A/N: Have been playing Zork as 'research' for this chapter.

Chapter 3:

"You do have the coordinates, right, Chuck?" Jack Walker said.

Chuck fumbled in his messenger bag until he found the Roark Instruments incident report on the crash, flipped to the appropriate page and read off the last known coordinates for the lost Gulfstream. Jack tapped the coordinates into the GPS as Chuck read, and then grimaced.

"Well, that's a pretty good run just to get there," he said, glancing at his watch. "We better boogie if we're going to get whatever it is off the wreck and back to the marina before dark. Probably three hours just to get there even with the superchargers."

Chuck's eyebrows rose. "Superchargers?"

Jack grinned. "They only add a couple knots to our top speed, but sometimes three knots is the difference between life and death." He pushed the throttle all the way forward and spun the wheel hard over.

Chuck swayed with the acceleration and frowned. "What? You find yourself in life and death situations often?"

"Well," Jack said, drawing the word out. "More than you might expect. South China Sea hasn't exactly been pirate free the last two hundred years."

"Hey, quit filling our client's head with your crazy pirate-phobia, dad," Sarah said, poking her head in the wheelhouse door. Chuck turned, hoping to be reassured about a lack of pirates, but instead, he blinked at her apparent lack of shirts.

"Uh..." Chuck stammered. "Why aren't you wearing a shirt?"

Sarah arched an eyebrow and stepped into the doorway, revealing that she was wearing a bikini patterned after the American flag. Chuck had never felt more patriotic in his life. "Because it's hot out," she said. "And I'm still wet from jumping in the ocean?"

"I can see that," Chuck said, and then had to fight off a coughing fit, when he realized he'd said that out loud. Jack barked a laugh, and Chuck remembered that the older man was Sarah's father. He squeezed his eyes shut and turned to face the bow, which was probably the only gentlemanly direction to turn his eyes at the moment.

"Darlin," Jack said. "You're gonna melt the schnook's brain in a minute, at least go put on somethin' over that thing."

Sarah rolled her eyes. Chuck caught that out of the corner of his eye. Trying to be a gentleman or not, he was still human, male and had a functioning circulatory system. "But it's fun watching him squirm," she complained. "I'm out of my depth here, dad. Usually our clients have trouble meeting my eyes for an entirely different reason. Twenty bucks and I'll cover up, Charlie."

"Sarah," Jack admonished. "We're already getting' paid."

"Hey, at least I'd be getting paid to put my clothes on, and not to take them off," Sarah smirked. "And I need to go belowdeck to get the ROV anyway, it was just a thought."

"The what?" Chuck said, ears perking up. "You've got one of those little robot subs? That's so awesome! I've always wanted to see how one of those actually worked."

"Come on then," she said. "Follow me."

"Um... how about I go first," Chuck said. Temptation being what it was, he was absolutely certain he couldn't stop himself from staring if he had to walk behind her.

Sarah smirked and waved for him to precede her. "The ladder's just around the corner a few feet aft, there you go."

"So, how about the five cent tour?" Chuck said as he went down the ladder.

"Sure thing, Chuck," Sarah said from above him. Chuck looked up involuntarily and then stared at his feet hoping the blush would subside before they finished climbing down into the ship's lower deck. "Down the hall aft is the engine room, which you could probably already tell from the noise!" she had to raise her voice to be heard over the rumble of Lisa's Revenge's two huge diesel engines. A few seconds earlier it hadn't been anything to worry about, but Jack had the ship moving at nearly full power. "There's the tool closet," she pointed, "Then moving toward the bow, we've got my cabin, Dad's cabin, and the galley. Feel free to snoop around the common areas, I'll just be a sec," Sarah darted into her cabin and shut the door.

Chuck felt unaccountably better with the door between them. She was a little overwhelming to be around, and not just because of her beauty. He hadn't really ever met anyone like Sarah before, much less been forced into such close proximity. Also, the bikini was all kinds of distracting when his willpower failed him (more often than his self-image as a nice guy would have liked) and he sneaked a look.

He stuck his head into the galley and was a little shocked. He'd always had an image in his mind of a ship's galley—from pirate movies, mostly—as a raucous and messy place, but the galley of Lisa's Revenge combined all the best parts of living-room, dining-room and kitchen. Even empty and scrubbed clean save for a rack with pots and pans hanging from the ceiling, it was... cozy... there was no other word for it.

Chuck walked past a gas stove and microwave built into the wall—bulkhead—he corrected, and spotted a cluster of framed photographs along the wall. He glanced at the pictures and slowly began to grin. There were a couple of a little blond girl and a noticeably younger Jack Walker, but then a gap. There weren't any photos of her growing up, just those two when she must have been seven or eight, and then late teens, with her and Jack on the deck of Lisa's Revenge, back when the paint wasn't peeling as bad. There were no awkward growing up pictures. Well, except for the one with her in braces and orthodontic headgear of some kind. His lip twitched into a wider grin.

"Oh, my god," Sarah's voice said behind him. "I guess you took me literal on the snooping thing," she sighed. "I should have burned the negatives."

"What? Why?" Chuck said as he turned to face her. Thankfully she had covered up some, but she was wearing a blue spandex shirt of some kind with a stylized surfboard emblazoned across her chest, and a gauzy wrap-style skirt. "You were a cute kid."

Sarah rolled her eyes. "You know I mean the headgear picture; I keep taking it down and throwing it in the ocean, but Dad's got the negatives hidden away somewhere, and I haven't found them... yet."

Chuck grinned. "Well, this is the twenty-first century. Maybe he's got a digital copy somewhere. I know if I wanted to make sure I didn't lose a picture, I'd use an online filesharing site."

"Oh, god," Sarah's eyes widened. "You're telling me that picture might be on the internet!" She shook her head in denial. "No, wait. This is my dad, we're talking about; he's not tech savvy enough for something like that."

"Okay, Chuck shrugged. "But it's actually pretty simple. Still maybe he's not as sneaky as me."

Sarah somehow started to choke on thin air, suffering a brief coughing fit before she got it under control. "Can we change the subject?" Sarah asked miserably.

"Sure," Chuck said. "I'm actually pretty excited to see this robosub."

"It's called an ROV," Sarah said. "Get it right, captain semantics."

"Potato potahto," he said with a shrug and a dismissive wave of his hand.

"You are thoroughly exasperating," she said. "Do you know that?"

"And yet only twenty minutes ago when you were trying out for the Indy 500, I was cute."

"Yeah, well, you know how they say absence makes the heart grow fonder?" she said. "The opposite is also true."

Chuck clutched at his chest as if struck in the heart by an arrow. "You wound me, Sarah Walker."

"Moving on," she said, "you want to help me with this?"

"What?"

"The table," Sarah nodded. "Two man job putting the table up."

Chuck shuffled over and followed her lead. The table was full sized, but hinged along one side, he saw now, as Sarah tilted the table up with Chuck's help, and it folded up against the bulkhead. A small wooden lever Chuck hadn't noticed nailed into the wood above head-height folded out and held the table up out of the way. Under where the table had sat was a small trap door.

Sarah squatted down and flipped the hatch open, reaching in and handing him a huge spool of thick electrical cable.

"What's this?" Chuck asked, trying to find the end of the cable so he could see what kind of connector it used. It was thicker than any computer cable he'd ever seen, probably half-inch at least, and the closest he could come was the T4 line that came through Roark Instruments.

"Power and telemetry and video line for the 'robosub' as you call it," Sarah shrugged. "Put that down and come help me get this thing up. It's not heavy, it's just awkward by myself."

The ROV was sitting in a small cubby under the floor, somewhere between two and three feet long and a foot and a half wide, with a blue plastic case and a plexiglass dome of some kind at what Chuck assumed was the front. There was a matte finish metal railing around the top side, that Chuck grabbed, and shifted around so he wouldn't fall on top of Sarah if he lost his balance.

"Careful," Sarah said. "That thing costs as much as tuition to Harvard."

"You went to Harvard?"

"No," Sarah blushed and shrugged. "I mean, it would have; didn't work out. I don't want to talk about it."

"Yeah, sorry," Chuck said. "I didn't mean to pry. You got the other end?"

"Hang on one sec, and—" Sarah scooped up the spool of heavy cable and looped it over her arm before grabbing the rear section of the railing on the ROV and hauling. "There we go. You want to go backward or forward?"

"Lady's choice," Chuck said. Sarah arched an eyebrow and waddling backward down the corridor to the ladder topside. She had been right, of course, the ROV was maybe fifty pounds, and between the two of them, it wasn't really heavy, just awkward. Mostly because of the expense of the thing, Chuck was being extra careful.

Sarah and Chuck lugged the ROV up on deck and she nodded toward the stern, where she set her end of the submersible down behind the crane. "You mind if I ask? Why a crane?"

"I mind if you ask."

"Sorry," Chuck said with a wince.

Sarah's eyes widened. "Kidding, god you're easy! We're running a salvage company here. Sometimes that means actually pulling wrecks up off the ocean floor. Mostly that's with floatation balloons, but the crane helps out more than you'd think. And it paid for itself when we found a chest of Spanish doubloons."

"Seriously?"

"Where do you think we got the money for the ROV?"

Chuck shrugged. "I hadn't thought about it."

Sarah grunted. "Whatever, anyway, let's get the monitors set up," she said, kicking open a storage locker filled with wires and cables and a pair of small television sets.

First they had to haul a folding card table out from behind the lockers, but Chuck got a crash course in ROV operations, or at least the setup for them. While they were hooking the cables up, she explained how the new models they couldn't afford were wireless, and could run faster off batteries than theirs did plugged into the ship's diesel-electric generator. Sarah had done her research, and they got lost in the technical details; Chuck was aghast when she revealed their method of Chuck thought he could hook his laptop into the feed and make a digital recording. Sarah wasn't convinced until he explained how much money they'd been spending on VHS tape and how little an upgrade would cost them. Chuck glanced up eventually and spotted Jack standing behind him.

"Who's driving the boat?" Chuck demanded.

"Conning," Sarah corrected instantly. "You drive cars. You con a boat."

"The point remains," he said. "Who's conning the boat?"

"I didn't see any other boats at all, Chuck," Jack said, with just the oddest hint of a grin. "Should be fine for a few minutes. Besides, we have such a thing as an auto-pilot on this tub. Just wanted to come check on you two. I thought you wanted a look at the charts."

"Well, Sarah was explaining the ROV, and I'm kind of a techno-nerd at heart," he said. "I got... engrossed."

"I'll bet," Jack laughed, eyes darting between the pair. Sarah rolled her eyes.

"How much longer to the coordinates Chuck gave you?"

"About an hour," he said. "You all set up back here, though?"

"Yeah, dad," Sarah said. "What's up?"

"You forgot to bring back the scuba tank from your lesson."

Sarah smacked herself in the forehead. "Oh, crap. Sorry," she said. "But we won't need it today, will we? We've got a couple spares, yeah?"

"Yes, we do," Jack said. "But I don't remember if there's any air in them?"

"Oh, I guess I'd better go check," Sarah started forward to the ladder belowdecks.

"If you've got your own scuba tanks, why does Sarah need lessons?" Chuck wondered aloud.

Jack barked a laugh. "No, schnook," he said. "She teaches scuba."

"Oh, cool! I've always wanted to learn to dive," Chuck said.

"Well, we've probably got time," Jack shrugged. "I'll leave you to your techno-nerding activities. I've got a boat to drive."

"I thought it was called conning."

Jack shrugged again. "A word of advice about my daughter? Never let her get the last word, she'll respect you more. She can call it whatever she wants, I just drive the boat." He clapped Chuck on the shoulder and made his way back to the wheelhouse.

Chuck glanced over the connections between his laptop and the monitors and controls for the ROV, and grinned. He still had a game of Zork to figure out.

He found the file he'd downloaded and double tapped with the touchpad.

The familiar black and white text box came up, and Chuck blanched in horror.

West of House

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here.

"Oh, crap," Chuck said. "It started me at the beginning?" He winced and wracked his brain. How the hell did he get back to the troll? "Double crap." He couldn't remember. He knew it was fairly close to be starting point, but he was drawing a blank. Still, he didn't really need an excuse to play computer games.

He was in the basement, about to be eaten by a grue, when Sarah turned back up. It had taken him almost twenty minutes to get that far since it seemed like all of his Zork mojo had left him. He pushed himself back to his feet and shrugged his shoulders. Chuck's back was stiff from bending over to type and squint into the display.

Sarah spotted the black-and-white text and frowned. "What's that?"

"That... is Zork," Chuck explained. "It's this old text based computer game from the eighties."

"Oh, whatever," she said. "Dad said you were thinking about scuba lessons?"

"Not a fan of video games?" Chuck said. "You like Star Wars, but not video games? Does not compute."

Sarah shook her head. "We used to have a nintendo when I was little," she said. "But it was never really my thing."

"Well," Chuck said. "I guess nobody's perfect."

"And it's not that I really like Star Wars that much," she explained. "For a while there, it was just one of the only movies we owned. That and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Our VHS library is still pretty limited."

"Hang on," Chuck said. "Wait just a minute. I thought the VCR was just for the ROV... not... you really don't have a DVD player? What about Netflix? Nevermind," he went on at the blank look on her face, turning back to the laptop screen. "I'm just about back to where I was, when I got this email."

"Email? What?"

Chuck shrugged. "My old roommate at Stanford, we both played this game. We actually used to write our own; I know, shocking. I'm a big nerd. He emailed me this file, and it started up in the Troll Room. If I'm doing this right, I think. Yes..."

go north

The Troll Room

This is a small room with passages to the east and south and a forbidding hole leading west. Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the walls.

A nasty-looking troll, brandishing a bloody axe, blocks all passages out of the room. Your sword has begun to glow very brightly.

"This is where it started me the first time, good thing I picked up the sword this time,"

kill troll

Instead of the usual message, about knocking the troll unconscious, the screen flashed, and a series of numbers scrolled up. Chuck frowned. "It's not supposed to do that," he complained. "This doesn't make any sense. We haven't spoken since senior year, and he sends me Zork, but it's rigged to do what? Show me a bunch of random numbers? I thought this was some weird half-assed apology."

"What'd he do?" Sarah said.

"Tried to frame me for cheating," Chuck said. "My webcam caught him planting the tests under my bed, and I got rid of them before he could tip off the dean."
"Ouch," Sarah said. "And this guy was a friend of yours?"

"I thought so at the time," Chuck shrugged. "But I guess not."

"So you turned him in, then?" Sarah said. "For trying to frame you?"

"No," Chuck said. "It just never occurred to me to turn him in. I had already destroyed the evidence that he had stolen the tests. I didn't do it to protect him, but that's how it worked out. And then I was still trying to figure out why he'd done it, when my girlfriend said she was breaking up with me to be with Bryce."

"I hope you did something to get back at him," Sarah said.

"Well, yeah," Chuck said. "I broke his nose for him the next time I saw him. It was weird, he was trying to get me to come work with him in the State department like nothing had happened, but I was too pissed to pay attention; I just let him have it and walked off."

"Wow," Sarah said. "How long ago was all this? Seems like the wound's still kind of fresh."

"Six years," Chuck said, and Sarah got quiet. "What?"

"Just doing the math," she said. "Girlfriend broke up with you on the beach, didn't she?"

Chuck grimaced. "Right after I got down on one knee to propose. Not before, couldn't do that, could she. Sorry," he said. "I'm not supposed to go on and on about the Jill/Bryce betrayal exacta. Drives away the ladies, my sister tells me."

Sarah shrugged and waved expansively at the open ocean around them. There wasn't any land in sight. "Where would I go?" she said. Sarah leaned in to look at the numbers, still flashing merrily on the screen. "Huh."

"What's up?"

"Your old nemesis know where you are?"

Chuck shrugged. "I can't see how. Why?"

She tapped the screen gently. "Those are GPS coordinates. It's only a few miles north of where that plane went down."

Chuck shrugged. "Must just be one of those weird coincidences. Bryce is probably just messing with me. Probably gets a kick out of it. Send Chuck bizarre GPS coordinates, make him go on wild goose chase to the Philippines. Sounds like something he'd do."

"Has he done something like that before?"

"Well he tried to frame me for cheating," Chuck said.

Sarah shook her head. "Yeah, but that was simple, and the motive seems uncomplicated. He was trying to steal your girlfriend, and wanted you out of the way. This, I can't see a reason for. Why these coordinates? And when did he send this email to you?"

Chuck frowned. "I don't know, some time while I was on the plane maybe?"

"So I guess he might have known you were coming here when he sent them?" Sarah said.

"Sure, I guess he could have. My trip wasn't exactly top secret," Chuck said.

"We could go check out Bryce's coordinates, if you want?"

"Ah, why bother?" Chuck said. "It's probably nothing, and we need to find that plane first."

"You say so," Sarah shrugged, but she still jotted the coordinates down on a post-it note and stuffed it into Chuck's breast pocket before letting him close the game window. "In case you change your mind," she explained.

"Your dad said you could teach me to scuba dive? How does that work on a moving boat?"

Sarah shook her head. "You don't get in the water until the second hour at least. First lesson is all technical stuff. Should be right up your alley."

Chuck managed a grin, but he couldn't quite get the thought of that second set of coordinates out of his head. Why had Bryce sent them to him? And why the weirdness with the Zork hack to deliver them? He shook his head and tried to concentrate as Sarah began explaining about oxygen narcosis and nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream, and half a dozen other ominous sounding things. He had enough to worry about, he decided, without thinking about why Bryce Larkin did the things he did.

TO BE CONTINUED...

A/N: Next time, the downed Roark Instruments jet yields up its secrets, and leaves our heroes with more questions than answers.