the empty darkness, one object waited for her: a small waterproof camera, mounted where the black box should have been, its tiny red eye glowing steadily. It was live. It was pointed directly at her face. Whoever was watching her now had not hidden this compartment from her. They had prepared it for her, the way you set a table for a guest you are expecting.

Above her, the dead ship began to wake up.

Deck by deck, its lights came on, rows of yellow windows blooming through the fog. An engine rumbled somewhere deep inside the steel, patient and amused. Then a searchlight lanced down from the bridge and found the exact patch of water where she had gone under, holding there, steady, like a finger pointing.

And over the ship's loudspeakers, clearly audible even through the water, a voice spoke with the calm of a man who has never once had to hurry.

"Welcome aboard, Ghost. We've been expecting you."