There was almost no doubt that the men who’d attacked the cottage were more of the mysterious Blackhawk Security bunch, but according to Quince he was just a hired gun as well. But groups like Blackhawk were usually hired by governments, or at the very least by giant multinational corporations. In fact, they were usually
owned
by multinational corporations.
So what multinational was interested in a piece of Middle Ages mythology to the extent that they’d send in people like Quince and his heavies or the Blackhawk people? It just didn’t make any sense.
Someone had been on their tail since the bald guy who’d followed them all the way from Mont Saint-Michel to Prague. It was almost as if they knew more about the so-called True Ark than he and Meg did.
He wrestled with the problem all the way across the Canadian provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick and into Nova Scotia, but couldn’t figure out a reasonable solution. By the time they arrived in Halifax at three thirty the following afternoon, the only conclusion Holliday had reached was that somewhere along the line he’d overlooked something, the missing puzzle piece that solved the problem.
Halifax itself had left behind much of its maritime past and now concentrated on being a government center and a modern, well-heeled tourist trap complete with menus without prices, obsequious waiters who gave you their first name before they took your order, a variety of city tours in assorted double-decker buses, and even a fleet of Vietnam War Lark amphibians that lumbered across the city and into the waters of the harbor, their aluminum hulls painted with bright green and yellow frogs.
Unfortunately, real frogs would never survive in the harbor. Eighty-two million gallons of raw sewage was pumped into the water each day due to a malfunctioning water treatment plant, and giant deodorant pucks were now being used to control the rank odor that regularly swept across the revitalized waterfront, complete with its hotels and casinos.
Eventually Holliday and Meg found what they were looking for on the other side of the wide harbor channel in the town of Dartmouth, Halifax’s industrial heart and the Atlantic home of the Canadian navy. Dartmouth had always been the rough edge of Halifax, far from maritime society, such as it was. There were no tourist attractions or tony restaurants in Dartmouth, but there were plenty of seafaring men who worked the docks and the navy yards and more than a few waterfront bars to slake their thirst after a long day of work.
The Admiral Benbow was located on a side street halfway up a steep hill that led up from the waterfront at Tuft’s Cove, one of a dozen forgotten commercial byways on the Dartmouth waterfront. Once upon a time Tuft’s Cove had been a thriving harbor for local lobstermen, but the big companies had long since made small-scale lobstering a marginal profession at best, and with the economy the way it was, it was easier to go on welfare than it was to waste gas and risk your life roaming around on the Atlantic.
Oddly, the Benbow, named after Jim Hawkins’s pub in
Treasure Island
, had adopted a cowboy theme, complete with waitresses in spurs, bright yellow hot pants and ten-gallon hats, something called the Gal Corral for line dancing and a bull ride named Old Tex, which was restricted to young ladies with bust sizes exceeding thirty-six inches. Even the food on the bar menu had been westernized. Chili dogs were “snake bites,” jalapeño fries were “critter fritters,” and chicken wings were “wang dang thangs.” According to a prominent sign over the bar, wang dang thangs were complimentary with a pitcher of draft between seven and midnight on Wednesdays. The big, high- ceilinged, onetime net warehouse had been redecorated within an inch of its life to look like the inside of a barn, but the lingering smell of fish was still there. It was early evening and the place was jammed. Big-breasted waitresses in cowboy boots hauled foaming pitchers of beer, Old Tex was going full steam ahead and the Gal Corral was full of lonely, generally plain women line dancing like rows of cowgirl penguins trying to attract a mate. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
“I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this,” said Meg as they sat down at the bar. She was dressed in reasonably fashionable jeans and a man’s white shirt with the tails out, but the look of disapproval on her face said it all: this was not a woman who spent a lot of time in bars.
“You don’t
look
very comfortable with it, either,” said Holliday. “You’d better lighten up or this isn’t going to work.”
“Why do we have to come to a place like this to find a boat?” Meg asked.
A bartender wearing a
Cross the Line Your Ass is Mine
T-shirt with a picture of a mean-looking bull behind a barbed-wire fence on it took their orders; a virgin Caesar for Meg, which seemed to be a uniquely Canadian version of a Bloody Mary that used clam juice instead of tomato juice, and a local Glen Breton straight up for Holliday. Holliday waited for their drinks to arrive before answering the question. Giant speakers suddenly started belting out a bawling rendition of Stompin’ Tom Connors’s “Bud the Spud,” a song about a potato trucker.
“We went over it on the train,” said Holliday. “This Sable Island place is protected. You can’t legally make landfall there, so a legitimate hired boat wouldn’t take you; you’d get your boat confiscated. But it’s almost impossible to land a boat there anyway because of the currents and the tides; that’s why anyone who does go to the island flies in.”
“Then we rent a plane.”
“I can’t fly. Can you?”
“As a matter of fact, I can,” she said primly. “Light planes anyway. I got my license when I was a kid. Single engines. My dad owned a Piper Cherokee.”
“When was the last time you flew?”
“A while ago.”
“How long is a while?”
Meg shrugged. “High school.”
“No, thanks. The planes they use have special soft wheels for landing on the beach. You up for landing on sand?”
“I guess not.”
“So it’s a boat.”
“But why here?”
“Because that guy I was talking to at the last place suggested we come here.”
The last place was a hole- in-the-wall called Buddy’s Bar and Grill back in Bedford Basin at the extreme end of the harbor. The owner had been surprisingly specific; after giving Holliday and Meg a once-over he told them that if you ever wanted things moved between point A and point B without government interference, go to the Benbow and wait for Arnie Gallant.
Arnie’s nickname was Super Mario, and for good reason; he was squat, dark, broad-shouldered and had a heavy Groucho Marx mustache, just like the character in the video game, and to make the comparison even closer he wore brown workman’s coveralls most of the time. Apparently Arnie Gallant loved wang dang thangs more than life itself, and this being Wednesday evening he was almost sure to make an appearance.
Holliday had taken the time to find a book about Sable Island at a bookstore near their hotel in Toronto and he’d read it on board the train to Halifax. The book was called
A Dune Adrift
and chronicled the life and times of the deadly sandbar from its glacial origins to the present.
It was a fascinating story, but it certainly wasn’t a pleasant one. The shifting crescent of sand, once a hundred miles long, was located at the center of every dangerous current and wind system in the Atlantic, perched on the edge of the continental shelf, its hidden shallows directly in the path of burgeoning hurricanes and perfect storms blowing in off the Grand Banks and Bermuda, a lurking trap for all sorts of shipping since man first crossed the Atlantic Ocean. A lot of lives and dreams had ended on Sable Island.
The place sounded decidedly unpleasant, and the more Holliday read the less he wanted to go there. If their quest for the True Ark hadn’t stirred up such a deadly maelstrom of interest ensnaring him, Holliday would have opted out of the chase long ago. Now it was too late; he’d gone too far and was in too deep to give up. He still wasn’t sure he believed in the existence of the ark, but other people—powerful ones—sure as hell did.
“Keith’s IPA, my love, and a bucket of thangs.” A man in his late forties or early fifties plopped himself down on the bar stool next to Holliday. He looked like a scaled-down version of a defensive tackle: all shoulders and chest. He had dark curly hair, graying at the temples, a bull neck, big hands and a bushy mustache that was almost a joke. He wore bright red half-glass bifocals and his black eyes twinkled as though he’d just told a particularly dirty joke. His Keith’s arrived in a stubby bottle without an accompanying glass and he took a long draw. He put down the bottle with a contented sigh and sucked the foam out of his mustache with his lower lip. He glanced at Holliday.
“You’d be Buddy’s Doc,” he said, peering over the funny little glasses.
“How’d you know that?” Holliday smiled.
“The
Pirates of the Caribbean
eye patch is a dead giveaway,” said the man. He took another swig of Keith’s. A red plastic basket lined with wax paper and filled with glistening, sauce-covered chicken wings was set down before him. He stripped the meat off one with practiced ease, wiped his mouth with a napkin and washed the chicken wing down with some more beer. He tossed the stripped bones back in the basket. “You want to rent me and my boat for some illicit purpose, as I understand it,” he said. The strange twanging accent wasn’t far off from Stompin’ Tom and “Bud the Spud.”
“Who said anything about illicit?” answered Holliday.
Arnie laughed. By the sound of it he was at least a pack a day man.
“You want a lesson in how not to catch the lobsters that are no longer there and that no one can afford these days, is that it?” Gallant picked up another wing, sucked off the meat and took another slug of beer.
“Maybe we want to go sightseeing,” Holliday said and shrugged. He took a small sip of the single malt. It was good, with a strange butterscotch aftertaste. “Bud the Spud” came to an end, but Stompin’ Tom went on; something that rhymed “glory” and “dory.”
“Look. I’m not a cop, you’re not a cop, so why don’t we cut the bull and get down to business?” Gallant went through his wing routine again.
Holliday stared at Gallant for a moment. The squat little man looked like something out of a Grimm brothers fairy tale. He had to be the real thing.
“We want you to take us to Sable Island.”
“That’s against the law,” said Gallant, eyes twinkling merrily. He ate another wing. As far as Holliday could tell the glory-dory song was a fisherman’s version of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”
“Like you said, illicit.”
“Illicit’s expensive,” said Gallant.
“I can pay.”
“Why do you want to go to Sable?”
“Is that any of your business?”
“My boat, my business,” Gallant said with a shrug. “My price.”
“We’re looking for something,” broke in Meg. “Something lost on Sable Island.”
“Buried treasure on Sable Island? Now, that’s original. Any particular boat you’re looking for? There’s about five hundred of them.” He ate another wing. “They even had one in the 1920s where a ship struck a submerged wreck and was wrecked itself.” He tossed the bones in the basket and took another hit of the honey-colored beer. “You’re crazy. The whole island moves, nothing stays in one place—that’s why it’s so dangerous.”
“We know where to look,” said Meg.
Holliday glanced at her curiously; this was the first he’d heard of a location. Now what was going on?
“What is it that you’re looking for?” Gallant asked.
“A religious relic. Not a treasure really.”
“Not gold doubloons or Blackbeard’s pearls or the like, then,” said Gallant, grinning.
“No,” said Meg, her voice serious.
Gallant ate another chicken wing and then another, thinking, staring at the rows and tiers of bottles behind the bar. Finally he turned to Holliday.
“There’s nothing like that on Sable Island,” he said. “There’s a hell of a lot of sand and a few ponies left over from God knows when, but there’s no religious relics there. If there had been they’d have been found long ago. There’s nothing even faintly religious about Sable. You’re talking fairy tales.” He paused. “But that’s your business, not mine. You’re playing some sort of game or fulfilling some fantasy or following some treasure map some idgit sold you off the Internet—well, that’s fine too, but know this, whoever you are, Sable Island is no joke and it’s no fantasy either. It’s a serious, dangerous place surrounded by serious, dangerous waters. Go there and you go there at your peril.”
“When can we leave?” Meg said.
25
Joseph Patchin sat at the elegant table in the Domingo Room at the Café Milano in Georgetown, happily working his way through his grilled lobster and heart of palm salad, knowing that it was Kate Sinclair’s treat, since she was the one who’d called the meeting. He and Kate were the only ones in the secluded room off the main restaurant, discretion guaranteed by a row of descending wooden shutters that ensured their privacy. He took a sip of his very expensive glass of Gaja Alteni di Brassica Sauvignon Blanc and patted herbed butter off his lips with his starched linen napkin.
“We’ve been here for the better part of an hour, Kate. That’s enough time for every CNN reporter and
Washington Post
writer inside the Beltway to know that the director of operations for the Central Intelligence Agency is having dinner with the last best hope of the Republican Party and to wonder loudly about it. Why don’t we get down to business.”
The brittle, hatchet-faced woman ignored the sumptuous-looking veal cutlet on the plate in front of her and reached into the Lana Marks one- of-a-kind clutch purse on her lap. She took out a plain gold Van Cleef & Arpels cigarette case that had belonged to her mother and the matching lighter. She removed a cigarette and lit it.
“I thought that was illegal in Washington restaurants,” said Patchin.
“For the price I’m paying for this meal and this room, Franco can eat the fine,” said Sinclair sharply. She took a healthy drag on the cigarette and sat back in her chair. “Tell me about this fiasco of yours in Canada,” she said.