Medusa

“Thank you very much for your cooperation, Captain.”

As Gannon hurried off to carry out Randolph’s request, Randolph said, “Now, gentlemen, since you were so intimately acquainted with the events of last night, perhaps you wouldn’t mind being interviewed first.”

“We’d be happy to tell you the whole story,” Austin said.

They shook hands all around. As Randolph walked off to supervise his team, he snorted like a horse.

“Engineers,” he muttered.

Austin suggested that Zavala take the first interview while he tried to reach Kane. He walked a short distance from the activity on the aft deck, and called directory assistance on his cell phone, asking for the number of Bonefish Key Marine Center. A computer-generated voice informed him that the lab was not open to the public and referred callers to the center’s website.

After a moment’s thought, he punched in another number from his phone list.

A low, cool female voice answered his call.

“Hi, Kurt,” said Gamay Morgan-Trout, “congratulations. Paul and I watched the bathysphere dive on TV until the transmission got cut off. How was the briny deep?”

“Briny and deep. I’ll tell you about it later. Sorry to interrupt your sabbatical at Scripps, but I need a favor. I’d like you or Paul to wrangle an invitation to the Bonefish Key marine lab in Florida. They discourage visitors, but if anyone can get in it’s you.”

“Didn’t the director of Bonefish Key make the B3 dive with Joe?”

“His name is Max Kane. But don’t expect any help from him.”

“I’ll give it a try, Kurt. What exactly should I be looking for?”

“I don’t know. Just keep your eyes open for anything that strikes you as funny.”

Gamay responded with a soft chuckle.

“I love the crisp specificity of your directive, Kurt.”

“It’s a management course they teach called Cover Your Ass 101. The first lesson in CYA is that if anything goes wrong, it’s not your fault. Call me when you or Paul get to Bonefish Key. Joe and I will be on the Beebe for another day or two.”

Austin clicked off, then walked to the ship’s railing. He was burning with impatience. He didn’t like interrupting the sabbatical Paul and Gamay Trout were taking from the Special Assignments Team, but until he and Zavala managed to extricate themselves from the police investigation they would have to be the team’s eyes and ears.

He gazed at the sparkle of the morning sun on the water. He sometimes joked that he was afflicted with what he called the King Neptune syndrome. He had spent so much of his life on or under the ocean that he had developed a proprietary attitude toward the two-thirds of the globe covered by water.

Austin had conceived the Bathysphere 3 project as a way to instill respect for the sea in the young people who would someday become its caretakers.

The faceless entity behind the attacks had almost ruined that.

He knew his mortal limitations. Unlike Neptune, Austin couldn’t raise a storm at the touch of a trident.

A cold glint came to his eyes, and he compressed his lips in a tight, humorless smile.

But he had shown numerous times that he could raise hell. He couldn’t wait to get off the ship so he could rattle the walls of Hades.

CHAPTER 17

PAUL TROUT WAS NEAR THE END OF THE SEMINAR HE WAS leading on global warming when his cell phone began to vibrate. Without missing a beat, he reached into his sports jacket pocket, shut off the phone, and threw the next graph up on the projection screen, only to hear a soft ripple of laughter behind his back. He turned, curious at what could be so humorous about an ocean-salinity pie chart.

No one was looking at the chart. Every eye in the room was staring out the window at an attractive red-haired woman in a two-piece bathing suit who was on the lawn outside the building. She was doing jumping jacks and waving a cell phone in the air at the same time.

Trout’s head dipped down, as if looking over his glasses in deep thought, and he tugged at the large, colorful bow tie at his neck.

A seminar participant snickered.

“Who is that crazy woman?”

A faint smile came to Trout’s lips.

“I’m afraid that crazy woman is my wife. Please excuse me.”

A quiet gasp of disbelief followed Trout’s exit from the room, but he was used to such reactions. He was a good-looking young man with large hazel-colored eyes and light brown hair neatly parted down the middle and combed back at the temples Gatsby style. In a tailored suit that draped his six-foot-eight physique perfectly, he was impeccably dressed as usual. But while he displayed a sly sense of humor, people often found his serious demeanor at odds with that of his more vivacious wife.

Trout stepped out into the hall and glanced at his phone. A text message appeared.

CAN U TALK?

Trout hit the MEMORY button to return the call.

“Quite the show you put on for my seminar on climate change,” Trout said in his dry New England tone. “Are you auditioning for the Rockettes?”

Rich feminine laughter cascaded from the phone.

“I tried to call you but you didn’t answer, Herr Professor,” said Gamay. “Then I waved my hands outside your window until I was blue in the face. I had on my bathing suit from this morning’s dive, so in desperation I slipped my shift off and put on a skin show. Apparently, it worked.”

Paul broke into an easy grin.

“Oh, it worked, all right,” he said. “The body temperature of every male in the room rose twenty degrees. Your little striptease may have set off a new round of global warming.”

“Sorry,” Gamay said lightly, “but Kurt called. He and Joe are still on the Beebe.”

“Kurt? Why didn’t you say so? How’d the bathysphere dive go?”

“I told him we had watched until the transmission got cut short. He said the dive was memorable.”

“Odd choice of words. What did he mean?”

“He said he’d explain later. But it appears our attempt to relive our courting days here at Scripps is over. Kurt needs somebody to go to Florida to look into the Bonefish Key Marine Center.”

“Why the interest in Bonefish?”

“He again said he’d explain later. He’d like us to snoop around the center and let him know if anything there strikes us as funny . . . As in peculiar.”

“It’s going to be awkward trying to get out of my schedule,” Paul said. “I’m committed to two more days of panels and lectures.”

“I’ve finished my research dives,” Gamay said. “While you wrap up your seminar, I’ll head off to Florida. You can follow when you’re done.”

Paul glanced at his watch.

“Let’s discuss it over lunch,” he said. “I’ll meet you in the cafeteria after I cool down my seminar group.”

He had been amused but not surprised at his wife’s effective, if unorthodox, attention-getting technique. It was typical of her resourcefulness and her fearlessness. Her open personality was the opposite of Trout’s New England reserve, but they had been immediately attracted to each other from the time they first met at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. Paul was studying for his Ph.D. in ocean science, while Gamay had changed her field of interest from marine archaeology to marine biology and was working toward her doctorate also.

They had met on a Scripps field trip to La Paz, Mexico, and were married after graduation the following year. NUMA’s former director, James Sandecker, had recognized their unique talents and asked them to join the Special