“It was Boudicca who talked Daddy into sparing your life by insisting I go along on the voyage.”
“Sparing my life?” Maeve looked lost. “You’re not making sense.”
“Who do you think arranged for the ship’s captain to send you ashore with the first excursion?”
“You?”
“Me.”
“It was my turn to go ashore. The other lecturers and I worked in sequence.”
Deirdre shook her head. “If they had stuck to the proper schedule, you’d have been placed in charge of the second shore party that never got off the ship.”
“So what was your reasoning?”
“An act of timing,” said Deirdre, suddenly turning cold. “Daddy’s people calculated that the phenomenon would appear when the first shore party was safe inside the whaling station storage caves.”
Maeve felt the deck reeling beneath her feet, and the color drained out of her cheeks. “No way he could have predicted the terrible event,” she gasped.
“A smart man, our father,” Deirdre said calmly as if she were gossiping with a friend over the telephone. “If not for his advance planning, how do you think I knew when to lock myself in the ship’s freezer?”
“How could he possibly know when and where the plague would strike?” she asked skeptically.
“Our father,” Deirdre said, baring her teeth in a savage smile, “is not a stupid man.”
Maeve’s fury seethed throughout her body. “If he had any suspicions, he should have given a warning and averted the slaughter,” she snapped.
“Daddy has more important business than to fuss over a boatload of dismal tourists.”
“I swear before God I’ll see that you all pay for your callousness.”
“You’d betray the family?” Deirdre shrugged sarcastically, then answered her own question. “Yes, I believe you would.”
“Bet on it.”
“Never happen, not if you want to see your precious sons again.”
“Sean and Michael are where Father will never find them.”
“Call in the dogs if you have a mind to, but hiding the twins with that teacher in Perth was not really all that clever.”
“You’re bluffing.”
“Your flesh-and-blood sister, Boudicca, merely persuaded the teacher and his wife, the Hollenders as I recall their name, to allow her to take the twins on a picnic.”
Maeve trembled and felt she was going to be sick as the full enormity of the revelation engulfed her. “You have them?”
“The boys? Of course.”
“The Hollenders, if she so much as hurt them—”
“Nothing of the sort.”
“Sean and Michael, what have you done with them?”
“Daddy is taking very good care of them on our private island. He’s even teaching them the diamond trade. Cheer up. The worst that can happen is that they suffer some type of accident. You know better than anybody the risks children run, playing around mining tunnels. The bright side is that if you stand with the family, your boys will someday become incredibly wealthy and powerful men.”
“Like Daddy?” Maeve cried in outrage and fear. “I’d rather they die.” She subdued the urge to kill her sister and sat heavily in a chair, broken and defeated.
“They could do worse,” said Deirdre, gloating over Maeve’s helplessness. “String along your friends from NUMA for a few days, and keep your mouth shut about what I’ve told you. Then we’ll catch a flight for home.” She walked to the door and turned. “I think you’ll find Daddy most forgiving, providing you ask forgiveness and demonstrate your loyalty to the family.” Then she stepped onto the outside deck and out of sight.
WHERE DREAMS COME FROM
Admiral Sandecker seldom used the large boardroom for conferences. He reserved it mainly for visiting congressmen and -women, and respected scientists, foreign and American. For internal NUMA business, he preferred a smaller workroom just off his office. It was an extremely comfortable room, uniquely his own, sort of a hideaway for him to hold informal but confidential meetings with his NUMA directors. Sandecker often used it as an executive dining room, he and his directors relaxing in the soft leather chairs set around a three-meter-long conference table built from a section of a wooden hull salvaged from a schooner on the bottom of Lake Erie and solidly set in a thick turquoise carpet in front of a fireplace surrounded by a Victorian mantelpiece.
Unlike the modern design and decor of the other offices in the NUMA headquarters building, which were encased in soaring walls of green-tinted glass, this room looked as if it was straight out of an antiquated London gentlemen’s club. All four walls and ceiling were richly paneled in a satiny teak, and there were paintings of United States naval actions hung in ornate frames.
There was a beautifully detailed painting of the epic battle between John Paul Jones in the woefully armed Bonhomme Richard and the new British fifty-gun frigate, Serapis. Next to it the venerable American frigate Constitution was demasting the British frigate Java. On the opposite wall the Civil War ironclads Monitor and Virginia, better known as the Merrimac, slugged it out. Commodore Dewey destroying the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay and a flight of dive bombers taking off from the carrier Enterprise to bomb the Japanese fleet during the Battle of Midway were mounted side by side. Only the painting above the fireplace lacked a sea battle. It was a portrait of Sandecker in casual uniform before he was promoted and thrown on the beach. Below the portrait, in a glass-enclosed case, sat a model of his last command, the missile cruiser Tucson.
After Sandecker’s retirement, a former President of the United States picked him to organize and establish a newly funded government agency dedicated to research of the sea. Beginning in a rented warehouse with a staff of fewer than a dozen people, including Pitt and Giordino, Sandecker had built NUMA into a huge organization that was the envy of oceanographic institutions around the world, manned by two thousand employees, and with a huge budget rarely questioned and almost always approved by Congress.
Sandecker fought advancing age with a passion. Now in his early sixties, he was a fitness nut who jogged, lifted weights and engaged in any kind of exercise so long as it brought about sweat and an increased heartbeat. The results of strenuous workouts and a nutritious diet were readily apparent in his honed and trim shape. He was slightly under what would be called average height, and his flaming red hair was still full, cut close and slicked down, with a razor-edge part on the left side. The taut, narrow shape of his face was accented by piercing hazel eyes and a Vandyke beard that was an exact match in color for the hair on his head.
Sandecker’s only vice was cigars. He loved to smoke ten grandly large cigars a day, specially selected and wrapped to his personal taste. He stepped into the conference room in a cloud of smoke as if he were a magician materializing on a fog-shrouded stage.
He walked to the head of the table and smiled benignly at the two men seated to his left and right. “Sorry to keep you so late, gentlemen, but I wouldn’t have asked you to work overtime unless it was important.”
Hiram Yaeger, the chief of NUMA’s computer network and overseer to the world’s most expansive data library on marine sciences, leaned his chair back on two legs and nodded toward Sandecker. Whenever a problem needed solving, Sandecker always started with Yaeger. Unperturbed in bib overalls and a ponytail, he lived with his wife and daughters in a ritzy section of the capital and drove a nonproduction BMW. “It was either respond to your request,” he said with a slight twinkle in his eye, “or take my wife to the ballet.”
“Either way, you lose,” laughed Rudi Gunn, NUMA’s executive director and second in command. If Dirk Pitt was Sandecker’s ace troubleshooter, Gunn was his organizational wizard. Thin with slim hips and narrow shoulders, humorous as well as bright, he peered through thick horn-rimmed glasses from eyes that suggested an owl waiting for a field mouse to run under his tree.