Trusting Viktor (A Cleo Cooper Mystery) (19 page)

Once I saw him, I felt I was in luck. Mr. Devereaux was old as the rocks we were drilling off the coast and might actually be the perfect source. I pegged him to be in his late seventies, though he stood straight as an arrow and looked snappy in his shirt, collegiate tie, loafers, and khakis. Nonetheless, the hand he extended was delicate, even birdlike, and I wondered how he’d avoided forced retirement.

“How may I be of service to you, my dear lady?”

“I’m looking for a French professor who taught here in the fifties. His name was Adrien Dubois.”

“I knew Professor Dubois very well. May I ask why you’re looking for him?”

“Certainly. He was a friend of my aunt,” I said, quickly adopting Lucy as kin.

“I see.” He leaned forward, his watery eyes probing mine for more information.

Starting with the truth, I said, “They became friends when she was a student here.” Then I veered wildly into the land of lies. “For years and years, they corresponded. She kept all the letters and now that she’s failing, she wants him to have them.”

“How very kind of your aunt. Unfortunately, I’m not sure Professor Dubois would remember her or, for that matter, even be able to read a letter. I’m told he has slipped into senility.”

“Oh dear.” I was momentarily stumped. Then, not willing to give up, I asked, “Do you know where I can find him?”

“Well, I don’t see that telling you would do any harm.” Mr. Devereaux gave a thin smile. “He retired from here after thirty years, so Accounting would have his exact address. However, I myself can tell you where he is if you want to go in person.”

“That’s very kind. I’d appreciate it. I’m sure my aunt would appreciate my seeing him in person.”

“He’s at Capital Oaks over off Blount,” he said, his expression now revealing a definite distaste. “It’s one of the only places around here that will take folks in need of … well, his kind of care.”

Nursing homes by their very nature are depressing. Capital Oaks, however, gave a whole new meaning to the word. I pushed through the glass double-doors, crossed the reception lobby, and approached a pear-shaped young woman at what looked like a nurses’ station. She squinted at me through prescription work goggles, then swallowed the wad of Krispy Kreme doughnut she was eating, like a heron choking down a big fish. “Can I help you?”

“Yes, you may,” I said unable to resist the gentle reminder that grammar separates the civilized from the rabble hordes. I blinked, trying not to stare at her goggles. “I’d like to visit one of your guests, Mr. Adrien Dubois.”

Her eyes crossed as she checked out her goggles from the inside. “Some of our residents might spit on you,” she said. “You won’t be expecting it.”

“Thanks for the warning. Mr. Dubois?”

I followed her down a long, dimly lit hallway. Several corridors later, I was starting to feel queasy from the stench of urine and boiled cabbage. But just as I was about to comment on how intolerably stuffy it was, Goggles stopped at a door. Without so much as a brief tap, she opened it, proceeding into the dark room.

“Mr. Dubois? You have a guest,” she said in her best institutional voice. Then, without turning on a light or even checking to see if Mr. Dubois was indeed still alive, she turned on her heel to make her way back to her doughnuts.

“Professor Dubois?” I called softly.

A rustle of sheets let me know Mr. Dubois was still in the land of the living, so I crossed the shadowy room to the outline of daylight behind two large window shades. Tentatively, I started raising one while studying the figure in the bed. When he had raised a frail, bony arm to protect his eyes, I stopped. At least my surroundings were visible now. I pulled a chair up to the bed and sat facing the wasting shell of a man who was undeniably the one I was looking for. Here was the man who had been entrusted with hiding the whereabouts of the Amber Room sixty-six years ago. How could I tell after all that time? His eyes.

Though rheumy with age, this man’s eyes still had the exact same haunted look. Moreover, his hair, now snowy white, was still thick and cut in the same style it had been in the photo. Blunt, parted in the middle, and tucked behind his enormous ears.

“Mr. Dubois, I’m Cleo Cooper. Do you feel up to a little chat?”

He gave no reply.

I tried a different tack. “Professor Dubois, I’m a friend of one of your students, Lucy Watkins. Do you remember her?”

Still silence. Just then a phlegmy voice cracked from the doorway, “Is Adrien being difficult today?”

I looked up to see another frail old gentleman struggling toward me with his walker.

“Hello,” I said, standing. “I’m Cleo Cooper. A friend of Professor Dubois—or, at least, my aunt is. And you are?”

“Just one of the old timers waiting for death. Same as Adrien, there.”

I was trying to think of a reply suitable to a statement like that when the man stopped, took one look at the professor, gave me the once-over, then turned back to the door. “Better come back another time,” he said.
“
’Cause if Adrien don’t want to talk, he ain’t gonna talk.”

“Thanks for the advice. But when does Adrien like to talk?”

“Anytime you bring Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia.”

Back in the parking lot, I lowered all the windows and turned the AC on full blast. Taking big gulps of fresh air, I wondered if could really be that easy. Could little old Cleo Cooper have stumbled upon the solution to a puzzle that had eluded the world’s best treasure hunters for decades? I considered the confluence of events and realized the answer was a definite yes. I mean, who else but me had put together the existence of the sub, the mission of two Germans aboard it,
and
, by way of a trip down memory lane with my “aunt” Lucy, the origins of the pair she saw come ashore on Hatteras Island?

Davy Duchamp and his boys certainly knew of the existence of the sub and its exact coordinates, and had even searched it, but they didn’t have Lucy’s information. Detective Pierce had gotten a whiff of treasure in checking Hunter’s emails, but he was headed down a blind alley in thinking it was on the
Magellan
. No one but me had all the pieces, and now it seemed incredible to think that the only stumbling block between me and unlocking one of the greatest mysteries of all time was a pint of Ben and Jerry’s.

I checked the time. Good grief. Recovery of the Amber Room would have to wait on a more imminent discovery.

Twenty

Back in Morehead, Viktor’s
car was in my drive. Since my house was locked tight as a vault and it was well over 90 degrees outside, I figured he must have sought the shade of the screened-in porch. Not seeing him there or in the back yard, I looked to the dock and the sound beyond. Then I saw him. Playing in the water like a giant otter, diving deep, then propelling himself up to dive again, sending sprays of water sparkling like prisms in the late afternoon sun. He made quite a sight.

I walked out on the dock to watch him. Even in a sleeveless cotton blouse and Dockers, the heat was still stifling. I pulled down the brim of my Panthers ball cap and adjusted my aviators to alleviate some of the glare off the water and continued to watch him at play until he saw me.

He threw up his hand and shouted, “
Mya morkovka
!” Heading for me, he cut the water like an Olympic swimmer. When he showed no signs of slowing down upon reaching the ladder, I started backing up. Like an out-of-control wet dog, he launched himself onto the dock. I couldn’t help it: I squealed like a girl and took off. I didn’t get far before he wrapped me up in salty wet kisses, his cutoffs dripping seawater down my legs and into my shoes.

Pushing back from him to catch a breath, I ran my fingers across his chest, stopping to play with his puckered nipples.

“It happens,” he said, grinning as he rubbed his thumbs over mine now protruding through bra and blouse. “I’ve gotten you all wet. Come. Let me dry you off upstairs where it’s cool.”

“Okay,” I said. Then, being my practical self, I added, “But I need to strip off these wet things first.”

In the comparative privacy of the screened-in porch, I dropped my wet shorts and reached for the button on my blouse, but Viktor’s hand pushed mine away.

Shortly after this, I had the answer to a question I’ve wondered about all my adult life. Is it possible to have sex in a one-person net hammock and not bounce yourselves out? The answer is no. At one point we managed to power-shoot ourselves into the wall. I thought I might have killed myself, but Viktor, undaunted, carried me upstairs, which is where we were when I thought of another question. “Viktor, what does
mya morkovka
mean?

“Ah,” he said, raising his head and resting in the palm of his hand. “You are interested in the romance of the Russian language. That’s good.”

“I don’t know about all that, but what
does
it mean?”

“It’s just a … term of endearment. A name my mother called me when I was very small. It means ‘my little carrot’
,
” he said, pulling me close.

“Doesn’t fit you anymore,” I said, noticing he was ready for round two but not sure if I was. I didn’t have time. I needed to get back out to the
Magellan
. Just at that moment my companion demonstrated a creative
gesture
of endearment, which caused me to postpone my leave taking.

Two hours later, Viktor was still napping, so I jotted him a back-late-don’t-forget-to-lock-up note, adding the location of the hide-a-key just in case he should need it, and phoned the transport service in Beaufort. The helicopter pilot who answered sounded suspiciously like the maniacal aerobat who’d flown Bud and me on our first trip. I started to hang up, but I really needed to get on board, so I instead told him I’d be right out.

My worst fears were confirmed upon seeing the ex-military chopper pilot from hell bull through the glass doors as I waited on the tarmac.

Forty minutes later, limp as a wet cat, I spilled from the copter onto the deck. Saying, “Let me know when you’re ready to leave,” my tormentor disappeared from sight within seconds.

“Never again in this life,” I muttered.

After notifying the radioman that I was aboard
Magellan
, I set off for the bridge and the conference room off the helm. Several copies of the site survey, along with other documents and maps pertinent to the well, were stored there, ready to be handed out if a situation arose that required a group think. There were also copies of different sections of the 2D seismic survey. I was looking for the area surrounding the wellhead out 4,000 feet, the length of the ROV’s tether.

As I reached for the conference room door, one of Powell’s assistants stepped from the helm. “Ma’am, we were just getting ready to call you. Captain Powell needs you in the DC.”

“Uh, okay, thanks,” I said and waited for him to return to the helm. He didn’t. He just stood there watching me as if he meant to make sure I didn’t ignore his directions. I turned and headed for the DC, disappointed that I’d have to put off following my hunch until later.

Upon reaching the DC, I was interrupted again when someone behind me called out, “Hey, Miss Cleo, you’re back!” It was Ricky, the ROV tech.

“Hey,” I said, turning to face him. “What’s up?”

“Just heading back after a break and seeing you reminded me. I found copies of an article you left in the printer. I kept them for you if you want to drop by and pick them up.”

I choked back panic and tried to sound confused instead, repeating, “Copies of an article?”

“Yeah. Something about Hitler refitting a submarine. I didn’t have time to read it.” Then, realizing my confusion, he added, “At least I thought they were yours since I found them in the print bin not long after you left that last day you visited us.”

I shook my head with slow sweeps. “Not mine.”

“Oh, I bet I know what happened,” he said. “It’s probably something that was in the queue on Hunter’s computer before the printer broke. When you printed something else after it was fixed, they printed too.”

I nodded—mystery solved, undoubtedly—and willed him to drop the subject. No luck.

Thinking for a few seconds, Ricky snapped his fingers and said, “Since there were two copies, he must have meant them for the twins. Can’t imagine why, but I’ll call them and let them know I have them.” Giving me a smile and a wave, he turned and headed aft in the direction of the ROV van.

Uh oh. “Ricky, wait!” I shouted, but he didn’t hear me over the ambient roar of drilling.

A chill shook me that had nothing to do with the opening of the DC door. I had to stop him from drawing the twins’ attention to the article. I should have told him they were mine—that might have been the best thing—but he caught me off guard. Now I had to fix the situation: tell them they were mine after all and hope he’d forget about it. Unfortunately, before I could run after him, Phil Gregson appeared. “There you are. We were really starting to worry about you. It’s about time to pull the logging device up.”

“I got tied up … kind of,” I mumbled, following him back into the DC.

“Hi there,” Bud said, standing beside Duncan Powell, who was studying the monitors with David Grant.

“Bud!” I said, truly surprised. “What are you doing here?”

He nodded toward Powell and Grant. “We just came down to give David the word to pull the logging device up.”

“Yeah, yeah, I heard that. What are
you
doing here?”

“I told you,” Bud said, beaming with joy at being on one of the world’s biggest big-boy toys. “We just came down to …”

“
You,
Bud. What are
you
doing here?

“My, my, a little testy today aren’t we? And somewhat bedraggled, I might add.”

Unconsciously, my hand shot to my hair wadded up under my hard hat. Ticked that I’d let him elicit such a girly response from me and impatient to get out of the DC and find Ricky, I snapped sanctimoniously, “Sorry if I don’t come up to your new standards, but this is what a little hard work will do for you.”

David feathered the joysticks, Powell stared intently at the monitors, and Phil cleared his throat and ventured, “Er, Cleo, if you’ll direct your attention to this updated drill log, you’ll see how our new azimuth direction put us right in the new bright spot.”

“Thanks, Phil,” I said. After catching us up on where we were in the hole, Powell thought we needed to go back to the conference room and look at some detailed figures on one of the formations that was causing pressure concerns. That put a real kink in my plan to go over the site survey again. Darkness was beginning to fall, but the ship’s lights hadn’t switched on yet. My head was beginning to pound from the long day and the ghastly ride over. What’s more, I was exhausted from my … workout with Viktor. But, more than anything, I desperately needed to find Ricky.

I was trying to come up with a way to accomplish this when Bud fell in beside me. “Sorry if I rattled you back there,” he said. “I was just worried about you.”

“You’ve had over six years to get used to your new job description—i.e., not worrying about me. One would think a smart fellow like you could have mastered that by now.”

Stepping ahead of me to lead the way through a narrow, dimly lit space interspersed with giant iron support beams, Bud said over his shoulder, “It’s just that you look really tired. You’ve got dark circles under your eyes.”

Dark circles? I was just about to lay Bud low with a withering remark when I ran smack into one of the beams. “Oof!”

Turning back to me, Bud demanded, “Did you just run into that beam?”

“No.”

“Yes, you did. You’re dead on your feet. I know you.”

“Shut up,” was all I could think to say. Resisting the urge to shake my head and realign my eyeballs, I stepped past him, caught up with Powell, and said, “Do we know how many billions of cubic feet of gas it’ll take to put Global back in the black?”

Powell shrugged. “Not really. All depends, I guess, on how deeply in dept they are.”

From what Bud had told me, we’d better hope we hit the mother lode.

After an hour of discussion on variations in formation pressure, I excused myself for a bathroom break and made a beeline for the ROV van. I didn’t have to go all the way to the van, though, as I saw Ricky coming out of one of the Internet rooms.

“Hold up, Ricky,” I said to his back, noting he seemed in a hurry.

“Hi, Miss Cleo. What can I do for you?”

“Nothing really, I was just wondering about that article …”

“Oh yeah, it was only three pages, so I just scanned it, placed it in a folder, and emailed it as an attachment to the twins, then threw away the hard copies. I figured if it was something Hunter meant for them to have, they’d know about it; if not, they could just delete it.”

I’m sure I paled visibly because he quickly asked, concerned, “You okay?”

“Oh sure. Just a little tired, that’s all.”

“Well, gotta go. I’ve been told by the powers that be that the end’s in sight and to get ready for end-of-drilling operations.”

“Right. See you later.”

“Nice working with you, Miss Cleo.”

Back in the conference room, we connected with Hiram Hightower and his team in Houston. It was after nine o’clock. Phil and I’d been over the logs several times and were in concurrence on the size of our gas discovery. On screen, Hightower tossed a pen down on the log sheets that spread from one end of the conference table to the other. With a heavy sigh, he crossed his arm over his barrel chest and said, “I’m confident our log analysts, even after a week of screwing with these figures, will come up with the same number we have.”

Phil chewed a hangnail, then said, “On the upside, the quality of the gas is exceptional—dry, no contaminants, and the size of the reservoir is about what we expected—”

Hightower impatiently cut him off, “Yes. Yes. But what wasn’t expected is that within this very high-quality, lower Cretaceous reservoir we’d encounter a payzone of only about ninety feet of natural gas.”

Bud cleared his throat, “Gentlemen,” he said. “I’m sensing a bit of panic here. I’m neither a geologist nor geophysicist, so correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t we just make the very first discovery of dry natural gas ever off the East Coast of the United States, and isn’t it substantial?

“Well,
substantial
is a relative term,” Braxton Roberts said. “The eight hundred fifty billion cubic feet we just tapped into is a far cry from the two
trillion
cubic feet we need to save the company. Especially when we know there’s at least a
major
field of one to five trillion cubic feet and, more probably, a
giant
field of five to fifty trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas down there … somewhere.”

The silence in the conference room was punctuated only by the steady hum of the diesel engines and generators below us and the buzz of florescent lights above us.

“What I’m trying to point out,” Bud said patiently, “is that, according to Cleo, the gas probably is there in sufficient quantity, it just leaked out due to a fracture somewhere. We just need to keep going.” Bud looked at me. “Right?”

“Absolutely,” I said, directing my comments to Hightower on the screen. “Phil and I can go over the 3D images until we’re blue in the face, but the fact remains, we’re still in the reservoir and the deeper we go, the greater the likelihood of equaling the recent finds by some of our competitors in Azerbaijan and Mozambique. If we just change—”

Roberts cut me off, booming, “I’m just not inclined to keep pouring more money down a weak hole. I say we pull out and start another well on our adjoining block. That would still keep us in the thickest part of the structure, but closer to the bright spot that we first looked at. Why don’t we just admit we picked the wrong spot and start over?”

One of the chief financial officers for Global, Patrick Donovan—so well-known in the industry as a wizard at numbers that, despite being in his late sixties, he hadn’t been forced into retirement—loosened his tie. “Dammit, Braxton,” he said with a force that belied his diminutive size. “You spend money like it’s water. You’re talking about another hundred million at least. I want to hear why Ms. Cooper thinks we should continue in the hole we’re in. Let her finish.”