A/N: Ehhhhhhhh, I'm still not really happy with the way this chapter turned out, but here it is anyway. Don't yell at me if the diving stuff isn't exactly right, please. Wikipedia, while a useful resource, isn't exactly foolproof and I've probably taken some liberties that anyone with extensive diving experience will take umbrage with. Just roll with it.

Chapter 5:

Sarah didn't particularly like doing a tech-dive without a buddy, but her father wasn't supposed to dive again for another week or so thanks to the beating his inner ear had taken. It wasn't something she could share with their client, even if he seemed fairly trustworthy, since strictly speaking they weren't certified as an underwater demolition crew. The occasional off the books side-job scuttling old ships to use as wreck-diving spots for the scuba-tourists had been known to keep Walker Marine Salvage in business, but right now, going into an unknown wreck-site, she wished her dad had been a little less liberal in his use of C4 last time out. She'd have felt better with him down there with her, even if it let Chuck loose to snoop around the boat. It was a spurious thought anyway; she doubted Chuck was the type to go around rooting through her underwear drawer just because the coast was clear.

Sarah grimaced around the regulator in her mouth and turned her mind back to the task at hand. She kept one hand on the cable from the ROV and panned the camera with its attached spotlight around as she swam down into the dark waters. Thanks to a gentle upward slope in the bottom as they'd followed the plane's glidepath, the wreck wasn't a hundred-eighty feet down, as it would have been at the first coordinates, but closer to ninety. Going down that far without a buddy wouldn't just have been an inconvenience, it would have been downright dangerous. Granted, even diving ninety feet down with out a second diver wasn't exactly a cakewalk, but she'd done it a couple dozen times before in the decade she'd been diving. Her tank had a little more than an hour worth of air, which dictated her dive profile. But hopefully, she would find the missing laptop right away and she wouldn't have to be down for more than half of her supply.

When Sarah and her father had arrived in the Philippines a step ahead of both the mob and the FBI, Sarah had taken to scuba immediately with a passion and a tenacity that had surprised her, and completely confounded her father. Sarah's love of diving had been at least half the reason for the founding of Walker Marine Salvage in the first place; the other half being Jack's need to figure out someplace to put the quarter million dollars he'd 'borrowed' from the west-coast mob, that wouldn't show up on a bank statement. They'd bought Lisa's Revenge straight cash from a man who had turned out to be something approaching the Filipino equivalent of her father, which explained a good deal about the boat's initial condition.

Diving was freeing for Sarah, which considering all the constraints that went along with the activity was an oddity her father had never understood. She liked the combination of seeming weightlessness when weighted down to neutral buoyancy and the time to let her mind wander during safety and decompression stops at the end of a dive. For her father diving was always about work, and Jack hadn't ever really been a fan of actual work, but over the last few years he'd become about as stable and dependable as Sarah ever remembered him being. The combination of an open bounty from the Armenian mob and an arrest warrant in the great state of California had had the unforeseen side effect of turning Jack from an thoroughly incorrigible conman into a mostly incorrigible sea captain, and Sarah was at once thankful for and a touch saddened by the change. It was something in her own makeup that she tried not to examine too closely, that thirst for danger and excitement which was quite possibly genetic. The risk inherent in diving was a lure as well, she was self-aware enough to admit.

The spotlight built into the casing of her camcorder finally hit the ROV, and Sarah's time for introspection was finished. Now it was work. The ROV's floodlights illuminated the downed Gulfstream fairly well, and getting around inside the wrech shouldn't be too difficult, but they were right on the edge of their safety guidelines. Ninety feet of water plus maybe ten feet of penetration into the wreck meant that the interior would be pretty close to pitch dark. Sunlight still managed to get to the bottom here, barely, and when Sarah glanced up briefly, she could make out the shape of Lisa's Revenge above her, and the two lines to the anchors fore and aft that her father had placed.

The lines faded into obscurity toward the bottom thanks to the low visibility; the ROV floods and the spot built into her camcorder were her primary light source and didn't reach much beyond twenty yards. First things first, Sarah checked her air gauge, and nodded. Her tank had a little more compressed air remaining than she'd projected, which was good. That meant she'd have maybe a whole extra minute or two in the wreck. Her air would last for more than an hour, but a fair amount of that time would be spent on a slow ascent, with pre-programmed stops to make sure she didn't give herself decompression sickness, commonly known as 'the bends.'

Sarah swam around the wreck once, panning her camera over the tail number, so Chuck's bosses back in LA would know for sure they'd found the right plane. Then she panned the rest of the wreck, showing the position and orientation, in case they wanted to bring the thing back up, so Gulfstream could see what had gone wrong with the engines.

The jet was still mostly intact, she was surprised to see, with the fuselage bent and torn toward the nose where the metal skin had impacted the ocean-bottom and dug a furrow in the silt. One of the wings had torn half-way off and gave the crash an odd similarity to a bird with a broken wing that she suddenly remembered from her childhood.

She and her mother had tried and failed to nurse the thing back to health. Sarah shook the memory off and made her way to the front of the plane, shining her light into the cockpit so Chuck's bosses could see the dead man at the controls. She resisted the impulse to turn the camera on herself and shake her fist into the lens. It wasn't the first time they'd been lied to by a client, but it wasn't exactly commonplace either, and it... irritated wasn't a strong enough word, but infuriated was too strong. She was miffed, maybe. Or peeved. Something in the middle. She was more peeved, really, that Chuck's employers hadn't trusted him with the truth. That much had been obvious from his reaction; unless he was a far better actor than he seemed to be, Chuck had been just as shocked as Sarah and her father to find a dead body still at the controls of the downed aircraft. She, better than most, understood keeping secrets, but Chuck had been working for Roark Instruments for years. She could understand the higher-ups not trusting the salvage company with all the details, but their man on the ground, as it were, should have had the full picture going in.

Next Sarah turned the camera on the gaping hole in the side of the plane where the door had come off. Now came the moment of truth. She swam up to the side of the fuselage and shined her light through the windows first. To make sure nothing was lurking inside, she hit the fuselage with her fist, hoping to startle any fish enough that they'd swim off. Sarah was careful to choose an unmarred section of the fuselage, at least a foot away from any visible warping in the metal. Cutting yourself, even the tiniest of scrapes, could be dangerous, both due to the trouble involved getting to the surface for medical attention, and because some sharks could scent even a drop of blood in the water from better than a mile out, and Sarah's little diving knife wasn't exactly going to stop a hammerhead.

No fish swam out of the yawning doorway and Sarah kicked her flipper-feet, positioning herself to haul herself through into the interior.

She tensed in shock, freezing in place momentarily. There was another dead body strapped into a comfy rear-facing leather seat. Sarah felt a chill that had nothing to do with the water temperature. There was a hole in the man's forehead that immediately registered in her mind as gunshot wound, even though she'd never seen one before. Not a fresh one, anyway, nearly skeletonized remains in a WWII wreck didn't count.

She imagined her father was giving Chuck an earful back up on the surface, and Sarah mastered her shock, moving carefully into the interior of the jet. She tried to put shot-dead body out of her mind for the time being. That was a question for later. Right now, she had a laptop to find. There were half a dozen plush leather seats in the passenger compartment, one still occupied, with the cockpit and the other body off to her right. She tread water, turning in place and sending the light around the compartment, memorizing the layout of the wreck.

From Chuck's description of the laptop, she first looked for briefcases, but nothing presented itself. The bathroom door was ajar off to the rear of the plane, and Sarah swam carefully over.

Her heart hammered in her chest, tension filling her before she hauled the door open. Empty. Sarah turned in place again, passing the light over every exposed surface. After a minute or so, she remembered about over-head bins, and went to check those out.

There was a briefcase in one of the bins, but except for a waterlogged copy of Wired magazine and a yellow legal pad it was empty. She continued the search, systematically checking every nook and cranny, but didn't find anything out of the ordinary, other than the fact that the plane had indeed been equipped with parachutes, which were thankfully still in a little closet just aft of the cockpit. If one of those chutes had been accidentally deployed by the crash-impact, she might have gotten tangled up in the lines. Sarah had no idea how many chutes the plane was supposed to be carrying, so she couldn't guess if anybody had actually escaped. There were two remaining in that closet.

Her mind kept going back unbidden to the gunshot victim. Somebody had shot him, but who? Had the shooter taken the laptop? Corporate espionage turned bloody? It didn't seem to fit, and Sarah swam back to the gunshot man, and noticed something she'd missed on her first, shocked sight of the man. He had a pistol in a shoulder holster, which was visible now that her swimming around in the wreck had floated open the side of his suit coat.

Sarah wrinkled her nose in disgust, and reached in, fishing the gun out and checking it. She wasn't a gun-nut, but she thought maybe the man's gun might tell them something. Then she winced and cursed inwardly. She should probably check for a wallet or other ID, but she didn't relish the thought of fishing in a dead man's pockets. Still, Roark Instruments would probably need to have positive IDs for legal purposes, and she steeled herself, reaching around to the man's hip pocket. Nothing. Sarah frowned around the pressure regulator and checked his other pockets; more nothing. Finally, she hit paydirt in the man's inside coat pocket. A laminated photo-id that matched up pretty well with the dead man's features. Some fish had been at his flesh around the bullet wound and along his jawline, but he was still recognizeable, thanks to the scar on the right side of his face. Tommy Delgado: Roark Instruments, Internal Security.

Sarah tucked the card into one of the pouches on her belt and went forward to the cockpit. The pilot deserved an ID confirmation as well, she decided.

This other body was in no better condition; he was slumped over the controls and... her heart nearly missed a beat. There were another couple holes in this man's back. Sarah heard a beeping sound and glanced at her dive computer in frustration. Had she really already been down here for half an hour? She mentally berated herself for losing track of time, and checked her air gauge. She still had enough air to get safely to the surface with at least ten minutes of oxygen to spare (she wouldn't even come close to dipping into the air in her smaller emergency tank), but she needed to get started back pronto. Sarah dug in the pilot's pockets and came away quickly with a wallet.

She turned back for the opening in the side and tucked the wallet in the same pouch as dead Tommy's ID and started her ascent. She'd lingered too long at the bottom and now she'd have to stop twice on the way up. Sarah always did a safety stop, but now she'd have to linger for at least five minutes at five meters in addition.

For the first time since the one time a couple years earlier when she'd had to ditch decompressing because there had been sharks circling, Sarah couldn't wait to get up and get out of the water. She usually enjoyed the peace and quiet underwater. Still, the bends was no picnic, and she took her ascent slow, at the approved rate of only a few meters a minute before pausing for her decompression stop. She was practically vibrating with nervous energy by the time her dive computer beeped and gave her the go-ahead to finish surfacing.

When her head broke the surface, she spit out her pressure regulator and tore her mask off. "What the hell!" She shouted even before she grabbed the ladder and started climbing aboard.

"We don't know," her father said and helped her back up on deck. "Give the schnook a break," he went on, nodding his head in Chuck's direction. He looked a little green, leaning against the card-table that held the monitors, his hands balled into fists.

"This isn't what I signed up for," Chuck said finally. "Hell, I didn't even really sign up at all. I got roped into doing this because my dad went to college with the head honcho, Mr. Roark himself. I thought..." he trailed off and Sarah frowned.

"What are you thinking?" she asked. He was obviously frustrated, and probably more angry than she was, which Sarah hadn't been expecting.

Chuck grimaced. "We're being set up," he said.

Sarah exchanged a worried glance with her father, and Jack finally broke the silence. "You care to elaborate there, Bartowski?"

"It's a long story," he said.

Jack laughed. "Well, it ain't exactly a short hop back to the marina, Chuck. We got time."

Chuck and Jack helped Sarah stow her gear before weighing anchor and turning back for Manila. They all crowded into the wheelhouse and Chuck laid out what he knew. True to his word, it was a long story, detailing his father's college run-ins with Theodore Roark, necessarily for his father's viewpoint.

"And you went to work for the bastard?" Jack demanded. Sarah seemed nearly as incredulous, crossing her arms across her chest and shaking her head. There was an eyeroll in there too.

He shrugged. "Call it poetic justice," he said. "I was planning on bankrolling my company with my bonus this year."

Jack laughed. "Well," he said. "I guess you can't be too upset with the man for sticking you with unexpected dead bodies, then, can you?"

Chuck grimaced. "Sure I can. So, what are you thinking?"

"Old college roommates falling out..." Sarah said. "You maybe letting your own past color your thinking?"

Jack arched an eyebrow. "Another long story, Chuck?"

"Not really," he said. "College roommate stole my girlfriend. I broke his nose. End of story."

Jack exchanged a glance with his daughter. "So, that's a yes on letting the past color your thinking. That's the guy sent you the other set of co-ordinates?"

"Yes."

"I don't know..." Jack scratched his chin and made an adjustment in their course. "Seems thin. Don't get me wrong, I understand revenge is highly motivating for some people. But then, the way you tell it, Roark's got a software empire he owes to cheating off your dad in school. If anything, he should feel guilty..."

"That's kind of the impression I got when I spoke to him," Chuck said. "But that was before we found two dead bodies, and no R7 prototype."

"Yeah, that does put a new wrinkle on things," Jack said, staring out at the water with a faraway look in his eyes.

"So, what're you thinking, dad? Corporate espionage?" Sarah leaned back against the window. "That was my first thought, but..."

"You're right. A little bloody for any kind of espionage, outside of the movies," Jack shook his head. "But if somebody stole that laptop... How much is the thing worth, Chuck?"

Chuck shrugged. "No idea. I mean, just the parts, about seven, eight thou. But yeah, maybe one of our competitors might pay pretty handsomely to get their hands on the specs a few months early. High enough to kill over though? Seems kind of outlandish."

"So, what are you going to say in your report when we get back to land?" Jack said. "Maybe I could help you frame things."
"Why wait?" Chuck said. "I got a sat antenna built into my laptop. I can email it from about anywhere on earth."

"Nerd," Sarah said.

Chuck conceded the point, nodding. "Yup."

In short order, with Sarah 'helpfully' pointing out typos over his shoulder and suggesting less confrontational ways to state the facts, they had a report on the attempted salvage operation and the two dead bodies they'd found instead of the laptop prototype. Before Chuck could send it, Sarah surged forward and grabbed his wrist. "Wait," she said, finger stabbing out to delete the part where he mentioned the fact that both men had been shot dead.

"You don't want to tell them about that?" Chuck frowned. "The company needs to know."
"Just wait," Sarah insisted. "They knew there'd be bodies on that plane, gunshot wounds might be expected as well."

"What? How would they expect that?"

Sarah shrugged. "Radio didn't look too shot up to me; the pilot might have gotten word out something was badly wrong. Even if it wasn't anything more than an 'oh god, I've been shot,' that would be enough, wouldn't it?" she said, then snapped her fingers in exasperated realization. "I should have grabbed the flight data recorder, and we'd know for sure on that."

"You want to turn around for it?"

Sarah winced and shook her head. "It's already after three, and we're forty five minutes away. Add in dive-time, we'll be getting in after eight o'clock. And all we've got on the boat for dinner are celebratory steaks that would seem a little out of place."

Chuck looked back at the email he had composed. "So, you really think somebody took the laptop, and Roark knew, and..." he shook his head, trying to make sense of it.

"If the laptop was ever there to begin with," she said.

Chuck's jaw dropped. "But that doesn't even make any sense at all! Why would they kill two of their own employees?"

"I notice you shifted from 'we' to 'they' in describing your boss," Sarah said. "And to answer your question, I don't think they did. There was a third man on that plane, and you got sent co-ordinates for a spot thirty miles north of the scheduled flight-path."

"Oh come on!" Chuck said. "You think Bryce killed them? What would he even be doing in the Philippines in your crack-pot theory?"

"You said he works for the state department?"

"Yes, so?"

"It's fairly common for spies to be covered as diplomats. That means, you know, the state department."

Chuck just stared at her. "You're... you think Bryce Larkin from Connecticut is a spy?" He wanted to laugh, but he saw the determined set of her jaw, and knew it wasn't a joke. He let himself fight through his initial reaction of amused disbelief, and really think about Sarah's insane theory. It was insane, wasn't it? He swallowed nervously. Something seemed to click into place. It made more sense than anything they'd come up with yet. It still didn't explain everything, but...

Crap. He sent his Sarah-edited report back to Roark Instruments headquarters. What the hell kind of people was he working for?

TO BE CONTINUED...