Flood Tide dp-14

by Clive Cussler

  Perlmutter bowed as far as his bulk allowed and kissed Julia's hand.

  “Always a pleasure to meet a friend of Dirk's.” He stood back and swept out an arm, the silk sleeve flapping like a flag in a stiff breeze. “Don't stand out there in the night. Come in, come in. I was just about to open a bottle of forty-year-old Barros port. Please share it with me.”

  Julia stepped from the enclosed courtyard that once served to harness teams of horses to fancy carriages and gazed enraptured at the thousands of books that were massed over every square inch of open space inside the carriage house. Many were neatly spaced on endless shelves. Others were piled along walls, up stairs and on bateonies. In bedrooms, bathrooms, closets, they were even clustered in the kitchen and dining room. There was barely enough room for a person to walk through a hallway, they were so thickly stacked.

  Over fifty years, St. Julien Perlmutter had accumulated the finest and most extensive collection of historical ship literature ever assembled in one place. His library was the envy of every maritime archive in the world and second to none. What books and ship records he could not possess, he painstakingly copied. Fearful of fire or destruction, his fellow researchers pleaded with him to put his immense archive on-line, but he preferred to leave his collection in bound paper.

  He generously shared it all without cost to anyone who came to his front door seeking information on a particular shipwreck. As long as Pitt had known him, Perlmutter had never turned down anyone who sought his extensive knowledge.

  If the staggering hoard of books wasn't a colossal sight, Perlmutter was. Julia gazed openly at him. His face, turned crimson from a lifetime of excessive good food and drink, barely showed under a curly mass of gray hair and a thick, heavy beard. His nose under the sky-blue eyes was a little red knob. His lips were lost under a mustache twisted at the ends. He was obese but not sloppy-fat. No flab hung. He was solid as a massive wood sculpture. Most people who first met him thought he was probably much younger than he looked. But St. Julien Perlmutter was a year past seventy and as hearty as they came.

  A close friend of Pitt's father, Senator George Pitt, Perlmutter had known Dirk almost from the time he was born. Over the years they had formed a close bond to the point where Perlmutter was like a favorite uncle. He sat Pitt and Julia down around a huge latticed hatch cover, reconstructed and lacquered to as high a sheen as a dining table's. He offered them crystal glasses that had once graced the first-class dining room of the former Italian luxury liner the Andrea Doria.

  Julia studied the etched image of the ship on her glass as Perlmutter poured the aged port. “I thought the Andrea Doria rested on the bottom of the sea.”

  “She still does,” said Perlmutter, twisting one end of the gray hair flowing from his lips. “Dirk here brought up a rack of wineglasses during a dive he made on the wreck five years ago and graciously gave them to me. Please tell what you think of the port.”

  Julia was flattered that such a gourmet would want her opinion. She sipped the ruby contents of the glass and made an expression of delight. “It tastes wonderful.”

  “Good, good.” He gave Pitt a look reserved for a derelict on a park bench. “You I won't ask, since your taste runs to the mundane.”

  Pitt acted as if he was insulted. “You wouldn't know good port if you drowned in it. While I, on the other hand, was weaned on it.”

  “I hate myself for ever letting you through the front door,” Perlmutter moaned.

  Julia saw through the charade. “Do you two always go on like this?”

  “Only when we meet,” Pitt said, laughing.

  “What brings you here this time of night?” asked Perlmutter, winking at Julia. “It couldn't have been my witty conversation.”

  “No,” Pitt agreed, “it was to see if you ever heard of a ship that left China sometime around nineteen forty-eight with a cargo of historical Chinese art and then vanished.”

  Perlmutter held the port in front of his eyes and swirled it around in his glass. His eyes took on a reflective expression as his encyclopedic mind delved into his brain cells. “I seem to recall that the name of the ship was the Princess Dou Wan. She went missing with all hands somewhere off Central America. No trace of ship or crew was ever found.”

  “Was there a record of her cargo?”

  Perlmutter shook his head. “The word that she was carrying a rich cargo of antiquities came from unsubstantiated reports only. Vague rumors actually. No evidence ever came to light to suggest it was true.”

  “How do you call it?” asked Pitt.

  “Another mystery of the sea. There is very little I can tell you except the Princess Dou Wan was a passenger ship that had seen her day and was scheduled for the scrap yard. A pretty ship, in her prime she was known as the queen of the China Sea.”

  “Then how did she end up lost off Central America?”

  Perlmutter shrugged. “As I said, another mystery of the sea.”

  Pitt shook his head vigorously. “I disagree. If there is an enigma, it is man-made. A ship simply doesn't vanish five thousand miles from where she is supposed to be.”

  “Let me dig out the record on the Princess. I believe it's in a book stacked under the piano.” He lifted his bulk off a thankful chair and ambled out of the dining room. In less than two minutes, Pitt and Julia heard his voice roar out through the hall from another room. “Ah, here it is!”

  “With all these books, he knows exactly where to find the one he's looking for?” she asked in amazement.

  “He can tell you the title of every book in the house,” said Pitt with certainty, “its exact location and what number it lies from the top of its stack or from the right side of its shelf.”

  Pitt had no sooner finished speaking than Perlmutter came into the room, his elbows brushing both frames of the doorway simultaneously. He held up a thick, leather-bound book. The title, lettered in gold, read, History of the Orient Shipping Lines. “This is the only official record I've ever come across on the Princess Dou Wan that gives details of her years afloat.” Perlmutter sat down at the table, opened the book and began reading aloud.

  “She was laid down and launched in the same year, nineteen thirteen, by Harland and Wolff shipbuilders of Belfast for the Singapore Pacific Steamship Lines. Her original name was Lanai. Gross tonnage of just under eleven thousand tons, over-all length of four hundred and ninety-seven feet and a sixty-foot beam, she was rather a good-looking ship for her day.” He paused and held up the book to show a photograph of the ship sailing over a flat sea with a trailing wisp of smoke from her single smokestack. The photo was tinted and revealed the traditional black hull with white superstructure topped by a tall green funnel. “She could carry five hundred and ten passengers, fifty-five of them first class,” Perlmutter continued. “She was originally coal-fired but converted to oil-firing in nineteen twenty. Top speed of seventeen knots. Her maiden voyage took place in December of nineteen thirteen when she left Southampton for Singapore. Until nineteen thirty-one, most of her voyages were between Singapore and Honolulu.”

  “It must have been a comfortable and relaxing experience sailing across the South Seas in those early days,” said Julia.

  “Passengers were not nearly so harried and occupied eighty years ago,” Pitt agreed. He looked at Perlmutter. “When did the Lanai become the Princess Dou Wan?”

  “She was sold to the Canton Lines out of Shanghai in nineteen thirty-one,” Perlmutter answered. “From then until the war, she carried passengers and cargo to ports around the South China Sea. During the war, she served as an Australian troop transport. In nineteen forty-two, while unloading troops and their equipment off New Guinea, she was attacked by Japanese aircraft and severely damaged, but she returned to Sidney under her own power for repair and a refit. Her war record is quite impressive. From nineteen forty to nineteen forty-five, she transported over eighty thousand men in and out of the war zone, dodging enemy aircraft, submarines and warships and suffering extensive damage inflicted during se
ven different attacks.”

  “Five years of sailing through Japanese-infested waters,” said Pitt. “It's a wonder she wasn't sunk.”

  “When the war ended, the Princess Dou Wan was returned to the Canton Lines and refitted as a passenger ship again. She then went into service between Hong Kong and Shanghai. Then in the late fall of nineteen forty-eight she was taken out of service and sent to the scrappers hi Singapore for breaking up.”

  “Breaking up,” Pitt echoed. “You said she sank off Central America.”

  “Her fate gets vague,” said Perlmutter, pulling several loose sheets of paper from the book. “I accumulated what information I could find and condensed it into a brief report. All that's known for certain is that she didn't make it to the scrappers. The final account came from a naval station radio operator at Valparaiso, Chile. According to the radio operator's records, a ship calling herself the Princess Dou Wan sent out a series of distress signals, saying she was taking on water and badly listing under a violent storm two hundred miles west. Repeated inquiries brought no answers. Then her radio went dead and she was never heard from again. A search turned up no sign of her.”

  “Could there have been another Princess Dou Wan?” asked Julia.

  Perlmutter shook his head negatively. “The International Ships Registry only lists one Princess Dou Wan between eighteen fifty and the present. The signal must have been sent as a red herring from another Chinese vessel.”

  “Where did the rumor originate that Chinese antiquities were on board?” asked Pitt.

  Perlmutter held out his hands, palms upward in a sign of unknowing. “A myth, a legend, the sea is full of them. The only sources I'm aware of were unreliable dockworkers and Nationalist Chinese soldiers who were in charge of loading the ship. They were later captured and interrogated by the Communists. One claimed a crate broke open while itXwas being lifted aboard, revealing a life-size bronze prancing horse.”

  “How on earth did you find all this information?” said Julia, overwhelmed with Perlmutter's knowledge of maritime disasters.

  He smiled. “From a fellow researcher in China. I have sources around the world that I rely on to send me books and information related to shipwrecks whenever they find it. They know that I pay top dollar for reports that contain new and uncovered ground. The story of the Princess Dou Wan came from an old friend who is China's top historian and researcher by the name of Zhu Kwan. We've corresponded and exchanged maritime information for many years. It was he who mentioned a legend surrounding the alleged treasure ship.”

  “Was Zhu Kwan able to give you a manifest of the treasure?” Pitt inquired.

  “No, he claimed only that his research led him to believe that before Mao's troops marched into Shanghai, Chiang Kai-shek cleaned out the museums, galleries and private collections of Chinese antiquities. Records of art and artifacts before World War n in China are sketchy to say the least. It is pretty well known that after the Communists took over, there were few antiquities to be found. All that you see in China today were discovered and excavated since nineteen forty-eight.”

  “Not one of the lost treasures was ever found?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” Perlmutter admitted. “Nor has Zhu Kwan told me any different.”

  Pitt took the last swallow from his glass of the forty-year-old port. “So a vast part of China's heritage may lie on the bottom of the sea.”

  Julia's expression altered to curiosity. “This is all most interesting, but I fail to see what good any of this has to do with Qin Shang's illegal immigrant-smuggling operations.”

  Pitt took her hand and held it tightly. “Your Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation can strike Qin Shang and his rotten empire from the front and sides. But his obsession with the lost antiquities of China opens the door for the National Underwater and Marine Agency to strike him from the rear, where he least expects it. St. Julien and I will have to play catch-up. But we're very good at what we do. Together, we make a better search team than any Qin Shang can put together.” Pitt paused, and his expression lightened. “Now the only trick we have to perform is to find the Princess Dou Wan before Qin Shang.”

  THE NIGHT WAS STILL YOUNG WHEN PlTT AND JULIA LEFT ST. Julien Perlmutter's carriage house. Pitt turned the Duesenberg around and drove out the driveway toward the street. He stopped before entering the traffic. The two Ford vans driven by the special bodyguards from the security company hired by Peter Harper were not parked and patiently waiting at the curb. They were nowhere in sight.

  “It seems we've been abandoned,” said Pitt, his foot firmly on the brake pedal of the Duesenberg.

  Julia looked puzzled. “I don't understand. I can think of no reason why they would desert us.”

  “Maybe they decided we were boring, and they drove to a sports bar to watch basketball.”

  “Not funny,” Julia said grimly.

  “Then it's deja vu all over again,” Pitt noted with deceptive calm. He leaned across Julia, reached into a side pocket on the door, pulled out the old .45 Colt that he had reloaded, and handed it to her. “I hope you haven't lost your touch since our escapade on the Orion River.”

  She shook her head vigorously. “You're exaggerating the danger.”

  “No, I'm not,” he argued. “Something is seriously wrong. Take the gun, and if you have to, use it.”

  “There must be a simple explanation for the vans' departure.”

  “One more prognostication of Pitt's precognition. The pockets of the Immigration and Naturalization Service are not as deep as the pockets of Qin Shang Maritime Limited. I suspect Harper's private security guards were paid double to pack up and go home.”

  Julia snatched the radio transmitter from her purse. “This is Dragon Lady. Come in, Shadow, and give me your position.” She patiently waited for a response, but her only reply was static. She repeated the message four times but received no answer. “This is inexcusable!” Julia snapped.

  “Can you raise anyone else with your call box?” Pitt asked cynically.

  “No, it's only good for about two miles.”

  “Then it's time to—” Pitt stopped in midsentence as the two vans suddenly turned the corner of the block and pulled up at the curb, one on each side of the Duesenberg, which was still sitting in the driveway. They left barely enough room for the Duesenberg's wide, flowing fenders to pass into the street between them. They showed no headlights, only parking lights. The figures inside looked vague and shadowy through the darkened, solar-coated windows.

  “I knew nothing was wrong,” said Julia, squinting at Pitt with a know-it-all look. She spoke into her radio transmitter again. “Shadow, this is Dragon Lady, why did you leave your positions around the carriage house?”

  This time a voice answered almost immediately. “Sorry Dragon Lady, we thought it best to circle the block and look for any suspicious vehicles. If you are ready to leave, please give us your destination.”

  “I don't buy it,” Pitt said, eyeing the distance between the two parked vans while gauging the passing traffic on the street. “One van should have remained in position while the other circled the block. You're an agent. Why am I telling you?”

  “Peter would not have hired irresponsible people,” Julia said firmly. “He doesn't work that way.”

  “Don't answer just yet!” said Pitt harshly. Danger, like a red warning sign, began to flash in Pitt's brain. “We've been sold out. A dime will get you a dollar those are not the same men Harper hired.”

  For the first time Julia's eyes reflected a growing apprehension. “If you're right, what do I tell them?”

  If Pitt thought their lives were in deadly peril, he didn't show it. His face was cool, his mind focused. “Say we're going to my place at the Washington National Airport.”

  “You live in an airport?” Julia asked, baffled.

  “For almost twenty years. Actually, I live on the perimeter.”

  Julia shrugged in
bewilderment and gave the instructions to the men in the vans as Pitt reached under the seat and produced a cellular phone. “Now get a hold of Harper. Explain the situation and say we're on our way toward the Lincoln Memorial. Tell him I'll try to stall off our arrival until he can arrange an intercept.”

  Julia dialed a number and waited for the party on the other end to answer. After giving her identification, she was put through to Peter Harper, who was at home relaxing with his family. After she gave him Pitt's message, she sat and listened in silence before punching off the phone. She looked at Pitt expressionless. “Help is on the way. Peter also said to tell you that considering what happened at your hangar earlier this evening, he regrets not being more alert to possible problems.”

  “Is he sending law-enforcement teams to the Memorial for the intercept?”

  “He's contacting them now.”

  “You never told me what happened at your hangar.”

  “Not now.”

  Julia began to say something, thought better of it and said simply, “Shouldn't we have waited right here for help?”

  Pitt studied the vans parked quietly and ominously at the curb. “I can't sit here any longer looking like I'm waiting for the traffic to ease or our friends will begin to think we're onto them. Once we reach Massachusetts Avenue and merge into the main stream of traffic, we'll be reasonably safe. They won't risk exposure by attacking us in front of a hundred witnesses.”

  “You could call nine-one-one on your cell phone and ask them to respond with a patrol car cruising the area.”

  “If you were a dispatcher, would you buy some bizarre story and take responsibility for ordering a fleet of patrol cars to charge to the Lincoln Memorial and look for an orange and brown nineteen-twenty-nine Duesenberg that is being pursued by killers?”

  “I suppose not,” Julia admitted. “Better we left it to Harper to call out the posse.” He slipped the big stick shift on the floor into first gear and accelerated out into the street, turning to the left so the vans would lose time swinging a U-turn to follow him. He gained almost a hundred yards before he caught the lights of the lead van coming up on his rear bumper. Two blocks later he whipped the heavy Duesenberg onto Massachusetts Avenue and began snaking in and out of the nighttime traffic.