Clive Cussler - Arctic Drift

“I can take care of that easily enough,” Zak said.

“It’s not a good idea to be blowing up high-visibility government officials. He can’t do anything from the States. I’ll have him tailed just to make sure he stays there. Besides, I’ll need you to go to the Arctic and investigate the Royal Geographical Society Islands. Take a security team with you, and I’ll send along some of my top geologists. Then figure out a way to put Mid-America out of business. I want you to find the ruthenium. Obtain it at any cost. All of it.”

“That’s the Mitchell Goyette I know and love,” Zak said with a twisted smile. “We haven’t talked about my share.”

“It’s a pipe dream at the moment. Ten percent of the royalties is more than generous.”

“I was thinking of fifty percent.”

“That’s absurd. I’ll be incurring all of the capital costs. Fifteen percent.”

“It’s going to take twenty.”

Goyette clenched his teeth. “Get off my boat. And enjoy the cold.”

Despite Loren’s pleas for him to stay in bed and rest, Pitt rose early the next morning and dressed for work. His body ached worse than it had the day before, and he moved slowly until his joints gradually limbered up. He contemplated drinking a tequila with orange juice to deaden the pain but ultimately thought better of it. The aches of injury took longer to vanquish, he thought, cursing the mark of time and its toll on his body.

Loren summoned him to the bathroom, where she cleaned the scrape on his head and applied a fresh bandage.

“At least your hair will cover that one up,” she said, scraping her finger across several scars on Pitt’s chest and back. Numerous bouts with death in the past had left their share of physical marks, as well as a few mental ones.

“A lucky blow to the head,” he quipped.

“Maybe it will knock some sense into you,” she replied, wrapping her arms around his torso. While Pitt had told Loren of the events in Ontario, he had neglected to mention that the landslide had not occurred by accident. She reached up and lightly kissed his scalp, then reminded him that he had promised to take her to lunch later in the day.

“I’ll pick you up at noon,” he promised.

He reached his office by eight o’clock and sat through a pair of research briefings before phoning Dan Martin later in the morning. The FBI director sounded excited to hear from Pitt.

“Dirk, your tip yesterday was a good one. You were correct, the janitorial service at the George Washington University lab works in the evenings. We reviewed the lab’s security video and found a clean shot of your wayward morning janitor. He fit your description to a tee.”

Sitting in the airport lounge in Elliot Lake, Pitt had finally made the connection between the man at the Co-op and the janitor he had bumped into at the lab just prior to the explosion.

“Have you been able to identify him?” Pitt asked.

“After confirming that he was not part of the building maintenance and janitorial staff, we ran his photo through the Home-land Security identification database. Not an exact science, mind you, but we came up with a potential hit list and one pretty good match in particular. On this side of the border, he goes by Robert Ford of Buffalo, New York. We’ve already confirmed that the registered address is a fake, as well as the name.”

Pitt repeated the name Robert Ford, then thought of the alias he had used in Blind River, John Booth. Too coincidental, Pitt thought. John Wilkes Booth was the man who had shot Lincoln, while Robert Ford had killed Jesse James.

“He has an admiration for historical assassins,” Pitt offered.

“Might be his line of work. We crossed our records with the Canadian authorities, and they think they have him pegged as a fellow named Clay Zak.”

“Are they going to pick him up?”

“They would if they knew where to find him. He’s a suspect in a twenty-year-old murder at a Canadian nickel mine. His whereabouts have been unknown ever since.”

“A nickel mine? Might be a tie to his use of dynamite.”

“We’re following up on that now. The Canadians might not find him, but if he sets foot in the country again we’ll have a good chance at picking him up.”

“Nice work, Dan. You’ve accomplished a lot in short order.”

“A lucky break that you recalled your encounter. There’s one more thing that you might be interested in knowing. Lisa Lane’s lab assistant, Bob Hamilton. We were able to obtain a search warrant on the guy’s financial records. It seems that he just had fifty thousand dollars wired into his bank account from an offshore entity.”

“I suspected something was amiss with that one.”

“We will do a little more digging, then bring him in for questioning at the end of the week. We’ll see if there is a connection, but I have to say, things look promising at the moment.”

“I’m glad the investigation has legs. Thanks for your efforts.”

“Thank you, Dirk. You’ve given us a nice jump on the case.”

Pitt wondered how his own research was going and took the stairwell down to the tenth-floor computer operations center. He found Yaeger seated at his console conversing again with Max, who stood before a large projection screen. A flattened map of the globe was displayed, with dozens of pinpoint lights flashing from scattered points across the oceans. Each light represented a buoy that relayed sea and weather info via satellite link to the headquarters building.

“Problem with the sea buoy system? ” Pitt asked, taking a seat beside Yaeger.

“We’ve had an uplink problem with a number of segments,” Yaeger replied. “I’m having Max run some software tests to try and isolate the problem.”

“If the latest software release had been properly tested before going operational, we wouldn’t be incurring this problem,” Max injected. Turning to Pitt, she said good morning, then eyed Pitt’s bandage. “What happened to your head?”

“I got in a slight fender bender on a rocky road,” he replied.

“We’ve tracked the information on the jet tail number that you phoned in about,” Yaeger said.

“It can wait. Fixing the sea buoy data is more important.”

“I can multitask with the best of them,” Max offered with a touch of indignation.

“She’s running a test that will take twenty minutes,” Yaeger explained. “We can exercise her until the results come back.”

Turning to the holograph image, he said, “Max, bring up the data on the Canadian Gulfstream jet.”

“The aircraft is a brand-new Gulfstream G650 eighteen-passenger jet, manufactured in 2009. According to Canadian aeronautical records, the tail number C-FTGI is registered to Terra Green Industries, of Vancouver, British Columbia. Terra Green is a privately held company, chaired by a man named Mitchell Goyette.”

“Hence the TGI in the tail number,” Yaeger said. “At least he didn’t flaunt his personal initials, like most filthy rich jet owners.”

“Goyette,” Pitt mused. “Isn’t he big into green energy?”

“His holdings include wind farms, geothermal and hydroelectric power plants, and a small number of solar panel fields,” Max recited.

“Being privately held tends to obscure things,” Yaeger said, “so we did a little digging. Found over two dozen other entities that trace their ownership to Terra Green. Turns out, a number of the holdings were related to gas, oil, and mining exploration activities, particularly in the Athabasca region of Alberta.”

“So Terra Green is apparently not all that green,” Pitt quipped.

“It’s worse than that. Another Terra Green subsidiary apparently controls a recently discovered natural gas field in the Melville Sound. Its value could conceivably outweigh his other holdings combined. We also found an interesting nautical link to NUMA. It seems that over the past few years, Terra Green has contracted for the construction of several big icebreakers from a Mississippi Gulf shipyard, along with a number of very large LNG and bulk-carrier barges. It was the same yard that built our last research ship, which was delayed in launching due in part to their work for Terra Green.”