"When can we remove her for a flight to the States?"
"Two days," Ortega replied politely. "In the meantime, please remain here and enjoy Mr. McGee's hospitality until you can all be questioned and reports filled out." He paused to look down at Renee indifferently. "She is from your country?"
Dodge could not bear to look at Renee and turned away. "She lives in Richmond, Virginia," he whispered in a voice that choked.
Pitt looked at Gunn. "We'd better inform the admiral."
"He won't take this sitting down. If I know him, he'll demand Congress declare war and send in the Marines."
For the first time, Ortega's eyes widened. "He would do what, senor?"
"A play on words," said Pitt, ignoring the police inspector and drawing a blanket over Renee.
Rita hurriedly made her way through the jungle, staying close to the riverbank until she reached the Rio Colorado Sport Fishing Lodge. She followed the signs on the walkway to the swimming pool. Wearing her bikini, she fit right in with the other fishing widows lying around the pool while their husbands indulged themselves trolling for tarpon and snook in the river.
Ignoring the stares from the pool attendants and waiters, she snatched up a towel from an empty lounge chair and draped it over one shoulder. Then she stepped along the walkway between the lodge's rooms. Finding one where the maid was cleaning the room, she stepped inside.
"Tome su tiempo." She told the maid to take her time, acting as if it were her room.
"Me casi acaban," the maid replied, as she carried the dirty towels to her cart on the walkway and closed the door.
Rita sat at the desk, picked up a phone and requested an open line. When a voice answered, she said, "This is Flidais."
"One moment."
Then came another voice. "The line is clear. Please go ahead."
"Flidais?"
"Yes, Epona, I'm here."
"Why are you calling on an open line from a hotel?"
"We have an unexpected problem."
"Yes?"
"A NUMA research boat looking for the source of the brown crud was not deceived by the hologram and destroyed our yacht."
"Understood," said the woman called Epona, without the slightest trace of emotion. "Where are you?"
"After our yacht sank, I was captured by the NUMA people, who held me prisoner. I escaped and am now sitting in a room at the Rio Colorado Lodge. It's only matter of minutes before the local police trail me here."
"Our crew?"
"Some were killed. The rest escaped in the helicopter and abandoned me."
"They will be dealt with." The voice paused. "Did they interrogate you?"
"They tried, but I gave them a phony story and told them my name was Rita Anderson."
"Keep the line open and wait."
Flidais, alias Rita, went to the closet and found a flowered-print summer dress that was a size ten to her size eight. Close enough, she thought. Better large than too small. She pulled it on over her bikini and found a scarf, which she tied around her head to hide her red hair. It didn't bother her in the least that she was stealing another woman's clothes and running up a large phone bill, certainly not after having killed Renee. Next she pulled on open sandals that were a close fit. A pair of sunglasses were sitting on a bed stand, so she slipped them on.
She smiled to herself as she searched the drawers of the dresser and found the room occupant's purse. Why women never used any creativity in hiding their valuables was a mystery to Flidais. It was well known among hotel thieves that women invariably hid their purses, including their wallets, under their clothes in a drawer. She found eight hundred dollars American and a few Costa Rican colones. With an exchange rate of 369,000 colones to the dollar, most monetary transactions in Costa Rica were handled in foreign currency.
Barbara Hacken was the name below the picture of the face on the driver's license and the photo inside the passport. Except for a different hair color and a few years' difference in age, they might have passed for sisters. Flidais cracked the door to see if the room's occupant was coming up the walkway, when Epona came back on the line. "All is arranged, sister. I'm sending my private plane to pick you up at the airport. It will be waiting on the tarmac when you arrive. Do you have transportation?"
"The hotel should have a car to carry guests to and from the airport."
"You may have to show identification to get past airport security."
"All is established on that score," answered Flidais, slinging the purse strap over her shoulder. "I'll see you and our sisters at the ritual in three days."
Then she hung up and walked to the hotel lobby past two local uniformed policemen who were checking the grounds. Looking for a woman last seen in a bikini, they gave her a quick glance, thinking she was a guest of the lodge, and passed on. She spotted Barbara Hacken sunning at the pool. She looked to be dozing. When Flidais reached the lobby, the owner of the lodge was standing behind the desk and smiled when she asked for a car.
"You and your husband are not leaving us, I hope."
"No," she said vaguely, scratching her nose to cover her face. "He's still out on the river after the big ones. I'm meeting some friends who are dropping in at the airport to refuel before continuing on to Panama City."
"We'll see you for dinner?"
"Of course," Flidais said, turning away. "Where else would I eat?"
When her car reached the airport gate to the tarmac, the driver stopped, as the security guard stepped from a small office.
"Are you leaving Rio Colorado?" he asked Flidais through the open window.
"Yes, I'm flying to Managua."
"Passport, please?"
She handed him Barbara Hacken's passport and sat back looking out the opposite window.
The guard went by the book. He took a long moment comparing the passport photo with Flidais's facial features. The hair was covered by a scarf, but a few red strands seeped from under the silk. He was not concerned. Women seldom tinted their hair the same color they wore the month before. The face seemed similar, but he could not see the eyes behind the sunglasses.
"Please open your luggage."
"Sorry, I don't have luggage. Tomorrow is my husband's birthday. I forgot to buy him a gift, so I'm on a shopping trip to Managua. I intend to return in the morning."
Satisfied, the guard handed back the passport and waved the car through.
Five minutes later, everyone within a mile of the airport stared in awe as a lavender-colored aircraft that looked too large to land on the airstrip came in low over the trees and set down smoothly. Reversing engines and braking, it stopped a hundred yards short of the runway's north end. Then it turned and taxied to where Flidais was waiting in the car. Five minutes later, she was aloft on the Beriev Be-210 bound for Panama City.
27
The two men casually lolling in what the native villagers called a panga looked like any of the local men who fished the Rio San Juan. They wore baggy white shorts and T-shirts with soft white baseball-style caps. Two outriggers hung over the panga's stern on an angle, their lines trolling for the fishermen's next dinner.
Except for a passing experienced fisherman who bothered to notice, no one on shore would have guessed the lines carried no hooks. In a waterway teeming with fish, no hook went without a bite more than a few seconds after it dropped under the surface.
The skiff was propelled by a thirty-horsepower Mariner outboard steered by cables running to a center console-column surmounted by an automobile steering wheel. The flat-bottomed, twenty-foot panga moved smartly up the calm river through the tropical rain forest under a light shower. They were traveling in the middle of the long rainy season that began in May and lasted through January. The jungle vegetation was so thick along the shore it seemed that every plant was in constant battle against its neighbor for a glimpse of the sun that beamed down infrequently through the never-ending mass of clouds.
Pitt and Giordino had purchased the panga, whose bow was painted with the name Greek Angel, along w
ith fuel and supplies, within hours after the NUMA jet had taken off for Washington with Rudi Gunn, Patrick Dodge and Renee Ford's body. The repair crew that was flown into Barra Colorado had beached Poco Bonito at low tide and were working efficiently to make her seaworthy for the voyage north.
Jack McGee threw them a going-away party and insisted on stocking their boat with enough beer and wine to start a saloon. Inspector Ortega was on hand, graciously expressing his appreciation for their cooperation in his investigation, and his sorrow for Renee's senseless murder. He was also irritated and regretful that the woman they knew as Rita Anderson had eluded his dragnet. Once Ortega's team learned of Barbara Hacken's missing passport, and they interrogated the owner of the lodge and the security guard at the airport gate, they were certain Rita had fled Costa Rica to the United States. Pitt added a piece to the puzzle when he heard the aircraft was painted lavender. This fact placed Rita squarely in the Odyssey camp. Now Ortega vowed to pursue Renee's murder internationally and to seek the cooperation of American law enforcement.
Pitt sat relaxed, leaned back in a raised chair in front of the wheel column, and steered the boat with one foot as they passed quiet picturesque lagoons that opened onto the river. Giordino had borrowed a lounge chair and pad from McGee, and reclined with his feet hanging over the bow, warily eyeing the occasional eighteen-foot crocodile that he spotted sunning itself on the bank.
Wise to the ways of a rain forest, Giordino shrouded himself with mosquito netting. Not usually mentioned in the travel brochures, in this part of the world the little bloodsuckers were nearly as prolific as raindrops. Not wanting to hinder his movements, Pitt soaked his exposed skin with repellent.
The first twenty miles took them northwesterly along the Rio Colorado until it eventually met the muddy waters of the Rio San Juan that served as the meandering borderline between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. From here, it was another eighty kilometers up the river until they reached the town of San Carlos on Lake Cocibolca, better known simply as Lake Nicaragua.
"I've yet to see any signs of construction," said Giordino, studying the shoreline through a pair of binoculars.
"You've already seen it," said Pitt, watching the multicolored birds nesting in the trees whose branches reached over the flowing water.
Giordino twisted in his lounge chair, pulled down his sunglasses and stared at Pitt over the rims as if he were looking at a bookie giving hundred-to-one odds on a favorite to win the next race. "Run that by me again."
"Your friend Micky Levy. Remember her?"
"The name rings a bell," muttered Giordino, still trying to follow Pitt's tack.
"Over dinner she talked about plans to build an 'underground bridge,' a railroad tunnel system that was designed to travel through Nicaragua between the oceans."
"She also said the project was never launched because Specter pulled out."
"A deception."
"A deception," Giordino parroted.
"After the engineers and geologists, like your friend, Micky, finished their survey, Odyssey officials insisted they sign confidentiality agreements never to reveal any information about the proposed project. Specter threatened to withhold any payment until they agreed. Then they announced that after studying the reports, they decided the project was not practical, and cost-prohibitive."
"How do you know all this?"
"I called your friend Micky just before we left Washington and after she faxed me the site plans," Pitt said casually.
"Go on."
"I asked her a few more questions regarding Specter and the underground bridge. Didn't she tell you?"
"I guess she forgot," said Giordino pensively.
"Anyway, as it turns out, Specter never had any intention of dumping the project. His Odyssey engineers have been digging furiously for more than two years. This is borne out by the port we passed, with containerships unloading what was probably mining equipment."
"Wasn't it I who said, 'A neat trick if he could hide millions of tons of excavated rock and muck?'"
"And you were right, it is a neat trick."
A light suddenly flashed on in Giordino's head. "The brown crud?"
"The million-dollar answer," Pitt acknowledged. "Satellite photos never showed construction activity because there was none to be seen. The only way to hide millions of tons of dirt and rock was to build a large tube, mix the muck with water and pump it a couple of miles offshore into the sea."
Giordino opened a Costa Rican beer and wiped the humidity-induced sweat with a towel across his face under the mosquito net. He rolled the cold can across his forehead. "Okay, mister smart guy, why the secrecy? Why would Specter go to such great lengths to cover up the project? Where is the gain if it was created and built to transport goods and materials from sea to shining sea and no one knows it's there?"
Pitt took a beer thrown by Giordino and pulled the tab. "If I knew that, we wouldn't be swimming in our own sweat cruising up the river admiring the wildlife."
"What do we hope to find?"
"An entrance, for one thing. They can't completely hide men and equipment going in and out of the tunnels."
"You think we'll find it on the jungle ride through hell on the African Queen?"
Pitt laughed. "Not on, but under. According to Micky's site plan, the excavation would have run under a town called El Castillo halfway up the river."
"So what's the attraction in El Castillo?"
"Tunnels of extreme length require ventilation shafts to supply air to the workers, cool or heat the air as required and bleed off exhaust fumes from the excavation equipment and smoke in the event of a fire."
Giordino stared uneasily at a huge crocodile swiveling off the bank into the water. Then his gaze turned to the impenetrable jungle along the north bank. "I hope you don't have any plans to hike in there. Mama Giordino's sonny boy would never be seen again."
"El Castillo is an isolated community on the river with no roads in or out. The main attraction is an old Spanish fortress."
"And you think a ventilation shaft pops up where everybody in town can see it," Giordino said dubiously. "Seems to me the jungle is a more ideal hiding place for ventilator shafts. It's so thick no aircraft or satellite photo could spot a shaft from above."
"No doubt most are hidden in the jungle, but I'm counting on them constructing one that comes up near civilization in case they have to use it for an emergency evacuation."
The scenery along the river was so spectacular, the two men drifted off into silence as they absorbed the beauty of the vegetation and the varied species of wildlife. It was like a boating wildlife safari through untouched tropical splendor. They spotted white-faced spider monkeys jabbering at jaguars which lurked under the trees. Anteaters as large as blue-ribbon state fair sows ambled through the brush, keeping a safe distance inshore from the caimans and crocodiles. Colorfully beaked toucans and multihued feathered parrots flew amid rainbows of butterflies and orchids. The jungles around the Rio San Juan had been described by Mark Twain when he journeyed down the river as an earthly paradise, the most enchanted land to be experienced anywhere.
Pitt kept the Greek Angel at a steady and smooth five knots. This was not water to speed through and cause waves from your wake to wash over the environmentally perfect shoreline. The fabulous three thousand acres of virgin rain forest was preserved as the Indio Maiz Biological Reserve. Three hundred species of reptiles, two hundred species of mammals and over six hundred species of birds called it home.
It was four o'clock in the afternoon when they turned off the Rio San Juan onto the Rio Bartola and cruised a short distance before docking at the Refugio Bartola Lodge and Research Center. Nestled in the rain forest, the compound had eleven rooms with private baths and mosquito nets. Pitt and Giordino each registered for a room.
After cleaning up, they headed for the bar and restaurant. Pitt had a tequila on the rocks whose brand was unknown to him. Giordino, claiming he had seen over a dozen Tarzan movies crawling with Engli
shmen on safari, opted for gin. Pitt noticed a fat man in a white suit sitting by himself at a table near the bar. There was an air about the man that suggested he was a respected local resident of the river, someone who might be a wealth of information.
Pitt approached the man. "Pardon me, sir, but I wondered if you might like to join my friend and me."
The man looked up and Pitt could see he was quite elderly, approaching his eighties. His face was flushed and he sweated freely, but miraculously managed not to stain his white suit. He wiped a handkerchief over his bald head and nodded. "Of course, of course, I'm Percy Rathbone. Please, it might be easier if you joined me," he said, pointing at his girth that amply filled his wicker chair.
"My name is Dirk Pitt and my friend here is Al Giordino."