Vixen 03 (Dirk Pitt 5)

Pitt smiled patiently. "She doesn't really look all that bad when you consider she's been immersed in the sea for seventy years."

Jarvis understood immediately. "From the Titanic1?"

"Yes. I was allowed to keep her after the salvage project. Sort of a prize for services rendered, so to speak."

Pitt led the way up a flight of stairs to his apartment. Jarvis entered and his professional eye routinely traveled over the unusual furnishings. The occupant was a well-traveled man, he surmised, judging from the nautical objects decorating the interior. Copper divers' helmets from another age. Mariners' compasses, wooden helms, ships' bells, even old nails and bottles, all neatly labeled with the names of famous ships from which Pitt had salvaged them. It was like looking into a museum of a man's life.

Jarvis sank into a leather sofa at Pitt's invitation. He looked his host directly in the eyes. "Do you know me, Mr. Pitt?"

"No."

"Yet you had no qualms about seeing me."

"Who can resist intrigue?" Pitt said, grinning. "It's not every day I find a note on my windshield with a phone number that turns out to be the National Security Agency."

"You guessed, of course, that you were being followed."

Pitt reclined in a leather chair and propped his feet on an ottoman. "Let's sack the wordplay, Mr. Jarvis, and get to the point.

What's your sport?"

"Sport?"

"Your interest in me."

"Okay, Mr. Pitt," said Jarvis. "Cards on the table. What is the real purpose behind NUMA's search for a special type of heavy naval shell?" "Sure you wouldn't like a drink?" Pitt countered. "No thanks," Jarvis answered, appraising Pitt's casual stall. "If you know we're in the market, then you know why." "Seismological tests on coral formations?" Pitt nodded.

Jarvis stretched his arms out on the sofa's backrest. "When do you have the tests scheduled?"

"The last two weeks of March next year."

"I see." Jarvis gave Pitt a benign, fatherly look and then lunged for the heart. "I've talked to four seismologists, two from your own agency. They do not subscribe to your idea of dropping sixteen-inch naval shells from an airplane. In fact, they found it downright ludicrous. I was also informed that there are no seismographic tests scheduled by NUMA in the Pacific. In short, Mr.

Pitt, your clever little dodge won't hold water." Pitt closed his eyes in thought. He could lie, or simply offer no comment. No, he reasoned, his alternatives had narrowed down to zero. There was virtually no hope that he and Steiger and Sandecker could negotiate a quick return of the QD warheads from the AAR. They had carried the search as far as their limited resources could take them. The time had come, he decided, to call in the professionals.

He opened his eyes and stared at Jarvis. " If it were within my power to place in the palm of your hand a plague organism that could kill without interruption for three hundred years, what would you do with it?"

Pitt's question caught Jarvis off guard. "I don't know what you're driving at."

"The question stands," said Pitt.

"Is it a weapon?" , ; Pitt nodded.

An uneasy feeling gripped Jarvis. "I know of no such weapon. Chemical and biological arms were effectively and unconditionally banned by every member of the United Nations ten years ago." "Please answer the question," Pitt said. "Turn it over to our government, I suppose." "Are you certain that's the correct course?"

72

"Good God, man, what do you want? The case is purely hypothetical."

"Such a weapon must be destroyed," said Pitt. His green eyes seemed to burn into the back of Jarvis's brain.

There was a short silence. Then Jarvis said, "Does one truly exist?" "It does."

The pieces were falling into place, and for the first time in all the years he could remember, Jarvis wished he hadn't been so damned efficient. He looked at Pitt and smiled thinly.

"I'll have that drink now," he said quietly. "And then I think you and I should exchange some very disturbing news."

It was past midnight when Phil Sawyer stopped the car in front of Loren's apartment building. He was what most women thought a handsome man, with a solid face and a neatly styled mass of prematurely gray hair.