“Almost a pity,” Dover said reverently, “to write finish to an enigma.”
“The sooner the better,” Pitt said, his tone grim as he considered the mass death inside.
Within five minutes the equipment was unloaded, the launch securely moored to the Pilottown’s rudder, and the men laboriously climbing the steep slope on the port side of the stern. Pitt took the lead, followed by Giordino and the rest as Dover brought up the rear.
The incline was not made up of solid rock but rather a combination of cinder ash and mud with the consistency of loose gravel. Their boots struggled to find a foothold, but mostly they slid back two steps for every three they gained. The dust from the ash rose and clung to their suits, coating them a dark gray. Soon the sweat was seeping through their pores and the increasingly heavy rasp of their breathing became more audible over the earphones inside their helmets.
Pitt called a halt at a narrow ledge, not four feet wide and just long enough to hold all six men. Wearily Giordino sank to a sitting position and readjusted the straps that held the acetylene tank to his back. When he could finally pant a coherent sentence, he said, “How in hell did this old rust bucket jam herself in here?”
“She probably drifted into what was a shelving inlet before 1987,” replied Pitt. “According to Mendoza, that was the year the volcano last erupted. The explosion gases must have melted the ice around the mantle, forming millions of gallons of water. The mudflow, along with the cloud of ash, poured down the mountain until it met the sea and buried the ship.”
“Funny the stern wasn’t spotted before now.”
“Not so remarkable,” Pitt answered. “So little is showing it was next to impossible to detect from the air, and beyond a mile from shore it blends into the rugged shoreline and becomes nearly invisible. Erosion caused by recent storms is the only reason she’s uncovered now.”
Dover stood up, pressing his weight against the steep embankment to maintain his balance. He unraveled a thin knotted nylon rope from his waist and unfolded a small grappling hook tied to the end.
He looked down at Pitt. “If you’ll support my legs, I think I can heave the hook over the ship’s railing.”
Pitt grasped his left leg as Giordino edged over and held the right. The burly Coast Guardsman leaned back over the lip of the ledge, swung the hook in a widening arc and let it fly.
It sailed over the stern rails and caught.
The rest of the ascent took only a few minutes. Pulling themselves upward, hand over hand, they soon climbed onto the deck. Heavy layers of rust mingled with ash flaked away beneath their feet. What little they could see of the Pilottown looked a dirty, ugly mess.
“No sign of Mendoza,” said Dover.
“Nearest flat ground to land a copter is a thousand yards away,” Pitt replied. “She and her team will have to hike in.”
Giordino walked over to the railing beside the corroded shaft of the jackstaff and stared at the water below. “The poison must be seeping through the hull during high tide.”
“Probably stored in the after hold,” said Dover.
“The cargo hatches are buried under tons of this lava crap,” Giordino said in disgust. “We’ll need a fleet of bulldozers to get through.”
“You familiar with Liberty ships?” Pitt asked Dover.
“Should be. I’ve inspected enough of them over the years, looking for illegal cargo.” He knelt down and began tracing a ship’s outline in the rust. “Inside the aft deckhouse we should find a hatch to an escape trunk that leads to the tunnel holding the screw shaft. At the bottom is a small recess. We might be able to cut our way into the hold from there.”
They all stood silent when Dover finished. They should all have felt a sense of accomplishment at having found the source of the nerve agent. But instead they experienced apprehension — a reaction, Pitt supposed, that stemmed from a letdown after the excitement of the search. Then also there was a hidden dread of what they might actually find behind the steel bulkheads of the Pilottown.
“Maybe… maybe we better wait for the lab people,” one of the chemists stammered.
“They can catch up,” Pitt said pleasantly, but with cold eyes.
Giordino silently took a prybar from the toolpack strapped on Pitt’s back and attacked the steel door to the after deckhouse. To his surprise it creaked and moved. He put his muscle to it, the protesting hinges surrendered and the door sprang open. The interior was completely empty, no fittings, no gear, not even a scrap of trash.
“Looks as though the movers have been here,” observed Pitt.
“Odd it was never in use,” Dover mused.
“The escape trunk?”
“This way.” Dover led them through another compartment that was also barren. He stopped at a round hatch in the center of the deck. Giordino moved forward, pried open the cover and stepped back. Dover aimed a flashlight down the yawning tunnel, the beam stabbing the darkness.
“So much for that idea,” he said dejectedly. “The tunnel recess is blocked with debris.”
“What’s on the next deck below?”
“The steering gear compartment.” Dover paused, his mind working. Then he thought aloud. “Just forward of the steering gear there’s an after steering room. A holdover from the war years. It’s possible, barely possible, it might have an access hatch to the hold.”
They went aft then and returned to the first compartment. It felt strange to them to walk the decks of a ghost ship, wondering what happened to the crew that abandoned her. They found the hatchway and climbed down the ladder to the steering gear compartment and made their way around the old, still oily machinery to the forward bulkhead. Dover scanned the steel plates with his flashlight. Suddenly the wavering beam stopped.
“Son of a bitch!” he grunted. “The hatch is here, but it’s been welded shut.”
“You’re certain we’re in the right spot?” Pitt asked.
“Absolutely,” Dover answered. He rapped his gloved fist against the bulkhead. “On the other side is cargo hold number five — the most likely storage of the poison.”
“What about the other holds?” asked one of the EPA men.
“Too far forward to leak into the sea.”
“Okay, then let’s do it,” Pitt said impatiently.
Quickly they assembled the cutting torch and connected the oxygen-acetylene bottles. The flame from the tip of the torch hissed as Giordino adjusted the gas mixture. Blue flame shot out and assaulted the steel plate, turning it red, then a bright orange-white. A narrow gap appeared and lengthened, crackling and melting under the intense heat.
As Giordino was cutting an opening large enough to crawl through, Julie Mendoza and her lab people appeared, packing nearly five hundred pounds of chemical analysis instruments.
“You found it,” she stated straight from the shoulder.
“We can’t be sure yet,” Pitt cautioned.
“But our test samples show the water around this area reeks with Nerve Agent S,” she protested.
“Disappointment comes easy,” said Pitt. “I never count my chickens till the check clears the bank.”
Further conversation broke off as Giordino stood back and snuffed out the cutting torch. He handed it to Dover and picked up his trusty prybar.
“Stand back,” he ordered. “This thing is red hot and it’s damned heavy.”
He hooked one end of the bar into the jagged, glowing seam and shoved. Grudgingly, the steel plate twisted away from the bulkhead and crashed to the deck with a heavy clang and spray of molten metal.
A hush fell over the dark compartment as Pitt took a flashlight and leaned carefully through the opening, staying clear of the superheated edges. He probed the beam into the bowels of the darkened cargo hold, sweeping it around in a 180-degree arc.
It seemed a long time before he straightened and faced the bizarrely clad, faceless figures pressing against him.
“Well?” Mendoza demanded anxiously.
Pitt answered with one
word: “Eureka!”
9
Four thousand miles and five hours ahead in a different time zone, the Soviet representative to the World Health Assembly worked late at his desk. There was nothing elaborate about his office in the Secretariat building of the United Nations; the furnishings were cheap and Spartan. Instead of the usual photographs of Russian leaders, living and dead, the only piece of wall decor was a small amateurish watercolor of a house in the country.
The light blinked and a soft chime emitted from his private phone line. He stared at it suspiciously for a long moment before picking up the receiver.
“This is Lugovoy.”
“Who?”
“Aleksei Lugovoy.”
“Is Willie dere?” asked a voice, heavy with the New York City accent that always grated on Lugovoy’s ears.
“There is no Willie here,” Lugovoy said brusquely. “You must have the wrong number.” Then he abruptly hung up.
Lugovoy’s face was expressionless, but a faint pallor was there that was missing before. He flexed his fists, inhaled deeply and eyed the phone, waiting.
The light blinked and the phone chimed again.
“Lugovoy.”
“Youse sure Willie ain’t dere?”
“Willie ain’t here!” he replied, mimicking the caller’s accent. He slammed the receiver onto the cradle.
Lugovoy sat shock-still for almost thirty seconds, hands tightly clasped together on the desk, head lowered, eyes staring into space. Nervously, he rubbed a hand over his bald head and adjusted the horn-rimmed glasses on his nose. Still lost in thought, he rose, dutifully turned out the lights and walked from the office.
He exited the elevator into the main lobby and strode past the stained-glass panel by Marc Chagall symbolizing man’s struggle for peace. He ignored it, as he always had.
There were no cabs at the stand in front of the building, so he hailed one on First Avenue. He gave the driver his destination and sat stiffly in the back seat, too tense to relax.
Lugovoy was not worried that he might be followed. He was a respected psychologist, admired for his work in mental health among the underdeveloped countries. His papers on thought processes and mind response were widely studied. During his six months in New York with the United Nations he had kept his nose clean. He indulged in no espionage work and held no direct ties with the undercover people of the KGB. He was discreetly told by a friend with the embassy in Washington that the FBI had given him a low priority and only performed an occasional, almost perfunctory observation.
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 paid 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 guide 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 Ch’in Shin Huang Ti. The 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.
10
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 81½ inches in length by 30½ 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.”
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