“You don’t need to go on,” Forte growled. “Evaporation from the sea will form clouds carried inland by prevailing westerlies. When rain is precipitated, they’ll add to the beta-3 contamination.”
“Yes, indeed,” Dr. Ashkar affirmed. “But there’s something even more sneaky about beta-3; it has a strong chemical affinity for salt. Since you’re in the. oceans business, Mr. Forte, you know that minute salt crystals are kicked into the atmosphere by wave motion at the rate of 300 million tons a year. In fact, if it weren’t for these salt particles, there would be a worldwide drought for they, like dust particles, form the nuclei of the raindrops precipitated from the clouds. Many of the salt particles float free, however, permeating every cubic centimeter of air we breathe. When you consider that the average individual inhales 5,000 quarts of air every day, you can readily imagine how slim are our chances of avoiding contamination by beta-3 from Pacific waters.”
Forte was too stunned to speak. Despite their recent nuclear disaster, here the Soviet Union was again knocking on America’s door. They had elaborated the beta-3 extraction technology, imported foreign wheat as an edible substitute for their wheat, which could then be used to produce beta-3, built factories….
“Hey!”
“Sir?” said Dr. Ashkar.
“You’ve laid this load of grief on me, but you haven’t really built your case.”
“I don’t understand.”
“So far, it’s all theory. This Livia dos Santos has disappeared, you say. It doesn’t mean she’s working for the Russians.”
“No, it doesn’t. But sixteen other young scientists seem to have disappeared, as well….And you collected the proof of Russian intentions and capabilities yourself, Mr. Forte, on your foray into Sevastopol. By whatever means, the Russians have obtained Livia dos Santos’ manuscript, or theories, and are busy implementing them. The way we-our Washington group-see it, the Russians will be able to launch a knockout punch against North America this very summer if we don’t do something. Their harvest is just beginning: the beta-3 you abstracted represents first fruits.”
17, APACHE
15 JULY 2009
“Mr. Daniel Cragg,” announced Marietta Molenaar, Forte’s statuesque personal assistant.
“Shoot him in,” said Ripley Forte from behind his desk in his fifty-eighth-floor office of the Houston Herald. He forced himself to do at least half an hour of paperwork a day and had only just begun plowing through the stack when Miss Molenaar ushered in the man with the ten-thirty appointment. With a sigh of relief, he consigned the unread letters, memoranda, and reports to the out basket and told his aide to handle them herself.
“Now then, Mr. Cragg,” Forte said as she closed the door behind her, “what have you got for me?”
“Not so much as I’d have if you’d given me a little more time-but something. The police, FBI, and CIA gumshoes checked out all the obvious leads-family, friends, and business associates-and came up blank, so I passed on all that. I concentrated instead on people and institutions owed money by Livia dos Santos and the other sixteen scientists who vanished at the same time. They were all reputable people who paid their debts, and I figured that, even though lost to the sight of man, they’d-”
“Good thinking, Mr. Cragg,” Forte said to the muscular, straight-backed former deputy chief of the Criminal Investigation Division of the U.S. Army, who had been recommended to him as a specialist in redeeming lost causes. “Any luck?”
“Some. I ran down a Miss Patricia Fairweather, formerly Mrs. Raymond Leeb, singing for her supper in a Cincinnati nightclub. Raymond Leeb, you’ll remember, was one of the desaparecidos, a top student of operations research, Ph.D. candidate from the Utica/Rome campus of the State University of New York. Leeb was -is?-a pretty smart fellow, but not so smart as the bookies. He’s into them for better than twenty-four thousand dollars. And he’s delinquent in his alimony payments, too, as you can see.” He laid a postcard on Forte’s desk.
“Dear Pat,” it read. “Sorry about missing last month’s check. Unfortunately, I’m going to miss the next three, as well, due to a hush-hush assignment. But when I surface, you’ll get it all with interest. Plane’s about to depart-got to run. Best, Ray.”
“Postmarked 16 February, Utica Municipal Airport,” Forte noted.
“Exactly. I checked all passenger manifests for that day and came up blank. But twenty-four small planes- business jets, sports craft, and so on-also took off from Utica Municipal on 16 February. Checked them out, too. It appears that Leeb left Utica aboard a Cessna Consortium that went to St. Louis. At St. Louis I flashed his picture and found a ramp rat who had seen Leeb walking to another Cessna-with a woman.” He smiled and passed over a photograph.
Forte examined the picture. “Livia dos Santos… And where was that second Cessna headed?”
“Its pilot filed a flight plan to Denver, then amended it in flight with destination El Centro, California…”
Ripley Forte caught up with the Apache about fifty miles off San Clemente Island. The yacht was built along the lines of her owner, Jennifer Red Cloud-beautiful, graceful, proud, and classy. He motioned with his thumb to the pilot to take him down. Five minutes later he was bracing himself against the chopper’s prop wash on the yacht’s heliport.
The reception committee, four brawny sailors togged out in white bell-bottom trousers and white skivvy shirts, blocked his path to the ladder leading down to the main deck. As the chopper’s blades slowed to a stop, they parted to let pass the ship’s captain, a distinguished man in white uniform, a jaunty peaked cap, and a neatly trimmed white beard. He nodded pleasantly to Forte. “Hail,” he said, “and farewell.”
“I’m here on business with Mrs. Red Cloud.”
“You must have an appointment. Mrs. Red Cloud grants none.”
Ripley Forte essayed a smile that belied his rising choler. The friend and confidant of presidents, he wasn’t used to being told no. “My business is urgent. Tell her it’s an affair of state.”
“The only state Mrs. Red Cloud cares about is the state of her nerves. You’re getting on them by being aboard this ship. I suggest, accordingly, that you push off-now.”
Forte calculated the odds. Five to one. He had faced bigger ones in his time, but he was fifty-two, now, and he didn’t feel up to fighting an entire yacht’s complement single-handed. Anyway, he didn’t have to. He nodded. “Very well, I’m going. But when I get aboard my chopper, I’m going to put in a call to a fellow named Horatio Francis Turnbull, whose business I’m here to transact. He may be unhappy that I’m unable to carry out his instructions. He may decide to have this ship, its crew, and its owner taken into custody at your next U.S. port of call and taken apart plank by plank looking for contraband gold, parrots, jaguar skins, cocaine, and Russian spies. It could take months, but maybe Mrs. Red Cloud’s got nothing better to do.”
The captain regarded him with a cold eye, then shrugged. His job was to drive the boat, not to second-guess tycoons and presidents. “Stand by.”
He returned five minutes later to report that Mrs. Red Cloud would be enchanted to have Mr. Forte’s company at lunch.
She was stunning, as usual. He’d expected it, for the Jennifer Red Clouds of this world, like fine cognac, only mellow with the years. The simple white silk caftan concealed her soft convexities as she stood, as regal as a maharani, in the center of her salon to receive him. But when she moved toward him, hand outstretched, it molded itself against a body whose hips seemed slimmer and bust incredibly fuller than when he had last caressed them so lovingly.
That had been at her Tokyo home. He even remembered the day, 21 July, a day which would live in ecstasy for them both. He had gone there to rape her, as she had raped him by swindling him out of his share in Forte Oceanic Resources fourteen years earlier. But what began as rape swiftly turned into a collision of body and soul whose passionate intensity they realized was the emotional fulfillment for which both had always unconsciously yearned. The next morning she had declared her love for him, love-after years of perverse sabotage of every project he undertook. That her declaration was sincere he could not doubt, but Ripley Forte had come to take possession of her body-temporarily-and her company, Raynes Oceanic Resources-permanently- and he was too proud to admit that one night of rapture could change his rules for corporate warfare. He walked out on her. It was the hardest thing he ever did, but he was a man, and a man moreover who never allowed himself to succumb to such feminine fantasies as “love.”
Yet, looking at her now, holding her warm hand in his own, for the thousandth time second thoughts assailed him. She was to every other woman he’d ever met, even exotic, erotic females like Valerie Vincent, what a raging sea is to a mill pond. Her Apache-Scots-Norwegian blood churned with guile and candor, cruelty and tenderness, her violet eyes never giving a hint which of her volcanic moods would surface next. She was flint to his steel, and he had now to keep his distance, or risk the spark that would set their lives again afire.