The guard smiled. “I’ve studied your photos. Knowing which is which is like comparing Joe Pesci to Clint Eastwood. You’re not difficult to tell apart.”
He pressed a button beside the door and it slid open, revealing a short hallway leading to another metal door. “When you reach the inner door, stand still for a moment until the guard on the other side ID’s you with a security camera.”
“Doesn’t he trust your judgment?” asked Giordino.
The guard never cracked a smile. “Insurance,” he said tersely.
“Aren’t they overdoing the security routine?” muttered Giordino. “We could have just as easily reserved a couple booths at Taco Bell to hold a briefing.”
“Bureaucrats have a fetish for secrecy,” said Pitt.
“At least I could have had a burrito.”
They were passed through the door into a vast carpeted room whose walls were covered with drapes to mute the acoustics. A twenty-foot-long kidney-shaped conference table dominated the room. A huge screen covered the entire far wall. The room was comfortably lit, and easy on the eyes. Several men and one woman were already seated around the table. None stood as Pitt and Giordino approached.
“You’re late.” This from Admiral James Sandecker, the head of NUMA. A small athletic man with flaming red hair and a Vandyke beard, he had commanding cold blue eyes that took in everything. Sandecker was as canny as a leopard sleeping in a tree with one eye open—he knew that a meal would come to him sooner or later. He was testy and irascible but ran NUMA like a benevolent dictator. He motioned now to a man sitting on his left.
“I don’t believe you two know Ken Helm, special agent with the FBI.”
A gray-haired man, dressed in a tailored business suit, with speculative, quiet hazel eyes that peered over reading glasses, half rose out of his chair and extended his hand. “Mr. Pitt, Mr. Giordino, I’ve heard a great deal about you.”
Which means he’s perused our personnel files, Pitt thought to himself.
Sandecker turned to the man on his right. “Ron Little. Ron has a fancy title over at Central Intelligence, but you’d never know it.”
Deputy director was the title that ran through’s Pitt’s mind at meeting Little.
He looked through collie-brown eyes set in a deeply lined face—pious, middle-aged, a face etched with experience. He simply nodded. “Gentlemen.”
“The others you know,” Sandecker said, nodding down the table.
Rudi Gunn was furiously taking notes and didn’t bother to look up. Pitt stepped over and placed a hand on Pat O’Connell’s shoulder and said softly, “Sooner than you thought.”
“I adore a man who keeps his promises.” She patted his hand, uncaring of the stares from the men around the table. “Come sit by me. I feel intimidated by all these important government officials.”
“I assure you, Dr. O’Connell,” said Sandecker, “that you’ll leave this room with every lovely hair intact.”
Pitt pulled out a chair and slid next to Pat, while Giordino took a seat next to Gunn. “Have Al and I missed anything of relevance?” Pitt asked.
“Dr. O’Connell briefed us on the skull and underground chamber,” said Sandecker, “and Ken Helm was about to report on the initial results of the forensic examination on the bodies flown in from Telluride.”
“Not much to tell.” Helm spoke slowly. “Making a positive identification from their teeth has become difficult. Preliminary examinations suggest that their dental work came from South American dentists.”
Pitt appeared dubious. “Your people can distinguish the difference in dental techniques of different countries?”
“A good forensic pathologist who specializes in identification through dental records can often name the city where the cavities were filled.”
“So they were foreign nationals,” Giordino observed.
“I thought their English was a bit odd,” said Pitt.
Helm stared over his reading glasses. “You noticed?”
“Too perfect without an American accent, although two of them spoke with a New England twang.”
Little scribbled on a yellow legal notepad. “Mr. Pitt, Commander Gunn has informed us that the murderers you apprehended in Telluride referred to themselves as members of the Fourth Empire.”
“They also referred to it as the New Destiny.”
“As you and Commander Gunn have already speculated, the Fourth Empire may be the successor to the Third Reich.”
“Anything is possible.”
Giordino pulled a gigantic cigar from his breast pocket and rolled it around in his mouth without lighting it, out of consideration for the people at the table who didn’t smoke. Sandecker shot him a murderous look at seeing that the label advertised it as one from his private stock. “I’m not a smart man,” Giordino said modestly. The Humble Herbert routine was an act. Giordino had been third in his class at the Air Force Academy. “For the life of me, I don’t see how an organization with a worldwide army of elite killers can operate for years without the finest intelligence services in the world figuring out who they are and what they’re up to.”
“I’m the first to admit we’re stymied,” said FBI’s Helm frankly. “As you know, crimes without motives are the most difficult to solve.”
Little nodded in agreement. “Until your confrontation with these people in Telluride, anyone else who came in contact with them did not live to describe the event.”
“Thanks to Dirk and Dr. O’Connell,” said Gunn, “we now have a trail to follow.”
“A few charred teeth make for a pretty faint trail,” offered Sandecker.
“True,” agreed Helm, “but there is the enigma of that chamber inside the Pandora Mine. If they go to such extremes to keep scientists from studying the inscriptions, slaughter innocent people, and commit suicide when apprehended—well, they must have a compelling motive.”
“The inscriptions,” Pitt said. “Why go to such lengths to hide their meaning?”
“They can’t be overjoyed at the outcome,” said Gunn. “They lost six of their professional killers and failed to secure photographs of the inscriptions.”
“It’s bizarre that such an ordinary archaeological discovery would cost so many lives,” Sandecker said expressionlessly.
“Hardly an ordinary discovery,” Pat said quickly. “If it is not a hoax perpetrated by old hard-rock miners, it could very well prove to be the archaeological find of the century.”
“Have you been able to decipher any of the symbols?” asked Pitt.
“After a cursory examination of my notes, all I can tell you is that the symbols are alphabetic. That is, writing that expresses single sounds. Our alphabet, for example, uses twenty-six symbols. The symbols in the chamber suggest an alphabet of thirty, with twelve symbols representing numerals, which I managed to translate into a very advanced mathematics system. Whoever these people were, they discovered zero and calculated with the same number of symbols as modern man. Until I can program them into a computer and study them in their entirety, there is little else I can tell you.”
“Sounds to me like you’ve done extremely well with what little you have had in such a short time,” Helm complimented her.
“I’m confident we can crack the meaning of the inscriptions. Unlike the complicated logosyllabic writing systems of the Egyptians, Chinese, or Cretans, which are as yet undeciphered, this one seems unique in its simplicity.”
“Do you think the black obsidian skull found in the chamber forms a link to the inscriptions?” asked Gunn.
Pat shook her head. “I can’t begin to guess. Like the crystal skulls that have come out of Mexico and Tibet, its purpose could be ritual. There are some people—not accredited archaeologists, I might add—who think the crystal skulls came in a set of thirteen that can record vibrations and focus them into holographic images.”
“Do you believe that?” asked Little seriously.
Pat laughed. “No, I’m pretty much of a pragmatist. I prefer har
d-core proof before I advance wild theories.”
Little looked at her pensively. “Do you think the obsidian skull—”
“Skulls,” Pitt corrected him.
Pat gave him a queer look. “Since when do we have more than one?”
“Since yesterday afternoon. Thanks to a good friend, St. Julien Perlmutter, I obtained another one.”
Sandecker looked at him intently. “Where is it now?”
“Along with the skull from Telluride, it was taken to NUMA’s chemical lab for analysis. Obsidian obviously can’t be dated by conventional means, but a study under instrumentation might tell us something about those who created it.”
“Do you know where it came from?” asked Pat, burning with curiosity.
Without going into tedious detail, Pitt briefly described the finding of the skull inside the derelict Madras by the crew of the Paloverde in Antarctica. He then told of his meeting and conversation with Christine Mender-Husted, and how she graciously gave him the skull after accepting Perlmutter’s offer for her ancestor’s papers.
“Did she say where the crew and passengers of the Madras discovered the skull?”
Pitt tantalized her and the others seated around the table by taking his time to reply. Finally, he said, “According to the ship’s log, the Madras was bound from Bombay to Liverpool when it was struck by a violent hurricane—”
“Cyclone,” Sandecker lectured. “To a sailor, hurricanes occur only in the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific oceans. Typhoons are in the Western Pacific and cyclones in the Indian Ocean.”
“I stand corrected,” Pitt sighed. Admiral Sandecker loved to show off his inexhaustible reserve of sea trivia. “As I was saying, the Madras ran into a violent storm and heavy seas that lasted for nearly two weeks. She was battered and driven far south of her course. When the wind and waters finally calmed, it was found that their water barrels had been damaged and much of their drinking supply lost. The captain then consulted his charts and made the decision to stop at a barren chain of uninhabited islands in the subantarctic south Indian Ocean. Now known as the Crozet Islands, they form a tiny overseas territory of France. He dropped anchor off a small island called St. Paul that was very rugged, with a volcanic mountain rising in its center. While the crew repaired the water barrels and began filling them from a stream, one of the passengers, a British army colonel on his way home with his wife and two daughters after serving ten years in India, decided to go on a little hunting expedition.
“The only real game on the island were elephant seals and penguins, but the colonel in his ignorance thought the island might teem with four-legged game. After climbing nearly a thousand feet up the mountain, he and his friends came upon a footpath laid with stones worn smooth with age. They followed the path to an opening hewn in the rock in the shape of an archway. They entered and saw a passageway that led deeper into the mountain.”
“I wonder if the entrance has been found and explored since then,” said Gunn.
“It’s possible,” Pitt admitted. “Hiram Yaeger checked it out for me, and except for an unmanned meteorological station set up by the Aussies from 1978 until 1997 and monitored by satellite, the island has been totally uninhabited. If their weathermen found anything inside the mountain, they never mentioned it. All records are purely meteorological.”
Little was leaning over the table, spellbound. “Then what happened?”
“The colonel sent one of his party back to the ship, and he returned with lanterns. Only then did they venture inside. They found that the passageway was smoothly carved from the rock and sloped downward for about a hundred feet, ending in a small chamber with dozens of strange and ancient-looking sculptures. They went on to describe unreadable inscriptions etched on the walls and ceiling of the chamber.”
“Did they record the inscriptions?” asked Pat.
“No symbols went into the captain’s log,” answered Pitt. “The only drawing is a crude map to the entrance of the chamber.”
“And the artifacts?” Sandecker probed.
“They’re still on the Madras,” explained Pitt. “Roxanna Mender, the wife of the captain of the whaler, mentioned them in a brief entry in her diary. She identified one as a silver urn. The others were bronze and earthenware sculptures of strange-looking animals she said she had never seen before. Under the laws of salvage, her husband and his crew intended to strip the Madras of anything of value, but the ice pack began to break up and they had to make a run for the whaler. They took only the obsidian skull.”
“Another chamber, this one with artifacts,” Pat said, staring as if seeing something beyond the room. “I wonder how many others are hidden around the world.”
Sandecker eyed Giordino waspishly as the little Italian chewed on his immense cigar. “It seems we have our work cut out for us.” He drew away his eyes from Giordino and trained them on Gunn. “Rudi, as soon as you can, expedite two expeditions. One to search for the Madras in the Antarctic. The second to check out the chamber found by the ship’s passengers on St. Paul Island. Use whatever research vessels are nearest the areas in question.” He turned to the men farther down the long table. “Dirk, you head up the search for the derelict. Al, you take St. Paul Island.”
Giordino sat slouched in his chair. “I hope our bloodthirsty little friends didn’t get to either place first.”
“You’ll know soon after you arrive,” Gunn said, with a straight face.
“In the meantime,” said Helm, “I’ll keep two agents on the hunt throughout the U.S. for any leads to the organization that hired the killers.”
“I must tell you, Admiral,” Little said seriously to Sandecker, “this is not a priority assignment for Central Intelligence. But I’ll do what I can to fill in the pieces. My people will concentrate on international corporate syndicates outside the United States that fund or search for archaeological searches. We’ll also investigate any discoveries that involved murder. Your new evidence pointing to a neo-Nazi order may prove invaluable.”
“Last but not least, we come to the lovely lady in our midst,” Sandecker said. He wasn’t being patronizing; it was the way he talked to most women.
Pat smiled in poised confidence at seeing every male eye focused on her. “My job, of course, is to attempt to decipher the inscriptions.”
“The photos the killers took should be processed by now,” said Gunn.
“I’ll need a place to work,” she said thoughtfully. “Since I am now a nonperson, I can’t very well walk into my office at the University of Pennsylvania and begin an analysis program.”
Sandecker smiled. “Between Ron, Ken, and myself, we have at our command what are perhaps three of the most sophisticated data-processing facilities and technicians in the world. Take your pick.”
“If I may suggest, Admiral,” said Pitt, making no attempt at impartiality, “because of NUMA’s continued involvement with the chambers and their contents, it may be more efficient for Dr. O’Connell to work with Hiram Yaeger in our own computer facility.”
Sandecker looked for some clue as to what was going on in Pitt’s devious mind. Finding none, he shrugged. “It’s your call, Doctor.”
“I do believe Mr. Pitt is right. By working closely with NUMA, I can be in close communication with the expeditions.”
“As you wish. I’ll place Yaeger and Max at your disposal.”
“Max?”
“Yaeger’s latest toy,” replied Pitt. “An artificial intelligence computer system that turns out visual holographic images.”
Pat took a deep breath. “I’ll need all the exotic technical help I can get.”
“Not to worry,” said Giordino with humorous detachment. “If the inscriptions prove ancient, they’re probably nothing but a book of ancient recipes.”
“Recipes for what?” inquired Helm.
“Goat,” said Giordino moodily. “A thousand and one ways to serve goat.”
14
“FORGIVE ME FOR ASKING, but are you Hiram Yaeger?” Fuel
ed by enthusiasm, Pat had made her way through the vast computer network that covered the entire tenth floor of the NUMA building. She had heard computer wizards at the University of Pennsylvania talk in awe of the oceans data center of the National Underwater and Marine Agency. It was an established fact that the center processed and stored the most enormous amount of digital data on oceanography ever assembled under one roof.
The scruffy-looking man sitting at a horseshoe-shaped console pulled down his granny glasses and peered at the woman standing in the doorway of his sanctum sanctorum. “I’m Yaeger. You must be Dr. O’Connell. The admiral said to expect you this morning.”
The brain behind this incredible display of information-gathering power hardly fit the image she had of him. For some reason, Pat had expected Yaeger to look like a cross between Bill Gates and Albert Einstein. He resembled neither. He was dressed in Levi’s pants and jacket over a pure white T-shirt. His feet were encased in cowboy boots that looked as if they had suffered through a thousand calf-roping contests on the rodeo circuit. His hair was dark gray and long and tied back in a ponytail. His face was boyish and clean-shaven, and featured a narrow nose and gray eyes.
Pat would have also been surprised to learn that Yaeger lived in a fashionable residential section of Maryland, was married to a successful animal artist, and was the father of two teenage daughters who attended an expensive private school. His only hobby was collecting and restoring old, obsolete computers.
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” said Pat.
“Weren’t you met at the elevator and shown to my domain?”
“No, I simply wandered around until I saw somebody who didn’t look like Dilbert.”
Yaeger, a fan of the comic strip character by Scott Adams, laughed. “I think I’m supposed to take that as a compliment. I deeply apologize for not having someone meet and escort you.”
“No bother. I took a self-guided tour. Your data empire is quite grand. Certainly nothing like the equipment I’m used to working with at the university.”
“Can I get you a cup of coffee?”
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