Chapter 10. Who Was Talking to Hale

The transit through Puerto Junco went smoothly — smoothly enough that even Saskia, not one to relax before her time, admitted over dinner that the plan had worked better than she'd expected. The tired inspector glanced briefly at the forged permit, let his eyes slide over the Nautilus's battered hull, logged in the documents as scientific equipment, and stamped it without even demanding the cargo bay be opened. The gold, hidden beneath the false bottom, passed the same way ordinary decommissioned gear would have — unnoticed, uninteresting, not worth the attention of a man tired at shift's end.

But the relief didn't last. On the way back to the work site, Owen took up his routine technical inspection of the submersible — a standard procedure he ran after every major transit, checking every joint, every connection, every panel for damage or corrosion that might fail at a critical moment.

It was during this check, removing the housing from an auxiliary compartment near the ballast system, that he found what shouldn't have been there: a small, neatly mounted device the size of a palm, wired to an independent power source and clearly not part of the vessel's original specifications.

He examined the find for a long time before he understood exactly what he was holding — and when understanding came, it washed over him colder than anything four hundred feet of water ever had.

"Eva," he called, not looking away from the device. "You need to see this."

She came quickly, and Owen's expression when he showed her the find made clear she'd understood just as fast.

"A tracking beacon," she said quietly. "Satellite, by the antenna. Not amateur — this is the kind of thing professional security and intelligence outfits use."

"That's exactly what I thought," Owen agreed. "The question is when it was installed. Because I personally checked this compartment the first week, when we pulled the Nautilus out of the dock, and I stripped the whole vessel nearly bare to figure out what needed repair. It wasn't here then."

He paused before continuing, knowing the next words would change the tone of the whole conversation.

"Which means it was installed later. After the vessel was already aboard the Kestrel. Which means whoever installed it had access to the equipment during its preparation for use — not some random outsider who snuck aboard at night, but one of us, or someone one of us let close enough to the equipment to do it unnoticed."

They gathered the rest of the crew in the command room within the half hour, closing the door more tightly than usual — the conversation ahead wasn't meant for casual ears, even if casual ears, on a small ship, essentially didn't exist.

Morten, examining the device, confirmed Owen's conclusion with a geologist's professional precision, accustomed to working with instruments.

"The power source is rated for roughly three weeks of autonomous operation without recharge," he said, taking the device apart with careful movements. "We've been at sea for five weeks. Which means either it was installed later than we assumed, or someone's been servicing it, swapping the battery, which would be physically impossible without direct access to the compartment."

"Or," Leyla said, "it was installed later than the very beginning, but earlier than we think. For instance, when we picked up the submarine from Rafael's dock contact."

All eyes turned briefly to Rafael, and he met them directly, without flinching.

"I mounted the towing rig myself that night," he said evenly. "Alone. No one else went near the vessel until we delivered it to the Kestrel. If the beacon was installed at the dock, then either I did it — and I didn't — or someone gained access to the vessel afterward, during the days I handed it to Owen for restoration work."

"Who had access to the vessel in those first days aboard?" Eva asked, though part of her already knew the rough list — and knew that this time, unlike the suspicion toward Morten days earlier, the list would point somewhere real.

"Owen, obviously," Morten said. "I went in once to help with the navigation unit wiring. Leyla was checking the mounts for the explosives we were temporarily storing nearby." He paused, and something shifted in his voice, as if he didn't want to say the next name aloud. "And Saskia. She organized procurement of spare parts for the vessel from before we'd even hired the rest of the crew — the entire equipment and supply list ran through her from the very start of expedition prep, long before any of us knew the Nautilus existed."

The command room fell into the particular silence that comes when an uncomfortable thought, until now existing only as a vague suspicion, suddenly takes on a shape too clear to ignore any longer.

Saskia, silent until then, stood by the door, and her face, usually impassive, for the first time in the whole expedition betrayed something like panic — quick, carefully suppressed, but noticeable to anyone who had, in recent days, learned to watch her more closely than before.

"That proves nothing," she said, and her voice came out slightly less steady than she'd have liked. "I organized the procurement, yes. That was my job. It doesn't mean I personally installed a spy device on the vessel."

"No one's accusing you directly yet, Saskia," Eva said, though the way she said it made clear the accusation was already hanging in the room's air, regardless of whether it had been dressed in direct words.

"But you're all looking at me like you've already reached a verdict," Saskia said, and for the first time something like the despair of someone cornered faster than she'd bargained for broke through in her voice.

No one answered right away. The silence in the command room stretched long enough to become almost physically palpable, and in that silence Eva understood that the moment she'd dreaded since the night she first shared her suspicion with Rafael had finally arrived — and there was no backing away from it now.

"I need to know for certain before we go any further," Eva said at last, turning directly to Saskia, keeping her voice level despite the weight of the moment. "Not guesses, not coincidences. A direct answer to a direct question: have you been passing information about this expedition to anyone without the crew's knowledge?"

Saskia was silent for a long time, looking not at Eva but at the floor, as if searching there for an answer she didn't yet have ready herself.

"I need to say this properly," she said finally. "Not here, not like this, rushed, in front of a device that looks a lot worse right now than it actually is. Give me an hour. I'll tell you everything — fully, holding nothing back. But I want you to hear the whole story, not draw conclusions from fragments."

Rafael looked at Eva, silently asking her decision, and after a brief hesitation she nodded.

"An hour," she said. "But the beacon stays with us, and you stay in plain sight until you come back with an answer."

The hour crawled by agonizingly slowly. Leyla stripped the beacon down completely, laying its parts out on the command room table like evidence at a crime scene, while Morten reached a longtime contact at the maritime registry over a secure channel to find out which security firm exactly the device's model belonged to — a result that only confirmed what everyone already suspected: the marking matched equipment procured exclusively by private outfits on the level of Meridian Salvage.