Medusa nf-8

by Clive Cussler

  Paul put his fingers to the artery in the dealer’s neck.

  “Now we know why Brimmer didn’t answer the phone,” he said.

  Gamay bent over the drafting board, which held a half-finished document written in ornate script. Next to it were some antique calligraphy pens and a bottle of ink. She read aloud a handwritten note on a sheet of paper next to an open book:

  “Call me Ishmael . . .”

  “The opening sentence from Moby-Dick?” Paul asked.

  Gamay nodded.

  “It appears our Mr. Brimmer was forging manuscript pages from Melville,” she said.

  “Could that type of thing get him killed?” Paul asked.

  “Rachael Dobbs would be my first suspect. But it was more likely that someone didn’t want him using the phone.”

  Paul slid a piece of paper under Brimmer’s cell and flipped it over so the display screen showed.

  “He was calling the police,” he said. “He got as far as 91 . . .”

  “I think we can conclude that Brimmer was forced to come here,” she said. “He would never have let anyone into his forgery workshop otherwise. And, judging from the mess on the floor, I’d say they were looking for something.”

  “The 1848 logbook?”

  “As Holmes would say, eliminate the impossible and you have the possible.”

  “His body is still warm, Ms. Holmes. What does that tell you?”

  “That we had better be on our toes,” she said. “And the murderer knew we were coming to see Brimmer.”

  “Doesn’t that seem far-fetched?” he asked.

  Gamay pointed to the corpse.

  “Tell Mr. Brimmer that it’s far-fetched.”

  “Okay,” Paul said with a tight smile. “You’ve convinced me.”

  Paul put his finger to his lips and opened a door opposite the one they had come through. He stepped out onto a landing, edged over to the railing, and looked down the stairs. He saw a tiny orange glow and smelled cigarette smoke rising up the shaft. He backed up into the office, shut the door quietly, and turned the lock.

  He picked up Brimmer’s cell phone, punched in the second 1 to complete the emergency call. When the police dispatcher answered, Paul said his name was Brimmer, gave the address, and said somebody was prowling around in the building. He suspected they were armed and dangerous.

  Paul hung up and put the phone back in Brimmer’s lifeless fingers.

  He and Gamay slipped out of Brimmer’s office and quickly made their way across the wide loom floor. Paul set the two-by-four against the wall, and they stepped out onto the fire escape, only to stop short.

  The rickety old fire escape was trembling, and there was the tunk-tunk of ascending footfalls on the cast-iron steps. The Trouts ducked back inside, and Paul picked up the two-by-four he’d just left behind. They plastered themselves flat against a wall on either side of the door. He tightened his grip on the board.

  Low male voices could be heard, then a quick exclamation of surprise. The men had found the smashed latch. Then the voices ceased.

  The door opened slowly. A figure stepped inside, followed by another. There was a spark, as the lead man flicked on a cigarette lighter. Paul calculated that he would have a second to act and brought the two-by-four down on the head of the second figure. The man with the cigarette lighter turned at the thwack of wood smacking skull. He was holding a revolver in his other hand. Paul jammed him in the midsection with the end of the two-by-four, and followed up with a blow to the head as the man doubled over.

  The Trouts dashed through the door, paused briefly to make sure nobody else was climbing the fire escape, then flew down the steps and raced to their vehicle. As they drove away from the mill, they passed two police cruisers speeding toward it, lights blinking but sirens silent.

  Gamay caught her breath, and said, “Where’d you learn to swing a bat like Ted Williams?”

  “The Woods Hole summer softball league. I played first base for the institution’s oceanography team. Strictly for fun. Didn’t even keep score.”

  “Well, I’m going to put you down for 2 to 0, after that neat double play,” Gamay said.

  “Thanks. I guess we’ve reached a dead end on the Dobbs logbook. . . . Literally,” Paul said.

  Gamay pursed her lips in thought for a moment.

  “Captain Dobbs wasn’t the only one who wrote down his memoirs,” she said.

  “Caleb Nye?” he said. “All his records went up in flames.”

  “Rachael Dobbs mentioned the diorama. Isn’t that a record of sorts?”

  Suddenly energized, he said, “It’s worth a try.”

  Paul pumped the SUV’s accelerator and headed across town to the Dobbs mansion.

  Rachael Dobbs was saying good night to the cleaning crew that had cleared up after the jazz concert and was about to close down the building. She looked less frazzled than when they saw her earlier.

  “I’m afraid you missed the concert,” she said. “You found Mr. Brimmer’s shop, I trust?”

  “Yes, thank you,” Gamay said. “He couldn’t help us. But then Paul and I remembered the Nye diorama that you mentioned. Do you think it might be possible to see it?”

  “If you come by tomorrow, I’d be glad to show it to you,” Rachael said.

  “We’ll be back in Washington by then,” Gamay said. “If there is any chance . . .”

  “Well, after all, your generous contribution made you members of the Dobbs Society in good standing,” Rachael said. “Let’s go down to the basement.”

  The basement of the Dobbs mansion was big and musty. They wove their way through antique odds and ends to a floor-to-ceiling cabinet that Rachael explained was an airtight, temperature-controlled walk-in safe. She opened the safe’s double doors to reveal metal shelves stacked with plastic boxes, each labeled. A cylinder-shaped object around six feet long, wrapped in plastic, filled the lowest shelf.

  “This is the Nye diorama,” Rachael said. “I’m afraid that it’s a bit heavy, which is probably why no one has dragged it out to have a look at it.”

  Paul squatted down and lifted one end of the cylinder up a couple of inches.

  “It’s doable,” he said.

  All through college, Paul had helped on his father’s fishing boat, and since then he’d spent hours at the gym keeping in shape for the physical demands of his job. Gamay was even more of a fitness nut, and although her long-legged figure could have come out of the pages of Vogue she was stronger than many men. Working together, the Trouts easily hefted the package and carried it upstairs.

  At Rachael’s suggestion, they took the cylinder to the tent, where there was space to unwrap it. The Trouts removed the plastic and undid the ties wrapped around the diorama. It had been tightly coiled, with its blank brownish gray back side facing outward.

  Carefully and slowly, they unrolled the diorama.

  The first panel became visible. It was an oil painting around five feet high and six feet wide, depicting a whaling ship tied up at a dock. There was a caption under the picture:

  JOURNEY’S END.

  “We must be looking at the last section of the diorama,” Rachael said. “This shows a ship unloading its catch in New Bedford. See the barrels being rolled down a ramp to the dock?”

  The colors of sea and sky were still bright, but the other colors were garish, in the style of a circus poster. The brushstrokes were bold, as if the paint had been applied in a hurry. The perspective was wrong, seen through the eyes of an untrained artist.

  “Any idea who painted this?” Gamay asked. “The technique is rough, but the artist had a good eye for detail. You can even see the name of the ship on the hull: Princess.”

  “You’re very discerning,” Rachael Dobbs said. “Seth Franklin was self-taught, and he sold paintings of ships to their owners or captains. Before he started painting, he was a ship’s carpenter. As I understand it, Nye stood in front of the diorama as it was unrolled from panel to panel and fleshed out the details with his o
wn story. The lighting would have been dramatic, and maybe there were even sound effects. You know, someone behind the diorama shouting ‘Thar she blows!’ ”

  The next panel showed the Princess rounding a point of land that the caption identified as THE TIP OF AFRICA. In another panel, the ship was at anchor against the backdrop of a lush volcanic island. Dark figures that could have been natives were standing on the deck, which was bathed in a blue glow. The caption read:

  TROUBLE ISLAND-LAST PACIFIC LANDFALL.

  The panel that followed showed another volcanic island, apparently much bigger, with a dozen or so ships at anchor in its harbor. The caption identified the setting as Pohnpei.

  Paul continued unrolling the diorama. The next panels depicted, in reverse, the crew cutting up a sperm whale and boiling its blubber down for oil. Particularly interesting was what appeared to be a white-haired man lying on the deck over the caption:

  MODERN-DAY JONAH.

  “It’s the Ghost,” Rachael said. “This is marvelous! This shows Caleb Nye as he must have looked after he’d been cut out of the whale’s stomach.”

  The stiff canvas of the diorama was becoming hard to handle, but with Paul unrolling it and Gamay rolling it back on its spindle, the whaling saga continued to unfold in reverse.

  The panel before them was the classic depiction of a whaleboat-harpooned sperm whale in the lace-topped waves. Two legs were sticking out of the whale’s mouth. The caption identified the scene:

  CALEB NYE-SWALLOWED BY A WHALE.

  Rachael Dobbs could hardly contain her excitement. She started talking about a fund-raiser to restore the diorama and finding wall space to hang it. Paul and Gamay Trout found the diorama fascinating but of little help. Yet they kept going until they came to the last panel, almost a mirror image of the ship in the first panel, only returning from its long voyage. In this panel, there was a crowd of people on the dock, and the ship’s rigging was unfurled. The caption read SETTING SAIL.

  Paul stood up to stretch his legs, but Gamay’s sharp eye noticed that there were a few more feet of canvas. She asked him to keep unrolling, expecting to see a title panel of some sort. Instead, they were looking at a map of the South Pacific. Lines had been drawn in a crooked pattern across the ocean. There were whales’ tails scattered across it. Each tail had a longitude-latitude position inked next to it.

  “It’s a map of the 1848 voyage of the Princess,” Rachael said. “Those position notations show where the whales were caught. Captains often illustrated their logbooks to record good whaling areas. The map would have given Caleb’s audience an idea of the extent of the voyage and shown where his adventures had occurred.”

  Gamay got down on her hands and knees and followed a line with her index finger from Pohnpei to a speck called Trouble Island. The island’s position had been noted next to it.

  The Trouts jotted down the coordinates, rolled the diorama back up, and carried it into the kitchen. Despite Rachael’s protest, they gave her a substantial contribution to start the ball rolling on a place for the mural.

  While Rachael Dobbs went to close up the museum, the Trouts went out into the garden.

  “What do you think?” Gamay asked.

  “I’m not sure whether this will help them find the lab,” Paul said, “but it’s all linked somehow: the present and the past, the blue medusa, the miraculous cure of the men aboard the Princess.”

  “Don’t forget that somebody thought the log was important enough to kill Brimmer over,” Gamay said. “We should let Kurt and Joe know what we found.”

  Paul already had his cell phone in hand, scrolling down to a number on his contact list.

  CHAPTER 39

  LIKE ANY GOOD DETECTIVE, JOE ZAVALA BEGAN HIS SEARCH for Davy Jones’s Locker at the crime scene. Using a one-person submersible borrowed from the NUMA ship, he dove to the ocean bottom and made a couple of passes over the circular depressions left by the lab’s footings. Seeing nothing new, he broke away from the site and started to explore the surrounding area. The submersible’s searchlights suddenly reflected off a piece of metal.

  Working the controls of the submersible’s mechanical arms, Zavala scooped a twisted piece of steel from the bottom and examined it under the lights before depositing it in a basket slung beneath the submersible.

  “I just picked up a chunk of the Proud Mary,” he called up to the ship’s bridge.

  “You’re sure it’s not a piece of the lab?” asked Captain Campbell, skipper of the NUMA ship.

  “Reasonably sure. The metal is twisted and melted, the way it would be from a missile strike. It doesn’t look at all like the structures I saw in the diagrams. What I’ve seen fits with our theory that the lab was lifted off its site and towed away.”

  “Have you checked out the canyon where the lab was prospecting for jellyfish?” asked Campbell.

  “Yeah. It’s a few hundred yards from the site. I dove down into it a couple hundred feet. The canyon goes down forever. Saw a few blue medusae floating around, but that was it. I could dive deeper, but I’ve heard that the definition of insanity is repeating the same useless action over and over.”

  “Come up for air, then,” said Campbell. “We’ll call the Concord and fill Captain Dixon in-Hold on, Joe. Call for you coming through the NUMA net. I’ll put it through.”

  After a moment or two, a female voice came over Zavala’s earphones.

  “How’s your search going, Joe?”

  “Hi, Gamay, nice to hear from you. I’ve picked a piece of the support ship off the bottom, but that’s it. How about you?”

  “We may have something,” she said. “We tried to contact Kurt but the call wouldn’t go through, so we tracked you down under the sea. Paul and I came across the coordinates for a place called Trouble Island. It’s about a hundred miles from the lab site. It may be where the crew of the Princess underwent their miraculous cure. Not sure how it relates to the missing lab, but maybe it will help.”

  “Give the captain the info,” he said, “and I’ll come up and check things out.”

  “We’re on our way back to Washington,” she said. “Call if you need anything at this end.”

  Zavala thanked Gamay and Paul, then pointed the nose of the submersible toward the surface and powered the thrusters. A crane was waiting to hoist it from the water onto the deck of the NUMA ship.

  Zavala popped the hatch, climbed out, and made his way to the bridge. Captain Campbell was poring over the chart table. He pointed to a speck on a chart of Micronesian waters.

  “This is the atoll closest to the position your friends gave me,” Campbell said. “Doesn’t look like much, and, as you can see, it’s within a red rectangle, which means it was searched visually. What do you think?”

  Zavala pondered the captain’s question, then said, “I think I need to talk to an expert.”

  A few minutes later, he was on the line with the NUMA navigational unit that supplied the agency’s worldwide expeditions with up-to-date navigational information.

  “Let me see if I understand,” said the map expert, a soft-voiced young woman named Beth. “You’re looking for a Pacific island that is no longer on the charts and you don’t know if it even existed in the first place.”

  Zavala chuckled softly.

  “Sorry,” he said. “This must be like looking for a nonexistent needle in a very big haystack.”

  “Don’t be discouraged, Joe. I like a challenge.”

  “Any chance the island might have been noted on a British Admiralty chart?”

  “It depends,” she said. “The Admiralty charts were ahead of their time when it came to accuracy, although the earlier ones were privately produced and had lots of errors. The Admiralty certified some maps that shouldn’t have been.”

  “You’re saying that an island could be on some charts but not others?”

  “Absolutely! The charts and atlases of the nineteenth century showed more than two hundred islands that never existed.”

  “How cou
ld that happen?”

  “Many ways. A land-starved mariner might mistake a cloud formation for an island and record its position. Figuring longitude was also a problem. Someone might mark a real island in the wrong place. Con men created phony islands to push get-rich-quick schemes. The next guy in the neighborhood looks at his chart and sees empty sea where an island should be . . . Now, tell me what you know about your phantom island.”

  “I know that it was real,” Zavala said. “An American whaling ship stopped there in 1848. But the island is not on any modern map. There’s an atoll fairly close by, though.”

  “I’ll start by looking for an 1848 chart or one close to it,” she said. “Next, you’ll want to compare it to Pacific Chart 2683.”

  “What is so special about it?”

  “It’s the gold standard of Admiralty charts. The British Hydrographic Office knew that the Admiralty maps were getting out of whack. Accurate charts were essential for the Navy and commercial interests. So, in 1875, the Admiralty brought in a chief hydrographer named Captain Frederick Evans to purge the phantom islands from all their charts. He got rid of more than a hundred islands in the Pacific alone. The corrected chart was designated with the number 2683.”

  “Then it’s possible that the island never existed?” he asked.

  “Possibly. But islands can disappear. Your island might have sunk into the sea after a volcanic eruption, an earthquake, or a flood. There is historical precedent: the island Tuanah supposedly sank with its inhabitants. And there are other reported cases on record. It could be a reef or rock below the surface now, and even a satellite wouldn’t pick it up. You’d have to get in for a close look.”