“Sam!” the Secretary of Defense exclaimed. “Where are you?”
“It doesn’t matter, ma’am. I’m still in the D.C. area.”
The secretary wasted half a minute explaining why it did matter, in her opinion. Sam grimaced. If she really wanted to know, she’d have to trace the call — by which time he intended to be elsewhere.
“I’ve spoken to Tom,” he said.
“That idiot! He’s putting us all at risk.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Sam neglected to mention that Tom had been caught out by the terrorist. “I’ve sent him back, as a matter of fact. We’ve received the next clue, and it leads to one of my family’s old ships, the Clarion Call.”
Sam knew that Tom would make a call of his own to the Secretary of Defense. His hope had been that he would be able to make one first.
It seemed to have paid off.
The secretary inhaled sharply, but said nothing.
“I’ve asked him to take the Maria Helena to the coordinates where the ship was scuttled. He needs to dive it. I think there may be further leads on that sunken wreck.”
“I see,” the secretary said.
She was far too experienced to blurt out what was on her mind, but she couldn’t conceal the fact that there was something significant about the location.
“Ma’am,” Sam said. “I’ve found three different ‘clues’ on this treasure hunt so far. Let me tell you about them. I have less than ten minutes before I have to cut off this call and power down the phone.”
“Tell me then, and quickly.”
He gave her the rundown of the information he’d learned at the Air and Space Museum, the Library of Congress, and Old Tony’s — the picture of Global One, and the four men in front of it.
“What conclusions did you draw from these mysterious tip-offs?” the secretary asked, when he was done.
Her voice sounded stiff. What he had told her had affected her somehow.
She knew more than she was saying.
“That this has something to do not just with the Germans during World War II, ma’am, but with the Russians as well. There’s something else you should also know.”
“Go on?”
“My family was involved.”
“It seems that way. What else?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“You don’t know, or you couldn’t say?”
“There’s a question I wouldn’t mind asking you.”
She snorted, but said nothing.
Sam added, “Let’s just say that neither one of us is confident enough about our conclusions to talk about them openly. That way it doesn’t sound like we’re deliberately hiding things from each other.”
The Secretary of Defense was an old friend of his family, but that didn’t mean that Sam trusted her further than he could throw her.
The woman used to cheat at ‘Old Maid’ back in the day, after all, and later taught him how to double-deal and count cards so they could fleece his father at poker.
She was definitely not to be trusted.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The next call was to his father.
“Sam, is that you?”
“It’s me.”
His father paused, took a deep breath. “What’s going on and how much is this going to cost me?” he asked.
Sam’s father wasn’t heartless, but he had a hell of a way of expressing himself. It was like living as a fish, while having a great white shark for a parent.
“You’ve seen the news,” Sam said. “How much do you know?”
“I know enough to know that you shouldn’t be on the damned phone with me.”
“I’ve sent Tom out to dive the Clarion Call,” Sam told him.
Which was strange in and of itself. If he wasn’t supposed to have any help and he wasn’t supposed to go beyond the Beltway — how in the world was he supposed to follow a clue? The terrorist must have known that he’d find a way to cheat at that point.
He must have been counting on it.
Sam grimaced.
“The Clarion Call,” Sam’s father said. “That’s one of our oldest vessels. Sunk off the coast of Sandy Point State Park. Before my time. It was one of old man Reilly’s ships.”
Sam waited.
“I’d always wondered why he scuttled it,” James acknowledged. “It was supposed to have been in poor repair, but I’d been on it a few months before that, and it didn’t seem in disrepair. Nothing that couldn’t have been repaired, anyway.”
“It was the first of the ‘special’ ships, wasn’t it?”
James chuckled. “You might say that.”
“So there might have been something hidden inside?” Sam asked.
“It sounds like exactly the sort of thing my father would have done. He would’ve taken on the job to hide something, accepted payment for the job, then taken the cost of the sunken ship he’d just been paid for off his taxes. He was a hard man, old man Reilly.”
In that case, pot, meet kettle. Like father like son.
“What might be in there?” Sam persisted.
“Anything. It went down in 1996. By then he had contacts all over the world.”
“Something illegal?”
“Probably.”
“How illegal?”
His father paused. Finally, he said, “He never smuggled women, as far as I know.”
“Dad…”
“It’s a long story. And you don’t have time.”
“What about Global One?”
“What about it?”
Sam explained about the picture and his theory that it all had something to do with the Russians.
His father made a thoughtful humming sound in the back of his throat. “I don’t know what to say, Sam. I do know that the Clarion Call was used to ship something from Canada to Russia, back when it was still the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”
“How is that connected?”
“I remember the cigars they used to smoke. The three of them would stand on the deck and smoke them after supper, with the full moon overhead…”
“The three of them?”
“I don’t remember much. I was young. Mama was always sick on the water, even on the big ships. ‘The boy has to know where he came from,’ Dad would say, and drag me across the ocean without her, but then he’d abandon me. Stan and I used to bet on horseraces, listening to the results over the radio all night long.”
James Reilly wasn’t one to share stories out of the past, and he wasn’t one to let his mind wander. If he did, he had a good reason.
Sam waited, hoping that his father’s memory would bring up whatever was swimming around in the depths of his highly intelligent mind.
James said, “Nothing good. That’s all I remember.”
“Another question. Did Grandpa ever meet Werner Heisenberg?”
“The scientist? No.”
Sam set his jaw hard. Oh, well. He hadn’t exactly expected to hit gold with the first strike of the hammer. “Look, dad. Will you see what else you can find?”
“Call you back at this number?”
“Yes.”
His father grunted, said, “Don’t do anything that hurts our stock prices!”
On the way back around the block, Sam picked up the phone and checked it.
So far, so good. No angry messages, no sounds of explosions, and no voice mails from the terrorist stating that he had pushed his luck too far.
That was good.
He was planning to push it even further.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Retired Senator Charles Finney sat in his wheelchair on his balcony at The Residences at Farragut. He was still sore from his morning’s efforts. It was a nursing home, plain and simple, although the staff didn’t let any of their patients call it that. The place was so expensive it felt more like being on a permanent pleasure cruise than anything else, but so restricted, it reminded him of a top-security military base, too.