The people who came here said that what we're doing could trigger worldwide destruction."
Gant laughed. "You've been on that island for too long. When you spend some time in a snake pit like Washington, you learn that the truth is exactly what you want it to be. They're bluffing."
"What should we do?"
"Speed up the deadline. At the same time, we'll slow them down with a diversion. The removal of Kurt Austin from the picture will derail NUMA and give us the time we need to make sure the project is completed."
"Has anyone heard about Karla Janos? I don't like the idea that she might show up out of nowhere."
"I've taken care of that. My friends in Moscow assured me that if I spread a little more money around Janos would never leave that island in Siberia alive."
"Do you trust the Russians?"•
"I don't trust anyone. The Russians will be paid in full when they show me the evidence of her death. In the meantime, she is thousands of miles away from here, unable to interfere."
"How do you plan to respond to Austin?"
"I was hoping I could borrow the Lucifer Legion for that job."
"Lucifer? You know how undisciplined they are."
"I'm thinking of deniability. If something goes wrong, they are simply a group of crazed killers acting on their own."
"They'll need some supervision."
"Fine with me."
"I'll take my boat to Portland and catch a helicopter to Bosto
n for the trip to Rio."
"Good. I'll join you there as soon as I take care of some minor matters."
After discussing last-minute details, Margrave hung up and barked an order to his guard. He went into the lighthouse and made a phone call. Then he piled a few belongings into a bag with his laptop computer. Minutes later, he was striding along the pier to the cigarette boat. The boat's powerful engine was warming up. He got aboard with two security men. They cast off, and he gunned the engine, launching the boat over the surface of Penobscot Bay with its bow high in the air.
The boat passed a speck of an island covered with a thick growth of fir trees. Paul and Gamay sat on a large rock in the shade of the trees and watched the fast-moving craft throw up a rooster tail of white water as it went speeding by the island.
"Looks like Mr. Margrave is a man in a hurry," Gamay said.
Trout smiled. "Hope it was something we said."
They hiked across the island to where their boat was tied up to a tree, got in and started the engine. Then they swung the boat around to the other side of the island, gave the motor throttle and followed in Margrave's vanishing wake.
35
The thirty-story tubular structure that houses the National Underwater and Marine Agency sat on an East Washington hill overlooking the Potomac River. Sheeted in green reflective glass, the building was home to thousands of NUMA's oceanographers, marine engineers and the labs and computers they worked with.
Austin's office was a spartan affair on the fourth floor. It had the usual accoutrements, including a desk, a computer and a filing cabinet. The walls were decorated with photos of NUMA research vessels, charts of the world's oceans and a bulletin board festooned with copies of scientific articles and news clips. On the desk was a favorite photograph of Austin's mother and father sailing on Puget Sound. It was taken in happier days, before his mother died of a lingering disease.
The office's plainness was partly deliberate. Because the nature of the Special Assignments Team's work was largely clandestine, Austin wanted to blend into the NUMA backdrop. The other reason for the purely functional nature of his office stemmed from the fact that he was often away on missions that took him around the globe. His workplace was the world's oceans.
On the same floor was the NUMA boardroom, an imposing space with a ten-foot-long conference table built out of a section of wooden hull from a sunken schooner. Austin had chosen a smaller and less regal space than the conference room to plot strategy. The small study lined with shelves that were stacked with books about the sea was a quiet place often used by those waiting to make presentations.
As Austin sat at an oak table in the center of the study, he thought about Churchill's war room, or the Oval Office, where decisions were made that affected the future of the world. He had no infantry divisions or powerful fleets, he mused. He had Joe Zavala, who would much rather be driving his Corvette convertible with a lovely woman at his side; Barrett, a brilliant computer nerd with a spider tattooed on his bald pate; and the beautiful and intelligent Karla Janos, whom Austin would have preferred to be talking to over cocktails.
"Paul and Gamay are on their way back from Maine," he announced. "They hit a dead end trying to persuade Margrave to call off his plans."
"That means we have only one option," Karla said. "We've got to stop this insane scheme."