"The watertight doors were closed right after the collision. We might make it down one of the escape ladders."
"Then keep going."
The journey along the circuitous alleyways went rapidly through the unending steel labyrinth of passages and ladder tunnels. Bigalow halted and lifted a round hatch cover and peered into the narrow opening. Surprisingly, the water on the cargo deck beneath was only two feet deep.
"No hope," he lied. "It's flooded."
The passenger roughly shoved the officer to one side and looked for himself.
"It's dry enough for my purpose," he said slowly. He waved the gun at the hatch. "Keep going."
The overhead electric lights were still burning in the hold as the two men sloshed their way toward the ship's strong room. The dim rays glinted off the brass of a giant Renault town car blocked to the deck.
Both of them stumbled and fell in the icy water several times, numbing their bodies with the cold. Staggering like drunken men, they reached the vault at last. It was a cube in the middle of the cargo compartment. It measured eight feet by eight feet; its sturdy walls were constructed of twelve inch-thick Belfast steel.
The passenger produced a key from his vest pocket and inserted it in the slot. The lock was new and stiff, but finally the tumblers gave with an audible click. He pushed the heavy door open and stepped into the vault. Then he turned and smiled for the first time. "Thanks for your help, Bigalow. You'd better head topside. There's still time for you."
Bigalow looked puzzled. "You're staying?"
"Yes, I'm staying. I've murdered eight good and true men. I can't live with that." It was said flatly. The tone final. "It's over and done with. Everything."
Bigalow tried to speak, but the words would not come.
The passenger nodded in understanding and began pulling the door closed behind him.
"Thank God for Southby," he said.
And then he was gone, swallowed up in the black interior of the vault.
Bigalow survived.
He won his race with the rising water and managed to reach the Boat Deck and throw himself over the side only seconds before the ship took her plunge.
As the bulk of the great ocean liner sank from sight, her red pennant with the white star that had been hanging limply, high on the aft mast peak under the dead calm of the night, suddenly unfurled when it touched the sea, as though in final salute to the fifteen hundred men, women, and children who were either dying of exposure or drowning in the frigid waters over the grave.
Blind instinct clutched at Bigalow and he reached out and seized the pennant as it slipped past. Before his mind could focus, before he knew the full danger of his foolhardy act, he found himself being pulled beneath the water. Yet he stubbornly held on, refusing to release his grip. He was nearly twenty feet below the surface when at last the pennant's grommets tore from the halyard and the prize was his. Only then did he struggle upward through the liquid blackness. After what seemed to him an eternity, he broke into the night air again, thankful that the expected suction from the sinking ship had not gotten him.
The twenty-eight-degree water nearly killed him. Given another ten minutes in its freezing grip, he would have simply been one more statistic of that terrible tragedy.
A rope saved him; his hand brushed against and grabbed a trailing rope attached to a capsized boat. With the last ounce of his ebbing strength, he pulled his nearly frozen body on board and shared with thirty other men the numbing ache of the cold until they were rescued by another ship four hours later.
The pitiful cries of the hundreds who died would forever linger in the minds of those who survived. But as he clung to the overturned, partly submerged lifeboat, Bigalow's thoughts were on another memory the strange man sealed forever in the ship's vault.
Who was he?
Who were the eight men he claimed to have murdered?
What was the secret of the vault?
They were questions that were to haunt Bigalow for the next seventy-six years, right up to the last few hours of his life.
THE SICILIAN PROJECT
July 1987
1
The President swiveled in his chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and stared unseeing out of the window of the Oval Office and cursed his lot. He hated his job with a passion he hadn't thought possible. He had known the exact moment the excitement had gone out of it. He had known it the morning be had found it hard to rise from bed. That was always the first sign. A dread of beginning the day.