The Lucifer Gospel (29 page)

“Simpson.”

“Simpson.” Adamson nodded. “The Lucifer Gospel, had it surfaced at that time, could have seriously altered the balance of power immediately prior to World War Two. It could have crippled the Vatican’s newly acquired tax base and it could have brought America into the war at least a year, if not two years, earlier.”

“Water under the bridge,” commented Hilts.

“Not really. When DeVaux reappeared in 1959 with news of the Gospel, the Cold War was at its height. The revelation of the Gospel’s existence and its existence within the United States would have had an enormous impact. Jack Kennedy, should you need reminding, was a Catholic.”

“The Pope killed Kennedy?” Hilts laughed. “That’s a new one!”

“His Catholicism may well have been a contributing factor to his death.”

“You think this lost Gospel is still that important?”

“Our own government thought so, Miss Ryan. DeVaux died for it on the Acosta Star.”

“Kerzner, the Canadian?” said Finn, remembering Lyman Mills’s theory.

“Your father was his control officer, Miss Ryan. Kerzner was CIA. His real name was Joseph Turner. He wasn’t Canadian, of course, but by then DeVaux was an American university professor and the Company’s mandate didn’t include assassinating our own people, as you are well aware, Mr. Hilts. Not back then, at any rate. His job was to find out what DeVaux was selling the bishop, and barring that, to kill both of them, which he did. Now it’s your turn.”

“We didn’t find anything either,” said Finn.

“That remains to be seen,” said Adamson. He took a small sip from his glass. “Not that it matters to you.” A pair of heavyset men in dark clothing appeared at the doorway to the big cabin.

“What are you going to do to us?” asked Finn.

“I’m not going to do anything, Miss Ryan, God is.”

By the time they were taken out onto the rear deck of the yacht, the rain was coming down in ragged torrents and the visibility was nonexistent. The ocean around the boat had been torn to ribbons, a mass of broken, spume-flecked chop and huge rolling waves that vanished in the sodden curtain of rain to break like thunder in the hidden distance. The sky overhead was a black roiling mass of clouds driven to madness.

“The robes, please,” said Adamson. They stripped them off, leaving them in their bathing suits. There was no sign of their dive vests or other equipment. The inflatable had vanished and the float plane was gone. “Follow the sound of the breakers. That’s Cay Lobos,” said Adamson, shouting to make himself heard over the sound of the storm. “ Micah, verse three, chapter three:
‘Who also eat the flesh of my people, and flay their skin from off them; and they break their bones, and chop them in pieces, as for the pot, and as flesh within the caldron.’
That’s what the coral is going to do to you, and if that’s not enough, the highest point on the island is twelve feet above sea level. During the last half dozen hurricanes in this area the storm surge was twice that. You two are about to have an unfortunate accident.”

“Why are you doing this?” Finn asked, shivering. “You have the medallion. Without it we have no proof of anything. You have what you wanted.”

“I need your silence, just as your father needed DeVaux’s silence and DeVaux needed Pedrazzi’s. The secret of the Lucifer Gospel can’t be shared.” He waved the shotgun in his hands. “Down onto the swim platform, please.” Finn looked over the side. Four steps down, the wide lip of the teak-decked swim platform jutted out from the rear of the yacht. The breaking seas curled over it in long steady sweeps. Beyond that the waves were a tangled hell. Once they went overboard they wouldn’t stand a chance.

“What if we refuse, then what?” asked Hilts.

“Then I’ll do the Lord’s work for him and blow your brains out,” answered Adamson, hefting the shotgun. “The barracuda won’t mind the mess and neither will the sharks. Up to you.” He motioned with the pump gun again. “Over you go.”

Hilts grabbed Finn by the wrist and pulled her toward him. “When we go over don’t try to stick with me and don’t try and help me if you see I’m in trouble. Take care of yourself, forget about anything else.” He turned, gave Adamson the finger and went down onto the platform. Within seconds a roller swept him off his feet and he vanished. Finn went after him and stepped down onto the platform, taking a deep lungful of air as she did so. Instantly she was swallowed by the darkness of the sea.

The first of the huge rollers pulled her down and under in a single, ice-cold moment of absolute terror. As a child she’d once been briefly caught by an undertow in the warm waters off Cancun, but she’d instantly been snatched to safety, plucked out of the water by the strong hand of her ever-vigilant father. There was no one to save her now. The deadly surge grabbed her in its watery fist and pulled her relentlessly toward the bottom.

Finally she broke free of the wave’s terrible grip and gulped in huge gasping lungfuls of air, retching seawater, feeling the tug of the next wave as she was swept forward and down, with barely enough time to take a breath before the deluge swallowed her again. Once more she was pressed down, thrown onto the reef, the rough sand and coral tearing at her skin, and once more, exhausted, she clawed her way to the surface for another retching breath.

A third wave took her, but this time instead of coral there was only sand on the sloping bottom, and she barely had to swim at all before she reached the surface. Her feet stumbled and she threw herself forward with the last of her strength, staggering as the sea sucked back from the shore of the tiny island in a rushing rip current, strong enough to bring her to her knees. She crawled, rose to her feet again and plunged on, knees buckling, in despair because she knew in some distant corner of her mind that another wave as strong as the first could still steal her life away with salvation and survival so tantalizingly near.

She staggered again in the treacherous sand that dragged at her heels and almost toppled her over. She took another step and then another, blinking in the slanting, blinding rain. Ahead, farther up the strip of shining beach, was a darker line of a few trees, fan palms and coconuts, their trunks bent away from the howling wind and the lashing rain, unripe fruit torn away, crashing away in the teeth of the storm like cannonballs. Finn’s breath came in ragged gasps and her legs were like deadweights, but at least she was free of the mad, clutching surf that broke behind her now like crashing thunder.

Struggling higher up the sandy slope she finally reached a point above the wrack and turned back to the sea, sinking down exhausted to her knees. The straps of her one-piece swimsuit were torn. She was still badly frightened, but wept with relief as she stared into the shrieking nightmare of the rising hurricane. She was alive.

Through the rain she could see the heaving broken line of frothing white that marked the reef, but nothing more. True to his word, Adamson had run before the wind and disappeared. Suddenly she felt something touch her shoulder and she turned, screaming. She whirled, heart in her throat. It was Hilts, a gash on his forehead streaming blood, his hair plastered down, grinning like a lunatic. He had survived as well.

“Misery acquaints man with strange bedfellows!” he said, yelling happily into her ear.

“What are you talking about!?”

“Adamson’s not the only one who can quote things!” Hilts yelled. “How about:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.”

“The Bible?” asked Finn.

“Shakespeare,” said Hilts. “Miss Slynn’s grade-nine English class.
The Tempest.
Had to learn the whole damn play. First time it’s ever come in handy.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Come on,” he said. “Even Caliban knew to get in out of the storm.”

Finn woke to the terrible, windborne crying of the gulls and the savage echo of broken surf pounding on the reef. She vaguely recalled the night before in brief images and sensations: the pressure of the mounting wind, the monstrous sounds of nature unleashed, the harsh, pervasive slanting rain so powerful at times it almost stole her breath. The sound of water swirling at her feet. The knowledge that there was no hope left.

Instead of hope there had been the fickle randomness of storms. Late in the night and early the following day the wind had veered a mere two points in a new direction, the hurricane had shifted its wheeling carnage overhead and slipped away, and finally the waters had receded. In the cold lens of the NOAA cameras roughly twenty-three thousand miles overhead, the pinwheel of the hurricane cloud began to shred and tear.

Opening her eyes, it took her a moment to realize that she was lying just inside the entrance to the abandoned hut next to the lighthouse. The dead cat was gone and so was most of the litter. The cat’s ghost still occupied the hut with its musky, dead animal odor. The strap on her bathing suit had been repaired with a neat reef knot. There was no sign of Hilts. Finn suddenly realized that she had a splitting headache. She was also cold.

Shivering, she sat up. She looked around. Somehow the sheet-metal roof of the hut had managed to stay nailed to the rafters, and it was obvious that Adamson’s prediction about the island being covered by the storm surge had not been borne out because, thankfully, she was high and dry.

Finn stood up, still groggy, and ducked through the entrance. The sky was hammered blue, the sun a blinding disk as it rose in the east, and the sea was like liquid metal, dark lines of heavy breakers destroying themselves loudly against the line of the invisible reef.

There was a strange, unpleasant taste in the air, like hot blood on tin or what she imagined death by electrocution would smell like. She made her way down to the spot where the marram grass met the sand and dropped down, hugging her knees as she stared out to sea. She realized that she was both hungry and terribly thirsty. She heard a faint sound and turned; Hilts was approaching from down the beach, hauling what seemed to be their flotation vests behind him.

In his other hand he was dragging the limp body of a large, brownish-gray bird with a long sharp beak and legs like sticks. The front of his once white T-shirt was stained pink with his own blood, and the gash in his forehead had scabbed over in a horrible-looking mass of caked blood and serum. His lips were bruised and covered with a cracked white layer of salt. His eyes looked bloodshot and feverish but he was smiling.

“Finished your beauty nap?”

“I’m thirsty,” she said, her voice croaking.

“Go back to the lighthouse. There’s a few puddles around the base. Drink up now because they’ll evaporate soon enough, and I couldn’t find anything to store water in.” He lifted the dead bird by the neck. “I’m going back to the hut. Start a fire with one of the vest flares. Cook up old Ichabod here. Found him with a broken neck up the beach a ways. We might die of thirst but at least we won’t starve to death while we’re doing it.” He gave her a grin, then plodded up the beach, heading for the hut. Finn climbed to her feet and headed for the lighthouse at the other end of the narrow little spit of land.

By the time she drank her fill and returned to the hut Hilts had already gathered driftwood and debris and had a blazing fire going, initiated by one of the emergency flares in the dive vests. He was on his knees in the sand in front of the hut, busily gutting the large, heronlike bird with his vest knife. He held up the blood-covered, razor-sharp tool and smiled.

“Adamson must have thrown the vests in for authenticity.”

“Maybe he’ll come back to see if we survived,” said Finn. “Did you ever think about that?”

“Why would he bother?” Hilts said. He scooped the bird’s entrails into his hand, pulled hard, then threw the guts downwind along the sand. The gulls screaming above them in the air dropped out of the sky and began to tear at the offal like vultures.

“The fact that we survived last night at all is a miracle. We’re not going to last for very long without water. Unless Fidel’s navy finds us or we’re visited by your friendly neighborhood cocaine runner, we’re pretty much screwed.” He found a long piece of driftwood, speared one end into the bird’s stomach cavity, and laid it across the flames. The feathers began to smoke and burn. It smelled horrible.

“That’s disgusting,” said Finn.

“That’s lunch,” Hilts answered.

After the bird had spent almost an hour in the flames, Finn tried the charred sour meat, and after throwing up she returned to the steadily drying puddles that lay around the concrete pad of the lighthouse in a gleaming string of little lakes, fading like mirages as the Caribbean sun rose overhead. She dragged herself back to the fire in front of the hut. The remains of the heron carcass had been discreetly removed. Hilts now had the dive vests laid out on the sand and was picking them over.

“Six flares, two knives, a reel of safety line we could maybe use for fishing if it wasn’t so big, an aluminum mirror, two personal first aid kits, two dive computers, a Garmin IPX7-Z series submersible GPS unit, and some shark repellant. They always seem to have more useful stuff on those reality TV shows.” He put a hand to his mouth in mock horror, eyes widening. “Could it be that reality TV isn’t real after all?”

“I’m not quite sure what you’re so happy about.”

“It’s all relative. We could be dead but we’re not.”

“But we soon will be by the sound of it.”

“Maybe the Buff Divers will show up from Katy, Texas, you never know.” He shrugged. “Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” he added philosophically.

“The man who said that also said, ’walk sober off; before a sprightlier age comes tittering on, and shoves you from the stage,’ ” said Finn.

“Show-off,” replied Hilts. He squatted in front of his little pile of booty like one of the dealers in the City of the Dead bazaar in Cairo.

“I’ve never really understood how GPS works,” said Finn, staring at the exotic Garmin unit that looked like an outsized bright yellow cell phone in the pile.