Medusa

  He got into the helicopter with Daley. The ignition fired the twin General Electric engines to life and the spinning rotors gathered speed. The sixty-five-foot-long aircraft lifted off the tarmac, hovered at an altitude of a few hundred feet, pivoted slowly, and flew over the lagoon toward the open sea.

  While the chopper carried Joe off to join the search flotilla, Austin and Lee exited the airport terminal to look for the taxi stand. A young man in his twenties who must have weighed three hundred fifty pounds was leaning against a faded maroon Pontiac station wagon paneled with fake wood, KOLONIA TAXI CO. painted on the door. Austin approached the man and asked him if he knew a tour guide named Jeremiah Whittles.

  “Old Jerry? For sure. He’s retired. If you need a guide, I can hook you up with my cousin.”

  “Thanks, but I’d like to talk to Jerry,” Austin said. “Can you take me to him?”

  “No problem,” the man said with a bright smile. “He lives in Kolonia town. Hop in.”

  Austin held the door open for Song Lee, then got in the car beside her. The driver, who said his name was Elwood, shoehorned his body into the driver’s seat, the wagon’s springs groaning and its chassis listing to that side. As Elwood pulled away from the curb, a black Chevrolet Silverado pickup that had been parked several car lengths behind the station wagon followed it across the causeway and into Kolonia, a town of about six thousand whose ramshackle Main Street had a frontier air about it. Elwood turned off Main into a residential neighborhood and stopped in front of a neat yellow house trimmed in white.

  The Silverado passed the Pontiac wagon and pulled up a short distance ahead where the driver could watch in his rearview mirror as Austin and Lee went up to the front door. Austin rang the bell and heard someone inside say hello. A moment later, a slightly built man who looked to be in his eighties answered the door.

  Jeremiah Whittles first smiled at Lee. Then his eyes turned to Austin and widened in surprise.

  “Is that Kurt Austin of NUMA? My God, I don’t believe it! How long has it been?”

  “Too long, Whit. How are you?”

  “Older, but not necessarily wiser. What brings you to my beautiful island, Kurt?”

  “Some routine NUMA stuff for the Navy. I’m showing Dr. Lee here around. She’s interested in Nan Madol, and I couldn’t think of anyone more knowledgeable on the subject than Pohnpei’s best-known guide.”

  “Make that best-known former guide,” Whittles said. “C’mon in.”

  With his pink-skinned pate, thin aquiline nose, kindly yet inquisitive blue eyes behind wire-rimmed bifocals, and slightly stooped shoulders, Whittles resembled a friendly buzzard.

  “I heard you had retired,” Austin said.

  “My brain was still full of all the facts, like an old stew kettle, but the spine was stiffening up, and I couldn’t turn my head without some difficulty, which I need to do to point out features on the tours. Had to swivel at the waist like a wooden soldier. Then my eyesight started to go. Not much call for a half-blind guide, so I thought it best to call it quits.”

  Whittles led the way through rooms filled with Micronesian folk art. There were masks, totems, and carved grotesque figures on every wall and in every corner. He settled his visitors on a screened-in porch and scuttled off to get them some cold bottled water.

  In his travels around the world, Austin had seen clones of Whittles, peripatetic Englishmen who attach themselves as guides to famous cathedrals, ancient palaces, and forgotten temples, absorbing every fact, large and small, and becoming local celebrities in the process.

  Austin had met Whittles during a tour of Nan Madol, and the depth and breadth of his historical and cultural knowledge had impressed him. Years before, Whittles had served as a navigator aboard a merchant ship that had stopped at Pohnpei and been entranced by its beauty and history. Retiring early from the merchant marine and relying on his savings, he moved to the island and led a monklike existence centered on the ruins. Nan Madol became not only his livelihood but his whole life.

  Whittles came back with the water, settled in a chair, and asked Lee what she knew about Nan Madol.

  “Not a lot, I must confess,” she said. “Only that it has been called the Venice of the Pacific.”

  “Nan Madol is a far cry from the city on the Adriatic,” he said, “but it is impressive nonetheless. It consists of ninety-two artificial islets dating back to 1100 A.D. The builders rafted hexagonal basalt pillars to the tidal flats and reef off Tenwen, some of the pillars more than twenty feet long, and stacked them horizontally to make artificial, flat-topped islets. A grid of shallow canals connects the islets to one another. Because the city is so remote and mysterious, and located where nothing of this sort should exist, it has given rise to theories that Nan Madol was part of the lost continent of Mu or Lemuria.”

  “What do you think, Mr. Whittles?” Lee asked.

  “I think that the reality is more prosaic but still marvelous. The city was the site of temples, administrative centers, burial vaults, houses for priests and nobles, and a pool said to have been the home of a sacred eel . . . How may I help you, Dr. Lee?”

  “Do you know of any ruins engraved with unusual carvings similar to those on another island?”

  “Only one instance,” Whittles said. “The temple known as the Cult of the Healing Priests. I’ve heard reports of a similar temple elsewhere but have never been able to verify it.”

  “What exactly was this cult?” Austin asked.

  “It originated on one of the islands near Pohnpei. The priests traveled around the islands tending the sick and became known for their miraculous healing.”

  Austin exchanged glances with Lee.

  “As a doctor,” she said, “I’m very interested in the healing part.”

  “Wish I could tell you more,” he said, “but the civilization degenerated from the effects of internecine warfare. And while there is a good chance that the beliefs and ceremonies of the cult survived in some more primitive form, most of what we know today was passed down by word of mouth. There is no written record.”

  “Wouldn’t the carvings be considered a written record?” Austin asked.

  “Sure,” Whittles said. “But from what I’ve seen, they’re more symbolic and allegorical than historical.”

  “What do the carvings at Nan Madol represent?” Lee asked.

  “I can show you better than I can tell you,” Whittles said.

  He went into his study and dug through his file cabinets, returning with a brown envelope. He opened the envelope and pulled out a stack of five-by-seven photos. He fanned the photos like a deck of cards, picking out one and handing it to Lee.

  “This is the façade of the temple as seen from a canal,” he explained. “There’s a hollow space under the temple’s floor that seems to have been some sort of pool. This picture shows the carvings on the interior.”

  Lee stared at the photo for a moment, then passed it over to Austin, who studied the bell shapes in it and then looked up.

  “Jellyfish?” he asked.

  “It appears to be,” Whittles said. “Not sure why they decorated the wall of a temple with those creatures. But, as I said, there’s a pool dedicated to the sacred eel, so why not one to jellyfish?”

  “Why not indeed?” Lee said, her dark eyes sparkling with excitement.

  “I’d like to see this place in person,” Austin said. “Can you tell us where it is?”

  “I can show you exactly, but I hope you brought your bathing suit. The platform the temple rested on got knocked around in an earthquake years ago and sank into the canal. Not too deep. Maybe twelve feet or so.”

  Austin looked at Lee.

  “What’s your pleasure, ma’am? Head off to our ship or check out Nan Madol?”

  “I think the answer to that question is obvious,” she said.

  He wasn’t surprised by her reply, given what he had seen of her determination.

  Austin asked to borrow a local telephone book and within minutes h
ad arranged to rent a boat and some scuba equipment. Whittles marked the temple’s location on a tourist map of the ruined city. They thanked him and said their good-byes, then went back out to the waiting Pontiac station wagon. As the taxi headed toward the harbor, the Chevy Silverado pulled away from the curb and followed a few lengths behind.

  Unknown

  NUMA 8 - Medusa

  CHAPTER 35

  DR. LYSANDER CODMAN GREETED THE TROUTS IN THE LOBBY of a building that overlooked the grassy square off Longwood Avenue where Harvard Medical School was part of a campus with some of the most prestigious such institutions in the country. The professor was a tall, loose-boned man in his sixties. He had the type of long, big-toothed face that seemed to raise the possibility that some of the old Yankee families had bred with horses.

  Codman led the way along a hallway and swept the Trouts into his spacious office. He asked his visitors to make themselves comfortable and poured cups of Earl Grey from an electric kettle. He then plunked himself behind his desk and asked a few questions about their work with NUMA, then held up a bound report so the Trouts could read the title on its dark blue cover:

  THE NEW BEDFORD ANOMALY:

  A STUDY OF IMMUNE RESPONSE AMONG

  CREW FROM THE WHALING SHIP PRINCESS

  Codman took a noisy slurp from his cup.

  “I’ve had a chance to browse through Dr. Lee’s paper,” he said. “It’s even more curious than I remember.”

  Paul asked, “Curious in what way, Professor Codman?”

  “You’ll understand when you get into it. The first section of Dr. Lee’s treatise is based mostly on newspaper reports. The reporter was interviewing retired whaling men, looking to chronicle their exploits, and realized that he was onto something. He noticed that a group of whalers in their seventies and eighties had been almost completely disease free for a good part of their very long lives.”

  “We were in the New Bedford Seamen’s Bethel earlier today,” Gamay said. “The walls are lined with tablets memorializing whaling crews. Paul remarked at how tough the old-timers must have been.”

  “It went beyond toughness in this case,” Codman said. “These men had never suffered a single illness, not even the common cold. They died at an advanced age, usually from some geriatric condition such as congestive heart failure.”

  “Newspaper writing can be overblown,” Gamay said.

  “Especially in the nineteenth century,” Codman said. “But the stories caught the eye of a doctor in immunology named Fuller here at the medical school. He organized a team of physicians to investigate. They talked to the men and the physicians who had treated them. What they found was even stranger than what newspapers had reported. The men enjoying the most robust health had all served on the whaling ship Princess during a single voyage in 1848. They had been infected on that voyage with a tropical illness then making the rounds through the Pacific whaling fleet. While some of those men shipped out again later and died in whaling accidents, fourteen were still living. They were compared to men from other ships, and the statistical differences healthwise were startling. The doctors backed up their findings with tables and graphs and so on.”

  “Yet you expressed doubts over Dr. Lee’s findings,” Gamay said.

  Professor Codman sat back in his chair, tented his fingers, and stared into space.

  “The preliminary stating of facts didn’t bother me as much as her conclusions,” he said after a moment. “The basis for Dr. Lee’s paper was built on empirical evidence that I found hard to swallow: primarily, her observations on the anecdotes told by the men involved. Unfortunately, the ship’s captain died before the interviews took place. His logbook was never found.”

  “Don’t firsthand observations have some validity?” Paul asked.

  “Oh, yes, but think of it: these men had been ill at the time, some even in fever comas, and their recollections were recorded decades after the event.”

  “What was the nature of those recollections?” Paul asked.

  “They all had the same story: they fell ill after leaving port, became unconscious, and woke up the next day in good health.”

  “Was spontaneous remission a possibility?” Gamay asked.

  “Dr. Lee presented reports of a flulike plague that rampaged through the fleet then. Judging by its speed and ferocity, as well as influenza’s high mortality rate, I’d say spontaneous remission was not likely.”

  “You said the crewmen all told the same story,” Gamay said. “Wouldn’t that strengthen the account of what happened?”

  “A whaling vessel was a small community unto itself. I think they developed a shared story line.” He paused. “Only the first mate had a different version.”

  “Did he contradict the crew’s version?” Gamay asked.

  “No. In fact, the first mate supplemented it. He recalled the ship dropping anchor at an island, even going ashore with the captain. He also remembered seeing glowing blue lights and feeling a stinging sensation in his chest. He woke up feeling as if he had never been sick.”

  “That’s interesting about the sting,” Gamay said. “Do you think he was talking about a primitive version of inoculation?”

  “He seemed to have been going in that direction. He said all the surviving crew and officers had a reddish mark on their chests. The lights could have been hallucinations or the electrical phenomenon known as Saint Elmo’s fire and the marks insect bites. In any case, inoculation can prevent disease but isn’t known to cure it.”

  “Did the Harvard team take blood samples from the men?” Gamay asked.

  “Yes. The samples were subjected to microscopic analysis. There was apparently some unusual antigen activity, but you have to understand that the optical instrumentation then was primitive by today’s standards. The science of immunology is comparatively young. Jenner and Pasteur had yet to make their groundbreaking discoveries explaining why people, having survived a disease, rarely caught it again after that.”

  “Could the blood samples be analyzed today?” Gamay asked

  “Sure, if we had them. Apparently, the samples were thrown out or just plain lost.” He handed the report to Gamay. “In any event, I’m sure you will find it fascinating reading.”

  The Trouts were walking back to their car when Paul’s cell phone trilled.

  He listened for a moment, then said, “Okay.” He clicked the phone shut, and said, “Guess we owe our friend Brimmer an apology.”

  “He’s found some papers from Caleb Nye’s traveling show?” Gamay asked.

  “Better,” Paul said. “Brimmer’s got the 1848 logbook from the Princess. He’ll meet us at his workshop to turn it over.”

  HARVEY BRIMMER PUT THE phone down and eyed the four Asian men in his office. They were in their twenties, dressed identically in black leather jackets and jeans, and all wore black headbands with Chinese characters in red on them. They had arrived in New Bedford not long after Brimmer had made the call about the logbook. Their leader, a thin-faced youth with a scar running down his right cheek, was the one who had visited the bookshop looking for the book. He had told Brimmer to call the Trouts.

  “They’re on their way,” Brimmer said. “Why do you want to see them?”

  The leader pulled a gun out of his shirt. He smiled, revealing a tooth inlaid with a gold pyramid.

  “We don’t want to see them, old man,” he said. “We want to kill them.”

  He ripped the phone line from the wall, then ordered Brimmer to hand over his cell phone, which he pocketed.

  Brimmer’s blood ran cold. He was smart enough to figure out that, as witness to a double murder, he would not be allowed to live. As he sat behind his desk, he thought about the spare cell he kept locked in one of its drawers. When he saw his chance, he would make his move.

  Unknown

  NUMA 8 - Medusa

  CHAPTER 36

  LIKE MANY OLDER BOATS CONSTRUCTED BEFORE BUILDERS were sure how thick to make a hull with the then-new fiberglass, the batter
ed twelve-foot-long skiff Austin had rented on the Kolonia waterfront was built like a battleship. The wide-beamed craft was powered by a pitted fifteen-horsepower Evinrude outboard that belonged in a museum of nautical artifacts.

  Austin was glad to see that the scuba gear he’d rented was in far better shape than the boat or the motor. He inspected the regulator, hoses, and tank and found all the equipment had been well maintained. As an afterthought, he purchased a throwaway underwater camera encased in plastic. Then, after stowing the dive-gear bag, he helped Song Lee into the boat. After a couple of pulls on the starter cord, the Evinrude hiccupped and caught. Once it got going, it proved to have a stout mechanical heart as it powered the heavy boat through the water at a slow but steady pace along the coast.

  Nan Madol was about forty-five minutes by boat from Kolonia. As they came up on the city on the southeast shore of Tenwen Island and caught their first glimpse of the enigmatic islets, Austin reached back into his memory trying to recall what Whittles had told him about the ruins years before. The place had been a ceremonial center going back to the second century A.D., but the megalithic architecture did not start to take shape until the twelfth century.

  The city served as a residence for nobility and mortuary priests, and its population never went beyond a thousand. The mortuary spread over fifty-eight islands in the northeast part of the city, a sector called Madol Powe. Whittles had taken Austin there and shown him the islets where the priests lived and worked. Madol Pah was the administrative sector on the south-western part of Nan Madol. That was where the nobles lived and the warriors were quartered.

  Nan Madol’s builders had put up seawalls to protect the city from the Pacific’s whims. The rectangular islets were all basically the same. Retaining walls, built by stacking heavy, prismatic basalt columns log-cabin style, surrounded cores of coral rubble. Once the walls reached several feet above sea level, platforms were built on top as foundations for living areas, or temples, or even crypts. The more elaborate of these islets, like the spectacular mortuary at Nandauwas, had two twenty-five-foot walls enclosing the royal compound.