The gauge: 2300 pounds of pressure.
We're doing fine. Keep going.
Clank.
That damn noise--like doors closing, sealing her shut. Well, ignore it, she told herself. Nobody's closing any doors.
The rooms above her--on the side of the Dragon facing the surface--were not, she deduced, the Ghost's: two didn't appear to have been occupied on the voyage and one was the captain's; in this one she found seafaring memorabilia and pictures of
the bald, mustachioed man she recognized as Captain Sen from the pictures tacked up on Lincoln Rhyme's wall.
Clank, clank, clank . . .
She swam downward to check out the rooms on the other side of the narrow corridor--facing the bottom.
As she did, her tank caught on a fire extinguisher mounted to the wall and she froze in position. Trapped in the narrow corridor she was seized with a flash of panic.
It's okay, Sachs, Lincoln Rhyme's voice said to her in that deep, lulling voice he always fell into when speaking to her through her headset at crime scenes. It's okay.
She controlled the panic and backed up, freeing herself.
The gauge told her: 2100 pounds.
Three of the cabins below her hadn't been occupied. That left only one more--it had to be the Ghost's.
A huge groan.
More clanks.
Then a moaning so loud she actually felt it in her chest. What was happening? The whole ship was buckling! The doors would be jammed. She'd be trapped here forever. Suffocating slowly . . . Dying alone . . . Oh, Rhyme . . .
But then the moaning stopped, replaced by more clanking.
She paused at the entrance to the Ghost's cabin, below her feet.
The door was closed. It opened inward--well, downward. She gripped the knob and twisted. The latch released and the heavy wooden door eased downward. Looking beneath her into the darkness. Things were swimming around inside the room. Jesus . . . She shivered and remained where she was, hovering in the narrow corridor.
But Lincoln Rhyme's voice, as clear as if he'd been speaking through her headphones, sounded in her thoughts. "It's a crime scene, Sachs. That's all it is. And searching crime scenes is what we do, remember? You grid it, you search it, you observe it, you collect evidence."
Okay, Rhyme. But I could live without eels.
She let some air out of the BCD and dropped slowly into the room.
Two sights made her gasp.
In front of her a man floated in the black space, eyes closed, his jaw down as far as it could go, arms outstretched, his coat billowing out behind him. His face was white as paper.
The second thing she saw was less macabre but far stranger: what must have been a thousand hundred-dollar bills floated in the water, filling the room, like flakes in a plastic souvenir snow globe.
The bills explained the man's death. His pockets were filled with money and she deduced that as the ship started to go down he'd run to the cabin to get as much of the Ghost's cash as he could but he'd been trapped here.
She eased farther into the room, the bills swirling in her wake.
The money soon proved to be a major pain in the ass. It stuck to her, it obscured the scene like smoke. (Add this to your book, Rhyme: excessive money at the crime scene can make searches extremely difficult.) She couldn't see more than a few feet past the cloud of bills. She grabbed several handfuls of the money for evidence and put them in her collection bag. Kicking her way to what was now the top of the room--originally the side--she noticed an open attache case floating in the thin air pocket. She found more currency inside--Chinese, it seemed. A handful of these bills went into the collection bag.
Clank, clank.
Jesus, this is spooky. Darkness around her, unseen things caressing the wetsuit. She could see only a few feet in front of her--the tunnel of dim illumination cast by the tiny spotlight on her head.