Chapter 7. The Night Search

The Meridian Salvage launch approached the Kestrel at three in the morning, running dark, without a radio warning, and was spotted only because Leyla, on radar watch that hour, had long since made a habit of checking the screen every ten minutes instead of the prescribed thirty.

"We've got company," she said into the shared cabin, in the particular level tone that on the Kestrel meant: don't panic, but move now. "Three people, unmarked boat, course straight for us."

By the time the launch bumped the hull, the whole crew was already on deck, hastily dressed but wearing the expressions of people properly annoyed at being woken for no apparent reason.

"Safety inspection," the senior of the three announced, climbing aboard without invitation, exactly as Hale had done days earlier. "Complaint received regarding improper storage of explosive materials on your vessel. Required to check."

The complaint was, of course, invented — no authority within a hundred miles had any knowledge that the Kestrel carried explosives at all, except Hale himself, who knew only because he'd seen Leyla's equipment on deck during his first visit. But the formal pretext, however unconvincing, gave Hale's men a legal-looking right to search the ship stem to stern — and they were clearly not looking for explosives.

Eva watched the two men accompanying the senior officer methodically, but purposefully, check cabins, compartments, crates — not like people looking for a safety violation, but like people looking for something specific: charts, coordinate records, a ship's log. One of them lingered at the table in the command room, where Morten's calculations had lain just the day before, running a hand over the empty surface with the disappointment of someone who hadn't found what he'd expected to.

The log, at that moment, lay exactly where it was supposed to under the plan devised back in the first week of the expedition — inside the hollow body of one of the spare scuba tanks, among a dozen identical tanks stacked haphazardly by the rail. The plan was sound right up until someone decided to check the tanks by weight — and one of the searchers, more thorough than the rest, began doing exactly that, lifting them one by one, gauging whether any felt heavier than an empty breathing-gas tank should.

Leyla noticed first and realized that in two, at most three tanks, he'd reach the right one — and that no one had thought up a backup plan for this exact scenario.

She did the only thing that came to mind in the seconds available: dropped a crate of signal flares she was supposedly carrying to check for damage right at the feet of the thorough searcher, and one of the flares, against every safety regulation, somehow ignited on impact.

A red smoke flare burst to life with a deafening hiss, flooding the deck in acrid light and thick smoke that sent everyone nearby into immediate coughing fits, Leyla herself included, playing panic with a conviction a professional actress might have envied.

"Sorry, sorry," she kept saying, waving her arms, clearing the smoke and simultaneously, with an unnoticed kick, rolling the right tank further into the shadows, behind a stack of less interesting inspection material. "Faulty mount, happens sometimes, we've already complained to the supplier…"

The chaos lasted less than two minutes, but it was enough. When the smoke cleared and the searcher returned to his interrupted task, the right tank had already been lost among the others, and his own attention, already dulled by acrid smoke, stinging eyes, and irritated coughing, was no longer sharp enough to catch the weight difference.

"All clear," he reported to the senior officer a few minutes later, clearly eager to leave the smoky deck.

The trio left the Kestrel as brazenly as they'd arrived, the senior officer remarking on his way out that they "hoped, in future, you'll be more attentive to hazardous material storage regulations" — a phrase delivered with the same cold politeness that characterized Hale himself, as if his entire crew had trained on the same course of intonation.

When the launch had pulled far enough away that conversation on deck could no longer carry over the water, the crew gathered around the still-smoking crate of flares in a silence broken by Leyla herself.

"That wasn't a safety inspection," she said. "That was a search. Targeted."

"Looking for the log," Morten agreed. "Or the charts. Or both."

"And they knew roughly where to look," Owen added quietly. "He was checking the tanks specifically, not the provisions crates, not personal effects. Someone pointed him toward thinking something important might be hidden in the gear."

The words hung in the air longer than anyone was comfortable with. Eva swept her gaze over the crew's faces — exhausted, anxious, and on every one of them the same unspoken suspicion, aimed simultaneously outward, at Hale, and inward, at each other.

"Someone's leaking information," she said finally, saying out loud what everyone already knew but had avoided putting into words directly. "Not necessarily maliciously. Maybe an accidental leak, maybe someone's sharing more than they should with someone they trust. But something is happening, and staying silent about it any longer means putting all of us at risk."

"And what do you propose?" Morten asked. "Interrogate each other?"

"I'm proposing we pay closer attention," Eva said. "And be more honest with each other than we've been so far."

She said it, looking around at each of them in turn, and for a split second her gaze lingered on Morten a beat longer than the others — not because she had any concrete grounds to suspect him specifically, but because of the whole crew, he'd been the most withdrawn lately, more often burying himself in his own notes and charts and less often taking part in conversation at meals.

No one really slept the rest of that night. Leyla relocated the log to a far less obvious hiding place — sewn into the lining of one of the life vests, reasoning that a vest, unlike a tank, was unlikely to be weighed. Rafael walked the ship end to end, personally checking whether Hale's men had left anything behind — a beacon, a microphone, any device that would explain how the searchers had known where to look. Nothing turned up, which was more unsettling still: the absence of a technical explanation left only one, human, alternative.

Toward morning, once most of the crew had finally fallen into a restless sleep, Eva sat alone in the command room with the log, freshly retrieved from the vest for one more entry, rewriting the last few days of the expedition, trying by simple elimination to figure out which of the five had a real opportunity to pass information to Hale. Owen had spent nearly all his time either underwater or at the submersible controls, in plain view of the others. Leyla had spent hours alone preparing charges — a theoretical opportunity existed, but no motive: her quick thinking had just saved the log that night. Morten, as it would turn out later, really was occupied with correspondence, but of a different kind. That left two whose schedules weren't as predictable as the others' — Eva herself, whom she of course ruled out for the obvious reason, and Saskia, whose job consisted precisely of constant contact with the outside world: banks, suppliers, intermediaries — contact that, unlike the others, no one considered suspicious simply because it was part of her duties.

Eva set the log aside, the entry unfinished, and stared into the darkness beyond the porthole, unable to find the resolve to write down directly the suspicion already forming in her mind with a clarity she could no longer afford to ignore.