The Last Alchemist

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The bodies were still there, preserved by the cold and dark of the sea, just as he said they would be. And they were right where he said they'd find them: two hundred feet down, off the coast of Spain, in the belly of a Spanish man-of-war. Maneuvering in the slow dreamwalk of the deep, the diver moved around the open hatch, watching the pantaloons of the dead quiver in the currents created with his heavy leaded feet. They were Spanish soldiers of the king, he had been told, guarding the ship for eternity. They would not harm him, he had been told. He had answered that he wasn't afraid of the dead; he was afraid of the old diving suit he had to wear. If they did find the wreck, and he had to enter it, an air hose going up to the mother ship could get caught in one of the old timbers.

"You're not getting paid to test modern equipment, you're getting paid to find a damned ship and get me something," Mr. Harrison Caldwell had told him from behind a desk in a very modern salvage office in Barcelona. Mr. Caldwell was an American, but strangely he could speak Spanish as though born a grandee. The diver, Jesus Gomez, had been warned of that, warned not to make little snide remarks about the gringo in Spanish.

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