The Reef

fingers of sunlight that stabbed through the surface and shimmered clear white. Caves and castles of coral spread out to form secret worlds.
    A reef shark, eyes bored and black, gave a twist of its body and slid through the water and away.
    More at home here than in the air, James dived deep with VanDyke at his heels. The wreck was already well exposed, trenches dug around it and mined of treasure. Coral claimed the shattered bow and turned the wood into a fantasy of color and shape that seemed studded with amethyst, emerald, ruby.
    This was the living treasure, the miracle of art created by seawater and sun.
    It was, as always, a pleasure to see it.
    When they began to work, James’s sense of well-being increased. The Lassiter luck was behind him, he thought dreamily. He would soon be rich, famous. He smiled to himself. After all, he’d stumbled onto the clue, he’d spent days and hours researching and piecing the trail of the amulet together.
    He could even feel a little sorry for that asshole VanDyke, since it would be the Lassiters who brought her up, from other waters, on their own expedition.
    He caught himself reaching out to stroke a spine of coral as though it were a cat.
    He shook his head, but couldn’t clear it. The alarm bell sounded in one part of his brain, far off and dim. But he was an experienced diver and recognized the signs. He’d had a brush or two with nitrogen narcosis before. Never at such a shallow depth, he thought dimly. They were well shy of a hundred feet.
    Regardless, he tapped his tanks. VanDyke was already watching him, eyes cool and assessing behind his mask. James signaled to surface. When VanDyke pulled him back, signaled toward the wreck, he was only mildly confused. Up, he signaled again, and again VanDyke restrained him.
    He didn’t panic. James wasn’t a man to panic easily. He knew he’d been sabotaged, though his mind was too muddled to calculate how. VanDyke was an amateur inthis world, he reminded himself, didn’t realize the extent of the danger. So he would have to show him. His eyes narrowed with purpose. He swung out, barely missing a grip on VanDyke’s air hose.
    The underwater struggle was slow, determined, eerily silent. Fish scattered like colorful silks, then gathered again to watch the drama of predator and prey. James could feel himself slipping, the dizziness, disorientation as the nitrogen pumped into him. He fought it, managed to kick another ten feet toward the surface.
    Then wondered why he’d ever wanted to leave. He began to laugh, the bubbles bursting out and speeding high as the rapture claimed him. He embraced VanDyke in a kind of slow whirling dance, to share his delight. It was so beautiful here in the gilded blue light with gems and jewels of a thousand impossible colors waiting, just waiting to be plucked.
    He’d been born to dive the depths.
    Soon, James Lassiter’s merriment would slide toward unconsciousness. And a quiet, comforting death.
    VanDyke reached out as James began to flounder. The lack of coordination was only one more symptom. One of the last. VanDyke’s sweeping grab pulled the air hose free. James blinked in bemusement as he drowned.

C HAPTER 1
    T REASURE . G OLD DOUBLOONS and pieces of eight. With luck, they could be plucked from the seabed as easily as peaches from a tree. Or so, Tate thought as she dived, her father said.
    She knew it took a great deal more than luck, as ten years of searching had already proven. It took money and time and exhausting effort. It took skill and months of research and equipment.
    But as she swam toward her father through the crystal blue Caribbean, she was more than willing to play the game.
    It wasn’t a hardship to spend the summer of her twentieth year diving off the coast of St. Kitts, skimming through gloriously warm water among brilliantly hued fish and sculptures of rainbow coral. Each dive was its own anticipation. What might lie beneath that white sand, hidden among the fans and sea grass, buried under the cleverly twisted formations of coral?
    It wasn’t the treasure, she knew. It was the hunt.
    And occasionally, you did get lucky.
    She remembered very well the first time she had lifted a silver spoon from its bed of silt. The shock and the thrill of holding that blackened cup in her fingers, wonderingwho had used it to scoop up broth. A captain perhaps of some rich galleon. Or the captain’s lady.
    And the time her mother had been cheerfully hacking away at a hunk of