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"Are fakes as good?" asked the British publisher.
"Chemical laboratories are currently producing cultured emeralds, rubies and sapphires with the same physical, chemical and optical properties as stones mined from the ground. They are so perfect that trained gemologists have difficulty detecting any distinction. The same is true with laboratory-created diamonds."
"Can they be sold without disclosure?" asked the chairman.
"No need to deceive. Just as we educated the public into believing diamonds were the only stone to own, so can cultured stones be advertised and promoted as the most practical to buy. The only basic difference is that one took millions of years for nature to create, the other fifty hours in a laboratory. The new wave of the future, if you will."
The room went silent for a moment as each man considered the potential profits. Then the chairman smiled and nodded. "It would seem, gentlemen, that no matter which way the pendulum swings, our future earnings are secure."
March 20, 2000
Washington, D.C.
Pitt had been lucky, as every nurse on the floor of the hospital in Hobart, Tasmania, never ceased telling him. After a bout of peritonitis from the perforated colon, and the removal of the bullet from his pelvic girdle, where if had made a nice dent in the bone, he began to feel as if he had rejoined the living.
When his lung reinflated and he could breathe freely, he ate like a starving lumberjack, Giordino and Sandecker hung around until they were assured by the medical staff that Pitt was on the road to recovery, a fact attested to by his requests, or rather demands, for something to drink that wasn't fruit juice or milk. Demands that were mostly ignored.
The admiral and Giordino then escorted Maeve's boys to Melbourne, to their father, who had flown in from his family's sheep station in the outback for Maeve's funeral. A big man, Aussie to the core, with a university degree in animal husbandry, he promised Sandecker and Giordino to raise the boys in good surroundings. Though he trusted Strouser & Sons' business judgments in their management of Dorsett Consolidated Mining, he wisely retained attorneys to watch over the twins' best interests. Satisfied the boys were in good hands and that Pitt would soon be ready to return home, the admiral and Giordino flew back to Washington, where Sandecker received a tumultuous welcome and a round of ceremonial banquets as the man who fought a one-sided battle to save Honolulu from a tragic disaster.
Any thoughts the President or Wilber Hutton might have had of replacing him at NUMA quickly died.
Word around the capital city was that the admiral would be at the helm of his beloved National Underwater & Marine Agency long after the current administration left the White House.
The doctor walked into the room and found Pitt standing at the window, gazing longingly down at the Derwent River flowing through the heart of Hobart. "You're supposed to be in bed," said the doctor in his Australian twang, pronouncing bed like byd.
Pitt gave him a hard look. "I've laid on a mattress a three-toed sloth wouldn't sleep on for five days.
I've served my time. Now I'm out of here."
The doctor smiled slyly. "You have no clothes, you know. The rags you were wearing when they brought you in were thrown out in the trash."
"Then I'll walk out of here in my bathrobe and this stupid hospital gown. Whoever invented these things, by the way, should have them stuffed up his anal canal until the strings in the back come out his ears."
"I can see arguing with you is wasting my other patients' time." The doctor shrugged. "It's a bleeding wonder your body still functions. I've seldom seen so many scars on
one man. Go if you must. I'll see the nurse finds you some decent street clothes so you won't be arrested for impersonating an American tourist."
No NUMA jet this trip. Pitt flew commercial on United Airlines. As he shuffled onto the aircraft, still stiff and with a grinding ache in his side, the flight attendants, women except for one man, stared at him in open curiosity, watching him search the overhead numbers for his seat.
One attendant, brown hair neatly coiffed, eyes almost as green as Pitt's and soft with concern, came over to him. "May I show you to your seat, sir?"
Pitt had spent a solid minute studying himself in a mirror before he caught a cab from the hospital to the airport. If he'd auditioned for a movie role that called for the walking dead, the director would have hired him in an instant the livid red scar across his forehead; the vacant, bloodshot eyes and gaunt, pale face; his movements like a ninety-year-old man with arthritis. His skin was blotched from the burns, his eyebrows were nonexistent, and his once thick, curly black hair looked like a sheep herder had tried styling it in a crewcut.
"Yes, thank you," he said more out of embarrassment than appreciation.
"Are you Mr. Pitt?" she asked as she motioned to an empty seat by the window.
"At the moment I wish I were someone else, but yes, I'm Pitt."
"You're a lucky man," she said smiling.
"So a dozen nurses kept telling me."
"No, I mean you have friends who are very concerned about you. The flight crew were told you would be flying with us and were requested to make you as comfortable as possible."
How in hell did Sandecker know he'd escaped the hospital, left directly for the airport and purchased a standby ticket to Washington, he wondered.
As it turned out, the flight attendants had little to do for him. He slept most of the trip, coming awake only to eat, watch a movie with Clint Eastwood playing the role of a grandfather, and drink champagne.
