Shock Wave(161)

"That concludes the entertainment part of the program," said Pitt, reversing the outboard.

"Shall we raise my sails?" asked Maeve, personalizing the pride of her accomplishment.

"Not yet. We'll motor around to the leeward side of the island where the sea is calmer before we test the wind."

Giordino helped Maeve step past the deckhouse and into the cockpit. They sat down to rest a moment while Pitt steered the boat through the channel and into the swells sweeping around the north and south end of the two deserted islands. They no sooner reached the open sea than the sharks appeared.

"Look," said Giordino, "our friends are back. I'll bet they missed our company."

Maeve leaned over the side and peered at the long gray shapes moving under the surface. "A new group of followers," she said. "These are makos."



"The species with the jagged and uneven teeth only an orthodontist could love?"

"The same."

"Why do they plague me?" Giordino moaned. "I've never ordered shark in a restaurant."

Half an hour later, Pitt gave the order. "Okay, let's try the sails and see what kind of a boat we've concocted."

Giordino unfolded the woven-mat sails, which Maeve had carefully reefed in accordion pleats, and hoisted the mainsail successfully while Maeve raised the mizzen. The sails filled, and Pitt eased over the tiller, skidding the boat on a tack, heading northwest against a brisk west wind.

Any yachtsman would have rolled on his deck in laughter if he had seen the Marvelous Maeve bucking the seas. A boat designer of professional standing would have whistled the Mickey Mouse Club anthem.

But the peculiar looking sailboat had the last laugh. The outriggers dug into the water and maintained her stability. She responded to her helm amazingly well and kept her bow on course without being swept sideways. To be sure, there were problems to be ironed out with her rigging. But remarkably, she took to the sea as if she had been born there.

Pitt took a final look at the Miseries. Then he looked at the packet wrapped in a piece of Dacron sail that held Rodney York's logbook and letters. He vowed that if he somehow lived through the next several days he would get York's final testament to his living relatives, trusting that they would mount an expedition to bring him home again to be buried beside Falmouth Bay in his beloved Cornwall.



On the tenth floor of a modernistic all-glass structure built in the shape of a pyramid on the outskirts of Paris, a group of fourteen men sat around a very long ebony conference table. Impeccably dressed, wielding enormous power, immensely wealthy and unsmiling, the directors of the Multilateral Council of Trade, known simply to insiders as the Foundation, an institution dedicated to the development of a single global economic government, shook hands and engaged in small talk before sitting down to business.

Normally, they met three times a year, but this day they met in an emergency session to discuss the latest unexpected threat to their widespread operations.

The men in the room represented vast international corporations and high levels of government. Only one top-ranking member from the South African cartel was entirely involved with the selling of quality diamonds. A Belgian industrialist from Antwerp and a real-estate developer from New Delhi, India, acted as the Foundation's middlemen for the huge illicit flow of industrial diamonds to the Islamic Fundamentalist Bloc, which was struggling to create its own nuclear destruction systems. Millions of these smaller industrial diamonds were sold underground to the bloc to make the precision instruments and equipment necessary to construct such systems. The larger, more exotic quality diamonds were used to finance unrest in Turkey, Western Europe, Latin America and several of the South Asian countries, or an other hot spot where subversive political organization could play into the hands of the Foundation's many other interests, including the sale of arms.

All these men were known by the news media, all were celebrities in their chosen fields, but none were identified with membership in the Foundation. That was a sec known only to the men in the room and their close associates. They flew across oceans and continents, weaving their webs in all sorts of strange places, takings toll while amassing unheard-of profits.



They listened with close attention in silence as the' chosen chairman, the billionaire head of a German banking firm, reported on the current crisis facing the diamond market. A regal man with a bald head, he spoke slowly in fluent English, a language every national around the to understood.

"Gentlemen, because of Arthur Dorsett we are facing a profound crisis in a vital area of our operations. Appraisal of his conduct by our intelligence network points to a diamond market headed into dark waters Make no mistake about it, if Dorsett dumps over a hundred metric tons of diamonds on the retail market street-beggar prices, as he is reported ready to do, this sector of the Foundation will totally collapse."