Then he heard a dull thud, saw the white water rise in a towering splash and felt a surge of pressure that squeezed the air out of him.
Underwater explosives! They were trying to kill him with the concussion from underwater explosives.
Four more detonations followed in quick succession. Fortunately, they came from the area amidships, near the paddlewheels. By swimming away from one end of the boat, Pitt had distanced himself from the main force of the detonations.
He doubled over with his knees in front of his chest to absorb the worst of the impact. Thirty meters closer and he would have been pounded into unconsciousness. Sixty meters (200 feet) and he would have been crushed to putty. Pitt increased the gap between himself and the ferry until the eruptions came with the same sensual squeeze as from a strong woman.
He looked up at a clear sky and checked the north star for his approximate bearings. At 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) away, the desolate west coast of the Gulf was the closest land. He tore off the ski mask and rolled over. Face toward the carpet of stars across the sky, he began a comfortable backstroke toward the west.
Pitt was in no condition to try out for the swimming team either. After two hours, his arms felt as if they were lifting twenty-pound weights with each stroke. After six hours, his muscles protested with aches he didn't believe possible. And then finally, and most thankfully, fatigue began to dull the pain. He used the old Boy Scout trick of removing his pants, tying the ankles into knots and swinging them over his head to catch the air, making a reasonably efficient float for rest stops that became more numerous as the night wore on.
There was never any question of stopping and letting himself drift in the hope of being spotted by a fishing boat in daylight. The vision of Loren and Rudi in the hands of Sarason was more than an ample stimulus to drive him on.
The stars in the eastern sky were beginning to fade and blink out when his feet hit bottom, and he staggered out of the water onto a sandy beach where he collapsed and immediately fell asleep.
Ragsdale, wearing an armored body suit beneath a pair of workman's coveralls, casually walked up to the side door of a small warehouse with a For Lease sign in the front window. He laid the empty toolbox he carried on the ground, took a key from his pocket, and opened the door.
Inside, a combined team of twenty FBI and eight Customs agents had assembled and were making last-minute preparations for the raid on the Zolar International building directly across the street. Advance teams had alerted local law enforcement to the operation and scouted the entire industrial complex for unusual activity.
Most of the men and the four women wore assault suits and carried automatic weapons, while several professional experts in the art and antiquities field wore street clothes. The latter were burdened with suitcases crammed with catalogues and photographs of known missing art objects targeted for seizure.
The plan called for the agents to split off into specific assignments once they entered the building. The first team was to secure the building and round up the employees, the second was to search out any stolen cache, while the third was to investigate the administration offices for any paper trail that led to theft operations or illegal purchases. Working separately, a commercial business team specializing in art handling was standing by to crate, remove and store the seized goods. The U.S. Attorney's Office, working on the case for both the FBI and Customs, had insisted the raid be carried out in a faultless manner and that confiscated objects be treated with a velvet touch.
Agent Gaskill was standing at an operations board in the center of the command post. He turned at Ragsdale's approach and smiled. "Still quiet?"
The FBI agent sat down in a canvas chair. "All clear except for the gardener trimming the hedge around the building. The rest of the grounds are as quiet as a churchyard."
Damned clever of the Zolars to use a gardener as a security guard," said Gaskill. "If he hadn't mowed the lawn four times this week, we might have ignored him."
"That and the fact our surveillance identified his Walkman headset as a radio transmitter," added Ragsdale.
"A good sign. If they have nothing to hide, why the wily tactics?"
"Don't get your hopes up. The Zolar warehouse operations may look suspicious, but when the FBI walked in with a search warrant two years ago, we didn't find so much as a stolen ballpoint pen."
"Same with Customs when we talked agents at Internal Revenue into conducting a series of tax audits.
Zolar and his family surfaced as pure as the driven snow."
Ragsdale nodded a "thank you" as one of his agents handed him a cup of coffee. "All we've got going for us this time around is the element of surprise. Our last raid failed after a local cop, who was on Zolar's payroll, tipped him off."
"We should be thankful we're not walking into a high security armed fortress."
"Anything from your undercover informant?" asked Gaskill.
Ragsdale shook his head. "He's beginning to think we've put him in the wrong operation. He hasn't turned up the slightest hint of unlawful activities."
"No one in or out of the building except bona fide employees. No illegal goods received or shipped in the past four days. Do you get the feeling we're waiting for it to snow in Galveston?"
"It seems that way."
Gaskill stared at him. "Do you want to rethink this thing and call off the raid?"
Ragsdale stared back. "The Zolars aren't perfect. There has to be a flaw in their system somewhere, and I'm staking my career that it's across the street in that building."
Gaskill laughed. "I'm with you, buddy, right on down to forced early retirement."
Ragsdale held up a thumb. "Then the show goes on in eight minutes as planned."
"I don't see any reason to call a halt, do you?"
"With Zolar and two of his brothers running around Baja looking for treasure, and the rest of his family in Europe, we'll never have a better opportunity to explore the premises before their army of attorneys gets wind of the operation and swoops in to cut us off at the pass."
Two agents driving a pickup truck borrowed from the Galveston Sanitation Department pulled up at the curb opposite the gardener who was cultivating a flower bed beside the Zolar building. The man in the passenger seat rolled down the window and called out, "Excuse me."
The gardener turned and stared questioningly at the truck.
The agent made a friendly smile. "Can you tell me if your driveway gutters backed up during the last rain?"
Curious, the gardener stepped out of the flower bed and approached the truck. "I don't recall seeing any backup," he replied.
The agent held a city street map out the window. "Do you know if any of the surrounding streets had drainage problems?"
As the gardener leaned down to study the map, the agent's arm suddenly lashed out and tore the transmitter from the gardener's head and jerked the cable leading from the microphone and headphones from its socket in the battery pack. "Federal agents," snapped the agent. "Stand still and don't wink an eye."
The agent behind the wheel then spoke into a portable radio. "Go ahead, it's all clear."
The federal agents did not smash into the Zolar International building with the lightning speed of a drug bust, nor did they launch a massive assault like the disaster that occurred years before in the compound in Waco, Texas. This was no high-security, armed fortress. One team quietly surrounded the building's exits while the main group calmly entered through the main entrance.
The office help and corporate administrators showed no sign of fear or anxiety. They appeared confused and puzzled. The agents politely but firmly herded them out onto the main floor of the warehouse where they were joined by the workers in the storage and shipping section and the artisans from the artifact preservation department. Two buses were driven through the shipping doors and loaded with the Zolar International personnel, who were then taken to FBI headquarters in nearby Houston for questioning. The entire roundup operation took less than four minutes.
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The paperwork team, made up mostly of FBI agents trained in accounting methods and led by Ragsdale, went to work immediately, searching through desks, examining files, and scrutinizing every recorded transaction. Gaskill, along with his Customs people and professional art experts, began cataloguing and photographing the thousands of art and antique objects stored throughout the building.
The work was tedious and time-consuming and produced no concrete evidence of stolen goods.
Shortly after one o'clock in the afternoon, Gaskill and Ragsdale sat down in Joseph Zolar's luxurious office to compare notes amid incredibly costly art objects. The FBI's chief agent did not look happy.
"This is beginning to have the look of a big embarrassment followed by a storm of nasty publicity and a gigantic lawsuit," Ragsdale said dejectedly.
"No sign of criminal activity in the records?" asked Gaskill.
"Nothing that stands out. We'll need a good month for an audit to know for certain if we have a case.
What did you dig up on your end?"
"So far every object we've studied checks clean. No stolen goods anywhere."
"Then we've performed another abortion."
Gaskill sighed. "I hate to say it, but it appears the Zolars are a hell of a lot smarter than the best combined investigative teams the United States government can field."
A few moments later, the two Customs agents who had worked with Gaskill on the Rummel raid in Chicago, Beverly Swain and Winfried Pottle, stepped into the office. Their manner was official and businesslike, but there was no hiding the slight upward curl of their lips. Ragsdale and Gaskill had been so absorbed in their private conversation that they hadn't noticed the two younger Customs agents had not entered through the office door, but from the adjoining, private bathroom.
"Got a minute, boss?" Beverly Swain asked Gaskill.
"What is it?"
"I think our instruments have detected some sort of shaft leading under the building," answered Winfried Pottle.
"What did you say?" Gaskill demanded quickly.
Ragsdale looked up. "Instruments?"
"The ground-penetrating sonic/radar detector we borrowed from the Colorado School of Mines,"
explained Pottle. "Its recording unit shows a narrow space beneath the warehouse floor leading into the earth."
A faint ray of hope suddenly passed between Ragsdale and Gaskill. They both came to their feet.
"How did you know where to look?" asked Ragsdale.
Pottle and Swain could not contain their smiles of triumph. Swain nodded at Poole who answered,
"We figured that any passageway leading to a secret chamber had to start or end at Zolar's private office, a connective tunnel he could enter at his convenience without being observed."
"His personal bathroom," Gaskill guessed wonderingly.
"A handy location," Swain confirmed.
Ragsdale took a deep breath. "Show us."
Pottle and Swain led them into a large bathroom with a marble floor and an antique sink, commode, and fixtures, with teak decking from an old yacht covering the walls. They motioned to a modern sunken tub with a Jacuzzi that seemed oddly out of place with the more ancient decor.
The shaft drops under the bathtub," said Swain, pointing.
Are you sure about this?" asked Ragsdale skeptically. "The shower stall strikes me as a more practical setup for an elevator."
"Our first thought too," answered Pottle, "but our instrument showed solid concrete and ground beneath the shower floor."
Pottle lifted a long tubular probe that was attached by an electrical cable to a compact computer with a paper printout. He switched on the unit and waved the end of the probe around the bottom of the tub.
Lights on the computer blinked for a few seconds and then a sheet of paper rolled through a slot on the top. When the recording paper stopped flowing, Pottle tore it off and held it up for everyone to see.
In the center of an otherwise blank sheet of paper, a black column extended from end to end.
"No doubt about it," announced Pottle, "a shaft with the same dimensions as the bathtub that falls underground."
"And you're sure your electronic marvel is accurate?" said Ragsdale.
"The same type of unit found previously unknown passages and chambers in the Pyramids of Giza last year."
Gaskill said nothing as he stepped into the tub. He fiddled with the nozzle, but it simply adjusted for spray and direction. Then he sat down on a seat large enough to hold four people. He turned the gold-plated hot and cold faucets, but no water flowed through the spout.
He looked up with a big smile. "I think we're making progress."
Next he wiggled the lever that raised and lowered the plug. Nothing happened.
"Try twisting the spout," suggested Swain.
Gaskill took the gold-plated spout in one of his massive hands and gave it a slight turn. To his surprise it moved and the tub began to slowly sink beneath the bathroom floor. A reverse turn of the spout and the tub returned to its former position. He knew, he knew, this simple little water spout and this stupid bathtub were the keys that could topple the entire Zolar organization and shut them down for good. He gave a come-hither motion to the others and said gleefully, "Going down?"
The unusual elevator descended for nearly thirty seconds before coming to a stop in another bathroom. Poole judged the drop to be about 20 meters (65 feet). They stepped from the bathroom into an office that was almost an exact copy of the one above. The lights were on but no one was present.
With Ragsdale in the lead, the little group of agents cracked open the door of the office and peered out onto the floor of an immense storehouse of stolen art and antiquities. They were all stunned by the size of the chamber and the enormous inventory of the objects. Gaskill made a wild guess of at least ten thousand pieces as Ragsdale slipped into the storeroom and made a fast recon. He was back in five minutes.
"Four men working with a forklift," he reported, "lowering a bronze sculpture of a Roman legionnaire into a wooden crate about halfway down the fourth aisle. Across on the other side, in a closed-off area, I counted six men and women working in what looked to be the artifact forgery section. A tunnel leads through the south wall, I'd guess to a nearby building that acts as a front for the shipping and receiving of the stolen property."
"It must also be used for the covert employees to enter and exit," suggested Pottle.
"My God," murmured Gaskill. "We've hit the jackpot. I can recognize four works of stolen art from here."
"We'd better stay put," said Ragsdale softly, "until we can shuttle reinforcements from above."
"I volunteer to operate the ferry service," said Swain with a foxy grin. "What woman can pass up the opportunity to sit in a fancy bathtub that moves from floor to poor?"
As soon as she left, Poole stood guard at the door to the storage area while Gaskill and Ragsdale searched Zolar's underground office. The desk produced little of value so they turned their attention to searching for a storeroom. They quickly found what they were looking for behind a tall sideboard bookcase that swiveled out from the wall on small castors. Pushed aside, it revealed a long, narrow chamber lined with antique wooden cabinets, standing floor to ceiling. Each cabinet held file folders in alphabetical order containing acquisition and sales records of the Zolar family operations as far back as 1929.
"It's here," muttered Gaskill in wonder. "It's all here." He began pulling files from a cabinet.
"Incredible," Ragsdale agreed, studying files from another cabinet that stood in the middle of the storeroom. "For sixty-nine years they kept a record of every piece of art they stole, smuggled, and forged, including financial and personal data on the buyers."
"Oh, Jesus," Gaskill groaned, "take a look at this one."
Ragsdale took the offered file and scanned the first two pages. When he looked up his face was marked with disbelief. "If this is true, Michelangelo's statue of King Solomon in the Eisenstein Museum of Renaissance Art in
Boston is a fake."
"And a damned good one, judging by the number of experts who authenticated it."
"But the former curator knew."
"Of course," said Gaskill. "The Zolars made him an offer he couldn't refuse. According to this report, ten extremely rare Etruscan sculptures excavated illegally in northern Italy, and smuggled into the United States, were exchanged along with the forged King Solomon for the genuine article. Since the fake was too good to be caught, the curator became a big hero with the trustees and patrons by claiming he had enhanced the museum's collection by persuading an anonymous moneybags to donate the objects."
"I wonder how many other cases of museum fraud we'll find," mused Ragsdale.
"I suspect this may only be the tip of the iceberg. These files represent thousands upon thousands of illegal deals to buyers who turned a blind eye in the direction the objects came from."
Ragsdale smiled. "I'd like to be a mouse hiding in the wall when the U. S. Attorney's Office finds out we've laid about ten years' worth of legal work on them."
"You don't know federal prosecutors," said Gaskill. "When they get a load of all the wealthy businessmen, politicians, sports and entertainment celebrities who willfully purchased hot art, they'll think they've died and gone to heaven."
"Maybe we'd better rethink all the exposure," cautioned Ragsdale.
"What've you got cooking?"
"We know that Joseph Zolar and his brothers, Charles Oxley and Cyrus Sarason, are in Mexico where we can't arrest and take them into custody without a lot of legal E hassle. Right?"
"I follow."
"So we throw a blanket on this part of the raid," explained Ragsdale. "From all indications, the employees on the legitimate side of the operation have no idea what's going on in the basement. Let them go back to work tomorrow as if the raid turned up nothing. Business as usual. Otherwise, if they get wind that we've shut down their operation and federal prosecutors are building an airtight case, they'll go undercover in some country where we can't grab them."