Deep Six Page 8

  Lugovoy was not in the United States to steal secrets. His purpose went far beyond anything the American counterspy investigators ever dreamed. The phone call meant the plan that was conceived seven years earlier had been put into motion.

  The cab pulled to a stop at West and Liberty streets in front of the Vista International Hotel. Lugovoy pain the driver and walked through the ornate lobby into the concourse outside. He paused and stared up at the awesome towers of the World Trade Center.

  Lugovoy often wondered what he was doing here in this land of glass buildings, uncountable automobiles, people always rushing, restaurants and grocery stores in every block. It was not his kind of world.

  He showed his identification to a guard standing by a private express elevator in the south tower and took it to the one hundredth floor. The doors parted and he entered the open lobby of the Bougainville Maritime Lines, Inc whose offices covered the entire floor. His shoes sank into a thick white carpet. The walls were paneled in a gleaming hand-rubbed rosewood, and the room was richly decorated in Oriental antiques. Curio cases containing exquisite ceramic horses stood in the corners, and rare examples of Japanese-designed textiles hung from the ceiling.

  An attractive woman with large dark eyes, a delicate oval Asian face and smooth amber skin smiled as he approached. "May I help you, sir?"

  "My name is Lugovoy."

  "Yes, Mr. Lugovoy," she said, pronouncing his name correctly.

  "Madame Bougainville is expecting you."

  She spoke softly into an intercom and a tall raven-haired woman with Eurasian features appeared in a high-arched doorway.

  "If you will please follow me, Mr. Lugovoy."

  Lugovoy was impressed. Like many Russians he was naive in Western business methods and wrongly assumed the office employees had stayed late for his benefit. He trailed the woman down a long corridor hung with paintings of cargo ships flying the Bougainville Maritime flag, their bows surging through turquoise seas.

  The guine knocked lightly on an arched door, opened it and stepped aside.

  Lugovoy crossed the threshold and stiffened in astonishment.

  The room was vast-mosaic floor in blue and gold floral patterns, massive conference table supported by ten carved dragons that seemed to stretch into infinity. But it was the life-size terra-cotta warriors in armor and prancing horses standing in silent splendor under soft spotlights in alcoves that held him in awe.

  He instantly recognized them as the tomb guardians of China's early emperor Chin Shih Huang TiThe effect was dazzling. He marveled that they had somehow slipped through the Chinese government's fingers into private hands.

  "Please come forward and sit down, Mr. Lugovoy."

  He was so taken aback by the magnificence of the room that he failed to notice a frail Oriental woman sitting in a wheelchair. In front of her was an ebony chair with gold silk cushions and a small table with a teapot and cups.

  "Madame Bougainville," he said. "We meet at last."

  The matriarch of the Bougainville shipping dynasty was eighty-nine years old and weighed about the same number of pounds. Her glistening gray hair was pulled back from her temples in a bun.

  Her face was strangely unlined, but her body looked ancient and frail. It was her eyes that absorbed Lugovoy. They were an intense blue and blazed with a ferocity that made him uncomfortable.

  "You are prompt," she said simply. Her voice was soft and clear without the usual hesitation of advanced age.

  "I came as soon as I received the coded telephone call."

  "Are you prepared to conduct your brainwashing project?"

  "Brainwashing is an ugly term. I prefer mind intervention."

  "Academic terminology is irrelevant," she said indifferently.

  "My staff has been assembled for months. With the proper facilities we can begin in two days."

  "You'll begin tomorrow morning.

  "So soon?"

  "I've been informed by my grandson that ideal conditions have turned in our favor. The transfer will take place tonight."

  Lugovoy instinctively looked at his watch. "You don't give me much time."

  "The opportunity has to be snatched when it arrives," she said firmly. "I made a bargain with your government, and I am about to fulfill the first half of it. Everything depends on speed. You and your staff have ten days to finish your part of the project-"

  "Ten days!" he gasped.

  "Ten days," she repeated. "That is your deadline. Beyond that I will cast you adrift."

  A shiver ran up Lugovoy's spine. He didn't need a detailed picture. It was plain that if something went wrong, he and his people would conveniently vanish-probably in the ocean.

  A quiet muffled the huge boardroom. Then Madame Bougainville leaned forward in the wheelchair. "Would you like some tea?"

  Lugovoy hated tea, but he nodded. "Yes, thank you."

  "The finest blend of Chinese herbs. It costs over a hundred dollars a pound on the retail market."

  He took the offered cup and made a polite sip before he set it on the table. "You've been informed, I assume, that my work is still in the research stage. My experiments have only been proven successful eleven times out of fifteen. I cannot guarantee perfect results within a set time limit."

  "Smarter minds than yours have calculated how long White House advisers can stall the news media."

  Lugovoy's eyebrows rose. "My understanding was that my subject was to be a minor American congressman whose temporary disappearance would go unnoticed."

  "You were misled," she explained matter-of-factly. "Your General Secretary and President thought it best you should not know your subject's identity until we were ready."

  "If I'd been given time to study his personality traits, I could have been better prepared."

  "I shouldn't have to lecture on security requirements to a Russian," she said, her eyes burning into him. "Why do you think we've had no contact between us until tonight?"

  Unsure of what to answer, Lugovoy took a long swallow of the tea.

  To his peasant taste it was like drinking watered-down perfume.

  "I must know who my subject is," he said finally, mustering his courage and returning her stare.

  Her answer burst like a bomb in the cavernous room, reverberated in Lugovoy's brain and left him stunned. He felt as though he'd been thrown into a bottomless pit with no hope of escape.

  AFTER YEARS OF BUFFETING by storms at sea, the drums containing the nerve agent had broken the chains holding them to wooden cradles and now they lay scattered about the deck of the cargo hold. The one-ton standard shipping containers, as approved by the Department of Transportation, measured exactly 81 inches in length by 301/2 inches in diameter. They had concave ends and were silver in color. Neatly stenciled on the sides in green paint were the Army code letters "GS."

  "I make the count twenty drums," said Pitt.

  "That tallies with the inventory of the missing shipment," Mendoza said, the relief audible in her voice.

  They stood in the hold's depths, now brightly lit by floodlights connected to a portable generator from the Catawba. Nearly a foot of water flooded the deck, and the sloshing sounds as they waded between the deadly containers echoed off the rusting sides of the hold.

  An EPA chemist made a violent pointing motion with his gloved hand. "Here's the drum responsible for the leak!" he said excitedly.

  "The valve is broken off its threads."

  "Satisfied, Mendoza?" Pitt asked her.

  "YOU bet your sweet ass," she exclaimed happily. Pitt moved toward her until their faceplates were almost touching. "Have you given any thought to my reward?"

  "Reward?"

  "Our bargain," he said, trying to sound earnest. "I found your nerve agent thirty-six hours ahead of schedule."

  "You're not going to hold me to a silly proposition?"

  "I'd be foolish not to."

  She was glad he couldn't see her face redden under the helmet.

  They were on an open radio
frequency and every man in the room could hear what they were saying.

  "You pick strange places to make a date."

  "What I thought," Pitt continued, "was dinner in Anchorage, cocktails chilled by glacier ice, smoked salmon, elk Remington, baked Alaska. After that-"

  "That's enough," she said, her embarrassment growing.

  "Are you a party girl?"

  "Only when the occasion demands," she replied, coming back on even keel. "And this is definitely not the occasion."

  He threw up his arms and then let them drop dejectedly. "A sad day for Pitt, a lucky day for NUMA."

  "Why NUMA?"

  "The contamination is on dry land. No need for an underwater salvage job. My crew and I can pack up and head for home."

  Her helmet nodded imperceptibly. "A neat sidestep, Mr. Pitt, dropping the problem straight into the Army's lap."

  "Do they know?" he asked seriously.

  "Alaskan Command was alerted seconds after you’ reported the discovering of Pilottown. A chemical warfare disposal team is on its way from the mainland to remove the agent."

  "The world applauds efficiency."

  "It's not important to you, is it?"

  "Of course it's important," Pitt said. "But my job is finished, and unless you have another spill and more dead bodies, I'm going home."

  "Talk about a hard-nosed cynic."

  "Say Yes."

  She felt trapped, impaled, and was annoyed with herself for enjoying it.

  She answered before she could form a negative thought. "Yes."

  The men in the hold stopped their work amin enough poison to kill half the earth's population and clapped muted gloves together, cheering and whistling into their transmitters. She suddenly realized that her stock had shot up on the Dow Jones. Men admired a woman who could ramrod a dirty job and not be a bitch.

  Later, Dover found Pitt thoughtfully studying a small open hatchway, shining his flashlight inside. The glow diminished into the darkness within, reflecting on dull sparkles on the oil-slicked water rippling from the cargo hold.

  "Got something in mind?" Dover asked.

  "Thought I'd do a little exploring," Pitt answered.

  "You won't get far in there."

  "Where does it lead?"

  "Into the shaft tunnel, but it's flooded nearly to the roof.

  You'd need air tanks to get through."

  Pitt swung his light up the forward bulkhead until it spotlighted a small hatch at the top of a lander. "How about that one?"

  "Should open into cargo hold four."

  Pitt merely nodded and began scaling the rusty rungs of the ladder, closely followed by Dover. He muscled the dog latches securing the hatch, swung it open and clambered down into the next hold, again followed by Dover. A quick traverse of their lights told them it was bone empty.

  "The ship must have been traveling in ballast," Pitt speculated out loud.

  "It would appear so," said Dover.

  "Now where?"

  "Up one more ladder to the alleyway that runs between the fresh water tanks into the ship's storerooms."

  Slowly they made their way through the bowels of the Pilottown, feeling like gravediggers probing a cemetery at midnight. Around every corner they half expected to find the skeletons of the crew.

  But there were no bones. The crews living quarters should have looked like an anniversary sale at Macy's-clothes, personal belongings, everything that should have been strewn about by a crew hastily abandoning ship. Instead, the pitch-black interior of the Pilottown looked like the tunnels and chambers of a desert cavern.

  All that was missing were the bats.

  The food lockers were bare. No dishes or cups lined the shelves of the crew mess. Even the toilets lacked paper. Fire extinguishers, door latches, furnishings, anything that could be unbolted or was of the slightest value was gone.

  "Mighty peculiar," muttered Dover.

  "My thought too," Pitt said. "She's been systematically stripped."

  "Scavengers must have boarded and carried away everything during the years she was adrift."

  "Scavengers leave a mess," Pitt disagreed. "Whoever was behind this job had a fetish for neatness."

  It was an eerie trip. Their shadows flitted on the dark walls of the alleyways and followed alongside the silent and abandoned machinery. Pitt felt a longing to see the sky again.

  "Incredible," mumbled Dover, still awed by what they'd found, or rather not found. "They even removed all the valves and gauges."If I was a gambling man," said Pitt thoughtfully, "I'd bet we've stumbled on an insurance scam."

  "Wouldn't be the first ship that was posted missing for a Lloyd's of London payday," Dover said.

  "You told me the crew claimed they abandoned the Pilottown in a storm. They abandoned her all right, but they left nothing but a barren, worthless shell."

  "Easy enough to check out," said Dover. "Two ways to scuttle a ship at sea. Open the sea cocks and let her flood, or blow out the bottom with explosive charges."

  "How would you do it?"

  "Flooding through the sea cocks could take twenty-four hours or more. Time enough for a passing ship to investigate. I opt for the charges. Quick and dirty; put her on the seafloor in a matter of minutes."

  "Something must have prevented the explosives from detonating."

  "It's only a theory."

  "Next question," Pitt persisted. "Where would you lay them?"

  "Cargo holds, engine room, most any place against the hull plates so long as it was below the waterline."

  "No sign of charges in the after holds," said Pitt. "That leaves the engine room and the forward cargo holds."

  "We've come this far," Dover said. "We might as well finish the job."

  "Faster if we split up. I'll search the engine room. You know your way around the ship better than I do-"

  "The forward cargo holds it is," Dover said, anticipating him.

  The big Coast Guardsman started up a companionway, whistling the Notre Dame fight song under his breath. His bear like gait and hulking build, silhouetted by the wavering flashlight in his hand, grew smaller and finally faded.

  Pitt began probing around the maze of steam pipes leading from the obsolete old steam reciprocating engines and boilers. The walkway gratings over the machinery were nearly eaten through by rust, and he treaded lightly. The engine room seemed to come alive in his imagination-creaks and moans, murmurings drifting out of the ventilators, whispering sounds.

  He found a pair of sea cocks. Their hand wheels were frozen in the closed position.

  So much for the sea-cock theory, he thought.

  An icy chill crept up the back of Pitts neck and spread throughout his body, and he realized the batteries operating the heater in his suit were nearly drained. He switched off the light for a moment. The pure blackness nearly smothered him. He flicked it on again and quickly swept the beam around as if he expected to see a specter of the crew reaching out for him. Only there were no specters. Nothing except the dank metal walls and the worn machinery.

  He could have sworn he felt the grating shudder as if the engines looming above him were starting up.

  Pitt shook his head to purge the phantoms in his mind and methodically began searching the sides of the hull, crawling between pumps and asbestos-covered pipes that led into the darkness and nowhere. He fell down a ladder into six feet of greasy water.

  He struggled back up, out of the seeming clutches of the dead and evil and-@ugly bilge, his suit now black with oil. Out of breath, he hung there a minute, making a conscious effort to relax.

  It was then he noticed an object dimly outlined in the farthest reach of the light beam. A corroded aluminum canister about the size of a five-gallon gas can was wired to a beam welded on the inner hull plates. Pitt had set explosives on marine salvage projects and he quickly recognized the detonator unit attached to the bottom of the canister. An electrical wire trailed upward through the grating to the deck above.

  Sweat was pouring from
his body but he was shivering from the cold. He left the explosive charge where he found it and climbed back up the ladder. Then he began inspecting the engines and boilers.