He picked up his mike. "Jake," he said, enunciating carefully and mouthing every word. "You're three—byone in the deckhouse. I cannot read you... I cannot read... open your mouth when you speak! Do you copy? Do you copy?"

"Copy... yes, I copy...." The voice was garbled and sounded as if he were speaking from the bottom of a GI can. "Conch on the march down here. Tagging every one... tagging every one I can...."

He sounded harried. Good. Mike did not know why the conch were on the move, but whatever had spooked them was providing his partner with proof that the tagging was not as simple as he thought.

Strange, though, that they were on the move so early in the day. He watched the trace on the computer screen. The rate and amplitude were increasing.

He glanced at his tally sheet. C-14, the conch that had hidden in the hull of the Leta, had emerged from the wreck that morning, apparently bored with shipboard life. Wherever he was, from the trace of his heartbeat on the screen, he was a very excited gentleman, indeed.

Michael wondered why.

***

Jake McCay labored along the bottom, in water as clear as air, trailing a stream of bubbles like rising pearls.

He hated diving. He had been a diver as a child, using primitive wooden goggles inherited from his father, and for all he knew, his father's father, swimming out on a broken tourist surfboard, skin-diving for conch.

He had had good lungs and a powerful heart. Some of the conch money his mother had banked in Barclay's Prince George Branch had been set aside for his education.

Without diving, he never would have studied in Boston and never have got his degree. But somewhere in his youth, plummeting downward with a coral rock for ballast, he had broken an eardrum, and though it had healed, he never forgot the piercing pain he had endured.

He hated scuba tanks. As a boy, he'd scorned the tourists he saw using them—out of jealousy, perhaps.

He tugged at his straps now. They were digging into his bare shoulders. He wore no wet suit. He never got cold, and his suit was too small for him, anyway, since Louisa's cooking had put all the weight on him.

The conch were on the move, he was miserable, and there was a sharp pain in his ear.

Okay, Louisa, he thought, I'm doing it, but if I bust that eardrum again, it's on your Haitian soul.

That morning she had awakened moody, eyes dull with a strange, dark fear. She served him his breakfast in bed. She must want something. At first she would only hint at what had happened at Mike's the night before.

"Come on, Louisa," he said with a grin. "So you are a genuine white witch. I won't laugh."

"Well, when I got there, Thea was sick, and I did a marrer. An arrêter."