Mirage (Oregon Files 9)

“Did he seem to believe that story?”

“That, I can’t recall. No, wait. I think he said it was a conspiracy theory, so he must have dismissed it.”

“Maybe he shouldn’t have,” Mark said with relish. As the ship’s resident conspiracy nut, he was in his element. “Get this. In the spring of 1963, a game warden in Alaska found the remains of three people who’d died sometime during the winter. The bodies had been picked over by scavengers, so a straight identification was out of the question. Here’s the thing. He found French francs in the pocket of one of them.”

“So?”

“I haven’t told you the best part. The men were all wearing lab coats over shorts and T-shirts, and they were found lying on a patch of pure white sand in the middle of a boreal forest. By the time the ranger returned with a team to recover the bodies, animals had dragged them away. The only thing he could do was recover a sample of the sand.

“He sent it to a geologist at the University of Alaska in Anchorage, who realized that the sand wasn’t pure silica but had a high concentration of ground coral in it. The ranger lost interest in the whole thing, but the geologist, Henry Ryder, kept on it.”

Eric cut in. “It took him three years of asking around and comparing samples, but the sand they found in the middle of Alaska originated on an atoll almost in the exact center of the Pacific Ocean called Mororoa.”

“Is that significant?” Cabrillo asked.

Mark said with delicious thrill, “Mororoa is where the French monitored their atomic bomb tests. Back in the sixties, it had a sizable population of scientists and engineers. This Ryder guy contacted the French government and asked if they’d lost any scientists from Mororoa. He was stonewalled. This was all top secret, and the Cold War was at full boil. But he didn’t let up. With the help of a woman in the university’s French department, he made calls to the offices of France’s top engineering schools and eventually deduced that three men”—he pulled a scrap of paper from his jeans—“Dr. Paul Broussard, Professor Jacque Mollier, and Dr. Viktor Quesnel had all been missing since 1963, and that all three men were linked to France’s nuclear weapons research.

“He reached out to their widows. Two wouldn’t talk to him at all, but one admitted that her government had sworn her to secrecy. She would only confirm that her husband had been on Mororoa Island three years earlier and that was the last she’d heard from him.”

“Where’d you get all of this?” Juan asked, trying to wrap his head around it.

The two exchanged a sheepish look.

“Ah, conspiracy websites,” Murph admitted.

“So this could all be a bunch of bull?”

“Yes, except we called Alaska. Henry Ryder’s long dead, and so is his wife. His daughter still lives in Anchorage and does remember that her father kept a vial of sand on his desk that she wasn’t allowed to touch when she was a little girl.”

Stone cut in again, “And he had a female friend who would come over from time to time who sounded like Catherine Deneuve.”

“Okay,” Juan said at length. “That gives a little credence to the story. Where is all this heading?”

“Back to the Philadelphia Experiment being something real, just not how it has been reported, and that the French killed Morris Jessup to silence him once and for all and they continued the research at their most secure facility, and that maybe something went wrong, and that some lab jockeys and the sand they were standing on was transported to Alaska via some unknown force. The same way George Westinghouse’s boat ended up in the Aral Sea years earlier.”

“I don’t like science fiction,” Juan said in a warning tone.

“Chairman, cell phones were science fiction not too long ago. Airplanes, rockets, nuclear submarines. The list is endless.”

“I’m putting my money on St. Julian Perlmutter.”

“But why?”

“I asked him to look into the Lady Marguerite.” Perlmutter was a close friend of Dirk Pitt, and someone Cabrillo had come to rely on as well. The man possessed the largest privately held collection of maritime books, papers, and histories in the world, and he had a bloodhound’s nose for solving mysteries. “I can’t bring myself to believe in teleportation devices. I think someone hijacked George Westinghouse’s yacht and it eventually ended up in Russia. I’ve got Perlmutter trying to prove my theory.”

“But we already looked into it. There was nothing.”

Juan smiled. “You guys are of the belief that everything worth knowing is already on the Internet. There is ten times more information in libraries than on the Web. Probably a thousand times. You two go way beyond Google searches, but you can’t hold a candle to St. Julian when it comes to tracking down answers to esoteric questions.”

Hali Kasim’s voice came over the intercom. He was the Oregon’s communications officer. “Chairman Cabrillo, please report to the op center.”

Juan placed his napkin next to his cleaned plate and stood. “If you will both excuse me. We’ll talk later.”

Hali was seated at a console on the right side of the op center when Cabrillo strode in. The Lebanese-born Kasim had a pair of earphones draped around his neck, but a line of crushed hair across his moppy head showed he’d been wearing them for a while.

“What’s up?”

“You have a call from the number we gave to L’Enfant, but it isn’t him.”