in the shipâs vault.
Who was he?
Who were the eight men he claimed to have murdered?
What was the secret of the vault?
They were questions that were to haunt Bigalow for the next seventy-six years, right up to the last few hours of his life.
PART 1
The Sicilian Project
The President swiveled in his chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and stared unseeing out of the window of the Oval Office and cursed his lot. He hated his job with a passion he hadnât thought possible. He had known the exact moment the excitement had gone out of it. He had known it the morning he had found it hard to rise from bed. That was always the first sign. A dread of beginning the day.
He wondered for the thousandth time since taking office why he had struggled so hard and so long for the damned, thankless job anyway. The price had been painfully high. His political trail was littered with the bones of lost friends and a broken marriage. And heâd no sooner taken the oath of office when he had found his infant administration staggered by a Treasury Department scandal, a war in South America, a nationwide airlines strike, and a hostile Congress that had come to mistrust whoever resided in the White House. He threw in an extra curse for Congress. Its members had overridden his last two vetoes, and the news didnât sit well with him.
Thank God, he would escape the bullshit of another election. How heâd managed to win two terms still mystified him. He had broken all the political taboos ever laid down for a successful candidate. Not only was he a divorced man but he was not a churchgoer, smoked cigars in public, and sported a large mustache besides. He had campaigned by ignoring his opponents and by hitting the voters solidly between the eyes with tough talk. And they had loved it. Opportunely, he had come along at a time when the average American was fed up with goody-goody candidates who smiled big and made love to the TV cameras, and who spoke trite, nothing sentences that the press couldnât twist or find hidden meanings to invent between the nouns.
Eighteen more months and his second term in office would be over. It was the one thought that kept him going. His predecessor had accepted the post of head regent at the University of California. Eisenhower had withdrawn to his farm in Gettysburg, and Johnson to his ranch in Texas. The President smiled to himself. None of that elder-statesman-on-the-sidelines crap for him. His plans called for self-exile to the South Pacific on a forty-foot ketch. There he would ignore every damned crisis that stirred the world while sipping rum and eyeing any pug-nosed, balloon-chested native girls who wandered within view. He closed his eyes and almost had the vision in focus when his aide eased open the door and cleared his throat.
âExcuse me, Mr. President, but Mr. Seagram and Mr. Donner are waiting.â
The President swiveled back to his desk and ran his hands through a patch of thick silver-tinted hair. âOkay, send them in.â
He brightened visibly. Gene Seagram and Mel Donner enjoyed immediate access to the President at any time, day or night. They were the chief evaluators for the Meta Section, a group of scientists who worked in total secrecy, researching projects that were as yet unheard ofâprojects that attempted to leapfrog current technology by twenty to thirty years.
Meta Section was the Presidentâs own brainchild. He had conceived it during his first year in office, connived and manipulated the unlimited secret funding, and personally recruited the small group of brilliant and dedicated men who comprised its core. He took great unadvertised pride in it. Even the CIA and the National Security Agency knew nothing of its existence. It had always been his dream to back a team of men who could devote their skills and talents to impossible schemes, fantasy schemes with one chance in a million for success. The fact that Meta Section was still