“You haven’t told her the true purpose behind your Alaskan fishing expedition?” Sandecker asked Pitt.
“No.”
“I think you should tell her.”
“Do I have your official permission?”
The admiral nodded. “A friend in Congress will come in handy before your hunt is over.”
“And you, Admiral, where do you stand?” Pitt asked him.
Sandecker stared hard across the table at Pitt, examining every feature of the craggy face as though he were seeing it for the first time, wondering what manner of man would step far beyond normal bounds for no personal gain. He read only a fierce determination. It was an expression he had seen many times in the years he’d known Pitt.
“I’ll back you until the President orders your ass shot,” he said at last. “Then you’re on your own.”
Pitt held back an audible sigh of relief. It was going to be all right. Better than all right.
Min Koryo looked down at the newspaper on her desk. “What do you make of this?”
Lee Tong leaned over her shoulder and read the opening sentences of the article aloud. “ ‘It was announced yesterday by Dirk Pitt, Special Projects Director for NUMA, that two ships missing for over twenty years have been found. The
“A bluff!” Min Koryo snapped. “Someone in Washington, probably from the Justice Department, had nothing better to do, so they sent up a trial balloon. They’re on a fishing expedition, nothing more.”
“I think you’re only half right,
“And this press release is a scheme to ferret out the true owners of that ship,” Min Koryo added.
Lee Tong nodded. “The government is gambling we will make an inquiry that can be traced.”
Min Koryo sighed. “A pity the ship wasn’t sunk as planned.”
Lee Tong came around and sank into a chair in front of the desk. “Bad luck,” he said, thinking back. “After the explosives failed to detonate, the storm hit, and I was unable to reboard the ship.”
“You can’t be faulted for nature’s whims,” Min Koryo said impassively. “The true blame lies with the Russians. If they hadn’t backed out of their bargain to buy Nerve Agent S, there would have been no need to scuttle the ship.”
“They were afraid the agent was too unstable to transport across Siberia to their chemical warfare arsenal in the Urals.”
“What’s puzzling is how did NUMA tie the two ships together?”
“I can’t say,
“No matter,” Min Koryo said. “The fact remains, the article in the newspaper is a ploy. We must remain silent and do nothing to jeopardize our anonymity.”
“What about the man who made the announcement?” Lee Tong asked. “This Dirk Pitt?”
A long, cold, brooding look came over Min Koryo’s narrow face. “Investigate his motives and observe his movements. See where he fits in the picture. If he appears to be a danger to us, arrange his funeral.”
The gray of evening softened the harsh outlines of Los Angeles, and the lights came on, pimpling the sides of the buildings. The noise of the street traffic rose and seeped through the old-fashioned sash window. The tracks were warped and jammed under a dozen coats of paint. It hadn’t been opened in thirty years. Outside, an air conditioner rattled in its brackets.
The man sat in an aging wooden swivel chair and stared unseeing through the grime filming the glass. He stared through eyes that had seen the worst the city had to give. They were hard, stark eyes, still clear and undimmed after sixty years. He sat in shirtsleeves, the well-worn leather of a holster slung over his left shoulder. The butt of a.45 automatic protruded from it. He was large-boned and stocky. The muscles had softened over the years, but he could still lift a two-hundred-pound man off the sidewalk and imbed him in a brick wall.
The chair creaked as he swung around and leaned over a desk that was battle-scarred with uncountable cigarette burns. He picked up a folded newspaper and read the article on the ship discoveries for perhaps the tenth time. Pulling open a drawer, he searched out a dog-eared folder and stared at the cover for a long while. Long ago he had memorized every word on the papers inside. Along with the newspaper he slipped it inside a worn leather briefcase.
He rose and stepped over to a washbowl hung in one corner of the room and rinsed his face with cold water. Then he donned a coat and a battered fedora, turned off the light and left the office.
As he stood in the hallway waiting for the elevator, he was surrounded by the smells of the aging building. The mold and rot seemed stronger with each passing day. Thirty-five years at the same stand was a long time, he mused, too long.
His thoughts were interrupted by the clatter of the elevator door. An operator who looked to be in his seventies gave him a yellow-toothed grin. “Callin’ it quits for the night?” he asked.
“No, I’m taking the red-eye flight to Washington.”
“New case?”
“An old one.”
There were no more questions and they rode the rest of the way in silence. As he stepped into the lobby he nodded at the operator. “See you in a couple of days, Joe.”
Then he passed through the main door and melted into the night.
23
To most, his name was Hiram Yaeger. To a Select few he was known as Pinocchio because he could stick his nose into a vast number of computer networks and sift over their software. His playground was the tenth-floor communications and information network of NUMA.
Sandecker hired him to collect and store every scrap of data ever written on the oceans, scientific or historical, fact or theory. Yaeger tackled the job with a fierce dedication, and within five years had accumulated a huge computer library of knowledge about the sea.
Yaeger worked erratic hours, sometimes coming in with the morning sun and working straight through until the following dawn. He seldom showed up for departmental meetings, but Sandecker left him alone because there was none better, and because Yaeger had an uncanny ability to pry out secret access codes to a great number of worldwide computer networks.
Always dressed in Levi’s jacket and pants, he wore his long blond hair in a bun. A scraggly beard combined with his probing eyes gave him the appearance of a desert prospector peering over the next hill for Eldorado.
He sat at a computer terminal stuck away in a far corner of NUMA’s electronic maze. Pitt stood off to one side watching with interest the green block letters on a display screen.
“That’s all we’re going to comb from the Maritime Administration’s mass storage system.”
“Nothing new there,” Pitt agreed.
“What now?”
“Can you tap the Coast Guard headquarters documents?”
Yaeger gave a wolfish grin. “Can Aunt Jemima make pancakes?”
He consulted a thick black notebook for a minute, found the insertion he was looking for and punched the number into a pushbutton telephone connected to a modem link. The Coast Guard computer system answered and accepted Yaeger’s access code, and the green block letters swept across the display: “PLEASE STATE YOUR REQUEST.”
Yaeger gave Pitt a questioning look.
“Ask for an abstract of title on the
Yaeger nodded and sent the request into the terminal. The answer flashed back and Pitt studied it closely,
