In Washington, a search was made in FBI files for Dr. Oswaldo Edwards. There was no record of a government employee by that name. If he had been an American citizen and a research scientist, he would almost certainly have received government assistance in his researches, and his name would be on record. No such record was found.
A search was made of the arid area surrounding the El Centro installation, in hope that perhaps some trace of the bodies of the scientists could be located. No trace was found.
Officials at Raynes Oceanic Resources had neither recollection nor records of dealings with anyone named Dr. Oswaldo Edwards. Of course, it was possible-certain-that the chairman, Mrs. Jennifer Red Cloud, had given permission personally, or admission to the base could never have been effected.
The caterer could tell them nothing beyond the details of the food deliveries over a period of months.
Base security had been assumed by a group of men who, on orders from Mrs. Red Cloud, relieved the base caretakers of their duties two days before the scientists arrived and turned the base back to them on 15 June. The names and signatures on the paperwork proved un-traceable.
Mrs. Jennifer Red Cloud had been assassinated on 17 July at her home on Montego Bay, Jamaica.
The trail was cold.
23. RESURRECTION
28 JULY 2009
“I should have let them hang you, you bastard,” said Jennifer Red Cloud as Ripley Forte, cold and dripping from half an hour’s exposure in the sea, clambered aboard the Raynes Rover and sank gratefully into the copilot’s seat.
“It might have been preferable to your warm reception, at that,” replied Forte, stripping off his wet suit and oxygen tanks as Mrs. Red Cloud secured the Plexiglas hatch and prepared to dive.
“Warm is a tepid way to describe my mood. Boiling would be better.”
“An improvement. Last time we met, you were as cold as an undertaker’s handshake.”
“Appropriately so, considering I am ‘dead.’ So, of course, are you, now that your plane has been blown out of the sky.”
“Two souls in search of something or other,” said Forte, stripping to the buff and toweling himself dry. “Any clothes aboard, or do I have to meet my maker in the altogether?”
“Under the stack of towels you’ll find a set of dungarees,” said Red Cloud, keeping her eyes fixed firmly on the instruments as she leveled off the undersea craft at 200 feet and set the throttle for thirty-five knots.
So far, Forte reflected, so lousy. It would take some time to unravel the sequence of events that had led not only to Red Cloud’s “death” but his own. Whatever had happened, it had effectively removed them from the fight. If either surfaced now, they would blow the cover they, in collaboration with Presidents Turnbull and Traynor and a few aides, had so carefully fabricated, with nasty consequences impossible to foretell.
Had the Russians been taken in? Maybe. He had laid down a trail the Soviets could follow, and Turnbull had provided Castle with paperwork they would even now be taking pains to verify.
Forte helped himself to a cup of steaming coffee from the machine behind the cockpit’s twin seats and sipped the warming liquid gratefully. “Okay, Red Cloud, what’s eating you? What the hell have you got to complain about?”
“That’s right-act innocent.”
“I am innocent. Pure as the driven snow. Men are struck dumb upon learning of my virtuous character, women shield their eyes at my approach, little children press my hand to their lips.”
“Well,” said Red Cloud, rounding on him, “I can tell you one little child who won’t be pressing your hand to his lips, you scheming son of a bitch, and if I ever hear that you consulted a lawyer on this subject again, I’ll kill you with my own bare hands.”
“Who squealed?” said Forte, suddenly chastened.
“You shouldn’t be allowed out without a keeper,” Red Cloud sneered. “The San Francisco law firm you consulted to assess your chances of getting custody of little Ripley, my dear oaf, has been sucking around for the past two years to represent Raynes Oceanic Resources. Naturally they came around and spilled their guts.”
“I’ll sue ’em!”
“Good thinking. It’s the only satisfaction you’re going to get.”
“You won’t let me see my son?”
“Of course I will-at age eighteen, when I intend to introduce him to the more unpleasant things of life, with his father topping the list.”
The rest of the hour’s journey to the Raynes Oceanic Resources ship, the Maryam, ostensibly exploring the Puerto Rico Trench for alluvial gold, was made in strained silence.
“Somehow,” said Joe Mansour, “this discussion reminds me of one of those ‘peace conferences’ so beloved of the United States and the Soviet Union, in which fulmination, accusation, and recrimination pass for negotiation. I think,” he said, turning to Jennifer Red Cloud, who was clad in a shimmering red silk gown and sitting on his left at the dinner table built for thirty diners but now accommodating only three, “that you have made abundantly clear that Ripley has neither legal nor moral right to your son, and would be well advised to tie a can on it.”
The dapper little Lebanese, who wore immaculate evening dress, turned to Ripley Forte, dressed in stiff new dungarees. “As for you, Rip, while it is obvious that you yearn to possess your son-being a billionaire does nurture one’s acquisitive instincts-I suggest you relieve your frustrations in a more positive manner, such as finding out what the Russians are really up to and then applying your-and my-considerable resources to pronging them in the eye with a sharp stick.
“And,” he went on, “while you are both ruminating on my Oriental wisdom, why don’t we, have cognac in the drawing room?” He rose, held the chair for Jennifer Red Cloud, and led the way to the salon, where a huge plate-glass window gave an unobstructed view of Cape Town far below them and Table Bay beset by winter’s tempests beyond.
The Lebanese financier had suggested that they both lie low until the situation was sorted out at his modest thirty-one-room digs on Table Mountain. There in South Africa they would be safe from prying eyes, and a sufficient staff would care for their every need. Accordingly, they boarded the Maryam’s tiltjet that evening and flew directly to Cape Town. There the entourage, which included the infant Ripley Forte cordoned off from his father by four burly bodyguards and a nurse who looked as if she spent her spare time bench-pressing steam radiators, sped in a convoy of curtained limousines to Mansour’s retreat.
The first day and evening had been spent in rancorous debate, with Joe Mansour sympathizing with Jennifer Red Cloud and despairing of his friend Ripley Forte for his abysmal ignorance of women. It was plain as the battered nose on Forte’s face that the woman was wildly in love with the big Texan. It was just as plain that Forte, whose breathing became noticeably stertorous whenever Red Cloud was in the vicinity, more than reciprocated her feelings. But pride stood like a wall between them. Neither would admit the truth so obvious to Mansour, and they each used the issue of their son’s custody as a bludgeon to batter the other into submission. In other words, two highly intelligent idiots, making war when they should have been making love.
Well, if it was war they wanted, they could at least wage it against a common enemy. Mansour poured a generous portion of cognac into snifters the size of goldfish bowls, raised his, and wished “Consternation to the commissars!”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Forte.
“You’ll have to do more than drink to it-you’ll have to do something about it.”
“I’m willing,” Forte said, “but I don’t know where to begin.”
“Begin here.” Mansour took a folded paper from his inside pocket and handed it to Forte. “That came for you just before dinner. Faxed from President Traynor’s office in Austin.”
Forte read the letter, part of which was a facsimile of that received by President Traynor from Livia dos Santos posthumously. He handed it to Jennifer Red Cloud. When she finished reading, he said: “A nice irony. We’re being subjected to Soviet environmental warfare planned at Raynes Oceanic Resources by the free world’s leading young scientists.”
“Yes,” mused Jennifer Red Cloud, “and presumably the Siberian lignite fires are only the opening shot in what will probably be an assault on many fronts.”
Mansour nodded. “But notice, as unexpected and as successful as that opening shot has been, there is an underlying weakness in the Soviet method.”
“If there is, I certainly don’t see it,” Red Cloud replied.
“Only because you take for granted that there is none. And, in fact, there probably isn’t.”
“Don’t mind him,” Forte said in an aside to Red Cloud. “He’s Lebanese. Lebanese always talk in riddles, and by the time you figure out what they’re saying, you’ve bought the rug for eight times what it’s worth.”