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Haven

Wednesday

A s Enzo steered us back to Positano, I pulled out my phone to text Mal. She’d told me earlier she remained on standby at the Naples airport. Unable to get home, she’d grown progressively more frustrated.

I was about to add fuel to the fire.

Ran into Conrad on the water , I hammered away at the keyboard. He’s 100% after the gems.

A moment later, she replied. F* him. How do you know?

He has some new techy camera. Wouldn’t tell me exactly what it was. But his implication was enough.

You’re going to prove him wrong , she said.

I have no idea how. Went down today—great wreckage field. Perfect for Project Relic , but not so much for finding long-lost treasure.

Mal didn’t reply, but I needed to off-gas my frustration, so I kept going. He told his guys that if he needed to save one of their lives, they’d owe him big. Then he looked at me and said, “If I scratch your back, you scratch mine.” WTF.

He wants you out of his way , Mal finally replied.

I don’t plan on giving him that.

Atta girl. Then: You need to think outside the box here, Haven.

I stared at my phone a few moments, then shoved it into my bag and turned my gaze to the cliffs. These same weathered bluffs had existed for millennia, and I couldn’t help but wonder what, exactly, the faces of this mountainside had witnessed. Thunderstorms and torrential rain. Rogue waves and rough seas. People slipping to their deaths. Children learning to swim. Lovers sneaking away for a night. Ships listing, snapping, sinking.

You need to think outside the box , Mal had said. I could make some phone calls, try to commission my own state-of-the-art equipment. I could invite Conrad to sit down with me and beg him to give up his search for my father’s discovery. I could tell Enzo to turn the boat around, then dive back under and turn off the knob on Conrad’s air tank.

Or I could give this entire thing up, go home, and try to restore some dignity.

I hated every idea more than the last.

As we approached the dock and disembarked, I blew out a sigh, glad that Enzo hadn’t asked me about my foul mood.

“I’ll check in with you a bit later,” I told him. “For now, I need some time alone.”

He didn’t argue. Instead, he gave me a slow, gentle kiss on my bottom lip, then he told me to take as much time as I needed. “Li Galli isn’t going anywhere. Everything will remain just where we left it.”

I appreciated his sentiment, his kindness. But someone else was searching those wrecks at this very moment.

Enzo had no idea how very wrong he might be.

***

Back at the rental, I downloaded that day’s photos from my camera onto my Mac. Given their high resolution, the file transfer went slowly, and I perched on the edge of the bed, tapping my foot impatiently. I’d captured more than a hundred and fifty images during the dive.

Once the images had transferred, I took a quick look through them. Some were dark or underexposed, so I manually adjusted the photo settings to better view the subjects. It was quick, easy work, a task I’d been doing for half my life. Besides, I much preferred looking at shipwrecks this way, when I was dry, warm, and under a blanket. On my computer, I could zoom in and out or apply helpful filters.

With the photos organized, I began a more thorough review, searching for something, anything, that might resemble my father’s grainy images: the shape of a cannon or bell, the pattern of wooden planks, or even a recognizable cluster of coral. If something matched, I’d spot it at once.

An hour passed, but nothing caught my eye. Many of the photos were very good otherwise—sharp, well-composed. The images of marine life, in particular, were outstanding. I created a separate folder for these images, in the event I wanted to print and frame them someday.

I’d seen an interesting type of orange lichen, or algae, on the second wreck—the one lying on its side, keel up. I revisited these images, zooming in to get a closer look. I’d seen the same bright-colored lichen on one of my father’s photos; it must be common around here, I reasoned, if we’d both captured it in our images.

Yet as I studied the image, I frowned. This supposed lichen was not clustered, like most underwater algae. Instead, there were a few sharp angles, as though someone had taken a knife and cut shapes from it.

I frowned, using the trackpad on my computer to zoom in on the images. It was indeed orange lichen, but it was clinging to something else—three raised letters spelling AQU . I guessed the letters were made of lead, same as the draft markings affixed on hulls, and the lichen must have found this a suitable element on which to live.

Quickly, I navigated to my father’s cloud folder, skipping past the list of indecipherable codes. I clicked on a photo I’d never given much thought to: a wreck segment, lying flat on the seafloor, with a cluster of the same orange lichen. Again I zoomed in, but the cluster didn’t appear to form any letters.

Until I rotated the photo ninety degrees.

Viewing it from another angle, I could make out what the lichen had clung to: three letters reading ILA . And the shape of the letters—or the font, for lack of a better word—seemed to match.

But what about the size?

My dad hadn’t used a scaling rod; he often didn’t on his recreational dives. Instead, I found objects in each photograph that could be used as measurement tools: a starfish in my image, and a half-buried beer bottle in my father’s. Knowing the general size of both, I approximated the size of the letters in each image.

To my delight, they matched.

“ Aquila ,” I said aloud, letting the word roll slowly off my tongue.

Though my father and I had photographed different segments of the same wreck, this almost certainly confirmed that the spot Enzo and I had explored today was close to the right place. Now I knew where to concentrate my search—which wreck, even. I nearly yelped with excitement, knowing I was, at last, on the right track.

At once, I thought of Conrad. He might have had proprietary equipment to search the seafloor, but I had something he didn’t have: the name of the ship that had gone down. We were, now more than ever, head-to-head.

I needed to know more about the Aquila . If I could get my hands on a blueprint of the vessel, its specifications might help me determine where on the ship any loot had been hidden. A cargo manifest would also be helpful.

Newly encouraged, I opened up my binder, where I’d kept a list of local maritime archives and resources to assist with Project Relic. The most extensive of these archives was in Naples, the Archivio Marittimo di Napoli, which housed more than two million documents, including shipping logs, sailors’ voyage diaries, vessel blueprints, and the like.

It was a long shot, but maybe they had something I could use.