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"Goodnight, Dirk."
If only she was real, he thought with a dreamy sigh.
"Jack Daniel's neat," Raphael O'Meara said cheerfully. "Make that a double. Best medicine I know to clear the brain of jungle rot."
"How long were you in Costa Rica?" asked Pitt.
"Three months. Rained the whole time."
"Bombay gin on the rocks with a twist," Pitt said to the barmaid.
"So you're joining the greedy ranks of the sea scavengers," O'Meara said, the words emanating through a thick Gabby Hayes beard that hid his face from the nose down. "Dirk Pitt a treasure hunter. I never thought I'd see the day."
"My interest is purely academic."
"Sure, that's what they all say. Take my advice and forget it. More loot has been poured into underwater treasure hunts than was ever found. I can count on one hand the number of lucky discoveries that paid a profit in the last eighty years. The adventure, excitement, and riches, nothing but hype and all myth."
"I agree."
O'Meara's barbed-wire eyebrows narrowed. "So what is it you want to know?"
"You familiar with Raymond LeBaron?"
"Old rich and reckless Raymond, the financial genius who publishes the Prosperteer?"
"The same. He disappeared a couple of weeks ago on a blimp flight near the Bahamas."
"How could anybody disappear in a blimp?"
"Somehow he managed. You must have heard or read something about it."
O'Meara shook his head. "I haven't watched TV or seen a newspaper in ninety days."
The drinks were brought, and Pitt briefly explained the strange circumstances surrounding the mystery.
The crowd was beginning to thin and they had the bar mostly to themselves.
"And you think LeBaron was flying around in an old gas bag looking for a shipwreck loaded to the gills with the mother lode."
"According to his wife, Jessie."
"What ship?"
"The Cyclops."
"I know about the Cyclops. A Navy collier that vanished seventy-one years ago. I don't recall any report of riches on board."
"Apparently LeBaron thought so."
"What sort of treasure?"
"The El Dorado."
"You've got to be kidding."
"I'm only repeating what I was told."
