Devil's Gate

27

Washington, D.C., June 23

THE VIEW FROM DIRK PITT’S OFFICE on the twenty-ninth floor of the NUMA headquarters building included much of Washington, D.C. From the generous rectangular window he could watch over a section of the shimmering Potomac, the Lincoln and Washington monuments, and the Capitol building, all of which stood lit up in brilliant white for the evening.

Despite the view, Dirk’s attention was directed elsewhere, toward the monitor of his computer, on which a three-way teleconference was proceeding.

In one corner, the smiling face of Hiram Yaeger, NUMA’s resident computer genius. Yaeger looked as if he’d just come off the road on a Harley; he wore a leather vest and had his long graying hair pulled back into a ponytail.

In the other corner of Pitt’s screen, a drawn and waifish version of Gamay Trout gazed up at him. Her deep red hair was also pulled back, but out of necessity rather than style. Occasionally, as she spoke, a stray lock worked itself loose and fell in front of her eyes. She would diligently push it back behind her ear or keep talking as if she didn’t notice.

Despite her obvious pain, and eyes Pitt had never seen so dark, she seemed to be holding it together. Certainly she’d helped them take a big step forward in solving the mystery of what happened to the Kinjara Maru.

As she explained a theory she and the Matador’s doctor had come up with, Pitt had to admire her tenacity and devotion to duty. Such qualities were in abundance at NUMA, but they always shone the brightest under the darkest circumstances.

While Pitt listened and asked what he thought were pertinent questions, Yaeger took notes and mostly grunted the occasional “Uh-huh” and “Okay.”

When Gamay was done speaking, Pitt turned to Yaeger. “Can you run a simulation on what she described?”

“I think so,” Yaeger said. “Gonna be a shot in the dark, to some extent, but I could put you in the ballpark.”

“Ballpark’s not good enough, Hiram. I want box seats down the third baseline.”

“Sure,” Yaeger said, drawing the word out slowly. “But the closest I can come is telling you what kind of power might be needed and how this might have accomplished it. So you might be on the third baseline, but you’re still gonna be up in the nosebleeds unless we get more data.”

“You start working,” Pitt said. “I’ll bet you a case of imported beer that we’ll get more data before you’re done with your first run-through.”

“Canadian?” Hiram said.

“Or German. Winner picks.”

“Okay,” Yaeger said. “I’ll take that action.”

His portion of the screen went blank, and Dirk turned to Gamay. “I’m not going to ask how you’re holding up,” he said. “Just want you to know I’m proud of you.”

She nodded. “Thanks,” she said. “And thank you for ordering me to study the samples. It helped me… helped me get back to being me.”

Pitt was confused. “I never gave any order like that,” he said.

“But the doctor…” she began. A smile creased her face for the first time.

“Doctor’s orders,” Pitt guessed.

“Apparently, part of my treatment,” she said.

“Hobson’s a crafty old guy,” Pitt said, thinking warmly of the doctor. “And he’s smart. If someone out there has developed a weapon like this, our best defense may be to find it and neutralize it before it gets used again. Thanks to you two, we have a chance.”

“What help can we expect?” she asked.

“I’ve already talked to the admiral,” Pitt said. “The Vice President, I mean. He’s going to take what we’ve found directly to the President and Joint Chiefs. I’m sure they’re going to be pretty damn interested, but as for getting involved… We’ve got to find them something tangible to get involved in. Right now, this is just a ghost that came to visit and left a mark. We have to put a body with that ghost, something they can deal with. You’ve given us the first step.”

The rebellious strand of hair fell down across her face again, and Gamay dutifully tucked it back behind her ear. “Dr. Smith and I theorized that the crew might have been killed because of what they saw. In other words, having survived the electromagnetic burst, they had to be killed, and the ship scuttled, to keep things quiet.”

“It’s reasonable,” Pitt said. “Dead men tell no tales.”

“I know,” she said. “But I was thinking there has to be something more. I mean, they fired torpedoes at us. We have to assume they could have done the same to the freighter when she was afloat.”

Pitt considered this. Sometimes you learned more by what wasn’t done than what was. “Would have been easier than boarding the ship.”

“And quicker,” she said.

“Yeah,” Pitt said, “that it would. So why didn’t they?”

“And why hit this particular ship in the first place?”

Another good question. He guessed there could be only one reason. One answer to both.

“There was something they wanted on that ship,” he said. “Something they had to get before it went down. And whatever that something was, whoever was behind this didn’t want the world to know it had gone missing.”

On the screen, Gamay nodded. “That’s the conclusion I reached too.”

It explained a few things. The CEO of Shokara was an old friend of Dirk’s — more of an old acquaintance, actually, in the sense that Dirk had once saved his life — but for a man who’d often insisted he’d do anything Dirk or NUMA ever needed, Haruto Takagawa had suddenly become very hard to reach.

Shortly after the freighter went down, Pitt had left a message for the man. But, so far, he hadn’t received a call back. Perhaps that was understandable, considering the circumstances, but it was at least a yellow flag.

A few days later, just to cover all the bases, Pitt had sent a pair of NUMA’s eager young associates to Takagawa’s New York offices to get the type of information the Coast Guard would have required if the ship had gone down in U.S. waters. Primarily, the ship’s manifest.

The two young men had been stymied in Takagawa’s lobby, made to wait for hours and then all but tossed out on their ears. It felt like a slap in the face to Pitt, enough to get his considerable anger up and running. So far, he’d been too busy to press the issue. But now it seemed paramount.

“We need to know what the Kinjara Maru was carrying,” Gamay said.

Pitt nodded. He knew what he had to do. He knew there was only one way to find out the truth.