Chapter 8. The Wrong Confession

The conversation with Morten took place the next day, and Eva didn't put it off until evening — too many questions had accumulated, too much in his behavior of the past weeks was starting to fit, if one wanted it to, into a suspicious picture.

She found him alone at the bow, studying a battered folder of photocopies he'd clearly brought aboard before departure and never once shown the rest of the crew.

"Morten, we need to talk," she said, sitting beside him uninvited.

He looked up, and something in his expression — not fear, but wariness — confirmed what she'd already begun to suspect: he genuinely had something to hide.

"I assume this is about last night's search," he said, closing the folder.

"It's about the fact that you've been keeping more distance from the crew than usual lately. And about the fact that, apparently, you have materials you're in no hurry to share with anyone."

Morten was silent for a long moment, staring at the closed folder in his hands, then, as if reaching a decision, exhaled heavily and held it out to her.

"Open it," he said. "Just — understand me correctly before you draw any conclusions."

Inside were photocopies of archival documents — records from the Spanish colonial administration, catalogs of church property, letters mentioning cargo taken from captured Incan temples and later melted down or reminted as coin to disguise its origin. Some pages carried Morten's own margin notes, dates circled, names underlined — all of it pointing to months, if not years, of painstaking research conducted long before he'd ever joined Eva's expedition.

"I've been consulting an independent historian who specializes in colonial temple looting," Morten said, as Eva paged through the documents. "Secretly, because I was afraid that if I told you before I had proof, you'd think me obsessed, or worse, think I was trying to undermine the expedition."

"Tell you what, exactly?"

"That part of the Santa Clara's cargo," he said, "based on certain markers in the ship's log we found, and on the route description in archival documents I never told you about, might not simply be Incan gold legally requisitioned by the crown. Part of it may be melted-down church relics — objects of worship stolen not only from the Incas but later from the colonial Catholic Church itself, whose origin the Spanish administration deliberately concealed, reminting them as ordinary bars and coin to avoid a church inquiry."

Eva froze, staring at one of the photocopies — a colonial official's letter referencing "cargo of disputed origin, duly melted down to remove questions of legal ownership."

"If that's true," she said slowly, "then we're not just raising a crown's trophy. We're raising stolen religious relics disguised as ordinary gold."

"That's exactly why I never told anyone," Morten said. "Because if it's confirmed, we'll have a fourth claimant, far more awkward than the three governments of the archipelago — the Church itself, and with it the question of whether we even have a moral right to sell this find as ordinary gold, regardless of who claims it legally."

Eva was silent for a long moment, processing what she'd heard, then asked the question that in truth concerned her more than the find's historical authenticity.

"Did you consult this historian over satellite comm?"

"Through encrypted email," Morten said. "Every few days, when we had a steady signal. Why does that matter?"

"Because someone on this ship is in regular enough contact with outsiders to raise serious suspicion," Eva said, "and I needed to be sure it wasn't you."

Morten looked at her with surprise that quickly gave way to understanding.

"You thought I was passing coordinates to Hale?"

"I thought it was possible," she admitted honestly. "I'm sorry for not saying it directly."

"Don't apologize," he said, though with evident relief in his voice that the suspicion, which had apparently weighed on him as heavily as it had on her these past days, had finally been spoken aloud and lifted. "In your position I'd have suspected anyone with more secrets than they should have too. Mine just turned out not to be the one you were afraid of."

She nodded, handing the folder back.

"Keep these documents. If it turns out you're right about the cargo's origin, we'll have to make decisions that seem unthinkable right now. But we have a more urgent problem at this moment: if it's not you, then who?"

Morten shook his head, tucking the folder back into its waterproof case.

"I don't know. But whoever it is, last night's search proved they trust the rest of us enough that no one suspected them before me — the person on this ship who already seemed the most secretive."

The words, said without any ill intent, lodged in Eva's mind more deeply than she'd like to admit, because somewhere at the edge of her consciousness she already understood: if suspicion had rightly moved on from the most withdrawn member of the crew, the search now had to turn to those who, by contrast, had seemed the most open and reliable — and there weren't many of those left aboard the Kestrel.

She told Rafael about the conversation with Morten that same evening, privately, not so much because she needed his advice as because she needed someone she could speak with candidly, without worrying every word would be used against her.

"So, not Morten," Rafael said, after hearing her out. "You don't look relieved by that."

"Because it shortens the list of suspects," she said, "and I don't like who's left on it."

Rafael studied her carefully, and from how slowly he nodded, it was clear he'd reached the same conclusion long before she had — perhaps that very night he'd told her about Hale's reputation and warned that men like him always had a plan B.

"You're thinking about Saskia," he said, not as a question but a statement.

"I don't want to think it," Eva admitted. "She's warned us honestly from the very start about every risk, every hole in the budget, everything that could go wrong. A person who's lying usually doesn't work so hard telling everyone around them how bad things are."

"Or," Rafael countered quietly, "a person who knows the truth will surface sooner or later prefers to look as honest as possible about everything else, so no one suspects the one lie that actually matters."

Eva had no answer to that, not right away, and for a while they both stood watching the dark water off the side, each turning over what to do with a suspicion that had no hard proof yet — only too many coincidences, too conveniently explained any other way, if one wanted them to be.

"What if we're wrong?" she said finally. "What if it really is just banking matters, calls to family, any of a dozen innocent explanations? Accusing someone of betrayal and being wrong isn't the kind of mistake a crew recovers trust from easily."

"That's why we don't accuse," Rafael said. "Yet. We watch, we gather what can be gathered, without turning suspicion into a witch hunt, and we act only once we have something weightier than your, admittedly not unfounded, gut feeling."

"And if the weightier proof comes too late?"

He didn't answer right away, looking to where Hale's ship's silhouette could just be made out on the horizon — a constant, patient reminder that their opponent, unlike the Kestrel's crew, had no doubts at all about what he was waiting for, or from whom.