Medusa nf-8 Read online

  Shortly before midnight, Austin crawled into his bed high in the boathouse turret. He awoke refreshed around seven the next morning. He made a pot of Jamaican coffee and toasted a frozen bagel found in his pitifully empty refrigerator. Thus fortified, he returned to his report.

  He made surprisingly few changes to it. After a quick review, he sent his words off on electronic wings to NUMA director Dirk Pitt.

  Austin decided to reward his hard work with a row on the Potomac. Rowing was his main form of exercise when he was home and was largely responsible for packing even more muscle onto his broad shoulders. He dragged his lightweight racing shell from its rack under the boathouse.

  As the slender shell skimmed over the river, his measured scull strokes and the beauty of the river quieted his mind. When he had cleared away the mental clutter-the sabotage of the B3, his fight with the AUV, the night raid on the Beebe-he was still left with an undeniable conclusion: somebody wanted Max Kane dead and would go to extreme lengths to make it happen.

  After his row, Austin stowed the shell, showered off the sweat from his exertions, shaved, and called Paul Trout.

  Trout told Austin that Gamay had left for Bonefish Key the day before. He had received a voice mail confirming her arrival but had yet to talk to her.

  Austin then gave Trout a condensed version of his report of the attacks on the bathysphere.

  “Now I know why you told Gamay that the dive was memorable, ” Trout said. “Where do we go from here?”

  “I’m hopeful Gamay will turn up something on Doc Kane. He’s our major lead right now. Joe and I will compare notes and figure out our next move.”

  Austin said he would keep Trout posted, and then he thawed out another bagel to make a tuna-fish sandwich. He ate the sandwich in his kitchen, wistfully reminiscing about the wonderful meals he had eaten in the world’s capitals, when the phone trilled.

  He checked the caller ID. Then he pushed the SPEAKER button, and said, “Hello, Joe, I was just about to call you.”

  Zavala got right to the point.

  “Can you come over right away?” he asked.

  “The Zavala black book has more women listed in it than the D.C. directory, so I know you’re not lonely. What’s going on?”

  “I’ve got something I want to show you.”

  Austin couldn’t miss the unmistakable note of excitement in Zavala’s soft-spoken voice.

  “I’ll be over in an hour,” Austin said.

  At sea, Austin’s typical work outfit was a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and sandals. The switch from oceangoing to land creature always came as a shock. Shoes felt like vises attached to his feet, legs seemed imprisoned in tan cotton slacks, the collar of his blue dress shirt chafed. While he would slip on his navy blue linen blazer, he refused to wear a tie. It felt like a noose around his muscular neck.

  Unlike Dirk Pitt, who collected cars and seemed to have one for every occasion, Austin put his passion into his antique dueling pistols and instead drove a turquoise-colored Jeep Cherokee from the NUMA motor pool.

  Suburban traffic was piling up, but Austin knew the short-cuts, and slightly less than an hour after Joe’s call he pulled up in front of a small building in Arlington.

  At the front door of the former library, he punched the entry code into a keypad and stepped into the main living level. The space, which once had housed stacks, now looked like the interior of an adobe building in Santa Fe. The floors were dark red Mexican tile, the doorways arched, and niches in the whitewashed walls displayed colorful folk art that Zavala had collected on trips to his ancestral home in Morales. His father, a skilled carpenter, had made the beautifully carved furniture.

  Austin called out Zavala’s name.

  “I’m down in Frankenstein’s lab,” Zavala yelled up from his basement, where he spent his spare time when he wasn’t tinkering with his Corvette.

  Austin descended the stairs to the brightly lit workshop. Zavala had utilized every square inch of the former book-storage room for his gleaming collection of lathes, drills, and milling machines. Odd-shaped metal parts whose functions were known only to Zavala hung from the walls next to black-and-white poster engravings of old engines.

  Mounted in glass cases were scale models of the cutting-edge underwater vehicles Zavala had designed for NUMA. A Stuart model steam engine he was restoring sat on a table. Zavala never hesitated to get his hands greasy when it came to tinkering with mechanical contrivances or creating new ones, but today he was facing a computer screen with his back to Austin.

  Austin glanced around at the bewildering shrine Zavala had established to moving parts.

  “Ever think of continuing where Dr. Frankenstein left off?” he asked.

  Zavala spun in his chair, his lips cracked in their usual slight smile.

  “Making monsters out of junk parts is ancient history, Kurt. Robotics is where it’s at. Isn’t that right, Juri?”

  A Tyrannosaurus rex, around ten inches high, with plastic skin the color and texture of an avocado, stood next to the computer. It waggled its head, shuffled its feet, rolled its eyes, opened its toothy mouth, and said, “Si, Senor Zavala.”

  Austin pulled up a stool.

  “Who’s your green friend?”

  “Juri, short for Jurassic Park. Got the little guy over the Internet. He’s programmed for about twenty functions. I tinkered with his innards to make him speak Spanish.”

  “A bilingual T-Rex,” Austin said. “I’m impressed.”

  “It wasn’t that difficult,” Zavala said. “His circuits are relatively simple. He can move and bite, and he can respond to external stimuli. Give him a little more muscle, bigger teeth, optical sensors, put him in a waterproof jacket, and you have something like the mechanical shark that thought an Austinburger would make a tasty snack.”

  Zavala wheeled his chair aside to give Austin a clear view of his monitor. Floating in a slow rotation against a black background was a three-dimensional neon-blue image of the manta-ray AUV that had cut the bathysphere cable and attacked Austin.

  Austin let out a low whistle.

  “That’s it. Where did you find this thing?”

  “I went back to the original video from the Hardsuit camera.”

  Zavala clicked his mouse to replay the skirmish with the AUV. There was a quick succession of images, a confusion of bubbles, and glimpses of the vehicle.

  “I didn’t give you much to go on,” Austin said.

  “You gave me enough. I slowed the action and culled details here and there. I used those bits to create a rough outline of the AUV and then compared it with the automated underwater vehicles in my database. I’ve got info on practically everything self-propelled ever made, but at first I couldn’t find this one anywhere.”

  “My first impression was that it resembled the Manta, the sub that the Navy developed for mine detection and destruction.”

  “Not a bad call,” Zavala said. “Here’s the Manta. There are some of the same features that you get when you have a computer-generated design. But your guy didn’t have the launching pads for mini mine sniffers and torpedoes like the Navy’s model.”

  “Good thing. Neither one of us would be here if our little friend had been armed with the hard stuff.”

  “After I breezed through military models, I went to scientific applications. Most of the AUVs I found are torpedo-shaped, like Woods Hole Oceanographic’s ABE or Scripps’s Rover. After ruling out military and scientific, I looked to industry. But oil, gas, and communications didn’t pan out, so I tried commercial fishing.”

  He called up an article from a commercial-fishing magazine.

  Austin looked at the photos with the article and smiled.

  “Jackpot,” he said.

  “The vehicle in the magazine piece is used to film experimental fishnet designs,” Zavala said.

  “That would account for the manta shape,” Austin noted. “You’d need something flat and smooth to get under the nets, no projecting fins that might catch.”<
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  “The pincers allow the AUV to cut its way through tangled nets,” Zavala said. “It was used by a Chinese company, Pyramid Seafood Exports.”

  “Chinese? That’s significant. The men who attacked the ship were Asian. The weapons they carried were Chinese.”

  “I Googled the name,” Zavala said. “Pyramid is headquartered in Shanghai, but they’re a global company.”

  Austin said, “Why would a legitimate fishing company be involved in the attacks on the Beebe and the bathysphere?”

  “I may be able to answer that question after seeing my friend Caitlin Lyons at the FBI’s Asian Crime Unit later today,” Zavala said.

  Austin had to admit that Zavala’s wide network of women friends sometimes came in handy.

  “Have you figured out how the attack on the B3 may have been set up?” Austin said.

  “The vehicle could have been launched from any of the press and party boats watching the dive,” Zavala said.

  “Maybe someone saw the launch,” Austin said. “We could get Detective-Superintendent Randolph and the Bermuda Coast Guard to ask around.”

  “That’s not a bad idea, but my guess is that the vehicle went into the water hours before the bathysphere dive and was put into a sleep mode, programmed to wake up after a certain time to begin the hunt. It could have been directed from the surface, in the general area of the Beebe.”

  “How would it have picked its target?”

  “Sonar combined with the optical sensors would look for a vertical line. The AUV homes in on the B3’s tether. Snip-snip. There goes the bathysphere.”

  “And there goes Doc Kane and the mysterious research project that was going to affect everybody on the planet.”

  “Any word from Kane since he took off into the wide blue yonder?” Zavala asked.

  “I’ve tried a number of official and nonofficial channels,” Austin answered. “Bonefish Key may be our only lead.”

  “Doubt he’s there. Somebody wanted him to die a horrible death at the bottom. Bonefish Key would be the first place to look after finding out he wasn’t on the Beebe.”

  A look of alarm crossed Austin’s tanned face.

  He dug his cell phone out of a pocket and called Paul Trout.

  “Have you heard from Gamay?” he asked.

  “I’ve been trying to reach her but my calls won’t go through,” Trout said.

  “Keep trying,” Austin said. “I’m at Zavala’s place. I may have been too casual when I asked you to poke around Kane’s lab. Gamay should be alerted to possible danger from the people who wanted to take down Kane.”

  Trout said, “Don’t worry, Kurt, Gamay can take care of herself.”

  “I know she can,” Austin said. “Just tell her to be careful and not take any chances.”

  HAVING DONE ALL HE could to warn the Trouts, Austin put in a call to NUMA and asked for a dossier on the Pyramid Trading Company. The agency’s computer center, under the supervision of cybergenius Hiram Yeager, was one of the greatest repositories of specialized information in the world. The powerful computers at NUMA were linked with databases around the world and in an instant could churn out reams of information on any subject having to do with the world’s oceans.

  Austin said he would talk to Zavala after he’d studied the results of the computer search. He got back in his Jeep and drove to the thirty-story green-glass tower, overlooking the Potomac, that housed NUMA’s headquarters. He parked in the underground garage and took the elevator up to his Spartanly furnished office.

  A thick file was sitting on his desk with a note from Yeager telling him to “Enjoy!”

  He opened the file, but had only made it past the first page when his telephone buzzed. Caller ID couldn’t identify the number.

  He realized why after he picked up the receiver and heard the crisp voice of James Sandecker, the founder and longtime director of NUMA before being appointed Vice President of the United States when the elected second-in-command died. As was his usual style, Sandecker got right to the point.

  “Pitt forwarded your report on the B3 incident to me. What in blazes is going on, Kurt?”

  Austin could imagine Sandecker’s crackling blue eyes and flaming red Vandyke beard, fixtures around NUMA for years.

  “I wish I knew, Admiral,” Austin said, using Sandecker’s hard-earned Navy title over his more recent political one.

  “How is Zavala faring after his ordeal?”

  “Joe’s fine, Admiral.”

  “That’s fortunate. If Zavala had bought the farm, half the female population of Washington would go into mourning and we’d have to shut down the whole damned town . . . Then this attack on the Beebe . . . Shocking. It was a miracle no one was hurt. Are you making any progress?”

  “We think there’s a Chinese connection,” Austin said. “The AUV that went after me and the B3 is the same model used by a Chinese fishing company that’s part of a multinational called Pyramid Trading. The men who attacked the ship carried Chinese weapons and were Asian. Joe will chase down any possible criminal connection. I’ll check with the Bermuda police to see if their forensics turned up anything we can use. We think Doc Kane’s research may hold the key to everything. Gamay is on Bonefish Key checking out the lab.”

  Sandecker chuckled.

  “I don’t know how Gamay wangled her way in, but she’s not likely to learn a thing. The work they’re doing is highly classified.”

  “Sounds like you know what the lab is up to.”

  “More than I’d like. This is part of something very big, Kurt, and we’ll have to move quickly. The situation is reaching critical mass. I’m setting up a meeting that will explain things. I’ll call you in about an hour, so stand by. In the meantime, pack your bags for a trip.”

  “I still haven’t unpacked from my last assignment.”

  “That’s good. You and Joe will have to move out on short notice. I’m still working out the details, don’t have time to get into it now. Don’t ever let anyone tell you the job of Veep is as worthless as a bucket of warm spit.”

  Sandecker hung up without another word. Austin stared at the phone in his hand.

  He pushed speculative thoughts aside and soon was engrossed in the file on his desk. It didn’t take him very long to learn that Pyramid was no ordinary corporation.

  CHAPTER 20

  GAMAY HAD BEEN AWAKENED EARLIER THAT DAY BY THE thin shafts of sunlight filtering through the louvered windows. She slipped out of bed and pulled on her running shorts, sport top, and shoes. Quietly exiting through the screened-in porch, she did a series of warm-up exercises, walked around the back of the lodge to the start of a trail, and began a slow jog that gradually accelerated into a steady rhythm.

  Feet crunching on the shell pathway, Gamay ran with an athletic grace, using a loose-boned economy of motion that assured that, if she were ever reincarnated, she’d come back as a cheetah. She ran every morning, a habit that went back to her tomboy days, hanging out on the streets of Racine with a gang of boys.

  Gamay heard footfalls and turned to see Dr. Mayhew coming up from behind.

  He caught up with Gamay and ran beside her.

  “Good morning, Dr. Trout!” he exhaled. “Enjoying your run?”

  “Yes, very much, thank you.”

  “Good.” He clicked on his quick smile. “See you at breakfast.”

  Mayhew stepped up his pace and continued past Gamay until he disappeared around a corner.

  The legendary Florida humidity soon nudged the coolness of early morning aside, and Gamay returned to her room drenched in perspiration. She showered and dressed in a fresh pair of shorts, a tank top, and sandals, and she followed the sound of voices to the dining room.

  Dr. Mayhew waved Gamay over to join the group she had met the previous night and pointed to an empty chair. The consensus at the table was in favor of the brie-and-tomato omelet. It was cooked to perfection, and served with homemade oatmeal bread.

  Noting Gamay’s gusto, Mayhew said, “The
cooking here is one of the perks we insisted upon before marooning ourselves on Bonefish Key.”

  He drained the rest of his coffee mug and dabbed his mouth with a napkin. Then he reached under his chair and handed Gamay a plastic bag with a clean lab coat in it.

  “Ready for the tour, Dr. Trout?”

  Gamay rose and buttoned herself into the coat.

  “Anytime you are, Dr. Mayhew.”

  He replied with the inevitable switched-on smile.

  “Follow me,” he said.

  They took an unmarked shell path in a direction opposite that of the nature trail and came upon a one-story cinder-block building painted a light mossy green. The air vibrated with the hum of unseen electric motors.

  “Resource cultivation is done in this building,” Mayhew said. “It may look like a garage, but this lab is on the leading edge of biomedical research.”

  The dimly lit building housed dozens of large, lighted fish tanks. A couple of white-coated technicians armed with clipboards moved from tank to tank. They paid no attention to the newcomers, except for a casual wave. The air was heavy with a wet, fishy smell.

  “These seawater tanks are precisely maintained to duplicate exactly the habitat of the marine organisms they contain,” Mayhew explained.

  “How many different organisms are you researching?” Gamay asked.

  “Dozens of species and subspecies. Let me show you the current reigning star of the show.”

  Mayhew went over to a tank that housed several vibrantly colored red blobs, each about the size of a grapefruit. Short, pointed tentacles surrounded their mouths. They festooned the rocks inside the tanks.

  “Lovely,” she said. “This must be the sea flower that I read about it in the scientific journals.”

  “The staff likes to give common names to the creatures,” Mayhew said. “Saves wrapping our tongues around Latin locutions. There’s the sea star and the sea blossom, and so on. Ironic, when you realize that these exquisite creatures are efficient killing machines superbly engineered to attract small fish close enough to sting and devour.”