Raise the Titanic! (8 page)

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headquarters was buried in a nondescript old cinderblock building beside the Washington Navy Yard. A large sign, its painted letters peeling under the double onslaught of the summer's heat and humidity, humbly advertised the premises as the Smith Van & Storage Company.

The loading docks appeared normal enough: packing crates and boxes were piled in strategic locations, and to passing traffic on the Suitland Parkway, the trucks parked around the yard behind a fifteen-foot-high chain-link fence looked exactly as moving vans should look. Only a closer inspection would have revealed old derelicts with missing engines and dusty, unused interiors. It was a scene that would have warmed the soul of a motion-picture set designer.

Gene Seagram read over the reports on the real-estate purchases for the Sicilian Project's installations. There were forty-six in all. The northern Canadian border numbered the most, followed closely by the Atlantic seaboard. The Pacific Coast had eight designated areas, while only four were plotted for the border above Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico. The transactions had gone off smoothly; the buyer in each case had gone under the guise of the Department of Energy Studies. There would be no cause for suspicion. The installations were designed, to all outward appearances, to resemble small relay power stations. To even the most wary of minds, there was nothing to suspect on the surface.

He was going over the construction estimates when his private phone rang. Out of habit, he carefully put the reports back in their folder and slipped it in a desk drawer, then picked up the phone. “This is Seagram.”

“Hello, Mr. Seagram.”

“Who's this?”

“Major McPatrick, Army Records Bureau. You asked me to call you at this number if I came up with anything on a miner by the name of Jake Hobart.”

“Yes, of course. I'm sorry, my mind was elsewhere.” Seagram could almost envision the man on the other end of the line. A West Pointer, under thirty—that much was betrayed by the clipped verbs and the youngish voice. Probably make general by the time he was forty-five, providing he made the right contacts while commanding a desk at the Pentagon.

“What do you have, Major?”

“I've got your man. His full name was Jason Cleveland Hobart. Born January 23, 1874, in Vinton, Iowa.”

“At least the year checks.”

“Occupation, too: he was a miner.”

“What else?”

“He enlisted in the Army in May of 1898 and served with the First Colorado Volunteer Regiment in the Philippines.”

“You did say Colorado?”

“Correct, sir.” McPatrick paused and Seagram could hear the riffling of papers over the line. “Hobart had an excellent war record. Got promoted to sergeant. He suffered serious wounds fighting the Philippine insurrectionists and was decorated twice for meritorious conduct under fire.”

“When was he discharged?”

“They called it ‘mustering out' in those days,” McPatrick said knowledgeably. “Hobart left the Army in October of 1901.”

“Is that your last record of him?”

“No, his widow is still drawing a pension—”

“Hold on,” Seagram interrupted. “Hobart's widow is still living?”

“She cashes her fifty dollars and forty cents' pension check every month, like clockwork.”

“She must be over ninety years old. Isn't that a little unusual, paying a pension to the widow of a Spanish-American War veteran? You'd think most of them would be pushing up tombstones by now.”

“Oh hell no, we still carry nearly a hundred Civil War widows on the pension rolls. None were even born when Grant took Richmond. May and December marriages between sweet young things and old toothless Grand Army of the Republic vets were quite ordinary in those days.”

“I thought a widow was eligible for pension only if she was living at the time her husband was killed in battle.”

“Not necessarily,” McPatrick said. “The government pays widows' pensions under two categories. One is for service-oriented death. That, of course, includes death in battle, or fatal sickness or injury inflicted while serving between certain required dates as set by Congress. The second is nonservice death. Take yourself, for example. You served with the Navy during the Vietnam War between the required dates set for that particular conflict. That makes your wife, or any future wife, eligible for a small pension should you be run over by a truck forty years from now.”

“I'll make a note of that in my will,” Seagram said, uneasy in the knowledge that his service record was where any desk jockey in the Pentagon could lay his hands on it. “Getting back to Hobart.”

“Now we come to an odd oversight on the part of Army records.”

“Oversight?”

“Hobart's service forms fail to mention reenlistment, yet he is recorded as ‘died in the service of his country.' No mention of the cause, only the date…November 17, 1911.”

Seagram suddenly straightened in his chair. “I have it on good authority that Jake Hobart died a civilian on February 10, 1912.”

“Like I said, there's no mention of cause of death. But I assure you, Hobart died a soldier, not a civilian, on November 17. I have a letter in his file dated July 25, 1912, from Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War under President Taft, ordering the Army to award Sergeant Jason Hobart's wife full widow's pension for the rest of her natural life. How Hobart rated the personal interest of the Secretary of War is a mystery, but it leaves little doubt of our man's status. Only a soldier in high standing would have received that kind of preferential treatment, certainly not a coal miner.”

“He wasn't a coal miner,” Seagram snapped.

“Well, whatever.”

“Do you have an address for Mrs. Hobart?”

“I have it here somewhere.” McPatrick hesitated a moment. “Mrs. Adeline Hobart, 261-B Calle Aragon, Laguna Hills, California. She's in that big senior citizens development down the coast from L.A.”

“That about covers it,” Seagram said. “I appreciate your help in this matter, Major.”

“I hate to say this, Mr. Seagram, but I think we've got two different men here.”

“I think perhaps you're right,” Seagram replied. “It looks as though I might be on the wrong track.”

“If I can be of any further help, please don't hesitate to call me.”

“I'll do that,” Seagram grunted. “Thanks again.”

After he hung up, he dropped his head in his hands and slouched in the chair. He sat that way not moving for perhaps two full minutes. Then he laid his hands on the desk and smiled a wide, smug grin.

Two different men very well could have existed with the same surname and birth year who worked in the same state at the same occupation. That part of the puzzle might have been a coincidence. But not the connection, the glorious 365-to-1 longshot connection that mysteriously tied the two men together and made them one; Hobart's recorded death and the old newspaper found by Sid Koplin in the Bednaya Mountain mine bore the same date: November 17, 1911.

He pushed the intercom switch for his secretary. “Barbara, put through a call to Mel Donner at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver.”

“Any message if he isn't in?”

“Just leave word for him to call me on my private line when he returns.”

“Shall do.”

“And one more thing, book me on United's early-morning flight tomorrow to Los Angeles.”

“Yes, sir.”

He clicked the switch to off and leaned back in the chair thoughtfully. Adeline Hobart, more than ninety years old. He hoped to God she wasn't senile.

Donner didn't normally
stay in a downtown hotel. He preferred the more inconspicuous setting of a garden-variety motel closer to the suburbs, but Seagram had insisted on the grounds that local cooperation comes more easily to an investigator when he lets it be known that he has a room in the city's oldest and most prestigious building. Investigator, the word nauseated him. If one of his fellow professors on the University of Southern California campus had told him five years ago that his doctorate in physics would lead him to play such a clandestine role, he'd have choked laughing. Donner wasn't laughing now. The Sicilian Project was far too vital to the country's interests to risk a leak through outside help. He and Seagram had designed and created the project on their own, and it was agreed that they'd take it as far as they could alone.

He left his rented Plymouth with the parking attendant and walked across Tremont Place, through the hotel's old-fashioned revolving doors, and into the pleasantly ornate lobby, where the young mustachioed assistant manager gave him a message without so much as a smile. Donner took it without so much as a thank you, then made his way to the elevators and his room.

He slammed the door and threw the room key and Seagram's message on the desk and turned on the television. It had been a long and tiresome day, and his bodily systems were still operating on Washington, D.C., time. He dialed room service and ordered dinner, then kicked off his shoes, loosened his tie, and sagged onto the bed.

For perhaps the tenth time he began going over the photocopy of the old newspaper page. It made very interesting reading, if, that is, Donner's interest lay in advertisements for piano tuners, electric belts for rupture, and strange malady remedies, along with editorials on the Denver City Council's determination to clear such-and-such street of sinful houses of entertainment, or intriguing little inserts guaranteed to make feminine readers of the early 1900s gasp in innocent horror.

Donner smiled at the quaint piece of history and turned his attention to the upper-right-hand section of the page, the part that Koplin had said was missing from the paper he'd discovered on Novaya Zemlya.

No matter how many times Donner's eyes traveled over the old news type, they always came back to the last name among the missing miners. Slowly, like a man in a trance, he laid the paper in his lap, picked up the phone, and dialed long distance.