“I assumed that you’re not a transvestite and these were for me.” Tish grinned, smoothing the skirt against her thighs.
“No, I gave up drag years ago. Are the sizes all right?”
“Right down to the 34C cup, thank you for noticing.” She threw him another saucy grin. “Is that coffee I smell?”
“Yes, but let me make a new pot, this is my own blend, brewed especially to wake the dead.”
“Sounds fine to me.” She took a tentative sip and winced. Mercer started a fresh pot. “Why didn’t you wake me last night for dinner?”
“I figured you needed sleep more than you needed my cooking.”
“I’ve found that most bachelors are excellent chefs.”
“Not this one, I’m afraid. I travel so much that I never took the time to learn how to cook. I live by the principle that if it can’t be nuked, it can’t be edible.”
Mercer saw Tish’s eyes dart to the map behind the bar. “I’ve only been on a few field trips. Most of my time is spent in a lab in San Diego. It must be exciting, all that travel, I mean.”
“At first it was, now it’s cramped airline seats, cardboard food, and dull meetings.”
Tish scoffed but didn’t press. “Do you have any new clues as to what’s going on?”
Before answering, Mercer glanced at his watch. It was well past his personal cutoff limit of 9:30. He strode around the bar and pulled a beer from the fridge. “I placed some calls yesterday, after you went to bed. We should be hearing something soon. Until then, I think it best that you stay here. Is there anyone you need to contact? Boyfriend, anything like that?”
“No.”
“Good. I hope by this afternoon we’ll know something that will lead us in a direction. But right now, all we can do is wait.”
“Don’t you have to go to work?”
Mercer laughed. “I’m consulting for the USGS. They expect me to be irresponsible.”
They talked for the next hour or so, Mercer deftly turning the conversation away from himself so that Tish spoke most of the time. She had an infectious laugh and, Mercer noticed, several charming freckles high on her cheeks. She had never been married, just engaged once, when she was younger. She was a Democrat and a conservationist, but she didn’t trust her party’s candidates or the mainstream environmental groups. She never knew her mother, which Mercer already knew, and idolized her late father, which he’d guessed. She enjoyed her work for NOAA and wasn’t ready to settle down into a teaching job just yet. Her last serious relationship had ended seven months before so right now the only thing she needed to worry about were several house plants that her neighbor promised to look after when she had gone away to Hawaii.
Around eleven, a phone rang in Mercer’s office. He made no move to answer it. A few seconds later, the fax machine attached to that phone line began to whirr. When it finally stopped, Mercer excused himself and retrieved the dozen sheets from the tray.
He walked slowly back to the bar, eyes glued to the first page. As he finished each page, he handed it to Tish. They read for twenty minutes; occasionally Mercer would grunt at some piece of information, or Tish would gasp.
“I don’t understand that question at the end of the report.”
“It’s a trivia challenge between Dave and me. Goes back years. I have to admit he has me stumped.”
Tish read the question aloud. “ ‘Who was the captain of the Amoco Cadizo?’ I’ve never even heard of that ship.”
“She was a fully loaded supertanker that ran aground in the English Channel in March of ’78. I’ll be damned if I can remember her captain’s name.”
Tish regarded him strangely, but changed the subject. “What do you make of this information?”
“I’m not too sure yet.” Mercer opened another beer.
Ocean Freight and Cargo, the company whose ship rescued Tish, was headquartered in New York City but the corporate money came from a Finnish consortium headed by a company once suspected of being a KGB front. “Slicker than Air America,” was David Saulman’s assessment. Their ships sailed mostly in the Pacific, running fairly standard cargos to established ports of call. Saulman did find that OF amp;C had a “Weasel Clause” — his words — written into all of their contracts concerning the August Rose. The clause allowed the five-hundred-foot refrigerator ship to break contract with only twelve hours’ notice, provided that cargo had not already been onloaded. In all of Saulman’s years of maritime law, he had never seen such a stipulation and couldn’t even guess its purpose. Since 1989, OF amp;C had evoked this clause several times, refusing to load cargo onto the August Rose in the States. The clause was odd, Saulman concluded, but certainly not nefarious.
Her present position was north of Hawaii, hove-to because of engine difficulties. Saulman’s sources said that she would be under way within fifteen hours and that the company had not requested outside help for their idle ship. Her cargo of beef, scheduled to be picked up in Seattle, was currently being loaded onto a Lykes Brothers’ vessel.
Mercer’s request for information about vessels sunk in the same waters as the NOAA ship Ocean Seeker had opened quite a Pandora’s box. No less than forty ships had sunk in that area in the past fifty years, although sinkings had been less frequent since the 1970s. Mercer assumed this was because of new weather-tracking technology. He noted that most of the vessels lost were charter fishing boats, pleasure craft, or day sailors. He checked off the notable exceptions with a black Waterman fountain pen.
Ocean Seeker, NOAA research vessel, June this year.
One survivor.
Oshabi Maru
, Japanese long-line trawler, December 1990. No survivors.
Philipe Santos
, Chilean weather ship, April 1982. No survivors.
Western Passage
, American freighter converted to cable layer, May 1977. No survivors.
Curie
, French oceanography research ship, October 1975. No survivors.
Colombo Princess
, Sri Lankan container ship, March 1972. Thirty-one survivors.
Baltimore
, American tanker, February 1968. Twenty-four survivors.
Between the loss of the Baltimore in 1968 and the sinking of an ore carrier named Grandam Phoenix in 1954, no large ships had sunk north of Hawaii. Any large vessel lost before 1954 could be attributed to World War II.
“I don’t know what to make of it either,” Tish added.
“Well, if the ship that rescued you is somehow connected to the KGB, that would explain why you heard Russian as you were being rescued.”
Mercer scanned the pages again, but kept returning to the list of sunken ships, noting that the Grandam Phoenix had been lost with all hands. There was something…
“Jesus.”
“What?” Tish said.
He hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud. “I have to go to my office.”
“What for?”
“I have a hunch.” Mercer reached for the phone. A second after dialing, Harry White’s bleary voice rasped,
“Hello.”
“Harry, Mercer. I need you over here to keep an eye on a friend of mine.… No, don’t bring a guest and yes, I do still have some Jack Daniel’s.… Right, see you in a few.”
Mercer hung up and turned to Tish. “A friend of mine will be here in a few minutes. I want you to stay here with him; I can’t trust you out on the streets just yet. Not until I know more.”
There was a pleading look in Tish’s eyes. Mercer couldn’t tell if she wanted reassurance or more information. “I’ll be back in a few hours. If what I suspect is true, we’ll have this cleared up by tonight and you’ll be on a plane home in the morning. Besides, Harry is better company than I am.”