66 Metres (12 page)

‘I fire him almost every day,' Pete said, gesturing for her to sit while he perched on the opposite tube.

‘Is it that hard to find help here?' she asked.

‘Nope. But he's my brother.'

Ben returned, keys dangling from the ring held between his teeth, coffee spilling from two steaming white tin mugs.

Pete took his drink and frowned at Ben, who shrugged and moved to the front end of the boat to fiddle with something on the console. Pete returned his gaze to Nadia. ‘I know, who'd have thought we were brothers? I asked my mum, but she just winked.' Pete lowered his voice, a crafty smile playing across his lips. ‘Anyway, Ben has his moments.'

Nadia took a sip. The instant coffee was bitter but hot. It warmed her throat. She cradled the mug in both hands close to her lips, steam rising over her face.

‘You take after your mother, then?' she asked.

She caught herself – the easy banter, the flirting – and backed up, remembering recent events. She shivered.

‘What just happened?' Pete asked. He was staring at her intently.

She dipped her eyes towards her coffee. She'd never been as good at masking her true feelings as her sister Katya. ‘What do you mean?'

He put his mug down, his smile fading. ‘I reckon I just saw our lives flash before your eyes.'

Perceptive, too. Must have a string of women. She swallowed more coffee, not tasting it, watching him. No, she told herself. Not a good idea. She called up Katya's face, then dredged up Kadinsky's. The
Mafioso
liked Katya – she'd lasted longer than most – but he had a string of captive concubines just as beautiful.

Her resolve steeled. The look of recognition dawned across Pete's face, his understanding that the moment where flirtation could lead to something more had passed. She felt a pang. Another time. Another life.

Pete stood, his face a mask. ‘Want us to drop you back at your hotel?'

‘No, that's okay, the run will get the seawater out of my trainers.'

He looked genuinely concerned. ‘You don't want to catch a cold.'

She stood up, downed most of the coffee, reached the granules at the bottom, and flicked them over the side. ‘I'll be okay. As you guessed from my accent, I'm Russian. Used to the cold.'

She towelled her hair brusquely, then flung the damp linen towards Ben. He did a nice catch for someone pretending not to be watching. The breeze had dropped and the sun's rays were already heating up. She turned back to Pete. ‘But I am a diver, and I was wondering –'

‘Any time,' he said. He held out his hand to help her step out of the boat.

She didn't need the hand but took it anyway, and stood on the granite steps. ‘How many dive operators are there here?'

His lips tightened, and he bent over, loosening the ropes tendering the rear of the boat, while Ben untied the front. ‘Two others, down the quay, Kennedy's and O'Hawkes.'

‘I didn't mean… Pete, when are you back?'

‘Lunchtime,' he said, without looking her in the eye. He flicked on one of the engines, revved it twice, then let it settle to a sputter. Moving forward to the central console with its steering wheel, he flicked the gear lever into reverse. With a clunk the boat began backing away from the jetty.

‘I'll be here,' she said.

Pete caught her eye once, then pushed the throttle forward and spun the boat around, heading out of the harbour, not looking back. Nadia shivered, and began her run back to the pub-hotel, her trainers squelching for the first few hundred metres. She'd have to buy new ones. In fact, new clothes all around. As she neared her hotel she glanced over to the horizon, but Pete's boat was already gone.

Three hours later Nadia had bought new clothes, and sat in stonewashed 501s outside an ice-cream parlour in the sunshine. She had to eat fast as the mid-morning heat created sticky vanilla rivers that trickled down the cone onto her fingers. It was hard to recall how cold she'd been earlier.

She tried to visualise where the Rose was, somewhere beyond the horizon. Sixty-six metres down. Two hundred and eighteen feet of water pressure. Blinking harmlessly at the foot of a wreck. She imagined being there, looking upwards. It would be like standing at the foot of a twenty-storey tower block, where the roof-top would be the surface. For the first time since her shower she felt a shiver. She imagined some large bottom-dweller, a spider-crab maybe, trying to move it. Probably not though. It would be quite alien, especially with its red lights pulsing in the gloom.

It was tempting to try and get someone to take her there right now, even though that might arouse suspicion. But she hadn't dived for a while, and doing a first dive to that kind of depth would give her nitrogen narcosis – the narcs – straight away. But she knew there must be an intense search going on, the net radiating farther out from London – and Penzance once they found the bodies – with each passing day. She imagined furious rows going on in closed Cabinet rooms over its loss. Probably a few military careers had been stunted.

She'd have to watch out for anyone suspicious turning up on the island. But for now only Sammy had an inkling of where she might be. For a second she had a bad feeling in her gut, but pushed it away. Sammy was a survivor. He'd get word to Kadinsky. She'd be extracted. She just needed to retrieve the device. But the bad feeling remained, so she thought it through. If anything went wrong, or if Kadinsky himself no longer trusted her, someone else would turn up, someone who, like her, didn't really belong there. She recalled her infiltration lessons at Kadinsky's training camp outside Irkutsk, with its extreme temperature variations.

In order to spot anyone unusual, she needed to study what was ‘usual', so Nadia took in the local environment and its people. The broad promenade swarmed with people. Her Ray-Bans allowed her to observe all and sundry trawling up and down the beach. In this ever-shifting crowd, there was nowhere to hide. Professionals would stick out. The prevailing tourist uniform appeared to be long, baggy canvas shorts and blazing white t-shirts for the men, with or without beer bellies, and ultra-short skirts and strapless tops for the girls. Some of the older mothers or grandmothers wore two-piece outfits in pastel shades as they eased along push-chairs imprisoning toddlers in pink or blue cotton outfits and matching bonnets.
Let the kids walk.
Her mother had never owned a push-chair, and once Nadia and Katya could toddle more than a few metres without falling over, they did so everywhere, or else were carried by their father. Every now and again a young boy dodged through the crawl-speed melee on a skateboard, pursued by pig-tailed grinning girls on roller-blades. Most people were smiling, she guessed for the simple reason that it was sunny and they were on holiday rather than at work. She let this normality – the fashion, the culture, the attitudes, the pace, the expressions and the banter – seep into her subconscious. That way anything or anyone that jarred with it would stick out.

Next was the lay of the land. She'd already looked at Google maps and satellite photos of Hugh Town on her phone, and gotten her bearings during the run and her small shopping spree. Now she took in the sweep of the landscape first-hand. The curve of the seafront rimmed a narrow gravel beach, bordered by boats at each end. Prime real estate was given over to hotels with names like
Grande
and
Splendide
that vied for the best vistas. Narrow streets ducked away from the beach and led to the older part of town with its tiny fisherman's houses crammed together. The beach itself, which had two jetties and a main landing area at the far end for the Scillonian ferry, was packed with young people lying on towels or lounging in deck chairs. No girls going topless from what she could see. Families armed with copious tubes of sun-cream and picnic hampers littered the beach, staking out their territory with garish, striped wind-breakers.

She surveyed everything. Nothing – and no one – unusual.

She licked the last slivers of ice cream off her finger-tips. A couple of tattooed young men tried to attract her attention. The predominant male hairstyle seemed to be razor-cut all around the sides with a stack of hair on top. Didn't exactly do it for her. She ignored them and stared out
to sea, like one of those figureheads attached to the prows of old sailing ships.

O'Hawkes had proven to be a low-key diving affair like Pete's, offering diving on air. Kennedy's, however, was the business: five-star PADI, BSAC and IANTD instruction, along with the full range of sport and technical diving, including air, nitrox, trimix, and rebreather. Only the latter two were recommended for a sixty-plus metre dive, though on air it was possible if it was just a bounce dive, a slow bungee jump to the bottom and an even slower return to nine metres and six metres for two-stage decompression.

She'd asked both diving joints their wreck-diving schedule, and only Kennedy's was planning a dive at the Tsuba wreck, on Sunday, the day after tomorrow. Eight divers had signed up for it, all using mixed gases. She wasn't eligible, as she had neither the technical dive training nor the qualification. Kennedy did things by the book, so she hadn't even asked about a private dive to the Tsuba's propeller on air. O'Hawkes told her that for that kind of dive it had to be Kennedy's or else forget it. Besides, there were plenty of other good wrecks above fifty metres. She hadn't pushed it. But she knew what she had to do.

She denuded the soggy cone of all traces of ice-cream and placed it on the brick wall where she'd been sitting, then drew back and waited. Two large squawking seagulls flew down and fought loudly before one of them snatched the prize into its bright orange beak and flew off, the other giving chase, shrieking into the cloudless sky. She'd always been fascinated by birds. They could fly away whenever they liked.

Her phone beeped the arrival of an SMS. She fished the phone out of her pocket, hoping it was Sammy. With the glare of the sun she could barely read the screen, so she got up and walked over to the awning of a shop selling postcards and sea shells. She lifted her Ray-Bans to see it more clearly. Her mood sank. Kadinsky.

How's your holiday?

Sammy must have told him where she was headed. She played along.

Sunny. Got hassled by a nice man in uniform. Accidentally dropped present in the water. Weather good. Might go diving. Treasure-hunt.

The reply didn't take long.
Hope it's not ruined like Chaiyin. Good hunting. Remember: relatives, like fish, go off after three days. Don't be a stranger.

She replied with a smiley face, but she wasn't smiling. The message from Kadinsky was clear enough. She had seventy-two hours, the referred-to relative being Katya. Worse was the reference to Chaiyin. She'd been one of Kadinsky's other favourites. Until one day she disappointed him. She disappeared. Rumour was that he had her buried alive in the woods. She imagined Katya, bound and gagged in a shallow grave, dirt piling up on her face, pressing down on her chest, all the while coughing, choking, trying to scream…

She slammed her fist onto the thin metal table. A few tourists turned around, but not for long. The waiter came over. ‘Espresso', she said. ‘Make it a double.' The ice cream break was definitely over. She'd been considering options, one of them radical, but Kadinsky had – as usual
– clarified everything for her. On impulse she texted Sammy, to check that everything was all right. She waited a minute. No reply. Which could mean anything and nothing. Most likely he'd ditched his phone and was using a burner. She'd have to wait till he called her.

Clearly she couldn't risk one of Kennedy's divers finding the Rose in two days' time. The espresso arrived and she took a gulp, burning her tongue and the back of her throat, but she didn't care. She made her plan, went through the timings again and again. It would work. First, she needed some gear. Heading away from the beach towards the old town, she found two hardware stores three streets apart. She bought half the components she needed from one, the rest from the other, buying other items to mask what she planned to build. She wore a different hat, top and skirt or jeans to each shop.

‘I'm doing some re-wiring' she said, when one shopkeeper asked why she needed the wires and tools.

‘Be careful with that,' the other shopkeeper said. ‘It's highly inflammable, especially in this heat.'

Back in her hotel room she put it together methodically. A basic explosive affair with a timer, as she'd learned back in Irkutsk. She hadn't been able to get anything as sophisticated as a mercury fuse. But if she located the bomb next to the oxygen tank, the heat generated would melt all its components, making it harder to trace where they'd come from.

She sat back and stared at the puzzle of wires, batteries, lighter fluid, egg timer… It looked amateurish. But it would work, and fed by pure oxygen it could do a lot of damage. She'd have to make sure no one was in Kennedy's when it went off. It was Friday. Kennedy's dive to the Tsuba was planned for Sunday morning. On Saturday his shop closed early, at 4pm. No one would work late at the weekend. She'd heard the instructors chatting about a gathering that evening at 7pm at a bar before heading off to one of the local clubs. The fire would shut down Kennedy's operations for the rest of the week while they rigorously checked all the remaining gear.

She'd need an alibi, just in case one of Kennedy's dive crew mentioned her to the police. She stowed the crude bomb under her bed, and headed back out to Pete's dive shack.

Pete and Ben, both sporting white-and-blue baseball caps, looked tired but happy. The RIB's fibreglass hull sat heavier in the water on account of six bedraggled divers in damp wetsuits. Pete's grin re-surfaced when he spied her perched on the wall. He slotted the boat into its berth next to the harbour steps, cut power and tilted both engines up so the propellers wouldn't snag on any floating seaweed.