The winch paid out cable at a steady sixty feet a minute. Juan observed the rock walls below the thick wooden supports placed here some time in the past by person or persons unknown. Where the Ronish brothers had used oakum to block water seeps, the 1978 expedition had used fast-drying hydraulic grout to fill any crack or crevice, and from the look of them it was still doing the job. The walls were bone dry.

“How are you doing?” Max’s question came down the fiber-optics.

Darkness sucked at Cabrillo’s dangling feet. “Oh, just hanging on. How far down am I?”

“About a hundred feet. See anything yet?”

“Murk. Lots and lots of murk.”

At one hundred and forty feet, Juan saw the reflection of his dive light off the surface of the water below him. The water was perfectly still. As he got lower, he finally saw evidence that the pit was still connected to the sea. The rock was damp from high tide, and mussels clumped like black grapes clung to the stone, awaiting the tide’s return. He could also tell that the ocean’s access to the pit had to be limited. The tidal mark was only a few feet tall.

“Hold on a sec,” Juan ordered.

“Looks like you’ve reached the water,” Max said, watching the scene on the laptop.

“Okay, lower slowly.” Juan didn’t know what lay under the surface and didn’t want to be impaled. “Hold again.”

When his foot made contact with the water, he kicked around, feeling for any submerged obstruction. It was clear.

“Okay, down another foot.”

They repeated this until the Chairman was completely submerged and he could see for himself that the pit was clear. He dumped a little air from his buoyancy compensator so that he sank to the full stretch of the cable.

“Visibility is about twenty feet,” he reported. Even through the dry suit, he could feel the cold Pacific’s embrace. Without the dive light, he was in a stygian world. There wasn’t enough sun from the surface to penetrate this deep into the pit. “Give me some slack.”

Cabrillo finned deeper into the pit. When he approached bottom at eighty feet, he realized that Dewayne Sullivan had pulled a fast one. He had used the excuse of the two accidents to call a halt to his exploration when in fact it looked like they had hit bottom only to discover the pit was empty. They had removed all the debris and found nothing. He swept his hand over the thin layer of silt covering the rock floor. The coating was only knuckle-deep. Below it, the rock was smooth against his fingertips, as though it had been ground flat. The only interesting feature was a man-sized niche just above the pit’s terminus.

“I think this is a bust,” he told Max. “There’s nothing down here.”