Riptide (35 page)

Magnusen left, closing the door to Island One behind her without another word. St. John sighed and settled into the now-vacant
chair. Hatch turned to leave.

“I didn’t mean for you to go,” St. John said. “Just her. What a dreadful woman.” He shook his head. “Have you seen this yet?
It’s remarkable, really.”

“No,” Hatch said, “What is it?”

“The Water Pit and all its workings. Or rather, what’s been mapped so far.”

Hatch leaned closer. What looked like a nonsensical jumble of multicolored lines was, he realized, a three-dimensional wireframe
outline of the Pit, with depth gradations along one edge. St. John pressed a key and the whole complex began to move, the
Pit and its retinue of side shafts and tunnels rotating slowly in the ghostly blackness of the computer screen.

“My God,” Hatch breathed. “I had no idea it was so complex.”

“The mapping teams have been downloading their measurements into the computer twice a day. My job is to examine the Pit’s
architecture for any historical parallels. If I can find similarities to other constructions of the time, even other works
of Macallan’s, it may help us figure out what booby traps remain and how they can be defused. But I’m having a difficult time.
It’s hard not to get swept away by the complexity. And despite what I said a minute ago, I have only the faintest conception
of how this contraption works. But I’d rather swing from a gibbet than ask that woman for help.”

He struck a few keys. “Let’s see if we can clear away everything but the original works.” Most of the colored lines disappeared,
leaving only red. Now the diagram made more sense to Hatch: He could clearly see the big central shaft plunging into the earth.
At the hundred-foot level, a tunnel led to a large room: the vault where Wopner was killed. Deeper, near the bottom of the
Pit, six smaller tunnels angled away like the fingers of a hand; directly above, a large tunnel climbed sharply to the surface.
There was another narrow tunnel angling away from the bottom, plus a small array of side workings.

St. John pointed to the lower set. “Those are the six flood tunnels?”

“Six?”

“Yes. The five we found, plus one devilish tunnel that didn’t expel any dye during the test. Magnusen said something about
a clever hydrological backflow system. I didn’t understand half of it, to be honest.” He frowned. “Hmm. That tunnel right
above with the gentle slope is the Boston Shaft, which was built much later. It shouldn’t be displayed as part of the original
works.” A few more keystrokes, and the offending tunnel disappeared from the screen.

St. John glanced quickly at Hatch, then looked back at the screen again. “Now, this tunnel, the one that angles toward the
shore—” He swallowed. “It isn’t part of the central Pit, and it won’t be fully explored for some time yet. At first, I thought
it was the original back door to the Pit. But it seems to come to a waterproofed dead end about halfway to the shore. Perhaps
it’s somehow linked to the booby trap that your brother…” His voice trailed off awkwardly.

“I understand,” Hatch managed to say, his own voice sounding dry and unnaturally thin to his ears. He took a deep breath.
“They’re making every effort to explore it, correct?”

“Of course.” St. John stared at the computer screen. “You know, until three days ago I admired Macallan enormously. Now I
feel very differently. His design was brilliant, and I can’t blame him for wanting his revenge on the pirate who abducted
him. But he knew perfectly well this Pit could just as easily kill the innocent as the guilty.”

He began rotating the structure again. “Of course, the historian in me would say Macallan had every reason to believe Ockham
would live long enough to come back and spring the trap himself. But the Pit was designed to live on and on, guarding the
treasure long after Ockham died trying to get it out.”

He punched another key, and the diagram lit up with a forest of green lines. “Here you can see all the bracing and cribbing
in the main Pit. Four hundred thousand board feet of heart-of-oak. Enough to build two frigates. The structure was engineered
to last hundreds of years. Why do you suppose Macallan had to build his engine of death so strong? Now, if you rotate it this
way—” He poked another button, then another and another. “Damn,” he muttered as the structure began to whirl quickly around
the screen.

“Hey, you’re going to burn out the video RAM if you twirl that thing any faster!” Rankin, the geologist, stood in the doorway,
his bearlike form blotting out the hazy morning light. His blond beard was parted in a lopsided smile.

“Step away from that before you break it,” he joked, closing the door and coming toward the screen. Taking St. John’s seat,
he tapped a couple of keys and the image obediently stopped spinning, standing still on the screen as if at attention. “Anything
yet?” he asked the historian.

St. John shook his head. “It’s hard to see any obvious patterns. I can see parallels here and there to some of Macallan’s
hydraulic structures, but that’s about it.”

“Let’s turn it around the Z-axis at five revolutions per minute. See if it inspires us.” Rankin hit a few keys and the structure
on the screen began rotating again. He settled back in his chair, threw his arms behind his head, and glanced at Hatch. “It’s
pretty amazing, man. Seems your old architect may have had some help with his digging, in a manner of speaking.”

“What kind of help, exactly?”

Rankin winked. “From Mother Nature. The latest tomographic readings show that much of the original Pit was already in place
when the pirates arrived. In natural form, I mean. A huge vertical crack in the bedrock. That might even have been the reason
Ockham chose this island.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“There’s a huge amount of faulting and displacement in the metamorphic rock underlying the island.”

“Now I’m
sure
I don’t understand,” Hatch said.

“I’m talking about an intersection of fault planes right under the island. Planes that got pulled apart somehow.”

“So there were underground cavities all along?”

Rankin nodded. “Lots. Open cracks and fractures running every which way. Our friend Macallan merely widened and added as needed.
But the question I’m still struggling with is, why are they here, under this island only? Normally, you’d see that kind of
displacement on a wider scale. But here it seems restricted to Ragged Island.”

Their talk was interrupted as Neidelman stepped into the hut. He looked at each of them in turn, a smile flicking across his
face, then vanishing again. “Well, Malin, did Sandra give you the permission chit?”

“She did, thanks,” Hatch replied.

Neidelman turned toward Rankin. “Don’t stop on my account.”

“I was just helping St. John here with the 3-D model,” Rankin said.

Hatch looked from one to the other. The easygoing geologist suddenly seemed formal, on edge.
Has something happened between these two?
he wondered. Then he realized it was something in the way Neidelman was looking at them. He, too, felt an almost irresistible
urge to stammer out excuses, explanations for what they were doing.

“I see,” Neidelman said. “In that case, I have good news for you. The final set of measurements has been entered into the
network.”

“Great,” Rankin said, and tapped a few more keys. “Got it. I’m integrating now.”

As Hatch watched the screen, he saw small line segments being added to the diagram with blinding speed. In a second or two,
the download was complete. The image looked much the same, though even more densely woven than before.

St. John, looking over the geologist’s shoulder, sighed deeply. Rankin hit a few keys and the model began spinning slowly
on its vertical axis once again.

“Take out all but the very earliest structures,” St. John said.

Rankin tapped a few keys and countless tiny lines disappeared from the image on the screen. Now, Hatch could see just a depiction
of the central Pit itself.

“So the water traps were added toward the end,” Neidelman said. “Nothing we didn’t already know.”

“See any design elements common to Macallan’s other structures?” Rankin asked. “Or anything that might be a trap?”

St. John shook his head. “Remove everything but the wooden beams, please.” Some more tapping and a strangely skeletal image
appeared against the blackness of the screen.

The historian sucked in his breath with a sudden hiss.

“What is it?” Neidelman asked quickly.

There was a pause. Then St. John shook his head. “I don’t know.” He pointed to two places on the screen where several lines
intersected. “There’s something familiar about those joints, but I’m not sure what.”

They stood a moment, a silent semicircle, gazing at the screen.

“Perhaps this is a pointless exercise,” St. John went on. “I mean, what kind of parallels can we really hope to find to Macallan’s
other structures? What buildings are ten feet across and a hundred forty plus feet tall?”

“The leaning tower of Pisa?” Hatch suggested.

“Just a minute!” St. John interrupted sharply. He peered more closely at the screen. “Look at the symmetrical lines on the
left, there, and there. And look at those curved areas, one below the other. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they were transverse
arches.” He turned toward Neidelman. “Did you know the Pit narrowed at the halfway point?”

The Captain nodded. “From twelve feet across to about nine at the seventy-foot level.”

The historian began to trace points of contact across the wireframe model with his finger. “Yes,” he whispered. “That would
be the end of an upside-down column. And that would be the base of an interior buttress. And this arch, here, would concentrate
mass distribution at one point. The opposite of a normal arch.”

“Would you mind telling us what you’re talking about?” Neidelman said. His voice was calm, but Hatch could see sharp interest
kindling in his eyes.

St. John took a step away from the monitor, his face full of wonder. “It makes perfect sense. Deep and narrow like that… and
Macallan was a religious architect, after all…” His voice trailed off.

“What, man?” Neidelman hissed.

St. John turned his large calf eyes to Rankin. “Rotate the Y-axis 180 degrees.”

Rankin obliged, and the diagram on the screen rotated into an upside-down position. Now the outline of the Water Pit stood
upright, frozen on the screen, a glowing red skeleton of lines.

Suddenly there was a sharp intake of breath from the Captain.

“My God,” he breathed. “It’s a cathedral.”

The historian nodded, a triumphant smile on his face. “Macallan designed what he knew best. The Water Pit is nothing but a
spire. A bloody upside-down cathedral spire.”

T
he attic was more or less as Hatch remembered it: cluttered to overflowing with the kind of flotsam and jetsam families collect
over decades of accumulated life. The dormer windows let in a feeble stream of afternoon light, which was quickly drowned
in the gloomy stacks of dark furniture, old wardrobes and bedsteads, hat racks and boxes, and stacks of chairs. As Hatch stepped
off the last step onto the worn boards, the heat, dust, and smell of mothballs brought back a single memory with razor sharpness:
playing hide and seek under the eaves with his brother, rain drumming loudly on the roof.

He took a deep breath, then moved forward cautiously, fearful of upsetting something or making a loud noise. Somehow, this
storehouse of memories was now a holy place, and he almost felt like a trespasser, violating its sanctuary.

With the surveying of the original Pit now completed by the mapping teams, and an insurance adjuster due on the island in
the afternoon, Neidelman had little choice but to call a half-day halt to activity. Malin took the opportunity to head home
for a bite of lunch and perhaps a bit of research. He remembered a large picture book,
The Great Cathedrals of Europe,
that had once been his great-aunt’s. With any luck, he’d find it among the boxes of books that his mother had carefully stowed
away in the attic. He wanted a private chance to understand, a little better, exactly what this discovery of St. John’s meant.

He made his way through the clutter, barking one shin on a scuffed bumper-pool table and almost upsetting a hoary old Victrola,
precariously balanced on a box full of 78s. He carefully replaced the Victrola, then glanced at the old records, scratched
and worn to mere whispers of their original tunes: “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” “The Varsity Drag,” “Let’s Misbehave,” Bing Crosby
and the Andrews Sisters riffing to “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby.” He remembered how his father insisted on playing the
ancient thing on summer evenings, the raucous old show tunes and dance numbers floating incongruously over the yard and down
toward the pebbled shore.

In the dim light of the attic, he could make out the great carved maple headboard of the family bed, leaning against a far
corner. It had been presented by his great-grandfather to his great-grandmother on their wedding day.
Interesting present,
he thought to himself.