Jones led the way to a black Humvee, opened the rear door for Kane, then got in front next to the driver, who was also dressed like an undertaker. After leaving the airport, they raced along the George Washington Memorial Parkway as if there was no speed limit, skirted the city, and headed toward Maryland.
Jones had been silent during the drive, but as they entered Rockville he spoke briefly into a hand radio. Kane overheard something about a package being delivered. Minutes later, the Humvee pulled up to a large office building. The sign out front identified the building as the Food and Drug Administration’s headquarters. The windows of the FDA were dark except for a few offices lit for cleaning crews.
Jones escorted Kane to a side entrance. They rode an elevator down one level and walked along a hushed corridor to an unmarked door. Jones knocked softly, then opened the door for Kane, who stepped into a nondescript conference room similar to hundreds of other sterile spaces scattered in government edifices around the capital. The room had pale green wall-to-wall carpeting, beige walls decorated with generic artwork, a lectern, and a projection screen. A dozen or so people were seated around a long oak table.
Kane went around the table shaking hands and was greeted with hellos or smiles from everyone except a stranger who identified himself as William Coombs, representing the White House.
Kane sat down in the only unoccupied seat next to a firm-jawed man wearing the uniform of a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy.
“Hello, Max,” he said. “How was your trip from Bermuda?” His name was Charley Casey.
“Fast,” Kane said. “Hard for me to believe that a few hours ago I was a half mile under the ocean.”
“I watched the dive on TV,” Casey said. “Too bad you lost contact with the surface just when things started to get really interesting.”
“Interesting isn’t the word for it,” Kane said. “But it’s nothing compared to the craziness about the lab. Any news?”
The lieutenant shook his head.
“We’re still trying to make contact,” he said, “but there has been no response.”
“Could it simply be a foul-up in the communications system?”
Casey glanced over at Coombs.
“We have reason to believe that there is more involved than a systems failure,” Casey said.
“You might want to bring Dr. Kane up to date on the details as we know them, Lieutenant Casey,” Coombs said.
The lieutenant nodded, opened a folder, and pulled out several sheets of paper.
“We’ve pieced together a scenario based on witness statements. The situation has been confused, and reports are still coming in, but here’s what we have so far. Yesterday, at approximately 1400 hours our time, a cruise missile was launched against the Proud Mary, the lab’s support-and-security ship.”
Kane shook his head in disbelief.
“A missile? That can’t be true!”
“I’m afraid it is true, Max. The missile hit the ship on the port side. No one was killed, but at least a dozen were injured. The Mary is a tough old gal. She stayed afloat and got off a Mayday. The Navy cruiser Concord showed up within hours and rescued the survivors. Repeated attempts were made to contact the Locker. No reply.”
“Maybe the blast damaged the communications buoy,” Kane suggested.
“Negative. The cruiser checked out the buoy and found it undamaged.”
“Where was the lab’s service shuttle when all this happened?”
“A short while before the attack, the submersible had made a run down to the lab to deliver a representative from the company in charge of the Locker’s security. The sub was still on the lab when the missile came in.”
“What about the Locker’s minisubs?” Kane said. “They could be used to evacuate the lab in an emergency. The lab also has escape pods it can use as a last resort.”
“No subs or pods, Max. Our guess is that what happened to the lab was sudden and catastrophic.”
Kane’s head was spinning. He slumped in his chair as he tried to digest the implications of Casey’s last statement. He thought about Lois Mitchell and the other members of the Bonefish Key lab staff who had gathered to send him off on the B3 dive. He rallied after a moment, reminding himself that he was a scientist who dealt with facts, not suppositions.
Straightening up in his chair, Kane said, “How long before we can check out the lab itself?”
“The Concord is sending down a remote-operated vehicle,” Casey said. “All we can do at this point is to wait for them to report in.”
“I hope the Navy is doing more than sitting on its hands,” Coombs said. “Have you tracked the source of the missile?”
The lieutenant raised an eyebrow. Coombs was one of those ubiquitous young staff aides who looked as if he had been punched out of white dough with a cookie cutter. He was as clean-cut as a West Point grad, although his closest brush with a uniform had been as an Eagle Scout. He had cultivated an all-purpose facial expression of quiet competence that failed to hide a barely restrained arrogance. During his naval career, Casey had frequently encountered clones of the White House man, with their inflated sense of power, and had learned to cloak his disdain under a polite veneer.
He prefaced his answer with a pleasant smile.
“The Navy can walk and chew gum at the same time, Mr. Coombs. We’ve reconstructed the probable trajectory of the missile, and we’ve got planes and ships vectoring in on the launch position.”
“The White House isn’t interested in trajectories or vectors, Lieutenant. Has the source of the launch been tracked? If it was launched by a foreign power, this could have serious international repercussions.”
“The missile could have come from a ship, a sub, or a plane, sir, that’s all we know. Pretty much a crapshoot at this time. We’d welcome suggestions as to how to proceed, sir.”
Coombs was too well practiced in the art of passing the buck to take the bait.
“I’ll leave that up to the Navy,” he said, “but I can tell you one thing: this has all the earmarks of a well-organized and well-financed plan.”
“You won’t get any argument from me on that score,” Kane said. “About the same time the Proud Mary was being attacked, an attempt was made to sabotage the bathysphere dive.”
Kane waited for the noisy reaction to subside and then laid out the details of the attack on the sphere.
When Coombs heard about Austin’s rescue dive, he said, “I’ve heard Vice President Sandecker talk about Kurt Austin. He’s some sort of NUMA troubleshooter. From the little I know of the man’s exploits, you would still be at the bottom of the ocean if he had not been on board the Beebe. This thing with the lab is starting to make sense now. Someone wants to destroy our project.”
“That’s my take on it too,” Kane said. “The people behind the attack on the lab must have figured that I’d be ripe for the picking in the bathysphere.”
Dr. Sophie Pappas, the sole female member of the scientific board, asked, “Why didn’t the people behind these events wait until you were back on the lab? Instead of two simultaneous attacks, they only would have had to mount one.”
“Good question.” Coombs turned to Kane. “Could the work of the lab go on without you?”
Kane nodded.
“Sure,” he said. “As director, my job is to ride herd on the project. I’m a scientific coordinator now rather than a researcher. Lois Mitchell, my assistant, knows more about the actual nuts and bolts of the project.”
“You’re saying that the project could continue without you, but not without her,” Coombs said.
Kane said, “I have more experience working with the government bureaucracy, but she could easily wrap up this project in days without me. On the other hand, I know enough to reconstitute the work with the scientists remaining at Bonefish Key. It would take time, but I could get things moving again.”
“Not if you’re dead,” Coombs said. “But the lab’s work could continue without you, which means that it may not have
been destroyed.”
“Your theory makes sense in a nutty sort of way,” Kane said.
“Thank you. A devious mind is essential at the higher levels of government. Have we informed the Chinese government of the attacks?”
“After the meeting, I’ll contact Colonel Ming, who is my Chinese counterpart on this project,” Lieutenant Casey said. “He’s corrupt as hell, I hear, but well connected. Perhaps he knows something that can help.”
“I hope so. This incident with the lab couldn’t have come at a worse time,” Coombs said. “The other shoe is about to drop.”
Coombs snapped his fingers, and his assistant went over to a large-screen computer at the end of the table and brought up a map of China.
“This red spot shows the village where the original outbreak occurred. These other three dots show that the epidemic has broken the quarantine and is spreading beyond the original source. We think the virus may be moving through the water table. The bug is leaping from village to village. Eventually, it will hit the big cities. Once it gets into the populations of Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai, there will be no stopping it from spreading to the rest of the world. It will be in North America within weeks.”
There was silence around the table for a moment, then Casey said, “How long before it strikes an urban area?”
“The computers say seventy-two hours from midnight.”
“That still gives us time to stop it with the vaccine,” Casey said. “Presumably, we’ll be able to reestablish contact with the lab. Once we have the cultures, we hope to produce the vaccine in quantity.”
“We’re whistling in the dark,” Coombs said. “We won’t know what happened to the lab until the Navy does its job.” Coombs leaned back in his chair and tented his fingers. “Let’s back up. Who would benefit from scuttling the work of the lab?”
“I’ll pass on that one until we know more,” Kane said, and the others at the table nodded their heads in agreement.
“Okay, then,” Coombs said with a shrug of his shoulders. “Maybe somebody can answer the question about how the attackers knew about the existence and location of a top secret facility.”
“Leaks may have been inevitable,” Kane said. “When this committee first approached the government with our findings and Uncle Sam set up Bonefish Key as a front, we were pretty inexperienced at this whole spook thing. The instinct of a scientist is to make information public, not withhold it.”
“Which is why the research was removed from Bonefish Key to the Locker,” Coombs said, “so we could keep a tight lid on it and be closer to the resource.”
“There were safety reasons as well,” Kane said. “We were working with a waterborne pathogen and tinkering with altered life-forms. The Bonefish Key lab is near populated areas that could have been impacted in the advanced stages of research.”
Coombs frowned.
“The Locker’s existence was under tighter security than the Manhattan Project,” he said. “What about that woman at your lab? The scientist the Chinese sent over as a liaison?”
“Dr. Song Lee? I’ll vouch for her. She was a whistle-blower during the SARS epidemic. She risked prison by speaking out. Her contributions to the project have been vital.”
“So were Oppenheimer’s during the original Manhattan Project,” Coombs said. “That didn’t keep his loyalty from being compromised.”
“Before you indict Dr. Lee, I’d like to point out that I was the only one at Bonefish Key who knew the exact location of the lab. That information could have come from an outside source. What about the security company?”
Lieutenant Casey said, “The security people didn’t know what the lab was for, but they knew where it was. And they might not have been as tight-lipped as government operatives.”
The lieutenant had made no secret of his opposition to outsourcing the security arrangements for the lab to a civilian company.
“The use of civilian contractors has been widespread,” Coombs said, “especially since the Iraq War.”
“Where it was proven time after time that the government had limited oversight-and-control capabilities,” Casey said. “The taxpayers pay for a professional Navy, not a bunch of oceangoing cowboys.”
“You’re out of line, Lieutenant,” Coombs said. He had lost his cool demeanor, and his face was flushed with anger.
The lieutenant’s phone trilled, heading off a heated argument over the use of private warriors. He had a brief conversation with the caller and hung up.
“The ROV is on the lab site,” he announced with a cutting glance at Coombs. “It’s transmitting photos of the bottom.”
He rose from his chair and went over to a computer at one end of the table, which was connected to a PowerPoint setup. He clicked the mouse and an image of the ocean bottom appeared on the projection screen. There was no trace of the lab, no wreckage to suggest that the Locker had been destroyed.
“Are you sure you’ve got the correct location?” Coombs asked with irritation in his voice.
“Absolutely,” Casey said. “Look closer. You can see the big circular indentations in the sand. That’s where the lab’s support legs rested.”
“What’s this all mean?” Coombs demanded.
Casey gave him a bleak smile.
“Taking a wild guess, Mr. Coombs, I’d say this means that Davy Jones’s Locker has been hijacked.”
Kane still didn’t believe it.
“How could anything that big simply disappear?” he asked.
“You fellows figure out how this facility was hijacked under the nose of the U.S. Navy,” Coombs said. “I’m going to see that Dr. Kane does a similar vanishing act.”
Coombs raised his hand to cut Kane’s next question off, reached into his suit jacket for a cell phone, and hastily punched in a number.
“We’ve got a problem,” he said into the phone.
After a quick conversation, he hung up.
“You’re going to a safe house, Dr. Kane,” he announced.
When Kane protested, Coombs again cut him off.
“Sorry for the temporary inconvenience,” he said, “but someone wants you out of the picture. These attacks show that unauthorized people have found out about the lab even though we have gone to a great deal of trouble to keep it a secret. Even without the natural disaster you suggested, the political repercussions would be staggering if word of this research gets out.”
“I can’t see that happening,” Kane said. “Whoever tried to torpedo our research seems to like secrets too.”
“The difference is, we were prepared to go public once we had a vaccine,” Coombs said.
There was a quick knock at the door, and Jones stepped into the room. He was still wearing sunglasses. Kane felt as if he were being placed under house arrest. He said good-bye, then followed Jones out into the hall.
After Kane was gone, Coombs turned to the others.
“I’m going to recommend to the President that he prepare the country for a state of emergency,” he said. “We’ll contact the CDC and tell them this is the big one.”
“I’ll inform Vice President Sandecker directly,” Casey said. “He maintains contacts at NUMA and will enlist them in the search for the lab.”
“Good idea,” Coombs said. “Maybe their guy Austin can give the Navy some help doing its job.”
This parting comment was intended as another dig at the Navy, but Casey didn’t come back at Coombs as he had at the earlier jibes from the White House aide. He merely smiled.
“Maybe he can,” he said.
KANE TRIED TO GET a rise out of the man in black.
“Guess we’re going to the mattresses,” he said as they walked to the elevator.
“Huh?” Jones said.
“From The Godfather . . . Mafia talk.”
“We’re not the Mafia, sir.”
No, you’re not, Kane thought as he followed Jones from the room, but you might as well be. He couldn’t resist using another borrowed line from the movie.
“Don’t forget the cannoli,” he said.
CHAPTER 14
A FEW MINUTES AFTER ONE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING, AN inflatable pontoon boat softly bumped against the hull of the William Beebe and four figures dressed in black-and-green camouflage suits clambered up the side of the ship on rope ladders suspended from padded grapnel hooks. They vaulted over the rail one by one and dashed across the deck as silently as the shadows they resembled.
Except for the night-shift watch on the bridge, the crew was sound asleep in their cabins, recovering from the exertions of the bathysphere launch and rescue. Austin was awake, however, and after staring at the ceiling, his mind churning, he got up and got dressed and made his way to the machine shop.
He switched on the lights, and went over to examine the blade clamped in a table vise. He found a magnifying glass, placed a desk lamp directly over the blade, and examined the tiny ding near the hilt. Through the lens he saw that the flaw was actually a mark in the shape of an equilateral triangle with a dot at each point.
Austin drew the design on a pad of paper. He stared at it for a few moments but nothing jumped out at him. He set the pad down and went out onto the deck, thinking the cool air might blow away the cobwebs of sleep. He took a deep breath, but the sudden influx of oxygen produced a yawn instead. His synapses needed a stronger jolt.
He looked up at the bridge lights glowing in the window of the pilothouse. The night watch always kept a coffeepot brewing. He climbed the exterior stairs to the starboard bridge wing. A man’s voice came through the partially open door. The words were growled rather than spoken, and had an accent Austin couldn’t place, but one word stood out from the others.
Kane.
Austin’s well-honed instincts came into play. He moved away from the door, plastered his back against the outside wall of the bridge, and edged up to a window. He saw Third Mate Marla Hayes, a male crewman, and Captain Gannon standing together in the pilothouse. The captain must have been rousted from his bunk because he had a jacket on over his pajamas and slippers on his feet.
Four figures wearing commando outfits were gathered around the captain, the third mate, and the crewman. Hoods covered the faces of three of the commandos, the fourth having removed his to reveal an Asian face with jade-green eyes and a clean-shaven head. All four cradled short-barreled automatic weapons carried sidearms, and had long-bladed knives hanging at their waists.
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