Текст книги "Medusa"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

CHAPTER 18

AS DOOLEY ESCORTED GAMAY DOWN THE DOCK TO THE ISLAND, they encountered a young Asian woman coming their way.

“Afternoon, Dr. Song Lee,” Dooley said. “I got your kayak all ready for you before I made my run to Pine Island.”

“Thank you, Dooley.”

Lee’s eyes darted to Gamay, who assessed her expression as neither friendly nor unfriendly. Neutral, maybe.

“This is Dr. Morgan-Trout,” Dooley said. “She’s visiting the island for a couple of days. Maybe you two could go kayaking together.”

“Yes, of course,” Lee answered without enthusiasm. “Pleased to meet you, Doctor. Enjoy your stay.”

Lee brushed Gamay’s extended hand with hers, and continued along the dock.

“Has Dr. Lee been here long?” Gamay asked.

“A few months,” Dooley said. “She doesn’t talk much about what she’s doing, and I don’t ask.”

He stopped at the end of the dock.

“This is as far as I’m allowed to go,” he said. “Give me a call if you need me. Remember, the only phone service from the island is from the top of the water tower.”

Gamay thanked Dooley, and watched his boat until it was out of sight. Then she picked up her duffel bag and climbed the stairs to the patio. The front door of the lodge burst open just then, and a man in a white lab coat came springing down the stairs from the veranda to the patio. He had the painfully thin physique of a runner. The stiffly extended handshake he gave Gamay was as limp and damp as a dead fish.

“Dr. Morgan-Trout, I presume,” he said, flashing a quick, precise smile. “I’m Dr. Charles Mayhew, the acting keeper of this madhouse while Dr. Kane is away.”

Gamay guessed that Mayhew had been watching for her arrival from the lodge. She smiled. “Thank you for having me as a guest on the island.”

“Our pleasure,” Mayhew oozed. “You have no idea how thrilled we were to learn that NUMA had invited Dr. Kane to dive in the bathysphere. I watched him make the dive. Too bad the television broadcast was cut short.”

“Will I get a chance to meet Dr. Kane?” Gamay asked.

“He’s involved with a field project,” Mayhew said. “I’ll show you your room.”

They climbed to the veranda and passed through wide double doors to the wood-paneled lobby. Beyond the lobby was a large, sunny dining room furnished with rattan chairs and tables of dark wood. Screened-in windows wrapped around the room on three sides. A smaller room off the dining room was called the Dollar Bar, harkening back to the days when guests signed dollar bills and stuck them on the wall. The bills got blasted off in the hurricane, Mayhew explained.

Gamay’s room was off a hallway a few steps from the bar.

Despite Mayhew’s earlier claim to having a full house, she was the only guest staying in the lodge. Her simple room had natural wood walls, an old metal-frame bed, and a dresser, and it projected a look of seedy comfort. A second door opened onto a screened-in porch that offered a view of the water through the palmettos. Gamay put her duffel on the bed.

“Happy hour starts in the Dollar Bar at five,” Mayhew said. “Make yourself at home. If you’d like to take a stroll, there are nature trails all over the island. A few areas have been restricted to avoid contamination from the outside world, but they are clearly marked.”

Mayhew bounded off with his bouncy Reebok stride. Gamay flipped open her cell phone, to let Paul know she had arrived, only to remember that Dooley said the only place with service was the water tower.

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 veryfunny.”

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 reallybrings 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 Fortunemagazine. 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 funnyon the island.

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

Based on Austin’s standard, Bonefish Key should be a barrel of 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-SUPERINTENDENT 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 Beebewith 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 Beebeto 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 Beebewere 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, “Si, Senor 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.

“That’s it.Where did you find this thing?”

“I went back to the original video from the Hardsuit camera.”

Zavala clicked his mouse to replay the skirmish with the AUV. There was a quick succession of images, a confusion of bubbles, and glimpses of the vehicle.

“I didn’t give you much to go on,” Austin said.

“You gave me enough. I slowed the action and culled details here and there. I used those bits to create a rough outline of the AUV and then compared it with the automated underwater vehicles in my database. I’ve got info on practically everything self-propelled ever made, but at first I couldn’t find this one anywhere.”

“My first impression was that it resembled the Manta, the sub that the Navy developed for mine detection and destruction.”

“Not a bad call,” Zavala said. “Here’s the Manta. There are some of the same features that you get when you have a computer-generated design. But your guy didn’t have the launching pads for mini mine sniffers and torpedoes like the Navy’s model.”

“Good thing. Neither one of us would be here if our little friend had been armed with the hard stuff.”

“After I breezed through military models, I went to scientific applications. Most of the AUVs I found are torpedo-shaped, like Woods Hole Oceanographic’s ABE or Scripps’s Rover. After ruling out military and scientific, I looked to industry. But oil, gas, and communications didn’t pan out, so I tried commercial fishing.”

He called up an article from a commercial-fishing magazine.

Austin looked at the photos with the article and smiled.

“Jackpot,”he said.

“The vehicle in the magazine piece is used to film experimental fishnet designs,” Zavala said.

“That would account for the manta shape,” Austin noted. “You’d need something flat and smooth to get under the nets, no projecting fins that might catch.”

“The pincers allow the AUV to cut its way through tangled nets,” Zavala said. “It was used by a Chinese company, Pyramid Seafood Exports.”

“ Chinese?That’s significant. The men who attacked the ship were Asian. The weapons they carried were Chinese.”

“I Googled the name,” Zavala said. “Pyramid is headquartered in Shanghai, but they’re a global company.”

Austin said, “Why would a legitimate fishing company be involved in the attacks on the Beebeand the bathysphere?”

“I may be able to answer that question after seeing my friend Caitlin Lyons at the FBI’s Asian Crime Unit later today,” Zavala said.

Austin had to admit that Zavala’s wide network of women friends sometimes came in handy.

“Have you figured out how the attack on the B3 may have been set up?” Austin said.

“The vehicle could have been launched from any of the press and party boats watching the dive,” Zavala said.

“Maybe someone saw the launch,” Austin said. “We could get Detective-Superintendent Randolph and the Bermuda Coast Guard to ask around.”

“That’s not a bad idea, but my guess is that the vehicle went into the water hours before the bathysphere dive and was put into a sleep mode, programmed to wake up after a certain time to begin the hunt. It could have been directed from the surface, in the general area of the Beebe.”

“How would it have picked its target?”

“Sonar combined with the optical sensors would look for a vertical line. The AUV homes in on the B3’s tether. Snip-snip.There goes the bathysphere.”

“And there goes Doc Kane and the mysterious research project that was going to affect everybody on the planet.”

“Any word from Kane since he took off into the wide blue yonder?” Zavala asked.

“I’ve tried a number of official and nonofficial channels,” Austin answered. “Bonefish Key may be our only lead.”

“Doubt he’s there. Somebody wanted him to die a horrible death at the bottom. Bonefish Key would be the first place to look after finding out he wasn’t on the Beebe.”

A look of alarm crossed Austin’s tanned face.

He dug his cell phone out of a pocket and called Paul Trout.

“Have you heard from Gamay?” he asked.

“I’ve been trying to reach her but my calls won’t go through,” Trout said.

“Keep trying,” Austin said. “I’m at Zavala’s place. I may have been too casual when I asked you to poke around Kane’s lab. Gamay should be alerted to possible danger from the people who wanted to take down Kane.”

Trout said, “Don’t worry, Kurt, Gamay can take care of herself.”

“I know she can,” Austin said. “Just tell her to be careful and not take any chances.”

HAVING DONE ALL HE could to warn the Trouts, Austin put in a call to NUMA and asked for a dossier on the Pyramid Trading Company. The agency’s computer center, under the supervision of cybergenius Hiram Yeager, was one of the greatest repositories of specialized information in the world. The powerful computers at NUMA were linked with databases around the world and in an instant could churn out reams of information on any subject having to do with the world’s oceans.

Austin said he would talk to Zavala after he’d studied the results of the computer search. He got back in his Jeep and drove to the thirty-story green-glass tower, overlooking the Potomac, that housed NUMA’s headquarters. He parked in the underground garage and took the elevator up to his Spartanly furnished office.

A thick file was sitting on his desk with a note from Yeager telling him to “Enjoy!”

He opened the file, but had only made it past the first page when his telephone buzzed. Caller ID couldn’t identify the number.

He realized why after he picked up the receiver and heard the crisp voice of James Sandecker, the founder and longtime director of NUMA before being appointed Vice President of the United States when the elected second-in-command died. As was his usual style, Sandecker got right to the point.

“Pitt forwarded your report on the B3 incident to me. What in blazes is going on, Kurt?”

Austin could imagine Sandecker’s crackling blue eyes and flaming red Vandyke beard, fixtures around NUMA for years.

“I wish I knew, Admiral,” Austin said, using Sandecker’s hard-earned Navy title over his more recent political one.

“How is Zavala faring after his ordeal?”

“Joe’s fine, Admiral.”

“That’s fortunate. If Zavala had bought the farm, half the female population of Washington would go into mourning and we’d have to shut down the whole damned town . . . Then this attack on the Beebe. . . Shocking.It was a miracle no one was hurt. Are you making any progress?”

“We think there’s a Chinese connection,” Austin said. “The AUV that went after me and the B3 is the same model used by a Chinese fishing company that’s part of a multinational called Pyramid Trading. The men who attacked the ship carried Chinese weapons and were Asian. Joe will chase down any possible criminal connection. I’ll check with the Bermuda police to see if their forensics turned up anything we can use. We think Doc Kane’s research may hold the key to everything. Gamay is on Bonefish Key checking out the lab.”

Sandecker chuckled.

“I don’t know how Gamay wangled her way in, but she’s not likely to learn a thing. The work they’re doing is highly classified.”

“Sounds like you know what the lab is up to.”

“More than I’d like. This is part of something very big, Kurt, and we’ll have to move quickly. The situation is reaching critical mass. I’m setting up a meeting that will explain things. I’ll call you in about an hour, so stand by. In the meantime, pack your bags for a trip.”

“I still haven’t unpacked from my last assignment.”

“That’s good. You and Joe will have to move out on short notice. I’m still working out the details, don’t have time to get into it now. Don’t ever let anyone tell you the job of Veep is as worthless as a bucket of warm spit.”

Sandecker hung up without another word. Austin stared at the phone in his hand.

He pushed speculative thoughts aside and soon was engrossed in the file on his desk. It didn’t take him very long to learn that Pyramid was no ordinary corporation.