Cyclops

by Clive Cussler

  "Mostly business. Video for recording executive meetings, laboratory experiments, security systems.

  And executive audio for secretaries. Stuff like that, you know."

  "How many employees do you have?"

  "Around twelve."

  "Thank you very much," said Hagen. "You've been most helpful. Oh, one more thing. Do you get many orders from Pattenden?"

  "Not really. Every couple of months they'll order a part to update or modify their video systems."

  "Thanks again. Goodbye."

  Hagen scratched that one and tried again. His next two calls reached answering machines. One was a chemical lab at Brandeis University in Waltham and the other an unidentified office at the National Science Foundation in Washington. He checked the latter for a follow-up in the morning and tried an individual's number.

  "Hello?"

  Hagen looked at the name in Mooney's diary. "Dr. Donald Fremont?"

  "Yes."

  Hagen went through his routine.

  "What do you wish to know, Mr. Judge?" Fremont's voice sounded elderly.

  "I'm making a spot check of long-distance telephone calls. Has anyone from Pattenden called you in the last ninety days?" Hagen asked, looking at the dates of the calls and playing dumb.

  "Why, yes, Dr. Earl Mooney. He was a student of mine at Stanford. I retired five years ago, but we still keep in touch."

  "Did you by chance also have a student by the name of Leonard Hudson?"

  "Leonard Hudson," he repeated as if trying to recall. "I met him on two occasions. He wasn't in my class, though. Before my time, or I should say before my tenure at Stanford. I was teaching at USC when he was a student."

  "Thank you, Doctor. I won't trouble you further."

  "Not at all. Glad to help."

  Scratch four. The next name from the diary was an Anson Jones. He tried again, well aware it never came easy and that making a gold strike was 99 percent luck.

  "Hello?"

  "Mr. Jones, my name is judge."

  "Who?"

  "Thomas Judge. I'm with the federal government, and we're running an audit on Pattenden Physics Laboratory."

  "I don't know any Pattenden. You must have the wrong number."

  "Does the name Dr. Earl Mooney ring a bell?"

  "Never heard of him."

  "He's called your number three times in the last sixty days.

  "Must be a phone company foulup."

  "You are Anson Jones, area code three-zero-three, number five-four-seven

  "Wrong name, wrong number."

  "Before you hang up, I have a message."

  "What message?"

  Hagen paused, and then leaped. "Tell Leo that Gunnar wants him to pay for the airplane. You got that?"

  There was silence on the other end for several moments. Then finally, "Is this a crank call?"

  "Goodbye, Mr. Jones."

  Pay dirt.

  He called the sixth listing just to be on the safe side. An answering service for a stock brokerage firm answered. A dry hole.

  Elation, that was what he felt. He became even more elated as he added to his notes. Mooney was not one of the "inner core," but he was connected-- one of the subordinate officers under the high command.

  Hagen tapped out a number in Chicago and waited. After four rings, a woman answered sweetly.

  "Drake Hotel."

  ''My name is Thomas Judge and I'd like to confirm a room reservation for tomorrow night."

  "One moment and I'll connect you with reservations."

  Hagen repeated the request for confirmation with the desk clerk. When asked for a credit card number to hold the room for late arrival, he gave Anson Jones's phone number in reverse

  "Your room is confirmed, sir."

  "Thank you."

  What time was it? A glance at his watch told him it was eight minutes to midnight. He closed the briefcase and wiggled into his coat. Taking a cigarette lighter from one pocket, he slid the interior workings from its case. Next, he removed a thin metal shaft with a dental mirror on one end from a slit in his rear coat flap.

  Hagen moved to the doorway. Clutching the briefcase between his knees, he stopped short of the threshold and tilted the tiny mirror up and down the corridor. It was empty. He turned the mirror until it reflected the television monitor above the far end of the corridor. Then he positioned the lighter until it barely protruded around the doorframe and pressed the flint lever.

  Inside the security booth behind the main lobby, a screen on one of the TV monitors suddenly turned to snow. The guard at the console quickly began checking the circuit lights.

  "I've got a problem with number twelve," he announced.

  His supervisor came over from a desk and stared at the monitor. "Interference. The eggheads in the electrophysics lab must be at it again."

  Suddenly the interference stopped, only to begin again on another monitor.

  "That's funny," said the supervisor. "I've never seen it happen in sequence before."

  After a few seconds, the screen cleared, showing nothing but an empty corridor. The two security guards simply looked at each other and shrugged.

  Hagen turned off the miniature electrical impulse jammer as soon as he stepped inside and closed the door to Mooney's office. He walked softly over to the window and closed the drapes. He slipped on a pair of thin plastic gloves and turned on the overhead lights.

  Hagen was a master at the technique of tossing a room. He didn't bother with the obvious, the drawers, files, address and telephone lists. He went directly to a bookshelf and found what he had hoped to find in less than seven minutes.

  Mooney might have been one of the leading physicists in the nation, but Hagen had read him like a pictorial magazine. The small notebook was hidden inside a book entitled Celestial Mechanics in True Perspective by Horace DeLiso. The contents were in a code employing equations. It was Greek to Hagen but he wasn't fooled by the significance. Normally he would have photographed the pages and put them back, but this time he simply pocketed them, fully realizing he could never have them deciphered in time.

  The guards were still struggling with the monitors when he stepped up to the counter.

  "Would you like me to sign out?" he said with a smile.

  The head security guard came over, a quizzical expression on his face. "Did you just come from finance?"

  "Yes."

  "We didn't see you on the security TV"

  "I can't help that," said Hagen innocently. "I walked out the door and through the hallways until I came here. I don't know what else to tell you."

  "Did you see anyone? Anything unusual?"

  "No one. But the lights flickered and dimmed a couple of times.'

  The guard nodded. "Electrical interference from the electro physics lab. That's what I thought it was."

  Hagen signed out and walked into a cloudless night, humming softly to himself.

  <2>THE CYCLOPS

  October 25, 1989

  Key West, Florida

  <<18>>

  Pitt lay with his back pressed against the cool concrete of the airstrip, looking up at the Prosperteer.

  The sun pushed over the horizon and slowly covered her worn hull in a shroud of pastel orange. The blimp had an eerie quality about it, or so it seemed in Pitt's imagination, an aluminum ghost unsure of where it was supposed to haunt.

  He'd been awake most of the time during the flight from Washington to Key West, poring over Buck Caesar's charts of the Old Bahama Channel and retracing Raymond LeBaron's carefully marked flight path. He closed his eyes, trying to get a clear picture of the Prosperteer's spectral wanderings. Unless the gas bags inside the blimp were reinflated from a ship, an extremely unlikely event, the only answer to Raymond LeBaron's whereabouts lay in Cuba.

  Something nagged at his mind, a thought that kept returning after he unconsciously brushed it aside, a piece of the picture that became increasingly lucid as he began dwelling on it. And then suddenly it crystallized.

&
nbsp; The flight to trace LeBaron's trail was a setup.

  A rational and logical conclusion remained a dim outline in a thick mist. The trick was to try to fit it into a pattern. His mind was casting about for directions to explore when he sensed a shadow fall over him.

  "Well, well," said a familiar voice, "looks as though Snow White fell for the old apple routine again."

  "Either that or he's hibernating," came another voice Pitt recognized.

  He opened his eyes, shielded them from the sun with one hand, and looked up at a pair of grinning individuals who stared down. The shorter of the two, a barrel-chested, muscled character with black curly hair and the ironbound look of a man who enjoyed eating bricks for breakfast, was Pitt's old friend and assistant projects director at NUMA, Al Giordino.

  AI reached down, grabbed an outstretched hand, and pulled Pitt to his feet as effortlessly as a sanitation worker picking up an empty beer can from park grass.

  "Departure time in twelve minutes."

  "Our unnamed pilot arrive yet?" Pitt asked.

  The other man, slightly taller and much thinner than Giordino, shook his head. "No sign of one."

  Rudi Gunn peered through a pair of blue eyes that were magnified by thick-lensed glasses. He had the appearance of an undernourished assistant bookkeeper toiling for a gold watch. The impression was deceptive. Gunn was the overseer of NUMAs oceanographic projects. While Admiral Sandecker waged pitched battles with Congress and the federal bureaucracy, Gunn watched over the agency's day-to-day operation. For Pitt, prying Gunn and Giordino from under Sandecker had been a major victory.

  "If we want to match LeBaron's departure time, we'll have to wrestle it aloft ourselves," said Giordino, unconcerned.

  "I guess we can manage," said Pitt. "You study the flight manuals?"

  Giordino nodded. "Requires fifty hours of instruction and flying time to qualify for a license. The basic control isn't difficult, but the art of keeping that pneumatic scrotum stable in a stiff breeze takes practice."

  Pitt couldn't help grinning at Giordino's colorful description. "The equipment loaded on board?"

  "Loaded and secured," Gunn assured him.

  "Then I guess we might as well shove off."

  As they approached the Prosperteer, LeBaron's crew chief climbed down the ladder from the control car. He spoke a few words to one of the ground crew and then waved a friendly greeting.

  "She's all ready to go, gentlemen."

  "How close are we to the actual weather conditions of the previous flight?" asked Pitt.

  "Mr. LeBaron was flying against a five-mile-an-hour head wind out of the southeast. You'll buck eight, so figure on compensating. There's a late-season hurricane moving in over the Turks and Caicos Islands.

  The meteorological guys christened her Little Eva because she's a small blow with a diameter no more than sixty miles wide. The forecasters think she'll swing north toward the Carolinas. If you turn back no later than 1400 hours, Little Eva's outer breeze should provide you with a nice fat tail wind to nudge you home."

  "And if we don't?"

  "Don't what?"

  "Swing back by 1400 hours."

  The crew chief smiled thinly. "I don't recommend getting caught in a tropical storm with fifty-mile-an-hour winds, at least not in an airship that's sixty years old."

  "You make a strong case," Pitt admitted.

  "Allowing for the head wind," said Gunn, "we won't reach the search area until 1030 hours. That doesn't leave us much time to look around."

  "Yes," Giordino said, "but LeBaron's known flight path should put us right in the ballpark."

  "A tidy package," Pitt mused to no one in particular. "Too tidy."

  The three NUMA men were about to climb on board when the LeBaron limousine pulled up beside the blimp. Angelo got out and smartly opened the passenger door. Jessie stepped into the sun and walked over, looking outdoorsy in a designer safari suit with her hair tied in a bright scarf, nineteen-thirties style. She was carrying a suede flight bag.

  "Are we ready?" she said brightly, slipping past them and nimbly hustling up the ladder to the control car.

  Gunn gave Pitt a grim look. "You didn't tell us we were going on a picnic."

  "Nobody told me either," Pitt said, gazing up at Jessie, who had turned and was framed in the doorway.

  "My fault," said Jessie. "I forgot to mention that I'm your pilot."

  Giordino and Gunn looked as if they had swallowed live squid. Pitt's face wore an amused expression.

  He said, "No kidding."

  "Raymond taught me to fly the Prosperteer," she said. "I've logged over eighty hours at the controls and have a license."

  "No kidding," Pitt repeated, becoming intrigued.

  Giordino failed to see the humor. "Do you also know how to dive, Mrs. LeBaron?"

  "Sky or scuba? I'm certified for both."

  "We can't take a woman," said Gunn resolutely.

  "Please, Mrs. LeBaron," pleaded the crew chief. "We don't know what happened to your husband.

  The flight might be dangerous."

  "We'll use the same communication plan as Raymond's flight," she said, ignoring him. "If we find anything interesting we'll transmit in normal voice. No code this time."

  "This is ridiculous," snapped Gunn.

  Pitt shrugged. "Oh, I don't know. I'll vote for her."

  "You don't really mean it!"

  "Why not?" replied Pitt with a sardonic grin. "I firmly believe in equal rights. She has just as much right to get herself killed as we do."

  The ground crew stood as silent as pallbearers, their eyes following the old blimp as she lifted into the sunrise. Suddenly she began dropping. They held their breath as the landing wheel touched the crest of a wave. Then she slowly bounced back into the air and struggled to rise.

  Someone muttered anxiously, "Lift, baby, lift!"

  The Prosperteer agonizingly rose a few feet at a time until she finally leveled out at a safe altitude. The ground crew watched motionless, staring until the blimp became a tiny dark speck above the silent horizon. They stood there when she was no longer in view, instinctively quiet, a sense of dread in their hearts. There would be no volleyball game this day. They all herded inside the maintenance truck, overburdening the air conditioning system, clustering around the radio.

  The first message came in at 0700 hours. Pitt explained away the shaky liftoff. Jessie had under compensated for the lack of buoyancy caused by the extra payload Giordino and Gunn had placed on board.

  From then on until 1400 hours, Pitt kept the frequency open and maintained a running dialogue, matching his observations with the transcribed report that was recorded during LeBaron's flight.

  The crew chief picked up the microphone. "Prosperteer, this is Grandma's house. Over."

  "Go ahead, Grandma."

  "Can you give me your latest VIKOR satellite position?"

  "Roger. VIKOR reading H3608 by T8090."

  The crew chief quickly plotted the position on a chart. "Prosperteer, you're looking good. I have you five miles due south of Guinchos Cay on the Bahama Bank. Over."

  "I read the same, Grandma."

  "How are the winds?"

  "Judging from the wave crests, I'd say the breeze has picked up to about Force 6 on the Beaufort scale."

  "Listen to me, Prosperteer. The Coast Guard has issued a new update on Little Eva. She has doubled her speed and swung east. Hurricane warnings are up throughout the southern Bahamas. If she sticks to her present course, she'll strike the east coast of Cuba sometime this evening. I repeat, Little Eva has swung east and is heading in your direction. Call it a day, Prosperteer, and beat a course for home."

  "Will do, Grandma. Turning onto new course for the Keys."

  Pitt was silent for the next half hour. At 1435 hours, the crew chief hailed again.

  "Prosperteer, come in, please. Over."

  No reply.

  "Come in, Prosperteer. This is Grandma's house. Do you read?"

  Stil
l nothing.

  The stifling air inside the truck seemed suddenly to turn cold as fear and apprehension gripped the crew. The seconds crawled past and took forever to become minutes as the crew chief tried desperately to raise the blimp.

  But the Prosperteer did not respond.

  The crew chief slammed down the microphone and pushed his way outside the truck through the stunned ground crew. He ran over to the parked limousine and feverishly jerked open a rear door.

  "They're gone! We've lost them, the same as the last time!"

  The man sitting alone in the rear seat simply nodded. "Keep trying to raise them," he said quietly.

  As the crew chief hurried back to the radio, Admiral James Sandecker lifted a telephone receiver from a varnished cabinet and placed a call.

  "Mr. President."

  "Yes, Admiral."

  "They're missing."

  "Understood. I've briefed Admiral Clyde Monfort of the Caribbean Joint Task Force. He's already put ships and planes on alert around the Bahamas. As soon as we hang up I'll order him to launch a search and rescue operation."

  "Please impress upon Monfort the need for speed. I've also been informed the Prosperteer disappeared in the predicted path of a hurricane."

  "Return to Washington, Admiral, and do not worry. Your people and Mrs. LeBaron should be sighted and picked up within a few hours."

  "I'll try to share your optimism, Mr. President. Thank you."

  If there was one doctrine Sandecker believed in with all his heart, it was "Never trust a politician's word." He placed another call on the limousine's phone.

  "Admiral James Sandecker. I'd like to speak with Admiral Monfort."

  "Right away, sir."

  "Jim, is that really you?"

  "Hello, Clyde. Good to hear your voice."

  "Damn, it's been nearly two years. What's on your mind?"

  "Tell me, Clyde, have you been alerted for a rescue mission in the Bahamas?"

  "Where did you hear that?"

  "The rumor mill."

  "News to me. Most of our Caribbean forces are conducting an amphibious landing exercise on Jamaica."

  "Jamaica?"

  "A little muscle-flexing display of military capability to shake up the Soviets and Cubans. Keeps Castro off balance, thinking we're going to invade one of these days."