They started out of the library, heading into a long passageway that the brochure indicated was the way to the exit.
“Are you talking about the Dan Brown character’s idea of symbolism or the Catholic Church?” Holliday asked.
“I’m talking about the fact that symbols often mean a great deal to people. Christian relics are like that. The Shroud of Turin doesn’t have to be genuine for people to take great peace and solace from it. If it leads them to prayer or contemplation that’s enough sometimes. A relic doesn’t have to perform miracles. The discovery of the True Ark would bring many doubters back to the faith. That’s why it’s so important to find it.”
“Like seeing the Virgin Mary cooked into a taco shell?” Holliday said.
“Whatever toots your horn,” said Meg as they headed down a narrow flight of stairs. Coming from a nun the line was so unexpected that Holliday burst out laughing.
He glanced out the streaming arched window on his right, the laughter fading. The view through the old leaded glass panes was of the forest pathway up to the castle and the harbor beyond. At the foot of the harbor Holliday could make out the fat, insectlike shape of a black Westland Sea King helicopter, its eight-bladed rotor still spinning lazily. The big side door of the sinister-looking machine was open and men in black riot gear were pouring out, one after the other. Not a rescue mission after all.
“Jesus,” whispered Holliday.
“Pardon?” Meg asked, startled.
“Trouble,” said Holliday. “SO19. The Brit equivalent of a SWAT team.”
“Swat?” Meg said. Holliday’s eyebrow rose.
“Special Weapons and Tactics,” Holliday explained.
He stared out the window and down to the base of the wooded hill. Twenty men had formed up in two lines in front of the big black chopper.
“We’ve got to find another way out of here,” said Holliday. “And we’ve got to find it fast.”
“Maybe they’re here for something else,” suggested Meg, staring out the window now. Holliday let out a short barking laugh. Could she really be that naïve?
“They’re here for us, believe me.”
He tried to remember what he knew of the elite armed response police. He vaguely recalled that they carried Glock 17 automatic pistols, Heckler & Koch MP5 machine guns, HK G3 assault rifles and Benelli riot shotguns. They also carried stun grenades, Tasers, tear gas and pepper spray. Twenty of them were enough to start a small war. It was unbelievable overkill to capture two unarmed civilians. Someone had called in a fat favor, that was for sure. But who?
There was no time to think about that. Holliday tore the brochure out of Sister Meg’s hand and scanned it, his brain working furiously. The SO19 team would have been briefed and prepared, most likely using aerial photographs. It wasn’t hard these days; you could plan an operation like this using Google Earth.
The twenty men would have been divided into squads, two to flank and one up the center through the woods. There were three paths: the middle one through the woods, one to the left following the sloping terrain, and one to the right going down the steeper western side of the island stronghold, beginning at the old abbey ruins and the ornamental gardens. Ten men up the middle, through the woods, five each on the flanking paths. There was no way to escape.
“What do we do?” Meg asked.
Holliday’s first commanding officer had a primary rule in critical situations—make a decision as fast as you can. It may be the wrong one, but even a wrong decision is better than no decision at all.
“What they don’t expect,” said Holliday. He grabbed Meg by the hand and headed back the way they’d come, going back down the hallway, through the library and back into the chapel. They cut across the nave of the church, ran up the steps and out onto the south terrace, looking out to sea. It was still pouring rain and they were soaked in seconds.
There was a single stone staircase in the old battlement tower. It had to lead somewhere. Holliday stepped up, looking out and down, trying to orient himself, praying that there was a pathway down the southern cliff that could take them down to sea level. The tide was just beginning to turn; maybe a strip of beach would be exposed, allowing them to circle around.
He peered through the curtain of rain, holding his hand above his eyes. There was no obvious path, but maybe they could pick their way down over the tumbled litter of boulders and through the briars and gorse clinging to the precipitous, slightly sloping wall of stone. The clifflike wall of the castle had been well placed, facing out to sea, huge thirty- two-pounder cannon mounted in every second slot of the crenellation. If the castle was true to type there would be a secondary “postern gate” at the bottom of the battlement tower stairway. A postern gate that wasn’t shown in the brochure and wouldn’t be visible on any diagram or photograph used by the SO19 squad.
“This way,” urged Holliday. He took Meg by the hand again and led her to the battlement tower.
The stairway offered some protection from the rain and cold as they descended. At the bottom of the stairs, as Holliday had hoped, there was a hallway that followed the line of the castle wall. Fifty feet along the narrow tunnel was an iron-strapped arched door way.
Holliday took a deep breath, then pushed down on the latch and pulled. The well-oiled door opened without a sound. The present occupant of the castle, Lord Levan, clearly took care of his property. They stepped out into the rain again.
“Hurry,” said Holliday; reflexively he looked back over his shoulder, expecting to see a figure in black Kevlar step out and mow them down with his MP5. So far there was nothing.
“It’s slippery,” complained Meg as they threaded their way down the sloping field of boulders and loose, rain-slick stones.
“So is spilled blood,” answered Holliday. It took them almost fifteen minutes to climb down. Any minute now one of the armed response team would stick his head over the side of the castle wall and spot them.
At the base of the cliff the terrain flattened to a layered shingle of rock that ran down to another sandy shelf, which stood less than a foot above the present sea level and was obviously submerged at full high tide. The heavy rain had flattened out the sea and it was absolutely flat without any swell at all.
“Look!” Meg yelled, raising her voice over the drumming chatter of the pounding rain. She pointed. Two hundred feet farther along the dark slick shingle and barely visible in the drifting sheets of rain, Holliday could make out a set of stone steps that led down to the narrow beach.
The steps were roughly cut and probably as old as the castle. A smugglers’ beach, ensuring that his lordship in the castle had a ready supply of French brandy in both peace and war. A wreckers’ beach as well; Cornwall was famous for its wreckers and their famous prayer:
Oh please Lord, let us pray for all on the sea
But if there’s got to be wrecks, please send them to
we.
“Come on!” Holliday said. They ran down the plateaulike shingle, slipping and sliding on the rock until they reached the steps. They paused for a moment, getting their bearings, then started down. The visibility was getting worse by the minute. The only way Holliday knew they’d reached the bottom of the steps was when his foot crunched on the pea gravel of the beach. The rain slowed briefly, and out of the gloom, hanging between sea and sky, an apparition loomed.
A man in a classic old sou’wester and a sloping rubber rain hat stood in the center of an eighteen- foot lapstrake-planked lobster boat, hauling on a steel-bound wire jigging line with two canvas- gloved hands. An enormous gray-bellied conger eel of perhaps twenty pounds appeared on one of the triple barbed hooks.
Deftly the man doubled up the line around one elbow, taking the strain, freeing the other hand to pick up a three-foot gaff and catching the barbed hook in the snakelike creature’s gill, just behind the small stiff pectoral fin. Barely pausing, the man twisted his wrist with one smooth motion and flipped the two- foot-long conger into the bottom of the boat. The fisherman was no more than fifty feet from shore.
Holliday turned and looked back the way they’d come. The cliff and the castle high above were barely visible, no more than shadows in the rain. He couldn’t see them but he knew the armed response team was there, in the castle, going from room to room. There wasn’t much time. He turned back to the man in the fishing boat, hailing him.
“Hey!” Holliday yelled, cupping his hand beside his mouth. The fisherman paid no attention.
“The rain is coming in from the south,” called Meg. “He can’t hear you.”
“Unless he looks this way in the next minute or two we’re going to be screwed.”
In answer Meg extended her lower jaw a little, stuck her thumb and index fingers into the corners of her mouth and blew out a classic, three- note come-hither whistle. The fisherman looked up instantly, startled by the familiar school yard call, eyes scanning the shoreline. He had the dark-eyed, black-haired and faintly Basque good looks of what Holliday’s uncle Henry used to call Black Irish.
Holliday raised his arm and gestured for the man to bring the boat to shore. The fisherman balked at first, but Holliday dug into his pocket, pulled out his wallet and took out a hundred-euro note, waving it over his head. The fisherman shrugged, brought in the rest of his jigging line and then pulled up a small aluminum Danforth anchor. It seemed to take forever.
“Come on, come on!” Holliday whispered.
He gave another anxious look toward the castle battlements; still nothing. He turned back toward the dark waters of the English Channel.
The fisherman sat down, fitted the pintles of his oars into the locks and let the blades fall into the flat gray sea. He backwatered, turning the oars in opposite directions, and the boat turned smartly, bow toward the shore. The fisherman pulled strongly and the boat headed inshore, slicing through the water.
The man at the oars neared the beach, and after a single look back over his shoulder he backwatered the boat again, this time bringing it all the way around so the stern of the boat was facing Holliday and Meg, a tantalizing ten feet away. Holliday could see the neatly painted name on the transom:
Mary Deare
.
Even from a distance Holliday could see the twinkle in the man’s black eyes and the smiling narrow face. The fisherman reminded Holliday of Otter in
The Wind in the Willows
. Charm was second nature to a man like this.
“What can I do for you two soggy castaways?” The accent was definitely Irish but not the Dublin lilt that Holliday was familiar with. “Two” became “tuh” and “soggy” became “saggy” in a sleepy, easy drawl.
“Get us off the island. Fast!” Holliday called out.
“And wha’ whou’ tha’ be wirt to ya?” The fisherman grinned.
“Name your own price,” called back Holliday. “Just get us the hell out of here.”
“That’s the sort of price a poor fisherman wants to hear,” replied the man at the oars. “What’s the matter, the Devil himself on your tail?”
“Worse,” yelled back Holliday, hoping that the guy was as Irish as he sounded. “British Specials with machine guns.”
“Bugger me, Jack,” said the fisherman, eyes widening. “Is that for true?”
“In about two minutes they’re going to start coming down that cliff behind us on ropes like something out of James Bond, and that is most definitely for true,” answered Holliday.
“Never did have much use for the feckin’ limeys, ’specially the Bluebottles; climb aboard, friends, and step lively.” The fisherman gave three hard backstrokes with the oars and the stern of the boat ground its way onto the beach. Holliday and Meg stepped into the boat.
Half a dozen conger eels were writhing in an inch or so of rainwater in the bottom of the dinghy, mouths gasping for air, the long slimy bodies thrashing hard as they suffocated. Lying flaccidly between the footboards were small bulbous squid. The bait. Holliday and Meg sat down and Meg drew up her feet, looking at the giant, slug-shaped fish.
The fisherman pulled strongly on the oars and they moved off, the Irishman grimacing with exertion. Within two minutes the island had vanished behind the cloak of rain. A stubby rusted hulk began to take shape in front of them. It was no more than sixty feet long with a high wheelhouse amidships and a raised afterdeck behind. A short, dark funnel rose from the middle of the afterdeck. There was a mast crane and rig close to the bows; it was some kind of coastal trawler.
“What’s that?” Meg asked.
The fisherman glanced over his shoulder then turned back to face his passengers, his features smiling proudly.
“That’s me old girl the
Mary Deare
, last of the old Clyde puffers, and I’m her captain, Sean O’Keefe, yeah?”
17
“Aw and well, it’s just a culchie from Cork City, County Cork, that I am and all, yeah?” O’Keefe said, pronouncing Cork as “Caark” and adding the particularly Irish query at the end of his sentences. He was sitting comfortably in a padded swivel chair bolted to the steel deck of the wheelhouse as he piloted the
Mary Deare
southwest across Mount’s Bay toward Land’s End, running blind through the gray, dreary sheets of rain, one eye on the radar screen to his left, the other eye on the floating compass needle in front of the old- fashioned wooden wheel. Holliday stood at O’Keefe’s side, dressed in borrowed clothes from the Irishman’s wardrobe. They were close to the same size, although the arms on the red-checked flannel shirt were a little short.
“You run the ship alone?” Holliday asked. They’d been aboard for almost an hour and he’d seen no sign of any crew.
“
Mary
’s more a boat than a ship, yeah?” O’Keefe said. “But yes, there is no crew, if that’s what you’re asking. We’re quite alone.”
“Must be tough,” said Holliday.
“Not so much.
Mary
’s displacement is no more than an outsized cabin cruiser. It’s not that I do much heavy lifting, yeah? If there’s no harbor they send out a lighter and a crew to take off cargo, and if there is a harbor they send out a bum boat with a couple of mooring hands and there’s stevedores on the quayside. That’s the way of it, yeah? Puffer’s been going up and down the coasts along the Irish Sea for a hundred and sixty years. Victualling boats they called them, yeah? Supply boats in the Aran Isles and the Hebrides, out-of-the-way places. Everyone has to eat, yeah? They had a shallow draft and were narrow across the beam, less than eighteen feet so they could travel in the canals.”