Nor would someone who didn't know him guess that he was chief of NUMA's communications and information network. Admiral Sandecker had pirated him away from a Silicon Valley computer corporation to build a vast data library, containing every book, article, or thesis, scientific or historical, fact or theory, ever known to be written about the sea. What St. Julien Perlmutter's archive was to ships, Yaeger's was to oceanography and the growing field of undersea sciences.
He was sitting at his own private terminal in a small side office of the computer data complex that took up the entire tenth floor of the NUMA building when his phone buzzed. Without taking his eyes from a monitor that showed how ocean currents affected the climate around Australia, he picked up the receiver.
"Greetings from the brain trust," he answered casually.
"You wouldn't know gray matter if it splashed on your shoe," came the voice of an old friend.
"Good to hear from you, Mr. Special Projects Director. The office topic of the day says you're enjoying a fun-filled holiday in sunny South America."
"You heard wrong, pal."
"Are you calling from the Deep Fathom?"
"Yes, Al and I are back on board after a little excursion into the jungle."
"What can I do for you?"
"Delve into your data bank and see if you can find any record of a tidal wave that struck the shoreline between Lima, Peru, and Panama City sometime in March of 1578."
Yaeger sighed. "Why don't you also ask me to find the temperature and humidity on the day of creation?"
"Just the general area where the wave struck will do, thank you."
"Any record of such an event would likely be in old weather and maritime records I gleaned from Spanish archives in Seville. Another remote possibility would be the local inhabitants, who might have handed down legends of such an event. The Incas were good at recording social and religious occasions on textiles or pottery."
"Not a good lead," Pitt said doubtfully. "The Inca empire was smashed by the Spanish conquest nearly forty years earlier. Whatever records they made in recalling the news of the day were scattered and lost."
"Most tidal waves that come inland are caused by seafloor movement. Maybe I can piece together known geological events of that era."
"Give it your best try."
"How soon do you need it?"
"Unless the admiral has you on a priority project, drop everything else and go."
"All right," said Yaeger, eager for the challenge. "I'll see what I can come up with."
"Thanks, Hiram. I owe you."
"About a hundred times over."
"And don't mention this to Sandecker," said Pitt.
"I thought it sounded like another one of your shady schemes. Mind telling me what this is all about?"
"I'm looking for a lost Spanish galleon in a jungle."
"But of course, what else?" Yaeger said with routine resignation. He had learned long before never to anticipate Pitt.
"I'm hoping you can find me a ballpark to search."
"As a matter of fact, through clean living and moral thinking, I can already narrow your field of search by a wide margin."
"What do you know that I don't?"
Yaeger smiled to himself. "The lowlands between the west flank of the Andes and the coast of Peru have an average temperature of eighteen degrees Celsius or sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit and an annual rainfall that would hardly fill a shot glass, making it one of the world's coldest and driest low altitude deserts. No jungle for a ship to get lost in there."
"So what's your hot spot?" asked Pitt.
"Ecuador. The coastal region is tropical all the way to Panama."
"A precision display of deductive reasoning. You're okay, Hiram. I don't care what your ex-wives say about you."
A mere trifle. I'll have something for you in twenty-four hours."
"I'll be in touch."
As soon as he put down the phone, Yaeger began assembling his thoughts. He never failed to find the novelty of a shipwreck search stimulating. The areas he planned to investigate were neatly filed in the computer of his mind. During his years with NUMA, he had discovered that Dirk Pitt didn't walk through life like other men. Simply working with Pitt and supplying data information had been one long, intrigue-filled, vicarious adventure, and Yaeger took pride in the fact that he had never fumbled the ball that was passed to him.
As Pitt was making plans to search for a landlocked Spanish galleon, Adolphus Rummel, a noted collector of South American antiquities, stepped out of the elevator into his plush penthouse apartment twenty floors above Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. A short, stringy man with a shaven head and an enormous walrus moustache, Rummel was in his midseventies and looked more like a Sherlock Holmes villain than the owner of six huge auto salvage yards.
Like many of his extremely wealthy peers who compulsively amassed priceless collections of antiquities from the black market with no questions asked, Rummel was unmarried and reclusive. No one was ever allowed to view his pre-Columbian artifacts. Only his accountant and attorney were aware of their existence, but they had no idea of how extensive his inventory was.
In the nineteen fifties German-born Rummel smuggled a cache of Nazi ceremonial objects across the Mexican border. The contraband included presentation daggers and knights-cross medals awarded to Germany's greatest World War II heroes, as well as a number of historic documents signed by Adolf Hitler and his maniacal cronies. Selling his hoard to collectors of Nazi artifacts at premium prices, Rummel took the profits and launched an auto junkyard that he built into a scrap metal empire, netting him nearly 250 million dollars over forty years.
After a business trip to Peru in 1974, he developed an interest in ancient South American art and began buying from dealers, honest or criminal. Source did not matter to him. Corruption was as common as rain in a jungle among the brotherhood of artifact finders and sellers throughout Central and South America. Rummel gave no thought to whether his acquired pieces were legally excavated but sold out the back door, or stolen from a museum. They were for his satisfaction and enjoyment, and his alone.
He walked past the Italian marble walls of his foyer and approached a large mirror with a thick gilded frame covered with naked cherubs entwined around a continuous grapevine. Twisting the head of a cherub in one corner, Rummel sprang the catch that unlatched the mirror, revealing a concealed doorway. Behind the mirror a stairway led down into eight spacious rooms lined with shelves and filled with tables supporting at least thirty glass cases packed with more than two thousand ancient pre-Columbian artifacts. Reverently, as if walking down the aisle of a church toward the altar, he moved about the gallery, cherishing the beauty and craftsmanship of his private hoard. It was a ritual he performed every evening before going to bed, almost as if he were a father looking in on his sleeping children.
Rummel's pilgrimage finally ended at the side of a large glass case that was the centerpiece of the gallery. It held the crowning treasure of his collection. Gleaming under halogen spotlights, the Golden Body Suit of Tiapollo lay in splendor, arms and legs outstretched, the mask sparkling with emeralds in the eye sockets. The magnificent brilliance of the artistry never failed to move Rummel.
Knowing full well it had been stolen from the national anthropological museum in Seville, Spain, seventy-six years previously, Rummel did not hesitate to pay one million two hundred thousand dollars in cash when he was approached by a group of men who claimed to be connected to the Mafia but were in reality members of a clandestine underground syndicate that specialized in the theft of precious art objects. Where they had come upon the golden suit, Rummel had no idea. He could only assume they had either stolen it themselves or bought it from the collector who had dealt with the original thieves.
Having had his nightly gratification, Rummel turned off the lights, returned upstairs to the foyer, and closed the mirror. Moving behind a wet bar designed around a two thousand-year-old Roman sarcophagus, he half-filled a small snifter from a bo
ttle of brandy and retired to his bedroom to read before falling asleep.
In another apartment directly level and across the street from Rummel's building, United States Customs Agent David Gaskill sat and peered through a pair of high-powered binoculars mounted on a tripod as the artifacts collector prepared for bed. Another agent might have been bored after nearly a week of stakeout, but not Gaskill. An eighteen-year veteran of the Customs Service, Gaskill looked more like a football coach than a special government agent, a look he cultivated for his work. His gray hair was curly and combed back. An African American, his skin was more doeskin brown than dark coffee, and his eyes were a strange mixture of mahogany and green. His massive bulldog head seemed to grow out of his shoulders on a stunted, tree-trunk neck. A huge mountain of a man, he was once an all-star linebacker for the University of Southern California. He had worked hard to lose his South Carolina drawl and spoke with practiced diction, occasionally being mistaken for a former British citizen from the Bahamas.
Gaskill had been fascinated by pre-Columbian art ever since a field trip to the Yucatan Peninsula during school. When stationed in Washington, D.C., he had handled dozens of investigations involving looted artifacts from the Anasazi and Hohokam cultures of the American Southwest desert. He was working on a case involving the smuggling of carved Mayan stone panels when he received a tip that was passed along to him by Chicago police from a cleaning woman. She had accidentally discovered photographs protruding from a drawer in Rummel's penthouse of what she believed to be a man's body covered in gold. Thinking that someone might have been murdered, she stole a photo and turned it over to the police. A detective who had worked on art fraud cases recognized the golden object as an antiquity and called Gaskill.
Rummel's name had always been high on the Customs Service's list of people who collected ancient art without concern about where it came from, but there was never any evidence of illegal dealings, nor did Gaskill have a clue where Rummel kept his hoard. The special agent, who possessed the expertise of an antiquities scholar, immediately recognized the photo supplied by the cleaning lady as the long-lost Golden Body Suit of Tiapollo.
He set up an immediate round-the-clock surveillance of Rummel's penthouse and had the old man tailed from the time he left the building until he returned. But six days of tight scrutiny had turned up no indication of where Rummel's collection was hidden. The suspect never varied his routine. After leaving for his office at the lower end of Michigan Avenue, where he'd spend four hours, sifting through his investments, it was lunch at a rundown cafe where he always ordered bean soup and a salad. The rest of the afternoon was spent prowling antique stores and art galleries. Then dinner at a quiet German restaurant, after which he would take in a movie or a play. He usually arrived home at eleven-thirty. The routine never varied.
"Doesn't he ever get tired of drinking the same rotgut in bed?" muttered Special Agent Winfried Pottle.
"Speaking for myself, I'd prefer the waiting arms of a beautiful woman oozing supple elegance and wearing a little something black and flimsy."
Gaskill pulled back from the binoculars and made a dour face at his second-in-command of the surveillance team. Unlike Gaskill in his Levi's and USC football jacket, Pottle was a slim, handsome man with sharp features and soft red hair, who dressed in three-piece suits complete with pocket watch and chain. "After seeing a few of the women you date, I'd have to say that was wishful thinking."
Pottle nodded at Rummel's penthouse. "At least give me credit for not leading a regimented existence."
"I shudder to think how you'd behave if you had his money."
"If I had invested a king's ransom in stolen Indian art, I doubt if I could do as good a job of hiding it."
"Rummel has to conceal it somewhere," said Gaskill with a slight trace of discouragement. "His reputation as a buyer of hot goods with a colorful history comes from too many sources in the antiquities market not to be genuine. Makes no sense for a man to build a world-class collection of ancient artifacts and then never go near it. I've yet to hear of a collector, whether he goes in for stamps, coins, or baseball cards, who didn't study and fondle them at every opportunity. Wealthy art junkies who pay big bucks for stolen Rembrandts and van Goghs are known to sit all alone in hidden vaults, gazing at them for hours on end. I know some of these guys, who started with nothing, got rich and then lusted to collect objects only they could possess. Many of them abandoned families or gladly suffered divorce because their craving became an obsession. That's why someone as addicted to pre-Columbian art as Rummel could never ignore a hoard that's probably more valuable than any in the finest museums in the world."
"Did you ever consider the possibility that our sources might be wrong or highly exaggerated?" asked Pottle gloomily. "The cleaning lady who claimed she found the photograph of the gold suit is a confirmed alcoholic."
Gaskill slowly shook his head. "Rummel's got it stashed somewhere. I'm convinced."
Pottle stared across at Rummel's apartment as the lights blinked out. "If you're right, and if I were Rummel, I'd take it to bed with me."
"Sure you would-" Gaskill stopped abruptly as Pottle's wit triggered a thought. "Your perverted mind just made a good point."
"It did?" muttered a confused Pottle.
"What rooms do not have windows in the penthouse? The ones we can't observe?"
Pottle looked down at the carpet in thought for a moment. "According to the floor plan, two bathrooms, a pantry, the short hall between the master and guest bedrooms, and the closets."
"We're missing something."
"Missing what? Rummel seldom remembers to draw his curtains. We can watch ninety percent of his movements once he steps off the elevator. No way he could store a ton of art treasures in a couple of bathtubs and a closet."
"True, but where does he spend the thirty or forty minutes from the time he exits the lobby and steps into the elevator until he sets foot in his living room? Certainly not in the foyer."
"Maybe he sits on the john."
"Nobody is that regular." Gaskill stood and walked over to a coffee table and spread out a set of blueprints of Rummel's penthouse obtained from the building's developer. He studied them for what had to be the fiftieth time. "The artifacts have to be in the building."
"We've checked every apartment from the main floor to the roof," said Pottle. "They're all leased by live-in tenants."
"What about the one directly below Rummel?" asked Gaskill.
Pottle thumbed through a sheaf of computer papers. "Sidney Kammer and wife, Candy. He's one of those highlevel corporate attorneys who saves his clients from paying a bushel of taxes."
Gaskill looked at Pottle. "When was the last time Kammer and his wife made an appearance?"
Pottle scanned the log they maintained of residents who entered and left the building during the surveillance. "No sign of them. They're no-shows."
"I bet if we checked it out, the Kammers live in a house somewhere in a plush suburb and never set foot in their apartment."
"They could be on vacation."
The voice of agent Beverly Swain broke over Gaskill's portable radio. "I have a large moving van backing into the basement of the building."
"Are you manning the front security desk or checking out the basement?" asked Gaskill.
"Still in the lobby, walking my post in a military manner," Swain answered pertly. A smart little blonde, and a California beach girl before joining Customs, she was the best undercover agent Gaskill had on his team and the only one inside Rummel's building. "If you think I'm bored with watching TV monitors depicting basements, elevators, and hallways, and on my way out the door for a flight to Tahiti, you're half right."
"Save your money," replied Pottle. "Tahiti is nothing but tall palms and exotic beaches. You can get that in Florida."
"Run tape on the front entrance," ordered Gaskill. "Then trot down to the basement and question the movers. Find out if they're moving someone in or out of the building, what apartment,
and why they're working at this ungodly hour."
"On my way," Swain answered through a yawn.
"I hope she doesn't meet up with a monster," said Pottle.
"What monster?" asked Gaskill with raised eyebrows.
"You know, in all those stupid horror movies, a woman alone in a house hears a strange noise in the cellar. Then she investigates by going down the stairs without turning on the lights or holding a kitchen knife for protection."
"Typical lousy Hollywood direction." Gaskill shrugged. "Not to worry about Bev. The basement is lit like Las Vegas Boulevard and she's packing a nine-millimeter Colt Combat Commander. Pity the poor monster who comes on to her."
Now that Rummel's penthouse was dark, Gaskill took a few minutes away from the binoculars to knock off half a dozen glazed donuts and down a thermos bottle of cold milk. He was sadly contemplating the empty donut box when Swain reported in.
"The movers are unloading furniture for an apartment on the nineteenth floor. They're ticked off at working so late but are being well paid for overtime. They can't say why the client is in such a rush, only that it must be one of those last-minute corporate transfers."
"Any possibility they're smuggling artifacts into Rummel's place?"
"They opened the door of the van for me. It's packed with art deco style furniture."
"Okay, monitor their movements every few minutes."
Pottle scribbled on a notepad and hung up a wall phone in the kitchen. When he returned to Gaskill's position at the window, he had a cagey grin on his face. "I bow to your intuition. Sidney Kammer's home address is in Lake Forest."