“The whole place used to be a prison. The graveyards are filled with generations of dissidents tortured to death by one government after another. A bad place to start a business, right? Maybe. But it was a good place if you just wanted to get by, to live. Sure, it had its problems—lots of them. Technically, the Global Conservation Park covered the entire archipelago, both land and water. Zero fishing or hunting allowed. There was even a UN watchdog organization that would show up once a year, write a report. But the reality was, there were always fishing boats coming in, tangling trawling nets in the reefs, using cyanide and dynamite. And the park rangers were all corrupt. How could they not be, with the salaries they were being paid? They sold turtle eggs, reef fish, whatever they could get their hands on. The locals were in on it—spearfishing, free diving for shellfish. Son, my assistant, had been a free diver.”

“And where is he now?”

“I told you before—I don’t know. We lost touch after the evacuation.”

“He was the one with you on the boat? The day of the incident?”

“Yeah. I was coming to that.” Avoiding it, more like. “The wreck is a steel-hulled Thai freighter, sixty meters long. It went down late in the twentieth century. It’s the only penetrable wreck you can dive in Vietnam. It’s in just twenty meters of water, but the conditions there are usually bad. Strong currents, poor visibility. It’s only for customers who know what they are doing. You don’t get many customers like that on Con Dao, so we hadn’t been out there in years. It was a morning dive. Off-season. Lousy visibility, maybe two meters. But the guy wanted a wreck dive. So we got in the water and worked our way down. It was just me and him.”

Lawrence paused. “I keep making it more dramatic than it is. But it wasn’t dramatic. It was routine. There were squid and cobia bumping into us. Visibility was awful. We were almost at the wreck when I decided to call it off. But when I turned around, he was gone. That’s normal, though. You lose people in low-vis water all the time. You just stay put. If you go looking for them, it’s easy to get disoriented.

“But after five minutes, I started to worry. I traced my way back along the freighter’s rail. He knew what he was doing, I kept telling myself. He wouldn’t have gone into the wreck without me. Was something wrong with his equipment? Had he decided to surface?

“I made my way up, expecting to find him bobbing there. I yelled to Son, on the boat, asking if he had seen him. Nothing. I made my way back down.