Grigor trusted the Wolf’s location-spoofing software would be masked from the most sophisticated counteranalysis. What he’d seen of his work in New York had easily cemented his reputation as dark prince of the technologie vampiri.

But he would have felt confident regardless. The average car had over a hundred fifty million lines of software code. How many powered the ship? Trillions? A few malignant lines slithering into its system would be hell to detect.

The digital conning binoculars on the console were Wi-Fi-tethered to the ship’s nav system. Grigor lifted them to his eyes. As the fleet appeared in the lenses, they noted its exact coordinates and measured the distance. It was less than ten miles to the southwest.

He counted ten unmarked boats...eighty-foot trawlers with high bows and stern wheelhouses. The sort of aging rust buckets that were mother ships for poachers of sea cucumbers and reef clams.

Grigor nodded to himself, lowered the binoculars. He saw that Jochi had come up to the console and handed them over to him.

The bearded man peered through them across the miles of glittering sea. “Tamen you henduo caihu,” he said. “They have many talents.”

Grigor gave a thin smile.

“Zongguo nan ti,” he said.

Jochi nodded his understanding. It was truly and literally a Chinese puzzle.

The submersible returned to the trawler’s launch bay with the diver still dangling from his umbilicals. His body was a gruesome sight.

When a person died and circulation ceased, the gases in the cells and blood vessels became static and formed thousands of tiny bubbles. When a person who died during a saturation dive surfaced too fast—without proper decompression time—the pressurized bubbles grew in size until they became very large.

The result was like shaking a can of carbonated beverage and then popping the tab. But with a human body instead of a can, and blood and fluid instead of soda.

The three deckhands who removed it from the grappler’s clasp wore their biohazard suits gladly.

As they removed the diver’s suit on a plastic tarpaulin, they would have unanimously agreed the most disturbing sight wasn’t the blood foaming from his pores and orifices, it was the eyes. They had ruptured in their sockets and then liquefied to the consistency of custard, which caused one of the men to vomit on the spot, inside his hood.

Undressed and wrapped in the tarp, the body would be carried off for cremation. But the trio would still need to sanitize his helmet and wet suit before passing them along for analysis.

The technicians had it easy, they grumbled. In all accomplishments they took full credit, leaving it for others to clean up their ugly messes.

2

New Hampshire/Maine
April 15, 2024

Mother Nature was responsible for the weather. The theatrics were Carol Morse’s.