Night Diver: A Novel by Elizabeth Lowell Read Free Book Online

of coral. With each motion of his hand, sand floated up like a slow, silent echo.
    Holden was familiar with the strange disconnect divers encountered their first few times down. For humans, the water beneath the surface was a slow-motion world, rather like the old videos of men on the moon. Everything seemed to take place with a time delay.
    He remembered that unearthly feeling of diving, an alien ballet that took place when gravity was largely subtracted from the equation. Largely, but not entirely. Heavy objects could still fall and pin unlucky divers, and nobody moved as fast underwater as they could on land.
    Not nearly as fast as the shrapnel from an exploding underwater mine, Holden thought, rubbing his thigh absently. His blood had been a muddy green until he was hauled out of the water and put in a decompression chamber with a doctor in attendance. In the air his blood had been scarlet drying to black.
    From the corner of his eye, Holden watched Kate’s reaction to being in the crowded space belowdecks. She had a faint sheen of sweat on her face, but that could have been due to the minimal ventilation in the room. Her face was calm, her hands still. She looked good. Beautiful, in fact.
    I’m going to have to check very carefully into her background. I wouldn’t be the first investigator caught in the net of a sexy thief.
    The pragmatic part of him hoped she was indeed part of the family scam; it would be so much simpler. But the part of him that sensed she was as honest as she was compelling knew that his life had taken a complex, unexpected turn.
    The diver’s wrist-mounted dive computer’s face flashed as it reflected the spill from the dive lights. The compact lightning drew Holden’s attention. Gray-green sea fronds danced lazily in the twilight, undulating to a rhythm all their own while neoprene-gloved fingers whisked like a clumsy broom over the bottom. The motion made sand lift in lazy curls that bent toward a nozzle off to the right side of the screen. An invisible, man-made current siphoned off the sand as it slowly settled into a low, eerie cloud around the diver’s black-clad hand.
    A big tiger shark swept into view with the ease of a supreme predator. Holden tightened instinctively. So did Kate. Larry scratched his cheek with a total lack of interest.
    The diver ignored the shark.
    As for the dive center operator, he was too busy reaching into a bag of fried pork rinds to react to anything, including the people behind him. From the look of his fleshy neck and cheeks, he spent a lot more time eating than exercising.
    Not a diver, that one, Holden thought. Far too much body fat. I’ve seen bored divers go through thousands of calories, but they burn it off as soon as they get back to work.
    Crunching sounds filled the room as the operator shoved in some more crispy bits.
    “Goddam, Volkert,” came a voice over a loudspeaker. “Sounds like you be eatin’ right in my ear.”
    “It’s bloody boring up here,” Volkert said indifferently.
    “You think it be better here? You say you put me in the right place this time,” the diver said in a long-suffering tone, “but I not be findin’ a shaggin’ thing and the tank be runnin’ on fumes.”
    The diver’s accent was Spanish, but with the lilt of the Caribbean dancing through the words. Then the man added a few more phrases in blistering Spanish.
    Holden looked at Kate.
    Sensing his attention, she gave him a wry smile and said softly, “I was raised around divers. I could swear in three languages and five dialects before I was four. As long as the cursing isn’t directed at me, I don’t really notice it.”
    Holden had worked alongside women in the military who had the same attitude. They were every bit as competent as the men and could be as blunt in their language.
    “Hullo,” came a new voice over a different speaker. “Hullo, Golden Bough .”
    The London accent was unmistakable to Holden.
    “This is Malcolm on board,” the voice