"You heard me. The situation requires the search be conducted as quietly as possible. You'll have to make do without any help from NUMA."
"Have you got both oars in the water?" Pitt demanded. "You expect me, one man working alone, to accomplish what half the Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard failed to do? Why, hell, they couldn't find a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot airship until it showed up on its own. What am I supposed to use, a dowser and a canoe?"
"The idea," Sandecker explained patiently, "is to fly LeBaron's last known course in the Prosperteer."
Pitt slowly sank into an office sofa. "This is the craziest scheme I've ever heard," he said, unbelieving.
He turned to Jessie. "Do you go along with this?"
"I'll do whatever it takes to find my husband," she said evenly.
"A cuckoo's nest," Pitt said gravely. He stood and began to pace the room, clasping and unclasping his hands. "Why the secrecy? Your husband was an important man, a celebrity, a confidant of the rich and famous, closely connected with high government officials, a financial guru to executives of major corporations. Why in God's name am I the only man in the country who can search for him?"
"Dirk," Sandecker said softly. "Raymond LeBaron's financial empire touches hundreds of thousands of people. Right now, it's hanging in limbo because he's still among the missing. It can't be proven whether he's alive or dead. The government has called off any further hunt, because over five million dollars have been spent by military search and rescue teams without a sighting, without a hint of where he might have disappeared. Budget-conscious congressmen will howl for scalps if more government money is spent on another fruitless effort."
"What about the private sector and LeBaron's own business associates?"
"Many business leaders respected LeBaron, but at one time or another most of them were burned by him in his editorials. They won't spend a dime or go out of their way to look for him. As to the men around him, they have more to gain by his death."
"So does Jessie here," said Pitt, gazing at her.
She smiled thinly. "I can't deny it. But the bulk of his estate goes to charities and other family members.
I do, however, receive a substantial inheritance."
"You must own a yacht, Mrs. LeBaron. Why don't you assemble your own crew of investigators and look for your husband?"
"There are reasons, Dirk, why I can't conduct a large publicized effort. Reasons you needn't know.
The admiral and I think there is a chance, a very slight chance, that three people can quietly retrace the flight of the Prosperteer under the same conditions and discover what happened to Raymond."
"Why bother?" asked Pitt. "All islands and reefs within the blimp's fuel range were covered by the initial search. I'd only be covering the same trail."
"They might have missed something."
"Like maybe Cuba?"
Sandecker shook his head. "Castro would have claimed LeBaron overflew Cuban territory under instructions from the CIA and flaunted the blimp's capture to the world. No, there has to be another answer."
Pitt walked over to the corner windows and gazed longingly down at a fleet of small sailboats that were holding a regatta on the Anacostia River. The white sails gleamed against the dark green water as they raced toward the buoy markers.
"How do we know where to concentrate?" he asked without turning. "We're looking at a search grid as large as a thousand square miles. It would take weeks to cover it properly."
"I have all my husband's records and charts," said Jessie.
"He left them behind?"
"No, they were found in the blimp."
Pitt silently watched the sailboats, his arms crossed in front of him. He tried to probe the motives, penetrate the intrigue, lay out the safeguards. He tried to segregate each into an orderly niche.
"When do we go?" he asked finally.
"Sunrise tomorrow morning," Sandecker replied.
"You both still insist I lead the fishing expedition?"
"We do," Jessie said flatly.