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"What about the Inca treasures?"
"They were left in the cargo holds of the Concepcion. Drake then put a prize crew on board to sail her back through the Magellan Strait and across the Atlantic to England."
"Did the galleon reach port?"
"No," answered Pe
rlmutter thoughtfully. "It went missing and was presumed lost with all hands."
"I'm sorry to hear that," said Pitt, disappointment in his voice. "I had hopes it might have somehow survived."
"Come to think of it," recalled Perlmutter, "a myth did arise concerning the Concepcion's disappearance."
"What was the gist of it?"
"A fanciful story, little more than rumor, said the galleon was caught in a tidal wave that carried it far inland. Never verified or documented, of course."
"Do you have a source for the rumor?"
"Further research will be needed to verify details, but if my memory serves me correctly, the tale came from a mad Englishman the Portuguese reported finding in a village along the Amazon River. Sorry, that's about all I can give you on the spur of the moment."
"I'd be grateful if you dug a little deeper," said Pitt.
"I can give you the dimensions and tonnage of the Concepcion, how much sail she carried, when and where she was built. But a crazy person wandering around a rain forest calls for a source outside my collection."
"If anyone can track down a sea mystery, you can."
"I have an utter lack of willpower when it comes to delving into one of your enigmas, especially after we found old Abe Lincoln on a Confederate ironclad in the middle of the Sahara Desert together."
"I leave it to you, Julien."
"Ironclads in a desert, Noah's Ark on a mountain, Spanish galleons in a jungle. Why don't ships stay on the sea where they belong?"
"That's why you and I are incurable lost shipwreck hunters," said Pitt cheerfully.
"What's your interest in this one?" Perlmutter asked warily.
"A jade box containing a knotted cord that gives directions to an immense Inca treasure."
Perlmutter mulled over Pitt's brief answer for several seconds before he finally said,
"Well, I guess that's as good a reason as any."
Hiram Yaeger looked as if he should have been pushing a shopping cart full of shabby belongings down a back alley. He was attired in a Levi's jacket and pants, his long blond hair tied in a loose ponytail, and his boyish face half-hidden by a scraggly beard. The only shopping cart Yaeger ever pushed, however, was down the delicatessen aisle of a supermarket. A stranger would have been hard-pressed to imagine him living in a fashionable residential area of Maryland with a lovely artist wife and two pretty, smart teenage girls in private school, and driving a top-of-the-line BMW.
Nor would someone who didn't know him guess that he was chief of NUMA's communications and information network. Admiral Sandecker had pirated him away from a Silicon Valley computer corporation to build a vast data library, containing every book, article, or thesis, scientific or historical, fact or theory, ever known to be written about the sea. What St. Julien Perlmutter's archive was to ships, Yaeger's was to oceanography and the growing field of undersea sciences.
He was sitting at his own private terminal in a small side office of the computer data complex that took up the entire tenth floor of the NUMA building when his phone buzzed. Without taking his eyes from a monitor that showed how ocean currents affected the climate around Australia, he picked up the receiver.
"Greetings from the brain trust," he answered casually.
"You wouldn't know gray matter if it splashed on your shoe," came the voice of an old friend.
"Good to hear from you, Mr. Special Projects Director. The office topic of the day says you're enjoying a fun-filled holiday in sunny South America."
"You heard wrong, pal."
"Are you calling from the Deep Fathom?"
