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Bigalow tried to speak, but the words would not come.
The passenger nodded in understanding and began pulling the door closed behind him.
"Thank God for Southby," he said.
And then he was gone, swallowed up in the black interior of the vault.
Bigalow survived.
He won his race with the rising water and managed to reach the Boat Deck and throw himself over the side only seconds before the ship took her plunge.
As the bulk of the great ocean liner sank from sight, her red pe
Blind instinct clutched at Bigalow and he reached out and seized the pe
The twenty-eight-degree water nearly killed him. Given another ten minutes in its freezing grip, he would have simply been one more statistic of that terrible tragedy.
A rope saved him; his hand brushed against and grabbed a trailing rope attached to a capsized boat. With the last ounce of his ebbing strength, he pulled his nearly frozen body on board and shared with thirty other men the numbing ache of the cold until they were rescued by another ship four hours later.
The pitiful cries of the hundreds who died would forever linger in the minds of those who survived. But as he clung to the overturned, partly submerged lifeboat, Bigalow's thoughts were on another memory the strange man sealed forever in the ship's vault.
Who was he?
Who were the eight men he claimed to have murdered?
What was the secret of the vault?
They were questions that were to haunt Bigalow for the next seventy-six years, right up to the last few hours of his life.
THE SICILIAN PROJECT
July 1987
1
The President swiveled in his chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and stared unseeing out of the window of the Oval Office and cursed his lot. He hated his job with a passion he hadn't thought possible. He had known the exact moment the excitement had gone out of it. He had known it the morning be had found it hard to rise from bed. That was always the first sign. A dread of begi
He wondered for the thousandth time since taking office why he had struggled so hard and so long for the damned thankless job anyway. The price had been painfully his. His political trail was littered with the bones of lost friends and a broken marriage. And, he'd no sooner taken the oath of office when he had found his infant administration staggered by a Treasury Department scandal, a war in South America, a nationwide airlines strike, and a hostile Congress that had come to mistrust whoever resided in the White House. He threw in an extra curse for Congress. Its members had overridden his last two vetoes and the news didn't sit well with him.
Thank God, be would escape the bullshit of another election. How he'd managed to win two terms still mystified him. He had broken all the political taboos ever laid down for a successful candidate. Not only was he a divorced man but he was not a churchgoer, smoked cigars in public, and sported a large mustache besides. He had campaigned by ignoring his opponents and by hitting the voters solidly between the eyes with tough talk. And they had loved it. Opportunely, he had come along at a time when the average American was fed up with goody-goody candidates who smiled big and made love to the TV cameras, and who spoke trite, nothing sentences that the press couldn't twist or find hidden meanings to invent between the nouns.
Eighteen more months and his second term in office would be over. It was the one thought that kept him going. His predecessor had accepted the post of head regent at the University of California. Eisenhower had withdrawn to his farm in Gettysburg, and Johnson to his ranch in Texas. The President smiled to himself. None of that elder-statesman on-the-sidelines crap for him. His plans called for self-exile to the South Pacific on a forty-foot ketch. There he would ignore every damned crisis that stirred the world while sipping rum and eyeing any pug-nosed, balloon-chested native girls who wandered within view. He closed his eyes and almost had the vision in focus when his aide eased open the door and cleared his throat.
"Excuse me, Mr. President, but Mr. Seagram and Mr. Do
The President swiveled back to his desk and ran his hands through a patch of thick silver-tinted hair. "Okay, send them in."
He brightened visibly. Gene Seagram and Mel Do
Meta Section was the President's own brainchild. He had conceived it during his first year in office, co
There was no hand shaking, only cordial hello's. Then Seagram unlatched a battered leather briefcase and withdrew a folder stuffed with aerial photographs. He laid the pictures on the President's desk and pointed at several circled areas that were marked on transparent overlays.
"The mountain region on the upper island of Novaya Zemlya, north of the Russian mainland. All indications from our satellite sensors pinpoint this area as a slim possibility."
"Damn?" the President muttered softly. "Every time we discover something like this, it has to sit in the Soviet Union or in some other untouchable location." He sca
Do
"It's radioactivity is so extreme," Seagram said, "it has long vanished from the continents in anything more than very minute trace amounts. The few bits and pieces we've gathered on this element have been gleaned from small, artificially prepared particles."
"Can't you build a supply through artificial means?" the President asked.
"No, sir," Seagram replied. "The longest-lived particle we managed to produce with a high-energy accelerator decayed in less thaw two minutes."