Polar Shift Read online

  On the same floor was the NUMA boardroom, an imposing space with a ten-foot-long conference table built out of a section of wooden hull from a sunken schooner. Austin had chosen a smaller and less regal space than the conference room to plot strategy. The small study lined with shelves that were stacked with books about the sea was a quiet place often used by those waiting to make presentations.

  As Austin sat at an oak table in the center of the study, he thought about Churchill’s war room, or the Oval Office, where decisions were made that affected the future of the world. He had no infantry divisions or powerful fleets, he mused. He had Joe Zavala, who would much rather be driving his Corvette convertible with a lovely woman at his side; Barrett, a brilliant computer nerd with a spider tattooed on his bald pate; and the beautiful and intelligent Karla Janos, whom Austin would have preferred to be talking to over cocktails.

  “Paul and Gamay are on their way back from Maine,” he announced. “They hit a dead end trying to persuade Margrave to call off his plans.”

  “That means we have only one option,” Karla said. “We’ve got to stop this insane scheme.”

  Austin gazed across the table at Karla, studying the creamy, unblemished skin and perfect mouth, thinking how unfair it was for a simple threat to the world to intrude on the potential for romance. Karla noticed that she was the object of Austin’s coral blue eyes. She raised a finely arched eyebrow. “Yes, Kurt?”

  Caught in the act, Austin cleared his throat. “I was wondering how your uncle is doing?”

  “Technically, he’s my god-grandfather, but he’s doing well. Simply exhausted and worn out. The hospital wants to keep him for a few days. He’s got to stay off his ankle. But he’ll probably escape as soon as he gets some rest.”

  “I’m glad to hear he’s doing well. I can drop you off at the hospital after our meeting. When we’re through here, I’m driving down to an event near Manassas National Battlefield to brief Dirk Pitt, NUMA’s director.”

  “Is Pitt refighting the Civil War?” Zavala said.

  “He’s satisfied with the outcome, as far as I know, but he got roped into a charity deal near Bull Run. He’d like to get filled in before the White House session. What have you got, Joe?”

  “Good news. I asked Yeager to scour the records of shipbuilders. I thought if we could figure out where the transmitter ships were built we might be able to track them down. But even Max drew a blank. Next I went after the dynamos. I thought they might be commercially made.”

  “The generators we saw aren’t the kind of thing you’d pick up at your neighborhood electrical supply house.”

  “Only a few companies manufacture equipment that size,” Zavala said. “I followed up on every one, checking their sales for the past three years. They all went to power companies except one order supposedly shipped to a factory in South America, which is owned by Gant’s foundation. The same multinational company that owns the factory has a shipyard in Mississippi. Seemed a funny combination of property for anyone to own, especially a nonprofit lobbying group.”

  “You’re sure the foundation owns them?”

  “Positive. I checked through the foundation’s filings as a nonprofit. They own the shipyard through a straw company set up in Delaware. I had someone from NUMA follow up with a bogus story about retrofitting a big research vessel for us. The company itself is apparently legit. The management said they had just wrapped up a major retrofit job—they wouldn’t go into details—and would be interested in making a bid.”

  “So the ships are still there?”

  “They left several days ago. I accessed the NUMA satellite archives. Four ships left the boatyard last week.”

  “Four?”

  “Three transmitter ships and what looks like a passenger liner. They seem to be headed toward South America.”

  Barrett had been silent since watching the computer simulation. “Thanks for your hard work, Joe. I’m feeling guilty as hell about all this. I can’t stop thinking that this tragedy is my fault.”

  “Not at all,” Karla said. “You could never know that your work would be used in a destructive way. It’s no different than my grandfather. He was simply interested in pure science.” Karla was shaking her head when a smile appeared on her face. “Topsy-Turvy,” she said.

  She laughed at the bewildered expressions around the table.

  “It’s the title of a bedtime poem my grandfather used to tell me. Not very good poetry, as I recall, but he said it was something that I would always have if I needed it.” She scrunched her brow as she tried to remember the words.

  Topsy-turvy,

  Turvy-topsy,

  The world stands on its head.

  The sky’s on fire,

  The earth’s afraid,

  The ocean leaves its bed.

  Her recitation was greeted by a deep silence, which Karla broke on her own.

  “Dear God,” she said. “I’ve just described auroras, earthquakes and tsunamis.”

  “A polar shift, in other words,” Austin said. “Tell us more.”

  “I’ll try. It’s been a long time.” She stared at the ceiling. “Each rhyme starts with the same topsy-turvy couplet, and then the verse itself changes. The next one goes, ‘The key is in the door,/We’ll turn the knob and hitch the latch,/To still the ocean’s roar.’ It goes on for several verses, then ends with my favorite one: ‘Say good-bye to night./All’s well once more,/As Karla dreams,/For all the world is right.’”

  Barrett whipped a ballpoint pen and notebook out of his pocket and slid them across to Karla. “Could you write down every verse?”

  “Yes, but—” Karla seemed flustered. “Do you think all this gibberish means anything?”

  “Just curious,” Barrett said.

  “We should follow any lead, no matter how seemingly frivolous,” Austin said. He glanced at a wall clock. “I’ve got to get moving. We’ll meet back here in a couple of hours.”

  He asked Zavala to talk to the Trouts and have them follow up on the transmitter ships, then turned to Karla. “I can give you that ride Austin offered to the hospital,” he said.

  “I’ll see Uncle Karl later. If I go now, he’ll demand that I help him escape from the hospital. I’d like to go with you to see Mr. Pitt,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” Austin said. “It might be safer if you stay out of sight.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t feel like being stashed in a safe house. There’s a good chance that whoever ordered my murder doesn’t know that I’m still alive.”

  “I’d like to keep you that way.”

  “My grandfather’s work started this nonsense. I owe it to him to stop his research from being perverted.”

  Seeing the determined jut to Karla’s jaw, Austin knew that no argument he advanced would be able to sway her.

  Fifteen minutes later, Austin and Karla were picking up a car from the motor pool in the NUMA garage. As Austin drove out of the garage exit to join the Washington traffic, he and Karla were observed from behind the one-way windows of a van crammed with the latest electronic listening and watching equipment. The letter on the van’s door identified it as belonging to the Metropolitan Transit Authority.

  Doyle sat inside the van puffing on a cigarette as he and a helper monitored several screens that showed the street scene around the NUMA building. Hidden cameras in the van and a similar vehicle parked outside NUMA’s main pedestrian entrance recorded the face of everyone leaving the building and compared it to images in its database. The facial recognition system was capable of checking more than a thousand faces a second.

  The monitor alarm buzzed. The signal for a hit. A picture of Austin behind the wheel of a turquoise Jeep Cherokee that had emerged from the garage was projected on one of the screens. Below Austin’s face was a summary of personal data. Doyle’s hard eyes gleamed with excitement. Bingo! He had just ordered his helper to get into the driver’s seat and follow the Jeep when a second monitor buzzed. The picture of the attractive young woma
n who was a passenger in the Jeep filled the screen. The database identified her as Karla Janos.

  Double bingo!

  A smile came to Doyle’s thin lips. He couldn’t wait to see Gant’s expression when he told him that Karla Janos was alive and well and consorting with the enemy. As the van pulled away from the curb and tailed the Jeep, Doyle called a motel in Alexandria where six Harley-Davidson motorcycles were parked. Minutes later, six men emerged from the motel, hopped on the motorcycles and roared off to rendezvous with Doyle.

  36

  KARLA SURVEYED THE MEN in Confederate gray and Union blue who were crowding the suburban roads in their pickup trucks and SUVs.

  “I must have been mistaken,” she said. “I thought the Civil War was over.”

  “You have led a sheltered life,” Austin said. “The War of Northern Aggression is still alive and well. Holler the name of Robert E. Lee out the window and you’ll recruit enough Rebel volunteers to reenact the Battle of Gettysburg.”

  Austin followed the traffic to a parking lot adjoining a large open field of a dozen or so acres. After parking the NUMA car, they joined the throng of spectators and Civil War reenactors streaming toward the field. Signs along the way announced that the military demonstration and steam car parade were being held to raise money for the Friends of the Manassas National Battlefield.

  Austin stopped a bearded man dressed in the butternut gray of an officer in Lee’s army to ask directions.

  “Stonewall Jackson at your service,” the man said with a courtly bow.

  “Nice to meet you, General. You’re looking well, considering. I wonder if you might know where the antique steam cars are gathered,” Austin said.

  Jackson squinted into the distance, tugging thoughtfully at his beard. “Technically speakin’, cars weren’t invented in 1861, so I don’t know what you’re talking about, suh. But if I did, I’d suggest that you might find what you’re looking for near the Porta Pottis, which we didn’t have back in my day.”

  “Thank you, General Jackson. Hope you enjoy the battle.”

  “My pleasure,” he said, tipping his hat at Karla.

  As she watched Jackson melt into the crowd, she said, “He really takes the part seriously, doesn’t he?”

  Austin smiled. “Manassas was the first big battle of the Civil War. The Feds thought they were going to walk over the Rebels. People even came down from Washington with their picnic baskets to watch the battle, pretty much the same as they’re doing today. The Confederates caught the breaks that day, but the Union eventually rallied.”

  “Why aren’t we at the actual battlefield?” Karla said.

  “They tried a reenactment there some years ago. Things got kind of crazy, so they’re holding it on private land.”

  Karla looked around. “I see what you mean about ‘crazy.’”

  Austin grinned.

  “As old Stonewall might say, ‘Save your blood. The South will rise again.’”

  THE SIX MEN who pulled their motorcycles up to the parked van looked as if they had been cloned in a lab. They all wore goatees, and their widow’s peaks had been trimmed to arrow-sharp points.

  Lucifer’s Legion was an extreme group of neo-anarchists who felt that violence in advancing their cause was not only justified but necessary. Like their wild-eyed, bomb-tossing predecessors, they were the fringe of the mostly nonviolent anarchist movement, which wanted nothing to do with them. They traveled from city to city on their motorcycles, leaving a trail of chaos in their wake.

  When Margrave became part of the neo-anarchist movement, he enlisted the legion’s help. He reasoned that since the Elites had the police, who were empowered to use physical force, and, in some situations, kill, he and his supporters should have a similar option. He bankrolled the legion, using them as his personal Praetorian Guard. He was amused at first when they grew beards and cut their hair to affect a satanic look that Margrave had come by naturally. After several anarchist protests they were involved in became unexpectedly bloody, he realized that they were out of control.

  He kept them on the payroll but used them less and less. He had readily accepted Gant’s recommendation that he hire the security company for day-to-day operations. Margrave was initially surprised when Gant suggested that he use the legion to kill Austin and Karla, but he accepted the argument that in case anything went wrong the authorities would think that this was a rogue gang acting on its own.

  Margrave knew the legion’s psychopathic tendencies better than Gant, which was why he had insisted that Doyle keep an eye on them. Doyle had removed the stick-on METROPOLITAN TRANSIT AUTHORITY letters from the van. When the motorcycles pulled up next to the vehicle, Doyle stepped out of the van and inspected the odd crew dismounting from their bikes with a friendly grin that masked his disdain.

  Doyle was a cold-blooded murderer, but with their glassy-eyed stares, fixed smiles and quiet-spoken voices these guys gave him the creeps. He hoped Gant knew what he was doing. He had worked, reluctantly, with the group from time to time. His own deadly expressions of violence were controlled and calculated. He killed for business reasons: to remove a competitor; to silence an informant. The undisciplined behavior of Lucifer’s Legion offended his sense of order.

  He pointed at a turquoise Jeep in an adjacent row. “Austin and the woman are headed to the battlefield. We’ll have to find them.”

  The legion’s members seemed able to communicate with each other without speaking, moving in unison like a flock of birds or a school of fish. Acting like a unit, they fanned through the parking lot. They sighted a panel truck owned by a company called Gone with the Wind Costumes. A company employee was unloading a rack of period outfits for the more casual reenactors who didn’t own their own uniforms. He found himself surrounded by six grinning clones. One clubbed him unconscious with a telescoping blackjack while the others used their bodies to screen the assault.

  They shoved the unconscious man into the back of the truck and rummaged through the collection until they found what they wanted. They carried their loot back to Doyle’s van and changed into the costumes. In a short time, the bikers dressed in jeans and T-shirts were gone. In their place were three Confederate and three Union soldiers. They tucked sawed-off shotguns in their belts, then got back on their motorcycles and spread out like hungry wolves in search of prey.

  Doyle left the van and joined the flow of foot traffic. As he moved through the stream of spectators and costumed participants, he scanned the crowd like radar. Doyle had near-perfect vision that was a valuable asset for a hunter and his sharp eye picked out Austin’s white hair. A second later, Doyle saw the attractive blond woman by Austin’s side. Her face was the same one the computer in the van had identified as Karla Janos.

  He unclipped a hand radio from his belt and sent a quick message to Lucifer’s Legion.

  AUSTIN HAD found the steamer cars. There were about twenty antique Stanleys lined up along the edge of the field. A middle-aged man with a clipboard in hand was moving along the line of cars.

  “I’m looking for someone with a little authority,” Austin said, purposely setting himself up for the old gag.

  The man grinned. “I’ve got as little authority as anyone.” He proffered his hand. “Doug Reilly. I’m president of the Virginia Stanley Steamer Club. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m looking for a car owner named Dirk Pitt.”

  “Oh sure, Pitt’s the replica of the 1906 Vanderbilt Cup racer over there.” Reilly pointed to an open red car whose long rounded hood was shaped like a coffin. “There were only two originals and neither exists as far as we know. Engines from a Stanley, though. Great hill climber.”

  “Which one’s yours?”

  Reilly led them over to a shiny black 1926 sedan and pointed out the car’s unique features like a proud father. “You know anything about these old buggies?”

  “I drove one at a steamer rally once. I spent more time watching the controls than watching the road.”

  “
That about sums it up,” Reilly said with a chuckle. “The Stanley Steamer was the fastest and most powerful vehicle of its day. A Stanley with the ‘canoe’ body broke the world’s speed record with 127 miles per hour back in 1906. They deliver full power the second you hit the throttle. With their diesel drive, they could go from a standing start to sixty while most gas-powered cars were grinding through the gears.”

  “It’s surprising that we’re not all driving steam cars today,” Austin said.

  “The Stanley boys didn’t want to mass-produce their cars. Henry Ford turned out as many in a day as they did in a year. The 1912 Cadillac introduced the electric starter. These cars are all steaming, to save time. If the Stanley brothers had figured out how to make their cars start faster, and improved their production and marketing, none of us today would be driving what the Stanleys called an ‘internal explosion engine.’ Sorry for getting off track.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Karla said. “That was fascinating.”

  Reilly blushed. “All the other car owners have gone over to watch the reenactment. I’m keeping an eye on things here. When the battle’s over, we’re going to lead a parade around the field.”

  Austin thanked Reilly, and then he and Karla made their way toward the battle reenactment. From the sound of musket fire and artillery, the fighting had begun. As they walked across the wide field, they could see a crowd watching skirmish lines of blue and gray advancing toward each other. The muskets made a pop-pop sound from a distance, and the smell of gunpowder drifted their way.

  A couple of dozen other stragglers were headed toward the reenactment. Austin was giving Karla a history lesson on the Bull Run battles when, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed someone moving laterally rather than with the general flow of foot traffic. The man cut across their path, stopped fifty feet ahead and turned to face them. It was Doyle, Gant’s henchman.

  Doyle was close enough so that the unsmiling expression on his hard features was clearly visible. He stared at them a moment, then reached under his jacket. Austin saw the sun flash on metal in his hand. Taking Karla firmly by the arm, he guided her back the way they had come.