Mirage

“For the record,” Juan said loud enough to take control of the meeting, “my flight was fine, much better than trying to backtrack out of the Uzbek desert following my old tire prints.”

“Good piece of work,” Linc said, his voice rumbling out of his deep barrel chest. “Make you an honorable SEAL one of these days.”

“Any blowback for Petrovski’s widow?” Stone asked. “It’s clear someone was sanitizing his discovery, and she would be another loose end.”

“When I got back to Muynak,” Juan said, “I told Arkin Kamsin what had happened. He promised to get her and her kids out of the country as quickly as he could. As soon as they were gone he was taking some time to visit friends in Astana, the capital. It’s the best we can do.”

He went on. “Bring me up to speed on your research.”

Mark Murphy wore a pair of fingerless gloves with wires jacked into his laptop, which itself was linked to the ship’s mainframe Cray supercomputer. He moved his hands through the air, and on the big flat screen his moves shuffled aside data windows in a way similar to a science-fiction movie. It was the latest generation slide-screen technology that he was beta-testing for a friend’s start-up company.

“Here we go,” he announced as an aerial photograph of an industrial site alongside a body of water came up on the display. “This is a shot of the C. Kraft and Sons shipbuilding facility taken in 1917, only three years before it was destroyed by fire. The company was founded in 1863 by Charles Kraft to build iron casements for the Union’s ironclad fleet. After the Civil War, they started constructing iron ships for the Great Lakes, mostly coastal ore carriers. At its peak in 1899, it was the prominent shipbuilder on the lakes.

“After Charles Kraft’s death, his two sons, Alec and Benjamin, squabbled over control. Alec, the elder son, eventually bought out his brother’s shares, but the debt he incurred eventually doomed the company. Rather than expand, it grew smaller and smaller as Alec was forced to sell off assets to cover his expenses. It didn’t help matters that he had a severe drinking problem.

“The fire that destroyed the yard was deemed suspicious, although the insurance company couldn’t prove arson. Alec Kraft died in 1926 from chronic liver disease. Benjamin Kraft hadn’t stayed in Erie after his buyout but moved to Pittsburgh with his family. He lived a quiet life off the proceeds of the sale. Neither man has any children alive today, but there are four grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren, mostly in Pennsylvania or Upstate New York.”

“Any record of the company ever selling a ship to anyone in Russia?” Juan asked the question that had been burning in his mind since discovering Karl Petrovski’s eerie boat, in fact, had been a boat built in Erie.

“No direct overseas sales at all,” Mark said. He flicked his hands, and up came a list of the ships they had built. “I found this on a database of the Great Lakes Maritime Museum.”

He then highlighted several on the long list and explained as he went. “Going on your description, I’ve narrowed down the vessels that could be the one you found.”

The pages showed more than two dozen craft that fit the rough dimensions and approximate age of the ship Juan had seen.

“Any pictures?” Juan asked.

“Yeah, hold on a second.” Murph worked more of his magic, and soon they were looking at sepia-tone photographs dating back more than a century.

Most of them were designed to carry cargo of one type or another. One of them was a ferry built to haul railcars on tracks laid onto the deck, with an arch over the bow to support the wheelhouse. More pictures clicked by.

“Stop!” Juan shouted. “Go back one. That’s her.”

“The Lady Marguerite,” Murph said after checking his laptop. “Built in 1899 for, get this, George Westinghouse, and named for his wife.”

Cabrillo studied the picture, not paying much attention to Mark’s commentary. She wasn’t a commercial vessel but rather a pleasure boat. She was painted snowy white with a dark-colored band around her plucky funnel. Her rear deck was mostly open, but partly covered by a sunshade to protect her passengers from the elements. In the picture, she was moored close enough to shore for a tree to be seen in the foreground. He couldn’t see her in great detail, but he could just imagine her lavish appointments.

“What do we know about her?” Juan asked, imagining himself cruising the Great Lakes while listening to tinny music from a gramophone. “And what’s so special about George Westinghouse owning a pleasure yacht? He was one of the richest industrialists of his age.”

Eric Stone had been polishing his wire-framed glasses and slipped them back onto his nose. “To answer your question: Westinghouse is significant here because he partnered with Nikola Tesla to build the Niagara Falls power station, and together they basically invented the electrical grid we use today.”

Tesla, Cabrillo thought, Yuri Borodin’s last word. This wasn’t a coincidence. It looked as though they had peeled the first layer off the onion of his cryptic death confession. The crazy Russian hadn’t died in vain, of that Juan was certain, but right now he had no idea what his friend had stumbled into.

“Mr. Murphy?” he prompted.

“Hiram Yaeger at NUMA gave me his master passwords to their mainframe. I’m accessing it now, but there isn’t much in the archives about the Lady Marguerite. Let’s see. It says here that she was moved from the Great Lakes to Philadelphia in 1901, and lost at sea in the summer of ’02.”

“Was she insured?”

“Yep, I’ve got the Lloyd’s of London claim right here. She went down with five people aboard. There is no list, but there were no survivors.”

“Storm?”

“Doesn’t say. I’m cross-checking the date for any other losses. No, nothing else was lost. Hold on. Checking NOAA’s archives for the weather. The night of August first, 1902, was clear for the entire Atlantic seaboard.”

“What else could have sunk the ship?” Eddie Seng asked, his fingers steepled under his chin.

Linc quipped, “How about a white whale?”

“Not a white whale,” Eric Stone said, looking up from his own laptop. “A blue cloud.”

“Come again?” Juan invited.

“There’s a report from a freighter, the Mohican, about a strange blue cloud, like an electrical aura, that enveloped their ship as they were approaching Philadelphia. It lasted for about thirty minutes, and vanished as mysteriously as it arose. The Mohican’s captain, a Charles Urquhart, reported strange magnetic anomalies while his ship was enshrouded. Metal objects adhered to the deck as if glued, and the ship’s compass just spun in its mount.”

“Any other ships report this effect?” Cabrillo asked.

“Nothing else. Just the Mohican.”

Mark Murphy gasped as he was struck by a sudden revelation.

“Hold on to that thought,” Juan warned, knowing when Murph was about to steer the conversation into a conspiracy-laden dead end. “No need to get ahead of ourselves. This sounds to me like a straight insurance scam. Westinghouse claims the boat sank, takes the money, and then sells it off to some Russian guy who parks it on the Aral Sea. And if there was ever a place an insurance investigator wouldn’t look, it’s there.”

Mark was practically bouncing up and down in his seat.

“Okay,” Juan conceded, “go ahead.”

Murph grinned wolfishly. “According to the Lloyd’s report, the insurance was just a token amount to satisfy a bank over liability issues. The ship itself wasn’t covered.” When no one reacted to his statement, he went on in a rush. “Come on, guys. It’s all there. Westinghouse’s money, Tesla’s genius, a weird blue aura with strange magnetic properties, and a ship found ten thousand miles from where it vanished.”

“Are you talking teleportation?” Linc asked dubiously.

“Exactly! What was it Sherlock Holmes said? If you eliminate all other factors, the one which remains must be true.”

“How do we know we’ve eliminated all the other factors?” Eddie asked.

Mark had no immediate answer to that.

“Insurance issues aside,” Seng continued, “I think the more likely scenario is, the ship was sold off. The new owners sailed it to the Black Sea, where it was disassembled, transported to the Aral, and put back together.”