“Any idea who they were?”
She shook her head. “There were three of them. One went in the water with me and was sucked through the spillway. They all made an effort to conceal their identities.”
“Professional artifact thieves who weren’t afraid to kill.”
Summer kicked at a small stone. “Dr. Torres was killed before he even had a chance to decipher the stone. Now it’s gone. I guess we’ll never know what it says.”
“Madero can still figure it out.”
“Not without the stone.”
“We still have something almost as good.” Dirk rummaged through the interior of the mangled van. A moment later, he crawled out clutching something.
Summer glanced at it and her face turned red. “No, you didn’t!”
Dirk could offer only a crooked grin as he held up the smashed housing of Summer’s new underwater camera.
22
The house phone rang and rang, and rang some more. St. Julien Perlmutter didn’t believe in answering machines, voicemail, or even cell phones. To his way of thinking, they were all intrusive annoyances. He particularly had no use for such devices on the rare occasion he left his Georgetown house, which usually meant he was eating at one of the capital’s finer dining establishments or engaging in archival research at a national library.
Fortunately for the caller, Perlmutter was at home, searching for an ancient tome on one of his many bookshelves. A behemoth of a man, he was perhaps the foremost maritime historian on the planet. His breadth of knowledge on ships and shipwrecks was legendary, while archivists drooled for the day Perlmutter would expire and his collection of letters, charts, journals, and logbooks might be subject to acquisition.
Dropping into a stout leather chair beside a rolltop desk, he reached for the phone on the tenth ring. Like most objects in his house, the handset was a marine relic, having once graced the bridge of the luxury liner United States.
“Perlmutter,” he answered in a gruff voice.
“St. Julien, it’s Summer. I hope I didn’t catch you in the middle of a meal.”
“Heavens, no.” His voice instantly warmed. “I was just searching for a firsthand account of Christopher Columbus’s fourth voyage to the New World.”
“A serendipitous era,” she said.
“The Age of Discovery always was. I had the pleasure of dining with your father recently. He said you and Dirk were working in Mexico.”
“Yes, we’re still here. And we could use your help. We’re trying to track down a Spanish ship that would have sailed from Veracruz in the early days of the conquest.”
“What was her name?”
“I’m afraid we don’t know. The only clue to her identity is a drawing from an Aztec codex, a copy of which I just emailed you.”
While Summer relayed the discovery of the codex and their travails with the Aztec stone, Perlmutter turned on his desktop computer and pulled up the image.
“Rather slim pickings,” he said. He studied the cartoonish image of a sailing ship with a monkey floating above its bow. “Do your Aztec experts have an interpretation?”
“Nothing definitive. The monkey may relate to the cargo, its route, or possibly a moniker for the ship’s name. We hope it’s the latter.”
“It’s possible, although during that time the Spanish were more apt to name their ships after religious icons. Fortunately, the records of the early Spanish voyages are fairly stout.”
“It’s the stone we’re after, so if you have any thoughts on where it may have ended up, we’d certainly be interested. It obviously has some deep significance to someone.”
“Regrettably, many among us will go to unsavory lengths in pursuit of a simple dollar. I’m sorry about your friend. I do hope you and Dirk will be careful.”
“We will.”
“As for the stone, I’ve been through all the major Spanish maritime museums and don’t recall any mention of such an artifact. I suppose it could have ended up in a private collection. I’ll make some inquiries.”
“Thanks, Julien. We’ll be sure to bring you back a bottle of your favorite tequila. Porfidio, if I remember.”
“Summer, you are an angel. Just don’t let your renegade father near the stuff or it will be a dry bottle before I get within sight of it.”
Perlmutter hung up the phone and stared at the image of the galleon on his computer. As he stroked his thick gray beard, his mind was miles away. Four thousand miles, to be exact.
“There’s only one place to start, my fine furry friend,” he said aloud to the image of the monkey. “Seville.”
23
Pitt gazed out the Sargasso Sea’s bridge window as a large container ship passed to the north. Another twenty miles beyond it lay the green coastline of southern Cuba. He wondered if the toxic effect of the mercury was already encroaching on its shores.
The NUMA research ship was approaching the third dead zone identified by Yaeger. Pitt was bristling at their failure to identify a source. The second site, a hundred miles northeast of the Cayman Islands, had yielded no answers. This current area, like the last, showed extreme concentrations of methyl mercury, though at slightly decreased levels. Because the mercury was more dispersed, it had taken the scientists two days to narrow the peak toxicity to a four-square-mile area.
The muted sounds of efficiency on the bridge were broken by the deep voice of Al Giordino grumbling through an overhead speaker. “Stern deck. AUV is aboard. I repeat, AUV is aboard. Please proceed to the next grid area.”
Pitt beat the captain to the transmitter. “Bridge acknowledged. I’ll meet you in the theater in five minutes for today’s matinee.”
“You bring the popcorn, I’ll bring the Milk Duds. Stern deck out.”
By the time Pitt made his way to the wet lab on the main deck, Giordino was scrolling through the AUV’s sonar images on a large-panel display. Pitt noticed the seafloor was much more dramatic than the earlier sites, with rocky outcroppings and undulating hills and valleys.
He took a seat next to Giordino. “Your AUV got a workout on this run.”
“That’s what she’s made for.” Giordino pointed to an insert on the screen that portrayed the overall search grid and their relative location. “If the drift estimates are correct, there’s a high probability the source of the mercury release is within the quadrant just surveyed.”
“Let’s hope there’s a visible indicator this time,” Pitt said.
They reviewed nearly an hour of sonar images. While the seafloor did flatten, no man-made objects were apparent. Finally, Pitt noticed a shadow on the seabed and had Giordino halt the scrolling.
“Zoom in on that streak,” he said. “It looks like a linear path across the bottom.”
Giordino nodded and enlarged the image. “There’s an even pair of lines. They look too precise to be geography.”
“Let’s see where it goes,” Pitt said.
Giordino resumed scanning. The faint lines appeared in greater concentration in a section of the grid that dipped into a large depression. Pitt was tracking the change in depth when Giordino froze the image.
“Well, lookie here,” he said. “Somebody lost a boat.”
A dark, slender object rose from the bottom, casting a short shadow. Familiar linear tracks edged nearby.
“It looks long and lean,” Pitt said. “Perhaps a sailing boat that’s partially buried.”
“The AUV was running at a low frequency to scan a wider path, so the definition is on the weak side. That blur of a boat looks to be about thirty feet long.”
“Doubtful it’s our mercury source but maybe worth a look.”
Giordino resumed scrolling until the AUV’s records came to an end. Pitt noted the vehicle’s last recorded depth before it returned to the surface.