The passenger nodded in understanding and began pulling the door closed behind him.

“Thank God for Southby,” he said.

And then he was gone, swallowed up in the black interior of the vault.

Bigalow survived.

He won his race with the rising water and managed to reach the Boat Deck and throw himself over the side only seconds before the ship took her plunge.

As the bulk of the great ocean liner sank from sight, her red pennant with the white star that had been hanging limply, high on the aft mast peak under the dead calm of the night, suddenly unfurled when it touched the sea, as though in final salute to the fifteen hundred men, women, and children who were either dying of exposure or drowning in the frigid waters over the grave.

Blind instinct clutched at Bigalow and he reached out and seized the pennant as it slipped past. Before his mind could focus, before he knew the full danger of his foolhardy act, he found himself being pulled beneath the water. Yet he stubbornly held on, refusing to release his grip. He was nearly twenty feet below the surface when at last the pennant’s grommets tore from the halyard and the prize was his. Only then did he struggle upward through the liquid blackness. After what seemed to him an eternity, he broke into the night air again, thankful that the expected suction from the sinking ship had not gotten him.

The twenty-eight-degree water nearly killed him. Given another ten minutes in its freezing grip, he would have simply been one more statistic of that terrible tragedy.

A rope saved him; his hand brushed against and grabbed a trailing rope attached to a capsized boat. With the last ounce of his ebbing strength, he pulled his nearly frozen body on board and shared with thirty other men the numbing ache of the cold until they were rescued by another ship four hours later.

The pitiful cries of the hundreds who died would forever linger in the minds of those who survived. But as he clung to the overturned, partly submerged lifeboat, Bigalow’s thoughts were on another memory the strange man sealed forever in the ship’s 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.

<1>THE SICILIAN PROJECT

July 1987

<<1>>

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 hadn’t thought possible. He had known the exact moment the excitement had gone out of it. He had known it the morning be 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 friend and a broken marriage. And, he’d 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 didn’t sit well with him.