“Yes,” Lee said. “I even called him when we stopped at Los Angeles and told him that we were coming to Pohnpei.”
“That explains how Chang and his buddies knew we were here.”
“Oh, no, you don’t think . . .”
Austin shrugged.
“Our mission is top secret,” he said. “Only a few trusted people knew we were coming here. But Chang must have had someone on our tail from the second we landed. How well do you know Dr. Huang?” he asked. “Could he be an informant?”
“I met him at Harvard, and he was quite helpful finding me employment.” She thought about Huang’s failure to fight her exile and his deceptive manner in bringing her into the medusa research. “Dr. Huang is a brilliant but fearful man. It would take only a little threat to bend him to someone’s will.”
“Someone or something like the Triad.”
Her mood darkened.
“Yes,” she said. “But it is my fault for letting him deceive me.”
“You did a favor for someone you thought was an old friend,” he said. “I’d suggest that you keep Dr. Huang in the dark from now on.”
The distant whup-whup of rotor blades from over the lagoon announced the imminent arrival of the helicopter from the Concord. The Seahawk set down moments later. Austin and Lee climbed in, and the chopper lifted off. It was less than an hour, but it seemed like days to Austin, before the helicopter was setting down for a landing on the aft deck of the Concord.
Captain Dixon helped Lee off the helicopter, and said, “Welcome to the Concord, Dr. Lee. Your government has been trying to get in touch with you.”
“We were somewhat delayed in Pohnpei,” she said.
“Quite all right,” he said. “I told your people that you were on the way. We’ve got a teleconferencing setup you can use. I’ll have my communications officer take you there.”
While Dixon stepped off to the side to use his hand radio, Lee turned to Austin.
“You’ll have to excuse me, Kurt. Thank you for an interesting day.”
“My pleasure,” he said. “Perhaps on our next tour of Nan Madol, we can spend more time above water.”
“That would certainly be different,” she said with a smile.
The communications officer arrived minutes later and led Lee to her teleconference. Dixon welcomed Austin back to the Navy cruiser, and said he would show him on a chart where Zavala had disappeared. On the way to the bridge, the captain said aircraft in the vicinity had made several sweeps around the atoll, but there was no sign of Zavala or the helicopter.
“No debris or oil slick?” Austin asked.
“Nothing,” Dixon said. “But we’ll keep looking.”
“Thanks, Captain, but you can’t spend any more time looking for Joe. The lab is our top priority.” Noting the frustrated look on the captain’s face, he added, “Don’t worry about Joe. He pops up when you least expect him.”
Austin studied the atoll’s location, wondering what had attracted Zavala to the tiny speck of land, and then punched in the Trouts’ number on his cell phone. Gamay answered.
“Kurt! Thank goodness you called. We’ve been worried. What’s going on?”
“We had a run-in with one of the Triad leaders in Nan Madol. Guy named Chang. The Triad had an informant. We’re back on the Concord, but now Joe is missing. Captain Dixon said Joe borrowed a helicopter and went off to check out an atoll.”
“We gave him the atoll’s coordinates,” Gamay said. “It’s located approximately where Trouble Island was, the place Captain Dobbs stopped at with his whale ship a hundred fifty years ago.”
“You found the logbook?” Austin asked.
“No,” she said. “You’re not the only one who’s discovered that the Triad has a long reach. We contacted a book dealer who said he had a lead on the log, but someone killed him and tried to jump us. We got away by the skin of our teeth.”
“Glad to hear that,” Austin said with relief. “I’m puzzled, though. If you didn’t find the log, where did you dig up the information about the atoll?”
Gamay told Austin about Perlmutter’s lead to Caleb Nye, the visits to the Dobbs mansion and Brimmer’s store, and finding Brimmer’s body in the old mill. Austin fumed as he listened to the details of Brimmer’s murder and the attempt to ambush the Trouts. Even without Dr. Huang, the vast criminal organization seemed to have eyes and ears everywhere. He asked for the longitude and latitude coordinates from Nye’s diorama and said he would check them out immediately.