Fluke or I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings - By Christopher Moore Page 0,52

its paucity of consonants. (You go ahead, I'm okay, she was saying.) She gestured for Clay to continue.

Clay cued the tape and fiddled with the audio. A whale tail in a field of blue passed by on the monitor.

"There's someone outside, Captain."

"Does he have my sandwich with him?"

Amy stopped yawning and scooted forward on the stool she was perched upon behind Clay. When the whale tail came down, Clay stopped the tape and looked back at her.

"Well?"

"Play it again."

He did. "Can we get a feeling for direction?" Amy asked. "That housing has stereo microphones, right? What if we move the speakers far apart - can we get a sense where it's coming from?"

Clay shook his head. "The mikes are right next to each other. You have to separate them by at least a meter to get any spatial information. All I can tell you is that it's in the water and it's not particularly loud. In fact, if I hadn't been using the rebreather, I'd never have heard it. You're the audio person. What can you tell me?" He ran it back and played it again.

"It's human speech."

Clay looked at her as if to say, Uh-huh, I woke you up because I needed the obvious pointed out.

"And it's military."

"Why do you think it's military?"

Now Amy gave Clay the same look that he had just finished giving her." 'Captain'?"

"Oh, right," said Clay. "Speaker in the water? Divers with underwater communications? What do you think?"

"Didn't sound like it. Did it sound like it was coming from small speakers to you?"

"Nope." Clay played it again. "Sandwich?" he said.

"Sandwich?"

"The Old Broad said that someone called her claiming to be a whale and asked her to tell Nate to bring him a sandwich."

Amy squeezed Clay's shoulder. "He's gone, Clay. I know you don't believe what I saw happened, but it certainly wasn't about a sandwich conspiracy."

"I'm not saying that, Amy. Damn it. I'm not saying this had anything to do with Nate's" - he was going to say drowning and stopped himself - "accident. But it might have to do with the lab getting wrecked, the tapes getting stolen, and someone trying to mess with the Old Broad. Someone is fucking with us, Amy, and it might be whoever is recorded on this tape."

"And there's no way the camera could have pulled a signal out of the air, something on the same frequency or something? A mobile phone or something?"

"Through a half-inch of powder-coated aluminum housing and a hundred feet of water? No, that signal came in through the mike. That I'm sure of."

Amy nodded and looked at the paused picture on the screen. "So you're looking for two things: someone military and someone who has an interest in Nate's work."

"No one - " Clay stopped himself again, remembering what he'd said to Nate when the lab had been wrecked. That no one cared about their work. But obviously someone did. "Tarwater?"

Amy shrugged. "He's military. Maybe. Leave the tape out. I'll run a spectrograph on the audio in the morning, see if I can tell if it's coming through some kind of amplifier. I've got nothing left tonight - I'm beat."

"Thanks," Clay said. "You get some rest, kiddo. I'm going to hit it, too. I'll be heading down to the harbor first thing."

" 'Kay."

"Oh, and hey, the 'kiddo' thing, I didn't mean - »

Amy threw her arms around him and kissed the top of his head. "You big mook. Don't worry, we'll get through this." She turned and started out the door.

"Amy?"

She paused in the doorway. "Yeah?"

"Can I ask you a... personal question, kinda?"

"Shoot."

"The shirt - who's stupid?"

She looked down at her shirt, then back at him and grinned. "Always seems to apply, Clay. No matter where I am or who I'm with, the smoke clears and the shirt is true. You gotta hang on to truth when you find it."

"I like truth," Clay said.

"Night, Clay."

"Night, kiddo."

The next day the weather was blown out, with whitecaps frosting the entire channel across to Lanai and the coconut palms whipping overhead like epileptic dust mops. Clay drove by the harbor in his truck, noting that the cabin cruiser that Cliff Hyland's group had been using was parked in its slip. Then he turned around and caught a flash of white out of the corner of his eye as he drove past the hundred-year-old Pioneer Inn - Captain Tarwater's navy whites standing out