"I hope you're on a secure channel, Jazz."

Jazz turned and blushed. "Yes, sir. Scrambled and spread spectrum. Sorry to wake you up." He pointed at a thirty-foot cabin cruiser sitting two hundred yards away. "They started to put divers down. They're from NBC News out of Houston."

Thomas looked closer and saw a Zodiac inflatable pulled up by the boat's stern.

"Who'd you send?"

"Ensign Terkel and Seaman Guterson. Captain Elmsford lent us the boat and a rating to crew."

"Good of him. You send for help?"

"Yes, sir. Buffalo Bayou Station is sending a patrol hydrofoil, but it won't be out here for another thirty minutes."

Terkel's voice came from the radio in Jazz's hand. "They're going, sir."

Jazz answered. "Escort them until they're at least a half-mile out before you come back."

"Aye, aye."

Jazz put the radio back in his belt holster.

"Is this the first appearance of our friends from the fourth estate?"

Jazz looked confused, then said, "Oh, the press? No, we've been buzzed by news helicopters out of Houston. The crew from CNN tried to land on the pad of the dive tender, but Elmsford put three men out there with M-22's and they sheered off."

"How many people got the damn video? Damn that woman, Beenan."

"Yes, sir."

"Any word on that sub?"

"None. They haven't heard her since yesterday. Sycorax forwarded her audio signature to the navy, and they've been listening on the SONUS net, but there's been no trace."Thomas frowned. Did they sink her? "See if you can get someone from the New Galveston unit to keep an eye on her residence in the Strand. Does she have an apartment?"

"An entire apartment building. Uh, I asked them for a profile, which they'll be sending, but she owns an entire hex. Her father was one of the original investors, even before the Deluge."

Thomas whistled. "A hex? What's on it?" A hex was the basic flotation unit of New Galveston, an inverted hexagonal cup two hundred feet across the flats. They were the floating city's equivalent of a block, over thirty-four thousand square feet of area.

"He said she has a twenty-unit apartment, a day-care center with a K-6 school, and a garden co-op. Patricia Beenan is also an alternate for the city assembly."

Thomas whistled. "Rich woman. Beenan. Beenan. I know that name from someplace else."

Jazz nodded. "Katherine Beenan, U.S. congresswoman from Texas. She's on the Joint Immigration Oversight Committee."

"Right! Any relation?"

"Her mother."

Thomas sat down heavily on the padded bench at the back of the pilothouse.

"Perfect. It's perfect. You couldn't ask for a more perfect situation. Well, maybe if the president had a stake in it, or maybe the pope. Or perhaps if you caught the president and the pope in bed having sex with a sheep-and they both had a stake in it. And the sheep were on the committee."

Jazz waited patiently for Thomas to run down.

Thomas finally stopped. "I don't suppose there's any chance of getting a cup of coffee, is there?"

Jazz lifted the radio. "Coming right up, sir."

"Well, send it to me on the tender's bridge. I've got to go talk Elmsford into raising the Open Lotus."

Convincing Elmsford to raise the Open Lotus took about five minutes. Getting him authorization from his chain of command took the rest of the afternoon with many calls back and forth to Washington. By the time Thomas had finished, his satphone was on its second battery and his voice was a croaking husk.

He was sitting in the tender's wardroom when Jazz came in. "We've got what seems to be the last body, Commander.""Okay. Get that shrimper headed for Houston. You take it and the unit. Leave me Guterson and have him secure our gear on the tender. When we get Open Lotus afloat, we'll take it to Buffalo Bayou." He paused, thinking furiously. "I'm hoping we'll need someone to work with waterlogged documents, but I guess we shouldn't ask until we find same. Tell you what. Get on your phone when you're under way, and get me some travel history on Open Lotus. Find out who owns it and where it's been. Give me twice-daily reports unless you've got something hot. Then call at any hour."

"When shall we expect you, sir?"

Thomas shook his head. "I don't know. I might go out to the Strand. I'd like to find out more about the Beenan woman."

Jazz blinked, suddenly very still. "You don't have to go out there. I could go for you."

Thomas grimaced. "Stop it. Just stop it. You have your orders."

Jazz was about to say something else when Captain Elmsford stuck his head in the doorway, then came the rest of the way in. "Got a present." He set a Styrofoam cup on the table and slid it across to Thomas. Partway, it tipped over and four pieces of metal tumbled out.

"Fifty-caliber, like the lady said."

Thomas picked up one jacketed slug, nearly perfect in its shape. "This can't have hit anything hard."

"It was on the floor of the bridge. If I were to guess, I'd say it was fired as the boat was sinking and it hit water first, then settled."

Thomas shook his head. "Okay. I guess the next thing is a ballistic check on every INS fifty-caliber machine gun in this region. I want our people to do it, Jazz.

Don't let the local personnel retrieve the rounds, you understand?"

"Aye, sir. I'll put Ensign Terkel on it. Shall I get a helicopter out of Buffalo Bayou?"

"See if you can get that hydrofoil assigned. That model came on line after the Coast Guard was brought into the service so they have the M-30 instead, right? So they're a clean base of operations."

Jazz shrugged. "Unless they brought one on board special."

"That scenario works for anybody in or out of the service. We know we use the M-61A1 twenty-millimeter cannon and M-2 fifty-caliber machine guns. If we don't hit pay dirt then we can cast the net wider."

"Uh, dig wider? Mixed metaphor and all that," Jazz said.

Thomas grinned. "Do you really want to start doing body-cavity searches on allthose victims, Jazz?"

Jazz straightened. "No, sir."

Behind him, Elmsford looked slightly green.

"Any other ideas, questions?" Thomas asked.

Jazz shook his head.

Elmsford said, "This is a pretty busy area. A lot of traffic moves through here.

Commercial fishing, freighters, tankers, you name it. Someone may have seen something, even at night."

"Gotcha," said Jazz.

Thomas added, "We look for witnesses."

With Jazz safely away in the shrimper and Ensign Terkel safely away on the hydrofoil, Thomas put Seaman Guterson to work with Thomas's workstation, organizing a summary of results to forward to the old man, Admiral Rylant, director of the INS Criminal Investigation unit charged with internal affairs.

Thomas slept, using the exec's cabin. Lieutenant Callard offered it freely, saying he'd be on duty until midnight. When Thomas's wrist alarm woke him at eleven-forty-five, he found Guterson waiting with a fresh pot of coffee in the officer's wardroom.

"Lieutenant Graham called thirty minutes ago. They're at the Houston dikes, and they'll be transferring the bodies immediately, vising the refrigerated semitrailer the county provided."

"Good. Have you secured a bunk yet?"

"Yes, sir, they've set me up in the decompression chamber aft. It's not being used right now." Guterson, a young blond, kept his voice deadpan, but his eyes were a little wide.

"How... cozy," commented Thomas.

"Yes, sir. I've got the draft memo to Admiral Rylant done. It's on your desktop." He was referring to the virtual desktop on Thomas's workstation.

"Fine. Get some rest, then-if you can. I'll see you in the morning."

"Yes, sir."

Reading the summary was chilling. Besides the three crewmen, the preliminary age and gender ID's were eighteen men, twelve women, and seventeen children dead in the hold. Alone, in the wardroom, Thomas felt the weight of their deaths. Fifty in all. What a horridly even number.He took his coffee cup out onto the deck. The clouds had dissipated during the evening and stars dotted the sky from horizon to horizon, fading slightly to the northwest, where the night lights of Houston painted a false dawn in the sky. A faintly visible line of yellowish lights on the horizon defined the near edge of the dikes. It was still hot, but far more bearable with the sun down and a light breeze from the south.

He'd been raised on this coast in a series of small towns with names like Ingleside, Port Aransas, Port Isabel, and Orange. His father had been a Coast Guard officer. My childhood is well and truly drowned, he often thought, but he never said so, since it wasn't exactly an uncommon experience. Ninety percent of the planet's population had lived in the first hundred feet above sea level before the Deluge. With the exception of a few dearly bought square miles like those at Washington Island or the lands inside the Houston dikes, the former homes of billions now rolled below the waves.

The images from the videotape pulled at him in a way he didn't understand. The drowned warehouses juxtaposed with the ship and its cargo of death. Not death.

Just the dead. The death had been carried on another craft-a craft with weapons and men who operated them.

Something inside of Thomas was making a connection between his drowned childhood and these drowned men, women, and children. Something intangible and elusive.

He took his empty coffee cup back inside and spent the rest of the night reviewing the data, downloading the catalog of victim data compiled by his team, and finalizing the daily summary for Admiral Rylant.

...and while it is true that many service vehicles (air force and navy) use the twenty-millimeter cannon, the INS uses it in combination with the M-2 fifty-caliber machine gun still in service on our older vessels-inherited from the Coast Guard.

So, preliminary investigations have to treat INS involvement as a possibility.

He encrypted it and sent it off without any sense of accomplishment. He didn't feel he'd lost any of the burden. Sharing the nasty details hadn't released him. It was a burden that didn't lessen on distribution.

N divided by 2 should be one-half N. But it's not working that way. It's bad math and it's even bad therapy. Talking about it should lessen the load.

He shook his head.

Talking about it and talking about how it affects me are two different things, aren't they? It'll have to wait.

This time he laughed out loud.

I've heard that before.

4.

Beenan: Llegando a casa

While Sycorax thundered overhead, sleep was possible, barely, if Patricia took cotton from the first aid kit and wadded it into her ears. But even then it was difficult. She could feel the noise from the Sycorax's engines through the hull, even when lying on top of the sleeping bag, and her dozing was haunted by images of the Open Lotus's hold.

She and Toni took turns resting in four-hour shifts. They stretched out in the lockout chamber, feet sticking through the open hatch into the pilot's compartment, head pillowed on Toni's clothes bag.

Fortunately, the Sycorax stopped to listen, sitting still for a blessed hour of silence at a time, then running at top speed for another hour to another listening spot.

They were twenty-five feet underwater and normally beyond the depth where Patricia could receive radio transmissions, but the giant steel hull just above them was acting as a radio guide, enabling Patricia to use the GPS to track their course.

Initially, the Sycorax hunted inshore, returning almost to old Galveston before heading southwest, some hundred miles off the coast, zigzagging along. Then, a full thirty-six hours after they'd attached themselves to her, the Fastship turned southeast and headed out to sea, toward the Strand.

By this time, Toni's claustrophobia had worsened to the point that Patricia was considering giving her a life jacket and shoving her out the lockout hatch. The last ten hours she kept Toni in the pilot's chair staring out into the clear blue, but unfortunately, it had been night and the darkness pressed in as readily as the titanium hull, relieved only by phosphorescent tinafores.

It was late afternoon and the light streaming past their constant overhead companion took on a red tinge when the Sycorax finished rounding the southern seawall and entered the INS shipping channel.

Toni shuddered at the thought of entering the INS lagoon at all. "You know what the refugees call this channel, don't you?"

Patricia did, but shook her head anyway. Talk, girl, all you want. Distract yourself.

"They call it la Boca del Infierno, the mouth of hell. They have a saying about it."Es un viaje sin regreso hacia la boca del infierno, thought Patricia. "What do they say?"

"It's a one-way trip down the mouth of hell."

"Ah. Perhaps we shouldn't take that journey?"

Toni twisted in the seat, looking at Patricia's face. "I thought we couldn't get away until they stopped again. You have to go outside to cut the rope, don't you?"

Patricia shrugged. "Perhaps. Perhaps not. Our rope has been rubbing on that steel grate for forty-eight hours with a great deal of strain. Frankly, I'm surprised it's lasted this long."