The Lost Island Read online

  “Metal objects you hang from the mast in a fog to make yourself more visible to ship’s radar.”

  “That would make the launch look as big as the Turquesa?”

  “Yes. Hang them on the launch as high as possible.”

  “Got it.”

  Gideon exited the pilothouse, staggering, holding on to whatever he could find. The wind roared around his ears, the boat shuddering and slamming through the sea. He unlatched the storage chest and there—between coiled ropes and other assorted equipment—were two round metal objects with crosspieces inside them, attached to wires. As he pulled them out, he heard another burst of machine-gun fire. Gouts of water swung past the stern.

  The Turquesa’s launch, an eleven-foot Zodiac, was hanging on davits at the stern, swinging violently. There was nothing sticking up he could hang the reflectors on…and then he noticed the rod mounts on either side.

  Deep-sea fishing rods…

  Lurching down into the cluttered galley, Gideon threw open the rod cabinets, quickly assembling the two biggest marlin rods he could find, tying the radar reflectors onto their ends. Back on deck, he climbed into the Zodiac, which was pitching madly, and managed to insert the rods into the mounts, securing the handles in place with duct tape from the storage chest. He set one hurricane lamp in the bow and another in the stern. Then, after a moment’s thought, he pulled the extra gas tank from its berth and hauled it into the Zodiac as well.

  More gunfire from astern.

  Now he had to lower the Zodiac into the water, with the boat going thirty-five knots in a heavy sea. This was going to be fun.

  Climbing out of the launch, he rummaged in a rear cargo box, finding a long towrope. He fixed it to the front bow eye of the Zodiac and wrapped the other end around a rear cleat on the Turquesa. Slowly—stabilizing himself as best he could to ensure he wasn’t jolted overboard by the heavy swells—he switched on the hurricane lamps and then lowered the boat from the davits. But when it hit the water, it spun off the davits like a leaf and almost flipped over, saved only when Gideon released a good ten feet of rope.

  The Zodiac stabilized and was now planing behind the yacht, riding its wake. Slowly, carefully, he let out more rope, until it found a stable place in the wake about fifty feet back. Then he tied it off and went into the pilothouse.

  “Everything’s set,” he said.

  “When you release the launch, I’ll execute an immediate escape maneuver—a course change.”

  “We need to go the way they’d least expect,” he said.

  “Leave it to me.”

  Another burst. A couple of rounds clipped through the side of the pilothouse at an angle, showering them with splinters of fiberglass.

  “Son of a bitch!” Without hesitating Gideon scrambled back to the stern, reached out, and cut the towrope. “Done!” he called out.

  The Zodiac skipped and slowed, and almost immediately dwindled to a tiny speck of light in the murk. There was more gunfire. Amy did not change course.

  “I said, done!” Gideon cried, hurrying back into the pilothouse. “Change course!”

  She shook her head. “The least obvious move is not to change course.”

  That made sense. “It won’t be long before they realize they were duped,” he said.

  “It only needs to work long enough for us to get out of radar range. We’re in a big sea—that’s a lot of sea return for radar—and this boat has a low profile. I think three thousand yards should do it.”

  Gideon stared at the radar screen. He could see the green blob that was their Zodiac, apparently motionless. The blob that was the Horizonte was approaching, slowing, turning.

  Once again, the sound of gunfire, burst after burst. Staring astern, he saw the dim light suddenly brighten. The Zodiac, no doubt, set afire. There was a puff and a ball of flame as the gas tank in the craft went up. The report of the explosion came rumbling toward them across the water. Another burst of automatic weapons fire, another ball of flame: the spare tank.

  Every second was precious, taking them farther away from the Horizonte, farther into the radar wilderness of sea and wind.

  “They’re on to us!” called Amy. “They’re coming!”

  On the radar screen, the faint green blob that was the much larger Horizonte was peeling away, moving faster, gaining speed. The Zodiac had disappeared from the screen—sunk. There was still a flickering light aft from the burning slick of gasoline.

  “Change course,” said Gideon. “Not much, say twenty degrees. Just to test if they can see us or not.”

  A hesitation. “Okay.”

  Amy changed course. They waited for the Horizonte to alter course accordingly. It didn’t. The faint green blob continued straight, and then, having clearly lost them on radar, made a course change. A guess. A wrong guess.

  They were out of range.

  A minute later, the image of the Horizonte had dropped off their own radar.

  “You realize,” Gideon said, “that the wife, instead of taking her husband for medical help, came after us. I wouldn’t be surprised if he bleeds to death.”

  Amy shook her head. “Treasure hunters—I’ve had experience with them. Crazy people. We haven’t seen the last of her.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “She’s going to be waiting for us at Cayo Jeyupsi. With a dead husband. Pissed.”

  25

  BROCK ENTERED THE EES lab, pausing in the doorway. It was seven AM, and these early-morning calls were getting more than irritating. Glinn’s attitude seemed to be, If I don’t sleep, why should you?

  Two technicians and Garza were bent over a large, obscure machine, cabled to a flat panel that displayed digital photographic strips covered with fuzzy lines. Glinn was behind them, half in shadow, silently observing the proceedings from his wheelchair.

  “Thank you for coming, Dr. Brock,” said Glinn, turning. To Brock’s surprise, he looked almost flustered, unusual for a man of preternatural coolness.

  Brock nodded.

  “Please,” said Glinn, recovering. “Sit down. Coffee?”

  “Thank you. Black, no sugar.”

  Brock took a chair in the little conference area of the lab. Garza and the two scientists paused in their work and swiveled their chairs around to join the meeting.

  “So,” said Brock, “did you figure out what animal it came from?”

  “That’s a difficult problem,” said Garza. “To be sure, we need to do a DNA analysis. But first, some questions have arisen about the making of vellum that we hope you can answer. It’s our understanding that three types of animal skins were normally used in fashioning vellum—sheep, calf, and goat. What about other animals?”

  “Well,” said Brock, always happy to deliver a lecture, “in the Levant, many Persian and Arabic manuscripts used a type of vellum made from camel skin.”

  “Interesting. Anything else?”

  “Very rarely, the skin of pig, deer, horse, or donkey was used. There are instances where cat skin was used in repairs.”

  “No others?” Garza asked.

  “Not that we know of.”

  There was a pause.

  “By the way,” Brock said with a sniff, turning to Glinn, “I must say that this idea of yours strikes me as a dead end. I don’t see how the vellum itself could be the answer to the riddle.”

  “Consider the quotation, Doctor. Respondeo ad quaestionem, ipsa pergamena. ‘I respond to the question, the page itself.’ You pointed out that pergamena also meant ‘parchment’ or ‘vellum.’” His eyes flickered as he said this. “Think of the sentence another way: the parchment itself is the response, the answer, to the riddle.”

  “We’ve run Eli’s conjecture through the language analysis routines of our computer,” Garza said. “They predict the likelihood of it being correct at over ninety percent.”

  That a computer program could interpret medieval Latin struck Brock as preposterous, but he let it pass. “How could the vellum itself possibly be the answer to
the riddle of this map?”

  “To know that, we need to discover what kind of animal it came from.” Glinn turned to the technicians. “What next?”

  Weaver—the lead DNA technician—spoke up. “The only way to solve this question is through DNA analysis. To do that we have to find a clean source of genetic material—ideally from inside a hair follicle. The trouble is, the parchment has been thoroughly scraped and washed.”

  Brock sighed. “If hair is what you’re after, may I make a suggestion?”

  “Of course,” said Garza.

  “You know that all pieces of vellum have two sides, a ‘flesh’ side and a ‘hair’ side. The hair side is darker and coarser, with occasional traces of hair follicles. The follicles themselves, of course, will have been destroyed during the initial preparation. However, you might take a close look at the binding edge of the page. The margins of the skins were sometimes less scraped and cleaned than the rest, and often they left a little extra thickness there to hold the binding. You may find an intact hair follicle in that area.”

  “Excellent,” Glinn said. “Thank you, Dr. Brock. You are certainly worth your keep.”

  Brock flushed at the compliment despite himself.

  26

  THE MORNING DAWNED dirty and rough, with a howling wind and dark clouds scudding low across the sky. They had taken refuge in Bahía Hondita, a huge, shallow lagoon with dozens of islands and coves and patches of mangrove swamp—an ideal place to hide. With the jet drive propulsion their draft was only three feet, and with no need to worry about fouling a propeller they’d been able to get the boat up a watercourse and deep into the recesses of a mangrove swamp, where the larger Horizonte could not follow, even if they knew where they were.

  Gideon spent the morning cleaning up the mess in the galley and mopping up the blood on the cockpit deck. Amy opened the hatches and examined the engine and boat systems, doing a damage assessment where rounds had struck the boat.

  They convened in the galley over espresso one hour before it was time to make a scheduled call to EES. Amy looked gray.

  “How’s your injury?” Gideon asked.

  “Fine,” said Amy. “Listen, we’ve got some damage. A 50-caliber round fragmented and went everywhere inside the engine compartment.”

  “The boat seems to be working all right.”

  “For now. We have some damaged hoses, fuel and oil lines, which I can patch or replace. Some shrapnel in the battery compartment, as well, but no leaks there. One bad circuit board. It’ll take most of the day. We’ll head out to Cayo Jeyupsi tonight.”

  “You sure the boat’s okay?”

  “My only real worry is the ricocheting of all those bits and pieces of shrapnel. It’s impossible to trace it all or know what might be wrong—until something fails.”

  “What about the other rounds that hit the boat?”

  “They went high, through the pilothouse. One in the forward hull above the waterline. I put a temporary patch on it.”

  “Oh, dear, we might lose our damage deposit.”

  Amy managed a wan smile. “That’s Glinn’s problem, not ours.”

  “Speaking of Glinn, we’ve got to give him a sit-rep in an hour. We should talk now about how we’re going to present this to him. I also need to write up what happened in the electronic log.”

  A hesitation. “Gideon, let’s not…alarm him.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “Look, we don’t want him to abort our mission. We’re too far into this.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m not suggesting we lie, exactly. We just have to give it the proper spin. An unfortunate encounter. A bump in the road.”

  “An ‘unfortunate encounter’? Amy, a man’s dead.”

  “We don’t know that.” A beat. She gazed at him intently with her dark eyes. “You want to give this up?”

  Gideon hesitated. “No.”

  “Then pitch your log entry accordingly, and in the video meeting think carefully about how you present things.”

  “Is that an order, Captain?”

  A long silence. “I won’t make that an order. Because I know you’re with me on this one.”

  Gideon nodded. She was right.

  The meeting with Glinn was short. They made their report, Gideon presenting it as a brief, unfortunate encounter with a pair of crazy treasure hunters, over and done with. It was, in the end, a good thing, as it produced an essential piece of information: the Devil’s vomit cay marked on the map. Glinn listened, asked few questions, did not offer any advice, and signed off quickly.

  Amy spent the rest of the day below, fixing the engine. She emerged at sunset covered with grease. She took a shower and then sat down at the computer. The wind had picked up further, the mangroves clacking and shaking around them. The tropical depression that had been building beyond the Cape Verde Islands had turned into a tropical storm and was now heading toward the Windwards and northwestward to Haiti. While they were considerably south of its path, it was a large system and, one way or another, they were going to be affected.

  Amy seemed pleased. “The worse the weather, the less chance there is of the Horizonte surprising us at the cay tonight.”

  “I doubt they’re going to be at the cay.”

  “I know they will. They’re treasure hunters. The word obsession doesn’t even begin to describe them.”

  “How do you know so much about treasure hunters, anyway?” Gideon asked.

  “That question falls into the personal information category. Sorry.”

  She went back to the laptop in the work area while Gideon prepared an elaborate dinner of seared duck breasts, wild rice, and toasted goat cheese salad. From time to time, he glanced over at what she was working on so assiduously. It appeared she was comparing the Phorkys Map to other old maps—and a bunch of texts in ancient Greek.

  “What’s all that?”

  “Idle speculation.”

  “Dinner’s ready.”

  She abandoned the computer and sat down at the dining room table. Gideon laid the plates on with ceremony. He poured himself some wine, giving her the glass of water, no ice, that she asked for.

  She tucked in and began the usual unceremonious shoveling.

  “Whoa, hold on,” aid Gideon, laying a hand on her fork hand, staying the scarfing process. “There’s no hurry. Can we please have a civilized meal? I worked hard preparing it—you should slow down and enjoy it.”

  “You eat your way, I’ll eat mine,” she said, forking a quarter of the breast into her mouth and chewing, her cheeks bulging like a chipmunk, making vulgar eating noises.

  Gideon shook his head. “Jesus, didn’t your parents teach you table manners?”

  This was met with a sudden, freezing silence. Gideon thought to himself, More personal information I won’t be privy to.

  She finished, pushing her plate away and standing up. “At midnight, we’ll start for Jeyupsi. It’s thirty nautical miles. I doubt we can make more than twelve knots in this sea, so we’ll arrive around two thirty in the morning. We’re going to make a large circle of the cay at extreme radar distance, just to see if they’re around. Their boat is bigger than ours, makes a larger radar target, so we’ll see them before they see us. If all looks good, we go in, try to figure out what was meant by the phrase Follow the Devil’s vomit. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “So why don’t you go below, get some sleep? I’ll take care of the dishes.”

  “No objections to that.”

  As he stood up, preparing to head for his stateroom, she laid a hand on his arm. “Gideon.”

  “Yes?”

  “You handled those treasure hunters really well back there—all that talk about a billion dollars in gold. You got them to lose their heads—and that saved our lives.”

  “Social engineering is my specialty. But your contribution was pretty damn crucial, too.”

  “And that business with the launch—they fell for it just long enough for
us to give them the slip.”

  “It was your radar reflectors that did the trick.”

  There was a slightly awkward silence. Gideon sensed that any praise from Amy was praise indeed, so he just smiled and said, “Thanks.”

  She nodded wordlessly.

  And as he turned to leave the galley, he saw her go back to the computer and continue working on the Greek texts and the map.

  27

  GARZA LOOKED ON as Weaver, the head DNA tech, leaned over a microscope, peering intently into the eyepiece as he moved the stage this way and that with fussy, tiny movements. Two other techs hovered nearby, watching, various tools at the ready. To Garza, the procedure had all the feel of a surgical operation.

  Glinn had vanished after the call from Gideon—in his usual way, without taking leave, saying where he was going, or mentioning when he’d be back. Glinn had always been secretive, but it was getting worse. He used to keep Garza in the loop. He was supposed to be Glinn’s right-hand man, second in command at EES. But now he was beginning to feel like an errand boy.

  “Okay,” Weaver murmured, eyes glued to the microscope. “I’ve got the binding edge of the page in view and it looks like there might be some intact follicles.”

  All work on the vellum was done at a painstaking, glacial pace; it had taken them most of a day just to prepare for this procedure. A silence settled over the lab as Weaver continued peering into the scope, every now and then adjusting its stage. The minutes ticked by. Garza resisted the urge to glance at his watch.

  “Got one that looks good,” said Weaver. “Two, actually. Hand me a probe, a sterile number three forceps, and a strip of PCR tubes.”

  The technicians came forward with the requested articles. Garza watched as—with the utmost care—Weaver extracted first one microscopic hair, then a second.

  “Both follicles are intact,” he said as he straightened up from the microscope.

  “How quickly can you get results?” Garza asked.

  “Sterile microsurgery will be required to access the uncontaminated interior of the follicles—with something like this, DNA contamination can be a huge problem. After that, we have to do a PCR on it, and then sequence it. It’s time consuming—and a lot depends on whether there’s still contamination in the samples that has to be teased out.” He seemed to hesitate.