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"Your flesh-and-blood sister, Boudicca, merely persuaded the teacher and his wife, the Hollenders as I recall their name, to allow her to take the twins on a picnic."
Maeve trembled and felt she was going to be sick as the full enormity of the revelation engulfed her.
"You have them?"
"The boys? Of course."
"The Hollenders, if she so much as hurt them--"
"Nothing of the sort."
"Sean and Michael, what have you done with them?"
"Daddy is taking very good care of them on our private island. He's even teaching them the diamond trade. Cheer up. The worst that can happen is that they suffer some type of accident. You know better than anybody the risks children run, playing around mining tunnels. The bright side is that if you stand with the family, your boys will someday become incredibly wealthy and powerful men."
"Like Daddy'?" Maeve cried in outrage and fear. "I'd rather they die." She subdued the urge to kill her sister and sat heavily in a chair, broken and defeated.
"They could do worse," said Deirdre, gloating over Maeve's helplessness. "String along your friends from NUMA for a few days, and keep your mouth shut about what I've told you. Then we'll catch a flight for home." She walked to the door and turned. "I think you'll find Daddy most forgiving, providing you ask forgiveness and demonstrate your loyalty to the family." Then she stepped onto the outside deck and out of sight.
WHERE DREAMS COME FROM
Admiral Sandecker seldom used the large boardroom for conferences. He reserved it mainly for visiting congressmen and -women, and respected scientists, foreign and American. For internal NUMA business, he preferred a smaller workroom just off his office. It was an extremely comfortable room, uniquely his own, sort of a hideaway for him to hold informal but confidential meetings with his NUMA directors. Sandecker often used it as an executive dining room, he and his directors relaxing in the sof
t leather chairs set around a three-meter-long conference table built from a section of a wooden hull salvaged from a schooner on the bottom of Lake Erie and solidly set in a thick turquoise carpet in front of a fireplace surrounded by a Victorian mantelpiece.
Unlike the modern design and decor of the other offices in the NUMA headquarters building, which were encased in soaring walls of green-tinted glass, this room looked as if it was straight out of an antiquated London gentlemen's club. All four walls and ceiling were richly paneled in a satiny teak, and there were paintings of United States naval actions hung in ornate frames.
There was a beautifully detailed painting of the epic battle between John Paul Jones in the woefully armed Bonhomme Richard and the new British fifty-gun frigate, Serapis. Next to it the venerable American frigate Constitution was demasting the British frigate Java. On the opposite wall the Civil War ironclads Monitor and Virginia, better known as the Merrimac, slugged it out. Commodore Dewey destroying the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay and a flight of dive bombers taking off from the carrier Enterprise to bomb the Japanese fleet during the Battle of Midway were mounted side by side. Only the painting above the fireplace lacked a sea battle. It was a portrait of Sandecker in casual uniform before he was promoted and thrown on the beach. Below the portrait, in a glass-enclosed case, sat a model of his last command, the missile cruiser Tucson.
After Sandecker's retirement, a former President of the United States picked him to organize and establish a newly funded government agency dedicated to research of the sea. Beginning in a rented warehouse with a staff of fewer than a dozen people, including Pitt and Giordino, Sandecker had built NUMA into a huge organization that was the envy of oceanographic institutions around the world, manned by two thousand employees, and with a huge budget rarely questioned and almost always approved by Congress.
Sandecker fought advancing age with a passion. Now in his early sixties, he was a fitness nut who jogged, lifted weights and engaged in any kind of exercise so long as it brought about sweat and an increased heartbeat. The results of strenuous workouts and a nutritious diet were readily apparent in his honed and trim shape. He was slightly under what would be called average height, and his flaming red hair was still full, cut close and slicked down, with a razor-edge part on the left side. The taut, narrow shape of his face was accented by piercing hazel eyes and a Vandyke beard that was an exact match in color for the hair on his head.
Sandecker's only vice was cigars. He loved to smoke ten grandly large cigars a day, specially selected and wrapped to his personal taste. He stepped into the conference room in a cloud of smoke as if he were a magician materializing on a fog-shrouded stage.
He walked to the head of the table and smiled benignly at the two men seated to his left and right.
"Sorry to keep you so late, gentlemen, but I wouldn't have asked you to work overtime unless it was important."
Hiram Yaeger, the chief of NUMA's computer network and overseer to the world's most expansive data library on marine sciences, leaned his chair back on two legs and nodded toward Sandecker.
Whenever a problem needed solving, Sandecker always started with Yaeger. Unperturbed in bib overalls and a ponytail, he lived with his wife and daughters in a ritzy section of the capital and drove a nonproduction BMW. "It was either respond to your request," he said with a slight twinkle in his eye, "or take my wife to the ballet."
"Either way, you lose," laughed Rudi Gunn, NUMA's executive director and second in command. If Dirk Pitt was Sandecker's ace troubleshooter, Gunn was his organizational wizard. Thin with slim hips and narrow shoulders, humorous as well as bright, he peered through thick horn-rimmed glasses from eyes that suggested an owl waiting for a field mouse to run under his tree.
Sandecker slid into one of the leather chairs, dropped an ash from his cigar into a dish made from an abalone shell and flattened a chart of the Weddell Sea and the Antarctic Peninsula on the surface of the table. He tapped his finger on a marked circle with a series of small red crosses drawn within its circumference and labeled by number. "Gentlemen, you're all familiar with the tragic situation in the Weddell Sea, the latest in a series of kill sites. Number one is the position where Ice Hunter found the dead dolphins. Two, the seal kills off South Orkney Island. Three, Seymour Island, the site of mass slaughter of men women, penguins and seals. And four, the approximate position of Polar Queen when the scourge struck."
Yaeger studied the perimeter of the circle. "Looks to be about ninety kilometers in diameter."
"Not good," Gunn said, a deep frown creasing his forehead. That's twice the size of the last kill zone, near Chirikof Island off the Aleutians.
"The count was over three thousand sea lions and five fishermen in that disaster," said Sandecker. He lifted a small remote control from the table, aimed it at a panel in the far wall and pressed a button. A large screen slowly dropped from the ceiling. He pressed another button and a computer-generated chart of the Pacific Ocean appeared in three-dimensional holograph. Several blue, neonlike globes, displaying animated fish and mammals, were projected seemingly from outside the screen and spaced in different areas of the chart. The globe over Seymour Island off the Antarctic Peninsula as well as one near Alaska included human figures. "Until three days ago," Sandecker continued, "all the reported kill zones have been in the Pacific. Now with the sea around Seymour Island, we have a new one in the South Atlantic."
"That makes eight appearances of the unknown plague in the past four months," said Gunn. "The occurrences seem to be intensifying."
Sandecker studied his cigar. "And not one lead to the source."
"Frustration is mine," Yaeger said holding his palms up in a helpless gesture. "I've tried a hundred different computer-generated projections. Nothing comes close to fitting the puzzle. No known disease or chemical pollution can travel thousands of miles, pop up out of the blue and kill every living thing within a limited area, before totally vanishing without a trace."
