Logan watched the distant horizon for a moment, then turned back to the press. “And now,” he said, “I would be happy to answer your questions as fully as I can.”
Three hours later, in the snug of the Edwardian-era bar within Glasgow’s most opulent hotel, the same two persons — Colin Reed and Jeremy Logan — toasted each other over glasses of a peaty single-malt scotch, served neat.
“An excellent performance,” Reed was saying. “And I don’t just mean at the press conference today — an excellent performance from beginning to end.”
“Acting is new to me,” Logan replied. “But it’s nice to know that, if the ghost-hunting business ever dries up, I can always supplement my Yale salary by treading the boards.”
“ ‘I would be happy to answer your questions as fully as I can,’ ” Reed said, chuckling at the memory. “Nice bit of prevarication, that.” He took a sip of his scotch. “Well, I think we can safely say that with today’s announcement — in addition to the new rules that have been instituted regarding use of watercraft in the loch — all this hunting for the monster will die off.”
“That’s the plan.”
Reed started, as if forgetting something. “Oh, yes.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a slender envelope. “Here’s your stipend.”
“I still feel bad taking money from the institute,” Logan said as he pocketed the envelope. “But I console myself with the thought that it’s recompense for the damage my reputation would suffer should the truth ever become known.”
“We thank you — and, more important, I’m sure Nessie thanks you.” The provost paused. “You have the, ah, data with you?”
Logan nodded.
“And you still believe the best thing is to destroy it?”
“It’s the only option. What if those images got into the open — or, God forbid, went viral on the Internet? It would undo everything we’ve accomplished. I’ll burn them as soon as I get up to my room.”
“You’re right, of course.” Reed hesitated. “May I…may I have one last look?”
“Of course.” Logan glanced around the bar, then unlocked the Zero Halliburton attaché case that sat on the banquette beside him, extracted a folder, and passed it to Reed. The man took it, opened it, and leafed through the pages within, his eyes glittering with hungry fascination.
The pages contained images produced from a variety of technologies: acoustic backscatter, synthetic aperture pulse, active beam-forming sonar. The images all showed the same thing, in different positions and from different angles: a creature with a bulky, ovoid body; lateral fins; and a long, slender neck. Reed lingered over the images for a moment. Then, with a rueful sigh, he closed the folder and passed it back to Logan.
Just as Logan was returning it to his attaché case, a man in the hotel’s uniform walked up to their table. “Dr. Logan?” he asked.
Logan nodded.
“There’s a call for you. It’s waiting at the front desk.”
Logan frowned. “I’m in the middle of a meeting. Can’t it wait?”
The man shook his head. “No, sir. I’m afraid the party on the line said that the matter was urgent. Most urgent.”
2
Approaching from the west along Rhode Island’s Route 138, the Jamestown Verrazzano Bridge was a four-lane, concrete box girder affair of a pleasing — if rather alarmingly pitched — design. It was midday, out of season; traffic was fairly light; and Dr. Jeremy Logan prodded the accelerator of his ’68 Lotus Elan just a little. The coupe obliged, rising effortlessly up and over the span. A narrow nubbin of land shot by beneath, and then a second bridge appeared ahead: the Claiborne Pell. This bridge was both much longer and much taller. Logan knew just enough about structural engineering to find suspension bridges faintly disquieting, and he pushed a little harder on the gas pedal. The car climbed; he topped the apex of the span — and then the view ahead and below drove all thoughts of resonant frequencies from his mind.
Newport, Rhode Island, lay before him, jewel-like and sparkling in the early autumn sun, like Oz at the end of the yellow brick road. Coves, marinas, harbors, wharves, and gleaming buildings dressed in stone or white-painted clapboard — barely discernible at this distance — stretched out to the left and right. In the middle distance, a handful of sloops and catboats coursed through the water, heeled over by the wind, their white sails taut and full. It was a sight that never grew old, and Logan drank it in.
It was almost enough to make him forget the nagging mystery of why, exactly, he was here.
At the end of the bridge he turned right onto Farewell Street, then cut through the narrow, traffic-heavy lanes of the old downtown until he reached Memorial Boulevard. Like all tourists, he turned first left, then right onto Bellevue. But then, instead of veering off to the east — toward the Cliff Walk and the impeccably manicured facades of such “cottages” as Marble House or the Breakers — Logan made his way south and west until he reached Ocean Avenue. He passed a series of small beaches, a country club, the inevitable summer mansions. And then, some two miles on, he slowed before a narrow road of paved stone that led south from the main thoroughfare, with no other name than PRIVATE fixed to its road sign. He turned onto the lane. A hundred yards on he reached a tall wall of weathered brick, leading off to each side as far as the eye could see. Directly ahead was a gate in the wall, and a quaint slate-roofed structure that served as a security station. Logan stopped to show some papers; the guard within the station glanced at them, nodded, and passed them back; the gate across the road lifted and, with a wave, Logan drove on.
The narrow, winding road passed through a tiny wood, over one low rise of land, and then another. And then, rounding a corner, Logan stopped as he caught his first glimpse of Lux in almost ten years.
It was even larger than he remembered. Modeled after England’s Knebworth House, but on an even grander scale, the sand-colored structure stretched away on both sides for what seemed leagues before terminating in East and West Wings. An odd mélange of Jacobean, Palladian, and high Gothic, leaded-glass windows winking in the sun, the mansion seemed even more Oz-like than Logan’s initial impression of Newport — save for the fact that the dark veins of ivy covering the facade; the oddly hooded, watchful appearance of the gables and turrets; and the low crenelations that ran along its roof as if in readiness for battle gave the building an appearance that was faintly sinister. No — that was too strong a word. “Disquieting,” Logan had termed it upon first sight, and he settled on that term again now. The high brick wall he had passed through could be seen far away on both sides, running up and down with the vagaries of the grassy terrain, and terminating on both sides at the steep, rocky cliffs above the Atlantic. Scattered around the flanks of the main structure were at least a dozen outbuildings of various shapes and sizes: a power plant, greenhouse, storage facilities, and a series of windowless structures that Logan knew to be laboratories, together forming a campus comprising almost a hundred acres.
Easing the car ahead now, he drove up the lane to a parking area on the near side of the East Wing — the front entrance, with its four massive Solomonic columns supporting a marble pediment, was much too grand to actually be used for anything save decoration — got out of his car, and walked down a short tree-lined sidewalk to a set of double doors. Only here, screwed into the facade on a weather-darkened panel of bronze, did the place allow itself to be named: LUX.
To one side of the doors were several devices: a numeric keypad, an intercom with a buzzer, and another technologic gadget Logan couldn’t identify. A printed sign above all three announced RESIDENTS AND GUESTS: USE KEYPAD AFTER HOURS. Logan was neither, and since it was noon, he pressed the buzzer.