In the Shadow of the Cypress (27 page)

Robert’s father interjected a serious note. “If you’ll forgive me, Mr. Lucas, I would like to have your response before we arrive at the airport. A great deal depends on your answer, especially if matters are to be put in place without delay.”

Luke sat back, looked down, and wiped his face with his hands. When he opened his eyes he focused on the wrapped folio at his feet. Luke thought to himself, Well, my board’s already in the water, so I might as well ride this “boomer” all the way. Then he looked up as if just coming awake. “My answer is yes, sir. Yes indeed. I think I’d like to follow this as far as it can lead us. Whatever we find, it’s sure to prove a remarkable piece of science, engineering, and history all rolled into one. It will also help authenticate existing documentation. I’m extremely grateful you’ve asked us to participate, Mr. Wu. We’ll do the very best we can, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed all the same.”

Mr. Wu gave a broad smile. “In that case, would you both please sign the two copies of the contracts you’ll find in those envelopes? The checks are in the amount of fifteen thousand dollars each. Ten of that is an advance on your salaries, and the remaining five is to cover individual business expenses until the line of credit clears whatever bank you choose. Keep strict records of every transaction, no matter how small. Others will be looking over our shoulders eventually, and it’s best not to feed their envy with questionable expenses.” Mr. Wu sipped his coffee and watched his new young dragons sign their contracts. He continued speaking upon receipt of his copies.

“Now, I want Robert to accompany you back to Monterey. He can help you get your business affairs in order, and also help you pack whatever you choose to bring to Atherton. If you’ll give me your landlord’s address, I will arrange for a check to be sent every month; you will be responsible for the other half, of course.”

“That’s very handsome of you, Mr. Wu, but I wonder if you’d think it out of place if I made a couple of suggestions of my own.”

“Not at all, Mr. Lucas. I’m most interested in what you have to say.”

“Well, first I think that the less mentioned about the stones the better. For our purposes, all anyone need know is that we’re doing research in multidisciplined submarine topography, which is, in fact, exactly what we’ll be doing most of the time. And second, that we choose a name for the corporation that reveals nothing of our goals, and even less about our methods.”

Robert piped in with a suggestion. “Let’s go with an old Chinese standby. We’ll call it the IAS Project.”

Luke did a double take. “What does IAS stand for?”

Robert giggled. “It’s A Secret. IAS, pronounced like ‘ice.’ ”

Luke turned to Mr. Wu. “What do you think, sir?”

Mr. Wu barely stifled a chuckle. “I have no objections to bad puns; you can call it anything you like. You can call it Porky Pig for all I care, but let us hope the ghost of Zhou Man is not sitting in opposition to our best intentions. Otherwise, I leave the IAS Project in your capable hands, but keep me informed at all times. I will send down my purchasing agent to see you next Thursday. Give him a list of the equipment you will need. Whatever it is, I can arrange for the best possible prices, no matter where it’s made. And what we can’t buy, we will lease.”

———

A
S SOON AS POSSIBLE AFTER
takeoff, Luke got the thumbs-up from the Lear’s captain and began texting his old roommates in Virginia. He asked for the names of the best programmers in northern California. Luke got an immediate response and was told to search out the website for the Flying Rodriguez Brothers of San Jose. He was informed that they were verifiable computer geniuses.

When Luke texted back inquiring about their lateral computer qualifications, his friends informed him that the preeminent Flying Rodriguez Brothers could reprogram a duck to give six pints of milk every day, and if that wasn’t lateral enough, then Luke would have to look elsewhere. Luke contacted and made an appointment to meet with the Rodriguez brothers even before they landed in Monterey.

Mr. Wu was as good as his word, and within three weeks Luke and Robert had the IAS Project up and running. They had rewired the north wing of the Atherton house to handle the increased power needs of their computers and other equipment. They installed a phone bank and rented all the office furnishings that seemed necessary. Soon they were masters of a very impressive array of powerful new computers and large-format scanners.

Luke began petitioning every possible source for topographical submarine maps of Monterey Bay and the coast of California a hundred miles north, west, and south of a line plotted between Monterey and Santa Cruz. In that regard, Luke’s association with Hopkins, Stanford, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium were extremely helpful. As soon as any material came in, it was coded and put into a custom program designed by the
Rodriguez brothers. It created a kind of multidimensional effect.

Maps from the turn of the century indicating sunken ships and other submarine hazards were layered with recent radar and sonar scans, which were then again layered with satellite radar images, and Navy and NOA topographical scans. The Rodriguez brothers even scanned a number of early Spanish and English maps of the bay. Then they layered in the tidal and current tables for the past one hundred years, which was an easier job than Luke might have surmised. He happily discovered that maritime records were the most assiduously preserved of all documents.

A
FTER EIGHT WEEKS,
P
ACO
R
ODRIGUEZ
informed Luke that they now possessed the most comprehensive data field on Monterey Bay in existence anywhere, and more information was becoming available every day. His brother, Estéban, suggested that it was about time to bring in a top CAG specialist to meld the whole data bank into a complete and comprehensive virtual 3-D map. Paco wrote out a list of talented candidates and Luke hired the most promising: a young Vietnamese woman named Françoise “Skipper” Nuygen. She ultimately proved to be the hardest-working and most creative member of the team.

But it was at night, after everyone had left, that Luke and Robert did their own work on the computers. Luke focused on current and tidal charts for the period, while Robert dealt with the artifacts as agreed.

From the very first Luke was amazed by how much garbage
littered the bottom of Monterey Bay. If he was going to get his computers to do a comprehensive search, he would need to know a great deal more about the missing steam launch. He found all kinds of links that gave him designs and dimensions, but they were mostly Edwardian lake or river steamers. What Luke needed was a picture of the boat itself, and through the clever auspices of a talented Monterey historian, Kent Seavey, a photograph was soon found in the Hotel del Monte historical archives. Luke hit the keyboard and traced backward to find that the Billings and Joyce Boat Works had built several passenger steam launches in their Oakland yards. In 1885 they specifically took an order from the Hotel del Monte. Luke thought the name sounded familiar. It was called the Del Monte Princess. Unfortunately, the famous hotel burned to the ground in April of 1887, and the vessel was sold as a local mail and passenger packet to service Big Sur.

Luke’s search eventually coughed up the exact designs for the launch, its dimensions, its displacement, the weight of the engine and boiler, and every other pertinent fact he could conceivably wish to have, including the costs charged to the owners of the Hotel del Monte. Because the clients demanded that only the best materials be employed to impress their guests, the elegant fifty-nine-foot steam-screw launch came down the shipway at a whopping fourteen thousand dollars. And it proved a great success for the hotel before the fire.

Thanks to the generosity of the Rodriguez brothers and Skipper, Luke found he was discovering more about complex computer programs than he ever thought possible. Under their guidance he practiced maneuvering through the numerous programs, and soon found he could navigate around the submarine topography with considerable dexterity. He learned to code in
specific GPS coordinates and watch the program instantly take him to that location on the virtual 3-D map. The layout also included all known sunken vessels and other foreign debris, so Luke could cruise in a leisurely fashion, like a sounding whale, loitering at points of interest and then moving on. It was like flying underwater, and Luke began to enjoy the process for its own sake.

And that wasn’t all Luke enjoyed. As much as he loved Monterey, Luke found life at the mansion in Atherton quite to his liking. He had the use of a new Lexus, his salary was more than generous, his commute to work was all of eighty-five feet, and the food was always exceptional. Plus the location had the advantage of being closer to Rosie, though he had to admit that she was now so heavily preoccupied with leaving for Duke that their time together became more infrequent, and somewhat strained.

Working on his own programs, Robert had accomplished his reconstruction of the stone artifacts, complete with all three texts and ancillary decorations. The next step was to have three-dimensional models carved on a computerized milling machine, but there was one problem: they needed more computer enhancements to make the engraved texts stand out on the model.

The Rodriguez brothers had pretty much finished their work after three months, and only came in now and then to tweak a program here and there, or to layer on a new update. Skipper was now of far more use to the project than anyone else, and Luke and Robert debated whether to bring her into their confidence full-time, or just conditionally, telling Ms. Nuygen the least critical part of the story. They decided to clue Skipper into the fact that they were designing a broad and comprehensive submarine
search program that required the best graphics available in the industry. To prove the program viable, they had decided to try to target a small wooden steam launch that had gone down between Monterey and Santa Cruz in 1906. So far no one had been able to find the target, so it had naturally been chosen as a perfect test subject. If, using only their multiprogram-generated maps, they could find the missing steam launch, they would have adequately proven the efficacy of their approach.

Skipper seemed content with this revelation, and since she already harbored an abiding crush on Robert, any excuse to stick around the office was just fine with her. And believing, as she did, that the enigmatic stones were a separate project controlled by Robert’s interests alone, Skipper happily volunteered to help him streamline and clean up his computer models for eventual physical reproduction.

Thirteen weeks into the project, Luke and Robert decided it was time to show their results to their backer. Subsequently an appointment was made with Mr. Wu for the following Monday evening. Luke leased a big-screen monitor to show off their new program to the best effect, and he also arranged that no one else would be present when they made their demonstration.

Up until now Luke had been so busy tweaking the finer details of the current and tidal charts that he had put off doing a general search for the launch. Robert teased him about getting his feet wet, but suggested that they wait and run the complete search program with his father present so he might appreciate the complexity of what had been accomplished. He also put forward the idea that even if they didn’t find the target they were looking for, the program itself might be of great commercial value in other fields, such as deep-ocean mining, marine salvage, and oil exploration. The possibilities were wide-ranging.
Even if their original goals went unfulfilled, at least all parties could realize some reasonable profit from the work they had already completed. Luke admitted that he had not been looking that far ahead.

M
R.
W
U WAS MOST IMPRESSED
with what Luke and Robert had accomplished. First, Robert showed his father the jade seal and the stone tablet as reconstructed by the computer. He mentioned in passing that it would be possible to have more copies of the artifacts made through a computer milling process, but said that hopefully that wouldn’t be necessary if they found the originals. Then he showed his father the complete translations of the various texts on the stone and the inscription and chop on the jade seal. He said there was no doubt whatsoever that the seal was once the property of Zhou Man. His name and imperial titles were clearly indicated on both the stone tablet and the seal.

Then Luke took over. He showed Mr. Wu the computer reconstruction of the steam launch, and the probable location of the boxed artifacts in the passenger cabin with the company courier. Using computer animation, Luke demonstrated the probable cause of the explosion and the subsequent fire. When the rate of the conflagration was estimated on the computer model, the steam launch was shown to burn to the waterline in less than twenty-five minutes, after which the remnants would sink. However, Luke pointed out that if the explosion had blown a hole in the hull, the launch might have gone to the bottom before being completely destroyed by fire. Either scenario was possible. Only discovery would answer the question.

Luke began to demonstrate how the various marine topographical maps and sonar surveys were overlaid with more recent side-scan radar and even satellite images. He went on to illustrate how the various maps, when overlaid on a detailed Coast Guard survey, pinpointed the various shipwrecks of known or unknown origins, as well as smaller debris fields from other maritime accidents. The computer program illuminated everything from the 1935 wreck of the Macon airship off Point Sur to the recent sinking of the trawler Bella Stella off the coast of Half Moon Bay. Luke then had the computer eliminate every known shipwreck, leaving only eighteen unidentified targets. He set the launch in its approximate position when the boiler exploded. Using the tidal and current charts, Luke showed that at the approximate time of the accident, the tides were slack, verging on the outgoing tide. The program illustrated just how far the burning launch would have drifted before sinking. This eliminated another ten targets. Then Luke eliminated any wreck that showed no magnetic anomalies, meaning it had no engine or substantial metal parts. This reduced the targets to four. Two were of the wrong length, and a third was broken up so badly that nothing could be determined of its original size. But the fourth was a strange anomaly that showed up as a cross-shaped image on the sonar and radar scans.