Page 35 of Poison Evidence

She was messed up in a way that belied her vaunted IQ. She’d married a traitor. And now a spy had aroused her with a glance.

She finished setting up CAM’s control console. Dimitri had insisted she work at the aft end of the uppermost deck so he could keep an eye on her and the equipment as he navigated the channels between islands.

She’d come to the conclusion Curt told her to cooperate with Dimitri because the CIA, DIA, and FBI wanted whatever it was Dimitri was looking for. Curt must know what Dimitri was after. She understood why he hadn’t shared the information. She could easily slip and let Dimitri knowsheknew what they were looking for.

Best for her to remain ignorant and keep her acting to a minimum. After all, she’d ruined the fourth grade play with her rendition of sunflower number three. But was it her fault the director didn’t understand that fully mature sunflowers don’t follow the sun across the sky? Their heads are too heavy and their growth cycle is complete. If you ask a girl to play a sunflower, at least understand the science before you tell her it’s October and her petals are turning brown.

She flashed on the memory of her parents laughing in the front row as she dramatically drooped under the weight of her seeds, stealing the spotlight from students singing songs about Halloween and candy corn.

Her heart squeezed. She hoped to hell she’d see her parents again. She wanted to thank them for embracing her kooky literal side and going to bat for her with teachers who were irritated by being corrected by a know-it-all student.

She’d been a handful for her parents and teachers. Socialization came naturally to some, but to Ivy, it was a skill that had to be learned and ten times harder than advanced trigonometry. Triangles made absolute sense, but the boy in seventh grade English who thought she was a freak because she was tall, busty, pimply, and obsessed with astrophysics had been a complete—and painful—mystery to her.

But then, triangles were the best shape, the key to time and distance. Triangles were poetry and magic and explained the entire universe.

She puffed out a deep breath and shook her head. She was losing it if she was mentally escaping to her excruciating adolescent years and fawning over triangles. Why would she want to return to that time?

Again her mind flashed on her parents, giving her the answer. At twelve, no matter how awkward she’d been, she’d always felt safe at home, grounded. Loved. But right this minute, she felt vulnerable on twenty-seven different levels. No wonder she wanted to find triangles in the wood grain lines on the deck.

Coping mechanism. Pure and simple.

She flicked the power switch for the drone, which gave a soft whirr as the system booted up.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Dimitri said from the helm, “what does CAM stand for?”

“Officially, it stands for Computer-Aided Mapping, but it’s a bullshit name. I named the system after my grandpa, Cameron MacLeod. Grandpa Cam.” Her Scottish grandfather with the heavy brogue who loved triangles too. She nodded to the drone as it lifted from the deck. “The drone is named RON.”

“Does RON stand for anything?”

“Not yet. There’s a pool at NHHC. The person who comes up with the best name that fits the acronym gets the kitty. Costs ten bucks to enter a name. I pick the winner.”

“Any good entries?”

“Nothing yet.”

“Recording Orientation…and Navigation?”

“See. It’s not easy. But you have to give me ten bucks if you want me to consider your entry.”

He laughed. “I’ll wait until I have something better.” He used reverse to bring the boat to a stop, then powered down the engine. She heard the metal clank of the anchor descending into the water. “If you want to get closer to the island, we’ll have to use the trolling motor to stay in place. I won’t drop anchor on the reef.”

She smiled, glad that he was considerate of the fragile live corals that were both beautiful and the habitat of thousands of species. She felt the same protectiveness for the Peleliu wreckage, where dropped anchors could damage historic debris and human remains.

RON checked out, all systems running, so she returned her focus to the computer. This was a test run in which she would use the drone to map the seafloor where there were known Peleliu wrecks. RON was equipped with regular and enhanced Lidar and infrared mapping technology. It was the enhanced Lidar she was testing here. To create the enhanced system, she’d bundled radio signals into the light beam so the laser could penetrate to the bottom without the radio signal being attenuated by water. Above-water mapping of the seafloor without distortion. A cartographer’s dream.

A Japanese Zero had crashed in the vicinity. RON would capture a three-dimensional image of it.

Her job at the keyboard was to integrate the data collected by RON using CAM, which could interpret the enhanced Lidar signal and break out the radar data. With calibration, CAM’s brain could learn the terrain, and then her baby would do the heavy lifting of separating the data into different map layers—seafloor, corals, metal wreckage, natural and artificial voids that represented tunnels. CAM and RON together were an X-ray machine for land and sea, with the ability to generate three-dimensional images.

Last week she’d done aerial survey with a seaplane instead of RON, using both types of Lidar and the infrared. She crunched the data through CAM, but in broader swaths, to get the overall landscape, nothing to a scale that allowed for 3D. RON was meant for slower, small-scale, meticulous survey, which she hadn’t been scheduled to start for another week.

Dimitri had altered her timeline.

She tested the regular Lidar system on RON, data she would gather for comparison and calibration. Regular Lidar checked out. Enhanced and infrared were also online. She was ready to begin the field test.

This was the part of the job that got her adrenaline pumping, where the magic happened. In the seaplane with Ulai, she’d barely even looked out the window at the spectacular views of Palau, because on the monitor, she saw a different kind of beauty. Patterns. Heat signatures. Markers of the past.

So many lovely triangles.

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