Chapter 9. The Forged Permit

The problem the crew had been putting off discussing since the first day of the gold recovery finally caught up with them with full inevitability: raising the cargo from the seabed had been half the task. Getting it out of contested waters legally — with no method at all, since neither Valmara, nor Tarif, nor Esperanza-Norte would recognize export rights to something each of them considered its own — remained unsolved.

"Without an export permit we won't clear a single customs checkpoint in the region," Saskia said at the evening briefing, spreading a chart of shipping lanes marked with inspection points before her. "And without clearing customs we can't sell the cargo legally, or even transport it to the mainland, without risking seizure at the first checkpoint."

"So we need a document that'll survive scrutiny, at least at first glance," Rafael said.

"Not just first glance," Saskia clarified. "Convincing enough that a tired port inspector at the end of a shift doesn't call the capital for a recheck. That's a different tier of forgery than a fake fish invoice."

Rafael was quiet for a long moment, then said what his tone suggested he'd been turning over as long as the decision about the borrowed submarine.

"There's a man in the port of Castelblanco, flying Tarif's flag. Old fellow named Emeric — Em, to friends. Made papers for smugglers and fugitives for twenty years, even before I knew him. Word is he's retired, but retirement in his understanding means fewer than ten jobs a month, not zero."

"Do you trust him?" Eva asked.

"I don't fully trust anyone in this business," Rafael answered, with a bluntness that in other circumstances would have been discouraging, but now felt like the only honest response available. "But Em trusts his own principles more than money, and one of those principles is never to hand a client to the authorities, because it's bad for reputation and very bad for his health. He'll do what we ask, take payment, and forget we exist faster than we can walk off the dock."

The trip to Castelblanco took two days — Rafael insisted on going alone, unaccompanied, reasoning that the fewer faces Em saw and remembered, the safer for everyone. Eva stayed behind in command of the Kestrel, torn between worry for the captain negotiating alone with a man of dubious repute and the need to keep raising gold in his absence, as if nothing had changed.

Rafael returned on the third day with a battered attaché case containing a document so convincingly official-looking that even Saskia, scrutinizing every detail — watermarks, license number, the signature of an official who, by her check, really had held the corresponding post at Tarif's Ministry of Trade three years earlier — didn't immediately find fault with it.

"Export permit for a shipment of historical artifacts," she read aloud, "structured as a scholarly transfer to a museum foundation in a third country, with temporary transit through Tarif territory. Clever. It explains both the cargo's origin as an already-documented scientific find and the export route."

"There's a catch," Rafael said, and his tone made clear the catch wasn't one anyone present would enjoy hearing. "The permit is as genuine as a document issued by the wrong agency can possibly be. It'll hold up to visual inspection, hold up to a license-number database check if the inspector doesn't bother calling the ministry directly. But if anyone decides to verify its origin seriously — call the official whose signature is on it, or request the original from the ministry archive — the forgery unravels within the hour."

"So we have exactly one attempt," Eva concluded. "One pass through customs, no room for error and no chance at a second try."

"Exactly right," Rafael confirmed. "Em was very clear on that point. The document is built to pass once, quickly, ideally through a checkpoint where the inspectors are either overworked, or not overly diligent, or both. Use it twice, and you're all but inviting exposure."

Morten, studying the shipping chart over Saskia's shoulder, tapped a point on the Tarif coastline, marked in small print among dozens of other port designations.

"Puerto Junco," he said. "Small cargo port, handles mostly fishing fleets and minor coastal shipping. Understaffed customs, inspections are usually perfunctory unless the cargo looks suspicious on sight."

"Then we need the gold to look like anything but gold," Leyla said.

"Or for the whole load to be inside something the inspector won't want to open fully," Owen added thoughtfully. "Heavy equipment, for example. No one's going to strip a research submersible down to the bolts for a routine check if the paperwork's in order."

The plan came together on its own, piece by piece, as the crew talked it through around the table — risky, dependent on a dozen factors none of them could fully control, but the only path available to get a fortune out of waters that refused to recognize it as belonging legally to anyone but whoever reached shore with it first.

Saskia listened to the discussion more attentively than usual, taking notes in her own notebook — not just about the route and the timeline, but, as Eva noticed later, glancing over her shoulder, the exact dates when the cargo was scheduled to pass through Puerto Junco. Dates that, under different circumstances, would have become extremely valuable information to someone.

Later that night, once the briefing broke up and most of the crew went off to prep for the transit, Eva pulled Rafael aside at the gangway with a brief gesture.

"I need you to do something quietly," she said in a low voice. "Check who on this crew has access to the exact Puerto Junco transit schedule. Not the general outline — I mean the precise dates and times we just discussed."

"Everyone has access," Rafael pointed out. "We discussed it out loud at the shared table."

"I know," Eva said. "But only one person wrote it down in a notebook — one who already has a habit of keeping separate, private records no one else can see. I want to know whether that notebook ever turns out to be less private than she thinks."

Rafael studied her for a long moment, weighing what she'd said without naming a name outright, though the implication was clear enough that clarification wasn't needed.

"You're asking me to watch one of our own crew," he said, not accusingly, more with the weariness of a man accepting the inevitability of a decision he didn't like.

"I'm asking that we stop looking away from something that's already been going on for two weeks," Eva answered. "If I'm wrong, no harm done by a little extra caution. If I'm right, we might still have time to do something about it before Hale gets the last thing he needs from us."

Rafael nodded and went off to ready the ship for the transit, and Eva stood alone at the gangway a long while, watching the light still burning over Saskia's table, bent as usual these days over her own calculations, cut off from the rest of the crew by a thin partition and an even thicker wall of things left unsaid.

The next morning, as the Kestrel set course for Puerto Junco, Owen finished fitting a false bottom into the Nautilus-4's cargo bay, as he and Rafael had agreed the night before: a layer of ordinary ballast and old technical equipment on top, the gold hidden in specially welded compartments beneath, inaccessible without partial disassembly of the hull. The work took the rest of the day and half the following night, and when Owen finally sealed the last panel, deliberately scarred with fresh scratches to hide the recent welding, even a sharp-eyed, experienced port inspector should have seen nothing but a battered, unremarkable research submersible, long past its prime.