The Lucifer Gospel (24 page)

“Complicated,” murmured Hilts.

“Ever talk to the legal department of a publishing company? Or someone from the staff of Oprah? You’ve got to cover your ass, sir, believe me.” He laughed, but the humor had a bitter tinge to it. “I haven’t written a new book in years, but I still have to talk to my agent at least twice a week and my lawyer almost as often. Somebody’s always trying to sue me. The last time it was an illiterate lunatic from the Fulton Fish Market who thought that I’d based one of my unsavory characters on his life story.”

“How did that turn out for you?”

“My lawyer suggested to his lawyer that if his client would be willing to admit in public to doing some of the unsavory things my character had done, then he might have a case, and maybe twenty to life in Ossining as well.”

“So what do you think really happened to Peter Devereaux?” Finn asked, reining in the writer’s slightly meandering story. “Do you think there was any real connection between him and this Kerzner fellow?”

Mills took another sip of iced tea and leaned back against the pale couch cushions. “All I know for sure is that they both have suspicious backgrounds and that neither one of them was rescued before the hurricane and brought to the naval station in Key West.” He gestured toward the files on the coffee table. “I’ve got the list right there.”

“What about this Bishop Principe, is he on the list?”

“Yes. He was one of the ones who died during the fire.”

“What do you think happened to them?” Finn asked.

The old writer scratched delicately at his scalp, as though he was afraid of dislodging the last few wisps of hair floating almost invisibly across it. “Well, dear, before you and your pilot friend came along and screwed up my plot with your tall tale, I’d have said that they simply died in the explosion or the subsequent fire and were overlooked, but now I’m not so sure.”

“Somebody must have done a head count,” said Hilts. “You’d think it would have been a standard safety procedure.”

“It was,” replied Mills. “I had a lengthy telephone conversation with Capitan Francisco Crevicas, the master of the
Acosta Star
. He ran the check himself. A party of crew members checked every stateroom, every deck. Everyone was accounted for. He said that after everyone was off they stayed with the ship for more than an hour. He said by then some of the deck plates were glowing cherry red from the flames and paint was peeling off the hull in huge chunks. According to him no one could have survived.”

“Where was this?”

“Twenty miles south and slightly east of Curley Cut Cays. That’s the tip of Andros Island. According to the captain the fire broke out just as they were coming off the Tongue of the Ocean.”

“What did I tell you?” said Tucker Noe, speaking for the first time since they’d arrived.

“If you learn nothing else from your experience here,” said Mills, “learn that Bonefish Tucker Noe is always correct, right, Mr. Noe?”

“Always key-wreck, that’s key-wreck, Mistah Mills,” the old man answered with a smile and an outrageously put-on Bahamian accent.

Mills swooshed the ice cubes around in his empty glass. “You’ve asked me a lot of questions,” he said, looking at Finn. “Now I’d like to ask a few of my own.”

“Shoot,” said Finn. She glanced at Hilts, sitting beside her across from the white-haired writer. “We’ve got nothing to hide.”

“As the unfortunate Mr. Lennon once said, everyone’s got something to hide,” responded Mills. “But that aside, can you tell me why you think your Mr. Adamson would be pursuing you so energetically. I met the man once or twice at cocktail parties and charity functions. He never struck me as being a homicidal maniac. You seem to be saying that the man is involved in some long-running criminal conspiracy involving stolen religious artifacts. It’s a little far-fetched, you’ll have to admit.”

Hilts answered. “Rolf Adamson comes from a long line of hyper-Christians. In his book, if it’s done in the name of Christ, it’s automatically ”right.’ ”

Mills smiled. “Hyper-Christian. Interesting term. You think he’s on some sort of crusade?”

“It worked for Richard the Lionheart. In his mind some kind of groundswell response to terrorism is just what the doctor ordered.”

“Fire with fire, that sort of thing?”

“And an eye for an eye.”

“Imperialism disguised as self-defense?”

“Something like that. We can invade everyone from Grenada to Afghanistan, but if anyone spills a drop of our blood, it’s terrorism.”

“Now we’re talking politics,” Mills said and smiled.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if politics wasn’t what it’s all about,” said Hilts. “Big power, big money, big politics.”

“Adamson?”

“Why not?” Hilts shrugged. “He uses this so-called Lucifer Gospel as a political device to rally around. The whole theory he’s putting out is that Christ spent his last days in the real promised land, America, which by definition makes Americans the real Chosen People.”

“Given the time frame it would probably make the chosen people members of the Algonquian tribe, if my knowledge of Native people is reliable.”

“The people from the Bible Belt could overlook that,” said Hilts. “Christ was an American; quite a platform for a fundamentalist political party. According to Adamson, the Lucifer Gospel is the one thing the Bible is missing: the teachings of Christ in his own words.”

“You truly think that’s what this is about?”

“Adamson’s got the background for it, and the ambition. He also has the money to make it happen. We’ve been heading in this direction since Reagan. Getting the United States back to its Puritan, witch-burning roots.”

“It’s still very hard to believe. According to you this man Hisnawi is involved. A Libyan, a Muslim. How do you explain that?”

“The same way you explain Iran, Iraq, even Venezuela and Cuba. Oil. Money. A deal. Who knows? Adamson’s got a lot of money and he’s been spreading it around. He got the license to launch a new dig in the desert for a reason, and it wasn’t to locate the remains of a Coptic monastery. Maybe Hisnawi wants to be the next dictator of Libya after he takes out Qaddafi, who’s getting pretty long in the tooth these days, I might add.”

“You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?” said Mills.

Hilts nodded. “I’ve given it a lot of thought.”

“And you, Miss Ryan, where do you fit into all of this?”

“I’m not sure. At first I thought it might just have been a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now I’m not so sure.”

“You believe Mr. Hilts’s story?”

“I’m still with him, aren’t I? And Simpson’s involvement seems to be through me, or my father. I don’t have all the answers yet.”

“And you think those answers might be on the
Acosta Star
?”

“Some of them. One thing I do know is that we’re in a hurry. The passports we’re using aren’t going to last forever. We need proof to take to the authorities. At least something to show that we didn’t have anything to do with Vergadora’s murder. The ship is the next step, that much is clear.”

“I don’t think your Martin Kerzner with the Canadian passport and Peter Devereaux not turning up as a survivor is a coincidence any more than you do, Mr. Mills.” Hilts offered his own smile. “And I think you’re curious as hell to find out.”

The writer lifted his glass, took one of the ice cubes and cracked it between a set of remarkably strong teeth for a man of his years. He chewed on the broken chips for a moment, then swallowed. He put the glass down on the table again with a hard clunk.

“We’ll need something stronger than iced tea and lemon.” He grinned, then turned and looked back over his shoulder. Almost by magic Arthur the servant immediately appeared.

“Yes, sir?” the man said, shimmering into the room.

“Do we have any Kaliks in the refrigerator, Arthur?”

“I’m sure we do, sir.”

“Then why don’t you fetch us some,” said Mills. “Then my new friends and I can get down to work.”

The seaplane flew low over the dark, rich blue of the Caribbean at just over a hundred knots, the sculpted boat hull of the fuselage less than five hundred feet above the calm rolling sea. The sky above the high-set wings was almost perfectly clear, and the horizon ahead was a sharp, steady line except for a speeding dark island of squall far to the west.

Daffy
’s two big Lycoming engines filled the cockpit with a steady, powerful roar, and the plane seemed to fly by itself. Hilts’s fingers on the old-fashioned throw-over yoke barely exerted any pressure, his free hand only rarely reaching up to the overhead knobs and throttles to make an occasional adjustment. They were an hour and a half out of Hollaback Cay, heading south above the Tongue of the Ocean.

They’d spent the better part of a week preparing for their dive on the
Acosta Star,
shuttling back and forth between Hollaback Cay and Nassau gathering equipment, including the bright yellow Inspiration Closed Circuit Rebreathers packed into the cargo area behind them. They’d gone to the library and museum on Shirley Street and studied the archives files of the
Nassau Guardian,
researching the
Acosta Star
and the details of her sinking almost fifty years before. They also spent a great deal of time with Tucker Noe, taking notes about the area immediately surrounding the dive site and consulting Lyman Mills’s personal chart library. According to the old bonefish guide the ship wouldn’t be hard to find if they knew what to look for; he’d taken accurate bearings from the old lighthouse, and while the sunken hull was hidden in the lee of the reef for twenty-three hours a day, there were several identifying markers on the reef itself that, seen from the air, would enable them to pinpoint the location to within a few hundred yards. It was Noe’s estimation that a dive of only forty feet or so would put them on the main deck of the ship.

Over the years Lyman Mills had collected an impressive collection of
Acosta Star
memorabilia, including old cruise brochures, schedules, and passenger lists, engineering drawings of the ship’s construction, and half a dozen photo albums from passengers who’d cruised on the ship at various times during her career. One of the most useful of these had been a detailed set of scrapbooks that once belonged to Paulus Boegarts, or Paul Bogart, as he liked to be called, a half Dutch, half American who’d been professionally associated with the ship through almost all of her incarnations. Using all of this information Finn, Hilts, Lyman Mills, and Tucker Noe spent several days and nights developing a strategy for the underwater penetration of the vessel.

The M.V.
Acosta Star
was by far the largest vessel ever to have sunk in the Caribbean. At 758 feet overall and 37,000 gross tons, she was 150 feet longer and 1,800 tons heavier than her nearest rival, the
Bianca C.,
which had gone down just off the coast of Grenada. By wreck diving standards the
Acosta Star
was a monster, and like any monster it would have to be treated with caution, care, and a great deal of respect. A ship a hundred feet wide and the length of two and a half football fields would have been confusing in broad daylight with a deck plan; after fifty years and a hundred feet down in the deep-seas gloom, the interior of the vessel was going to be a very dark, dangerous, sharp-edged and coral-encrusted labyrinth.

In theory the dive didn’t pose any insoluble problems. The bottom depth was a hundred feet in clear water, an easy depth even for simple scuba. With rebreathers they would have almost triple the time they’d have with ordinary tanks—better than three hours—and with their constant mix of oxygen and nitrogen, the rebreathers gave them even more time by removing the need to decompress on the way up. They’d be wearing full face masks with Ocean Technology Buddy Phones to let them communicate underwater and have the best tank-mounted and handheld lighting units available. They even had a GEM systems portable magnetometer that would ping for the wreck, find it, and instantly provide its exact location via the Global Positioning System.

According to the passenger lists, Bishop Principe had taken the Gelderland Deluxe Suite on the Upper Promenade Deck. Pierre DeVaux, alias Peter Devereaux, had occupied cabin A-305, one level below the Main Deck on the port, or left, side of the ship, about one hundred and fifty feet from the bow of the ship and two decks below Bishop Principe. Given the way the ship had reportedly gone down, this would put Devereaux’s cabin on the “outer,” ocean side of the reef. Martin Kerzner, the supposed Israeli Intelligence agent traveling on the false Canadian passport, had been on the deck below Devereaux in cabin B-616 on the inner, or reef side of the ship. To go from one cabin to the other would involve entering the ship through one of the main hull hatches leading into the
Acosta Star
’s central lobby, located on either side of the ship. From there they would follow the wide lobby stairs up to Bishop Principe’s suite on the Upper Promenade Deck, then down to Devereaux’s cabin on A Deck. If necessary they could then use the lobby stairs again to descend to B Deck.

If the stairs were blocked by debris, they had two alternate routes: one down the purser’s companionway, the other using one of the two elevator shafts on the port and starboard sides of the lobby. Theoretically it was a walk in the park.

“You realize that realistically this whole thing is insane, don’t you?” Hilts said. “You’ve never done any wreck diving at all.”

“I used to free dive into cenotes in the jungles of Quintana Roo. Two hundred feet,” Finn countered. “How long can you hold your breath, Hilts?”

“That’s not the point,” the pilot answered.

“That’s exactly the point. I’ve used scuba and rebreathers, my dive limit is around two hundred and fifty feet, and on top of that I’ve done cave diving, which is at least as complicated as wreck diving, and you know it.”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“For a woman? Is that what you’re saying?” Finn queried hotly.

“No, of course not, but…”

“No buts.”

“I’ll need someone on the surface.”