Ghost Ship

TWENTY-ONE

On the top floor of the NUMA building in Washington, Dirk Pitt and Hiram Yaeger sat on one side of the communications console. Kurt and Joe had just signed off.

Pitt decided it was time to get the temperature of the room. “Well,” he said, “what do you think?”

Across from him, out of sight and silent during the call, sat Trent MacDonald of the CIA, a man named Sutton from the NSA, and two others from NUMA: Dr. Elliot Smith, who’d become NUMA’s chief medical officer, and Anna Ericsson.

Pitt didn’t like speaking to Kurt with these observers watching from the shadows like some kind of judging committee, but considering how the stakes were rising, it needed to be done.

Dr. Smith spoke first. “Kurt looks stable. His affect is normal and he’s not reporting any symptoms.”

“That’s good,” Pitt said.

Smith gave a noncommittal shrug. “It is, except that symptoms like Kurt’s shouldn’t just vanish because he got away from Washington.”

“I’ve always found leaving this place cures a few ills,” Yaeger added, clearly hoping Kurt was on the road to recovery. “Maybe,” Smith said, “but not the kind Kurt had.” Pitt jumped in. He wanted concrete statements, not vague assertions. “Meaning what?”

“I’d say we can expect his symptoms to return at some point.

Most likely, under a moment of extreme duress.”

“Ms. Ericsson?” Pitt asked.

“He looks well to me. Better than he did when he was cooped up back here.”

“What about his story?” Sutton asked.

“What about it?” Pitt said.

“Seems a little odd, don’t you think? He got on board the yacht, found something extremely vague, was attacked, and then was rescued by this strange mystery woman. He supposedly got her satellite phone but lost it. Gave us a poor description. All things we have to take on faith.”

“You think he was making that up?”

“That’s just it,” Sutton said. “He was the only one there. So we can’t prove it one way or another.”

“What about the call she made?” Pitt asked.

“We’ve been trying to determine if that happened,” Sutton admitted. “No luck yet.”

“It could have been foreign service,” Hiram pointed out, “someone you don’t have access to.”

“We have access to everyone,” Sutton assured him.

“Trust me.”

“What about the names of those hackers?” Pitt asked. “He didn’t just pluck them out of thin air.”

Sutton shrugged. He had no comeback to that.

“Now for the elephant in the room,” Pitt said. “We know where Sutton stands. He thinks this is all one big delusion. But what does it mean if Kurt’s actually onto something?”

Trent MacDonald wrung his hands for a second. Pitt noted that the CIA rep had been awfully quiet.

“Trent?”

“If he’s onto something, if Sienna Westgate is alive and in the hands of foreign nationals or persons unknown, then we may have a bigger problem than any of us know. At the very least, we should let Kurt continue and look into this Than Rang character. With a little prodding, I might be able to pledge some help. We have a lot more assets on the Korean Peninsula than we do in Iran.”

Dirk nodded quietly. He couldn’t recall a time he’d gotten so much cooperation from the CIA. He wondered if it had something to do with Kurt’s history there or, for that matter, with Sienna’s. A thought formed in his mind. “Is Sienna Westgate still working for the CIA?”

MacDonald did not reply immediately. “In a manner of speaking,” he said finally. “Sienna legitimately left the Agency eight years ago. We didn’t want to lose her when she went private, but we couldn’t compete with a guy like Westgate and all he had to offer.”

“Go on,” Pitt said.

“She was brilliant,” MacDonald said, nodding to Hiram. “You’ve seen her work.”

“A savant,” Yaeger said. “And I mean that as the highest compliment I can give.”

“Exactly,” MacDonald said. “So we made a deal with her and Westgate. We gave them the beginnings of our most advanced theoretical system and asked them to build it into an unbreakable barrier.”

“Which she turned into Phalanx,” Pitt said.

MacDonald nodded.

“But you never expected it to get out of the bottle,” Yaeger pointed out.

“No,” MacDonald said. “And that possibility is daunting for two reasons. One, we’re going to lose a lot of intelligence- gathering ability if the rest of the world co-opts Phalanx and keeps us from prying into their systems. But there’s a bigger worry, one we don’t know how to quantify.”

“Which is?”

“We all believe that Phalanx is unbreakable. We’ve installed it on everything from the DOD computer network to the Social Security database, but no one knows as much about it as Sienna Westgate. She was the lead designer of the project, she was the only one entrusted with the technology we gave her, and she took it ten steps beyond. That means she knows its weaknesses better than anyone. She might even have designed a back door into the system in case she ever needed to use it. We have no way of knowing.”

Pitt was beginning to understand. “And Phalanx is now protecting the entire federal government.”

MacDonald nodded. Sutton did likewise.

“Maybe we should pull Phalanx off active duty,” Pitt suggested.

“It’s being considered,” Sutton said. “But it would be premature and foolish to do so based on what we know at this point. We need proof one way or the other before we act.”

MacDonald summed up. “I don’t know if she’s out there and in the hands of our would-be enemies,” he said. “But as much as I hate to say it, I’d be a lot happier knowing for certain that she’d been dragged to the bottom of the sea and drowned.”

As cold as the statement was, Pitt understood the thought. “Then we’d better get a team down to what’s left of Westgate’s sunken yacht,” he said bluntly. “It’s a long shot, considering the condition of the vessel. But if we find Sienna’s body, then you guys can rest easy. And I can bring Kurt home.”