Medusa

by Clive Cussler

She followed a crushed-shell pathway past a row of neat cabins to the foot of the tower. After climbing to a platform at the top, she got a signal, but then she hesitated. Paul was most likely in a seminar, and she didn't dare interrupt him again. She tucked the phone in her pocket.

  She took in the view from the tower. The long, narrow island was shaped like a deformed pear. It was one of a group of mangrove islands whose rough texture looked like scatter rugs when seen from the air.

  Gamay climbed down from the tower, working up a good sweat in the humidity with little exertion, and walked until she came to a tangle of mangroves where the trail ended. Turning around, she explored the island's network of trails before returning to her room. After a refreshing catnap, she took a shower, and was patting her body dry when she heard laughter. Happy hour had started.

  Slipping into white shorts and a pale green cotton blouse that complemented her dark red hair, now twisted up on the back of her head, she made her way to the Dollar Bar. About a dozen people in lab coats were sitting at the bar or around tables. The conversation came to a near stop as she entered, like a scene in an old Western where the gunslinger pushes through the swinging doors into the saloon.

  Dr. Mayhew got up from a corner table, came over to the bar, and greeted Gamay with his quick smile.

  "What can I get you to drink, Dr. Trout?" he asked.

  "A Gibson would be fine," she replied.

  "Straight up or on the rocks?"

  "Straight up, please."

  Mayhew relayed the order to the bartender, a well-muscled young man with a military-style brush cut. He shook the gin, poured, and put three onions on a toothpick, making it a Gibson martini instead of a martini with olives.

  Mayhew guided Gamay and her drink back to a corner table. Pulling out a chair, he introduced her to the four people seated around the table, explaining that they were all part of the center's development team.

  The lone female at the table had short hair, and her pretty face was more boyish than feminine. Dory Bennett introduced herself, and said she was a toxicologist. She was drinking a tall mai tai.

  "What brings you to the Island of Dr. Moreau?" asked the woman.

  "I heard about this wonderful bar." Gamay glanced around at the practically bare walls, and with a straight face added, "It seems that a dollar doesn't go as far as it used to."

  There was a ripple of laughter around the table.

  "Ah, a woman scientist with a sense of humor," said Isaac Klein, a chemist.

  "Dr. Klein, are you saying I don't have a sense of humor?" Dr. Bennett asked. "I find your scientific papers very funny."

  The good-natured ribbing drew another round of laughter.

  Dr. Mayhew said, "Dr. Bennett forgot to mention that the center's assistant director is a woman as well: Lois Mitchell."

  "Will I get to meet her?" Gamay asked.

  "Not until she gets back from—" Dr. Bennett caught herself midsentence. "She's away… in the field."

  "Lois is working with Dr. Kane," Mayhew said. "When she's here, the island is not as male dominated as might appear at first glance."

  Gamay pretended she hadn't seen Mayhew gently nudge Bennett's arm and looked around at the other tables in the room.

  "Is this the lab's entire staff?" she asked.

  "This is a skeleton crew," Mayhew said. "Most of our colleagues are working in the field."

  "It must be a very large field," she said in a lame attempt at humor.

  There was deafening silence.

  Finally, Mayhew showed his teeth.

  "Yes, I suppose it is," he said.

  He glanced around at the others, who took his comment as a signal to force grins on their faces.

  Gamay had the feeling that they were all connected to one another with wires and that Mayhew had the switch in his hand.

  "I met another woman on the dock," she said. "I believe her name was Dr. Lee."

  "Oh, yes, Dr. Song Lee," Mayhew said. "I didn't count her because she's a visiting scientist and not regular staff. She's extremely shy, and even dines in her cabin by herself."

  Chuck Hallum, who headed the immunology section, said, "She's Harvard educated, and one of the most brilliant immunologists I've ever met. Speaking of off islanders, what really brings you to Bonefish Key?"

  "My interest in marine biology," Gamay said. "I've read in the scientific journals about the groundbreaking work you've been doing in biomedicine. I was planning to visit friends in Tampa and couldn't pass up the opportunity to take a firsthand look."

  "Are you familiar with the history of the marine center?" asked Mayhew.

  "I understand that you're a nonprofit funded by a foundation, but I don't know much beyond that," Gamay said.

  Mayhew nodded. "When Dr. Kane started the lab, his initial funding came from the bequest of a University of Florida alumna who had lost a close relative to disease. There were some legal challenges to the will from disgruntled family members, and the funding was about to dry up when he formed a foundation and started attracting money from other sources. Dr. Kane envisioned Bonefish Key as the ideal research center because it would be away from the hubbub of a busy university."

  A bell rang to announce dinner, and they moved into the dining room, the bartender taking over as waiter. The meal prepared by the chef was fresh-caught redfish, with a pecan crust and seared to perfection, washed down with a delicate French sauvignon blanc. Conversation around the table was on the light side, with little talk about the work being done on the island.

  After dinner, the scientists moved out onto the veranda and the patio. There was more chatter, almost none of it having to do with the lab. As darkness deepened, most drifted off to their cabins.

  "We hit the sack early here," Mayhew explained, "and we're up with the sun. We close the bar, so there's not much action after ten o'clock."

  Mayhew asked Gamay a few more polite questions about her work at NUMA, then excused himself and said he would see her at breakfast. Any remaining staff followed, leaving Gamay alone on the veranda to absorb the sights and sounds of the subtropical night.

  Gamay decided to call Paul, and she followed the same path to the water tower that she had taken earlier. The crushed white shells glowed under the brilliant moon. She started up the tower, only to stop in midstep. A female voice was coming from the platform. Speaking in what sounded like Chinese.

  The conversation ended after a minute or two, and Gamay heard soft footfalls descending. Gamay backed down the ladder and hid behind a palmetto. She watched Dr. Lee descend the ladder, then hurry off down the path.

  Gamay followed the path to the cabins. All were dark except for one, and, as she watched, the light in its window went out. She stood there looking at the darkened cabin, wondering what Nancy Drew would do in a case like this.

  She decided to go back to the water tower. There, she left a voice mail on Paul's phone, saying she had arrived safely, then headed back to her room.

  She sat on her screened-in porch and tallied up the impressions of the few short hours she had spent on the island. Her natural powers of intuition had been honed by years as a scientific observer, first as a nautical archaeologist, then as a marine biologist.

  She had picked up on Dooley's suggestion that there was more than meets the eye on Bonefish Key. The man who had mixed her drinks looked as if he had stepped out of the pages of Soldier of Fortune magazine. Then Mayhew and his people were laughingly clumsy in their attempts to be evasive whenever talk touched on Dr. Kane, the center's mysterious field project, and the whereabouts of the rest of the staff. She was intrigued, too, by the young Asian scientist who had given her the cold shoulder at the dock, and how Mayhew had conveniently forgotten to mention Dr. Song Lee. And how the other scientists avoided Gamay as if she were a leper.

  Austin told her to look for anything funny on the island.

  "How about weird, Kurt old boy?" she muttered to herself.

  Based on Austin's standard, Bonefish Key should be a barrel o
f laughs. But as she sat in the darkness listening to the sounds of the night, Gamay was beginning to understand why Dooley hadn't smiled when he welcomed her to paradise.

  CHAPTER 19

  Detective-Supt. Randolph's good-natured nonchalance was misleading. He seemed to be everywhere at once. He hovered over the forensic experts who photographed the crime scene and collected evidence, listened to the witness interviews for discrepancies, and went over the Beebe with a very large fine-tooth comb.

  All he needed to complete the picture was a deerstalker hat and meerschaum pipe.

  The detective-superintendent and his team worked late into the night before they took advantage of the temporary sleeping quarters that Gannon had arranged for them. The next day, at Randolph's request, the captain moved the ship closer to the Marine Police Service station on the mainland. The bodies were transported to the pathology lab for autopsies.

  After Austin and Zavala gave their interviews, they cleaned up the bathysphere and inspected it for damage. Except for places where the paint had been scraped away from the unexpected plunge to the bottom of the sea, the doughty little diving bell had come through its ordeal in fine fashion.

  Austin wished the same could be said for the Humongous. He supervised the removal of the wreckage by crane from the deck of the Beebe to a flatbed truck, then to a garage on the mainland.

  Satisfied that this last piece of major physical evidence was in police hands, Detective-Superintendent Randolph thanked Gannon and his crew for their cooperation and said the ship was free to leave. He said he would handle the questions from the dozens of reporters who were swarming around the station now that word of the attack had leaked out.

  Randolph gave Austin and Zavala a ride in his police car to the airport, where the NUMA jet they would travel on to Washington was parked. Zavala was an experienced pilot certified to fly small jets, and by late afternoon he was taxiing the plane up to a hangar at Reagan National Airport reserved for NUMA aircraft. Austin and Zavala then went their separate ways, agreeing to touch base the following day.

  Austin lived in a converted Victorian boathouse, part of a larger estate that he bought when he commuted to CIA headquarters in nearby Langley. At the time, it was what the real-estate agents called a fixer-upper. It had reeked of mildew and old age, but its location on the banks of the Potomac River persuaded Austin to open his wallet and spend countless hours of his own fixing it up.

  Following his usual ritual, Austin dropped his duffel bag in the front hall, went in the kitchen and grabbed a cold bottle of beer from the refrigerator, then walked out on the deck to fill his lungs with the damp-mud fragrance of the Potomac.

  He tossed back the beer, then went into his study and plunked himself down in front of his computer. The study was an oasis for Austin. He likened himself to ship captains who grow sick of the sea and retire to Kansas or anyplace other than the ocean when their careers are over. The sea was a demanding mistress, and it was good to get away from her strong embrace. Except for a few paintings of ships by primitive artists and photos of his small fleet of boats, there was little in his house that would indicate his connection to the world's premier ocean-study agency.

  The walls were taken up by bookshelves housing his collection of philosophy books. While he liked to read the old philosophers for their wisdom, their writings also provided the moral anchor that kept him from going adrift. The men on the Beebe were not the first he had killed. Nor, unfortunately, would they be the last.

  Over the fireplace was a matched pair of dueling pistols, part of an extensive collection that he considered his main vice. While he admired the pistols for their technical innovations, they also reminded him of the role that chance plays in life-or-death situations.

  He plucked a Miles Davis record from his equally extensive jazz collection and put it on the turntable. He sat back in his chair, listening to a couple of cuts from the seminal Birth of the Cool, then flexed his fingers and began typing. While the details were still fresh in his mind, he wanted to pound out a first draft of his report on the attack on the B3.

  Shortly before midnight, Austin crawled into his bed high in the boathouse turret. He awoke refreshed around seven the next morning. He made a pot of Jamaican coffee and toasted a frozen bagel found in his pitifully empty refrigerator. Thus fortified, he returned to his report.

  He made surprisingly few changes to it. After a quick review, he sent his words off on electronic wings to NUMA director Dirk Pitt.

  Austin decided to reward his hard work with a row on the Potomac. Rowing was his main form of exercise when he was home and was largely responsible for packing even more muscle onto his broad shoulders. He dragged his lightweight racing shell from its rack under the boathouse.

  As the slender shell skimmed over the river, his measured scull strokes and the beauty of the river quieted his mind. When he had cleared away the mental clutter—the sabotage of the B3, his fight with the AUV, the night raid on the Beebe—he was still left with an undeniable conclusion: somebody wanted Max Kane dead and would go to extreme lengths to make it happen.

  After his row, Austin stowed the shell, showered off the sweat from his exertions, shaved, and called Paul Trout.

  Trout told Austin that Gamay had left for Bonefish Key the day before. He had received a voice mail confirming her arrival but had yet to talk to her.

  Austin then gave Trout a condensed version of his report of the attacks on the bathysphere.

  "Now I know why you told Gamay that the dive was memorable," Trout said. "Where do we go from here?"

  "I'm hopeful Gamay will turn up something on Doc Kane. He's our major lead right now. Joe and I will compare notes and figure out our next move."

  Austin said he would keep Trout posted, and then he thawed out another bagel to make a tuna-fish sandwich. He ate the sandwich in his kitchen, wistfully reminiscing about the wonderful meals he had eaten in the world's capitals, when the phone trilled.

  He checked the caller ID. Then he pushed the SPEAKER button, and said, "Hello, Joe, I was just about to call you."

  Zavala got right to the point.

  "Can you come over right away?" he asked.

  "The Zavala black book has more women listed in it than the D.C. directory, so I know you're not lonely. What's going on?"

  "I've got something I want to show you."

  Austin couldn't miss the unmistakable note of excitement in Zavala's soft-spoken voice.

  "I'll be over in an hour," Austin said.

  At sea, Austin's typical work outfit was a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and sandals. The switch from oceangoing to land creature always came as a shock. Shoes felt like vises attached to his feet, legs seemed imprisoned in tan cotton slacks, the collar of his blue dress shirt chafed. While he would slip on his navy blue linen blazer, he refused to wear a tie. It felt like a noose around his muscular neck.

  Unlike Dirk Pitt, who collected cars and seemed to have one for every occasion, Austin put his passion into his antique dueling pistols and instead drove a turquoise-colored Jeep Cherokee from the NUMA motor pool.

  Suburban traffic was piling up, but Austin knew the short-cuts, and slightly less than an hour after Joe's call he pulled up in front of a small building in Arlington.

  At the front door of the former library, he punched the entry code into a keypad and stepped into the main living level. The space, which once had housed stacks, now looked like the interior of an adobe building in Santa Fe. The floors were dark red Mexican tile, the doorways arched, and niches in the whitewashed walls displayed colorful folk art that Zavala had collected on trips to his ancestral home in Morales. His father, a skilled carpenter, had made the beautifully carved furniture.

  Austin called out Zavala's name.

  "I'm down in Frankenstein's lab," Zavala yelled up from his basement, where he spent his spare time when he wasn't tinkering with his Corvette.

  Austin descended the stairs to the brightly lit workshop. Zavala had utilized every square inch of
the former book-storage room for his gleaming collection of lathes, drills, and milling machines. Odd-shaped metal parts whose functions were known only to Zavala hung from the walls next to black-and-white poster engravings of old engines.

  Mounted in glass cases were scale models of the cutting-edge underwater vehicles Zavala had designed for NUMA. A Stuart model steam engine he was restoring sat on a table. Zavala never hesitated to get his hands greasy when it came to tinkering with mechanical contrivances or creating new ones, but today he was facing a computer screen with his back to Austin.

  Austin glanced around at the bewildering shrine Zavala had established to moving parts.

  "Ever think of continuing where Dr. Frankenstein left off?" he asked.

  Zavala spun in his chair, his lips cracked in their usual slight smile.

  "Making monsters out of junk parts is ancient history, Kurt. Robotics is where it's at. Isn't that right, Juri?"

  A Tyrannosaurus rex, around ten inches high, with plastic skin the color and texture of an avocado, stood next to the computer. It waggled its head, shuffled its feet, rolled its eyes, opened its toothy mouth, and said, "Sí, Señor Zavala."

  Austin pulled up a stool.

  "Who's your green friend?"

  "Juri, short for Jurassic Park. Got the little guy over the Internet. He's programmed for about twenty functions. I tinkered with his innards to make him speak Spanish."

  "A bilingual T-Rex," Austin said. "I'm impressed."

  "It wasn't that difficult," Zavala said. "His circuits are relatively simple. He can move and bite, and he can respond to external stimuli. Give him a little more muscle, bigger teeth, optical sensors, put him in a waterproof jacket, and you have something like the mechanical shark that thought an Austinburger would make a tasty snack."

  Zavala wheeled his chair aside to give Austin a clear view of his monitor. Floating in a slow rotation against a black background was a three-dimensional neon-blue image of the manta-ray AUV that had cut the bathysphere cable and attacked Austin.

  Austin let out a low whistle.