She closed her eyes and tried to picture the shocked expressions on her supervisors’ faces when they discovered the money and reliable little Arta Casilighio missing at the same time. She had fooled them all!
She felt a strange, almost sexual, thrill at knowing the FBI would post her on their list of most wanted criminals. The investigators would question all her friends and neighbors, search all her old haunts, check a thousand and one banks for sudden large deposits of consecutively numbered bills — but they would come up dry. Arta, alias Estelle, was not where they’d expect her to be.
She opened her eyes and stared at the now familiar walls of her stateroom. Oddly the room began to slip away from her. Objects were focusing and unfocusing into a blurry montage. Her bladder signaled a trip to the bathroom, but her body refused to obey any command to move. Every muscle seemed frozen. Then the door opened and Lee the mess boy entered with another Oriental crewman.
Lee wasn’t smiling.
This can’t be happening, she told herself. The mess boy wouldn’t dare intrude on her privacy while she was lying naked on the bed. It had to be a crazy dream brought on by the lavish food and drink, a nightmare stoked by the fires of indigestion.
She felt detached from her body, as if she were watching the eerie scene from one corner of the stateroom. Lee gently carried her through the doorway, down the passageway and onto the deck.
Several of the Korean crewmen were there, their oval faces illuminated by bright overhead floodlights. They were hoisting large bundles and dropping them over the ship’s railing. Abruptly, one of the bundles stared at her. It was the ashen face of the young fourth officer, eyes wide in a mixture of disbelief and terror. Then he too disappeared over the side.
Lee was leaning over her, doing something to her feet. She could feel nothing, only a lethargic numbness. He appeared to be attaching a length of rusty chain to her ankles.
Why would he do that? she wondered vaguely. She watched indifferently as she was lifted into the air. Then she was released and floated through the darkness.
Something struck her a great blow, knocking the breath from her lungs. A cool, yielding force closed over her. A relentless pressure enveloped her body and dragged her downward, squeezing her internal organs in a giant vise.
Her eardrums exploded, and in that instant of tearing pain, total clarity flooded her mind and she knew it was no dream. Her mouth opened to emit a hysterical scream.
No sound came. The increasing water density soon crushed her chest cavity. Her lifeless body drifted into the waiting arms of the abyss ten thousand feet below.
Part I
The Pilottown
1
July 25,1989
Cook Inlet, Alaska
Black clouds rolled menacingly over the sea from Kodiak Island and turned the deep blue-green surface to lead. The orange glow of the sun was snuffed out like a candle flame. Unlike most storms that swept in from the Gulf of Alaska creating fifty- or hundred-mile-an-hour winds, this one bred a mild breeze. The rain began to fall, sparingly at first, then building to a deluge that beat the water white.
On the bridge wing of the Coast Guard cutter Catawba, Lieutenant Commander Amos Dover peered through a pair of binoculars, eyes straining to penetrate the downpour. It was like staring into a shimmering stage curtain. Visibility died at four hundred meters. The rain felt cold against his face and colder yet as it trickled past the upturned collar of his foul-weather jacket and down his neck. Finally he spat a waterlogged cigarette over the railing and stepped into the dry warmth of the wheelhouse.
“Radar!” he called out gruffly.
“Contact six hundred fifty meters dead ahead and closing,” the radar operator replied without lifting his eyes from the tiny images on the scope.
Dover unbuttoned his jacket and wiped the moisture from his neck with a handkerchief. Trouble was the last thing he expected during moderate weather.
Seldom did one of the fishing fleet or private pleasure craft go missing in midsummer. Winter was the season when the gulf turned nasty and unforgiving. Chilled Arctic air meeting warmer air rising from the Alaska Current detonated incredible winds and towering seas that crushed hulls and iced deck structures until a boat grew top-heavy, rolled over and sank like a brick.
A distress call had been received by a vessel calling herself the Amie Marie. One quick SOS followed by a Loran position and the words “… think all dying.”
Repeated calls requesting further information were sent out, but the radio on board the Amie Marie remained silent.
An air search was out of the question until the weather cleared. Every ship within a hundred miles changed course and steamed full speed in response to the emergency signals. Because of her greater speed, Dover reckoned the Catawba would be the first to reach the stricken vessel. Her big diesels had already pushed her past a coastal freighter and a halibut long-liner gulf boat, leaving them rocking in her wake.
Dover was a great bear of a man who had paid his dues in sea rescue. He’d spent twelve years in northern waters, stubbornly throwing his shoulder against every sadistic whim the Arctic had thrown him. He was tough and wind-worn, slow and shambling in his physical movements, but he possessed a calculatorlike mind that never failed to awe his crew. In less time than it had taken to program the ship’s computers, he had figured the wind factor and current drift, arriving at a position where he knew the ship, wreckage or any survivors should be found — and he’d hit it right on the nose.
The hum of the engines below his feet seemed to lake on a feverish pitch. Like an unleashed hound, the Catawba seemed to pick up the scent of her quarry. Anticipation gripped all hands. Ignoring the rain, they lined the decks and bridge wings.
“Four hundred meters,” the radar operator sang out.
Then a seaman clutching the bow staff began pointing vigorously into the rain.
Dover leaned out the wheelhouse door and shouted through a bullhorn. “Is she afloat?”
“Buoyant as a rubber duck in a bathtub,” the seaman bellowed back through cupped hands.
Dover nodded to the lieutenant on watch. “Slow engines.”
“Engines one third,” the watch lieutenant acknowledged as he moved a series of levers on the ship’s automated console.
The Amie Marie slowly emerged through the precipitation. They expected to find her half awash, in a sinking condition. But she sat proud in the water, drifting in the light swells without a hint of distress. There was a silence about her that seemed unnatural, almost ghostly. Her decks were deserted, and Dover’s hail over the bullhorn went unanswered.
“A crabber by the look of her,” Dover muttered to no one in particular. “Steel hull, about a hundred and ten feet. Probably out of a shipyard in New Orleans.”
The radio operator leaned out of the communications room and motioned to Dover. “From the Board of Register, sir. The Amie Marie’s owner and skipper is Carl Keating. Home port is Kodiak.”
Again Dover hailed the strangely quiet crab boat, this time addressing Keating by name. There was still no response.
The Catawba slowly circled and hove to a hundred meters away, then stopped her engines and drifted alongside.
The steel-cage crab pots were neatly stacked on the deserted deck, and a wisp of exhaust smoke puffed from the funnel, suggesting that her diesel engines were idling in neutral. No human movement could be detected through the ports or the windows of the wheelhouse.
The boarding party consisted of two officers, Ensign Pat Murphy and Lieutenant Marty Lawrence. Without the usual small talk they donned their exposure suits, which would protect them from the frigid waters if they accidentally fell into the sea. They had lost count of the times they had conducted routine examinations of foreign fishing vessels that strayed inside the Alaskan 200-mile fishing limit, yet there was nothing routine about this investigation. No flesh-and-blood crew lined the rails to greet them. They climbed into a small rubber Zodiac propelled by an outboard motor and cast off.
They watched as Murphy and Lawrence tied their tiny craft to the crab boat, hoisted themselves to the deck and disappeared through a doorway into the main cabin.
Several minutes dragged by. Occasionally one of the searchers would appear on the deck only to vanish again down a hatchway. The only sound in the Catawba’s wheelhouse came from the static over the ship’s open radiophone loudspeaker, turned up to high volume and tuned to an emergency frequency.
Suddenly, with such unexpected abruptness that even Dover twitched in surprise, Murphy’s voice loudly reverberated inside the wheelhouse.
“Catawba, this is Amie Marie.”
“Go ahead, Amie Marie,” Dover answered into a microphone.
“They’re all dead.”
The words were so cold, so terse, nobody absorbed them at first.
“Repeat.”
“No sign of a pulse in any of them. Even the cat bought it.”
What the boarding party found was a ship of the dead. Skipper Keating’s body rested on the deck, his head leaning against a bulkhead beneath the radio. Scattered throughout the boat in the galley, the mess-room and the sleeping quarters were the corpses of the Amie Marie’s crew. Their facial expressions were frozen in twisted agony and their limbs contorted in grotesque positions, as though they had violently thrashed away their final moments of life. Their skin had turned an odd black color, and they had gushed blood from every orifice. The ship’s Siamese cat lay beside a thick wool blanket it had shredded in its death throes.
Dover’s face reflected puzzlement rather than shock at Murphy’s description. “Can you determine a cause?” he asked.
“Not even a good guess,” Murphy came back. “No indication of struggle. No marks on the bodies, yet they bled like slaughtered pigs. Looks like whatever killed them struck everyone at the same time.”
“Stand by.”
Dover turned and surveyed the faces around him until he spotted the ship’s surgeon, Lieutenant Commander Isaac Thayer.
Doc Thayer was the most popular man aboard the ship. An old-timer in the Coast Guard service, he had long ago given up the plush offices and high income of shore medicine for the rigors of sea rescue.
“What do you make of it, Doc?” Dover asked.
Thayer shrugged and smiled. “Looks as though I better make a house call.”
Dover paced the bridge impatiently while Doc Thayer entered a second Zodiac and motored across the gap dividing the two vessels. Dover ordered the helmsman to position the Catawba to take the crab boat in tow. He was concentrating on the maneuver and didn’t notice the radio operator standing at his elbow.
“A signal just in, sir, from a bush pilot airlifting supplies to a team of scientists on Augustine Island.”
“Not now,” Dover said brusquely.
“It’s urgent, Captain,” the radio operator persisted.
“Okay, read the guts of it.”
“ ‘Scientific party all dead.’ Then something unintelligible and what sounds like ‘Save me.’ “
Dover stared at him blankly. “That’s all?”
“Yes, sir. I tried to raise him again, but there was no reply.”
Dover didn’t have to study a chart to know Augustine was an uninhabited volcanic island only thirty miles northeast of his present position. A sudden, sickening realization coursed through his mind. He snatched the microphone and shouted into the mouthpiece.
“Murphy! You there?”
Nothing.
“Murphy… Lawrence… do you read me?”
Again no answer.
He looked through the bridge window and saw Doc Thayer climb over the rail of the Amie Marie. Dover could move fast for a man of his mountainous proportions. He snatched a bullhorn and ran outside.
“Doc! Come back, get off that boat!” his amplified voice boomed over the water.
He was too late. Thayer had already ducked into a hatchway and was gone.
The men on the bridge stared at their captain, incomprehension written in their eyes. His facial muscles tensed and there was a look of desperation about him as he rushed back into the wheelhouse and clutched the microphone.
“Doc, this is Dover, can you hear me?”
Two minutes passed, two endless minutes while Dover tried to raise his men on the Amie Marie. Even the earsplitting scream of the Catawba’s siren failed to draw a response.
At last Thayer’s voice came over the bridge with a strange icy calm.
“I regret to report that Ensign Murphy and Lieutenant Lawrence are dead. I can find no life signs. Whatever the cause it will strike me before I can escape. You must quarantine this boat. Do you understand, Amos?”
Dover found it impossible to grasp that he was suddenly about to lose his old friend. “Do not understand, but will comply.”
“Good. I’ll describe the symptoms as they come. Beginning to feel light-headed already. Pulse increasing to one fifty. May have contracted the cause by skin absorption. Pulse one seventy.”
Thayer paused. His next words came haltingly.
“Growing nausea. Legs… can no longer… support. Intense burning sensation… in sinus region. Internal organs feel like they’re exploding.”
As one, everybody on the bridge of the Catawba leaned closer to the speaker, unable to comprehend that a man they all knew and respected was dying a short distance away.
“Pulse… over two hundred. Pain… excruciating. Blackness closing vision.” There was an audible moan. “Tell… tell my wife…” The speaker went silent.
You could smell the shock, see it in the widened eyes of the crew standing in stricken horror.
Dover stared numbly at the tomb named the Amie Marie, his hands clenched in helplessness and despair.
“What’s happening?” he murmured tonelessly. “What in God’s name is killing everyone?”
2
“I say hang the bastard!”
“Oscar, mind your language in front of the girls.”
“They’ve heard worse. It’s insane. The scum murders four kids and some cretin of a judge throws the case out of court because the defendant was too stoned on drugs to understand his rights. God, can you believe it?”
Carolyn Lucas poured her husband’s first cup of coffee for the day and whisked their two young daughters off to the school bus stop. He gestured menacingly at the TV as if it were the fault of the anchorman announcing the news that the killer roamed free.
Oscar Lucas had a way of talking with his hands that bore little resemblance to sign language for the deaf. He sat stoop-shouldered at the breakfast table, a position that camouflaged his lanky six-foot frame. His head was as bald as an egg except for a few graying strands around the temples, and his bushy brows hovered over a pair of oak-brown eyes. Not one to join the Washington, D.C., blue pinstripe brigade, he was dressed in slacks and sportcoat.
In his early forties, Lucas might have passed for a dentist or bookkeeper instead of the special agent in charge of the Presidential Protection Division of the Secret Service. During his twenty years as an agent he had fooled many people with his nice neighbor-next-door appearance, from the Presidents whose lives he guarded to the potential assassins he’d stonewalled before they had an opportunity to act. On the job he came off aggressive and solemn, yet at home he was usually full of mischief and humor — except, of course, when he was influenced by the eight A.M. news.
Lucas took a final sip of coffee and rose from the table. He held open his coat — he was left-handed — and adjusted the high-ride hip holster holding a Smith and Wesson.357 Magnum Model 19 revolver with a 2½-inch barrel. The standard issue gun was provided by the Service when he had finished training and started out as a rookie agent in the Denver field office investigating counterfeiters an
d forgers. He had drawn it only twice in the line of duty, but had yet to pull the trigger outside a firing range.
Carolyn was unloading the dishwasher when he came up behind her, pulled away a cascade of blond hair and pecked her on the neck. “I’m off.”
“Don’t forget tonight is the pool party across the street at the Hardings’.”
“I should be home in time. The boss isn’t scheduled to leave the White House today.”
She looked up at him and smiled. “You see that he doesn’t.”
“I’ll inform the President first thing that my wife frowns on me working late.”
She laughed and leaned her head briefly on his shoulder. “Six o’clock.”
“You win,” he said in mock weariness and stepped out the back door.
Lucas backed his leased government car, a plush Buick sedan, into the street and headed downtown. Before reaching the end of the block he called the Secret Service central command office over his car radio.
“Crown, this is Lucas. I’m en route to the White House.”
“Have a nice trip,” a metallic voice replied.
Already he began to sweat. He turned on the air conditioner. The summer heat in the nation’s capital never seemed to slacken. The humidity was in the nineties and the flags along Embassy Row on Massachusetts Avenue hung limp and lifeless in the muggy air.
He slowed and stopped at the checkpoint gate on West Executive Avenue and paused for a few moments while a uniformed guard of the Service nodded and passed him through. Lucas parked the car and entered the west executive entrance on the lower level of the White House.
At the SS command post, code-named W-16, he stopped to chat with the men monitoring an array of electronic communication equipment. Then he took the stairs to his office on the second floor of the East Wing.
The first thing he did each morning after settling behind his desk was to check the President’s schedule, along with advance reports by the agents in charge of planning security.
Lucas studied the folder containing future presidential “movements” a second time, consternation growing across his face. There had been an unexpected addition — a big one. He flung down the folder in irritation, swung around in his swivel chair and stared at the wall.
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