27
Washington, D.C., June 23
THE VIEW FROM DIRK
PITT’S OFFICE on the twenty-ninth floor of the NUMA headquarters
building included much of Washington, D.C. From the generous
rectangular window he could watch over a section of the shimmering
Potomac, the Lincoln and Washington monuments, and the Capitol
building, all of which stood lit up in brilliant white for the
evening.
Despite the view,
Dirk’s attention was directed elsewhere, toward the monitor of his
computer, on which a three-way teleconference was
proceeding.
In one corner, the
smiling face of Hiram Yaeger, NUMA’s resident computer genius.
Yaeger looked as if he’d just come off the road on a Harley; he
wore a leather vest and had his long graying hair pulled back into
a ponytail.
In the other corner
of Pitt’s screen, a drawn and waifish version of Gamay Trout gazed
up at him. Her deep red hair was also pulled back, but out of
necessity rather than style. Occasionally, as she spoke, a stray
lock worked itself loose and fell in front of her eyes. She would
diligently push it back behind her ear or keep talking as if she
didn’t notice.
Despite her obvious
pain, and eyes Pitt had never seen so dark, she seemed to be
holding it together. Certainly she’d helped them take a big step
forward in solving the mystery of what happened to the Kinjara Maru.
As she explained a
theory she and the Matador’s doctor had
come up with, Pitt had to admire her tenacity and devotion to duty.
Such qualities were in abundance at NUMA, but they always shone the
brightest under the darkest circumstances.
While Pitt listened
and asked what he thought were pertinent questions, Yaeger took
notes and mostly grunted the occasional “Uh-huh” and
“Okay.”
When Gamay was done
speaking, Pitt turned to Yaeger. “Can you run a simulation on what
she described?”
“I think so,” Yaeger
said. “Gonna be a shot in the dark, to some extent, but I could put
you in the ballpark.”
“Ballpark’s not good
enough, Hiram. I want box seats down the third
baseline.”
“Sure,” Yaeger said,
drawing the word out slowly. “But the closest I can come is telling
you what kind of power might be needed and how this might have accomplished it. So you might be on the
third baseline, but you’re still gonna be up in the nosebleeds
unless we get more data.”
“You start working,”
Pitt said. “I’ll bet you a case of imported beer that we’ll get
more data before you’re done with your first
run-through.”
“Canadian?” Hiram
said.
“Or German. Winner
picks.”
“Okay,” Yaeger said.
“I’ll take that action.”
His portion of the
screen went blank, and Dirk turned to Gamay. “I’m not going to ask
how you’re holding up,” he said. “Just want you to know I’m proud
of you.”
She nodded. “Thanks,”
she said. “And thank you for ordering me to study the samples. It
helped me . . . helped me get back to being me.”
Pitt was confused. “I
never gave any order like that,” he said.
“But the doctor . .
.” she began. A smile creased her face for the first
time.
“Doctor’s orders,”
Pitt guessed.
“Apparently, part of
my treatment,” she said.
“Hobson’s a crafty
old guy,” Pitt said, thinking warmly of the doctor. “And he’s
smart. If someone out there has developed a weapon like this, our
best defense may be to find it and neutralize it before it gets
used again. Thanks to you two, we have a chance.”
“What help can we
expect?” she asked.
“I’ve already talked
to the admiral,” Pitt said. “The Vice President, I mean. He’s going
to take what we’ve found directly to the President and Joint
Chiefs. I’m sure they’re going to be pretty damn interested, but as
for getting involved . . . We’ve got to find them something
tangible to get involved in. Right now, this is just a ghost that
came to visit and left a mark. We have to put a body with that
ghost, something they can deal with. You’ve given us the first
step.”
The rebellious strand
of hair fell down across her face again, and Gamay dutifully tucked
it back behind her ear. “Dr. Smith and I theorized that the crew
might have been killed because of what they saw. In other words,
having survived the electromagnetic burst, they had to be killed,
and the ship scuttled, to keep things quiet.”
“It’s reasonable,”
Pitt said. “Dead men tell no tales.”
“I know,” she said.
“But I was thinking there has to be something more. I mean, they
fired torpedoes at us. We have to assume they could have done the
same to the freighter when she was afloat.”
Pitt considered this.
Sometimes you learned more by what wasn’t done than what was.
“Would have been easier than boarding the ship.”
“And quicker,” she
said.
“Yeah,” Pitt said,
“that it would. So why didn’t they?”
“And why hit this
particular ship in the first place?”
Another good
question. He guessed there could be only one reason. One answer to
both.
“There was something
they wanted on that ship,” he said. “Something they had to get
before it went down. And whatever that something was, whoever was
behind this didn’t want the world to know it had gone
missing.”
On the screen, Gamay
nodded. “That’s the conclusion I reached too.”
It explained a few
things. The CEO of Shokara was an old friend of Dirk’s—more of an
old acquaintance, actually, in the sense that Dirk had once saved
his life—but for a man who’d often insisted he’d do anything Dirk
or NUMA ever needed, Haruto Takagawa had suddenly become very hard
to reach.
Shortly after the
freighter went down, Pitt had left a message for the man. But, so
far, he hadn’t received a call back. Perhaps that was
understandable, considering the circumstances, but it was at least
a yellow flag.
A few days later,
just to cover all the bases, Pitt had sent a pair of NUMA’s eager
young associates to Takagawa’s New York offices to get the type of
information the Coast Guard would have required if the ship had
gone down in U.S. waters. Primarily, the ship’s
manifest.
The two young men had
been stymied in Takagawa’s lobby, made to wait for hours and then
all but tossed out on their ears. It felt like a slap in the face
to Pitt, enough to get his considerable anger up and running. So
far, he’d been too busy to press the issue. But now it seemed
paramount.
“We need to know what
the Kinjara Maru was carrying,” Gamay
said.
Pitt nodded. He knew
what he had to do. He knew there was only one way to find out the
truth.