“Yeah. It’s a few hundred yards from the site. I dove down into it a couple hundred feet. The canyon goes down forever. Saw a few blue medusae floating around, but that was it. I could dive deeper, but I’ve heard that the definition of insanity is repeating the same useless action over and over.”

“Come up for air, then,” said Campbell. “We’ll call the Concord and fill Captain Dixon in—Hold on, Joe. Call for you coming through the NUMA net. I’ll put it through.”

After a moment or two, a female voice came over Zavala’s earphones.

“How’s your search going, Joe?”

“Hi, Gamay, nice to hear from you. I’ve picked a piece of the support ship off the bottom, but that’s it. How about you?”

“We may have something,” she said. “We tried to contact Kurt but the call wouldn’t go through, so we tracked you down under the sea. Paul and I came across the coordinates for a place called Trouble Island. It’s about a hundred miles from the lab site. It may be where the crew of the Princess underwent their miraculous cure. Not sure how it relates to the missing lab, but maybe it will help.”

“Give the captain the info,” he said, “and I’ll come up and check things out.”

“We’re on our way back to Washington,” she said. “Call if you need anything at this end.”

Zavala thanked Gamay and Paul, then pointed the nose of the submersible toward the surface and powered the thrusters. A crane was waiting to hoist it from the water onto the deck of the NUMA ship.

Zavala popped the hatch, climbed out, and made his way to the bridge. Captain Campbell was poring over the chart table. He pointed to a speck on a chart of Micronesian waters.

“This is the atoll closest to the position your friends gave me,” Campbell said. “Doesn’t look like much, and, as you can see, it’s within a red rectangle, which means it was searched visually. What do you think?”

Zavala pondered the captain’s question, then said, “I think I need to talk to an expert.”

A few minutes later, he was on the line with the NUMA navigational unit that supplied the agency’s worldwide expeditions with up-to-date navigational information.

“Let me see if I understand,” said the map expert, a soft-voiced young woman named Beth. “You’re looking for a Pacific island that is no longer on the charts and you don’t know if it even existed in the first place.”

Zavala chuckled softly.

“Sorry,” he said. “This must be like looking for a nonexistent needle in a very big haystack.”

“Don’t be discouraged, Joe. I like a challenge.”

“Any chance the island might have been noted on a British Admiralty chart?”