“Canadian?” Hiram said.
“Or German. Winner picks.”
“Okay,” Yaeger said. “I’ll take that action.”
His portion of the screen went blank, and Dirk turned to Gamay. “I’m not going to ask how you’re holding up,” he said. “Just want you to know I’m proud of you.”
She nodded. “Thanks,” she said. “And thank you for ordering me to study the samples. It helped me… helped me get back to being me.”
Pitt was confused. “I never gave any order like that,” he said.
“But the doctor…” she began. A smile creased her face for the first time.
“Doctor’s orders,” Pitt guessed.
“Apparently, part of my treatment,” she said.
“Hobson’s a crafty old guy,” Pitt said, thinking warmly of the doctor. “And he’s smart. If someone out there has developed a weapon like this, our best defense may be to find it and neutralize it before it gets used again. Thanks to you two, we have a chance.”
“What help can we expect?” she asked.
“I’ve already talked to the admiral,” Pitt said. “The Vice President, I mean. He’s going to take what we’ve found directly to the President and Joint Chiefs. I’m sure they’re going to be pretty damn interested, but as for getting involved… We’ve got to find them something tangible to get involved in. Right now, this is just a ghost that came to visit and left a mark. We have to put a body with that ghost, something they can deal with. You’ve given us the first step.”
The rebellious strand of hair fell down across her face again, and Gamay dutifully tucked it back behind her ear. “Dr. Smith and I theorized that the crew might have been killed because of what they saw. In other words, having survived the electromagnetic burst, they had to be killed, and the ship scuttled, to keep things quiet.”
“It’s reasonable,” Pitt said. “Dead men tell no tales.”
“I know,” she said. “But I was thinking there has to be something more. I mean, they fired torpedoes at us. We have to assume they could have done the same to the freighter when she was afloat.”
Pitt considered this. Sometimes you learned more by what wasn’t done than what was. “Would have been easier than boarding the ship.”
“And quicker,” she said.
“Yeah,” Pitt said, “that it would. So why didn’t they?”
“And why hit this particular ship in the first place?”
Another good question. He guessed there could be only one reason. One answer to both.
“There was something they wanted on that ship,” he said. “Something they had to get before it went down. And whatever that something was, whoever was behind this didn’t want the world to know it had gone missing.”
On the screen, Gamay nodded. “That’s the conclusion I reached too.”
It explained a few things. The CEO of Shokara was an old friend of Dirk’s — more of an old acquaintance, actually, in the sense that Dirk had once saved his life — but for a man who’d often insisted he’d do anything Dirk or NUMA ever needed, Haruto Takagawa had suddenly become very hard to reach.
Shortly after the freighter went down, Pitt had left a message for the man. But, so far, he hadn’t received a call back. Perhaps that was understandable, considering the circumstances, but it was at least a yellow flag.
A few days later, just to cover all the bases, Pitt had sent a pair of NUMA’s eager young associates to Takagawa’s New York offices to get the type of information the Coast Guard would have required if the ship had gone down in U.S. waters. Primarily, the ship’s manifest.
The two young men had been stymied in Takagawa’s lobby, made to wait for hours and then all but tossed out on their ears. It felt like a slap in the face to Pitt, enough to get his considerable anger up and running. So far, he’d been too busy to press the issue. But now it seemed paramount.
“We need to know what the Kinjara Maruwas carrying,” Gamay said.
Pitt nodded. He knew what he had to do. He knew there was only one way to find out the truth.
28
Eastern Atlantic, June 24
A POUNDING ON HIS CABIN DOOR woke Joe Zavala. He sat straight up, almost ran for the door as if general quarters had sounded, and then remembered he wasn’t in the Navy anymore.
The pounding returned. “Captain wants you on the bridge, Zavala,” a voice shouted.
“Tell him I’ll be right there,” Joe said, grabbing his pants and pulling them on.
He heard footsteps as the messenger ran off. Only then did he sense that the Argowas in motion, not turning or making steerage or sitting at anchor near the anomaly but charging through the water as if racing something.
Joe pulled a shirt over his head, stuffed his bare feet into sneakers that he never untied, and then ran out the door.
A minute later, he was on the bridge. The Argowas indeed moving at flank speed, the bow rising and dropping as it rode the increasing swells.
“Captain,” Joe said, reporting for duty even though he wasn’t technically one of the crew.
“Where in God’s green earth or Poseidon’s blue water is Austin?” Captain Haynes barked.
Still a little groggy, Joe offered up his honest thoughts. “Probably waking up to something a lot nicer than I just woke up to.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s on a date,” Joe said.
“A date?” Haynes shook his head. “How does a guy get a date out here in the middle of the ocean?”
Joe scratched his head. “That’s a good question,” he said. “I wish I could figure it out because, honestly, it gets kind of lonely when—”
“Zavala!” the captain shouted. “Wake up, man. This is not a dream. I need your full attention. Who is Austin out with?”
For a second, Joe wondered if it was a dream. The captain was acting weird. Kurt was a grown man, and Joe had reported Kurt’s disposition to the officer of the watch upon returning from the Zodiac.
“He’s with the Russian scientist he rescued from one of the wrecks,” Joe said. “She told him she had some secret information that he might find interesting.”
“What time was he planning on coming back?”
“Well,” Joe said, “I guess that would kind of depend on how the date went… sir.”
The captain cut his eyes at Joe and Joe burst out laughing.
“I’m sorry,” Joe said, “but you sound like my pop back when my brother took the family car without asking and stayed out way past curfew. What’s the big deal?”
The captain explained about the attack on the Grouper, Paul Trout’s condition, and NUMA’s theory that some type of electromagnetic weapon had been used on the Kinjara Maru. He made a point of explaining that whoever attacked the Grouperhad used torp edoes.
“What are they doing now?” Joe asked.
“They’re headed due west at full speed,” the captain said. “Sometime tomorrow they’ll be in range of a Navy guided-missile frigate. At that point they should be safe, and Paul will be transferred to a hospital ship.”
“What about us? Is that why we’re heading in?”
“The Director feels it’s too dangerous to sit out here alone,” the captain said. “If someone’s targeting those with knowledge, we, and Austin, could be next. He’s going to contact the Spanish and Portuguese admirals tomorrow and get us some backup. But until then, he wants us docked and all hands accounted for. And that’s why I’m concerned. Because Kurt hasn’t answered his damn phone all night.”
“Have we contacted the local police?”
“Yes,” the captain said. “We’ve made them aware of who Kurt is, what he looks like, and the fact that we’re trying to find him. And they’ve made us aware of a fight, gunfire, and a vehicular chase that ended in two cars going off a cliff on a normally peaceful island. A man fitting Kurt’s description was involved, but no body matching his has been recovered.”