Pitt had an expression of ecstasy on his face. "When I'm served sweetbreads from a master chef, I hear bells with every bite. The sauce is a triumph."

"Try my rabbit," said Loren, holding up her plate.

"Care to try my sweetbreads?" queried Pitt.

"No, thank you," she said, wrinkling her nose. "I'm not keen on internal organs."

Fortunately, the portions were not as large as dishes served in lesser restaurants, and they did not feel stuffed when it was time for dessert. Pitt ordered the peaches cardinal: poached peaches with raspberry puree. Later, over Remy Martin brandy, they resumed their discussion.

"None of what I've seen or heard about the Wolfs makes sense," said Pitt. "Why ama.s.s a fortune if they think their financial empire will go up in smoke after the comet's impact?"

Loren swirled the brandy in her gla.s.s, staring at the golden sparkle of the liquid in front of the light from the table's candle. "Perhaps they intend to survive the catastrophe."

"I've heard that from Elsie Wolf and one of their a.s.sa.s.sins in Colorado," said Pitt. "But how can they survive a worldwide disaster better than anyone else?"

"Did you read file eighteen?" Loren asked.

Pitt did not immediately answer, but sifted through the folders until he found the file marked "eighteen." He opened it and read. After two or three minutes, he looked up and stared into Loren's violet eyes. "Is this verified?"

She nodded. "It's as though Noah built an entire fleet of arks."

"Four colossal ships," Pitt said slowly. "One pa.s.senger liner, actually a floating community, six thousand feet in length by fifteen hundred feet wide, thirty-two stories high, displacing three and a half million tons." He looked up, his brow furrowed. "A fanciful concept, but hardly practical."

"Read the rest of it," said Loren. "It gets better."

"The gigantic oceangoing vessel has a large hospital, schools, entertainment centers, state-of-the-art engineering technologies. An airport with an extensive runway on the upper deck will house and maintain a small fleet of jet aircraft and helicopters, and living quarters and office facilities will accommodate five thousand pa.s.sengers and crew." Pitt shook his head in disbelief. "A huge vessel like that should hold at least fifty thousand people."

"Actually, twice that number."

"Check out the other three vessels."

Pitt continued reading. "They also have the same mammoth dimensions. One is a cargo and maintenance vessel, housing machinery and manufacturing facilities with an immense cargo of vehicles, construction machinery, and building materials. The second is a veritable zoo-"

"See," Loren interrupted. "There is an ark."

"The last vessel is a supertanker built to carry tremendous amounts of oil, natural gas, and various other fuels." Pitt closed the folder and gazed at Loren. "I heard such vessels were on the drawing boards, but I had no idea they were actually built, and certainly not by Destiny Enterprises."

"The hulls were built in sections and then towed to a secluded shipyard owned by Destiny Enterprises on an isolated fjord on the southern tip of Chile. There, the exterior superstructure and the interior build-out was completed, and the ships furnished and loaded. Estimates state the pa.s.sengers and crews of the fleet should be self-sufficient, with enough food and supplies to last them twenty or more years."

"Haven't outsiders visited the vessels? Hasn't the news media written articles on what has to be the world's largest seagoing vessels?"

"Read the CIA's report on the shipyard," explained Loren. "The area is heavily restricted and patrolled by a small army of security guards. No outsiders get in or get out. The shipyard workers and their families are housed in a small community ash.o.r.e without ever leaving the ships or the yard. Surrounded by the Andes, a hundred mountainous islands, and two peninsulas, the only way in and out of the fjord is by sea or aircraft."

"The investigation by the CIA seems cursory. They haven't studied the Destiny Enterprises project in depth."

Loren finished the last sip of her brandy. "An agent a.s.signed to brief my office claimed the agency did not conduct a major investigation because they saw no threat to United States security or interests."

Pitt stared thoughtfully beyond the walls of the restaurant. "Al Giordino and I were in a Chilean fjord several years ago during a search for a liner hijacked by terrorists. The hijackers had hidden the ship near a glacier. From what I recall of the islands and waterways north of the Straits of Magellan, there are no channels wide and deep enough to permit pa.s.sage of such gargantuan vessels."

"Maybe they were not intended to sail the seven seas," suggested Loren. "Maybe they were built simply to ride out the predicted cataclysm."

"As fantastic as it seems," said Pitt, attempting to accept the incredible concept, "you're close to the truth. The Wolfs must have spent billions betting on the end of the world."

Pitt became quiet, and Loren could see he was absorbed in his thoughts. She rose from the table and walked to the ladies' room, allowing him time to sift through the conceptions running through his head. Although he found it difficult to accept, he began to see why the later generations of the Wolf family were genetically engineered.

The old n.a.z.is who'd fled Germany were long gone, but they had left in their place a family of superpeople who would be strong enough to survive the coming cataclysm and then take over what was left of the civilized world and rebuild it into a new one, controlled and directed under their exacting standards of superiority.

29

THE GRAY GRANITE CLIFFS of the gorge rose like giant shadows before they were blotted out by the night sky. Below, the blue-white ice of the glacier glittered and flashed from the glow of a three-quarter moon. The 11,800-foot snow-mantled peak of Cerro Murallon, starlit and cloud-free, soared above the western slopes of the southern Andes before dropping steeply toward the sea, as its chasms became filled with age-old glaciers from a distant past. The night was clear and sharp and the sky ablaze. Revealed from the light of the Milky Way, a small vehicle darted through the menacing walls of the gorge like a bat scanning a desert canyon for food.

It was fall in the Southern Hemisphere, and light snow had already fallen on the upper elevations. Tall conifers marched up the rugged slopes before stopping at the timberline, where the barren rocks took over and rose to the sharp and jagged mountain summits. There wasn't a man-made light to be seen in any direction. Pitt imagined that the scene in daylight would have been one of majestic beauty, but at ten o'clock at night, the steep cliffs and rocky crags became dark and threatening.

The Moller M400 Skycar wasn't much larger than a Jeep Cherokee, but it was as stable in flight as a much larger aircraft, and capable of being piloted down city streets and parked in a residential garage. The aerodynamic design, with its sloping, conical bow, gave it a look somewhere between a General Motors car of the future and a rocket fighter out of Star Wars. The four lift/thrust nacelles each held two counterrotating engines, enabling the Moller to lift off the ground like a helicopter and move horizontally like a conventional aircraft at a cruising speed of three hundred miles an hour, with an operational ceiling of 30,000 feet. Lose an engine or two and it could still land safely without discomfort to the pa.s.sengers. Even if it suffered a catastrophic component failure, dual airframe parachutes would be deployed to lower the Skycar and its occupants to the ground, undamaged and unhurt.

Sensors and fail-safe systems protected against all errors in the flight mechanisms or computers. The vehicle's four computers constantly monitored all systems, and maintained automatic control on a preset flight path directed by Global Positioning System satellites that guided it over rivers and mountains and through valleys and canyons. The enormously efficient guidance system eliminated the need for a pilot.

Pitt's view of the environment outside the c.o.c.kpit was limited. He seldom bothered to stare through the canopy. He didn't care to see the plane's shadow under the dim light from the moon whisking over the uneven rocks below, flitting over the tops of the trees, lifting over sharp rises before they could be seen ahead. He especially wasn't interested in seeing how the plane and its shadow almost blended into one. He could watch the flight's path through the virtual reality topographical display, while the automatic navigation equipment flew the Skycar to its preprogrammed destination. Turbulence was dampened by the quick, automatic reaction of the vanes below the engines commanded by the automatic stabilization system.

Pitt found it disconcerting to sit with his arms crossed while the aircraft swept in and around mountains in the dead of night without the slightest a.s.sistance from a human brain and hands. He had little choice but to put his trust in the computer guidance system and let it do the flying. If Giordino, seated next to him, was unduly concerned about the computer failing to avoid collision with the side of a mountain, no trace of it showed in his face. Giordino calmly read an adventure novel under a c.o.c.kpit light, while Pitt turned his attention to a nautical chart showing the underwater depths of the fjord leading to the Wolf shipyard.

There was no plan to fly at safe heights above the tallest of the peaks. This was a stealth mission. The powerful, efficient rotary thrusters were taking them to their destination well out of sight of radar and laser detection.

Both men's bodies were sweating up a storm inside their DUI CF200 series dry suits, which were worn over radiant insulating underwear, but neither of them complained. By dressing for cold-water diving before the flight, they saved time changing after touchdown.

Pitt punched in a code and read the numbers on the box. "Two hundred and twelve miles since we lifted off the ship at Punta Entrada outside of Santa Cruz."

"How much farther?" asked Giordino without looking up from the pages of his novel.

"A little less than fifty miles and another fifteen minutes should put us in the hills above the Wolf shipyard." The exact landing site had been programmed into the computer from an enhanced photo taken from a spy satellite.

"Just enough time to knock out another chapter."

"What's so interesting that you can't tear yourself away from the book?"

"I'm just to the part where the hero is about to rescue the gorgeous heroine who is within seconds of being ravished by the evil terrorists."

"I've read that plot before," Pitt said wearily. He refocused his eyes on the virtual reality display that pictured the terrain ahead in extreme detail through a powerful night-vision scope mounted in the nose of the M400. It was like traveling inside a pinball machine. The mountainous landscape approached and flashed past in a blur. A box in the corner displayed speed, alt.i.tude, fuel range, and distance to their destination in red and orange digital numbers. Pitt recalled using a similar system on the aircraft they had flown searching for the hijacked cruise ship over an area of the Chilean fjords not more than a hundred miles south of their present position.

Pitt looked out the bubble canopy at the glacier below. He breathed a sigh of relief at seeing the worst of the mountains fall behind. The moon's rays reflected on a smooth glacier with irregular creva.s.ses slicing through its surface every half mile. The ice spread wider as it flowed toward its rendezvous with the fjord before melting and emptying into the sea.

They were through the worst of the mountains now, and Pitt could discern lights on the horizon beyond the glacier. He knew they were not stars, because they were cl.u.s.tered and twinkling at too low an alt.i.tude. He also knew that because of the crisp atmosphere, the lights were much farther away than they looked. Then gradually, almost imperceptibly, he became aware of other light cl.u.s.ters against a plain of pure black. Another five minutes and they were solidly, unmistakably there, the lights of four monstrous ships that blazed like small cities in the night.

"Our objective is in sight," he said evenly, without emotion.