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  "I'm aware of that."

  "Will you listen to another proposal?"

  "I'll listen."

  "I'm not going to hand you a lot of double-talk about doing me a great service by keeping this conversation to yourself. If it gets out I go down the drain, but that's my problem. True?"

  "If you say so, yes."

  "You were scheduled to direct a survey of the sea floor in the Bering Sea off the Aleutians next month.

  I'll bring in Jack Harris from the deep-ocean mining project to replace you. To head off any questions or later investigations or bureaucratic wrongdoing, we'll sever your connections with NUMA. As of now, you're on leave of absence until you find Raymond LeBaron."

  "Find Raymond LeBaron," Pitt repeated sarcastically. "A piece of cake. The trail is two weeks cold and getting colder by the hour. No motive, no leads, not one clue to why he vanished, who did it, and how. Impossible is an understatement."

  "Will you at least give it a try?" asked Sandecker.

  Pitt stared at the teakwood planking that made up the floor of the admiral's office, his eyes seeing a tropical sea two thousand miles away. He disliked becoming linked with a riddle without being able to calculate at the very least an approximate solution. He knew Sandecker knew that he would accept the challenge. Chasing after an unknown over the next horizon was a lure Pitt could never resist.

  "If I take this on, I'd need NUMA's best scientific team to man a first-rate research vessel. The resources and political clout to back me up. Military support in case of trouble."

  "Dirk, my hands are tied. I can offer you nothing."

  "What?"

  "You heard me. The situation requires the search be conducted as quietly as possible. You'll have to make do without any help from NUMA."

  "Have you got both oars in the water?" Pitt demanded. "You expect me, one man working alone, to accomplish what half the Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard failed to do? Why, hell, they couldn't find a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot airship until it showed up on its own. What am I supposed to use, a dowser and a canoe?"

  "The idea," Sandecker explained patiently, "is to fly LeBaron's last known course in the Prosperteer."

  Pitt slowly sank into an office sofa. "This is the craziest scheme I've ever heard," he said, unbelieving.

  He turned to Jessie. "Do you go along with this?"

  "I'll do whatever it takes to find my husband," she said evenly.

  "A cuckoo's nest," Pitt said gravely. He stood and began to pace the room, clasping and unclasping his hands. "Why the secrecy? Your husband was an important man, a celebrity, a confidant of the rich and famous, closely connected with high government officials, a financial guru to executives of major corporations. Why in God's name am I the only man in the country who can search for him?"

  "Dirk," Sandecker said softly. "Raymond LeBaron's financial empire touches hundreds of thousands of people. Right now, it's hanging in limbo because he's still among the missing. It can't be proven whether he's alive or dead. The government has called off any further hunt, because over five million dollars have been spent by military search and rescue teams without a sighting, without a hint of where he might have disappeared. Budget-conscious congressmen will howl for scalps if more government money is spent on another fruitless effort."

  "What about the private sector and LeBaron's own business associates?"

  "Many business leaders respected LeBaron, but at one time or another most of them were burned by him in his editorials. They won't spend a dime or go out of their way to look for him. As to the men around him, they have more to gain by his death."

  "So does Jessie here," said Pitt, gazing at her.

  She smiled thinly. "I can't deny it. But the bulk of his estate goes to charities and other family members.

  I do, however, receive a substantial inheritance."

  "You must own a yacht, Mrs. LeBaron. Why don't you assemble your own crew of investigators and look for your husband?"

  "There are reasons, Dirk, why I can't conduct a large publicized effort. Reasons you needn't know.

  The admiral and I think there is a chance, a very slight chance, that three people can quietly retrace the flight of the Prosperteer under the same conditions and discover what happened to Raymond."

  "Why bother?" asked Pitt. "All islands and reefs within the blimp's fuel range were covered by the initial search. I'd only be covering the same trail."

  "They might have missed something."

  "Like maybe Cuba?"

  Sandecker shook his head. "Castro would have claimed LeBaron overflew Cuban territory under instructions from the CIA and flaunted the blimp's capture to the world. No, there has to be another answer."

  Pitt walked over to the corner windows and gazed longingly down at a fleet of small sailboats that were holding a regatta on the Anacostia River. The white sails gleamed against the dark green water as they raced toward the buoy markers.

  "How do we know where to concentrate?" he asked without turning. "We're looking at a search grid as large as a thousand square miles. It would take weeks to cover it properly."

  "I have all my husband's records and charts," said Jessie.

  "He left them behind?"

  "No, they were found in the blimp."

  Pitt silently watched the sailboats, his arms crossed in front of him. He tried to probe the motives, penetrate the intrigue, lay out the safeguards. He tried to segregate each into an orderly niche.

  "When do we go?" he asked finally.

  "Sunrise tomorrow morning," Sandecker replied.

  "You both still insist I lead the fishing expedition?"

  "We do," Jessie said flatly.

  "I want two old hands for my crew. They're both on NUMAs payroll. Either I get them or I'll walk."

  Sandecker's face clouded. "I've already explained=

  "You've got the moon, Admiral, and you're asking for Mars. We've been friends long enough for you to know I don't operate on a halfassed basis. Put the two men I need on leaves of absence too. I don't care how you do it."

  Sandecker wasn't angry, wasn't even annoyed. If there was one man in the country who could pull off the unthinkable, it was Pitt. The admiral had no more cards to play, so he folded.

  "All right," he said quietly. "You've got them."

  "There's one more thing."

  "Which is?" Sandecker demanded.

  Pitt turned around with a bleak smile. His gaze went from Jessie to the admiral. Then he shrugged and said, "I've never flown a blimp."

  <<14>>

  "Appears to me you're making an end run behind my back," said Sam Emmett, the outspoken chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  The President looked across his desk in the Oval Office and smiled benignly. "You're absolutely right, Sam. I'm doing exactly that."

  "I give you credit for laying it on the line."

  "Don't get upset, Sam. This in no way reflects any displeasure with you or the FBI."

  "Then why can't you tell me what this is all about?" Emmett asked, holding his indignation in check.

  "In the first place, it's primarily a foreign affairs matter."

  "Has Martin Brogan at CIA been consulted?"

  "Martin has not been called in. You have my word on it."

  "And in the second place?"

  The President was not about to be pushed. "That's my business."

  Emmett stiffened. "If the President wishes my resignation--"

  "I don't wish anything of the sort," the President cut in. "You're the ablest and best-qualified man to head up the bureau. You've done a magnificent job, and I've always been one of your biggest boosters.

  However, if you want to pick up your marbles and go home because you think your vanity has been dented, then go right ahead. Prove me wrong about you."

  "But if you don't trust=

  "Wait just a damned minute, Sam. Let's not say anything we'll be sorry about tomorrow. I'm not questioning your loyalty or integrity. No one is stabbing you in the bac
k. We aren't talking crime or espionage. This matter doesn't directly concern the FBI or any of the intelligence agencies. The bottom line is that it's you who has to trust me, at least for the next week. Will you do that?"

  Emmett's ego was temporarily soothed. He shrugged and then relented. "You win, Mr. President.

  Status quo. I'll follow your lead."

  The President sighed heavily. "I promise I won't let you down, Sam."

  "I appreciate that."

  "Good. Now let's start at the beginning. What have you got on the dead bodies from Florida?"

  The tight uneasiness went out of Emmett's expression, and he noticeably relaxed. He opened his attaché case and handed the President a leather-bound folder.

  "Here is a detailed report from the Walter Reed pathology lab. Their examination was most helpful in giving us a lead for identification."

  The President looked at him in surprise. "You identified them?"

  "It was the analysis of the borscht paste that opened the door."

  "Borscht what?"

  "You recall that the Dade County coroner fixed death by hypothermia, or freezing?"

  "Yes."

  Yes."

  "Well, borscht paste is a god-awful food supplement given to Russian cosmonauts. The stomachs of the three corpses were loaded with the stuff."

  "You're telling me that Raymond LeBaron and his crew were exchanged for three dead Soviet cosmonauts?"

  Emmett nodded. "We were even able to put a name on them through a defector, a former flight surgeon with the Russian space program. He'd examined each of them on several occasions."

  "When did he defect?"

  "He came over to our side in August of '87."

  "A little over two years ago."

  "That's correct," Emmett acknowledged. "The names of the cosmonauts found in LeBaron's blimp are Sergei Zochenko, Alexander Yudenich, and Ivan Ronsky. Yudenich was a rookie, but Zochenko and Ronsky were both veterans with two space flights apiece."

  "I'd give my next year's salary to know how they came to be inside that damned blimp."

  "Regrettably, we turned up nothing concerning that part of the mystery. At the moment, the only Russians circling the earth are four cosmonauts on board the Salyut 9 space station. But the NASA people, who are monitoring the flight, say they're all in good health."

  The President nodded. "So that eliminates any Soviet cosmonaut on a space flight and leaves only those on the ground."

  "That's the odd twist," Emmett continued. "According to the forensic pathology people at Walter Reed, the three men they examined probably froze to death while in space."

  The President's eyebrows raised. "Can they prove it?"

  "No, but they say several factors point in that direction, starting with the borscht paste and the analysis of other condensed foods the Soviets are known to consume during space travel. Also evident were physiological signs the men had breathed air of a high oxygen constant and spent considerable time in a weightless environment."

  "Wouldn't be the first time the Soviets have launched men into space and failed to retrieve them. They could have been up there for years, and fell to earth only a few weeks ago after their orbit decayed."

  "I'm only aware of two instances where the Soviets suffered fatalities," said Emmett. "The cosmonaut whose craft became tangled in the shrouds of its reentry parachute and slammed into Siberia at five hundred miles an hour. And the three Soyuz crewmen who died after a faulty hatch leaked away their oxygen."

  "The disasters they couldn't cover up," said the President. "The CIA has recorded at least thirty cosmonaut deaths since the beginning of their space missions. Nine of them are still up there, drifting around in space. We can't advertise the fact on our end because it would jeopardize our intelligence sources."

  "We-know-but-they-don't-know-we-know kind of affair."

  "Precisely."

  "Which brings us back to the three cosmonauts we've got lying here in Washington," said Emmett, clutching his briefcase on his lap.

  "And a hundred questions, beginning with, Where did they come from?"

  "I did some checking with the Aerospace Defense Command Center. Their technicians say the only spacecraft the Russians have sent aloft large enough to support a manned crew-- besides their orbiting station shuttles-- were the Selenos lunar probes."

  At the word "lunar" something clicked in the President's mind. "What about the Selenos probes?"

  "Three went up and none came back. The Defense Command boys thought it highly unusual for the Soviets to screw-up three times in a row on simple moon orbiting flights."

  "You think they were manned?"

  "I do indeed," said Emmett. "The Soviets wallow in deception. As you suggested, they almost never admit to a space failure. And keeping the buildup for their coming moon landing clouded in secrecy was strictly routine."

  "Okay, if we accept the theory the three bodies came from one of the Selenos spacecraft, where did it land? Certainly not through their normal reentry path over the steppes of Kazakhstan."

  "My guess is somewhere in or around Cuba."

  "Cuba." The President slowly rolled the two syllables from his lips. Then he shook his head. "The Russians would never allow their national heroes, living or dead, to be used for some kind of crazy intelligence scheme."

  "Maybe they don't know"

  The President looked at Emmett. "Don't know?"

  "Let's say for the sake of argument that their spacecraft had a malfunction and fell in or near Cuba during reentry. About the same time, Raymond LeBaron and his blimp show up searching for a treasure ship and are captured. Then, for some unfathomable reason, the Cubans switch the cosmonauts' bodies for LeBaron and his crew and send the blimp back to Florida."

  "Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds?"

  Emmett laughed. "Of course, but considering the known facts, it's the best I can come up with."

  The President leaned back and stared at the ornate ceiling. "You know, you just might have struck a vein."

  A quizzical look crossed Emmett's face. "How so?"

  "Try this on for size. Suppose, just suppose, Fidel Castro is trying to tell us something."

  "He picked a strange way to send out a signal."

  The President picked up a pen and began doodling on a pad. "Fidel has never been a stickler for diplomatic niceties."

  "Do you want me to continue the investigation?" Emmett asked.

  "No," the President answered tersely.

  "You still insist on keeping the bureau in the dark?"

  "This is not a domestic matter for the justice Department, Sam. I'm grateful for your help, but you've taken it about as far as you can go."

  Emmett snapped his attaché case shut and rose to his feet. "Can I ask a touchy question?"

  "Shoot."

  "Now that we've established a link, regardless of how weak, to a possible abduction of Raymond LeBaron by the Cubans, why is the

  President of the United States keeping it to himself and forbidding his investigative agencies to follow up?"

  "A good question, Sam. Perhaps in a few days we'll both know the answer."

  Moments after Emmett left the Oval Office, the President turned in his swivel chair and stared out the window. His mouth went dry and sweat soaked his armpits. He was gripped by foreboding that there was a tie between the Jersey Colony and the Soviet lunar probe disasters.

  <<15>>

  Ira Hagen stopped his rental car at the security gate and displayed a government ID card. The guard made a phone call to the visitors center of the Harvey Pattenden National Physics Laboratory, then waved Hagen through.

  He drove up the drive and found an empty space in a sprawling parking lot crowded by a sea of multicolored cars. The grounds surrounding the laboratory were landscaped with clusters of pine trees and moss rock planted amid rolling mounds of grass. The building was typical of tech centers that had mushroomed around the country. Contemporary architecture with heavy use of bronze glass
and brick walls curving at the corners.

  An attractive receptionist, sitting behind a horseshoe-shaped desk, looked up and smiled as he walked through the lobby. "May I help you?"

  "Thomas judge to see Dr. Mooney."

  She went through the phone routine again and nodded. "Yes, Mr. Judge. Please enter the security center to my rear. They'll direct you from there."

  "Before I go in, can I borrow your men's room?"

  "Certainly," she said, pointing. "The door on the right beneath the mural."

  Hagen thanked her and passed under a massive painting of a futuristic starship soaring between a pair of spectral blue-green planets. He went into a stall, closed the door, and sat down on the toilet. Opening a briefcase, he removed a yellow legal pad and turned to the middle. Then, writing on the upper back of the page, he made a series of tiny cryptic notes and diagrams on the security systems he'd observed since entering the building. A good undercover operative would never put anything down on paper, but Hagen could afford to run fast and loose, knowing the President would bail him out if his cover was blown.

  A few minutes later he strolled out of the restroom and entered a glass-enclosed room manned by four uniformed security guards, who eyeballed an array of twenty television monitors mounted against one wall. One of the guards rose from a console and approached the counter.

  "Sir?"

  "I have an appointment with Dr. Mooney."

  The guard scanned a visitor list. "Yes, sir, you must be Thomas Judge. May I see some identification, please?"

  Hagen showed him his driver's license and government ID. Then he was politely asked to open the briefcase. After a cursory search the guard silently gestured for Hagen to close it, asked him to sign a

  "time in and out" sheet, and gave him a plastic badge to clip on his breast pocket.

  "Dr. Mooney's office is straight down the corridor through the double doors at the end."

  In the corridor, Hagen paused to put on his reading glasses and peer at two bronze plaques on the wall. Each bore the raised profile of a man. One was dedicated to Dr. Harvey Pattenden, founder of the laboratory, and gave a brief description of his accomplishments in the field of physics. But it was the other plaque that intriqued Hagen. It read: