“Tesla was older by then,” Yaeger said. “And broke. Maybe he needed money.”
“From what I’ve read, he always needed money. Why should 1937 be any different?”
“What are you suggesting?”
Pitt shrugged as if it were obvious. “He buried this Wardenclyffe project when he could have saved it or at least kept it afloat. Then, thirty years later, he insists he’s ready to spring the theory on the world. What are the chances he would do that unless he thought he’d found a solution?”
Again it was the computer that answered.
2,400 miles southwest of Perth
Patrick “Padi” Devlin stood on the black-painted deck of the sailing abomination that had once been the
Devlin pulled his coat tight, shoved his hands deep into his pockets, and wished mightily for a scarf. Still, he didn’t want to go back inside.
“Thank you for letting me out on deck,” he said to a figure, hovering behind him: Janko Minkosovic, his old crewmate and current jailer.
“I can’t see any harm in it. Not like you’re going to swim back to Jakarta.”
“I noticed you didn’t extend the same courtesy to the others in the hold.”
“There are twenty-six of them,” Janko said. “They come from a pair of vessels we hit. Together, they could be a danger.”
Devlin considered that.
“Remind you of anything?” Janko asked.
“The day this hulk went down,” Devlin replied.
“The day you cut us loose.”
“You know that was the captain’s choice,” Devlin shot back. “I begged him to hold on.”
“Stop blaming him,” Janko said. “For that matter, stop blaming yourself, Padi. Look at you. You’re a worse wreck than this ship. And you thought you’d make captain someday.”
Devlin cut his eyes at Janko.
“There was nothing any of you could have done,” Janko said. “We set it up that way. If you hadn’t released the cable, we’d have cut through it ourselves.”
“Who?” Devlin asked sharply. “Who’s we? And why? To fake the ship’s destruction? She was already a derelict. She wasn’t even insured.”
“The man I work for bought her,” Janko explained, “years before. All that time in dry dock at Tarakan, he had people working on her. Making changes. When the moment came, he needed her to disappear. So he ordered us to tow her into the storm.”
Devlin stared at Janko. “But you were part of the crew. Our crew!”
“For six months, along with the other two. He arranged that with your employer.”
“Fine,” Devlin said. “So he got you on with us and had you put aboard the
this ship—
“How the hell did you do it, then?”
“Follow me,” Janko said. “You’re about to find out.”
Janko led Devlin in through the main hatch and then through a second, inner hatch. For the first time, Devlin noticed that the outer section of the ship was left pretty much as it had been when he’d seen it years back. It looked neglected, disused. But once they passed the inner hatch, things were different.
Soon, Devlin found himself in a modern control room. Chart tables, propulsion gauges, radarscopes, and graphic displays surrounded him. Large screens on the front wall were set up like the forward view from the bridge; in fact, they showed the gray sky and the cold sea ahead of the ship, piped in from the highest vantage point of a group of video cameras.
“When did all this get done?”
“I told you,” Janko insisted, “the changes were made before the ship was towed off the beach.”
“But we inspected it for leaks.”
“The outer hull only,” Janko reminded him. “Besides, I was with you to make sure you didn’t stray into any sensitive areas.”
Devlin remembered now. They’d checked the repair job and the lower decks, the engine room and the bilge. No one had bothered with the inner spaces of the ship.
Janko turned his attention to one of the crewmen. “Switch to infrared.”