Free In Too Deep by Coert Voorhees Page B

I’d ever seen him. His fingers were shaking like he’d overdosed on caffeine. He shuffled through the photocopied pages until he came up with the right one.
    “Here’s what de la Torre wrote: ‘The Vida Preciosa , under full sail ten days due north, approached the land of swallows during a storm. Looking for shelter, she dropped anchor on the leeward side, where—’”
    “Where the waters were calm,” Katy said. “We know that already.”
    I glared at her. “But that’s as far as we got. Unfortunately.”
    Alvarez continued, “‘Three days later, VP set sail for the mainland, her holds lighter of cargo the captain is sure to retrieve under more agreeable conditions.’”
    “But they never came back to get it, did they?” I felt giddy. “Whatever it was. De la Torre never left Spain again.”
    “I know what you’re thinking. The Devil’s Throat doesn’t even start until a hundred feet. There’s no way they could have gotten the cargo down that far. To say nothing of gear, fins, masks—”
    “Not necessarily,” I said. “Leonardo da Vinci had a design for scuba gear in 1500. It was supposed to be something like a leather bag over the diver’s head, connected to a cane tube to replenish the air.”
    Silence. I swear I could hear the waves lapping at the shore two blocks away.
    “I’m a dork, I know.” More silence. “Anyway, he never did anything with it because he decided to concentrate on the diving bell.”
    “What’s a diving bell?” Josh said, and I felt a little better. If he wanted to know, maybe I wasn’t such a dork after all.
    Mr. Alvarez jumped in. “Like an upside-down jar that traps the air so divers can breathe. If you build a big-enough one, you can fit a couple of people inside—”
    “Alexander the Great got down to about eighty feet in one,” I said. “And that was around 300 BC .”
    Alvarez instantly morphed back into a high school teacher again. “Even Aristotle wrote about divers going a hundred feet deep to collect sea sponges.”
    Nate laughed. “Looks like dork is contagious.”
    “Okay, so it was possible to go down that deep,” I said.
    “Right.” Alvarez went back to the journal. “This comes much later, after a reference to that other entry: ‘A narrow shaft leading to a fissure accessible by only the slightest of men reveals a hidden compartment. In this compartment the key was concealed, its location revealed by the Southern Cross.’”
    “The constellation?” I said. “Can you even see the Southern Cross from Mexico?”
    Alvarez shook his head impatiently. He searched the pile for another paper and pointed to a crude drawing of what looked to be a cross attached to an uneven rock wall. “Here’s a sketch, from the same diary.”
    I could feel my pulse in my temples.
    He continued, “The Vida Preciosa never traveled remotely close to a latitude where the Southern Cross constellation would have been visible. This cross has got to be in that compartment, off Punta Sur.”
    “Punta Sur,” I said. “Southern Point. You’re saying—”
    “At that point, Cortés was losing power, facing upheaval in Mexico City, under investigation for not paying his fair share back to the Spanish crown. Not to mention he’d been accused of murdering his wife. He had a lot going on. He needed to fund the expansion of his army, and the Jaguar was worth enough, but there were too many people who knew about it. He had to hide it somewhere for safekeeping.”
    “So why not come back to familiar territory, right?” I said. “The first place he landed in Mexico.”
    “But there was too much scrutiny for him to ever retrieve the Jaguar. Mexico was in a state of near anarchy, and Cortés returned to Spain in 1541 to restore his reputation. To his great shock, the king refused to see him, and Cortés died before ever setting foot in Mexico again.”
    “Many people search in vain for El Jaguar Dorado,” Wayo said. “For hundreds of years.”
    “The Golden Jaguar