“Uncle Percy, this is Dirk.”
“Oh, my goodness, Dirk. About time I heard your voice. You haven’t called your old uncle in five months.”
“Four,” Pitt corrected him. “I’ve been on an overseas project.”
“How’s my beautiful sister and that dirty old politician she married? They never call me either.”
“I haven’t been over to the house yet, but judging from their letters, Mom and the senator are as testy as ever.”
“What about you, nephew? Are you in good health?”
“Fit and ready to race you around Marinda Park.”
“You remember that, do you? You couldn’t have been much older than six at the time.”
“How could I forget? Every time I’d try and pass, you’d throw me in the bushes.”
Nash laughed like the jolly man that he was. “Never try to better your elders. We like to think we’re smarter than you kids.”
“That’s why I need your help, and was wondering if you could meet me at the NUMA Building. I need to pick your brain.”
“On what subject?”
“Nuclear reactors for race cars.”
Nash knew instantly Pitt was dodging the real issue over the telephone. “When?” he asked without hesitation.
“As soon as convenient.”
“An hour okay?”
“An hour will be fine,” said Pitt.
“Where are you now?”
“Eating Japanese sashimi.”
Nash groaned. “Ghastly stuff. God only knows what pollutants and chemicals fish swim through.”
“Tastes good, though.”
“I’m going to speak to your mother. She didn’t raise y right.”
“See you in an hour, Percy.”
Pitt hung up and went back to his table. Hungry as he was, he barely touched the sashimi. He idly wondered if one of the smuggled bombs might be buried under the floor of the restaurant.
Pitt took a cab to the ten-story NUMA Building. He paid the driver and gazed briefly up at the emerald-green solar glass that covered the walls and ended in a curving pyramidal spire at the top. No lover of the classical look of the capital’s government buildings, Admiral Sandecker wanted a sleek contemporary look, and he got it. The lobby was an atrium surrounded by waterfalls and aquariums filled with exotic sea life. A huge globe rose from off the center of the sea-green marble floor, contoured with the geological furrows and ridges of every sea, large lake, and primary river on the earth.
Pitt entered an empty elevator and pressed the button marked 10. He skipped his fourth-floor office and rode up to the communications and information network on the top level. Here was the brain center of NUMA, a storehouse of every scrap of information ever recorded on the oceans—scientific, historical, fiction, or nonfiction. It was in this vast room of computers and memory cores where Sandecker spent a goodly percentage of NUMA’s budget, a constant source of criticism from a small company of his enemies in Congress. Yet this great electronic library had saved enormous sums of money on hundreds of projects, led the way to numerous important discoveries, and helped avert several national disasters that were never reported in the news media.
The man behind this formidable data supermarket was Hiram Yaeger.
“Brilliant” was the compliment most often paid to Yaeger’s mind, while “rumpled” distinguished his appearance. With his graying blond hair tied in a long ponytail, a braided beard, granny spectacles, and frayed, patched Levi’s, Yaeger exuded the aura of a hippie relic. Strangely, he had never been one. He was a decorated, three-tour Vietnam veteran who served as a Navy SEAL. If he had remained in computer design in California and launched his own company, he might have eventually headed a booming corporation and become a very wealthy man. But Yaeger cared nothing for being an entrepreneur. He was a class-act paradox, and one of Pitt’s favorite people.
When Admiral Sandecker offered him the job of command over NUMA’s vast computer data complex with nearly unlimited funding, Yaeger took it, moved his family to a small farm in Sharpsburg, Maryland, and set up shop all within eight days. He put in long hours, running the data systems twenty-four hours a clay, using three shifts of technicians to accumulate and disperse ocean data to and from ongoing American and foreign expeditions around the earth.
Pitt found Yaeger at his desk, which sat on a raised stage and revolved in the center of the vast room. Yaeger had it specially constructed so he could keep an all-seeing eye on his billion dollar domain. He was eating a pizza and drinking a nonalcoholic beer when he spied Pitt and jerked to his feet with a broad smile.
“Dirk, you’re back.”
Pitt climbed the stairs to Yaeger’s altar, as his staff called it behind his back, and they shook hands warmly. “Hello, Hiram.”
“Sorry to hear about Soggy Acres,” Yaeger said seriously, what I’m real happy to see you’re still among the living. God, you look like a felon just out of solitary. Sit down and rest yourself.”
Pitt gazed longingly at the pizza. “You couldn’t spare a slice, could you?”
“You bet. Help yourself. I’ll send out for another. Like a fake beer to wash it down? Sorry I can’t give you the real stuff, but you know the rules.”
Pitt sat and put away a large pizza plus two slices from Yaeger’s, and three beers without alcohol the computer genius kept in a small refrigerator built into his desk. Between bites, Pitt filled Yaeger in on the events leading up to his rescue, stopping short of his flight to Hawaii.
Yaeger listened with interest and then smiled like a skeptical judge on a divorce trial. “Made a quick trip home, I see.”
“Something’s come up.”
Yaeger laughed. “Here we go. You didn’t rush back to eat my pizza. What’s swirling in that evil mind of yours?”
“I’m expecting a relative of mine, Dr. Percy Nash, to arrive in a few minutes. Percy was one of the scientists on the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bomb. A former director on the Atomic Energy Commission, now retired. Together with your supercomputer intelligence and Percy’s knowledge of nuclear weaponry, I want to create a scenario.”
“A conceptualization.”
“A rose, et cetera.”
“Involving what?”
“A smuggling operation.”
“What are we smuggling?”
“I’d rather spell it out after Percy gets here.”
“A tangible, a solid object, maybe like a nuclear warhead?” Yaeger asked smugly.
Pitt looked at him. “That’s one possibility.”
Yaeger lazily rose to his feet and started down the stairs. “While we’re waiting for your uncle, I’ll warm up my CAD/CAM.”
He was gone and away on the computer floor before Pitt thought to ask him what he was talking about.
23
A GREAT WHITE BEARD flowed down Payload Percy’s face and covered half his paisley necktie. He had a knuckle for a nose and the set brows and squinting eyes of a wagon master intent on getting the settlers through Indian country. He beamed at the world from a face that belonged in a TV beer commercial, and seemed far younger than his eighty-two years.
He dressed natty for Washington. No regimented gray pinstripe or blue suit with red tie for Percy. He entered NUMA’s computer complex in a lavender sport coat with matching pocket kerchief and tie, gray slacks, and lizard-skin cowboy boots. Sought and intimately entertained by half the attractive widows within a hundred miles, Percy had somehow managed to remain a bachelor. A wit who was in demand as a party guest and speaker, he was a gourmand who owned a wine cellar that was the envy of every society party thrower in town.
The serious side of his character was his tremendous knowledge of the deadly art of nuclear weaponry. Percy was in on the beginning at Los Alamos and stayed in harness at the Atomic Energy Commission and its succeeding agency for almost fifty years. Many a third-world leader would have given his entire treasury for Percy’s talents. He was one of a very small band of experts who could assemble a working nuclear bomb in his garage for the price of a power lawn mower.