Cyclops (Dirk Pitt 8)

What time was it? A glance at his watch told him it was eight minutes to midnight. He closed the briefcase and wiggled into his coat. Taking a cigarette lighter from one pocket, he slid the interior workings from its case. Next, he removed a thin metal shaft with a dental mirror on one end from a slit in his rear coat flap.

Hagen moved to the doorway. Clutching the briefcase between his knees, he stopped short of the threshold and tilted the tiny mirror up and down the corridor. It was empty. He turned the mirror until it reflected the television monitor above the far end of the corridor. Then he positioned the lighter until it barely protruded around the doorframe and pressed the flint lever.

Inside the security booth behind the main lobby, a screen on one of the TV monitors suddenly turned to snow. The guard at the console quickly began checking the circuit lights.

"I've got a problem with number twelve," he announced.

His supervisor came over from a desk and stared at the monitor. "Interference. The eggheads in the electrophysics lab must be at it again."

Suddenly the interference stopped, only to begin again on another monitor.

"That's funny," said the supervisor. "I've never seen it happen in sequence before."

After a few seconds, the screen cleared, showing nothing but an empty corridor. The two security guards simply looked at each other and shrugged.

Hagen turned off the miniature electrical impulse jammer as soon as he stepped inside and closed the door to Mooney's office. He walked softly over to the window and closed the drapes. He slipped on a pair of thin plastic gloves and turned on the overhead lights.

Hagen was a master at the technique of tossing a room. He didn't bother with the obvious, the drawers, files, address and telephone lists. He went directly to a bookshelf and found what he had hoped to find in less than seven minutes.

Mooney might have been one of the leading physicists in the nation, but Hagen had read him like a pictorial magazine. The small notebook was hidden inside a book entitled Celestial Mechanics in True Perspective by Horace DeLiso. The contents were in a code employing equations. It was Greek to Hagen but he wasn't fooled by the significance. Normally he would have photographed the pages and put them back, but this time he simply pocketed them, fully realizing he could never have them deciphered in time.

The guards were still struggling with the monitors when he stepped up to the counter.

"Would you like me to sign out?" he said with a smile.

The head security guard came over, a quizzical expression on his face. "Did you just come from finance?"

"Yes."

"We didn't see you on the security TV"

"I can't help that," said Hagen innocently. "I walked out the door and through the hallways until I came here. I don't know what else to tell you."

"Did you see anyone? Anything unusual?"

"No one. But the lights flickered and dimmed a couple of times.'

The guard nodded. "Electrical interference from the electro physics lab. That's what I thought it was."

Hagen signed out and walked into a cloudless night, humming softly to himself.

THE CYCLOPS

October 25, 1989

Key West, Florida

Pitt lay with his back pressed against the cool concrete of the airstrip, looking up at the Prosperteer.

The sun pushed over the horizon and slowly covered her worn hull in a shroud of pastel orange. The blimp had an eerie quality about it, or so it seemed in Pitt's imagination, an aluminum ghost unsure of where it was supposed to haunt.

He'd been awake most of the time during the flight from Washington to Key West, poring over Buck Caesar's charts of the Old Bahama Channel and retracing Raymond LeBaron's carefully marked flight path. He closed his eyes, trying to get a clear picture of the Prosperteer's spectral wanderings. Unless the gas bags inside the blimp were reinflated from a ship, an extremely unlikely event, the only answer to Raymond LeBaron's whereabouts lay in Cuba.

Something nagged at his mind, a thought that kept returning after he unconsciously brushed it aside, a piece of the picture that became increasingly lucid as he began dwelling on it. And then suddenly it crystallized.

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