The Silent Sea (Oregon Files 7)

“Juan, please.”

“Juan, I’m not really the person you need to be speaking with. All I know is that there was a claim that Tsai sailed to America and back sometime around the end of the 1400s. I am going to put you in touch with Tamara Wright. She’s a Chinese history scholar who wrote an excellent book about Admiral Zheng’s voyage to India and Africa and has pieced together a history of the Admiral Tsai legend. Can I call you in ten minutes?”

“Sure.” Juan gave him his cell number and glanced at Max. “You just witnessed history, my friend. Dirk Pitt told me that in all the years he’s known Perlmutter, he’s never been able to stump the man.”

Not knowing St. Julian, Hanley was underwhelmed. “I’ll mention it next time I’m at NUMA.”

Juan’s phone trilled a few minutes later. “Bad news, I’m afraid. Tamara’s on vacation and won’t be back to her office at Dartmouth until next Monday.”

“For reasons I can’t discuss,” Juan said, “time might be of the essence. We only need a couple of minutes of her time.”

“That’s just it. She’s unavailable. The grad student who answered at her office said Tamara left her cell phone behind.”

“Do you know where she’s vacationing? Maybe there’s a way we can track her down.”

“Is it really that important?” Perlmutter asked, and then spoke again before Juan could reply, “Of course it is or you wouldn’t have asked. She’s on a Mississippi River jazz cruise aboard the Natchez Belle. I have no idea where they are right now, but you can probably get that information from the cruise line.”

“I’m already logging on to their website,” Cabrillo said. “Thank you, Mr. Perlmutter.”

“You can forget my crab and send me a translation of that plaque, and we’ll call it even.”

“Done and done.”

“So?” Max asked.

Juan spun the laptop so Hanley could see. The image on the screen was a beautiful white paddle wheeler with smoke coming from her two skinny stacks and people waving from her three wedding-cake-like decks. In the background was the famous St. Louis Arch, one of her usual ports of call.

“Up for a little riverboat gambling?”

“I left my derringer at the safe house.” Max shot his cuffs. “But I should be able to find a few spare aces. Where is she now?”

“We can catch her in Vicksburg and get back off again in Natchez, Mississippi,” Juan said, taking back the computer to book them on the overnight trip and make the flight arrangements to get them there. “After that, we’ll hook up with the Oregon again in Rio and either head to the assignment in South Africa or see where the Fates blow us.”

“You’re having fun, aren’t you?” Max was pleased.

“Apart from getting shot at and left at the bottom of a two-hundred-foot pit for a while, yeah, I am.”

Hanley chuckled. “You liked those parts, too.”

Juan just grinned.

SEVENTEEN

The closest large airport to Vicksburg was in Jackson, Mississippi, fifty miles to the east. The wall of humidity Cabrillo walked into when he stepped out of the terminal made him think he was back in the Amazon. The air shimmered with heat, and he couldn’t seem to fill his lungs. Beads of sweat popped up on the dome of Max’s balding head, and he had to mop his brow with a bandanna.

“My God,” he said. “What is this place, like, ten miles from the sun?”

“Eighteen,” Juan replied. “I read that in the airline magazine.”

What made it worse is that both men had donned jackets after retrieving their pistols from the checked baggage.

Rather than bother with the formalities of renting another car, they opted to take a cab instead. Once they found a driver and agreed on a price, the bags went into the trunk and the men settled in the arctic comfort of the taxi’s air-conditioning.

With traffic, it took a little over an hour to reach their destination, but they arrived in plenty of time. The Natchez Belle wouldn’t leave for its namesake city for another forty minutes.

She was moored behind a structure made up to look like a side-wheel steamer that housed one of the casinos in the shadow of the Vicksburg Bridges, a pair of skeletal steel spans that stretched across the muddy Mississippi. Her boarding gantry was lowered right onto the parking lot. A white tent had been set up nearby, and the brassy beat of jazz music carried to where the men stood, as the cabbie headed back home again. Dozens of people milled around with plates of hors d’oeuvres and drinks in their hands. A few of the boat’s staff were in attendance, dressed in period costumes.

“What do you know, more gambling.” Max no longer noticed the heat.