Maggie stared back at me with a blank expression on her usually pretty face.
Hannah simply muttered, "Oh, my God."
8
I went to sleep with pieces of the Prometheus puzzle scattered all over my cerebral landscape. Sylvia's hospitality was far-ranging. She had found a way to accommodate us, and I crawled between the sheets with the fragments of several different theories spread out for inspection.
Most of all, I found the question of the cylinders to be the most perplexing. Bormann had put one over on us. First there was the question of the number — why six? Logically, it took no more than two — or maybe even only one, if he wanted to pack his Fuhrer and Eva in the same can. So, why six? I was convinced that there was something I was overlooking, something I just hadn't figured out. Govan's notes on his conversations with Froelling indicated that there was no certain way to tell the cylinders apart unless you could break the code, and if one of them was missing, there was no way to know what the number corresponding to the letter was. If Froelling didn't have the code, who did? Bachmann? Kohler hadn't said anything about a code to his wife. Did Bormann plan to meet the cylinders when they arrived in Argentina? Or was I right in assuming that Bormann had concocted an elaborate and diabolical scheme for revenge?
If all of that wasn't enough, there was the matter of the actual count of the cylinders. Lamillian's log from the Bay Foreman indicated that Crompton's first dive had located four cylinders — and six cavities. If Froelling was right and the crew of the Garl had attempted to open one of the cylinders, that would mean there were five remaining. If the object in Queet's picture was actually one of the cylinders, that also would account for one. And if the large metal tube Hannah and I found on the deck of the Bay Foreman was also one of the cylinders, that would mean there were three left.
All of this brought me to the point where I had to stretch my imagination. Three cylinders had apparently been found and brought to the surface — and the big island, Deechapal and the Bay Foreman all looked hideously the same to me. Therefore, did Bormann actually put some sort of deadly device in four of the six cylinders? And what about the poor souls who retrieved those three? Were they so unlucky as to each have been unfortunate enough to have picked one of the cylinders containing Bormann's little surprise? The mathematical possibilities of that happening were staggering. Or — and this was the most haunting of the possibilities — were all of the cylinders nothing more than death machines?
The cylinder question was a riddle, but now it definitely was no longer just a question of trying to retrieve the three remaining chunks of tin from a derelict old wreck. Now there was the very real problem of knowing how to handle them once we got them to the surface. And if two of them contained bodies, which one was the bomb? As Hannah would have said, "first things first… let's get them to the surface," but that was a virtual certainty now that we had the PC-13A submersible.
From the riddle of the cylinders, my thoughts turned to Byron Huntington. Hannah's comments about the necessity of having to open the cylinders in a carefully controlled laboratory environment made a lot of sense. Surely Schuster realized that. The man had accumulated one of the world's great fortunes by being clever, and clever people didn't make mistakes like that. So what was the role of the man from California? What was his part in all of this? And if he was the contact man with Zercher's cartel, how did he manage to get on Schuster's Prometheus team?
I was beginning to feel like a rank novice. The solution wasn't evolving. Maybe it was all those old Frankenstein movies I gobbled up as a youth, but somewhere along the line I had gotten the distinct impression that all we had to do was bring the tin cans to the surface, pop them open and let Byron baby work his cryonic magic. We would get instant Adolph and Eva dolls — World War Two versions of Barbie and Ken.
That line of thinking put Byron Huntington on even thinner ice than he had been up until now. All I had to do was roll over to be reminded of my little frolic with Chauncey Packer the previous evening on the Ciel's fun-filled beach. Somebody had to have told Packer that Poqulay had sold out, and that reduced the possibilities to a meager handful — the troops aboard the Sloe Gin and Poqulay's own men. It was easy to dismiss the unlucky lieutenant's two surly thugs. They didn't look smart enough to make the connection, and they didn't look dumb enough to squeal on the man who was augmenting their income. Eliminating them, however, dumped the dubious honor onto one of my colleagues aboard the Sloe Gin, and they were even easier to catalogue than Poqulay and his men. I knew it wasn't Queet; the Jamaican had been to hell and back with me over the years. Sargent, despite being endorsed by Queet, was still an unknown quantity, but somehow he didn't fit the Wages profile of a "plant."
True, I hadn't considered the two ladies, but there were plenty of reasons to accept them for what they represented themselves to be. Maggie was fresh out of Bearing's well-guarded compound, and though she hadn't admitted it, I would have bet that her bread was being buttered by Bearing himself. Despite her glib banter, I had the feeling the filly was quite loyal to the old codger. Hannah, on the other hand, had a whole different set of credentials, along with other reasons for being caught up in all this. The fair Ms. Holbrook, I was willing to wager, didn't give a tinker's damn whether Bearing Schuster achieved even a small portion of his dream of life everlasting. Her real interest lay in trying to break up Zercher's playground on Deechapal.
All of which pointed to Huntington. I was trying to look past the fact that I didn't care for the weasel-faced little twerp, and I was trying to be equally objective about the fact that I couldn't figure out why he was even here. Still, like the rest of the team, he had been hand-picked by Bearing, and Bearing Schuster, despite his faults, was picking up the tab for this little venture.
The bottom line was to be damn careful about who I would tell what.
All of this led up to a few fleeting thoughts about my old college chum, Marshal, the boss's son. Whatever role Marshal, Zercher and associates were playing in all of this, it still hadn't surfaced. That question, like the one about who had hired the Bay Foreman, was one I hadn't dealt with yet. One thing I was certain of at this point was the fact that Chauncey Packer was only a middle man.
All of this heavy meditation about the various pieces of the Prometheus puzzle had put me on the brink of sleep, and that's exactly where I was when I heard a sharp knock on my door.
''You in there?" a husky but decidedly feminine voice inquired.
I muttered something unprintable, hauled my aching body out of bed and stumbled through the darkness to the door. Further evidence that I was half-asleep and wasn't thinking clearly was revealed by the fact that I threw the door open without even asking who was out there.
"Well," Bluebell cooed, "I sleep in the raw, too — that is, when I finally get a chance to sleep."
I started to mutter some kind of protest, but the lady shoved her way past me, headed for the bathroom, turned on the light, closed the door so that the room was barely illuminated, and came back to meet me. "Holy shit," she muttered after studying my black and blue face, "what happened to you?"
"Your boyfriend Packer did a few calisthenics on my face last night."
Bluebell reached out with her sharp fingernails and touched my swollen face. "No wonder he's tired tonight. He must have used up all his energy on you."
Having made her assessment, Bluebell backed away and sat down on the edge of my bed with her legs crossed. She popped one of her sticks in her mouth, lit it and slowly exhaled a blue-grey cloud of pungent smoke. "I never seen a white dude look so technicolor," she said grinning.