Mirage

CHAPTER NINE

Manhattan had once been ringed by piers, like spokes projecting from the axle of a bicycle tire, and nearly every inch of the island’s coast was given over to maritime commerce. The advent of containerization and the booming value of the city’s property had closed all but a few anchorages, and those were reserved mostly for cruise ships. So for the Oregon, there was no triumphant trip up the East or Hudson rivers to dock before the most famous skyline in the world.

Instead, after passing under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, she found herself berthed in Newark, New Jersey, amid acres of metal containers and rows of cars that had been off-loaded from the factories of Europe. By today’s commercial standards, she was a wilting flower amid oceangoing behemoths. At 550 feet, she was dwarfed by the panamax and super panamax ships that lined the docks, and her appearance was that of a hag next to a group of beauty queens.

Her hull was a mismatch of paint colors that was peeling so badly it looked like the ship had some hideous skin condition. Her decks were littered with trash and old machinery that no longer worked. She had a central superstructure, with a large funnel, just aft of amidships. Bridge wings thrust out port and starboard from it. The pilothouse’s glass was filthy with dried salt, and one small pane had been patched over with a piece of delaminating plywood. Three cranes serviced her forward six cargo hatches while another pair of cranes aft could load and unload her remaining two holds. There was just a trace of champagne-glass grace to her fantail, while her bow was a blunt blade that looked as if it fought the sea more than thrust it aside. From outward appearances, she looked like an old tramp steamer that should have been scrapped many years ago.

As Cabrillo made his way across the quay following a taxi ride from JFK, he couldn’t imagine a more beautiful vessel in the world. He knew that her dilapidation was artful window dressing, a ruse that gave her such anonymity that she went unnoticed in any of the Third World ports she frequently called upon.

The Oregon’s papers were in order, and a customs inspection turned up nothing suspicious. Her bills of lading said she was carrying rolls of paper from Germany to various ports in the Caribbean, and when the hatches were popped, the inspectors did see the curving tops of enormous paper drums, each weighing more than eight tons.

Of course, the paper drums, like the ship’s rough façade, was just that: a façade. The rolls were only a foot thick and covered over the top of the hold like the false bottom of a spy’s briefcase and weighed less than a thousand pounds.

He climbed up the ship’s gangplank and looked aft, as was his ritual. The ship normally flew the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran, one more ruse on top of all the others, and it was his tradition to give it the one-fingered salute. To make their stay here less problematic, the Oregon carried Panamanian registry, and that nation’s quartered and starred white, blue, and red standard hung from the jackstaff.

The interior of the ship’s superstructure matched that of her exterior, with gloomy passages, peeling paint, and enough dust to fill a child’s sandbox. The floors were mostly bare metal or cheap vinyl tiles. Only the captain’s cabin had carpet, but this was an indoor/outdoor variety that was about as plush as burlap. Secreted throughout the accommodations block were doors that led to the hidden and much more opulent spaces where the crew actually lived and worked.

Juan went to one such door, passing through the grease-laden galley and seedy mess area. The secret door opened using a retinal scanner hidden in the belly button of a bikini-clad beauty adorning a travel poster plastered to the wall with other cheap decorations that would be seen to amuse a crew of misogynist seamen.

As the door slid open seamlessly, Juan entered the luxurious interior of the Oregon proper. Here, the carpets were plush, the lighting discreet and pleasing, and the artwork the labor of some of the world’s masters. This was the secret her outer disguises masked — this, and the fact that the ship was armed to the teeth.

She sported launchers for surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, as well as 20mm Gatling guns and a monstrous 120mm cannon hidden in the bow that could be deployed through clamshell-type doors. Of the dozen old oil drums sitting on the deck, six held remotely controlled.30 caliber machine guns that were operated from the Oregon’s high-tech op center. These were used to repel pirates, and more than a few off the Somali coast had felt their sting.

The Oregon also possessed a sophisticated suite of sensors that made her optimal for intelligence-gathering operations in places the United States could not send in her own spy ships. They’d lingered near any number of adversarial nations, such as Iran and Libya before its fall, gathering signal intelligence that satellites couldn’t detect. One recent mission had them posted off the coast of North Korea, armed with an experimental high-energy laser “loaned” to them by Sandia National Laboratories. The result had been the spectacular though inexplicable, at least to them, failure of that reclusive regime’s test launch of its Unha-3 long-range missile.

Juan chatted up a few crew members as he made his way to his cabin to shower off nearly twenty-four hours of travel. He still had grit from Uzbekistan under his nails. He dressed in charcoal slacks with a striped button-down shirt and custom-made shoes from Otabo.

He had time to enjoy a Cobb salad in the dining room, surrounded by overstuffed leather furniture and a gentlemen’s club’s cozy atmosphere, before heading to the Oregon’s boardroom for a status meeting with his senior staff.

The room was rectangular in shape and done in a sleek modern style, with a glass table and black leather chairs. Had they been at sea, portals would be opened to give the room natural light, but since they were hard against the Newark pier it wouldn’t do to give dockworkers a glimpse of the ship’s true interior.

Seated at the table were Max Hanley, Eddie Seng — another CIA veteran like Cabrillo — who headed up shore operations, along with the big former SEAL at his side, Franklin Lincoln. Across from them were Eric Stone and Mark Murphy. Stone had put in his five after Annapolis and retained a Navy man’s bearing, though he was still trapped in a nerd’s gawky body. Murph was one of the only civilians on the crew. Possessor of several Ph.D.s, a near-photographic memory, and the paranoia of a true conspiracy theorist, he usually dressed like he’d picked up last night’s laundry from the floor, and his wild dark hair was an unkempt bush. He’d been a weapons designer for one of the big defense contractors and had joined up with the Corporation on Eric Stone’s suggestion.

Absent from the meeting was Linda Ross, who was still with the Emir on his yacht, and the ship’s medical officer, Julia Huxley, who was visiting her brother in Summit, New Jersey.

“Welcome back,” Max said, lifting a cup of coffee. “Good flight?”

“Why do people still ask that?” Murph interrupted. “It’s not like flying is so rare these days that the answer is important. The plane landed. Good or bad, who cares?”

Max shot him a look. “For the same reason people pick up a ringing phone as quickly as possible: it’s a polite social convention.”

“It’s a waste of time,” Mark countered.

“Most of the good social conventions are,” Max replied with a dismissive wave. “Only, your generation’s in too much of a hurry to appreciate them.”

“For the record,” Juan said loud enough to take control of the meeting, “my flight was fine, much better than trying to backtrack out of the Uzbek desert following my old tire prints.”

“Good piece of work,” Linc said, his voice rumbling out of his deep barrel chest. “Make you an honorable SEAL one of these days.”

“Any blowback for Petrovski’s widow?” Stone asked. “It’s clear someone was sanitizing his discovery, and she would be another loose end.”

“When I got back to Muynak,” Juan said, “I told Arkin Kamsin what had happened. He promised to get her and her kids out of the country as quickly as he could. As soon as they were gone he was taking some time to visit friends in Astana, the capital. It’s the best we can do.”

He went on. “Bring me up to speed on your research.”

Mark Murphy wore a pair of fingerless gloves with wires jacked into his laptop, which itself was linked to the ship’s mainframe Cray supercomputer. He moved his hands through the air, and on the big flat screen his moves shuffled aside data windows in a way similar to a science-fiction movie. It was the latest generation slide-screen technology that he was beta-testing for a friend’s start-up company.

“Here we go,” he announced as an aerial photograph of an industrial site alongside a body of water came up on the display. “This is a shot of the C. Kraft and Sons shipbuilding facility taken in 1917, only three years before it was destroyed by fire. The company was founded in 1863 by Charles Kraft to build iron casements for the Union’s ironclad fleet. After the Civil War, they started constructing iron ships for the Great Lakes, mostly coastal ore carriers. At its peak in 1899, it was the prominent shipbuilder on the lakes.

“After Charles Kraft’s death, his two sons, Alec and Benjamin, squabbled over control. Alec, the elder son, eventually bought out his brother’s shares, but the debt he incurred eventually doomed the company. Rather than expand, it grew smaller and smaller as Alec was forced to sell off assets to cover his expenses. It didn’t help matters that he had a severe drinking problem.

“The fire that destroyed the yard was deemed suspicious, although the insurance company couldn’t prove arson. Alec Kraft died in 1926 from chronic liver disease. Benjamin Kraft hadn’t stayed in Erie after his buyout but moved to Pittsburgh with his family. He lived a quiet life off the proceeds of the sale. Neither man has any children alive today, but there are four grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren, mostly in Pennsylvania or Upstate New York.”

“Any record of the company ever selling a ship to anyone in Russia?” Juan asked the question that had been burning in his mind since discovering Karl Petrovski’s eerie boat, in fact, had been a boat built in Erie.

“No direct overseas sales at all,” Mark said. He flicked his hands, and up came a list of the ships they had built. “I found this on a database of the Great Lakes Maritime Museum.”

He then highlighted several on the long list and explained as he went. “Going on your description, I’ve narrowed down the vessels that could be the one you found.”

The pages showed more than two dozen craft that fit the rough dimensions and approximate age of the ship Juan had seen.

“Any pictures?” Juan asked.

“Yeah, hold on a second.” Murph worked more of his magic, and soon they were looking at sepia-tone photographs dating back more than a century.

Most of them were designed to carry cargo of one type or another. One of them was a ferry built to haul railcars on tracks laid onto the deck, with an arch over the bow to support the wheelhouse. More pictures clicked by.

“Stop!” Juan shouted. “Go back one. That’s her.”

“The Lady Marguerite,” Murph said after checking his laptop. “Built in 1899 for, get this, George Westinghouse, and named for his wife.”

Cabrillo studied the picture, not paying much attention to Mark’s commentary. She wasn’t a commercial vessel but rather a pleasure boat. She was painted snowy white with a dark-colored band around her plucky funnel. Her rear deck was mostly open, but partly covered by a sunshade to protect her passengers from the elements. In the picture, she was moored close enough to shore for a tree to be seen in the foreground. He couldn’t see her in great detail, but he could just imagine her lavish appointments.

“What do we know about her?” Juan asked, imagining himself cruising the Great Lakes while listening to tinny music from a gramophone. “And what’s so special about George Westinghouse owning a pleasure yacht? He was one of the richest industrialists of his age.”

Eric Stone had been polishing his wire-framed glasses and slipped them back onto his nose. “To answer your question: Westinghouse is significant here because he partnered with Nikola Tesla to build the Niagara Falls power station, and together they basically invented the electrical grid we use today.”

Tesla, Cabrillo thought, Yuri Borodin’s last word. This wasn’t a coincidence. It looked as though they had peeled the first layer off the onion of his cryptic death confession. The crazy Russian hadn’t died in vain, of that Juan was certain, but right now he had no idea what his friend had stumbled into.

“Mr. Murphy?” he prompted.

“Hiram Yaeger at NUMA gave me his master passwords to their mainframe. I’m accessing it now, but there isn’t much in the archives about the Lady Marguerite. Let’s see. It says here that she was moved from the Great Lakes to Philadelphia in 1901, and lost at sea in the summer of ’02.”

“Was she insured?”

“Yep, I’ve got the Lloyd’s of London claim right here. She went down with five people aboard. There is no list, but there were no survivors.”

“Storm?”

“Doesn’t say. I’m cross-checking the date for any other losses. No, nothing else was lost. Hold on. Checking NOAA’s archives for the weather. The night of August first, 1902, was clear for the entire Atlantic seaboard.”

“What else could have sunk the ship?” Eddie Seng asked, his fingers steepled under his chin.

Linc quipped, “How about a white whale?”

“Not a white whale,” Eric Stone said, looking up from his own laptop. “A blue cloud.”

“Come again?” Juan invited.

“There’s a report from a freighter, the Mohican, about a strange blue cloud, like an electrical aura, that enveloped their ship as they were approaching Philadelphia. It lasted for about thirty minutes, and vanished as mysteriously as it arose. The Mohican’s captain, a Charles Urquhart, reported strange magnetic anomalies while his ship was enshrouded. Metal objects adhered to the deck as if glued, and the ship’s compass just spun in its mount.”

“Any other ships report this effect?” Cabrillo asked.

“Nothing else. Just the Mohican.”

Mark Murphy gasped as he was struck by a sudden revelation.

“Hold on to that thought,” Juan warned, knowing when Murph was about to steer the conversation into a conspiracy-laden dead end. “No need to get ahead of ourselves. This sounds to me like a straight insurance scam. Westinghouse claims the boat sank, takes the money, and then sells it off to some Russian guy who parks it on the Aral Sea. And if there was ever a place an insurance investigator wouldn’t look, it’s there.”

Mark was practically bouncing up and down in his seat.

“Okay,” Juan conceded, “go ahead.”

Murph grinned wolfishly. “According to the Lloyd’s report, the insurance was just a token amount to satisfy a bank over liability issues. The ship itself wasn’t covered.” When no one reacted to his statement, he went on in a rush. “Come on, guys. It’s all there. Westinghouse’s money, Tesla’s genius, a weird blue aura with strange magnetic properties, and a ship found ten thousand miles from where it vanished.”

“Are you talking teleportation?” Linc asked dubiously.

“Exactly! What was it Sherlock Holmes said? If you eliminate all other factors, the one which remains must be true.”

“How do we know we’ve eliminated all the other factors?” Eddie asked.

Mark had no immediate answer to that.

“Insurance issues aside,” Seng continued, “I think the more likely scenario is, the ship was sold off. The new owners sailed it to the Black Sea, where it was disassembled, transported to the Aral, and put back together.”

Cabrillo turned his gaze to Murphy, an eyebrow arched. “You have to admit that makes a lot more sense than your science-fiction idea.”

Mark looked like a child who just had his favorite toy taken from him.

“I hate to be the one to say this,” Max Hanley said with a resigned shake of his bulldog head, “but Mark might not be wrong.”

“Excuse me?”

“At the turn of the twentieth century, the only way to reach the Aral Sea was by caravan, probably using camels rather than horses. It’s a thousand miles from any navigable water, and we’re talking about a ship that weighed a couple hundred tons and was not designed to be easily broken down. Anyone know the pack load of the average Asian double-humper camel? Can’t be more than a few hundred pounds. A bit more, using carts. How many trips would it take? How many animals? It would be easier, and cheaper, for our fictitious Russian guy to build a boat right there on the Aral rather than lug one in. But here’s the kicker: Where would they reassemble it? You’d need a dry dock or a large shipyard, and I’m willing to bet dollars to donuts that you won’t find either anywhere in the region as early as 1902.”

Eddie chimed in immediately. “She could have been used on the Black Sea for years and only later transported to the Aral.”

“That window slams closed after the Russian Revolution,” Max countered. “No more rich men and, therefore, no more rich men’s toys. Mark can double-check, but I doubt the facilities I mentioned were around in 1917 either.” He looked at each Corporation partner in turn. “I think Murph’s idea is screwy too, but it can’t be dismissed out of hand.”

Juan nodded but was far from convinced. “Murph, anything in your research into Tesla indicating he was working on teleportation?”

This time, it was Mark’s turn to look frustrated. “Nikola Tesla is such a shadowy figure, especially in his later years when he became destitute, that there’s no way of ever knowing what he actually worked on. There’s talk of death rays and earthquake machines and mind control. It’s impossible to know what was true and what’s speculation.”

“Who would know?”

“Glad you asked.” Mark waved his gloved hands through the air, pushing aside the picture of the Marguerite and the insurance information and bringing up the head shot of an older, balding man fitting the stereotype of the absentminded professor. In the photo, he wore a tweed jacket and large black-framed eyeglasses. His features were weak and his expression bemused. His comb-over seemed to be his only concession to vanity. “This is Professor Wesley Tennyson, a theoretical physicist formerly with MIT. He retired to Vermont five years ago. He’s the author of the definitive Tesla biography, The Genius of Serbia.

“Eric and I have hacked into this guy’s life every way possible. Since leaving MIT, he’s basically gone into hiding. He has no phone number listed, no e-mail account, and just a P.O. box address, though we did track down an actual address for him in Vermont’s capital city, Montpelier. By modern standards, he’s off the grid.”

“Why are you telling us this?”

Eric replied, “It’s our excuse for why we haven’t actually questioned him.”

Cabrillo leaned back in his ergonomic chair, lacing his fingers behind his stubbled head. “So the dynamic duo failed.”

“Using technology to find a Luddite is like trying to catch a moth with an anvil,” Mark countered.

Max chuckled when Juan couldn’t come up with a suitable rejoinder.

“Looks like someone’s going to Vermont,” he said, looking at the Chairman. “Be sure to bring back some maple syrup.”

“Oh, and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream,” Eric added. “Hux loves their Cherry Garcia.”

Juan looked around the room. “I think Vermont is famous for granite too. Anyone want some of that?” He got no takers. “Okay, so I’ll head north. Mark and Eric, I want you two to find a more plausible explanation for how that ship ended up in the Aral Sea. Max, you came up with a good point about a dry dock or shipyard. Pore through whatever archives you can and see if there’s any mention of either of those on the Aral. To be safe, cover from 1902 until they started the irrigation work that eventually drained the lake. Also, Max, when are we finished provisioning the ship?”

Max had slipped on a pair of cheater glasses and now peered over their top with a look of mock disdain. “You want to pursue what could be the greatest scientific discovery since man started making fire and you’re asking me about provisions? Are you that dismissive of the idea?”

“Quite frankly, yes. Linda’s waiting for us. What’s our ETA in Bermuda?”

Max pulled off his glasses and studied Juan. He waited a beat and finally said, “When Nikola Tesla started his studies, he had no peer. Nothing was off-limits because, well, because the nascent field of electricity was so new, no one knew there even were limits. A lot of modern scientists stop themselves from looking into certain things because they have the preconceived notions, based on those who came before them, that some things are simply impossible. The thing is, Tesla had no such limitations because he was the first. He was the pioneer who would set the limits. Who’s to say he didn’t investigate teleportation and death rays and earthquake machines? And just because he never published his findings doesn’t mean he wasn’t successful.” He looked down the table to Mark and Eric. “Who was the guy who said teleportation was impossible?”

“Werner Heisenberg,” they said in perfect sync, and then both added, “The Heisenberg uncertainty principle.”

“Right. You can know the location of a subatomic particle or its spin, but not both.” Max made it sound like a question, and when he got a pair of nods from the resident geniuses, he went on. “This came out decades after the time frame we’re talking about. Tesla didn’t know the uncertainty principle, so he wouldn’t have been constrained in his thinking.”

“But Max,” Juan said, “the principle still stands, whether it had been discovered or not. For example, no one went faster than light before Einstein proved you couldn’t do it, and no one’s done it since.”

Hanley had laid a logic trap, and Cabrillo had walked right into it. Max pounced, “A couple months ago you got a telephone call from a computer based on quantum entanglement that relies on subatomic particles communicating with one another at a speed faster than light. Impossible, you just said, and yet your call happened. All I’m saying is that when it comes to technology, yesterday’s impossibility is tomorrow’s IPO. Go to Vermont, keep an open mind, and Murph, Stoney, and I will come up with an alternative theory that fits your gestalt.”

“Gestalt?” Cabrillo smirked.

“Word-of-the-day toilet paper,” Max chuckled, “don’t mock it. Just to keep things in perspective, your cell phone has more computing capacity than the lunar lander that put men on the moon. And both of those things were considered impossible less than ten years before they were invented.”

“Fine, consider my mind open. Getting back to my original question, when is the ship’s provisioning over?”

“Ten tonight. We’re waiting for a shipment from a liquor wholesaler, and the flight from Anchorage with our king crab legs lands at Newark at eight thirty.”

“An army travels on its stomach,” Linc said.

“And liver, apparently,” Eddie Seng added. “It will be nice to have real bourbon again. Max, that African swill you bought in Madagascar was beyond rotgut.”

“What do you expect for a dollar a bottle?”

“I’m just grateful that stuff didn’t blind us all.”

“If you go blind, it’ll be for other reasons,” Hanley shot back. He looked to the Chairman. “We’ve got a pilot scheduled to take us out at eleven.”

“So you meet Linda and the Emir in Bermuda the day after tomorrow?”

“Actually, they’ve made good time. We’re going to have to kick the old girl into high gear and reach Bermuda in twenty hours in order to meet them.”

Juan considered timing for a moment. “Once I’m done with Professor Tennyson, I’ll fly commercial to Hamilton and have Gomez pick me up in the chopper. We shadow the Emir like we’re contracted to do, but I want the ship ready to bug out at a moment’s notice.” He looked at each of his top people. “Yuri Borodin died to reveal a secret Pytor Kenin is keeping. We’re not going to stop until we find out what it is.”