Chương 5 - THE WRECK BENEATH THE BLUE
“You knew the coordinates?”
Sarah demanded.
Raffaele shook his head.
“I knew Thomas found something.”
“Yet you never looked?”
“I looked for eighteen years.”
Marcus stepped closer to him.
“You told me my mother died in an engine fire.”
“I told you what your father asked me to tell you.”
“That lie lasted longer than he did.”
“Yes.”
No defense.
No apology.
Just the truth.
Marcus looked away.
Sarah opened the compass.
The faded coordinates pointed several miles offshore, near a submerged limestone ridge local divers called the Blue Cathedral.
She knew it.
Deep.
Beautiful.
Dangerous in bad weather.
“We go tomorrow morning.”
Marcus turned.
“No.”
Sarah almost smiled.
“You still think that works?”
“The wreck may be evidence.”
“Which requires a diver.”
“I have divers.”
“Do they know those caves?”
Silence.
“Do they know the current?”
Silence again.
“Can they identify what my father would have hidden?”
Marcus’s jaw tightened.
“No.”
“Then I’m going.”
Raffaele surprised them.
“She should.”
Marcus looked at him.
“You have lost the right to give me advice.”
“Probably.”
The old man took Teresa’s rosary from the table.
“But Thomas trusted her enough to leave the compass.”
The next morning the Mediterranean looked deceptively calm.
Paolo captained.
Sarah checked her equipment twice.
Marcus stood beside her in a black wetsuit.
She stared.
“You dive?”
“I grew up on an island.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
“I have rescue certification.”
“When?”
“Four years ago.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Why?”
He looked toward the water.
“My mother drowned.”
The answer silenced her.
At the coordinates, sonar found something wedged beneath a rock shelf.
Not a yacht.
Part of one.
The bow section.
Sarah and Marcus descended together.
Blue swallowed them.
At thirty meters, the wreck appeared through the gloom.
White fiberglass.
Burned along one side.
The name remained barely visible beneath marine growth.
STELLA MARIS.
Marcus stopped moving.
His mother’s boat.
The real one.
Sarah touched his arm.
He nodded.
They continued.
Inside the cabin, everything had been stripped.
No instruments.
No papers.
No bodies.
Then Sarah saw something trapped beneath a metal seat bracket.
Blue stone.
She carefully freed it.
A bracelet.
Silver.
Small sapphires.
Marcus stared at it underwater.
She didn’t need him to explain.
Teresa’s.
He closed his fist around it.
Sarah searched beneath the navigation console.
Scratches marked one panel.
Three short lines.
One long.
Her father’s old signal.
He used to carve it into toolbox drawers when he wanted Sarah to find birthday presents.
Her throat tightened.
She opened the panel.
Inside was a waterproof cylinder.
Marcus saw it.
So did someone else.
A shadow moved above the wreck.
Sarah turned.
A diver.
Not Paolo’s deckhand.
Black equipment.
No visible markings.
The diver grabbed Marcus’s air hose.
Marcus twisted away.
Sarah kicked hard toward them.
The stranger pulled a knife.
Underwater fights in movies looked graceful.
Real ones were clumsy, slow, and terrifying.
Sarah struck the attacker’s wrist with her dive light.
Marcus shoved him against the hull.
The knife drifted down.
Then the diver reached for Marcus’s regulator.
Sarah rammed her shoulder into him.
He released Marcus.
The attacker kicked upward.
Toward the boat.
Sarah’s blood went cold.
Paolo.
She signaled Marcus.
UP.
They ascended as quickly as safety allowed.
The moment Sarah broke the surface, she heard shouting.
Then a gunshot.
“PAOLO!”
Marcus hauled himself onto the stern platform first.
Sarah followed.
Paolo lay beside the wheelhouse with blood on his shirt.
“No.”
She dropped beside him.
The bullet had passed through his upper shoulder.
Painful.
Messy.
But not immediately fatal.
“I’m fine,” Paolo growled.
“You’ve been shot.”
“I’ve had marriages worse.”
“You had one marriage.”
“Exactly.”
Marcus’s security man had captured the attacker.
He knelt on the deck, breathing hard.
Marcus ripped off his dive mask.
“Who sent you?”
The man said nothing.
Then Sarah noticed his equipment bag.
A stitched emblem.
Santoro Maritime.
Marcus saw it too.
He went very still.
Not outside enemies.
His own company.
Again.
They returned to the villa with Paolo stabilized by a private doctor.
Sarah sat at the table while Marcus opened the waterproof cylinder.
Inside were original shipping manifests.
Photographs.
A cassette tape sealed in plastic.
And two letters.
One addressed to Sarah.
One to Marcus.
Sarah touched hers but couldn’t open it yet.
Marcus unfolded his.
The handwriting belonged to his mother.
My darling Marcus,
His face changed immediately.
Sarah looked away to give him privacy.
He kept reading.
Teresa wrote that she and Lorenzo had discovered Raffaele’s hidden trafficking network.
She believed Raffaele had convinced himself the money was necessary to keep the Santoro organization alive during a financial war with rival families.
Lorenzo wanted to shut it down.
Raffaele refused.
Then came the line Marcus read aloud.
“My father knew.”
Sarah looked at him.
Marcus continued.
“‘Your father knows everything. He is frightened, but he has chosen us. If we fail, do not mistake his fear for betrayal.’”
Marcus sat back.
His father had not been complicit.
He had been trying to stop it.
Raffaele had lied by omission again.
Sarah opened Thomas’s letter.
Her father explained the second wreck.
Teresa’s real yacht had been rammed offshore after someone disabled its steering.
Thomas pulled Teresa from the water.
Alive.
They reached another vessel.
A Santoro vessel.
Thomas believed they were safe.
Then men boarded.
He was struck unconscious.
When he woke, Teresa was gone.
The fake burned wreck was staged afterward.
Sarah’s hands shook.
Her father had spent the rest of his life believing Teresa might have survived longer than anyone admitted.
At the bottom, Thomas had written one final sentence:
Ask Raffaele why Teresa’s sapphire bracelet was found in the real wreck when I saw it on her wrist after we left that boat.
Sarah stared at the bracelet they had just recovered.
Marcus understood.
“If your father saw her wearing it afterward…”
Sarah finished the thought.
“Then somebody put it back in the wreck.”
The villa door opened.
A guard entered, pale.
“Boss.”
Marcus stood.
“What?”
“Your uncle is gone.”
Marcus’s face hardened.
“When?”
“Forty minutes ago.”
The guard held out something found in Raffaele’s empty car.
A torn strip of cloth.
Bloodstained.
Paolo’s shirt.
Sarah looked toward the room where Paolo had been recovering.
The bed was empty.
Marcus closed his fist around his mother’s bracelet.
May you like
Raffaele had taken Paolo.
---
