Devil's Gate

On the screen, Gamay nodded. “That’s the conclusion I reached too.”

It explained a few things. The CEO of Shokara was an old friend of Dirk’s — more of an old acquaintance, actually, in the sense that Dirk had once saved his life — but for a man who’d often insisted he’d do anything Dirk or NUMA ever needed, Haruto Takagawa had suddenly become very hard to reach.

Shortly after the freighter went down, Pitt had left a message for the man. But, so far, he hadn’t received a call back. Perhaps that was understandable, considering the circumstances, but it was at least a yellow flag.

A few days later, just to cover all the bases, Pitt had sent a pair of NUMA’s eager young associates to Takagawa’s New York offices to get the type of information the Coast Guard would have required if the ship had gone down in U.S. waters. Primarily, the ship’s manifest.

The two young men had been stymied in Takagawa’s lobby, made to wait for hours and then all but tossed out on their ears. It felt like a slap in the face to Pitt, enough to get his considerable anger up and ru

“We need to know what the Kinjara Maru was carrying,” Gamay said.

Pitt nodded. He knew what he had to do. He knew there was only one way to find out the truth.

28

Eastern Atlantic, June 24

A POUNDING ON HIS CABIN DOOR woke Joe Zavala. He sat straight up, almost ran for the door as if general quarters had sounded, and then remembered he wasn’t in the Navy anymore.

The pounding returned. “Captain wants you on the bridge, Zavala,” a voice shouted.

“Tell him I’ll be right there,” Joe said, grabbing his pants and pulling them on.

He heard footsteps as the messenger ran off. Only then did he sense that the Argo was in motion, not turning or making steerage or sitting at anchor near the anomaly but charging through the water as if racing something.

Joe pulled a shirt over his head, stuffed his bare feet into sneakers that he never untied, and then ran out the door.

A minute later, he was on the bridge. The Argo was indeed moving at flank speed, the bow rising and dropping as it rode the increasing swells.

“Captain,” Joe said, reporting for duty even though he wasn’t technically one of the crew.

“Where in God’s green earth or Poseidon’s blue water is Austin?” Captain Haynes barked.

Still a little groggy, Joe offered up his honest thoughts. “Probably waking up to something a lot nicer than I just woke up to.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He’s on a date,” Joe said.

“A date?” Haynes shook his head. “How does a guy get a date out here in the middle of the ocean?”

Joe scratched his head. “That’s a good question,” he said. “I wish I could figure it out because, honestly, it gets kind of lonely when—”

“Zavala!” the captain shouted. “Wake up, man. This is not a dream. I need your full attention. Who is Austin out with?”

For a second, Joe wondered if it was a dream. The captain was acting weird. Kurt was a grown man, and Joe had reported Kurt’s disposition to the officer of the watch upon returning from the Zodiac.

“He’s with the Russian scientist he rescued from one of the wrecks,” Joe said. “She told him she had some secret information that he might find interesting.”

“What time was he pla

“Well,” Joe said, “I guess that would kind of depend on how the date went… sir.”

The captain cut his eyes at Joe and Joe burst out laughing.

“I’m sorry,” Joe said, “but you sound like my pop back when my brother took the family car without asking and stayed out way past curfew. What’s the big deal?”

The captain explained about the attack on the Grouper, Paul Trout’s condition, and NUMA’s theory that some type of electromagnetic weapon had been used on the Kinjara Maru. He made a point of explaining that whoever attacked the Grouper had used torp edoes.

“What are they doing now?” Joe asked.

“They’re headed due west at full speed,” the captain said. “Sometime tomorrow they’ll be in range of a Navy guided-missile frigate. At that point they should be safe, and Paul will be transferred to a hospital ship.”

“What about us? Is that why we’re heading in?”

“The Director feels it’s too dangerous to sit out here alone,” the captain said. “If someone’s targeting those with knowledge, we, and Austin, could be next. He’s going to contact the Spanish and Portuguese admirals tomorrow and get us some backup. But until then, he wants us docked and all hands accounted for. And that’s why I’m concerned. Because Kurt hasn’t answered his damn phone all night.”

“Have we contacted the local police?”

“Yes,” the captain said. “We’ve made them aware of who Kurt is, what he looks like, and the fact that we’re trying to find him. And they’ve made us aware of a fight, gunfire, and a vehicular chase that ended in two cars going off a cliff on a normally peaceful island. A man fitting Kurt’s description was involved, but no body matching his has been recovered.”

Thank God, Joe thought. He gazed through the Argo’s forward windows. The lights of Santa Maria were visible up ahead.

“We’ll reach port in twenty minutes. I want you to come up with a plan to find him,” the captain said. “I don’t care if you use the phone or some flares or you rent a damn plane to fly around trailing a ba

Joe nodded. He would start with the Russian scientist. Hopefully, someone at one of the hotels would recognize her.

AS THE ARGO was racing shoreward, Kurt and Katarina were descending toward the lights of Vila do Porto themselves. The sensation was rather unlike any Kurt could remember.

The open cockpit was designed for daytime use in warm weather. There were no lights to see the limited instrument panel by. In addition, though the small craft never made more than 50 knots, the damp mountain air blowing over them at fifty miles an hour was enough to chill them to the bone.

In daylight conditions Kurt would have brought them down to a lower altitude as rapidly as possible, but night flying presented a different challenge. Piloting such a craft through the mountains in the dark was like walking through an unfamiliar room without any lights on, only hitting the furniture here would hurt far worse than a stubbed toe.

At one point, he spotted the lights of a car on the twisting road down below. He angled toward them, knowing that the road cut through the mountain passes. Following the car, staying far above and well behind it, he was able to follow the road itself. But, perhaps not surprisingly, the car turned out to be faster than the flying lawn mower he was commanding.

As the car’s lights became too faint to see, another set of lights came into view: the comparatively bright streets of Vila do Porto. He angled toward them, knowing that if he could keep them in sight no mountain could rise up and smite them from the sky.

Katarina noticed them too. “Are we almost there?” she said. Her teeth were chattering.

She sat behind him in the two-seat machine. Kurt remembered the simple black dress she had on. Not exactly made for 50-knot winds and 40-degree temperatures.

“You’re cold,” he said.

“Freezing to death,” she insisted.

She had to be turning blue by now. “I thought you Russians were used to the cold.”

“Yes, and we know how to dress for it, with layers and fur hats. You don’t have one hiding up there for me, do you?”