Oracle (28 page)

Nichols
’ face screwed up in consternation. “I rebooted the system and it seems to be working again. Not sure what’s up with the compass; it’s about as old as some of the wrecks we dive on and honestly, we haven’t used it in years. But it hardly matters.”

“
Why?” asked Jade.

“
We have to head back to Nassau.”

Ophelia stiffened and strode over quickly to face Nichols.
“Absolutely not.”

Jade heard unexpected steel in the blonde woman
’s voice. “I’ve already paid you well, Mr. Nichols, and I’m willing to pay you a good deal more, but you will take us to our destination.”

“
Ms. Doerner, when I agreed to this, I didn’t know that my ship was going to be in the crosshairs. Even if we ignore this incident, and I don’t think that’s a very good idea, the fact of the matter is that we’re not going to be able to use the QED until it is repaired and thoroughly tested and inspected. You can’t pay me enough to send her down to crush depth until that happens. And, if I’m not mistaken, the equipment you were going to use to focus your search just got pulverized. So what exactly do you hope to accomplish by continuing forward like nothing has happened?”

Nichols
’ assessment of the situation hit Jade like a blow. Even though he had failed to kill them, the saboteur had done incalculable damage. Ophelia however was undeterred. “I can have another atomic clock flown out to us in forty-eight hours. As to the submersible, if the target location is at dive depth, we may not need it.”

Nichols
’ frowned. “And if it’s not?”

“
We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” She scrutinized him for a few seconds. “I’m surprised at your reluctance. Given your reputation, I didn’t think you would want to give up so quickly.”

Nichols reddened, but evidently remembered who was talking to him and swallowed his pride.
“I have to answer to my stockholders, Ms. Doerner. And despite whatever reputation you think I have, safety is my primary concern.”

“
Your stockholders will be grateful for the money that I’m paying you. They’ll be even happier when you discover a fortune in Spanish gold.”

Jade turned to Professor.
“What do you think?”

He shook his head.
“I’m not sure. If we can dive, then she’s right. But I don’t like the idea of pushing forward with a killer on board.”

“
Going back now might give the Norfolk Group a chance to get even more men aboard.”

Lee returned before a consensus could be reached.
“We’re still searching deck by deck, but it may not do us much good. One of the RIBs is missing.”

“
Rib?” Ophelia asked.

“
Rigid inflatable boat,” Professor explained quickly. “A Zodiac. Basically a big raft with an outboard.” He faced the captain. “You think our saboteur set out in open water?”

“
It looks that way.”

“
Could there be another ship shadowing us?” Jade asked.

“
Possibly. But we’re not that far from Nassau. He could simply be heading back.”

“
Then we should keep going. Make for Great Isaac.”

“
Without a functioning atomic clock, we’re not going to be able to accomplish much.”

Jade turned back to Ophelia.
“Are you serious about having another clock flown out to us?”

“
I am,” Ophelia said. “But there’s something else I’d like to try first.” She glanced at Nichols and Lee, and then in a conspiratorial tone meant only for Jade and Professor’s ears, added, “I need to speak to you privately.”

The search of
the vessel yielded another vital clue to the identity of the saboteur. In addition to the motor launch, the ship had also lost a crewman—a last minute replacement added shortly before Jade and the others had arrived in Nassau. Nichols came to them in the salon with the news, and assured them that the rest of the crew was above reproach, but that did little to ease their concerns.

“
Who hired him?” Jade asked.

“
Cliff handles personnel matters,” Nichols replied and then seemed to grasp the subtext of the question. “You can’t think he’s involved in this, too?”

“
He did call Ophelia away just before the attack. Almost like he wanted to protect her.”

Nichols swallowed nervously.
“I trust Cliff implicitly.”

His tone was not quite convincing, but before he could further protest his subordinate
’s innocence, Ophelia dismissed him tersely. “Thank you. We’ll talk about this more in the morning.”

When he was gone, she immediately changed the subject.
“I will arrange to have another atomic clock brought to us by helicopter. It should take no more than forty-eight hours. Until then however, I believe there may be something else that can help us find what we’re looking for.”

“
The Shew Stone,” Jade murmured.

Ophelia nodded.
“We know it has a connection to what we seek. It didn’t show us anything at Delphi, but this close to our goal, close enough that the ship is already experiencing distortions of space-time, I believe we should take another look at it.”

“
We don’t know that a dark matter field caused the problem with the GPS,” countered Professor. “In fact, given what just happened, I’d say that the explanation for that is almost certainly much more commonplace.”

Jade
’s first impulse was to agree with Professor, but Nichols hadn’t said anything about the cause of the problem with the GPS; only that it had evidently cleared up with a reboot. That seemed inconclusive at best. “We’ve nothing to lose by trying it,” she said, taking the crystal ball out and placing it on the table. “Should we light some candles or something?”

Ophelia reached out for it quickly, greedily, and grasped it between thumb and forefinger. She held it up and peered into its depths as if hoping to see the answer to every question she had ever asked.

“If it’s that easy,” Jade whispered to Professor, “then I guess we don’t need to find the Moon stone after all.”

After a moment, Ophelia set the globe down, her smooth face creased by uncharacteristic uncertainty.

“Did you see anything?” Jade asked.

“
I’m not certain. For a moment, I thought I was somewhere else. At our corporate headquarters building in New York. I was in my office, but it…it wasn’t my office. Not the one I have right now. It was my brother’s office, one floor above mine, but somehow I knew that it had become my office.” She shook her head as if trying to clear away mental cobwebs. “What do you think it means?”

“
Sibling rivalry rearing its ugly head?” Jade remarked. “I thought you and your brother were two peas in a pod.”

“
I love my brother deeply,” Ophelia said, a faint smile touching her lips. “But he thinks he’s better and smarter than me, and as it happens, he’s wrong. I am much better suited to leading our family empire than he, but for many reasons, not the least of which is my gender, he will not admit it.”

“
It may be a possible future,” breathed Dorion. “Where you have taken control of your company.”

Ophelia nodded.
“I thought the same. This is a sign. If we can find the Moon stone, I will be able to use it to see the future more clearly, and that knowledge will enable me to chart a course that leads to ultimate success. Now I know that we cannot turn back.”

Jade thought it sounded more like Ophelia was misconstruing a wishful daydream as
a vision supplied by the Shew Stone, but she said nothing. Regardless of where the images had come from, Ophelia’s “vision” offered no insight into the location of the Moon stone.

“
May I?” Dorion asked, and then promptly picked up the crystal orb. Unlike Ophelia, he did not peer into, but instead held it tightly in his fist and closed his eyes.

The seconds stretched into a minute, then two, and the silence was almost unendurable. Jade could feel the vibrations of the ship
’s engines, once more turning and propelling the vessel through the Atlantic, hopefully on the right heading.

Dorion had been statue-
still the whole time, but after another minute or so, he seemed to relax, as if he had dozed off. Jade glanced at the others, silently telegraphing the message: ‘Should we wake him up?’

Before she could act on the impulse to do so, Dorion
’s eyelids fluttered open. His gaze drifted for a moment and then he started, looking about wildly. “I’m on the
Explorer
?” He took a deep breath then looked down at the Shew Stone in his hand. “I did not lose consciousness, did I? The effect is similar to what I felt at CERN, but not as…”

“
What did you see?” asked Ophelia, with the same eager breathlessness.

“
I remember things that I know haven’t happened yet.”

“
Did you see the location of the Moon stone?”

Dorion frowned and appeared to be searching his anachronistic memories.
“I think I did. I remember you.” He pointed to Jade. “You were very excited. You were about to change into a diving suit right on the open deck. That must mean we find it. Perhaps if we get closer to the location, I will recognize it.”

“
Then we are on the right course,” Ophelia said with sublime confidence. “Literally as well as…you know what I mean. We will find it.”

Jade
’s first impulse was to caution against raising hopes too high, but she could not forget how they had found the stone sphere on Isla del Caño.

Dorion set the Shew S
tone on the table. Professor turned to Jade. “I guess it’s your turn now.”

“
Maybe you should give it a try?”

He shook his head.
“No thanks, I don’t want to spoil the twist at the end. Besides, I think I’ve already caught a peek of the future, and there’s a great big Bootstrap Paradox coming down the pike. You go ahead.”

Now that the opportunity to glimpse the future had come, Jade felt apprehensive. There was a reason that, despite having the Shew Stone in her possession, she had not made a serious effort to test whether it possessed even a very small dark matter field. It seemed quite reasonable that it did. The ferocity with which Roche had pursued Jade, to say nothing of his prescient certainty that she would steal the orb, seemed to suggest that his uncannily accurate predictions were not
simply well reasoned guesses. She wasn’t ambivalent about the crystal ball because of a fear that it might not work; quite the opposite in fact.

She reached out and took the orb in her hand. But I
need to know.

Jade checked her
watch again.  Like her, the diver’s chronograph had picked up a few scars over the last few years. The stainless steel casing was scratched and the blue paint on the fixed bezel was chipped in a few places, but the sapphire crystal covering the blue watch face with the bright red sweep hands was clear and unmarred. It reminded her of another crystal she had looked into once, long, long ago.

He was late.

Professor was late. Strange how she still thought of him as Professor after all these years. After everything they had been through, everything they had made together, everything they had lost, he was still Professor.

And he was late. That wasn
’t like him. She hoped he had merely been delayed by a detour to get around the riots, and not caught up in them.

Even from ten blocks away, the acrid smell of the smoke burned in her nostrils. Maybe the wind was blowing the fume
s through the concrete canyons, or maybe the wildfire of violence had escaped containment and was now racing south, toward this bastion of wealth and power. Not that there was any danger here. The rioters would never reach this place, not with all the troops deployed throughout the city, and she hoped they had the good sense not to try.

“
Jade!”

She turned in the direction of the hissed whisper and saw him, standing at the corner of the building. He wasn
’t exactly inconspicuous. Even without the hoodie covering his head, shadowing his features—she had actually gotten used to that silly fedora, and now she found herself acutely aware of its absence—he would have looked out of place here. Still, there was something about his presence, the way he moved, that made him seem almost invisible.

She smiled. It was good to see him again, in spite of the circumstances.
“You made it.”

He nodded.
“I think you’re right about this. About everything that’s happened.”

“
How do we stop it?”

“
You already know the answer to that,” he said. “The real question is, can we?”

Jade felt a knot of fear settle in her gut. He was right.
“Have you got a plan?”

“
You mean a better plan than go in with guns blazing?” He shook his head.

She knew him well enough to know what he was thinking. This was bigger than just the two of them, but there wasn
’t anyone else left now. All their friends were gone.

How did things get this bad?

She knew the answer to that, too.

My fault.

“She probably already knows we’re coming,” Professor said.

Jade nodded soberly.
“But there’s something she doesn’t know.”

“
What’s that?”

“How it ends.”

“
Jade?”

Jade blinked and looked around. Where am I? She spotted Professor, but he looked different
, younger, without the scar.

I remember this
. Yet, it was an old memory, like something from a dream. Her eyes slid sideways and she saw….

The universe abruptly synchronized and she realized what had happened. This was the reality and all of those things that she now remembered so vividly were nothing but distant possible futures.

“Jade?” Professor repeated. “You okay?”

She nodded slowly, unable to tear her stare away from….

Ophelia leaned forward, her eyes alight with hope and anticipation. “What did you see?”

Jade shook her head.
“Nothing.”

After two fruitless
hours, Jade gave up on the hoped-for oblivion of sleep. She pulled on a t-shirt and a pair of cargo shorts and headed up to the deck to get some fresh air. The tropical night was warm and humid, but not uncomfortably so. The stars were startlingly visible despite the bright lights that illuminated the deck and shone out over the water, and a nearly full moon hung almost directly overhead.

The moon made her think about their goal, but also called to mind Professor
’s theory about the added influence of tidal forces on the dark matter fields. Dorion had explained it to her on the flight from London. The Delphic oracle had only spoken on one day each month, when a half moon would have been visible in the sky during daylight hours. He had suggested that perhaps at other times, the alignment of earth, moon and sun might combine to negate the dark matter field, but there was another possibility, a simpler one to Jade’s way of thinking. The moon’s gravity complemented the dark matter field, and that effect was strongest when the moon was overhead. Perhaps that was why so many ancient cultures had worshipped the moon; perhaps they had known that, in addition to helping them mark the turning of the seasons, the moon might also reveal possible futures.

Maybe the knowledge of those possible futures, even at a subconscious level, lay at the heart of all the anecdotal reports about strange behavior during the full moon. There was a reason, after all, that insane people were called
lunatics.

“
Couldn’t sleep?”

She started
reflexively, but it was Professor’s voice and she knew there was no cause for alarm. She turned and found him sitting in a deck chair, likewise gazing into the sky. “Guess I’m not used to being rocked in my bed all night long,” she lied. “What about you?”

“
Stargazing. To be honest, I’m not exactly sold on the accuracy of this ship’s GPS navigation system.”

“
You think it will happen again?”

He shrugged.
“It’s like when you know something’s wrong with your car, but when you take it to the mechanic, everything runs fine. No one’s given a good explanation for why it started acting up, so the problem hasn’t been fixed.”

She was about to ask him for his opinion on what that cause might be, but realized she already knew the answer.
“You think there’s another saboteur on board?”