Dourado

CHAPTER 6

“Hey, babe. Thought you’d be home by now.”

“Sorry, I had to make a stop. I’ve got a surprise for you!”

“I hate surprises. What is it?”

“Dane! You are no fun at all.”

“I know. Now, what’s my surprise?”

“I’m not…”

Dane bolted up, gasping. Sweat trickled down his cheek, or was it a tear? He didn’t care. Wiping it away, he shook his head, as if that could clear the memory from his mind. He hated the dream, and now he hated the sun that had made him drowsy enough to doze off. Rising, he snapped his notebook shut and went back into the condo. He hurried past Bones and Kaylin, who were working at the small kitchen table.

Inside the bathroom, he closed and locked the door, doused his face with cool water, and appraised his reflection in the mirror. He looked a bit older than his thirty-five years. Sun and salt water had weathered his skin and bleached his ash blond hair almost white. The empty look in his green eyes matched the hollowness in his heart: both remnants of the dream. He breathed deep and puffed out his cheeks as he exhaled. Pronouncing himself ready to face the world, he returned to the kitchen.

“Have a nice nap?” Kaylin asked. She looked up from Rienzi’s bible and smiled. “Nice digs you and Bones found, by the way. I forgot to tell you earlier.”

Fearing for Kaylin’s safety, and assuming that their assailants had the resources to discover Dane’s identity through the car rental agency, they had packed up and headed for North Carolina, where Bones’ uncle, Crazy Charlie, who dealt in used Cadillacs and brand new casinos, owned this vacation condo. They had brought with them everything that might be pertinent to the Dourado investigation. At Kaylin’s insistence, Bernie had returned to Mississippi to stay with relatives.

“How’s the translation coming?” He sat down across from her, forcing his focus onto the case. He was getting good at walling away those memories.

“Challenging. Many of these notes he’s written in the margins are so cryptic that I don’t know if we’ll be able to get any meaning from them out of context. A few of them are pretty interesting, though.

“Here in the book of Genesis, he’s underlined a passage which describes a time when ‘there were giants on the earth’ who married the ‘daughters of men.’

“Sounds like simple folklore to me,” Dane said. Religion and the bible did not mean much to him anymore. God, if He existed, wasn’t paying any attention to what was going on down here.

“That’s what Bones said. But here,” Kaylin pointed to a phrase jotted in the margin, “Rienzi has written ‘could it be?’ in big letters. He’s at least considering the possibility that it’s more than folklore.”

The story of David and Goliath had strange markings around it as well. Dane had not been much of a churchgoer since childhood, but, like most people, he supposed, he was familiar with the tale. A Philistine giant named Goliath had challenged any soldier of Israel to single combat. Only a teenaged shepherd named David was up to the challenge. The story went that Goliath, nearly ten feet tall, was armed to the teeth, while David brought with him only a sling, some rocks, and his faith in God. David nailed Goliath in the head, knocking him out. While the giant was down, David cut off the Philistine’s head with his own sword. It was actually a gruesome story if you stopped to think about it.

This, like most of the familiar children’s bible stories, was one Dane assumed to be less history than fable. It was, in his mind, a story to teach a lesson about not giving up in the face of overwhelming odds, and, of course, to encourage faith in God. Dane was not interested in any of that. God had given up on him a long time ago.

Rienzi had apparently seen something of great value in this story. Goliath’s name was underlined in bold strokes. Oddest of all was a strange drawing in the upper right corner of the page. It was a stick figure of some sort. A series of dots of various sizes were linked by straight lines, creating an oddly familiar image.

Kaylin returned to translating Rienzi’s notes, while Dane reviewed Maxie’s work, and Bones looked over the research Jimmy had done on Rienzi.

“I don’t get it,” Bones said. “Whatever Rienzi found, he obviously lost it when the Dourado sank. That’s not exactly a secret. Neither is the location of its sinking.”

“What do you not get?” Dane asked.

“Maxie was after the Dourado. Why don’t the guys who are following us just try to beat us to the ship? What do we have that they need?” He tossed the stack of papers onto the table, and sat back. Hands folded behind his head, he looked up at the ceiling and sighed loudly. “It’s enough to make a guy crave a bottle of Jose.”

“Not a chance, pal.” Dane didn’t like Bones when he was drunk. In fact, Bones didn’t like Bones when he was drunk. The big man did not reply.

“It’s a good question, though,” Dane mused. “Maybe they don’t know what they’re looking for.”

“Why would that matter?” Bones asked.

“Think about what we know of the Dourado,” Dane said, turning the details over in his mind as he spoke. “The wreck turned up some distance from where it sank, with very little of the cargo remaining. Obviously, everything inside the ship spilled out over the course of several miles. There must have been something unique about this one object that made Maxie believe he could find it.”

Bones sat in silent contemplation for a minute.

Kaylin looked up from her work, a thoughtful expression on her face. She seemed about to say something, but then shook her head and returned her attention to her task.

“All right,” Bones said. “We almost have to assume you’re right. Nothing else has made sense so far. If that’s the case, then what is it about this object that would make him, or us for that matter, believe that we could find it?” He folded his arms across his chest and fixed Dane with a challenging stare.

Dane had wrestled with this question since reading Rienzi’s journal two days earlier. It was crazy to believe they could find a single object that had lain on the seabed for almost two hundred years. But he knew, without a doubt, that Hartford Maxwell was anything but crazy. If Maxie thought something could be done, it most likely was quite possible, if not probable.

“It could be a very large object,” Dane said. “Something he could have hoped to find with sonar.”

“Like what? A statue?” Bones shook his head. “It could be buried in silt, maybe pitted and misshapen, grown over with all kinds of organisms. It’s possible, but I don’t like the odds.”

“It’s not totally out of the question that the cargo could be found, is it?” Kaylin asked, looking up again from her reading. “I remember reading about the discovery of some Roman artifacts. When the ship started taking on water, the crew threw things overboard in an effort to stay afloat. Underwater archaeologists were able to trace the ship’s path by the trail of relics scattered across the seabed.”

“That was in deep water,” Bones protested. “The water between Singapore and Bintan is relatively shallow in most places. Storms and currents have more effect on shallow water wrecks than they do in deep water.” He paused for a moment, stroking his chin, his brown eyes narrowed. “Still, you’re right. It’s not out of the question.”

“Okay,” Dane said. “Let’s explore a completely different line of thinking. What if whoever is after us only knows that Maxie was on to something big, but they don’t know what? The fake journal he planted probably wouldn’t have mentioned anything about Rienzi or the Dourado. They might have discovered right away that the information was no good, and come after Kaylin to get the real story.”

“That could be.” Bones’ frown indicated that he was not satisfied with Dane’s idea. “But they’re coming at us awfully hard for something they know very little about.”

“The information from Jimmy said that the church was ready to excommunicate Rienzi over the ramifications of whatever it was he claimed to have found. We also know from the journal that even the scholars of the day rejected his claims, whatever they were.” Dane chose his words carefully. “What if the implications of this discovery would be just as controversial today as they were back then?”

“Too many what-ifs for me,” Bones groaned, rubbing his temples. “I just don’t see…”

“Look at this!” Kaylin’s soft voice trembled with excitement. She had returned to her examination of Rienzi’s bible. Dane and Bones leaned toward her. Her slender finger was pointing to a single word, “vraiment,” written in the margin next to an underlined passage.

“What does that mean?” Bones asked. “Sounds like some kind of stinky cheese.”

“It means ‘truly,’ or ‘truthfully,’” Dane answered, drawing a raised eyebrow from Kaylin. “I took high school French. Good way to meet hot girls.”

Kaylin narrowed her eyes and fixed him with a withering stare. When she was annoyed, she reminded Dane a little bit of Melissa. Melissa… he was definitely not going to travel down that road right now. It was almost sad how easily he could push those thoughts away these days.

“Listen to the passage Rienzi underlined. Kaylin’s knuckles whitened as she tightened her grip on the book. “And the priest said, ‘The sword of Goliath the Philistine, whom you killed in the valley of Elah, behold, it is here wrapped in a cloth behind the ephod, if you will take that, take it, for there is none but that here.’ And David said, ‘There is none like it; give it to me.’” She slammed the bible closed, dropped it hard on the table and smiled triumphantly.

“So he likes Goliath’s sword,” Bones said.

“Wait a minute!” Dane snatched Rienzi’s journal off the table and flipped to the last page. He read aloud, “I will say only that truly, there is none like it.”

Bones whistled between his front teeth. “Son of a… Do you think he might have…”

“He found Goliath’s sword,” Kaylin said. She held the aged bible in trembling hands. “That’s what Dad was after. It would stand to reason. Rienzi was the first to rediscover those ancient cities in the Holy Land. Why wouldn’t he find biblical artifacts?”

“The sword of Goliath.” Bones said the words slowly, as if trying them on for size. “I don’t know anything about it.”

“Jimmy can run it through NAILS,” Dane said. “Right now, we need to get ready for a dive.”