Lost City nf-5 Read online

  Heads were nodding in the audience. Austin saw that he was getting nowhere. He asked Zavala to sit in on the rest of the strategy session while he went to the bridge. A few minutes later, he was in the wheelhouse, using the ship's radiophone to call the Trouts, who were on the Sea Searcher, over the Lost City. He made quick contact with the NUMA research vessel and a crewman tracked down Paul, who had been directing a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) from the deck.

  "Greetings from the wild weird world of Dr. Strangelove," Austin said.

  "Huh?" Trout replied.

  "I'll explain in a minute. How's your work going?"

  "It's going," Trout said, with no real enthusiasm. "We've been running an ROV to collect samples of algae and weed. Gamay and her team are busy in the lab doing analysis."

  "What's she looking for?"

  "She hopes they can find something in the weed's molecular structure that might help. We've been sharing information with NUMA scientists back in Washington, and with scientific teams in other countries. How about you?"

  Austin sighed. "We've tried every trick we can think of, but with no success. The offshore wind is giving us a little reprieve. But it won't be long before every harbor on the east coast will be clogged up. The Pacific is showing patches of infestation as well."

  "How long do we have?"

  Kurt told him what Osborne had said. He could hear Paul suck his breath in.

  "Are you having any problem navigating in the stuff?" Austin asked.

  "The area around the Lost City is relatively clear. This is where the infestation starts, and it thickens as it goes east and west of here."

  "That may be the only clear patch in the ocean before long. You'd better plot an escape route so you don't get caught up in the weed yourself."

  "I've already talked to the captain. There's a channel open south of here, but we're going to have to leave within twenty-four hours if we expect to get out. What was that you said about Strangelove?"

  "There's a general here by the name of Kyle. He's going to tell the president to nuke the stuff with every bomb in our arsenal."

  Trout paused in stunned silence and then found his voice. "He's not serious."

  "I'm afraid he is. There is tremendous political pressure on leaders around the world to do something, anything. Vice President Sandecker may be able to stall him. But the president will be forced to act, even if the scheme is foolhardy."

  "This is more than foolhardy! It's crazy. And it won't work. They can blow the weed to pieces, but every stray tendril will self-replicate. It could be just as disastrous." He sighed. "When can we expect to see mushroom clouds over the Atlantic?"

  "There's a meeting going on now. A decision could come as early as tomorrow. Once the machinery is set in motion, things could start moving fast, especially with the Gorgonweed lapping at our shores." He paused. "I've been thinking about MacLean Didn't he tell you that he could come up with an antidote for the weed using the Fauchard formula?"

  "He seemed fairly confident that he could do it. Unfortunately, we don't have MacLean or the formula."

  Austin thought about the helmet buried under tons of rubble.

  "The key lies in the Lost City. Whatever caused the mutation in the first place came from the Lost City. There's got to be a way to use something from down there to fight this thing."

  "Let's think about this," Trout said. MacLean knew that his life-extension formula was flawed, that it would reverse aging, but as Racine Fauchard learned the hard way, the formula was unpredictable. It also accelerated growth."

  "That's what I was getting at. Nature is always out of balance."

  "That's right. It's like a rubber band that snaps back after being stretched too far."

  "I don't know if Racine Fauchard would like being compared to a rubber band, but it makes my point about nature seeking equilibrium. Mutations happen every day, even in humans. Nature has built a corrective device into the system or we'd have people running around with two or three heads, which might not be all that bad. When it comes to aging, every species has a death gene that kills off the old to make room for the new generation. Go/gonweed was stable until the Fauchards introduced the enzyme into the equation, tipping things out of balance. It's got to snap back eventually."

  "What about the mutant soldiers who lived so long?"

  "That was an artificial situation. Had they been on their own, they probably would have devoured each other. Equilibrium again."

  "The constant here is the enzyme," Trout concluded. "It's the precipitating factor. It can retard aging or it can accelerate it."

  "Have Gamay look at the enzyme again."

  "I'll see how she's coming along," Trout said.

  "I'm going back to the meeting to see if I can discourage General Kyle from a nuclear carpet bombing of the Atlantic Ocean, although I'm not optimistic."

  Trout's head was spinning. The Fauchards were dead, but they were still managing to inflict harm on the world from their graves.

  He left the bridge and went down to a "wet" lab where Gamay was working with a four-person team of marine biologists and those from allied marine sciences.

  "I was talking to Kurt," Paul said. "The news isn't good." He outlined his conversation with Austin. "Have you turned up anything new?"

  "I explored the interaction between the enzyme and the plant, but I didn't get anywhere, so I've been looking into DNA instead. It never hurts to revisit previous research."

  She led the way to a table where a series of about twenty steel containers were lined up in a row.

  "Each one of these containers contains a sample of Gorgon weed. I've exposed the samples to the enzymes that the ROV collected from the columns to see what would happen. I wanted to see if there would be any reaction if I overloaded the weed with various forms of enzyme. I've been busy following other avenues and haven't looked at the samples recently."

  "Let me see if I understand what happened," Trout said. "The Fauchards distorted the molecular makeup of the enzyme during the refinement process, when they separated it from the microorganisms that created the substance. The irregularity was absorbed into the genetic makeup of the weed, triggering its mutation."

  "That's a pretty good summation."

  "Stay with me. Up until that time, the weed coexisted with the enzyme in its natural state."

  "That's right," Gamay said. "Only when the enzyme was modified did it interact with the nearest life-form, which happened to be obnoxious but perfectly normal seaweed, transforming it into a monster. I hoped that an overdose of the stuff would speed up the aging even more, just the way it did with Racine Fauchard. It didn't work."

  "The premise sounds logical there's something missing here."

  He thought about it for a moment. "What if it isn't the enzyme but the bacteria that are the controlling influence?"

  "I never thought about that. I've been fooling around with the chemical, thinking that was the stabilizing factor here, rather than the bugs that produce it. In extracting the enzyme from the water, the Fauchards killed off the bacteria, which may have been the governing factor that kept things on an even keel."

  She went over to a refrigerator and extracted a glass phial. The liquid contents had a slight brown discoloration.

  "This is a culture of bacteria we collected from under the Lost City columns."

  She measured off some liquid, poured it into a Gorgonweed container and made a note.

  "Now what?"

  "We'll have to give the bacteria time to do their work. It won't take long. I haven't eaten. What say you get me some food?"

  "What say you get out of here and we have, a real meal in the mess hall?"

  Gamay brushed the hair back from her forehead. "That's the best invitation I've had all day."

  Cheeseburgers had never tasted so good. Refreshed and full, the Trouts went back to the lab after an hour. Trout glanced at the container with the bacteria. The complex tangle of tendrils looked unchanged.

  "Can I take a c
loser look at this stuff? It's hard to see in this light."

  Gamay pointed to a long pair of tongs. "Use those. You can examine the specimen in that sink basin."

  Trout extracted the glob of weed from its container, carried it to the sink and dropped it into a plastic tub. By itself, the clump of Gorgonweed looked so innocent. It was not a pretty plant, but it did have an admirable functionality, with spidery tendrils hooked onto other

  pieces of weed to form the impenetrable mat that sucked nutrients from the ocean. Trout poked it with the tongs, then lifted it up by a tendril. The tendril broke off at the stem and the weed plopped wetly back into the tub.

  "Sorry," he said. "I broke your weed sample."

  Gamay gave him a peculiar look and took the tongs from his hand. She plucked at another tendril and it, too, came off. She repeated the experiment. Each time, the thin appendages broke off easily. She removed a tendril and took it over to a bench, where she sliced it up, put the thin sections on slides and popped them under a microscope.

  A moment later, she looked up from the eye piece. "The weed is dying," she declared.

  "What?" Trout peered into the sink. "Looks healthy to me."

  She smiled and plucked off more tendrils. "See. I'd never be able to do this with a healthy weed. The tendrils are like extremely strong rubber. These are brittle."

  She called over her assistants and asked them to prepare microscope slides from different parts of the sample. When she looked up from her microscope again, her eyes were red-rimmed, but her face was wreathed in a wide grin.

  "The weed sample is in the first stage of necrosis. In other words, the stuff is dying. We'll try it with some of the other samples to make sure."

  Again she mixed the bacteria in with the weed, and again they waited an hour. Microscopic examination confirmed their original findings. Every sample subjected to the bacteria was dying.

  "The bacteria are essentially eating something in the Gorgon weed that it needs to survive," she said. "We'll have to do more research."

  Trout picked up the phial with the original bacteria culture. "What's the most effective way to use these hungry little bugs?"

  "We'll have to grow large quantities, then spread the bacteria far and wide and let them do the work."

  Trout smiled. "Do you think the British government would let us use the Fauchard submersible to spread this stuff around? It's got the capacity and speed that we need."

  "I think they'll bend over backward to keep the British Isles from being cut off from the rest of the world."

  MacLean saved our hash again," Trout said, with a shake of his head. "He gave us the hope that we could beat this thing."

  "Kurt deserves some credit."

  "His instincts were on the nose when he said to go back to the Lost City and to think in terms of equilibrium."

  Trout headed for the door.

  "Are you going to tell Kurt the good news?"

  Trout nodded. "Then I'm going to tell him that it's about time we had a send-off for a proper old Scottish gentleman."

  THE LOCH WAS several miles long and half as wide and its cold, still waters reflected the unblemished Scottish sky like a queen's mirror. Rugged, rolling hills carpeted with heather held the loch in a purple embrace.

  The open wooden-hulled boat cut a liquid wake in the tranquil waters as it headed out from shore, gliding to a drifting stop, finally, at the deepest part of the loch. The boat held four passengers: Paul and Gamay Trout, Douglas MacLean and his late cousin Angus, whose ashes were carried in an ornate Byzantine chest the chemist had picked up on his travels.

  Douglas MacLean had met his cousin Angus only once, at a family wedding some years before. They had hit it off and vowed to get together, but as with many a well-meant plan made over a glass of whiskey, they'd never met again. Until now. Douglas was the only living relative Trout had been able to track down. Equally important, he played the bagpipe. Not well, but loudly.

  He stood in the prow of the boat, dressed in full MacLean tartans, his kilted legs braced wide to give himself a steady platform. At a signal from Gamay, he began to play "Amazing Grace." As the haunting skirl echoed off the hills, Paul poured Angus's ashes into the loch. The gray-brown powder floated on the calm surface for a few minutes and gradually sank into the deep blue water.

  "Aveatque vale," Trout said softly. Hail and farewell.

  About the same time Trout was saying his good-bye, Joe Zavala was among the pallbearers carrying a simple wooden casket along a dirt path that ran between the moldering headstones in an ancient churchyard near the cathedral city of Rouen. The other pallbearers were all descendants of Captain Pierre Levant.

  At least twenty members of the extended Levant family surrounded the open grave set next to the headstones that marked the final resting place of the captain's wife and son. The gathering included a contingent of men and women representing the French army. As the country priest intoned the last rites, the army people saluted briskly and Captain Levant was lowered into the grave, given the rest that had been denied him for so long.

  "Ave atque vale," Zavala whispered.

  By prearrangement, high above the Fauchard vineyards, the small red biplane circled like a hungry hawk. Austin checked the time, banked the Aviatik slightly and, by prearrangement, dumped out the ashes of Jules Fauchard, whose body had been removed from the glacier.

  There had been some discussion whether Jules should be cremated, a practice frowned upon by the Catholic Church. But since there were no living relatives, Austin and Skye took the matter into their own hands, deciding to return Jules to the soil that nurtured his beloved vineyards.

  Like Trout and Zavala, Austin, too, gave the old Latin funeral salutation.

  "Well, that does it for Jules," Austin said, speaking into the microphone that connected him with Skye, who was in the other cock

  pit. "He proved the best of the bunch. He deserved better than being frozen like a Popsicle under that glacier."

  "I agree," she said. "I wonder what would have happened if he had made it to Switzerland?"

  "We'll never know. Let's imagine that in a parallel time stream he was able to stop the bloody war."

  "That's a nice thought," Skye said. Then, after a moment, she added, "How far can we fly in this thing?"

  "Until we run out of fuel?"

  "Can we make it to Aix-en-Provence?"

  "Wait a minute," he said. He tapped the keys on the GPS and programmed in a route that showed airport fueling points. "It will take a few hours and we'll have to stop to refuel. Why do you ask?"

  "Charles has offered us the use of his villa. He says we can even use his new Bentley if we promise not to drive it into the swimming pool."

  "Tough condition, but I guess I can agree to that."

  "The villa is a wonderful place," Skye said with growing excitement. "Quiet and beautiful with a well-stocked wine cellar. I thought it might be a good place to work on my paper. I must thank the Fauchards, for one thing. Using what Racine said about their family background, I'll be able to prove my theory linking Minoans with early European trade. We can talk about your theory that they went as far north as the Faroe Islands. Maybe even to North America. What do you say?"

  "I didn't bring any clothes."

  "Who needs clothes?" she said in a laugh that was ripe with promise. "That's never stopped us before."

  Austin grinned. "I think that's what they call a deal clincher. We're picking up a tailwind. I'll try to get us to Provence in time for dinner."

  Then he glanced at his compass and pointed the nose of the plane south, on a course that would take them toward the beckoning shores of the Mediterranean Sea.

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