Read Online Buried At Sea by Paul Garrison - Free Book Online Page B

think?"
    "I'm still too close to it. But I think Shannon's right. Underneath all her demandingness, my mother was very, very needy." He smiled, suddenly happy. "You won't be surprised to hear that she and Shannon can't stand each other—I'm going to check my e-mail."
    "Why not? Maybe Shannon's changed her mind." "Maybe 'they' have changed their minds."
    Dear Jim,
    Your shark-and-flipper experience sounds a little weird. Is Will a little weird?
    Dear Shannon,
    Weird, I don't know. Maybe Will was a little cold-blooded, but maybe cold-blooded is what makes him so cool and collected when something goes wrong with the boat. I have to admit that if it happened again, I hope l'd keep my eyes open long enough to really see what's going on before I freak out.
    Lloyd McVay, a tall, stooped man in a glen-plaid suit and florid bow tie, telephoned ports up and down the coasts that rimmed the Atlantic Ocean. His reach extended from Brazil to the island of Antigua in the Caribbean, to Miami on the American mainland, to Dakar in Senegal on the great bulge of West Africa; in Freetown, Lagos, Gibraltar, the Azores, and Bermuda, bankers, importers, shipping agents, oilmen, diamond merchants, and diplomats took his calls, eager to please. Val McVay, his daughter and chief grant officer of the McVay Foundation for Humane Science, worked across from him on the other side of their partners desk, e-mailing yacht clubs and marinas on those same coasts. She was a pale woman, dressed all in black; her face was as white as paper, her close-cropped hair was ash-blond, and her wide-open, wide-set eyes were dark. The goals list she kept on a pad beside her included polling a score of charter yacht captains she knew from her sailing days and a hundred scientists, engineers, and academics beholden to the foundation.
    Raised a lone child among adults, she had learned early to read faces and eyes: their assistants—three recently minted MBAs in dark suits, white shirts, and bow ties deferentially imitative of her father's signature neckwear—were experiencing real terror; even her father was feeling pressed.
    The disaster was writ large on the jumbo high-resolution flat-panel display that showed an electronic chart of the Atlantic Ocean. The red line that marked Will Spark's voyage from Barbados ran out abruptly midocean. The icon that had represented the fast ferry Barcelona was beached, as it were, in the Cape Verde Islands, where Andy Nickels had disembarked. Except for the useless red line and the ferry icon, nine million square miles of seawater depicted on the chart were empty. The enormous circle of blue that marked how far Spark could have sailed in the past week already encompassed an area larger than Europe.
    A dozen smaller monitors displayed CNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, and a range of science and engineering websites. The only decoration in their large, windowless office was a vintage poster for the movie Fantastic Voyage—her father's idea. Their desk was littered with telephones and computer monitors. A printer sighed in a corner, attended by an MBA. A second MBA was whispering into a phone. The third was
    poised to retrieve paper files from a bank of cabinets.
    Lloyd McVay said, "I should speak with someone in the oil business, in the event Spark heads for his old stomping grounds in West Africa."
    "Richard Hood at Shell," suggested Val. "We gave his brother a lab grant."
    "Dick's an accountant, for goodness' sake. Bob Hunt oversees security." Val's grandfather had founded McVay Radio, building transceivers for the air force in World War II and microwave generators for the then-new radar. After a long stint with the CIA, her father had taken over, renaming the company McVay Microwaves in time for the Vietnam War and the NASA moon project, and developing transmitters and laser generators for the Defense Department, NASA, and private industry. He had made a second fortune by jumping down from elite technology into PCs for ordinary people. With the