Almost before the anchor flukes of Ice Hunter had taken bite of the bottom, representatives from Ruppert & Saunders had departed their aircraft and boarded a Zodiac for the trip from shore. Within minutes they climbed aboard the lowered gangway and quickly climbed to the bridge, where Pitt, Dempsey and Giordino awaited them. One man cleared the steps three at a time and pulled up short, surveying the three men standing before him. He was big and ruddy and wore a smile a yard wide.
"Captain Dempsey?" he asked.
Dempsey stepped forward and extended his hand. "I'm he."
"Captain Ian Ryan, Chief of Operations for Ruppert & Saunders."
Happy to have you aboard, Captain."
Ryan looked apprehensive. "My officers and I are here to take command of Polar Queen."
"She's all yours, Captain," Dempsey said easily. "If you don't mind, you can send back my crew in your boat once you're aboard."
Relief spread across Ryan's weathered face. It could have been a delicate situation. Legally, Dempsey was salvage master of the cruise ship. Command had passed to him from the dead captain and the owners. "Am I to understand, sir, that you are relinquishing command in favor of Ruppert & Saunders?"
"NUMA is not in the salvage business, Captain. We make no claim on Polar Queen."
"The directors of the company have asked me to express our deepest thanks and congratulations for your efforts in saving our passengers and ship."
Dempsey turned to Pitt and Giordino and introduced them. "These are the gentlemen who found the survivors on Seymour Island and kept your company's ship from running onto the Danger Island rocks."
Ryan pumped their hands vigorously, his grasp strong and beefy. "A remarkable achievement, absolutely remarkable. I assure you that Ruppert & Saunders will prove most generous in their gratitude."
Pitt shook his head. "We have been instructed by our boss at NUMA headquarters, Admiral James Sandecker, that we cannot accept any reward or salvage monies."
Ryan looked blank. "Nothing, nothing at all?"
"Not one cent," Pitt answered, fighting to keep his bleary eyes open.
"How bloody decent of you," Ryan gasped. "That's unheard of in the annals of marine salvage. I've no doubt our insurance carriers will drink to your health every year on the anniversary of the tragedy."
Dempsey gestured toward the passageway leading to his quarters. "While we're on the subject of drinks, Captain Ryan, may I offer you one in my cabin?"
Ryan nodded toward his officers, who were grouped behind him. "Does that include my crew?"
"It most certainly does," Dempsey said with a friendly smile.
"You save our ship, rescue our passengers and then stand us a drink. If you don't mind my saying so,"
said Ryan in a voice that seemed to come from his boots, "you Yanks are damned odd people."
"Not really," Pitt said, his green eyes twinkling through the weariness. "We're just lousy opportunists."
Pitt's movements were purely out of habit as he took a shower and shaved for the first time since before he and Giordino took off to find Polar Queen. He came within an eye blink of sagging to his knees and drifting asleep under the soothing splash of the warm water. Too tired even to dry his hair, he tucked a bath towel around his waist and stumbled to his queen-sized bed-no tight bunk or narrow berth on this ship-pulled back the covers, stretched out, laid his head on the pillow and was gone.
His unconscious mind didn't register the knock on his cabin door. Normally alert to the tiniest peculiar sound, he did not awaken or respond when the knock came a second time. He was so dead to the world there wasn't the slightest change in his breathing. Nor was there a flutter of his eyelids when Maeve slowly opened the door, peered hesitantly into the small anteroom and softly called his name.
Mr. Pitt, are you about?"
Part of her wanted to leave, but curiosity drew her on. She moved in cautiously, carrying two short-stemmed snifter glasses and a bottle of Remy Martin XO cognac loaned to her by Giordino from his private traveling stock. The excuse for her barging in like this was to properly thank Pitt for saving her life.
Startled, she caught her reflection in a mirror above a desk that folded from the wall. Her cheeks were flushed like those of a young girl waiting for her date to the high school prom to show up. It was a condition she'd seldom experienced before. Maeve turned away, angry at herself. She couldn't believe she was entering a man's quarters without being invited. She hardly knew Pitt. He was little more than a stranger. But Maeve was a lady used to striking out on her own.
Her father, the wealthy head of an international mining operation, had raised Maeve and her sisters as if they were boys, not girls. There were no dolls or fancy dresses or debutante balls. His departed wife had given him three daughters instead of sons to continue the family's financial empire, so he simply ignored fate and trained them to be tough. By the time she was eighteen, Maeve could kick a soccer ball farther than most men in her college class, and she once trekked across the outback of Australia from Canberra to Perth with only a dog, a domesticated dingo, for company, an accomplishment her father rewarded her for by pulling her out of school and putting her to work in the family mines alongside of hard-bodied male diggers and blasters. She rebelled. This was no life for a woman with other desires.
She ran away to Melbourne and worked her way through university toward a career in zoology. Her father made no attempt to bring her back into the family fold. He merely abolished her claim to any family investments and pretended she never existed after her twins were born out of wedlock six months after a wonderful year she spent with a boy she met in class. He was the son of a sheep rancher, beautifully dark from the harsh outback sun, with a solid body and sensitive gray eyes. They had laughed, loved and fought constantly. When they inevitably parted, she never told him she was pregnant.
Maeve set the bottle and glasses on the desk and stared down at the personal things casually thrown among a stack of papers and a nautical chart. She peeked furtively into a cowhide wallet fat with assorted credit cards, business and membership cards, two blank personal checks and $123 in cash.
How strange, she thought, there were no pictures. She laid the wallet back on the desk and studied the other items strewn about. There was a wellworn, orange-faced Doxa dive watch with a heavy stainless-steel band, and a mixed set of house and car keys. That was all.
Hardly enough to give her an insight into the man who owned them, she thought. There had been other men who had entered her life and departed, some at her request, a few on their own. But they all left something of themselves. This seemed to be a man who walked a lonely path, leaving nothing behind.
She stepped through the doorway into his sleeping quarters. The mirror above the sink in the bathroom behind was still fogged with steam, a sign that the occupant had recently bathed. She smelled a small whiff of men's aftershave, and it produced a strange tingle in her stomach.
"Mr. Pitt," she called out again, but not loudly. "Are you here?"
Then she saw the body laid out full length on the bed, arms loosely crossed over the chest as though he were lying in a coffin. She breathed a sigh of relief at seeing that his loins were covered by a bath towel. "I'm sorry," she said very softly. "Forgive me for disturbing you."
Pitt slept on without responding.
Her eyes traveled from his head to his feet. The black mass of curly hair was still damp and tousled.
His eyebrows were thick, almost bushy, and came close to meeting above a straight nose. She guessed he was somewhere in the neighborhood of forty, though the craggy features, the tanned and weathered skin and chiseled, unyielding jawline made him seem older. Small wrinkles around the eyes and lips turned up, giving him the look of a man who was perpetually smiling. It was a strong face, the kind of face women are drawn to. He looked like a man of strength and determination, the kind of man who had seen the best of times and worst of times but never sidestepped whatever life threw at him.
The rest of his b
ody was firm and smooth except for a dark patch of hair on his chest. The shoulders were broad, the stomach flat, the hips narrow. The muscles of his arms and legs were pronounced but not thick or bulging. The body was not powerful but tended on the wiry side, even rangy. There was a tenseness that suggested a spring that was waiting to uncoil. And then there were the scars. She couldn't begin to imagine where they came from.
He did not seem cut from the same mold as the other men she had known. She hadn't really loved any of them, sleeping with them out of curiosity and rebellion against her father more than passionate desire.
Even when she became pregnant by a fellow student, she refused an abortion to spite her father and carried her twin sons to birth.
Now, staring down at the sleeping man in the bed, she felt a strange pleasure and power at standing over his nakedness. She lifted the lower edge of the towel, smiled devilishly to herself, and let it fall back in place. Maeve found Pitt immensely attractive and wanted him, yes, feverishly and shamelessly wanted him.
"See something you like, little sister," came a quiet, husky voice from behind her.
Chagrined, Maeve spun and stared at Deirdre, who leaned casually against the doorway, smoking a cigarette.
"What are you doing here?" she demanded in a whisper.
"Keeping you from biting off more than you can chew."
"Very funny." In a motherly gesture, Maeve pulled the covers over Pitt's body and tucked them under the mattress. Then she turned and physically pushed Deirdre into the anteroom before softly closing the bedroom door. "Why are you following me? Why didn't you return to Australia with the other passengers?"
"I might ask the same of you, dear sister."
"The ship's scientists asked me to remain on board and make out a report of my experience with the death plague."
Ànd I remained because I thought we might kiss and make up," Deirdre said, drawing on her cigarette.
"There was a time I might have believed you. But not now."
Ì admit there were other considerations."
"How did you manage to stay out of my sight during the weeks we were at sea?"
"Would you believe I remained in my cabin with an upset stomach?"
"That's so much rot," snapped Maeve. "You have the constitution of a horse. I've never known you to be sick."
Deirdre looked around for an ashtray, and finding none, opened the cabin door and flipped her cigarette over the railing into the sea. "Aren't you the least bit amazed at my miraculous survival?"
Maeve stared into her eyes, confused and uncertain. "You told everyone you were in the freezer."
"Rather good timing, don't you think?"
"You were incredibly lucky."
"Luck had nothing to do with it," Deirdre contradicted. "What about yourself? Didn't it ever occur to you how you came to be in the whaling station caves at exactly the right moment?"
"What are you implying?"
"You don't understand, do you?" Deirdre said as if scolding a naughty child. "Did you think Daddy was going to forgive and forget after you stormed out of his office, swearing never to see any one of us again? He especially went mad when he heard that you had legally changed your name to that of our great-great-great-grandmother. Fletcher, indeed. Since you left, he's had your every movement observed from the time you entered Melbourne University until you were employed by Ruppert & Saunders.
Maeve stared at her with anger and disbelief that faded as something began to dawn slowly in her mind. "He was that afraid that I would talk to the wrong people about his filthy business operations?"
"Whatever unorthodox means Daddy has used to further the family empire was for your benefit as well as Boudicca and myself."
"Boudicca!" Maeve spat. "Our sister, the devil incarnate."
"Think what you may," Deirdre said impassively, "Boudicca has always had your best interests at heart.
"If you believe that, you're a bigger fool than I gave you credit for."
"It was Boudicca who talked Daddy into sparing your life by insisting I go along on the voyage."
"Sparing my life?" Maeve looked lost. "You're not making sense."
"Who do you think arranged for the ship's captain to send you ashore with the first excursion?"
"You?"
"Me.'
"It was my turn to go ashore. The other lecturers and I worked in sequence."
Deirdre shook her head. "If they had stuck to the proper schedule, you'd have been placed in charge of the second shore party that never got off the ship."
"So what was your reasoning?"
"An act of timing," said Deirdre, suddenly turning cold. "Daddy's people calculated that the phenomenon would appear when the first shore party was safe inside the whaling station storage caves."
Maeve felt the deck reeling beneath her feet, and the color drained out of her cheeks. "No way he could have predicted the terrible event," she gasped.
"A smart man, our father," Deirdre said calmly as if she were gossiping with a friend over the telephone. "If not for his advance planning, how do you think I knew when to lock myself in the ship's freezer?"
"How could he possibly know when and where the plague would strike?" she asked skeptically.
"Our father," Deirdre said, baring her teeth in a savage smile, "is not a stupid man."
Maeve's fury seethed throughout her body. "If he had any suspicions, he should have given a warning and averted the slaughter," she snapped.
"Daddy has more important business than to fuss over a boatload of dismal tourists."
"I swear before God I'll see that you all pay for your callousness."
"You'd betray the family?" Deirdre shrugged sarcastically, then answered her own question. "Yes, I believe you would."
Bet on it."
"Never happen, not if you want to see your precious sons again."
"Sean and Michael are where Father will never find them."
"Call in the dogs if you have a mind to, but hiding the twins with that teacher in Perth was not really all that clever."
"You're bluffing."
"Your flesh-and-blood sister, Boudicca, merely persuaded the teacher and his wife, the Hollenders as I recall their name, to allow her to take the twins on a picnic."
Maeve trembled and felt she was going to be sick as the full enormity of the revelation engulfed her.
"You have them?"
"The boys? Of course."
"The Hollenders, if she so much as hurt them--"
"Nothing of the sort."
"Sean and Michael, what have you done with them?"
"Daddy is taking very good care of them on our private island. He's even teaching them the diamond trade. Cheer up. The worst that can happen is that they suffer some type of accident. You know better than anybody the risks children run, playing around mining tunnels. The bright side is that if you stand with the family, your boys will someday become incredibly wealthy and powerful men."
"Like Daddy'?" Maeve cried in outrage and fear. "I'd rather they die." She subdued the urge to kill her sister and sat heavily in a chair, broken and defeated.
"They could do worse," said Deirdre, gloating over Maeve's helplessness. "String along your friends from NUMA for a few days, and keep your mouth shut about what I've told you. Then we'll catch a flight for home." She walked to the door and turned. "I think you'll find Daddy most forgiving, providing you ask forgiveness and demonstrate your loyalty to the family." Then she stepped onto the outside deck and out of sight.
WHERE DREAMS COME FROM
Admiral Sandecker seldom used the large boardroom for conferences. He reserved it mainly for visiting congressmen and -women, and respected scientists, foreign and American. For internal NUMA business, he preferred a smaller workroom just off his office. It was an extremely comfortable room, uniquely his own, sort of a hideaway for him to hold informal but confidential meetings with his NUMA directors. Sandecker often used it as an executive dining room, he and his directors relaxing in the sof
t leather chairs set around a three-meter-long conference table built from a section of a wooden hull salvaged from a schooner on the bottom of Lake Erie and solidly set in a thick turquoise carpet in front of a fireplace surrounded by a Victorian mantelpiece.
Unlike the modern design and decor of the other offices in the NUMA headquarters building, which were encased in soaring walls of green-tinted glass, this room looked as if it was straight out of an antiquated London gentlemen's club. All four walls and ceiling were richly paneled in a satiny teak, and there were paintings of United States naval actions hung in ornate frames.
There was a beautifully detailed painting of the epic battle between John Paul Jones in the woefully armed Bonhomme Richard and the new British fifty-gun frigate, Serapis. Next to it the venerable American frigate Constitution was demasting the British frigate Java. On the opposite wall the Civil War ironclads Monitor and Virginia, better known as the Merrimac, slugged it out. Commodore Dewey destroying the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay and a flight of dive bombers taking off from the carrier Enterprise to bomb the Japanese fleet during the Battle of Midway were mounted side by side. Only the painting above the fireplace lacked a sea battle. It was a portrait of Sandecker in casual uniform before he was promoted and thrown on the beach. Below the portrait, in a glass-enclosed case, sat a model of his last command, the missile cruiser Tucson.
After Sandecker's retirement, a former President of the United States picked him to organize and establish a newly funded government agency dedicated to research of the sea. Beginning in a rented warehouse with a staff of fewer than a dozen people, including Pitt and Giordino, Sandecker had built NUMA into a huge organization that was the envy of oceanographic institutions around the world, manned by two thousand employees, and with a huge budget rarely questioned and almost always approved by Congress.