Devil's Gate

“I remember that,” she said. “Can’t recall taking any other samples.”

“Can’t you?” With a product demonstrator’s wave of the hand, he directed her attention to another bench. A length of steel cable lay on a flat surface.

“Still in Rapunzel’s grasp when she hit the surface,” Smith said.

The cable that had held them down, she thought. She remembered cutting through it with Rapunzel’s acetylene torch, and then putting Rapunzel into a climb. She’d never directed Rapunzel to drop the cable.

“And what’s the third?” she asked.

“A piece of plastic wedged into part of Rapunzel’s frame. A broken triangular-shaped piece, probably became embedded when she was in the freighter getting knocked about.”

Dr. Smith walked over to the cable. Gamay followed. He pointed out several blackened marks.

“What do you suppose those are?”

She leaned closer. Touching the black spots, she could feel a different texture when compared to the rest of the cable, almost as if the metal had been lying on something hot enough to begin melting it.

“They remind me of spot welds,” she said.

“I thought so as well,” he said. “But I’ve never heard of someone spot-welding a cable before, and it certainly wasn’t attached to anything.”

“Maybe the cutting torch,” she suggested.

“I checked the video,” he said. “Rapunzel cut the cord in one quick move. She held the cable in place with her claw and burned through it with her torch. This section, two feet to the left, was never touched.”

Gamay looked up, intrigued, at least, a bit. “Maybe after Paul is feeling better we can—”

“Gamay,” Dr. Smith said. “We need you to do this.”

“I’m not exactly up for it,” she said.

“Director Pitt talked with the captain this morning,” Smith said. “He wants you looking at this. He knows it’s tough sledding for you right now, but someone’s gone to great lengths to keep us from finding out what happened on that ship, and he wants to know why. These are the only leads we have.”

“He ordered you to make me look at this?” she said, surprised.

Dr. Smith nodded. “You know Dirk. When there’s a job to be done…”

For the first time she could remember, she was actually angry with Dirk Pitt. But, deep inside, she knew he was right. The only hope of finding the people who’d harmed Paul began with figuring out who might want that ship on the bottom and why.

“Fine,” she said, attempting to put her feelings aside. “Where do we start?”

He led her over to the microscopes. “Take a look at the plastic samples.”

She set herself over the first microscope and peered into the eyepiece, blinking until everything became clear.

“Those are shavings from the plastic,” Dr. Smith said.

“Why are they different colors?” she asked.

“Two different types of plastic. We think it came from some type of storage case. The darker plastic is much harder and denser, the lighter-colored piece is also a lighter grade of material.”

She studied them both. Oddly, the darker plastic seemed to be deformed. The color was swirled in places; there were distortions in the material itself.

“It looks like the darker plastic melted,” she said. “But the lighter plastic doesn’t seem to have been affected.”

“My thoughts exactly,” he said.

“That seems backward,” she said, looking up. “Lighter plastic should have a lower melting point, and even at the same temperature would have less ability to absorb heat without deforming because there is less material to act as a heat sink.”

“You are very good at this, Mrs. Trout,” he said. “Sure you don’t want to work in the lab?”

“After what just happened,” she said, “I might never leave it.”

He smiled, crinkles forming around his eyes.

“You’re saving the tissue sample for last,” she noted.

“Because it’s the most interesting,” he said.

She slid over. “May I?”

“By all means.”

She squinted into the microscope, increased the magnification once, and then once again. She found herself looking at cellular structures, but something was wrong.

“What happened here?”

“You tell me, my marine biology expert,” Dr. Smith said.

She moved the focal point, sca

“You took a two-inch core out of the man’s thigh. The cells on the right are surface cells. Those on the left are the deeper muscle cells.”

“Yes. They look odd. Almost as if they’ve exploded from the inside.”

“They have,” Dr. Smith said. “The deeper you go, the more damage you see. The highest level of epidermal tissue shows no damage at all.”

“Could it be a chemical burn?” she asked, unable to take her eyes off the ruined cells. “Maybe something that soaked in and then reacted.”

“There’s no residue present,” Smith said. “And any chemical strong enough to do that would wreak havoc with the epidermis on its way in. You ever get strong bleach on your hands?”

“Good point,” she said. “But what else could do this?”

“What could do all of this?” he said. “That’s the question we have to ask ourselves.”

She sat up and turned to face him. “One cause. Three events.”

“If you can think of one thing that would fit the bill…” he said.

Her mind began to churn, not in hopeless, powerless circles, as it had while she sat over Paul, but in forward motion. She could almost feel the synapses waking up and firing, like lights going on one by one in a dark office tower.

“It looks like thermal damage,” she said. “But high heat or fire would damage the surface layer of the epidermis the most.”

“Exactly,” he said. “That’s the whole reason we have an epidermal layer of dead skin cells. As thin and weak as it is, it’s basically a shell designed to keep moisture in and other things out.”

She turned back to the microscope and glanced at the cells one more time. She thought about the plastic slivers under the other scope to her side. What could possibly deform thick, heavy plastic without melting thi