Lily glanced at her watch. "Only forty minutes to shower and do my hair. I'd better get with it."
Pitt gave her the room key. "You're in two twenty-one. Al and I have rooms adjoining yours on each side."
As soon as Lily disappeared with the porter into an elevator, Pitt motioned Giordino into the cocktail lounge. He waited until the barmaid took their drink order before passing the second message across the table.
Giordino read it aloud softly. " 'Your library project takes top priority. Most urgent you find a permanent address for Alex in the next four days. Luck, Dad."
" He looked up, utterly confused. "Do I read this right? We have only four days to identify the location?"
Pitt nodded positively. "I read panic between the lines and smell something rumbling in Washington power circles."
"They might as well ask us to invent a common cure for herpes, AIDS and acne," Giordino grumbled. "We can kiss off our skiing trip."
"We'll stay," said Pitt resolutely. "Nothing we can do until Yaeger gets lucky." Pitt rose from his chair. "And speaking of Yaeger, I'd better give him a call."
He found a public telephone in the hotel lobby and made a call on his credit card. After four rings a voice answered in what sounded like the middle of a yawn.
"Yaeger here."
"Hiram, this is Dirk. How's your search going?"
"It's going."
"Run onto anything?"
"My babies sifted through every piece of geological data in their little banks from Casablanca around the horn to Zanzibar. They failed to find a hot spot along the coast of Africa that matched your drawing. There were three vague possibilities.
But when I programmed profiles on land-mass transformations that might have occurred over the past sixteen hundred years, none proved encouraging. Sorry."
"What's your next step?"
"I'm. already in the process of heading north. This will take more time because of the extensive shoreline encompassing the British Isles, the Baltic Sea and the Scandinavian countries as far as Siberia."
"Can you cover it in four days?"
"Only if you insist I put the hired help on a twenty-four-hour schedule."
"I insist," said Pitt sternly. "Word has just come down that the project has become an urgent priority."
"We'll hit it hard," Yaeger said, his voice more jovial than serious.
"I'M in Breckenridge, Colorado. if you strike on something, call me at the Breckenridge Hotel." Pitt gave Yaeger the hotel phone and his room number.
Yaeger dutifully repeated the digits. "Okay, got it."
"You sound like you're in a good mood," said Pitt.
"Why not? We accomplished quite a lot."
"Like what? You still don't know where our river lies."
"True," replied Yaeger cheerfully. "But we sure as hell know where it ain't."
Snowflakes the size of cornflakes were falling as the three trudged across the street from the hotel to a two-story cedarsided condominium.
A floodlighted sign read SKIQUEEN. They climbed a stairway and knocked on the door to unit 22B.
Bertram Rothberg greeted them with a jolly smile beneath a splendid gray beard and sparkling blue eyes. His ears rose in full sail through a swirling sea of gray hair. A red plaid shirt and corduroy trousers clad his beefy body. Put an ax in one hand -and a crosscut saw in the other, and he could have reported for duty as a lumberjack.