Flood Tide

Her gray eyes were soft and unblinking. She laid a hand on his arm and murmured. “And if I'm a naughty girl?”

Pitt laughed, partly from the relief of escaping another death trap, partly from seeing Julia's bedraggled appearance and partly because she was trying without success to cover the parts of her body that were revealed through the wet dress. “Keep talking like that and I'll skip the coffee.”

SUNLIGHT WAS SLIDING OVER THE SILLS OF THE SKYLIGHTS when Julia slowly pushed aside the mist of sleep. She felt as if she was floating, her body totally weightless. It was a pleasurable sensation left over from the ardor of the night. She opened her eyes, shifted her mind into gear and began studying her surroundings. She found herself lying alone. The bed was king-size and sat in the middle of a room that looked like the captain's cabin from an old sailing ship, complete with mahogany-paneled walls and a small fireplace. The furnishings, including the dressers and cabinets, were nautical antiques.

Like most women, Julia was curious and intrigued about male bachelor apartments. She felt that the opposite gender could be read by their surroundings. Some men, ladies observed, lived like pack rats and never cleaned up after themselves, creating and preserving strange alien life-forms in their bathrooms and inside their refrigerators. Making beds was as foreign as processing goat cheese. Their laundry was piled beside and over washers and dryers that still had the instruction booklets attached to the knobs.

And then there were the neatness freaks who lived in an environment only a decontamination scientist could love. Dust,  food scraps and toothpaste droppings were all furiously attacked and energetically eliminated. Every piece of furniture, every object of decor, was positioned with precision, never to migrate. The kitchen would have passed a white-glove inspection by the most diligent of sanitation inspectors.

Pitt's apartment was somewhere in between. Tidy and uncluttered, it had a masculine casualness about it that appealed to the women who visited occasionally rather than frequently. Julia could see that Pitt was a man who preferred to live in the past. There was nothing modern in the entire apartment. Even the brass plumbing fixtures in the bathroom and kitchen seemed to have come out of some old passenger liner that once traveled the seas.

She rolled over on her side and stared through the doorway into the living room, where shelves on two walls were filled with delicately built ship models of wrecks that Pitt and his NUMA crew had discovered and surveyed. The remaining walls held dockyard builders' half models and four seascape paintings by Richard DeRosset, a contemporary American artist, of nineteenth-century steamships. There was a feeling of comfort about the apartment, not the formal and grandiose atmosphere produced by an interior decorator.

Julia soon came to realize that Pitt's home made no allowances for a woman's touch. It was the sanctuary of an intensely private man who adored and admired women but who could never be fully controlled by them. He was the kind of man women were drawn to, had wild adventures and amorous affairs with, but never married.

She smelled coffee coming from the kitchen but saw no sign of Pitt. She sat up and set her bare feet on a wood-plank floor. Her dress and underwear were neatly hung in an open closet, dried and pressed. She padded across the plank floor into the bathroom and smiled at herself in the mirror when she found a tray with an unopened new toothbrush, women's moisturizers, bath gels, body oils, makeup accessories and an assortment of feminine hairbrushes. Julia could not help but wonder how many women had stood and looked into the same mirror before her. She showered inside of what looked like an upended copper tank, toweled and dried her hair with a blow-dryer. After she dressed, Julia stepped into the empty kitchen, helped herself to a cup of coffee and moved out onto the balcony.

Pitt was down on the main floor in coveralls replacing the shattered windshield on the Duesenberg. Before she greeted him, Julia's gaze swept over the immaculate machinery on the spacious floor below.

She did not recognize the makes of the classic cars parked in even rows, nor did she recognize the Ford Trimotor aircraft and the Messerschmitt 262 jet plane sitting side by side at one end of the hangar. There was a large, old-fashioned Pullman car sitting on a short section of track, while behind it a small bathtub with an outboard motor stood perched on a small platform beside a strange-looking craft that resembled the upper half of a sailboat that had been tied to the buoyancy tubes of a rubber boat. A mast rose from the middle with what seemed like palm fronds woven into a sail. “Good morning,” she called down.

He looked up and gave her a killer smile. “Nice to see you, lazybones.”

“I could have stayed in bed all day.” “No chance of that,” he said. “Admiral Sandecker called while you were in dreamland. He and your boss want our bodies at a conference in one hour.”

“Your place or mine?” Julia asked in a humorous tone. “Yours, the INS headquarters office.” “How did you ever clean and press my silk dress?” “I soaked it in cold water after you fell asleep last night and hung it to dry. This morning I lightly ironed it through a cotton towel. As far as I can tell, it looks good as new.”

“You're quite a guy, Dirk Pitt,” she said. “I've never known a man so thoughtful, or i

“Only exotic ladies of Chinese descent,” he answered. “May I fix breakfast?”

“Sounds good. You'll find whatever you need in the fridge and on the upper cupboards to your right. I already made coffee.”

She hesitated as Pitt began removing the fragmented mirror on the side-mounted spare tire. “I'm sorry about your car,” she said sincerely.

Pitt merely shrugged. “The damage is nothing I can't fix.” “Truly, she's a lovely car.”

“Fortunately, the bullets failed to strike any vital parts.” “Speaking of Qin Shang's thugs ...”

“Not to worry. There are enough hired guards patrolling outside to stage a coup on a third-world country.”

“I'm embarrassed.”

Pitt looked up at Julia leaning on the balcony railing and saw that her face was genuinely red with chagrin. “Why?”

“My superiors at INS and fellow agents must know I spent the night and are probably making snide remarks behind my back.”

Pitt looked up at Julia on the balcony and gri

“That's not fu

“Sorry, I meant to say differential.”

“That's better,” Julia said, turning flippantly with a toss of her ebony hair and strutting into the kitchen, having enjoyed Pitt's teasing of her.

Accompanied by two bodyguards in an armored sedan, Pitt and Julia were driven to her sorority sister's apartment so she could change into attire more fitting for a government agent. Then they were taken to the stark-looking Chester Arthur Building on Northwest I Street, which housed the headquarters of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. They entered the beige seven-story stone structure with its blackened windows from the underground parking area and were escorted up an elevator to the Investigations Division where they were met by Peter Harper's secretary, who showed them into a conference room.

Six men were already present in the room: Admiral San-decker; Chief Commissioner Duncan Monroe and Peter Harper of the INS; Wilbur Hill, a director with the Central Intelligence Agency; Charles Davis, special assistant to the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and Al Giordino. They all rose to their feet as Pitt and Julia entered the room. All, that is, except Giordino, who simply nodded silently and gave Julia an infectious smile. Introductions were quickly made before everyone settled in chairs around a long oak table.