Deep Sea One (29 page)

"Oh, Herr Braun!" he heard the old man call from the hallway. Patrick looked up, surprised.

"I see you are perusing our interior decorator's choices. What do you think?" Eickhart asked, stretching his neck like a curious turtle.

I think you are a sick fuck, old boy,
Patrick thought, as he smiled at the boss.

"I would not change a thing, personally. The place echoes your sublime taste perfectly, but I am just a glorified builder," he said, as he rose to his feet. "You should not trust me."

☼

Chapter 37

"Should we leave, lads?" Darwin asked his colleagues after Calisto left the room.

"No, what for?" Tommy frowned. He was driven more by curiosity as to the location of this subsea laboratory complex. Liam, however, had his usual point of view and leaned on the console board to look out the wide window.

"The sergeant is not fibbing, my friends," he said from the window and as they turned to face him they were met with a terrifying sight. "Tiamat has risen once again."

From the horizon ahead of them, a growing storm crept. Over the waves it slid at an unusual speed while thunder rumbled in the distance.

"What the fuck is happening?" Tommy asked in astonishment.

"Remember the freak storms Liam kept going on about? Well, have a look, mate," Darwin answered, as he joined Liam at the window. Over the ocean the skied darkened and the silver glimmer of the sun on the water turned to an opaque fog, which quickly smothered all visibility. Tommy stood back. He stayed on the other side of the room, mesmerized by the rolling storm.

Purdue peeked in the door.

"Gentlemen, have you seen my bodyguard? She was supposed to bring my briefcase to me." he looked up and saw what they were staring at. His eyes widened with surprise.

At once the engineers got on the wire and the mechanic ran out to get his crew to secure everything in preparation for the storm.

"Haven't seen her, sir," Tommy said with a shrug, and Purdue immediately ran to his office to make sure he got everything he needed. Then he made his way to the emergency section while the sirens echoed the warning over the intercom. The waves rose frighteningly high and crashed hard against the platform, but the steel structure remained strong.

"Tommy! Where are you going?" Liam shouted, as the engineer sped from the control room into the gaining onslaught of the saline spray, but he was ignored. Chaos rode the entire platform as men rushed all over to pack up and run for cover from the unexpected freak storm.

Below, in the laboratory, Nina had finished analyzing the artifact. Sam was loading all his pictures onto his laptop and saved each copy to a drive for Purdue's records. Outside in the corridor the other scientists appeared to be sharing something secret, their faces contorted in concern.

"That looks serious," Sam said, as he motioned his head toward them. Nina was curious. She nodded and made her way to them as Sam watched. The Spear was back in its chest and the machine was off, but her computer still displayed the relic and its different metallurgic values next to a graph, which reported that it consisted mainly of iron, silver and gold.

When she returned, she looked perplexed.

"Remember the strange storms the mechanic and his one colleague reported as coming from nowhere?" she asked.

"No, I don't really recall . . ."

"They said that the weather satellite system would show the area as clear, but since the discovery of the Spear, these storms frequently battered Deep Sea One without warning. Maybe the relic is causing it?" she wondered.

"The weather is controlled by a religious icon brought up from the ocean floor?" Sam said in his most ridiculing tone. This was just all becoming too much for his logical deduction.

"Listen, since we took the Spear out of the chest, nothing but a bad smell and an eerie vibe has befallen us. Take note, oh great Sarcasmus, that since I put it back in the chest, all hell has supposedly broken loose upstairs," Nina announced with acres of confidence.

"Coincidence," he replied.

"Really? It will be lunchtime soon. Why don't you see if you can find the logs of the past few weeks and check the frequency of these anomalies, cupcake? You'll see that this object wanted to be found. It was unearthed by the currents and that must be when the storms started," she explained.

"Or it is a coincidence," he reiterated, infuriating Nina into a fever.

"Sam Cleave . . ."

"Prove it, doc," he said quickly, taunting her with his empty smile, which offered the challenge. "If you prove it, I'll believe it."

It was not a bad idea. She imagined that a little experiment of her own would suffice, not only to put Sam in his place, but to ascertain if her theory was correct.

"All right," she smiled, "shall we wager on it?"

"If I am right you owe me dinner," he announced, with a glint in his dark eyes.

"If I am right you give Matlock the finger. No assistance ever again," she challenged.

"Really? Work? You can have anything you want from me if you win and you choose work? You're no fun, Dr. Gould," he sighed, tapping his finger on the surface of the table. Nina scoffed at his refusal. While the scientists in the other areas checked on the security of their subjects, Nina wondered how she could extort Sam Cleave.

Doctors and professors in white coats ran madly up and down, unlocking cell doors and securing cupboards while the journalist and the historian busied themselves with intimate flirtation.

"Very well, if I win you make me breakfast," she mumbled speedily. As the words left her she could feel her face flushing from the possibly inappropriate offer she just made, but she had steadily grown tired of resisting him. He was everything that annoyed and attracted her and she wished to rekindle whatever started months before, before she stormed out on him.

Sam was stunned, but he could not let her notice. After all, he was not supposed to be surprised to hear a woman say that. Instead of mocking her about her admission of romantic interest, he merely said, "Done." And they shook on it.

Nina, relieved that he did not make anything of it, opened the chest and removed the Spear while Sam went to the master system on the main monitor to call up the current satellite view of Deep Sea One.

"Fucking hell," he gasped, "it's more like a damn tsunami than a storm! I had no idea it was that violent," he remarked, and stood aside so that Nina could also see the screen. She was equally taken aback by the diameter of the front, which seemed to concentrate only on a three-kilometer radius around the oil rig they were on. She unwrapped the relic and placed it on the table.

"Now we wait," she said, and leaned with her buttocks against the cupboards, folding her arms patiently. Nothing happened . . . yet. Sam kept an eye on the weather diagram, which remained as strong as it was, but a few seconds later already they could see the edges of the front fray and dissolve gradually. Nina hoped to be right, but she did not expect it. Her arms fell to her sides as they watched the white clump slowly wither, revealing the gradient markers, which before had vanished under the cloud cover.

"No way," Sam said under his breath, hands on his thighs. His eyes beheld a miracle for the first time in his life. Or was he witness to a heretic tool of destruction at play?

"Told you," she said. "Sam, admit it. This relic has powers. It has to be the one Hitler was seeking, perhaps the other one was a decoy while the sunken sub under Deep Sea One was smuggling it across the North Sea in secret."

Sam did not look at her. His eyes were still fixed on the screen, watching the storm dissipate before his eyes. Nina was right, he had to admit. His argument did not warrant coincidence as an excuse. The timing was simply too synchronized to be happenstance. All over the oil rig the staff members sighed with relief for the rapid passing of the storm, unaware of its origin or the fact that it was more than nature at work.

"Aye, that does make sense. But why did the boat perish, then?" he asked in slow-coming words, retarded by his lingering amazement as the screen cleared completely now.

"Look, the boat had the Spear onboard, right? How did it get outside the vessel?" Nina asked, still self-conscious deep inside about her suggestive wager. Sam looked at her.

"Someone tried to steal it? Someone tried to steal it before it could reach its destination. Look, there is no sign that the German submarine was torpedoed. The crew inside . . . most of those uniforms were riddled with holes," he revealed, and Nina remembered what she saw as she moved through the mummified remains of the men, some of their skulls shattered and their clothing with holes ripped in.

"Someone killed the crew, disabled the submarine and it sank here," she said.

"But why did they leave the chest here? Whoever stole it could not have made it out successfully . . ." Sam stopped, his eyes darting as he tried to decipher the circumstances.

"What, Sam?"

"Hang on."

"Sam! The suspense is killing me," she said.

"Don't you see the discrepancy here? Holy shit, it makes absolutely no sense," he spoke to himself. Nina laid her hand on his, pressing her delicate fingers on his skin to prompt him. He looked at Nina and said quietly, "If the U-boat was transporting the Spear from Germany, how come the book inside the submarine already had the clues to the Tibetan shrine?"

"I don't follow."

"We found the book on the sunken U-boat that pointed us to the Godwomb. When we went into the Godwomb the location of the Spear was already mapped here! If they had been on their way with the Spear, and it sank here, how did the location come to be in the Godwomb in Tibet?" Sam asked. He hoped that he conveyed the riddle properly to Nina, but from her expression she was thoroughly confused. "Do you get it?"

She frowned, "Give me a few minutes to wrap that around my brain, will you?"

"It means our theory of someone stealing the chest and accidentally losing it here is ludicrous. If it was an accident where the thief simply lost it after sinking the U-boat, how the fuck did it come to be inside a mountain shrine in Asia?" he tried once more. Nina listened, closed her eyes and motioned with her index finger in the air from one location to another, and then she opened her eyes, "And who scribbled the clues in the book?"

That was another thing he missed. "Oh shit, yes, you have a point there!"

"I guess some things stay unexplained," she lamented.

The two stood, utterly perplexed at the conundrum. Purdue came in, rubbing his hands together eagerly.

"Ah, bugger. Not now, for fuck's sake," Nina grunted through her teeth.

"Dr. Gould! My dear, what have you discovered?" he smiled as he approached them. His eyes fell on the artifact.

Nina was not sure she wanted to tell him everything she had discovered, but she had to tell him the truth at least. That is, after all, why he hired her. It was his money and he was the one who found the U-boat that gained them the Spear. She had to admit it was Purdue's party and she was merely a guest.

"We compared the piece to the photographs Sam took of the cavern roof," she said evenly, assuring that her assumptions and deeper concerns remained undetected. With a sure hand she placed the photographs next to one another to show Purdue the likeness.

"By God, it is the same, the middle piece without the blade, then!" he grinned. "Excellent."

"I found that as we expected the relic consists of various trace metals and the main components tied in, the gold, silver, and the notable iron nail. As you know . . ."

"Yes, the nail is reputed to be an iron nail from the cross," Purdue filled in her sentence, "although I think that is utter shite. It takes a huge iron spike to nail a man's wrists to wood and I venture to guess this is simply part of it."

"Or even just a nail, who knows," she nodded. "But the bottom line is that the metals are consistent with the composition of the Spear of Destiny."

"It's genuine?" Purdue shivered with anticipation.

"It is authentic, older than the Holy Lance examined in 2003, but I would have to wait for the carbon-dating data to process," Nina said.

A flash momentarily blinded Purdue as Sam snapped a picture of his face. The millionaire's facial expression was too good to ignore. It was a stunned look of absolute glee that filled his face at the historian's revelation and he wrapped Nina in his arms and shook her lightly in a tight embrace. Taken by surprise, all she could do was groan and smile and Sam wasted no time in also capturing that, if only to tease her incessantly for the rest of her days.

☼

Chapter 38

Wind brushed across the calm ocean as the night wore on. On Deep Sea One most of the crew was asleep, save for two engineers and one mechanic, who were thoroughly worried about what was afoot at the platform. Steadily the feeling of impending disaster lodged itself in their reality and by now they were discussing concrete escape maneuvers without unnecessarily alarming anyone. What they were told by Mr. Purdue's bodyguard, and what they had witnessed—the supernatural tides—had convinced them to prepare for something larger than a normal evacuation. What bothered the men, though, was the distinct silence on the matter from management and the fact that other crew members did not notice anything suspicious.

"I wonder what that bird was talking about when she said 'down there' is a laboratory with dangerous explosives," Tommy said, as he flung his boots aside and sat down on the comfortable chair next to the beds.

"I tell ye, I saw Peter go down the stairs with that big bloke and they just disappeared. I think Mr. Purdue's elevator must be the way down 'ere, but I dun't really want to go and see for meself, see?" Liam groaned, stretching out on his bed. "Don't get curious, son. If you get caught that's your ass. He'll fuckin' fire you right there."

"I know," Tommy said as his foot tapped on the balding carpeting that filled the floor of the room. The night was quiet for a change, apart from the breeze that raised and eased the watery darkness, which threatened to engulf the oil rig. All over the platform, loose signs and rubber flaps swung and twirled under the force of the wind, producing all manner of creaky sounds on the otherwise deserted place.