Valhalla Rising (Dirk Pitt 16)

Mulholland thought a moment. Then his dour face brightened slightly and he looked down. "The floor!"

"Pull up the rugs and throw them on the sofa," instructed Perlmutter. "Carefully examine the seams between the boards. Look for small notches on the ends where they have been pried up before."

Mulholland was on his hands and knees for nearly half an hour, scrutinizing every board laid in the floor. Then suddenly he looked up, grinned and pulled a dime from his pocket. He slipped it between the ends of two boards and pried one up.

"Eureka!" he exclaimed excitedly.

Enthused enough to swivel his great body down on the floor, Perlmutter lay sideways and looked into the slot beneath the board. There was a leather pouch inside. He carefully took it between a thumb and forefinger and gently lifted it out. Then, with no small assistance by Mulholland, he rose to his feet and sank into the sofa again.

Almost reverently, he untied a small velvet cord from around the pouch and opened it. He removed a notebook not much larger than a small stack of postcards but three inches thick. He blew the dust off the cover and read aloud, translating the French wording engraved on the leather jacket.

"Investigation of the ingenious Captain Amherst."

Very slowly Perlmutter began reading the words written in a precise handwriting less than an eighth of an inch high. A master of six languages, he had no problem in comprehending Verne's narrative about the adventures of a British scientific mastermind by the name of Captain Cameron Amherst.

Though his eyes read the words, his mind conjured up the images of this extraordinary man whom Verne had known and whose life he chronicled. Two hours later, he closed the notebook, and leaned

heavily back in the sofa with the expression of a man who has just proposed to the woman he loved and been accepted.

"Find anything of interest?" asked Mulholland, curious. "Something that no one else knows?"

"Did you notice the ribbon around the pouch?"

Mulholland nodded. "Couldn't be more than ten or twelve years old? If Verne was the last to handle the pouch, the ribbon would have rotted away long ago."

"Which leads to the conclusion that Dr. Hereoux learned Verne's secret a long time ago."

"What secret is that?"

Perlmutter stared off into space for several seconds. "When he spoke, his voice was soft and faint, as if the words came from a distance. "Pitt was right."

Then he closed his eyes, gave a long sigh and promptly dozed off.

54

Eight hours into the congressional committee hearing, Curtis Merlin Zale was staring frequently at his watch and fidgeting nervously in his chair. He was not the supremely confident man who had faced Congresswoman Smith and her committee members earlier. The smug grin on his face was also gone, replaced by lips tensed and pressed tightly together.

Word from Omo Kanai and late-breaking reports of a disaster in New York should have reached the hearing room hours earlier.

Congressman William August from Oklahoma was in the midst of questioning Zale about the rising prices charged by the oil company refineries when Sandra Delage, wearing a tailored business dress, approached Curtis from behind and laid a paper on his desk. He excused himself before answering August and scanned the paper's contents. His eyes suddenly widened and he looked up at Delage. Her face was as grim as a mortician's. He placed his hand over his microphone and asked several hushed questions, which she answered in a voice too low for anyone sitting nearby to hear. Then she turned and left the proceedings.

Zale was not a man easily shaken by defeat, but at this moment he looked like Napoleon after Waterloo. "I'm sorry," he murmured to August. "Could you repeat the question?"

Loren was tired. Late afternoon had become early evening, but she was not about to let Zale leave the committee hearings, not yet. Her aides had kept her informed on the operation to stop the Pacific Trojan and the fact that no demolition charges had been found. Not until two hours later was she alerted to the mission to stop the Mongol Invader. She had heard nothing from Pitt or Sandecker since two o'clock, and had fought a nagging fear during the following four hours.

Her anxiety was made worse by a cold anger directed at Zale, who resolutely fired back calculated answers to their questions without hesitation or claims of faulty memory. To the reporters covering the hearings, it looked as if he was in perfect control and steering the proceedings to fit his own agenda.

Loren knew Zale was tiring, too, and she forced patience on herself. She was waiting, like a lioness in ambush, for the right moment to strike with the damaging information given by Sally Morse. She pulled the papers containing the questions and accusations she had prepared from her briefcase and waited patiently until Congressman August had finished his line of questioning.

At that moment, she noticed the faces in the audience suddenly stare behind her. Whispers began circulating throughout the chamber. Then a hand touched her shoulder. She turned and found herself gazing up incredulously into the face of Dirk Pitt. He was dressed in dirty jeans and a wrinkled sweatshirt. He looked exhausted, as if he had just climbed a mountain. His hair was a tangled mess and his face sported a three-day growth of black stubble. A security guard was clutching his arm, trying to drag him from the chamber, but he pulled the guard along with him like a stubborn Saint Bernard.

"Dirk!" she whispered. "What are you doing here?"

He didn't look at her as he answered, but stared with a smug grin at Zale and spoke in a voice that carried across the room through her microphone. "We stopped the Liquid Natural Gas tanker from blowing up New York Harbor. The ship now rests on the bottom of the sea. Please inform Mr. Zale that his entire Viper team went down with the ship and it is now safe for Ms. Sally Morse, the CEO of Yukon Oil, to testify before your committee without fear of reprisal."

Then Pitt, in what might have looked like an accidental motion, lightly brushed his hand against Loren's auburn hair and exited the chamber.

A vast load was suddenly lifted from Loren's shoulders. She said, "Ladies and Gentlemen, it is getting late and if there is no objection, I would like to adjourn this hearing until nine o'clock tomorrow, when I will call an important witness to testify who will reveal the truth behind Mr. Zale's criminal activities-"