“Couldn’t miss it!” she said. “Brimmer forgot his Mr. Friendly impersonation.”

Paul let his eye wander to the marble tablets hung on the wall that were inscribed with the names of captains and crews lost in the far corners of the world.

“Those old whalers were tough as nails,” he said.

“Some were tougher than others,” she said, “if you can believe Song Lee’s story about the New Bedford pod.”

Paul pursed his lips.

“That medical phenomenon is a link between the past and the present. I’d love to read the paper that Lee wrote at Harvard.”

Gamay slipped her BlackBerry out of her handbag. “Do you remember the name of Lee’s professor?”

“How could I forget?” Paul said with a smile. “His name was Codman.”

“Trout . . . Cod . . . Why are practically all you New Englanders named after fish?”

“Because we didn’t have wine connoisseurs for fathers.”

“Touché,” she said.

She called up the Harvard Medical School on her BlackBerry, thumb-typed Codman’s name into a person finder, and called the number shown on the screen. A man who identified himself as Lysander Codman answered the call.

“Hello, Dr. Codman? My name is Dr. Gamay Morgan-Trout. I’m a friend of Dr. Song Lee. I’m hoping that you remember her.”

“Dr. Lee? How could I forget that brilliant young woman? How is she these days?”

“We saw her yesterday, and she’s fine. She’s working with some NUMA colleagues of mine, but she mentioned a paper she had done at Harvard and submitted to you. It has something to do with a medical phenomenon called the New Bedford anomaly.”

“Oh, yes,” Codman said. Gamay could hear him chuckling. “It was an unusual subject.”

“We told Song Lee we’d be in the neighborhood, and she asked if my husband and I could swing by and pick up a copy for her. She’s lost the original.”

The professor had no reason to have kept a paper from one of hundreds of students who had passed through his classroom, but he said, “Normally, I wouldn’t hold on to a student’s paper, but the subject was so bizarre I kept it in what I call the Book of the Dead, as Charles Fort termed subjects that can be neither proven nor disproven. I’m sure I can put my hands on it.”

Gamy gave Paul a thumbs-up.

“Thank you very much, Professor. We’ll be there in a little over an hour, if that’s convenient.”

She jotted down directions to Codman’s office in her BlackBerry, and then she and Paul walked from the whaling chapel to the car. Minutes later, they were heading north out of the city.

Unknown

NUMA 8 - Medusa

CHAPTER 34

THE VOICE OF THE PILOT CRACKLED OVER THE CITATION X’s cabin intercom.