Serpent (20 page)

"I'm sure he does," Austin said. "See you tomorrow, Admiral."

Austin hung up, chuckling at Sandecker's paternalism and his disingenuous shot at the CIA whose headquarters were less than a mile from the boathouse. The admiral's agency was primarily scientific, but its operations as the undersea counterpart of NASA were naturally made for intelligence gathering that rivaled or even surpassed the best "the Company" could come up with.

Sandecker envied the CIA's bottomless budget and limited accountability, although he himself was no slouch at prying funding from Congress. He could muster the support of twenty top universities with schools in the marine sciences and a host of large corporations. With its five thousand scientists, engineers, and others; its ongoing studies in deep ocean geology and mining, biological studies of sea life, marine archaeology, and climatology; and its farflung fleet of research vessels and aircraft, NUMAs reach extended to every part of the globe.

Hiring Austin away from the CIA had been a major Sandecker coup. Austin came to NUMA in a roundabout fashion. He had studied for his master's degree in systems management at the University of Washington and attended a high-rated dive school in Seattle. He'd trained as an underwater jack-of-all trades, which meant he was proficient in basics such as welding, the commercial application of explosives, and mud diving. He specialized in flotation, lifting heavy objects from the sea, and deep-sea saturation diving in various environments using mixed air and undersea chambers. After working on oil rigs in the North Sea a couple of years, he returned to his father's marine salvage company for six years before being lured into a little-known branch of the CIA that specialized in underwater intelligence gathering. He was assistant director of the secret raising of a Russian submarine and the salvage and investigation of an Iranian container ship carrying nuclear weapons that was sunk clandestinely by an Israeli submarine. He also conducted several investigations into commercial airlines that had been mysteriously shot down over the sea, locating, salvaging, and investigating the incidents.

At the end of 'the Cold War the CIA closed down the undersea investigation branch. Austin probably would have drifted into another CIA section had he not been hired by Admiral Sandecker for special undersea assignments that often took place outside the realm of government oversight. Sandecker could cry poor mouth and point at Langley all he wanted, but he was well acquainted with cloak-and-dagger operations.

Austin glanced at his watch. Ten o'clock. It would be seven in Seattle. He picked up the phone and punched out a number. A voice with a buzzsaw edge answered.

"Good morning," Austin said. "It's your number one son."

About time you called."

"I talked to you yesterday, Pop."

"A lot can happen in twenty-four hours," Austin's father replied with good-natured gruffness.

"Oh? Like what?"

"Like landing a multi-million dollar contract with the Chinese. That's what. Not bad for an old geezer."

It was from his father that Austin inherited his strapping physique and stubbornness. Now in his mid-seventies, the elder Austin had a slight stoop to his wide shoulders, but he regularly put in work days that would kill a younger man. His Seattle-based marine salvage company had made him wealthy. But he still drove himself, especially since the death of Austin's mother a few years earlier. Like many self-made men, it had become the game, not the money, that was important.

"Congratulations, Pop. Can't say I'm surprised. But you're hardly a geezer, and you know it."

"Don't waste your time buttering me up. Talk's cheap. When are you coming out so we can celebrate with a bottle of Jack Daniel's?"

That's all I need, Austin thought. A night out with his hard drinking father would land him back in the hospital. "Not for a while. I'm going back to work"

About time. You've gold-bricked long enough." There was disappointment in his voice.

"You must have been talking to the admiral. He said pretty much the same thing."

"Now, I got better things to do." Austin's father was only half kidding. He had a great deal of respect for Sandecker. At the same time he saw him as a rival for his son and had never abandoned hope that Kurt would come to his senses someday and take over the family business. Austin sometimes thought this hope was what kept hits father going.

"Let me see what he wants. I'll get back to you."

Heavy sigh. "Okay, you do what you have to do. Got to go. Call coming in on the other line."

Austin stared at the now dead receiver and shook his head. In more, fanciful moments he wondered what would happen if his bear-like father dashed head-to-head with the slightly built but bantamtough Sandecker. He wouldn't bet on the outcome, but he knew one thing. He didn't want to be around if it happened.

The Coltrane CD was ending. Austin replaced it with a Gerry Mulligan disk and leaned back in his chair with a smile on his face as he prepared to savor the last hours of leisure time he might have for weeks to come. He was glad Sandecker had called and that his vacation was about to end. It went beyond boredom. The admiral wasn't the only one who wanted to get to the bottom of what he called "this Moroccan business."

14 HIRAM YAEGER LEANED BACK IN HIS chair hands folded behind his neck, and stared through his wire-rimmed granny glasses at the three-dimensional black-and-white photograph of the buxom Sumatran woman, made even more life-like by the holographic display, who was projected on the huge monitor beyond his horse-shoe-shaped console. He wondered how many millions of young males learned their first lesson in female anatomy from the dusky maidens in the pages of National Geographic magazine.

With a sigh of dreamy nostalgia Yaeger said, "Thanks for the treat, Max."

"You're welcome," replied the computer's disembodied female voice. "I thought you'd enjoy a break from your work" The nubile maiden disappeared, sent back to 1937 where she had been frozen in time by a Geographic photographer.

"It brought back fond memories," Yaeger said, taking a sip from his coffee.

From his private terminal in a small side room the chief of the agency's communications network could, in a blink of the eye, tap into the vast files of the computer data complex that occupied the entire tenth floor. of the NUMA headquarters building. It was NUMA's hardware that usually made world headlines. The exploits of the high-tech research vessels, deep-submergence submarines, and assorted undersea robots were

what caught the public's imagination. But one of Sandecker's greatest contributions was NUMAs unseen jewel in the crown, the massive high-speed computer network Yaeger had designed with a free hand and unlimited funding thanks to the admiral.

Sandecker had lured Yaeger to NUMA in a raid on a Silicon Valley computer corporation and assigned him to build what would undeniably be the finest and largest archive of ocean sciences in the world. The vast data library was Yaeger's joy and his passion. It had taken years to put together centuries of human knowledge gleaned from books, articles, and scientific and historical theses. Everything known to have been written about the sea was available not only to NUMA but to ocean science students, professional oceanographers, marine engineers, and underwater archaeologists worldwide.

Yaeger was the only person in NUMA who ignored Sandecker's dress code and got away with it, which spoke eloquently of his talents. With his Levi's jacket and jeans, his long blondish-gray hair tied in a ponytail, and the untamed whiskers that hid the boyish eagerness of his face, the scruffy Yaeger could have come off a sixties hippy commune. In fact; Yaeger did not live in a yurt, but drove to and from a fashionable Maryland suburb in a fully equipped BMW His attractive wife was an artist, his two teenage daughters were students at a private school, and their main complaint was that Yaeger spent more time with his electronic family than his flesh-and-blood one.

Yaeger was still in awe of the tremendous power at his command. He had given up the keyboard and monitor for spoken commands and the holographic display. His foray into the more revealing aspect of the Geographic articles was an excuse to take a break from the demanding assignment he'd been working on at Sandecker's request. On the surface Sandecker's directive had been uncomplicated. Find out if there were any attacks on archaeological expeditions similar to what happened in Morocco. It turned out to be a monumental task. He'd neglected his understanding wife and children even more than usual in his passion to solve the puzzle.

Although the NUMA system was geared to the oceans, Max routinely hacked into other systems, without authorization, to gather information and transfer data among libraries, newspaper morgues, research libraries, universities, and historic archives anywhere on the globe. Yaeger began by compiling a master list of expeditions, divided chronologically by decades and going back fifty years. There were hundreds of names and dates on the list. Then he prepared a computer model based on the facts that were known about the Moroccan incident. He asked Max to compare the model to each expedition, drawing on various sources such as published academic papers, scientific journals, and news reports, cross-checking the accounts to determine if any of these expeditions had come to a similar unscheduled end, always searching for patterns.

The sources were often fragmentary and sometimes dubious. Like a sculptor trying to find a figure in a piece of marble, he chipped the master list down in size. It was still long and complicated enough to daunt the most experienced researcher, but the challenge only whetted his appetite. After several days he had brought together an enormous amount of information. Now he would instruct the computers to sift through the data and refine the results into a palatable serving.

"Max, please print out your findings when you've exhausted your networks;" he instructed the computer.

"I will get back to you shortly. Sorry for the delay" the soft monotone voice responded. "Why don't you pour yourself another cup of coffee while you wait?"

Time was irrelevant to a computer, Yaeger reflected as he followed Max's suggestion. It did what it did at unimaginable speeds, but no matter how fast and smart Max was, it had no concept of what it was like to have Sandecker breathing down its circuits. Yaeger had promised Sandecker the results by the following morning. While Max labored, Yaeger could have taken a break, walked to the NUMA cafeteria, or simply left his sanctum sanctorum for a brisk walk. He hated to leave his electronic babies and instead used the time to explore other options.

He stared up at the ceiling and remembered that Nina Kirov had said the killers came in the night, massacred the party then disposed of the bodies.

"Max, let's take a look at 'assassins.'"

Max was actually a number of computers that, like the human brain, could work on several complicated tasks at the same time.

"That should be no problem." A second later the computer voice said: Assassins. An English analog of the Arabic hashshashin, meaning one who is addicted to hashish. A secret eleventh-century politicoreligious Islamic order presided over by an absolute ruler and deputy masters. Unquestioning obedience was demanded of sect members known as 'the devoted ones,' the actual hit men who murdered political leaders and put their skills out for hire. The killers were given hashish and a heavy dose of sensual pleasures and told this was a taste of the paradise that awaited them if they did their job. The sect spread terror for more than two hundred years."

Interesting. But how pertinent? Yaeger tugged at his scraggly beard while Max described other groups of assassins such as the thugs of India and the Japanese ninja. These groups didn't quite fit the profile of the Moroccan killers, but, more important, they had been out of business for centuries. He didn't dismiss them out of hand. If he were forming an assassin squad he'd look toward the past to see how others had operated.

Dr. Kirov said the killers destroyed a stone carving that could be evidence of pre-Columbian contact between the Old and the New World. If he called up everything on pre-Columbian culture, even with Max's speed, it would take ten years to sort things out. Instead, Yaeger had established what he called a "parallel paradigm," basically a set of questions that asked the computer in different ways who would be upset by revelations that Columbus had not been the first Old World representative to set foot in the New World. And vice versa.

A few days ago he started the computers working on the problem but had been too busy until now to call up the findings.