BioShock: Rapture

Park Avenue, New York City 1946

Almost a year later…

Bill McDonagh was riding an elevator up to the top of the Andrew Ryan Arms—but he felt like he was sinking under the sea. He was toting a box of pipe fittings in one hand, tool kit in the other. He’d been sent so hastily by the maintenance manager he didn’t even have the bloody name of his customer. But his mind was on earlier doings in another building, a small office building in lower Manhattan. He’d taken the morning off from his plumbing business to interview for an assistant engineer job. The pay would start low, but the job would take him in a more ambitious direction. They had looked at him with only the faintest interest when he’d walked into the Feeben, Leiber, and Quiffe Engineering Firm. The two interviewers were a couple of snotty wankers—one of them was Feeben Junior. They seemed bored by the time they called him in, and their faint flicker of interest evaporated completely when he started talking about his background. He had done his best to speak in American phraseology, to suppress his accent. But he knew it slipped out. They were looking for some snappy young chap out of New York University, not a cockney blighter who’d worked his way through the East London School of Engineering and Mechanical Vocation.

Bill heard them say it, through the door, after they’d dismissed him: “Another limey grease monkey…”

All right then. So he was a grease monkey. Just a mechanic and, lately, a freelance plumbing contractor. A dirty little job screwin’ pipes for the nobs. Heading up to some rich bloke’s penthouse. There was no shame in it.

But there wasn’t much money in it either, working on assignment for Chinowski’s Maintenance. It’d be a long time before he could save up enough to start a big contracting outfit of his own. He had a couple of lads hired on, from time to time, but not the big contracting and engineering company he’d always envisioned. And Mary Louise had made it clear as polished glass she was not really interested in marrying a glorified plumber.

“I had enough of fellas that think they’re the cat’s meow because they can fix the terlet,” she said. A pretty girl from the Bronx was Mary Louise Fensen and raring to go. But not terribly bright, after all. Probably drive him barmy anyway.

The moment he’d got home the phone rang, Bud Chinowski, barking about getting his ass to an address in Manhattan, on Park Avenue. Their building maintenance was AWOL—probably drunk somewhere—and the Bigshot at the penthouse needed plumbers “fast as you can drag your lazy ass over there. We’ve got three bathrooms to finish installing. Get those witless wrench-jockeys of yours over there too.”

He’d called Roy Phinn and Pablo Navarro to go on ahead of him. Then he’d changed out of the ill-fitting suit, into the gray, grease-stained coveralls. “Limey grease monkey…” he’d murmured, buttoning up.

And here he was, wishing he’d taken time for a cigarette before coming—he couldn’t smoke in a posh flat like this without permission. He stepped glumly out of the elevator, into an antechamber to the penthouse, his toolbox clanking at his side. The little wood-paneled room was scarcely bigger than the elevator. An artfully paneled mahogany door with a brass knob, embossed with an eagle, was its only feature—besides a small metal grid next to the door. He tried the knob. Locked. He shrugged, and knocked on the door. Waiting, he started to feel a little claustrophobic.

“’Ello?” he called. “Plumbin’ contractor! From Chinowski’s! ’Ello!” Don’t drop your Hs, you bastard, he told himself. “Hel-lo!”

A crackling sound, and a low, forceful voice emanated from the grid. “That the other plumber, is it?”

“Uh…” He bent and spoke briskly into the grid. “It is, sir!”

“No need to shout into the intercom!”

The door clicked within itself—and to Bill’s amazement it didn’t swing inward but slid into the wall up to the knob. He saw there was a metal runner in the floor and, at the edge of the door, a band of steel. It was wood on the outside, steel inside. Like this man was worried someone might try to fire a bullet through it.

No one was visible on the other side of the open doorway. He saw another hallway, carpeted, with some rather fine old paintings, one of which might be by a Dutch master, if he remembered anything from his trips to the British Museum. A Tiffany lamp stood on an inlaid table, glowing like a gem.

This toff’s got plenty of the ready, Bill thought.

He walked down the hall, into a large, plush sitting room: luxurious sofas, a big unlit fireplace, more choice paintings and fine lamps. A grand piano, its wood polished almost mirrorlike, stood in a corner. On an intricately carved table was an enormous display of fresh flowers in an antique Chinese jade vase. He’d never seen flowers like them before. And the decorations on the tables…

He was staring at a lamp that appeared to be a gold sculpture of a satyr chasing an underdressed young woman when a voice spoke sharply to his right. “The other two are already at work in the back… The main bathroom’s through here.” Bill turned and saw a gent in the archway to the next room already turning away from him. The man wore a gray suit, his dark hair oiled back. Must be the butler. Bill could hear the other two lads, faintly, in the back of the place, arguing about fittings.

Bill went through the archway as the man in the suit answered a chiming gold and ivory telephone on a table in front of a big window displaying the heroic spires of Manhattan. Opposite the window was a mural, done in the sweeping modern-industrial style, of burly men building a tower that rose up out of the sea. Overseeing the workers in the mural was a slim dark-haired man with blueprints in his hand.

Bill looked for the WC, saw a hallway with a gleaming steel and white-tile bathroom at its end.

That’s my destination, Bill thought bitterly. The crapper. A fine crapper it might be, one of three. My destiny is to keep their WCs in working order.

Then he caught himself. No self-pity, now, Bill McDonagh. Play the cards you’re dealt, the way your Da taught you.

Bill started toward the door to the bathroom hall, but his attention was caught by the half-whispered urgency of the man’s voice as he growled at the telephone.

“Eisley, you will not make excuses! If you cannot deal with these people I will find someone who has the courage! I’ll find someone brave enough to scare away this pack of hungry dogs! They will not find my campfire undefended!”

The voice’s stridency caught Bill’s attention—but something else about it stirred him too. He’d heard that distinctive voice before. Maybe in a newsreel?

Bill paused at the door to the hall and had a quick look at the man pressing the phone to his ear. It was the man in the mural—the one holding the blueprint: a straight-backed man, maybe early forties, medium height, two thin, crisply straight strokes of mustache matched by the dark strokes of his eyebrows, a prominent cleft chin. He even wore a suit nearly identical to the one in the painting. And that strong, intense face—it was a face Bill knew from the newspapers. He’d seen his name over the front door of this very edifice. It never occurred to him that Andrew Ryan might actually live here. The tycoon owned a significant chunk of America’s coal, its second biggest railroad, and Ryan Oil. He’d always pictured a man like that whiling the days away playing golf on a country estate.

“Taxes are theft, Eisley! What? No, no need—I fired her. I’ve got a new secretary starting today—I’m elevating someone in reception. Elaine something. No, I don’t want anyone from accounting, that’s the whole problem, people like that are too interested in my money, they have no discretion! Sometimes I wonder if there’s anyone I can trust. Well they’ll get not a penny out of me more than absolutely necessary, and if you can’t see to it I’ll find a lawyer who can!”

Ryan slammed the phone down—and Bill hurried on to the bathroom.

Bill found the toilet in place but not quite hooked up: an ordinary Standard toilet, no gold seat on it. Looked like it needed proper pipe fittings, mostly. Seemed a waste of time to send three men out for this, but these posh types liked everything done yesterday.

He was aware, as he worked, that Ryan was pacing back and forth in the room outside the hall to the bathroom, occasionally muttering to himself.

Bill was kneeling to one side of the toilet, using a spanner to tighten a pipe joint, when he became aware of a looming presence. He looked up to see Andrew Ryan standing near him.

“Didn’t intend to startle you.” Ryan flashed his teeth in the barest smile and went on, “Just curious how you’re getting along.”

Bill was surprised at this familiarity from a man so above him—and by the change in tone. Ryan had been blaring angrily into the phone but minutes before. Now he seemed calm, his eyes glittering with curiosity.

“Getting on with it, sir. Soon have it done.”

“Is that a brass fitting you’re putting in there? I think the other two were using tin.”

“Well, I’ll be sure they didn’t, sir,” said Bill, beginning not to care what impression he made. “Don’t want to be bailing out your loo once a fortnight. Tin’s not reliable, like. If it’s the price you’re worried about, I’ll pick up the cost of the brass, so not to worry, squire…”

“And why would you do that?”

“Well, Mr. Ryan, no man bails water out of privies built by Bill McDonagh.”

Ryan looked at him with narrowed eyes, rubbing his chin. Bill shrugged and focused on the pipes, feeling strangely disconcerted. He could almost feel the heat from the intensity of Ryan’s personality. He could smell his cologne, pricey and subtle.

“There you are,” Bill said, tightening with the wrench one last time for good luck. “Right as the mail. These pipes, anyhow.”

“Do you mean the job’s done?”

“I’ll see how the lads are getting on, but I’d guess it’s very nearly done, sir.”

He expected Ryan to wander back to his own work, but the tycoon remained, watching as Bill started the water flow, checked it for integrity, and cleaned up his tools and leftover materials. He took the receipt book from his pocket, scribbled out the cost. There’d been no time for an estimate, so he had a free hand. He wished he were the sort to pad the bill, since he gave a percentage to Chinowski and Ryan was rich, but he wasn’t made that way.

“Really!” Ryan said, looking at the bill, eyebrows raised.

Bill just waited. Strange that Andrew Ryan—one of the richest, most powerful men in America—was personally involved in dealing with a plumber, scrutinizing a minor bill. But Ryan stood there, looking first at the bill, then at him.

“This is quite reasonable,” Ryan said at last. “You might have stretched your time, inflated the bill. People assume they can take advantage of wealthy men.”

Bill was mildly insulted. “I believe in being paid, sir, even being paid well—but only for the work I do.”

Again that flicker of a smile, there and gone. The keen, searching gaze. “I can see I’ve struck a nerve,” Ryan said, “because you’re a man like me! A man of pride and capability who knows who he is.”

A long, appraising look. Then Ryan turned on his heel and strode out.

Bill shrugged, gathered up the rest of his things, and returned to the mural room, expecting to see some Ryan underling awaiting him with a check. But it was Ryan, holding the check out to him.

“Thank you, sir.” Bill took it, tucked it into a pocket, nodded to the man—was he mad, staring at him like that?—and started hastily for the front door.

He’d just gotten to the sitting room when Ryan called to him from the archway. “Mind if I ask you a question?”

Bill paused. Hoping it didn’t turn out that Andrew Ryan was a poof. He’d had enough of upper-class poofs trying to pick him up.

“Where do you think a man’s rights should end?” Ryan asked.

“His rights, sir?” A philosophical question asked of a plumbing contractor? The old toff really was mad. McDonagh humored him. “Rights are rights. That’s like asking which fingers a man should do without. I need all ten, me.”

“I like that. Now—just suppose you lose one or two fingers? What would you do? You’d think yourself unable to work, and you’d have a right to a handout, as it were, eh?”

Bill hefted the toolbox as he considered. “No. I’d find something to do, with eight fingers. Or four. Make my own way. I’d like to be able to use my talents more—that’s right enough. But I don’t take handouts.”

“And what talents are those? Not that I discount a gift for plumbing. But—is that what you mean?”

“No sir. Not as such. I’m by way of being an engineer. In a simple way, mind. Could be I’ll start me own… my own… building operation. Not so young anymore, but still—I see things in my mind I’d like to build…” He broke off, embarrassed at being so personal with this man. But there was something about Ryan that made you want to open up and talk.

“You’re British. Not one of the… the gentry types, certainly.”

“Right as rain, sir.” Bill wondered if he’d get the brush-off now. There was a touch of defensiveness when he added, “Grew up ’round Cheapside, like.”

Ryan chuckled dryly. “You’re touchy about your origins. I know the feeling. I too am an immigrant. I was very young when I came here from Russia. I have learned to control my speech—reinvented myself. A man must make of his life a ladder that he never ceases to climb—if you’re not rising, you are slipping down the rungs, my friend.

“But by ascending,” Ryan went on, shoving his hands in his jacket pockets and taking a pensive turn about the room, “one makes one’s own class, do you see? Eh? One classes oneself!”

Bill had been about to make his excuses and walk out—but that stopped him. Ryan had articulated something he fiercely believed.

“Couldn’t agree more, sir!” Bill blurted. “That’s why I’ve come to the USA. Anyone can rise up, here. Right to the top!”

Ryan grunted skeptically. “Yes, and no. There are some who don’t have the stuff. But it’s not the ‘class’ or race or creed that they were born into that decides it. It’s something inside a man. And that’s something you have. You’re a true mugwump, a real individual. We’ll talk again, you and I…”

Bill nodded good-bye, not believing for a second that they’d speak again. He figured a rich bloke took it into his mind to have a natter with “the little people,” patronizing a chap to prove to themselves how fair and kindly they could be.

He headed to check on Pablo and Roy before he made his way to the lobby and went about his business. This had been an interesting encounter—it’d be a story to tell in the pub, though no one would likely believe him. Andrew Ryan? Who else did you hobnob with—Howard Hughes? Yer ol’ pal William Randolph Hearst?

Bill McDonagh’s head was only moderately sore the next morning, and he answered his flat’s clangorous telephone readily enough, hoping for work. A good sweat always cleared his head.

“This Bill McDonagh?” said a gruff, unfamiliar voice.

“Right enough.”

“My name’s Sullivan. Head of Security for Andrew Ryan.”

“Security? What’s ’e say I’ve done, then? Look here, mate, I’m no crook—”

“No no, it’s nothing like that—he just set me to find you. Chinowski didn’t want to give up the number. Claimed he lost it. Tried taking the job himself. I had to get it from our friends at the phone company.”

“What job?”

“Why, if you want it, Andrew Ryan’s offering you a job as his new building engineer… Starting immediately.”

The Docks, New York City 1946

Sullivan sometimes wished he were back working the Meatball Beat in Little Italy. Ryan paid him well, sure, but having to dodge G-men on the docks was not his idea of a good time.

It was a bracing, misty evening, supposed to be spring but didn’t feel much like it. The waves were choppy and the gulls were huddled on the pylons with their beaks under their wings, their feathers ruffled in the cold northeast wind. Three hulking great ships were tied up at the beat-up old dock, all freighters. This was not one of the fashionable wharfs, with passenger liners and pretty girls waving hankies. Just a couple of red-faced, sour-looking salts in pea jackets tramping by, trailing cigarette smoke, boots crunching on old gull droppings.

Sullivan walked up to the gangplank of the Olympian, the largest of the three ships in the fleet Ryan had bought for his secretive North Atlantic project. He waved at the armed guard, Pinelli, huddled into a big coat on the top deck. Pinelli glanced down at him and nodded.

Ruben Greavy, head engineer for the Wales brothers, was waiting on the lower deck at the top of the gangplank. Greavy was a fussy, pinch-mouthed, bespectacled little man in a rather showy cream-colored overcoat.

Sullivan hesitated, glancing back down the dock—just making out the dark figure of the man who’d been following him. The guy in the slouch hat and trench coat was about seventy yards down the wharf, pretending to be interested in the ships creaking at their moorings. Sullivan had hoped he’d dodged the son of a bitch earlier, but there he was, lighting a pipe for a bit of realistic spycraft.

The pipe smoker had been tailing Sullivan since he’d gotten a cab at Grand Central and maybe before. There wasn’t much the guy could learn following him here. The ship was already loaded. The feds would never get an inspection warrant before it sailed at midnight. And what would they make of the prefabricated metal parts, giant pipes, and enormous pressure-resistant sheets of transparent synthetics? It was all stuff you could legitimately call “export goods.” Only it wasn’t being exported across the ocean. It was being “exported” to the bottom of the ocean.

Sullivan shook his head, thinking about the whole North Atlantic project. It was a crazy idea—but when Ryan put his mind into something, it got done. And Sullivan owed the Great Man a lot. Almost ruined him, getting kicked out of the NYPD. Shouldn’t have refused to grease those palms. They’d set him up to look like a crook, fired him, and taken away his pension. Left him with almost nothing.

Sullivan took to gambling—and then his wife ran off with the last of his dough. He’d been thinking about eating a bullet when he crossed paths with the Great Man, two years earlier…

Sullivan reached into his coat pocket for the flask—then remembered it was empty. Maybe he could get a drink from Greavy.

Sullivan waved at Greavy and climbed the gangplank. They shook hands. Greavy’s grip was soft, fingers puny in Sullivan’s big grasp.

“Sullivan.”

“Professor.”

“How many times… I’m not a professor, I have a doctorate in… never mind. You know someone’s shadowing you on the dock back there?”

“Different gumshoe this time. Probably FBI or IRS.” He turned his collar up. “Kind of chilly out here.”

“Come along, then, we’ll have a drink.”

Sullivan nodded resignedly. He knew what Greavy’s idea of a drink was. Watered brandy. Sullivan needed a double Scotch. His father had sworn by Irish whiskey, but Sullivan was a Scotch man. Sure, the black betrayal of yer heritage, it is, his pa would say. A steady liquid diet of Irish whiskey had killed the old rascal at fifty.

Greavy led him along a companionway to his cabin, which was not much warmer. Most of the little oval room that wasn’t the narrow bed was taken up by a table covered with overlapping blueprints, sketches, graphs, intricate designs. The Wales brothers’ design sometimes looked like Manhattan mated with London—but with the power of a cathedral. The designs were overly fancy for Sullivan’s taste. Maybe he’d get to like it once it was done. If it ever was…

Greavy took a bottle from under his pillow and poured them two slugs in glasses, and Sullivan eased the stuff down.

“We need to be ready for any kind of raid,” Greavy said, distractedly looking past Sullivan at the blueprints, his mind already back in the world of the Wales’s design—and, very nearly, Ryan’s new world.

Sullivan shrugged. “With any luck he’ll get the place finished before they can screw with us. The foundation’s already laid. Power’s flowing, right? Most of the stuff’s in place on the support ships. Just a few more shipments.”

Greavy snorted, surprising Sullivan by pouring himself a second drink—and irritating Sullivan by not offering him one. “You have no idea of the work. The risk. It’s enormous. It’s the very soul of innovation. And I need more men! We’re already behind schedule…”

“You’ll get some more. Ryan’s hired another man to supervise the—‘foundational work’ he calls it. Man named McDonagh. He’s going to put him on the North Atlantic project once he proves he really can be trusted.”

“McDonagh. Never heard of him—don’t tell me, he’s not another apple picked from an orange tree?”

“A what?”

“You know Ryan, he has his own notions of picking men. Sometimes they’re remarkable, and well, sometimes they’re—strange.” He cleared his throat.

Sullivan scowled. “Like me?”

“No, no, no…”

Meaning yes, yes, yes. But it was true: Ryan had a way of recruiting black sheep, people who showed great potential but needed that extra chance. They all had a spirit of independence, were disillusioned with the status quo—and sometimes willing to skirt the law.

“The problem,” Sullivan said, “is that the government thinks Ryan is hiding something because he’s trying to keep people from finding out where these shipments are going and what they’re for… and he is hiding something. But not what they think.”

Greavy went to the blueprints, shuffling through them with one hand, his eyes gleaming behind his thick spectacles. “The strategic value of such a construction is significant, in a world where we’re likely to go toe-to-toe with the Soviets—and Mr. Ryan doesn’t want any outsiders going down there to report on what he’s building. He wants to run things his way, ’specially once it’s set up. Without interference. That’s the whole point! Or to be more accurate—he wants to set it up to run itself. To let the laissez-faire principle free. He figures if governments know about it, they’ll infiltrate. And then there’s the union types, Communist organizers… suppose they were to worm their way in? The best way to keep people like that out is to keep it completely secret from them. Another thing—Ryan doesn’t want any outsiders to know about some of the new technology… You’d be amazed at what he’s got—new inventions he could patent and make a fortune on, but he’s holding it back… for this project.”

“Where’s he getting all these new inventions?”

“Oh, he’s been recruiting people for years. Who do you think designed those new dynamos of his?”

“Well, it’s his call,” Sullivan said, looking wistfully into his empty glass. Weak brandy or not, a drink was a drink. “You’ve been working for him twice as long as I have. He don’t tell me much.”

“He likes information to be compartmentalized on this project. Keeps a secret better.”

Sullivan crossed to the porthole and peered out. Saw his shadow, out there, still clamping that pipe in his mouth. But now the G-man was pacing by the Olympian, looking the freighter up and down. “Son of a bitch’s still out there. Doesn’t seem empowered to do anything but ogle the ship.”

“I’ve got to meet the Wales brothers. You know what they’re like. Artists. All too aware of their own genius…” He frowned at the blueprints. Sullivan could see he was jealous of the Waleses. Greavy sniffed. “If there’s nothing else—I’d better get on with it. Unless there’s something else besides this new man that Ryan’s taken on?”

“Who? Oh, McDonagh? No, I’m here to confirm the time you ship out. Ryan wanted me to come down personally. He’s beginning to think they might be listening in on the telephones somehow. I’m thinking if you can leave earlier than midnight, it’d be better.”

“As soon as the captain’s back. I expect him within the hour.”

“Leave soon as you can. Maybe they’ll get a warrant after all. I don’t think they’d find anything illegal. But if Ryan wants to keep them from knowing what he’s up to, the less they see, the better.”

“Very well. But who could imagine what he’s up to? Jules Verne? Certainly not these drones at the IRS. But Sullivan, I assure you—Ryan is correct: if they knew what he really has in mind, they’d be quite worried. Particularly considering how little help he gave the Allies in the war.”

“He took no sides at all. He didn’t care for Hitler or the Japs neither.”

“Still—he showed no special loyalty to the United States. And who can blame him? Look at the wreckage the ant society made of Europe—for the second time in the century. And the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki… I can’t wait to leave all that behind…” Greavy escorted Sullivan toward the door. “Ryan has every intention of creating something that will grow—and grow! First across the seabed, and then, in time, above the surface of the sea—when they’ve done such damage to themselves, these so-called nations of the earth, that they can no longer pose a threat. Until then, he is right to mistrust them. Because he is creating something that will compete with them. A whole new society. Indeed, in time a whole new world! One which will utterly replace the vile, squirming anthill humanity has become…”

New York City 1946

“Merton? Get outta my bar.”

Merton was gaping at Frank Gorland from behind the beer-stained desk of The Clanger’s smoky little office. Harv Merton was a man with a large round head and thick lips, a skinny body, and a brown turtleneck sweater. Hell, he looked like a damn turtle—but a turtle in a bowler hat. “Whatta hell ya mean, your bar?” he asked, tamping a cigarette out in a butt-filled ashtray.

“I’m the owner, ain’t I? As of tonight anyhow.”

“Whatta hell ya mean you’re the owner, Gorland?”

The man who called himself Frank Gorland smiled without humor and leaned against the frame of the closed door. “You know any expressions besides whatta hell? You’re about to sign this bar over to me, is whatta hell.” Gorland ran a hand over his bald head. Prickly, needed to shave it. He took the papers from his coat, all legal down to the last period, and dropped them on Merton’s desk. “That look familiar? You signed it.”

Merton stared at the papers, eyes widening. “That was you? Hudson Loans? Nobody told me that was—”

“A loan is a loan. What I seem to recall is, you were drunk when you signed it. Needed some money to pay off your gambling vig. A big fucking vig it was too, Merton!”

“You were there that night? I don’t remember—”

“You remember getting the money, don’t you?”

“It—it don’t count if I was drunk!”

“Merton, if there was no business done drunk in this town, half its business wouldn’t get done.”

“I think you put something in my drink, that’s what I think; the next day I felt—”

“Stop whining; you cashed the check, didn’t you? You got the loan, couldn’t pay the interest, time’s up—now this place is mine! It’s all there in black and white! This dump was your collateral!”

“Look, Mr. Gorland…” Merton licked his thick lips. “Don’t think I disrespect you. I know you’ve hustled—uh, worked your way to a good thing, this end of town. But you can’t just take a man’s bidness…”

“No? My attorneys can. They’ll come after you hammer and tongs, pal.” He grinned. “Hammer, Tongs, and Klein, attorneys at law!”

Merton seemed to shrivel in his seat. “Okay, okay, whatta ya want from me?”

“Not what I want—what I’m taking. I told you, I want the bar. I own a bookkeeping operation. I own a drugstore. But—I don’t have a bar! And I like The Clanger. Lots of dirt on the fights, what with the boxin’ setup and all. Might be useful… Now you call that fat-ass bartender of yours in here, tell him he’s gotta new boss…”

Gorland. Barris. Wiston. Moskowitz. Wang. Just some of the names he’d had the last few years. His own name, quite another Frank, seemed like it belonged to somebody else.

Keep ’em guessing, that was his way.

The Clanger wasn’t just a cash cow—it was the place for Frank Gorland to hear the right conversations. It was just a short walk from the docks—but it was not just a nautical bar. There was a big boxing bell on the wall behind the bar; when they tapped a new keg, the bell was loudly clanged and the beer lovers came running, sometimes from down the street. Best German-style brew in New York City. The walls of the dusty, cavelike bar were decorated with worn-out boxing gloves, frayed ropes from rings, black-and-white photos of old-time boxers going back to John L. Sullivan. He had a bartender, an old Irish lush named Mulrooney, working down at the other end. But Gorland liked to work the bar so he could hear the talk. Good for his bookmaking action, and you never know how it might fit the next grift. When you serve a beer—cock an ear.

The talk at the crowded bar tonight was full of how Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, back from the war with a pocketful of nothing and a big tax debt, was going to defend his world heavyweight title against Billy Conn. And how the retired Jack Johnson, first Negro to win the heavyweight champ title, had died two days before in a car accident. None of which was what Gorland needed to know. But there were a couple of guys here who’d have the skinny on the up-and-comer Neil Steele versus the fading boxing-circuit bum Charlie Wriggles.

Gorland had heard a rumor that Steele might be throwing the fight, and he had a theory about how that information might pay off—way past the usual payoff. Only, Gorland needed more assurance that Steele was taking the fall…

Gorland hated bartending because it was actual physical work. A great grifter should never have to do real work. But he wiped down the bar, made small talk; he served a beer, and cocked an ear.

The jukebox was finishing a rollicking Duke Ellington number, and in the brief interval before it switched over to an Ernie “Bubbles” Whitman big-band cut, Gorland zeroed in on the conversation of the two wise guys in the white ties and pinstripes whispering over their Sambocas. He wiped at an imaginary spill on the bar, edging closer. “But can we count on Steele?” said the one some called Twitchy. He twitched his pencil-thin mustache. “Thinks he’s going to challenge the Bomber next year…”

“So let him challenge; he can lose one fight. He needs the payoff, needs it big,” said the chunkier one of the two, “Snort” Bianchi—with a snort. Bianchi scowled, seeing the bartender hanging around too nearby. “Hey bartender—there’s a broad over there trying to get a drink, how’s about you fuck off and serve ’er!”

“I’m the owner here, gents,” Gorland said, smiling. “You want to come back in here, show some respect for the establishment.” Wasn’t good to let these greasers get the upper hand.

Bianchi frowned but only shrugged.

Gorland leaned closer to the wise guys, adding in a murmur, “Psst. Maybe you better take a powder if these feds are looking for you…” He nodded toward the door where an FBI flatfoot by the name of Voss stood in his gray snap-brim and overcoat, glaring about with his piggish little eyes. He looked about as “undercover” as the Statue of Liberty.

The wise guys slipped out the back way as the federal agent made his way to the bar. He was reaching into his coat when Gorland said, “Don’t bother with the badge, Voss, I remember you.” He didn’t want badges flashed anywhere near him if he could avoid it.

Voss shrugged and dropped his hand. He leaned across the bar so he could be heard over the noise. “Word on the street is, this here’s your joint now.”

“That’s right,” Gorland said evenly. “Lock, stock, and leaky barrels.”

“What you calling yourself now? Gorland still?”

“My name’s Frank Gorland, you know that.”

“That’s not the name you had when we tried to connect you to that interstate bookmaking operation.”

“You wanta see my birth certificate?”

“Our man’s already seen it. Says maybe it was forged.”

“Yeah? But he’s not sure? Not much of an expert, if he doesn’t know for sure.”

Voss snorted. “You got that right… You going to offer me a drink or not?”

Gorland shrugged. Decided not to make a smart remark about drinking on duty. “Bourbon?”

“Good guessin’.”

Gorland poured the G-man a double. “You didn’t come in here to cadge drinks.”

“You got that right too.” He took down a slug, grimaced appreciatively, and went on, “I figure you’re gonna hear stuff in a place like this. You give me something now and then—we might lay off finding out who the hell you really are.”

Gorland chuckled. But he felt a chill. He didn’t want his past poked into. “If I tip you, it’ll be because I’m a good citizen. No other reason. Anything special going on?”

Voss crooked a finger, leaned even farther across the bar. Gorland hesitated—then he leaned close. Voss spoke right in his ear. “You hear anything about some kind of big, secret project happening down at the docks? Maybe bankrolled by Andrew Ryan? North Atlantic project? Millions of bucks flowing out to sea…?”

“Nah,” Gorland said. He hadn’t heard about it—but the millions of bucks and the name Andrew Ryan got his attention. “I hear anything, Voss, I’ll tell you. What kinda deal’s he up to?”

“That’s something we don’t… something you don’t need to know.”

Gorland straightened up. “You’re killing my back, here, with this. Listen, I gotta make it look like… you know.” He’d been seen talking to the fed a little too chummily.

Voss nodded, just slightly. He understood.

“Listen, flatfoot!” Gorland shouted, as the jukebox changed records. “You won’t find out anything from me! Now charge me with something or buzz outta my place!”

Some of the customers laughed; some grinned and nodded. Voss shrugged. “You better watch your step, Gorland!” He turned and walked out. Playing his part.

Only he was going to find out, one of these days, that “Frank Gorland” wasn’t going to play along with anything the feds wanted. He’d feed them some hooey—and find out for himself what Andrew Ryan was up to. That kind of money—must be some way to tap into it…

Especially as this was Frank Gorland’s territory. He was owed.

He didn’t hear anything about Ryan for a couple of days, but one day he heard a drunk blond chippie muttering about “Mr. Fatcat Ryan… goddamn him…” as she frantically waved her empty glass at him.

“Hey wherezmuh drinkie?” demanded the blonde.

“What’ll you have, darlin’?”

“What’ll I have, he sez!” the frowsy blonde slurred, flipping a big, mussed curl out of her eyes. Her eye shadow had run from crying. She was a snub-nosed little thing but might be worth a roll in the hay. Only the last time he’d banged a drunk she’d thrown up all over him. “I’ll have a Scotch if I can’t have my man back,” she sobbed, “that’s what I’ll have! Dead, dead, dead, and no one from that Ryan crew is saying why.”

Gorland tried out his best look of sympathy. “Lost your man, didja? That’ll get you a big one on the house, sweet cakes.” He poured her a double Scotch.

“Hey, spritz some goddamn soda in there, whatya think, I’m a lush ’cause I take a free drink?”

“Soda it is, darlin’, there you go.” He waited as she drank down half of it in one gulp. The sequins were coming off the shoulder straps of her secondhand silver-blue gown, and one of her bosoms was in danger of flopping out of the décolletage. He could see a little tissue sticking up.

“I just want my Irving back,” she said, her head sagging down over the drink. Lucky the song coming on the juke was a Dorsey and Sinatra crooner, soft enough he could make her out. “Jus’ wannim back.” He absentmindedly poured a couple more drinks for the sailors at her side, their white caps cocked rakishly as they argued over bar dice and tossed money at him.

“What became of the unfortunate soul?” Gorland asked, pocketing the money and wiping the bar. “Lost at sea was he?”

She gawped at him. “How’d you know that, you a mind reader?”

Gorland winked. “A little fishy told me.”

She put a finger to one side of her nose and gave him an elaborate wink back. “So you heard about Ryan’s little fun show! My Irving shipped out with hardly a g’bye, said he had to do some kinda diving for them Ryan people. That was where he got his lettuce, see, what they call deep-sea diving. Learned it in the navy salvage. They said it’d be pennies from heaven, just a month at sea doing some kinda underwater buildin’, and—”

“Underwater building? You mean like pylons for a dock?”

“I dunno. But I tell ya, he came back the first time real spooked, wouldn’t talk about it. Said it was much as his life was worth to talk, see? But he tol’ me one thing—” She wagged a finger at him and closed one eye. “Them ships down at dock 17—they’re hidin’ something from the feds, and he was plenty scared about it! What if he was in on somethin’ criminal, not even knowin’, and he took the fall? And then I get a telegram… a little piece of paper… saying he ain’t comin’ back, accident on the job, buried at sea…” Her head wobbled on her neck; her voice was interrupted by hiccupping. “… And that’s the end of my Irving! I’m supposed to jus’ swallow that? Well, I went over to the place that hired him, Seaworthy Construction they was called—and they threw me out! Treated me like I was some kinda tramp! All I wanted was what was comin’ to me… I came out of South Jersey, and let me tell you, we get what we’re owed ’cause…”

She went on in that vein for a while, losing the Ryan thread. Then a zoot-suiter put a bebop number on the juke and started whooping it up; the noise drowned her out, and pretty soon she was cradling her head on the bar, snoring.

Gorland had one of those intuitions… that this was the door to something big.

His lush bartender came weaving in, and Gorland turned the place over, tossing over his apron, vowing inwardly to fire the bastard first chance. He had a grift to set up…

First thing Gorland noticed, coming into the sweat-reeking prep room for the fight, was that hangdog look on Steele’s face. Good.

Sitting on the rubdown table getting his gloves laced on by a black trainer, the scarred, barrel-chested boxer looked like his best friend had died and his old lady too. Gorland tucked a fiver into the Negro’s hand and tilted his head toward the door. “I’ll tie his gloves on for ’im, bud…”

The guy took the hint and beat it. Steele was looking Gorland up and down, his expression hinting he’d like to practice his punching right here. Only he didn’t know this was Frank Gorland, what with the disguise. Right now, the man the east side knew as “Frank Gorland” was going by…

“My name’s Lucio Fabrici,” Gorland said, tying Steele’s gloves nice and tight. “Bianchi sent me.”

“Bianchi? What for? I told him not an hour ago it was a done deal.” Steele showed no sign of doubting that he was talking to “Lucio Fabrici,” a mobster working with Bianchi.

“Fabrici” had gone to great lengths for this disguise. The pinstripe suit, the toothpick stuck in the corner of his mouth, the spats, the toupee, the thin mustache—a high quality theatrical mustache carefully stuck on with spirit gum. But mostly it was his voice, just the right Little Italy intonation, and that carefully tuned facial expression that said, We’re pals, you and I, unless I have to kill you.

Not hard for him to pull off the character, or almost any character. Running off from the orphanage, he’d taken a job as a stage boy in a vaudeville theater—stuck it out for three years though they paid him in pennies and sausages. He’d slept on a pile of ropes backstage. But it had been worth it. He’d watched the actors, the comics—even a famous Shakespearean type who played half a dozen parts in his one-man show. Young Frank had sucked it all up like a sponge. Makeup, costumes—the works. But what most impressed him was the fact that the people in the audience believed. For a few minutes they believed this laudanum-addicted Welsh actor was Hamlet. That kind of power impressed young Frank. He’d set himself to learn it…

Judging from Steele’s reaction, he’d learned it good. “Look here, Fabrici, if Bianchi’s gonna welsh on my cut… I won’t take it! This is hard enough for me!”

“You ever hear of a triple cross, kid? Bianchi’s changed his mind!” Gorland lowered his voice, glanced to make sure the door was closed. “Bianchi doesn’t want you to throw the fight… we’ve let it out you’re throwing the fight so we can bet the other way! See? You’ll get your cut off the proceeds, and double!”

Steele’s mouth hung open. He jumped to his feet, clapped his gloved hands together. “You mean it? Say, that’s swell! I’ll knock that lug’s socks off!” Someone was pounding on the door. The audience was chanting Steele’s name…

“You do that, Steele—I hear ’em calling you… Get out there and nail him early, first chance! Make it a knockout in the first round!”

Steele was delighted. “Tell Bianchi, I’ll deliver—and how! A KO, first round! Ha!”

Half an hour later Gorland was at his bookie operation in the basement of the drugstore. Gorland and Garcia, his chief bookie, were in the room behind the betting counters, talking quietly, as Morry took bets at the window. Two or three freight-ship deckhands, judging by their watch caps and tattoos, stood in line to place their bets, passing a flask and yammering.

“I dunno, boss,” Garcia said, scratching his head. Garcia was a chubby second-generation Cuban in a cheap three-piece suit, chomping a cigar that had never been anywhere near Cuba. “I get how knowing about Steele throwing the fight’ll get us paid off if we place our own bets through our guys,” Garcia was saying. “But, boss, I don’t see how you’re going to get the kinda money out of it you’re talking about…”

“’Cause he isn’t going to throw the fight. All the smart mob money’ll be on him losing—and we’ll bet on him winning. And we’ll take ’em big-time when he surprises ’em!”

Garcia blinked. “They’ll take it outta Steele’s hide, boss.”

“And how’s that my worry? Just you make sure the mob’s up to their neck betting against Steele. They’re gonna be sad little monkeys when they lose. But they won’t trace it to us. If you see Harley, tell him to keep an eye on that poker game up at the hotel, got some real big money suckers comin’ in…”

He walked over to Morry, to have a gander at the take, and heard a couple of the dockworkers talking over their flask. “Sure, Ryan’s hiring big down there. It’s a hot ticket, pal, big paydays. But problem is—real QT stuff. Can’t talk about the job. And it’s dangerous too. Somewhere out in the North Atlantic, Iceland way…”

Gorland’s ears pricked up at that.

He slipped outside by the side door and set himself to wait. Less than a minute later a couple of the deckhands came out, weather-beaten guys in watch caps and pea jackets, headed for the docks. The deck rats didn’t notice him following. They were too busy whistling at a group of girls having a smoke across the street.

He shadowed the sailors close to dockside, then hung back in the shadows of a doorway, sussing the scene out. The deckhands went aboard one of the ships—but it was another one that caught Gorland’s eye—a new freighter with a lot of activity on its decks, getting ready to cast loose. The name on the bow was The Olympian. That was one of Ryan’s ships. There was a guy in the lee of a stack of crates near the loading dock, smoking a pipe. Something about him said G-man. It wasn’t Voss—probably one of his men, if Gorland was any judge of cop flesh.

If Andrew Ryan was attracting G-men, he must be up to something of “questionable legal status.” Which meant, at the very least, he could be blackmailed—if Gorland could find out exactly what to blackmail him for.

Seemed like the agent was watching the two guys arguing at the gangplank of Ryan’s freighter—but he wasn’t close enough to listen in without them noticing.

Gorland tilted his hat so the G-man wouldn’t see his face and strolled over, hands in his pockets, weaving a bit, making like he was drunk.

“Maybe I can get me some work on one of these ships,” Gorland said, slurring his words. “Mebbe, mebbe… Back bustin’ work, they got… Don’t care for it… mebbe they need a social director…” He did a good drunk—and all three men discounted him immediately as he approached.

Gorland paused near the gangplank, muttering to himself as he pretended to struggle with lighting a cigarette. All the while, he listened to the argument between the man standing on the roped gangplank, and a mustachioed man on the dock who looked like he might be a deckhand.

“I just ain’t shipping out to that place again, and that’s all there is to it,” snarled the deckhand in the black peacoat. He wore a knit cap on his head and a handlebar mustache on his upper lip. A swarthy type, eyebrows merged in a single black bar. But getting old, maybe—skin leathery, hair salt and pepper, hand trembling as he jabbed a finger at the ship’s officer. “You ain’t going to make me go out there! Too goddamned risky!”

“Why, percentagewise, they’re losing less people than building the Brooklyn Bridge,” said the officer. “I have Mr. Greavy’s word on that. Stop being such a coward!”

“I don’t mind being on the ship—but in that hell down below, not me!”

“There’s no use trying to say you’ll only take the job if you stay on the ship—it’s what Greavy says that goes! If he says you go down, you go down!”

“Then you go down in my place—and you wrestle with the devil! It’s unholy, what he’s tryin’ to do down there!”

“If you leave here now, matey, you don’t get paid a penny more! Get aboard this instant—we sail in ten minutes—or you can say good-bye to your contract!”

“Two weeks salary for my life? Pah!”

“You won’t die down there. We had one run of bad luck is all—”

“I say it again: Pah! Good-bye to you, Mr. Forester!”

The deckhand stalked off—and Gorland realized the ship’s officer was glaring at him with unconcealed suspicion. “You—what are you doing hanging ’round here?”

Gorland flicked his cigarette butt into the sea. He grinned drunkenly. “Just having a smoke, matey.”

He set off to follow the deckhand, wondering what he’d stumbled onto. It was like a trail of coins gleaming on a moonlit path. If he kept following the shiny little clues he’d find the moneybag they were leaking from.

Gorland knew this trail could lead him to trouble, maybe jail. But he was a restless man, unhappy if he wasn’t out on an edge. He either stayed busy working the game or lost himself in a woman’s arms. Otherwise he started thinking too much. Like about his old man dumping him in that orphanage when he was a boy.

The deckhand turned the corner of one of the loading docks to go up the access road. It was a foggy night, and there was no one else on the short side road to the avenue. No one to see…

Frank Gorland had two approaches to getting what he wanted from life. Long-term planning—and creative improvisation. He saw a possibility—a foot-long piece of one-inch-diameter metal pipe, fallen off some truck. It was just lying in the gutter, calling to him. He scooped up the piece of pipe and hurried to catch up with the slouching shape of the deckhand.

He stepped up behind the man, grabbed his collar, jerked him slightly off balance without knocking him over.

“Hey!” the man yelped.

Gorland held the deckhand firmly in place and pressed the end of the cold metal pipe to the back of his neck. “Freeze!” Gorland growled, altering his voice. He put steel and officiousness into it. “You turn around, mister, you try to run, and I’ll pull the trigger and separate your backbones with a bullet!”

The man froze. “Don’t—don’t shoot! What do you want? I don’t have but a dollar on me!”

“You think I’m some crooked dock rat? I’m a federal agent! Now don’t even twitch!”

Gorland let go of the deckhand’s collar, reached into his own coat pocket, took out his wallet, flipped it open, flashed the worthless special-officer badge he used when he needed bogus authority. He flicked it in front of the guy’s face, not letting him have a real look at it.

“You see that?” Gorland demanded.

“Yes sir!”

He put the wallet away and went on, “Now hear this, sailor: you’re in deep shit, for working on that crooked project of Ryan’s!”

“They—they told me it was legal! All legal!”

“They told you it was a secret too, right? You think it’s legal to keep secrets from Uncle Sam?”

“No—I guess not. I mean—Well I don’t know nothing about it. Just that they’re building something out there. And it’s a dangerous job, down them tunnels under the sea.”

“Tunnels? Under the sea? For what?”

“For the construction. The foundations! I don’t know why he’s doing it. None of the men do—he tells ’em only what they need to know. Only, I heard Greavy talking to one of them scientist types! All I can tell you is what I heard…”

“And that was—?”

“That Ryan is building a city under the sea down there!”

“A what!”

“Like, a colony under the goddamn ocean! And they’re laying out all kindsa stuff down there! It don’t seem possible, but he’s doing it! I heard he’s spending hunnerds of millions, might be getting into billions! He’s spending more money than any man ever spent buildin’ anything!”

Gorland’s mouth went dry as he contemplated it, and his heart thumped.

“Where is this thing?”

“Out in the North Atlantic—they keep us belowdecks when we go, so we don’t see where exactly. I ain’t even sure! Cold as death out there, it is! But he’s got the devil’s own heat coming up—steam comes up someways, and sulfur fumes, and the like! Some took sick from them fumes! Men have died down there, buildin’ that thing!”

“How do you know how much he’s spending?”

“I was carryin’ bags into Mr. Greavy’s office, on the platform ship, and I was curious, like. I hears ’em talkin’…”

“The what kind of ship?”

“That’s what they call it. Platform ship! A platform to launch their slinkers! The Olympian there, it supplies the platform ships!”

“Slinkers, that what you said?”

“Bathyspheres, they is!”

“Bathyspheres! If you’re lying to me…”

“No officer, I swear it!”

“Then get out of here! Run! And tell no one you spoke to me—or you go right to jail!”

The man went scurrying away, and Gorland was left in a state of mute amazement.

Ryan is building a city under the sea.

Ryan Building, New York City 1946

Ten A.M. and Bill McDonagh wanted a cigarette. He had a pack of smokes calling to him from his jacket pocket, but he held off. He was right bloody nervous about this meeting with Andrew Ryan. He was sitting literally on the edge of the padded velvet waiting-room chair outside the door of Ryan’s office trying to relax, his report on the tunnel in a big brown envelope on his lap.

Bill glanced at Elaine working diligently at her desk: a sturdy brunette in a gray-blue dress suit. She was about twenty-nine, a self-contained woman with snappy blue eyes—and that upturned nose that reminded him of his mum. But the jiggle when she shifted in her seat—that sure wasn’t like his bony old mum. He’d watched Elaine walking about the office whenever he could do it discreetly. She had slightly wide shoulders and hips, long legs. One of those leggy American women like Mary Louise, but smarter, judging from the brief contact he’d had with her. Bet she liked to dance. Maybe this time he’d get up his nerve and ask her…

Bill made himself sit back in the seat, suddenly feeling weary—he was still knackered from staying up past midnight supervising the night crew in the tunnel. But he was glad for the work—he was making far more money than he’d ever made before. He’d moved up to a nicer flat on the west side of Manhattan after his first month working for Ryan, and he was thinking of buying a car. The work was sometimes like plumbing writ large. But the gigantic pipes in the tunnel project weighed tons.

Maybe he should talk to Elaine. Ryan didn’t respect a man without enterprise. Didn’t matter what the enterprise was in.

Bill cleared his throat. “Slow day, innit, Elaine?”

“Hm?” She looked up as if surprised he was there. “Oh—yes, it has been a bit slow.” She looked at him, blushed again, bit her lip, and looked back at her paperwork.

He was encouraged. If a woman blushed looking at you that was a good sign. “Things are slow, got to make ’em brisker, I always say. And what’s brisker than the jitterbug?”

She looked at him innocently. “Jitterbug?”

“Yeah. Fancy a jitterbug sometime?”

“You mean—you’d like to go dancing…?” She glanced at the door to Ryan’s inner office, and lowered her voice. “Well, I might… I mean, if Mr. Ryan doesn’t… I’m not sure how he feels about employees who…”

“Employees who cut a rug?” Bill grinned. “All quite ’armless…” He cleared his throat again. “Harmless.”

“Ah Bill, you’re here—!”Andrew Ryan was at the door to the inner office. He seemed cheerful, almost ebullient.

“Right you are, sir,” Bill mumbled. He got up, trying to catch Elaine’s eye as he went. She was studiously back at work.

“I expect you’ve brought the report,” Ryan said, looking at Bill’s manila envelope. “Good man. But I already know how it’s going. Tell you what: let’s skip the office meeting. You and I, Bill, if you are up for it, are going on a trip. Couple of stops. One in town, and one—far beyond town… we’ll talk about it on the way…”

It was Bill’s first ride in a limousine. A smooth, quiet ride, a world away from the traffic outside. But Bill felt out of his social depth.

He’d only had a few meetings with Ryan since being hired. He’d been working mostly with contractors, and sometimes with Greavy when the engineer was back from the North Atlantic. Only it had seemed to Bill like Greavy came out to the site mostly to watch him. Like the boffin was trying to guess his weight. One time Greavy had brought a couple of bearded, scowling Irishmen in fancy suits to look him over—brothers by the name of Daniel and Simon Wales. Greavy never did bother to explain what that was about.

“When you get a chance to take a dekko at the figures, sir,” Bill said, “you’ll see we’re caught up on the schedule and just about done—”

Ryan held up a hand to stop him. But he was smiling—faintly. “I’m not surprised that you’re almost finished, Bill. In fact the crew can finish without you, at this point. That’s why I hired you—I knew that you’d do a good job. Greavy was testing you on this tunnel assignment. But I had you figured right all along. There’s something else I need to know. Something far more important, Bill.”

“Yes sir?” Bill waited, fascinated by the electric charge of sheer certainty that seemed to shimmer around Andrew Ryan.

Ryan looked at him seriously. “I need to know if you’re ready to meet the greatest challenge of your life.”

“I…” Bill swallowed. Whatever Ryan had in mind, he had to be equal to it. “Anything you want to throw at me, sir—I’ll take it on.”

“Bill—” Ryan leaned forward, glancing at the chauffeur to make sure the window to the front seat was closed, and spoke in a low, urgent voice. “Have you heard of something called the North Atlantic project?”

Bill couldn’t suppress a chuckle. “Heard those four words and not a word more. They’re all like monks with a vow of silence when I ask what it is.”

“Yes. Yes, and for several good reasons. Reasons like the United States government—the OSS. British intelligence, Soviet intelligence.”

“OSS—that’s American spies, yeah? When I was with the RAF we’d get a report from those blokes from time to time…”

“Right. Office of Strategic Services.” He snorted. “We run rings around them and the FBI, I can tell you.” The bonhomie faded from his eyes, replaced by a hard glitter as he looked sharply at Bill. “You fought in the war—tell me a little about it.”

It wasn’t something Bill liked to talk about any more than he had to. “Not so much the fighting end. More like support. Onboard radioman for the RAF. Never had to kill a man personally. Eleven bombing missions over Germany—after I was wounded, they found me a place in the Royal Engineers. Liked that better. Got my schooling.”

“Did you feel a great loyalty to the government you fought for?”

Bill sensed this was a key question. “Wouldn’t put it that way, sir. Wasn’t loyal to the government. Never liked ’em. It wasn’t who I was for—it was who I was against. I was against the bloody Nazis—the bastards bunging flyin’ bombs at London.”

Ryan nodded gravely. He made eye contact—and Bill felt the voltage of it.

“My feelings about loyalty,” Ryan said carefully, “are very… particularized. I believe a man must be loyal to himself first. But I also look for men who believe what I believe—men who believe it enough that they know that being loyal to me is being loyal to themselves! Men like you, I hope.”

Bill was moved. This man, one of the world’s most powerful, was opening yet another door to him—and at the same time acknowledging him as an individual. “Yes sir—I believe I understand.”

“Do you? Of course I run a corporation, and I ask for cooperation from people under me. But self-interest is at the root of cooperation, Bill. I intend to prove that self-interest oils the wheels of business—and that freedom from the… the tentacles of government, from the usual social shackles on science and technology and growth, will produce unstinting prosperity. I have envisioned a great social experiment. But Bill, ask yourself, where can a social experiment on a large scale take place? Where in this world is there a place for men like us? My father and I fled the Bolsheviks—and where did we end up? This isn’t the ‘land of the free’ it pretends to be. It’s the land of the taxed. And it was his reluctance to pay taxes that put my father in jail. Every society is the same on the face of the earth these days. But Bill—suppose it were possible…,” his voice pitched low, breathless, “… to leave the face of the earth? Just for a time. Just for a century or two. Until the fools have destroyed themselves with their Hiroshima bombs.”

Bill was flummoxed. “Leave it sir?”

Ryan chuckled. “Don’t look so astonished. I don’t mean we’re going to the moon. We’re not going up. We’re going down! Bill—I have something to show you. Will you take a trip with me… to Iceland?”

“Iceland!”

“Just the first leg. A plane to Iceland—then, immediately, a boat to the North Atlantic. To see the foundation, the beginning, of the North Atlantic project. I’m going to have to trust you—and you’re going to have to trust me…”

“Sir…” Bill swallowed. He was not usually so open with people. But he was moved by Ryan’s passion—and his trust. “You trusted me, guv’nor. Right out of the Christmas cracker. And I’ll trust you.”

“Good—but you’ll be giving me your point of view, Bill. Because I feel you’re trustworthy. Ah—we’ve reached our first stop. We’ll have a few words with one of our resident artists here, and then we’re taking a very late plane to see the North Atlantic project. I’m going to show you a marvel taking shape southwest of Iceland. And I promise that you will be… enraptured.”

Driving a delivery truck later that night, Gorland spotted the small, discreet sign on the warehouse front: SEAWORTHY CONSTRUCTION. He drove around the corner and pulled up near the loading dock. Even this time of night the place was a hive of activity. One shift clocking out, another one clocking in.

Gorland turned off the engine and adjusted his stomach padding. Hiring a delivery truck was easy. Coming up with a new disguise had used up another hour. He got the delivery service coveralls, stuffed a pillow in them for a big belly, gave himself a scar, and rearranged the toupee. Most of all he rearranged his facial expression—made it the expression of a bored wiseacre.

“Hey how ya doin’,” Gorland said to himself, in the rearview mirror. He made the voice a little higher. He didn’t want anyone recognizing “Frank Gorland.” He was now Bill Foster, delivery driver—because Bill Foster happened to be the name sewn onto the overalls.

He looked over the clipboard that the driver of his borrowed truck had left on the dash. Heinz canned goods, it said. That’d work. The truck was empty—the stuff had already been delivered somewhere—but the warehouse didn’t need to know that.

Gorland climbed down from the truck and stalked over to the loading dock, acting like he was in a hurry to get a delivery over with. He went up the steps like he owned the place. Big steel doors into the warehouse were wide open, and inside a whole separate crew bustled and grunted about crates and palettes supporting intricate steel equipment, the likes of which he’d never seen before.

A sign over the doors, bigger than the business sign out front, read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

A grumpy-looking man in a long coat, horn-rimmed glasses, and a patch of a mustache was supervising a crew of eight men offloading a truck backed to the loading dock—maybe the biggest truck Gorland had ever seen. Gorland watched for a minute as a hefty wooden crate was swung with a block and tackle, several men wrestling it into place on a wheeled pallet. Some of the other crates in the back of the truck looked big enough to hold a small car. Stenciled on one of the crates was DESIGN FACING BLDG FOUR.

“You!” barked the man in the horn-rims. He scowled, not seeming happy to find Gorland staring into the back of the big truck. “What do you want here?”

Gorland meditatively chewed a wooden match and considered the question. Then he hooked a thumb at the truck he’d driven here in. “Got a delivery for a Ryan.” He flashed the clipboard he’d brought along. “Canned goods.”

The man turned to shout, “Careful with that!” at two burly workmen, then turned back to Gorland. “Canned goods? They’ll be glad to hear that out at the site. Second we get this truck unloaded, you back yours up here…”

“Hold on now!” Gorland said, furiously chewing his toothpick. “This here delivery is for a man named Ryan! You him?”

The man snorted in contempt. “Don’t be a fool. Mr. Ryan doesn’t come here in person! I’m Harry Brown; I sign for everything!”

Gorland shrugged and turned away. “Says here Mr. Ryan. I don’t have no other instructions.”

“Now wait a minute, hold on!” Brown stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “They go through food out there like there’s no tomorrow! We got the word from Rizzo yesterday that we had to step up on the canned goods!”

“Fine,” Gorland said, chewing his match. “Then get Mr.…” He paused to squint at his clipboard as if it was written on there. “Mr. Andrew Ryan out here to sign for it.”

“Look—” Brown seemed to be working hard to hold onto his temper. “You know who Andrew Ryan is?”

“I heard of him. Some big muckety-muck. I don’t care if he’s Harry Truman; my instructions say he’s got to sign or no delivery. Hell, I’ll come back tomorrow, it’s just a truckload of canned food.”

“We’ve got a ship coming in tonight—and they need those goods! They’ve got an army of men out there to feed!”

“So why don’t they buy ’em something to eat local, wherever that is, till we get this straightened out?” Gorland asked, as if innocently amused. “They don’t have a corner grocery there?”

“No, you tubby fool—it’s off the coast of Iceland! And if he buys in Iceland…” He broke off, frowning.

Gorland scratched his head, as if trying to puzzle it out. “Well, maybe I can let you have this one truckload. How many men’s he got out there—one truckload going to be enough? Maybe you want us to send out another?”

“Hell, we could probably use three more!”

“Cost more to get it out here that quick. He give you guys enough budget for that?”

“Enough budget!” Brown snorted and crossed his arms over his chest. “If you only knew what we spent on the air pumps already… Money’s… what they call it… no object. You get it? Now back that truck up here!”

“I dunno. This whole thing—how do I know it’s on the up-and-up if the guy who ordered ain’t here to sign? Who’s in charge at Seaworthy if it isn’t Ryan?”

“Ryan’s the owner, you damned…” He took a deep breath, removed his glasses, polished them with a handkerchief. That seemed to calm him. “Ryan’s the owner. Man named Rizzo, over at the administration office, he’s in charge.”

Brown turned to sign a manifest held up for him by a thickset black man in overalls. Gorland leaned over, trying to make out what was on it. All he could gather was Air purification system bldg 32, 33. And the cost of that system added up to well over a million dollars…

Brown saw Gorland trying to see the manifest and stepped to block his view. “Mister, you sure are a nosy sort…”

Gorland shrugged. “Just as curious as anybody else. Well, I can’t let you sign for this stuff. Where’s this Rizzo’s office at? Maybe I better talk to him…”

Brown hesitated, looking at him suspiciously. Then he shrugged and told him, and Gorland wrote it down on the clipboard. He turned to peer inside the warehouse. “Hey—that one of those bathysphere things?”

Brown stared at him. “What delivery company you say you were with?”

“Me? Acme. Name’s Foster.”

“Yeah? Let me have another look at that clipboard of yours…”

“Now who’s the nosy one? See you when I get the signature, pal.” Gorland turned and hurried down the stairs. He felt the men on the loading dock staring at him. He glanced back and saw one big fist-faced palooka take a sap out of his pocket, and slap it in his palm.

He hurried to the truck, forcing himself not to run, and got out of there as fast as he could. Smiling to himself as he drove away. Maybe this wasn’t going to be a blackmail operation. Maybe it’d be something much bigger…

Yeah. If he figured out where to stand, it’d be raining money—and all he needed was a bucket.

“It’s not generally known that I sometimes back Broadway musicals,” said Andrew Ryan, as the limousine pulled up in front of the theater. “I prefer to do it quietly. I have a rather old-fashioned taste in music, they tell me—George M. Cohan or Jolson, they’re more my style. Or Rudy Vallee. I don’t care much for this jitterbug business. Don’t understand it.” He waved a hand at the marquee. “You know the work of Sander Cohen? Some say he is getting a bit long in the tooth, but I think he’s every bit the musical genius he ever was… a Renaissance man of the arts, really.”

Bill read the marquee: SANDER COHEN IN “YOUNG DANDIES.”

“Cor!” he burst out. “Me ma took a liking to Sander Cohen, a few years back. Fair wore out his ‘Kissing the Tulip’ on her old Victrola!”

“Ah yes. I was a fan of his ‘No One Understands Me.’ You shall meet him tonight, my boy! We’re just in time to catch his final number—I’ve seen the show many times of course—and we’ll have a word backstage. Karlosky—this is fine here!”

The chauffeur, Ivan Karlosky, was a pale-haired man, scarred and impassive, with a distinctively Russian bone structure. He gave a small salute with his gloved hand and nodded. Bill had heard that Karlosky was not only one of the finest auto mechanics around but also pretty much invincible. No one messed with Karlosky.

Bill got out of the limo, instinctively holding the door for Ryan and closing it behind him. A group of swells spilled out of the theater, laughing—though the music of the show could be heard through the open theater door. The show was still going on. A bored-looking man in spats and tuxedo was escorting a platinum-haired girl in a white mink; two other young men followed with elaborately coifed girls on their arms, all of them tipsy from intermission cocktails.

Bill hesitated as Ryan paused, glowering at the swells, seeming to disapprove of them leaving the theater early.

“Say,” laughed one in a top hat, “that Sander Cohen is a funny old character!”

“I heard some young men go into his dressing room never come out again!” said a sleepy-eyed swell in a bowler hat more seriously, voice low.

“Well, you won’t get me to one of his shows again,” said the top hat, as they strolled wobblingly off. “Mincing about like that! Constantly in the spotlight! All that makeup! Looked like a clown!”

Ryan growled audibly to himself as he glared after them. “Drunks!” He shook his head, stalking toward the alley between the theaters that led to the stage door. Bill followed, feeling a bit squiffy himself though he hadn’t had a drop today. He felt socially out of his depth with Ryan—but the whole experience exhilarated him too.

“This way, Bill,” Ryan muttered. “… Those decadent young poltroons… but it’s ever that way. Inconsequential people know only mockery—only the great understand the great…”

He rapped on the stage door, which was opened by a cigar-chewing bulldog of a man. “Well? Who is it now?”—and then his cigar dropped from his slack mouth. “Oh! Sorry, Mr. Ryan, I didn’t realize it was you, please come in sir, right this way sir, nice night ain’t it?”

What an arse kisser, Bill thought, as the man, practically curtseying, let them in. An echoing passage, and then they were backstage, standing in the wings, watching Sander Cohen. He was just finishing off his climactic number, “Hop Away to Heaven.”

Strange to see a stage show from this angle, everything looking oddly overlit, the clack of heels on the wooden stage audible, the extreme angle not showing the dancers to best effect. They seemed almost to lumber around.

And Sander Cohen was stranger still. The fading Broadway star was wearing a silvery jacket that might have seemed more natural on a Busby Berkeley dancing girl. He had matching silvery trousers with a red stripe down the side; his boots, with heels like a flamenco dancer’s, glittered too. He had a rather bulbous head, with thinning hair emphasized by a great pale swath of forehead not much helped by a spit curl, and a puckish little mustache, upturned at the ends. He did wear a surprising amount of pancake—and what seemed to be eyeliner.

Cohen was sashaying rhythmically about, singing in a jaunty tenor, spinning a silvery walking stick in his fingers. Two rows of very handsome young men and pretty girls danced in chorus patterns behind him. Cohen sang:

“Admittedly, a trivial number,” said Ryan, leaning over to whisper behind his hand to Bill, “but the public needs that sort of thing, you know, something light from time to time. Sander would like to be more serious. Artists should have their chance to work without interference. So long as it’s profitable, of course…”

Bill nodded, hoping that this blighter did have some better numbers than this rubbish. He wouldn’t have pictured Ryan listening to this prancing chap—would have thought him more the Wagner type, or maybe Tchaikovsky. But then, you never knew what kind of music a man might relax with. He’d once known a bare-fisted bruiser of a longshoreman who thought nothing of taking on three men in a bar fight—but burst into sentimental tears when he saw Shirley Temple singing “The Good Ship Lollipop.” Wiping his eyes, sniffing, “Ain’t she a pip?”

The curtain rang down to a rather puny spatter of applause and went back up almost immediately so that Cohen could take several bows that no one was asking for. The dancers hurried offstage.

A gesture from Ryan, and one of the dancers lingered: a corn-fed chorus girl in a bathing suit trimmed in white fur; a great flowing spill of blond hair fell over her pink shoulders; golden bangs stuck to her forehead in a light sheen of perspiration. She was a big girl, in an Amazonian, voluptuous way, and seemed several inches taller than Ryan—but almost shrank in his presence, while her china-blue eyes grew large.

“Mr. Ryan!” Her voice was not melodious. It was rather squeakily grating, to Bill—he hoped she was a good dancer.

Ryan gazed at her benevolently—but with a hungry light in his hard eyes. Then the hunger was somehow folded away, and he seemed almost paternal—carefully reserved. “You positively glowed with talent tonight, Jasmine,” Ryan said. “Ah—allow me to present my business associate, Mr. Bill McDonagh.”

She barely glanced at Bill. “Did you really think I was good, Mr. Ryan? You could see me out there?”

“Of course, my dear. I’ve watched you dance many times. You’re always stimulating.”

“Enough for a lead? I can’t seem to get anywhere in this business, Mr. Ryan. I mean—I got here, but I can’t get any farther than the chorus. I’ve tried to talk to Sander, but he doesn’t seem interested in me. He’s so involved with his, what does he call them, his protégés…”

“A big talent like yours will pop out in good time, Jasmine, don’t you worry,” Ryan said as the curtain closed on another uncalled-for bow by Sander Cohen.

“Do you really think so, Mr. Ryan? I mean, if you wanted to—”

“In fact—” Ryan interrupted—with such authority that her voice cut off in midsqueak. “I’m going to help you—I’m going to pay for you to take elocution lessons. Your only weakness as an artist is… shall we call it vocal presentation. I took such lessons myself, once. You’ll sound differently—and people will look at you differently.”

“El-o-quew-shun! Sure, I know what that is!” She seemed a bit frustrated, though. Seemed improving her elocution wasn’t what she’d had in mind.

“I am founding… a new community,” he said, glancing about them. “In another place, some distance away. You might call it a resort—in a sense. It will take a while to complete. But, given the right dedication, you could work there—in show business. It would definitely be a new start.”

“Where will it be exactly?”

“Oh—foreign places. You know.”

“Like Bermuda?”

“Well—um, more or less. Ah, Sander!”

“Ooh, a resort, that’d be swell!” she said, walking away but looking at him as she went—so that she almost collided with Sander Cohen.

“Do excuse me, my dear,” Cohen muttered, with a forced smile. Cohen brightened when he saw Ryan, putting on a completely different aspect, beaming, one eyebrow arched. “Andrew! My dear fellow! You caught the show after all!”

“We have been standing here entranced. Allow me to introduce you to Bill McDonagh.”

“Bill, eh?” Cohen scrutinized him with sleepy eyes. “Mm—earthy!”

“Right you are,” Bill said. “Keep the ol’ feet on the ground, me.”

“And British! How charming. You know, just the other day I was saying to Noël Coward…” He went into a lengthy anecdote, much of which was lost in the buzz of the backstage bustle, but it seemed to be something about Coward’s rather embarrassing admiration for Cohen. “… one wishes he wouldn’t fawn so.”

Bill noticed that Cohen’s left eyebrow seemed permanently cocked, stuck higher than the other, never going down—as if he’d been paralyzed in a condition of irony.

“You’re a real artist, not just a cocktail wit like Noël Coward,” Ryan said, “it’s only natural the man should be overwhelmed.”

“You are too good, Andrew!”

It bothered Bill, hearing this man call Mr. Ryan by his first name. Didn’t seem right, somehow. He took a step back, feeling that Cohen was standing rather too near him.

“Andrew—can I expect you at my little opening in the Village?”

Ryan frowned. “Opening?”

“Did you not receive the invitation? I shall have to positively flay my personal assistant alive! Ha ha! I have a bit of a gallery show, at the Verlaine Club. My new obsession. An art form almost unknown in America.” Looking sleepy eyed again, he turned to explain to Bill. “It’s a tableau vivant show.”

“Ah yes,” Ryan said to Bill. “Tableau vivant. It’s a French artistic tradition—they pose people on a stage, in different ways, to represent scenes from history or drama. They stand there in costume… almost like sculptures.”

“Precisely!” Cohen crowed, clapping his hands together with delight. “Living sculptures, in a way—in this case they are representing scenes from the life of the Roman emperor Caligula.”

“Sounds fascinating,” Ryan said, frowning slightly. “Caligula. Well, well, well.”

“My protégés, such artistic courage—they stand there posed in a state of near undress in a cold room, minute after minute, as if frozen in place!” He tossed his head like a stallion and whispered, “They’re in fierce competition to please me! Oh how hard they work at it—but art calls for an agony of self-sacrifice, for submission, an inverted immolation upon its altar!”

“That’s what I admire about you, Sander,” Ryan said. “Your complete devotion to your art. No matter what anyone thinks! You are yourself completely. That’s essential to art, it seems to me. Expressing one’s true self…”

But it seemed to Bill that whatever Sander Cohen really was, it was all hidden away, even as he presented another side of himself to the world with great verve. It was like there was a scared little animal looking out of his sleepy eyes. And yet he spoke with flourishes, moved with striking dynamism. Queer sort of duck.

“I may be out of the country for your opening, I’m afraid,” Ryan was saying. “But I was just telling Jasmine—”

“Oh—Jasmine.” Cohen shrugged dismissively. “She does have her charms. Believe me, I understand. But Andrew—I’m told that this show may close rather sooner than we expected. Dandies was to be my re-emergence, my metamorphosis! And the cocoon, I find, is rather constricting and may squeeze me out too soon—” He hugged himself tight, seemed to writhe in his own hug as he said it. “I feel positively squeezed!”

“Artists chafe at constraint,” Ryan said, nodding sympathetically. “Don’t worry about the show—Broadway will soon be old hat. We’ll create our own venue for genius, Sander!”

“Really! And with what sort of… scope? A large audience?”

“You’ll see. As for scope—well, there will be plenty of people to appreciate you there. Almost a captive audience in a way.”

“Ooh, nothing I’d like better than a captive audience! But I must away! I see Jimmy signaling desperately to me from the dressing room. Do keep me informed as to this… this new project, Andrew!”

“You will be among the first to know when it’s ready, Sander. It will take some courage on your part”—Ryan smiled crookedly—“but if you take the leap, you’ll find yourself immersed in something beautiful.”

They watched Sander Cohen strutting off toward the dressing rooms. It seemed to Bill that Cohen was off his trolley, but Ryan was right—genius was eccentric. As if guessing his thoughts, Ryan said, “Yes, Bill, he can be… outrageous. Exasperating. But all the great ones hurt the eyes and burn the ears a bit. He calls himself the Napoleon of Mime sometimes—and so he is, when he’s miming. Come along, Bill. We’re off to the airport. If you’re quite ready to go. Or are you having second thoughts?”

Bill grinned. “Not me, sir. I’m in, A to Zed. I’m diving in at the deep end, Mr. Ryan…”

New York City 1946

“Look, Mr. Gorland—I don’t know that much about it.” Merton was sitting in the backroom of The Clanger, across from what used to be his own seat. Now Gorland was behind the desk, with Garcia standing to one side, eyeing Merton and tapping a blackjack in his palm, while on the other side was Reggie, a bruiser from the Bronx, wearing the doorman’s uniform that went with his day job.

Gorland knew Reggie from the old days—he was one of the only people alive who knew Frank’s real last name—and he sometimes hired him as extra muscle. Tonight, Gorland had to put the fear of God into Merton. Harv Merton needed to have more fear for Frank Gorland than for the powerful Andrew Ryan.

“I mean, if I knew anything else,” Merton went on, wringing his hands, “I’d tell ya.”

“Hey, you got any hot advice on the horses, Merton?” Garcia, asked, grinning.

Gorland signaled for Garcia to be quiet. The bookie shrugged, put away his sap, and took out a cigar instead. In the lull, the sound of the bar seeped through the closed door. A girl squealed with laughter; a man hooted, “Aw you don’t know nothin’ about Dempsey!”

“Let’s all just think this through, Merton,” Gorland said, pouring Merton a drink from the bourbon bottle. “You’re telling me you got a job with Seaworthy, on the North Atlantic project, from this guy Rizzo—you were working as a steward on one of their ships. Right? And they take your ass out to the North Atlantic and keep it there for a month and a half—and you didn’t see a thing out there?”

Gorland shoved the shot glass across the desk, and Merton snatched it up. “Thanks. Uh—that’s about the size of it. I mean… some stuff was taken down, you know, under the water. But…” He laughed nervously. “I didn’t go down with it! They were all hush-hush about what was going on down there. Much as your life was worth to talk about it, one fella said, after he come up. I don’t know what they’re up to.”

“You see, I know what they’re up to—in a general kind of way,” Gorland said, pouring himself a drink. “Building something big. But I don’t know what Ryan’s angle is. Where the money is. You seen ’em bring up any… ore? You know, mining goodies? Gold, silver, oil?”

“No, nothin’ like that. Just a lotta ships. Never saw Mr. Ryan. Heard his name sometimes, that’s all. I was busy the whole time. Seasick too. I was glad to get back here and look for another job…”

“Yeah, you’ll live to look for another job too,” Reggie said helpfully, his voice mild. “If you tell Mr. Gorland exactly what he needs to know.”

“I swear—I didn’t find out anything else! I hardly left the galley on that big ol’ ship! Now, Frank Fontaine—he might know something. He’s got boats going out there to supply ’em with fish! And they get to talk more. You know, to the guys in the construction…”

Gorland frowned thoughtfully. “Frank Fontaine. Fontaine’s Fisheries? He used to smuggle stuff from Cuba up here in those fishing boats of his. Now he’s delivering… fish? You kiddin’ me?”

“I saw him on the dock—that’s what he told me! I used to buy some of the rum he smuggled up here for my… for your place.” Merton swallowed. “Fontaine says there’s more money selling fish to Ryan for that crew out there than there is selling rum to New York! They got a cryin’ need for food out there—got an army of workers to feed…”

Gorland grunted thoughtfully to himself. That did dovetail with what he’d heard at the loading dock. The one sure way to get close to that operation… was to supply it.

A crazy thought came to him. Bringing with it some interesting possibilities…

But if he did go that far—and far was the word, all right—he’d be way out of his own stomping ground. He’d be splashing around in the North Atlantic.

There was something about this secret project of Ryan’s that fascinated him, that drew him the way rumors of buried pirate gold drew a treasure hunter. Millions of dollars were being sunk into the North Atlantic. He ought to be able to scoop some of it up.

Years ago, when “Frank Gorland” was dodging the law, he’d hopped a freight train. Riding the boxcar he’d read an old newspaper about the newly minted industrialist Andrew Ryan. There was a picture of him standing in front of a fancy building with his name on it. That picture had stirred something in him. The picture of Andrew Ryan standing there in front of the skyline of Manhattan, like he owned it, had made Frank think:

Whatever he’s got—I want it. I’m going to take it from him…

Could be now was his chance. But first he had to figure out what Ryan’s angle was. What he was up to—or down to—out there with a city down in the cold guts of that dark ocean…

Somewhere over the Atlantic 1946

“It’s a converted Liberator, really.” Andrew Ryan led Bill McDonagh through a big, humming aircraft cabin, toward the tail. “A stratocruiser now—United Airlines has ordered eleven of them for luxury flights. But this is the prototype. Of course, this is a prop plane, but the next generation will be jets…”

“Saw a fighter jet in the war, my last trip out,” Bill said. “ME-262 it was. German prototype. Didn’t even engage us—I reckon they were test flying…”

“Yes,” Ryan said distractedly. “Fast and efficient, the jet engine. Haven’t bothered developing them—not as aircraft—because after the North Atlantic project we hope to need no aircraft. We’ll have a great many submersibles—and in time we’ll hardly need those. We hope to be entirely self-sufficient…”

Submersibles? Bill must have misheard him.

Bill had mixed feelings about being on this plane. The drone of its engines was just close enough to the sound of the bombers he’d flown on in the war. He’d taken a ship to get to the USA, after. He’d had enough of planes. Seen his best friend turned to red marmalade that last time out.

Inside, though, this plane wasn’t much like a bomber. Except for the sound, the vibrations through the floor, the curved “inner skin,” it could easily be a luxury suite at a hotel. The Victorian-style chairs and sofas were bolted down, but they were luxurious, their silken red cushions trimmed in gold. Lace curtains were elegantly swept back from the windows with silk cords. The cabin was quietly served by three liveried servants and a chef. Behind a stainless-steel bar, an Asian servant in a red and black jacket, with gold braid, looked up attentively as they passed.

But Ryan wasn’t after drinks yet. They passed through a red velvet curtain into an after cabin, smaller, with a metal table bolted to the center of the floor. On the table was a fairly large object, rising like a ghost under a white muslin covering. The room contained almost nothing else—except taped to one interior wall, to the left, was a full-color drawing of a crowded, highly stylized city. It reminded Bill, at first glance, of the Emerald City of Oz. Only the city in the colorful drawing appeared to be underwater—a school of colorfully sketched fish swam past its windows. Was it Atlantis, the day after it went down?

Ryan strode dramatically up to the table and whipped off the cover. “Et voila!” he said, smiling. He had revealed a scale model of the city. It was all one structure formed of many lesser structures, all in the industrial-arts style, as if the designer of the Chrysler Building had made an entire small city to go with it. The model was about three feet high, a construction of linked towers, sheaths of green glass and chrome, transparent tubular passageways, statues, very little open space between buildings. The structure seemed quite sealed off, and indeed Bill made out what appeared to be air locks near the bases of several towers resembling artfully turned lighthouses. Outside the air lock sat the mock-up of a small submarine. Through one of the miniature city’s transparent panels he saw what looked like a tiny bathysphere, partway risen up through a vertical shaft.

“This,” said Andrew Ryan, breathing hard as he said it, the muslin sheet dangling at his side, “is Rapture!”

A surge of turbulence hit the plane at exactly that moment, making the model city quiver dangerously on its table.

Bill stared at it, careful in the turbulence. “Right. Lovely, innit? Rapturous, like.”

“No Bill—Rapture is the name of this city. What you see here is just the core, the downtown you might say. Its foundations are already under construction—a habitat for thousands of people beneath the waters of the North Atlantic.”

Bill gaped at him. “You’re taking the piss!”

Ryan flashed one of his pensive smiles. “But it’s true! It’s being constructed in secret—in a part of the sea rarely plied by anyone. The architecture is glorious, isn’t it? The Wales brothers designed it. Greavy’s been implementing their vision—and now so will you, Bill.”

Bill shook his head in wonder. “It’s—being built right now?” The turbulence died down, to Bill’s relief. It brought ghostly memories of being in a plane hit by flak. “How big’s Rapture to be, then?”

“It will be a small city, hidden away under the ocean… Miles to a side… lots of open space inside it. We don’t want claustrophobia…”

The model’s shape reminded Bill of the densest parts of Manhattan in some ways, all those buildings packed together. But in this case the buildings were crowded even closer, and even more interconnected.

“Do you see what’s in there, through that little window?” Ryan pointed. “That is going to be park land… a park under the sea! I call it Arcadia. We have a system for bringing reflected sunlight down, as well as electrical light. Arcadia will help provide oxygen as well as being a place for relaxation. Now here you see—”

He broke off at a sudden rough turbulence and the boom of thunder, somewhere close at hand. Both men looked nervously at the window opposite the drawing.

Bill put one hand to the edge of the table and ducked to see through the port—black and gray storm clouds billowed angrily outside, flickering with lighting. “Dodgy ride coming.”

Another boom, another quiver, and Bill closed his eyes, trying to will away the pictures rising in his mind. The boom of a flak shell, the clatter and whine of many small, vicious impacts. Another shell exploding just outside, a section of the bomber hull suddenly gone, blown out by the Jerries. Wind roaring in through the ragged gap like a mad house invader, as Bill McDonagh, radioman, sees the curly-headed Welsh lad, a green little blighter just a week out of training, being sucked backward against a five-foot breach in the curved metal wall, pulled hard by the sudden drop in air pressure, the boy’s face contorting in terror. Bill shouts to the pilots, “Reduce altitude!” as he rushes to the young flyer, gripping a stanchion with his right hand so he can try pulling the Welsh lad back with his left—knowing full well it was no good. The boy screams as the suction around the breach jerks him harder into the jagged edge, the sharp metal ripping through his left shoulder; his blood precedes him, streaming out through the gap—and then he follows it, just gone like a magic act, vanished into the roaring sky. All that remains are scraps of torn clothes and skin flapping on the ragged edges of the bulkhead. The boy is falling somewhere, out in the gray mist. Bill clings to the stanchion as the bomber angles sharply down to equalize air pressure…

“Bill? You all right?”

Bill managed a sickly grin. “There’s a reason I took a ship to America ’stead of a plane, guv. Sorry. I’m all right.”

“I think we both need a drink…”

“Right you are, Mr. Ryan. That’s the very medicine…”

“Let’s have a seat in the main cabin and ride out this storm. We should be at the airport in another hour or so—winds are behind us. Then it’s to the ship. Come on, I’ll have Quee pour you the best single malt you ever tasted, and I’ll tell you about the Great Chain…”

The bar in Staten Island was almost deserted tonight. But Captain Fontaine was there, as arranged, sitting in a booth in the dim corner, frowning at his beer. Just waiting for Frank Gorland.

Captain Fontaine did look a lot like the man who called himself Frank Gorland—but he was more weather beaten, a little older. He wore a red watch cap and a long green corduroy double-breasted coat. His calloused red hands showed the life he’d led at sea—first as a smuggler, now as the head of a small fishing fleet.

Gorland ordered a bottled beer from the stout barmaid, who seemed to be flirting with a drunken marine, and carried it over to Captain Fontaine’s table.

Fontaine didn’t look up from brooding on his beer as Gorland sat across from him. “Gorland, seems to me that every time I run into you, something goes wrong.”

“How’s that? What about all that cash you made from what I did for you on your last cargo?”

“Your cut was near as big as mine, and all you did for it was run your mouth.”

“Well, running my mouth is how I live, friend. Now look, Fontaine. You want the information I have or not? I’m offering it for free. I’m hoping we can work together again, and we can’t do it if you’re in jail. So you’d better cock one of those shell-like ears—I’ve got word they’re going to wait till you head out— and raid you on the way back.”

Fontaine slurped at his brew. “They… who?”

“Why the…” Gorland leaned over the table and lowered his voice. “Just the Federal Bureau of Investigation, that’s who. Agent Voss is chewing at your rump!”

Fontaine sat up straight. Gorland looked at him calmly, believing it himself, almost, as he said, “I got it from my sister’s best friend—she’s a secretary for them. Keeps an eye on things for me.” That was the secret to being a good liar—believing it when you said it. “So she’s typing up some kind of warrant, and there you are. Captain Frank Fontaine. Smuggling, it says. Drugs, it says.”

“Keep your voice down. Anyhow it don’t signify—I gave up smuggling that stuff. Company I work for now is bringing me crazy money to bring my catch over by Iceland… long ways, but it’s big money. Safe and legal!”

“You mean your deal with Andrew Ryan’s operation out there?”

Fontaine shrugged. “Nothin’ you need to know about.”

So he took the fish out there himself. Interesting. The exact whereabouts of the North Atlantic project would be on the charts in one of those boats.

Gorland sighed and shook his head. “You don’t get it. Voss is out to get you. He’s going to look down in your hold, first time you set to sea, and plant the dope down there! You gave him the slip one too many times.”

“I… I don’t believe it!”

“They’re raiding you all right. And suppose they don’t set you up—they know that Ryan’s trying to hide something out there. So they’ll take you in for questioning. How’ll Ryan feel about that? You want to go to jail for standing in the way of an investigation?”

“What proof is there a raid’s coming, Gorland?”

“Proof? Just a carbon from the raiding order.” Gorland passed it over. Every good con man knows a good forger. “You can sell your boats to me and slip off to Cuba…”

Fontaine looked at the order—and his shoulders slumped. “Hmmf… maybe. It’s true I’m sick of being on those boats. Like to retire to Cuba. But I want a good price.”

“Sure, I’ll give you top money.”

Fontaine looked at him narrowly. “And why would you be so goddamn helpful, Gorland? It don’t add up.”

“It’s you they’re looking for, not me—I’ll play fisherman till things cool off. Make some money from Ryan. And have the trawlers for when it’s safe to smuggle again.”

Fontaine expelled a long, slow breath. Gorland knew that meant he was giving in. He felt the physical thrill, an almost sexually delicious inward shiver, that always came when a mark surrendered.

Two nights later, Frank Gorland was waiting in the pilothouse of a fishing trawler, trying to get used to the smell of old codfish, and drinking coffee. The trawler was called Happydrift. Christ, but it was chilly on this old tub.

He heard a hail from the dock and smiled. Captain Fontaine was here for his money.

Gorland nodded to his grizzled gray-haired helmsman and said, “When I give you the signal, head due East.”

“You got it, boss.”

“Call me captain. I’m about to be one…”

“Aye aye, cap’n.”

Gorland went down the ladder to the main deck, where he found Fontaine stalking back and forth, scowling.

“Gorland—I hear you fired my crew! You’re up to something! This whole thing is starting to stink.”

“Surprised you can smell a stink at this point. But come on down to the galley and I’ll explain—I’ve got a parcel of money for you.”

Gorland turned and went belowdecks, humming to himself. Fontaine hesitated—then followed.

There was no crew staying warm in Happydrift’s little galley. Gorland planned to pick up the rest of the crew later.

On a small foldout table near the stove was a small brown suitcase. “There you are, Fontaine—open it up and count it.”

Fontaine looked at him—and he looked at the suitcase. Then he licked his lips, went to the suitcase, opened it—and stared. It was filled with dead fish. Red snapper.

“I’m thinking,” Gorland said, taking a blackjack from his coat pocket, “of changing the name of this boat to Happygrift. What do you think?”

Captain Fontaine turned angrily to Gorland—who hit him hard with the blackjack, crack, right on the forehead. Fontaine went down like a sack of bricks.

Gorland put the blackjack away and went to the ladder, climbed to the deck, turned, and waved up at the pilothouse, where the helmsman, Bergman, was watching for his signal. The helmsman pointed at the dock—and Gorland remembered he had to cast off. That much he knew how to do. He cast the ropes off, and the boat roared to life, swinging out from the dock toward the open sea.

Humming “My Wild Irish Rose,” Gorland descended to the galley. Captain Fontaine, facedown, was still out cold. Gorland went through the man’s pockets, removing his identification, money, personal effects. Might need them.

He considered Captain Fontaine, now stirring slightly on the deck—and then he muttered to himself, “Do it. Go all the way, Frank.”

He took a deep breath—then pulled off his shirt and pants. He dragged Fontaine’s outer clothing off him, then switched clothes with him, wincing at the smell of Fontaine’s unwashed trousers. Just a little too large. Had to tighten the belt.

Then he used his old clothing to tie Fontaine’s hands behind him. “Whuh yuh doing?” Fontaine asked, starting to come to. “Lemme go…”

“I will let you go, right now, Captain,” Gorland said. “But you got to climb that ladder. I’ll help you.”

“I need clothes, it’s freezing out here.”

“You’ll be all taken care of. Up the ladder…”

He got the bleary Fontaine up, at last, and out on the tilting deck. Fog streamed by and wreathed the sea. He glanced at the pilothouse. Bergman was facing out to sea. Not that he would probably have cared. The man had done five years in prison not so long ago. He was being well paid—he’d go along with whatever his new boss wanted.

Fontaine was swaying on deck, goggling blearily about him. “We’re… we’re out tuh sea… why are… we…”

“I’ll show you why,” Gorland said, escorting him to the side. “You ever notice how much you and I look alike… Frank? We even have the same first name! Possibilities, Frank—possibilities! I’ve got a whole new concept here—I call it, ‘Identity theft.’ What do you think?” Then he bent, grabbed the vessel’s former captain by the ankles, and tilted him over the side, headfirst down into the cold sea. A yell, a splash or two—and Captain Fontaine went down… He didn’t come up.

Captain Fontaine was dead. Long live… Captain Frank Fontaine.

The North Atlantic 1946

The Andrew Ryan was pitching at sea-anchor that gray morning, and Bill was queasy. The cigarette helped a little.

He tried to ignore the steward throwing up over the starboard rail. Gazing into the sea, he watched the frothing bathysphere bob to the surface…

“These are no ordinary bathyspheres,” Ryan said proudly, joining him at the taffrail, his hair so slicked down the considerable wind didn’t budge it. “Some of the men call them slinkers because they get around with such agility.”

“Never seen the like. Almost elegant, it is.”

Ryan looked at him closely. “Feeling seasick? I have a pill…”

“No,” said Bill, stepping back from a burst of spray. The spray put his cigarette out, and he flicked the butt overboard. “I’ll take this rust bucket over your bucketing palace in the sky any day, guv’nor.” He grabbed the rail as the deck pitched under him.

“Now then, Bill—” Ryan took a good grip on the rail himself and looked at Bill closely. “Are you ready to go down? I’m informed that the wind’s dropping; in an hour the sea will be just calm enough for the launching.”

Bill swallowed. He looked out to sea at the other two platform ships and the retreating shape of the Olympian as it headed back to New York for supplies. The platform ships were modified barges, linked by chains and buoys, marking out a square half mile of sea. It was an enormous enterprise. He had to do his part and accept going down in the bathysphere. He had been expecting this, but he wasn’t eager. “Ready, Mr. Ryan. Always ready, me.”

He expected to change into a diving suit or something aquatic, but an hour later they went as they were, both of them in overcoats—Ryan’s cut of the best material, precisely tailored. The bathysphere was hoisted onto the deck, steadied by the stoic crewmen in their rubber slickers and sou’westers as Ryan and Bill got in. It was roomy enough for two inside, with a window in the hatch and small ports on the sides. The smell was a bit like a locker room, but it was comfortably padded and equipped with handholds. Between them was a bank of controls and gauges. Ryan didn’t seem concerned with them as the bathysphere was hoisted up, lowered over the side, and released.

A light switched on inside as the sea closed over them…

Bill, licking his lips, waited for Ryan to somehow pilot the vessel. But he didn’t. He simply sat back, smiling mischievously, seeming amused by Bill’s transparent attempt at appearing unworried. They sank deeper and deeper.

Then the bathysphere stopped with a slight jolt and began to move horizontally of its own accord.

“It’s radio controlled,” Ryan explained, at last, “we don’t have to do a thing. It follows an underwater radio signal to the entrance shaft, uses turbine props. You will experience no discomfort from increased air pressure—there isn’t any increased air pressure needed. The same will hold true in Rapture itself. There is no danger of the bends. We have a new method for constantly equalizing air pressure at any depth with no special gasses. It will be almost always exactly the same as on the surface, with only minor variations.”

Bill looked at him skeptically. “Air pressure always the same—at any depth?”

Ryan gave him a mysterious smile, leveraging the opportunity to brag a bit. “We have gone to great lengths to keep our discoveries to ourselves. I have found some of the most unusual, extraordinarily talented scientists in the world, Bill—and in some very difficult spots.” He peered through a porthole, smiling absently. “The hardest one to get at was this quite peculiar but brilliant fellow, name of Suchong—he was stuck in Korea during the Japanese occupation. The Japs had accused him of selling their men opium to pay for his experiments. Imperialists have such a narrow view of things. Ah, speaking of marvels, you can just see the foundations of Rapture there, before we go into the dome shaft… And let us have some appropriate music…”

Bill bent and peered through the port. Below them, electric lights glowed through the blue gloom along the rocky bottom of the sea—lines of lights like landing markers for a plane on a foggy night. He saw the rugged outlines of what might be a decayed volcanic crater, like a miniature mountain range, around a mysterious electrical glow. The music kicked in: Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, the Grofé arrangement for piano and symphony flowing from hidden speakers in the bathysphere. As the rhapsodic music swelled, Bill made out structures looming through the dark blue water beyond the stony natural ramparts: the frameworks of elegant buildings, the panels of unfinished walls, the silhouette of what might be a statue, tilting as it waited to be craned into place.

“The genius of the Wales brothers,” Ryan said, as more mighty, soaring structures came into view. “Simon and Daniel. Ironic, really, their starting with cathedrals and coming to build Rapture. But Simon says that Rapture will be a great cathedral—but not to God. To man’s will!”

“How’d you get the foundations done?” Bill asked, peering through the viewport. “That had to be a great challenge.”

“We retrofitted my steamer the Olympian, fixed it up to take cargo—and we brought the sinker out here and put it together. It’s a big submersible platform. We’d lower it to the bottom with the deep-sea team and everything they needed. It’s there permanently—absorbs vibration, offers insulation, for the biggest central section of Rapture… Brought in the platform ships for the next stages…”

A small submarine equipped with mechanical arms glided by the construction site…

“You can see the remains of a very ancient volcanic cone,” Ryan went on, pointing. “That’s a clue about Rapture’s energy source. You see that dark spot there, to one side—that’s the opening of a deep crevice, a real abyss—but the city’s foundations rest on solid rock. It’s quite secure.”

And then the panorama vanished, swallowed up in shadow. The music continued as they dipped into the dark, vertical entrance shaft leading down to the dome. It was as if they were going down a chimney. The descent was sickeningly fast and smooth until they bumped against the concrete and steel sides of the water-filled shaft with an alarming clang. A metallic squeal came as a hatch in the shaft shut above them. A shivering clunk—and they came to a complete halt. They were in an air lock, Bill reckoned, as the water drained away. A mechanical grating sound and another metallic screech—and the hatch of the bathysphere opened.

“Come along, Bill!” Ryan switched off the music and climbed out through the hatch.

Bill followed and found himself in a short metal-ribbed passage of rough concrete. Electric lights burned overhead. The smell of the sea mingled with the smell of new cement.

Two strides along the short passage, then a metal door swung open for them and there was Dr. Greavy, in a long work coat and metal construction helmet. Greavy’s mouth trembled as he gazed at Ryan. He backed away, to let Ryan enter the sizable hemispherical room, like a courtier backing away from a sovereign.

“This is an honor, sir,” Greavy sputtered, “but really, it’s a bit too risky—”

“Risky!” Ryan said, looking around. “Nonsense! Bill, he’s trying to keep me out of here!” But Ryan was chuckling as he looked around at the equipment in the dome.

“Only until we have more safety structures in place—McDonagh understands.”

“I’m here now, Greavy,” Ryan said, “and I mean to have a look around. I am sinking my life into this project, and I need to see it flourishing. Is Simon here?”

“Not here, sir, he’s in sub three.”

“Let him do his work. You can show us around.” The dome was about two hundred feet in diameter, about thirty-five feet to the ceiling in the center, which was supported by a grid of metal girders. To Bill the girders looked like steel, but he knew if they were only steel they’d all be buried under a mountain of saltwater. He supposed they must be made of some special alloy.

Bill recognized some of the big, wheeled machines crowded into the room: routers as big as small cars, mining drills, scoops and cranes, many of them still dripping water; some, adapted for deep-sea use, looked strange to him. One machine was about twenty feet long, with enormous pincers at the ends of the jointed arms, like the ones on the submarine.

“What’s that thing do?” Bill asked, pointing to it.

“The mechanical gripper?” Greavy said. “That’s one of our basic workhorses. Remote controlled. It’s a concept that came out of weapons development in the war.”

“Right—like the teletanks the Russians use. Didn’t work out so well, them things.”

“Our remote control is reliable—like the bathysphere you came in. Remote-controlled machines speed up construction. Very difficult to set up the foundations of Rapture in this deep cold water otherwise. We have a good deal of the Hephaestus level set up already—and indeed geological energy is already flowing into the finished units…”

Greavy glanced at Ryan for approval before continuing. Ryan nodded, and Greavy went on: “It’s heat-driven electrical energy drawn from volcanic sources under the sea floor—hot springs and fumaroles, sulfur chimneys, and the like. ‘Geothermal’ some call it. A virtually endless source of power. Wonderful, isn’t it? No coal needed, no oil!” Greavy said, rubbing his hands together gleefully. “Once the supply line is set up, the energy flow goes on as long as the earth retains its heat!”

“We have twelve domes like this one arrayed around the site,” Ryan added proudly. “We sank them, pumped them out. Pipe in clean air. The domes are all connected by tunnels we’ve built right on top of the seabed.”

“Not sure I believe it, guv,” Bill said, staring at the big gripper, “and here I am looking at it!”

Ryan chuckled. “Then you shall see it up close! Greavy—ask Wallace to take us in for a closer look!”

Roland Wallace was a bearded, dour man of about forty with deep-set eyes and a furrowed brow. Ryan introduced him. “This is a man you can count on to get things done in tough conditions.”

Wallace led them to a large steel door, one of three placed symmetrically around the dome. He checked a couple of dials on a panel beside the door, nodded to himself, and spun the wheel. He grunted as it swung open into a tunnel made of some amalgam pocked by vents and ribbed in metal. “Now if you gentlemen will wait to the side here…”

They pressed against the wall to the right, Ryan with an expression of proprietary pride. After a minute, the battery-powered gripper drove slowly through the doorway, whirring to itself. Affixed to its rear was a small cockpit, where Wallace drove, the gripper’s jointed, black-metal arms retracted; behind him came a little radio-slaved tram, reminding Bill of a small funicular without the cable. It seemed to be driving itself—and it stopped in front of Ryan and Bill when the gripper stopped.

“Step in,” Ryan said, and they climbed into the leather-mesh seats of the shuttle, side by side. The gripper moved off, and the little shuttle followed.

They passed under the electric lights of the tunnel for what seemed a quarter mile when suddenly a killer whale flashed overhead, its toothy mouth agape. Bill recoiled. “Oi!”

Ryan laughed dryly. “Look closer!”

Bill leaned out of the tram and saw that the walls here were transparent—they were a heavy, polished glass of some kind banded with metal. Light shone upward from electric lamps on the seabed outside the transparent section. He could see the tunnel, mostly cement, occasionally glass, wending out across the seabed toward the framework of Rapture. The foundations of Rapture stood out in shades of dark green and indigo.

“It’s hard to reckon where the water stops and the glass starts—it’s like we’re in the water with ’em!” Bill muttered. A diffuse shimmer from the surface far above answered the glow from the seabed lamps. Schools of fish emerged from billowing forests of green kelp and purple sea fans: tuna, cod, and fish he couldn’t identify, gleaming with iridescence, threading in and out of light and shadow. A squid pulsed by and then another great black-and-white orca swept by. Bill was awestruck. “Look at that bloody thing! Fast as a swallow but big enough to swallow a man! It’s flyin’ right over us!”

“Wonderful, isn’t it?” Ryan mused, gazing through the curving, transparent pane as they rolled along. “Fairly obvious, looking out at a glorious prospect like this one, why I’m calling the city Rapture! Of course, I’ve always had a fascination with the deep sea. It’s another world—a free world! For years I read of giant squid netted from the depths, the adventures of explorers in diving bells and bathyspheres, strange things sighted by submariners. The thrilling potential of it all! I detest the warmongering of the ‘Great Powers’—but world wars did generate workable submarines…”

“Nothing but glass, holding out all that water?” Bill marveled. “We’re down fair deep! All that bloody great pressure…!”

“I’m not ready to share all my secrets with you yet, Bill, but that is in fact a perfect merging of glass—and metal. Something new called submolecular bonding. Astonishingly pressure resistant. Expensive, but worth every cent.”

The two vehicles paused under the curving transparent pane of the tunnel, and Bill gazed into the shaded blue distances of the sea. He glimpsed great shadowy shapes swimming along out there, murk-veiled outlines not quite definable—appearing and vanishing. An object on the seabed about five hundred yards away gave off a faint red glow.

“What’s that—glowing, over there?”

“That’s our geothermal energy valve,” said Ryan. “We lost three men setting it up,” he added casually. “But now it seems quite secure…”

“Three men lost?” Bill looked at him, suddenly feeling what a deep, cold place this was. “How many have died working out here?”

“Oh, not so many. Why, when they built the Panama Canal, Bill—how many do you think died there?”

Bill thought back to his reading as he watched the silhouette of a bathysphere drifting by overhead. “If I recall, the French lost about fifteen thousand men. When the Americans finished the job, another five thousand died.”

Ryan nodded briskly. “Risk, Bill—nothing is built without risk. Build an ordinary house and lay the foundations a few inches wrong, the whole thing might collapse on you. Men died for the canal. Men died in the building of great bridges, died attempting to scale the highest mountains. Pioneers died crossing deserts. But we don’t take pointless risks. We are observing safety precautions—we don’t wish to lose skilled workers. Ah”—Ryan pointed— “look there.”

Bill saw something like a giant lobster flying over, fifty feet long. Then it passed from a patch of dimness into the glow around the edges of Rapture, and he saw it was one of the smaller, specialized submarines he’d glimpsed earlier. Beams of light projected from headlights like shining eyes; its jointed, pincered mechanical arms were extended to grasp a big ornate segment of metal wall lowering on a cable.

Bill watched a gripper move up opposite it, mechanical arms poised to help ease the big metal section into place on a wall. The wall sections appeared to be sculpted, prefabricated metal pieces. Bill thought of the way the Statue of Liberty had been constructed, with the separate pieces made in Europe, then shipped to America and fitted precisely together to form the gargantuan figure.

He noticed there was no one in the small cockpit at the rear of the gripper—he could just make out the connective control cable trailing behind it.

“How does anyone see enough to control it?” he asked. “The controller watches through a window?”

Ryan smiled. “He’s watching on a screen. We use a television camera on that one.”

“Television! Me second cousin in the Bronx had one. Got a headache, me, when I tried to watch one of those boxes, not a week ago. Fellas caperin’ about in dresses, dancing packs of cigarettes…”

“The technology can be used for more than entertainment,” Ryan said. He pointed across the site. “One of our supply submarines…”

Bill saw it gliding along on the far side of Rapture’s foundations: a larger submarine, without mechanical arms, that could almost have belonged to the British Navy—except that it was pulling a massive oblong shape behind it on a doubled chain. “It’s towing freight in some kind of container,” he remarked.

“There is a little air in the cargo bag, for buoyancy,” Wallace said. “Mostly it contains some dry goods and medical supplies. All netted together.”

“Costly process,” Ryan said. “Off we go, Wallace…”

Wallace returned to the gripper, and they drove on, through tunnel after tunnel, passing through domes crowded with tool racks, machinery, tables. Here and there a lighted window looked out into the deep. Just outside a dome window a crowd of translucent pink jellyfish billowed, trailing long, delicate-looking stingers. A strong smell of sweat and old laundry was a physical presence in the domes; some were partly screened off, and Bill glimpsed men sleeping in cots back there.

“The construction goes on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week,” Ryan said. “The men work in shifts, ten hours on, fourteen off. We have a recreation dome where beer is sold, music is played, movies are shown. They showed the latest Cagney film there last week…”

“Fan of ’opalong Cassidy meself,” Bill murmured, as they passed into another covered tunnel. A transparent panel gave a glimpse of workers in deep-sea diving suits wrestling a culvert-sized copper pipe into place.

“We’ll be sure to get you some Hopalong Cassidy films to watch when you’re down here,” Ryan said.

“Will I be working down here a great deal, then?”

“You’ll be with me in New York much of the time. And in Reykjavík. I need the perspective of someone I can trust. But we’ll be down here too—I intend to supervise the next stage closely. Rapture will be my legacy. I fully expect to spend the rest of my life down here, once the city is built.”

Bill tried to conceal his shock. “The rest of your life, guv’nor? All of it? Down here?”

“Oh yes. The ant society up above is not for us. And radiation from the atomic wars, when they come, will last for many years above the surface of the sea. We’ll be safe down here.”

That’s when Bill noticed the hissing sound of wheels through water—he looked over the lower window frame of the little transport and saw two inches of water accumulated on the floor of the tunnel.

“What’s that! Wallace—pull us over! Look at the floor!” The two vehicles jarred to a stop and Bill climbed out. He knew that Ryan wasn’t pleased to have him suddenly giving orders, but he also instinctively knew this could be a matter of life and death. “Look there!” Bill pointed to the thin coating of water over the amalgam floor.

Wallace was getting out, flashing an electric hand torch. “What the devil! We haven’t had any leaks in this section!” His eyes had grown big; his hands trembled, making the light jiggle on the wet floor.

“Didn’t you say the water pressure wasn’t a problem…?” Bill asked, examining the curved walls of the tunnel more closely.

“Well, these tunnels aren’t entirely made of the new alloy—it’s tremendously expensive to make. We keep most of that back for Rapture itself. Only the support ribs… But they should be enough, when you consider the steel mesh in the concrete, the doubling of—”

“What’s this about?” Ryan asked nervously. “Wallace—is there something I should know?”

“Need to get you back to Dome One, sir!” But Wallace, eyes flicking about, looked more scared for himself than for Ryan.

“Let’s identify the problem first!” Ryan snapped.

“There!” Bill said, pointing. “You see—the support ribs, they’re about a foot and a half farther apart in that spot—someone’s been sloppy! The weakened support’s yielding to pressure, stressing the concrete. You see? It’s trickling through at the bottom…”

“I swear to you this flooding wasn’t here two hours ago!” Wallace said, looking around desperately. “I… I passed through this very section! There was no leak!”

“That’s bad,” Bill said. “Means it’s happening fast! And it’s going to accelerate! We’ve got to get Mr. Ryan back right bloody now before it—”

A resounding, high-pitched crick!—and water began to sheet powerfully down from the edge of a metal rib supporting the tunnel, about forty feet down. A crack spread visibly through the ceiling, like a slithering, living thing; there was a squeal, an extended creaking sound of metal buckling.

A sizzling sound, then, followed by sparks spitting down—and several of the lights went out near the spraying, hissing leak.

Wallace backed away from it—bumping into the little funicular where Ryan was staring down the tunnel.

Bill grabbed Wallace’s arm, squeezed it hard to snap him out of his panic. “Wallace, listen—this thing I came here in, can it go back without the gripper?”

“Yes, yes, there’s a switch, I can reverse it—but there’s not room for three men, and I doubt it could carry so much weight, it’s not meant for—”

“Quiet and listen! Get in it, take Mr. Ryan back to the next dome! Soon as you get there, communicate with the other domes—there must be some kind of public address system—”

“Yes, yes—there is—” Wallace was staring aghast at the sheets of water shooshing down, spraying hard on the tunnel floor, driving water to surge against their ankles.

“Tell them to seal off the domes connected to this tunnel!”

“What about you?” Ryan asked.

“Someone can watch for me—and if there’s time they can let me through! I’m going to work up a temporary support to slow this down! Go!”

“Right! Right, I…” Wallace jumped into the little transport beside Ryan and flicked a switch.

Bill just had a glimpse of Ryan’s appalled face looking back at him as the transport lurched off down the tunnel the way they’d come.

He turned and ran splashing through deepening water, up to his shins now, to the idling gripper. He climbed into the cockpit, aware of the strengthening smell of brine and a kind of fog thickening in the tunnel. Mist rose from the swirling, swishing flood. In the wan light of the gripper cockpit he found a series of switches, levers, a small steering wheel, a gearshift, an accelerator pedal…

Bill flicked the toggle on a switch labeled Grip, and the mechanical arms extended and opened their pincers in front of him, like a lobster warning off a rival. Two levers jutting beside the steering wheel seemed to control the arms…

The rising water was already seeping into the cockpit when he worked out how to manipulate the mechanical arms. Bill leaned out of the cockpit, peering upward in the muted light, and made out the spot he was looking for before another two overhead lights sparked, sizzled, and went out. He shifted gears and drove the gripper forward a few yards, leaving a wake in the water behind him as cold brine gathered around his ankles.

God send the gripper mechanism didn’t short-circuit before he could do the job.

The sounds of metal creaking were becoming ominously loud…

Bill took a deep breath and then manipulated the arms so that they bent at the nearest joints, angling sharply upward. He forced them hard against the ceiling, just where the water was spraying through. And the leak slackened. It was still coming, but not so fast.

He noted a switch marked Hold and flicked it. The gripper’s arms went rigid, holding in place, but already he could see the mechanical arms shivering, starting to buckle…

Heart thudding, he clambered quickly out, knocking his head against the metal cockpit in his hurry. “Bloody buggerin’ fuck!” Bill grabbed a spanner from a toolbox at the back of the gripper and hurried down the tunnel, splashing through shadow toward the lights, the saltwater above his knees now.

Another squealing sound from behind… the sea was going to crash through and flood the tunnel—damn quick too. But he might have the leak slowed down just enough to see to it Mr. Ryan got to safety. He wasn’t optimistic about his own chances.

Then he was in a lighted area of the tunnel, sloshing as fast as he could around a curve—and seeing a steel doorway up ahead in the recessed arch of a dome entrance. He splashed up to it, almost falling again. No window in this door, no intercom grid. The door was equipped with a wheel that could be used to open it—but he didn’t dare unless they judged it safe. They’d have water-pressure gauges. They’d know better than he would. He couldn’t risk all those lives for his own. He’d brought the spanner to let them know he was here—and used it to bang hard on the door. He heard faint voices on the other side, but couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying. It sounded like an argument.

He looked over his shoulder and saw a wave rushing toward him along the tunnel. That was it, then. He was done for. He’d be toes-up in no time.

But then the door grated within itself and swung open. Water rushed past his knees into the dome. “No!” he shouted. “Close it! No time! Don’t let the water in!”

But strong arms were circling him, Ryan dragging him into the bright lights and human smells of the dome. Bill turned and, with Ryan and Wallace, took hold of the handle on the door, and pulled. The water flow was with them, helping them slam the big metal door shut. They got it closed only a moment before the big wave rushing down the tunnel struck it with a dull booming…

“Good lord but that was close,” Wallace said, panting, as the water receded about their ankles. “Thank God you’re safe, Mr. Ryan!”

Ryan turned to Bill—and then they spontaneously shook hands, grinning at each other. “Don’t thank God, Wallace,” Ryan said. “Thank a man. Thank Bill McDonagh.”

The Lighthouse, Rapture 1947

It was a chilly, breezy early evening as Andrew Ryan stepped off the launch. Ryan gestured for his bodyguards and coxswain to wait in the boat, then turned and climbed the steps of the great lighthouse structure. It was modeled on ancient descriptions of the lighthouse of Alexandria, and it radiated that classical majesty. He paused partway up to take it all in, entranced by the tower, the surface entrance to Rapture.

He had ordained this… This was the manifestation of his will…

WELCOME TO RAPTURE, read the metal letters over the great, round copper-plated Securis door. To either side of the art deco entrance rose streamlined chromium figures of men, statues built into the walls, looking as if they were supporting the building, their elongated, upraised arms straining for the heights.

The door opened as he approached, and Chief Sullivan, smiling, emerged to shake his hand; along with a beaming Greavy; a wryly glum, bearded Simon Wales—and Bill McDonagh, looking a bit stunned. Ryan was glad Bill was here to see this. He had sensed doubts in Bill sometimes—now Bill would see, they’d all see, that the “impossible” was possible.

Wales nodded to Ryan, barely managing a smile. “I think you’ll be pleased, Andrew.” He had a mild Dublin accent. “Sure, we’re nearly there…” The architect wore a pea jacket, a black turtleneck sweater, and black trousers, his round, balding head shiny with perspiration, his bruised-looking eyes gleaming.

They entered the high-ceilinged, hexagonal chamber, like the interior of a particularly grand observatory, their footsteps echoing on the marble floors. Intricately trimmed, picked out in precious metals, the entryway to Rapture had the spacious marble-and-gold gravitas of a capitol building’s rotunda—exactly as planned. Ryan felt a certain awe, gazing up at himself—at the giant gold bust of Andrew Ryan looking gravely down at whoever entered this place. The expression was stern but not angry. It expressed authority but also objectivity. It gave notice: Rapture would tolerate only the worthy.

The statue seemed oddly mute, however. He would add a banner to let people entering here know that they were on the brink of a new society where men were not cramped by superstition or big government:

He made a mental note of it. He would not forget. And why not have welcoming music playing for those entering the lighthouse? Perhaps an instrumental of “La Mer,” a whimsically pertinent song.

Wales was talking about veneers and trim—“certain endemic leakage issues that have Daniel quite concerned”—but Ryan scarcely heard him. Wales was caught up in a designer’s fixation on details, superficialities. It was the big picture that was thrilling, and, gazing about himself now, Ryan was almost speechless with its power.

Sullivan led the way to the bathysphere that would take them down the shaft of water, a kind of specialized elevator, into Rapture herself…

“After you, sir,” Sullivan said.

Mouth dry with excitement, hands gently trembling, Ryan climbed into the bathysphere, the first transport in the Rapture Metro. The others followed and took their places in the small craft, knees nearly touching. It was a bit crowded, but it didn’t matter. The air crackled with anticipation.

Too bad the bathysphere’s television screen was blank at the moment; in time it would show a short film, “Welcome to Rapture,” for those permitted secret immigration to the new undersea colony.

Down they went, bubbles in the water-filled shaft streaming past them. The bathysphere’s cable creaked, but the ride was comfortable. “Runs smooth as silk, this,” Bill chuckled.

Then they’d arrived at the first vantage, the lounge from which they’d view the city of Rapture. The bathysphere opened almost soundlessly.

They climbed out of the bathysphere, and Ryan clapped Bill on the shoulder. “Bill—you’ve been down here a lot more than I have. You’d know the best view. Lead the way!”

Simon Wales didn’t seem pleased at that—but Bill had a great deal to do with the internal structure of Rapture. “Got ’er guts ’n’ garters in me hands,” he’d said once. And Ryan simply liked Bill McDonagh better than Wales. Though his genius was undeniable, there was something subtly unstable about the glum, spade-bearded man—as if Simon Wales were always a heartbeat from a shout that never quite burst free.

Bill grinned and made a sweeping “right this way” gesture. They struck off toward the big picture window to one side, where blue-and-green tinted light rippled across the floor…

Ryan stepped up to the window and gazed out at Rapture. The marvel rose up before them, seeming almost a natural outgrowth of this aquatic world, as much a part of the planet as the Himalayas. Electrically illuminated canyons of steel and glass gleamed; art deco towers soared; sunken buildings stood sturdily, dry inside; watertight skyscrapers reared without a sky in sight to scrape. The lines of Rapture’s magnificent architecture seemed to rocket toward the reticulating surface of the sea, some distance above, where light and shadow played tag. A school of golden-tailed fish swam by the window like a flock of birds, glittering as they passed. A raft of sea lions gamboled by up above, silhouettes near the surface.

Base lights streamed colored rays up the sides of the building—subtle reds and greens and purples attiring the towering edifices in a royal splendor. It was as impressive as the Grand Canyon or the Swiss Alps—but it was the work of man. It took Ryan’s breath away to look on it.

“Of course, it’s not quite finished—but you see what man’s will can do,” Ryan said, his voice catching with emotion. In the distance, down the “street” crisscrossed with glass tunnels, an electric sign rippled with the gay life of an undersea Times Square: RYAN ENTERPRISES. The first of many electric signs that would shine within the cold, dark sea. Billboards, neon signs, all the trappings of a truly free market would be found here, both inside and outside, a shining declaration of liberty and unrestrained enterprise.

“It’s a wonder, is Rapture,” Bill said, huskily. “One of the wonders of the world!” Adding with a touch of regret: “Pity most of the world won’t know…”

“Oh, in time, they will,” Ryan assured him. “All who survive the destruction of the upper world—they will know Rapture! One day it will be the capital city of all civilization.”

“You’ve done it, sir!” Greavy declared, his voice trembling with an emotion he rarely showed.

Wales glanced at Greavy. “We’ve done it, all of us,” he said, irritated.

“Oh, it’s not quite fully realized, Greavy—but it is alive,” Ryan said glowingly. “A new world—where men and women will stand up on their own two feet in the glory of competition. They will empower themselves with struggle!”

Bill said, “But what about populating this miracle? Got to fill up all those buildings, guv…” So far, only a relatively few people lived in Rapture, mostly maintenance workers, engineers, some security.

Ryan nodded and took a folded paper from his coat pocket. “I’ve brought something along I wanted to share with you.” He unfolded the paper and read aloud to them. “Letter of recruitment.” He cleared his throat and went on,

Ryan shrugged and folded the letter. “Just one of our recruiting tools, discreetly distributed. An early draft… Of course, Rapture’s not quite ready for the bulk of its population.”

“Has Prentice Mill made any progress on his Express?” Ryan asked, turning to Wales.

Wales grunted. “Oh, that he has. Two stations completed, a good deal of rail laid down. He’s down in Sinclair Deluxe, supervising construction.” He sniffed and drew a pipe from his coat and then stuck it in his teeth but didn’t light it. “Complains he needs more workers, of course. They all do.”

“The Express is its own business,” Ryan pointed out. “Let him get busy and hire more workers himself. Those who are finished working on the outer shell can start on the rail.”

He turned to gaze out the window at Rapture again. Who knew how long it would take to grow—this almighty expression of his will that could continue proliferating in steel and glass and copper and Ryanium, long after Andrew Ryan himself had passed away…