Skeleton Key

THE DEVIL’S CHIMNEY

It was late afternoon when they set out from Puerto Madre, leaving the port with its fish markets and pleasure cruisers behind them. Turner and Troy were going to make the dive while it was still light. They would find the cave and wait there until sunset, then climb up into Casa de Oro under cover of darkness. That was the plan.

The man called Garcia had a boat that had known the sea too long. It wheezed and spluttered out of the harbour, trailing a cloud of evil-smelling black smoke. Rust had rippled and then burst through every surface like some bad skin disease. The boat had no visible name. A few flags fluttered from the mast, but they were little more than rags, with any trace of their original colours faded long ago. There were six air cylinders lashed to a bench underneath a canopy. They were the only new equipment in sight.

Garcia himself had greeted Alex with a mixture of hostility and suspicion. Then he had spoken at length, in Spanish, with Turner. Alex had spent the best part of a year in Barcelona with his uncle and understood enough of the language to follow what they were saying.

“You never talked about a boy. What do you think this is? A tourist excursion? Who is he? Why did you bring him here?”

“It’s none of your business, Garcia. Let’s go.”

“You paid for two passengers.” Garcia held up two withered fingers, every bone and sinew showing through. “Two passengers… that was what we agreed.”

“You’re being paid well enough. There’s no point arguing. The boy’s coming and that’s the end of it!”

After that, Garcia fell into sullen silence. Not that there would have been any point talking anyway. The noise of the engine was too great.

Alex watched as the coastline of Cayo Esqueleto slipped past. He had to admit that Blunt had been right-the island was strangely beautiful with its extraordinary, deep colours; the palm trees packed together, separated from the sea by a brilliant ribbon of white sand. The sun was hovering, a perfect circle, over the horizon. A brown pelican, clumsy and comical on the ground, shot out of a pine tree and soared gracefully over their heads. Alex felt strangely at peace. Even the noise of the engine seemed to have drifted away.

After about half an hour, the land began to rise up and he realized they had reached the north point of the island. The vegetation fell back and suddenly he was looking at a sheer rock wall that dropped all the way, without interruption, to the sea. This must be the isthmus that he had been told about, with the road leading to the Casa de Oro somewhere at the top. There was no sign of the house itself but, craning his neck, he could just make out the top of a tower, white and elegant, with a pointed red slate roof. A watch-tower. There was a single figure framed in an archway, barely more than a speck. Somehow Alex knew that it was an armed guard.

Garcia turned off the engine and moved to the back of the boat. For such an old man, he seemed very agile. He picked up an anchor and threw it over the side, then hoisted a flag-this one more identifiable than the others. It showed a diagonal white stripe on a red background. Alex recognized the international scuba-diving sign.

Troy came over to him. “We’ll go down here and swim in to the coast,” she said.

Alex looked up at the figure in the tower. There was a glint of sunlight reflecting off something. A pair of binoculars? “I think we’re being watched,” he said.

Troy nodded. “Yes. But it doesn’t matter. Dive boats aren’t allowed to come here but they sometimes do. They’re used to it. The shore is strictly off-limits but there’s a wreck somewhere… people swim to that. We’ll be fine, provided we don’t draw attention to ourselves. Just don’t do anything stupid, Alex.”

Even now she couldn’t resist lecturing him. Alex wondered what he would have to do to impress these people. He said nothing.

Turner had taken off his shirt, showing a hairless, muscular chest. Alex watched as he stripped down to his trunks, then pulled on a wetsuit which he had taken from a small cabin below. Quickly the two CIA agents got ready, attaching air cylinders to their buoyancy jackets-BCDs-then adding weight belts, masks and snorkels. Garcia was smoking, sitting to one side and watching all this with quiet amusement, as if it really had nothing to do with him.

At last they were ready. Turner had brought a waterproof bag with him and he unzipped it. Alex noticed the Game Boy sealed in a plastic bag inside. There were also maps, torches, knives and a harpoon gun.

“Leave it all, Turner,” Troy said.

“The Game Boy…?”

“We’ll come back for it.” Troy turned to Alex. “Right, Alex,” she said. “Listen up! We’re going to make an exploratory dive to begin with. We’ll be gone about twenty minutes. No longer. We need to find the cave entrance and check there are no security devices in operation.” She glanced at her watch. It was only half past six. “The sun won’t set for another hour,” she continued. “We don’t want to spend that long sitting in the cave, so we’ll come back to the boat for the rest of our equipment, change tanks and make a second journey back. You don’t have to worry about anything. As far as the people in the villa are concerned, we’re just tourists doing a sunset dive.”

“I’m a qualified diver,” Alex said.

“The hell with that!” Turner cut in.

Troy agreed. “You talked your way onto the boat,” she said. “Fine. Personally, I wish you’d stayed in the hotel. But maybe you were right about that, it might have raised suspicions.”

“You’re not coming with us,” Turner said. He looked at Alex coldly. “We don’t want any more people killed. You stay here with Garcia and leave the rest to us.”

The two agents made their all-important buddy checks, each one looking over the other’s equipment. No pipes twisted. Air in the tanks. Weights and releases. Finally, they went over to the side of the boat and sat with their backs facing the sea. They both put on their fins. Turner gave Troy the all-clear sign: second finger and thumb forming an O, with the other fingers raised. They lowered their masks and rolled over backwards, disappearing immediately into the depths of the sea.

That was the last time Alex saw them alive.

He sat with Garcia on the gently rocking boat. The sun was almost touching the horizon and a few clouds, deep red, had intruded into the sky. The air was warm and pleasant. Garcia sucked on his cigarette and the tip glowed.

“You American?” he asked suddenly, speaking in English.

“No. I’m English.”

“Why you here?” Garcia smiled as if amused to find himself alone at sea with an English boy.

“I don’t know.” Alex shrugged. “How about you?”

“Money.” The one word answer was enough.

Garcia came over and sat down next to Alex, examining him with two dark eyes that were suddenly very serious. “They don’t like you,” he said.

“I don’t think so,” Alex agreed.

“You know why?”

Alex said nothing.

“They are grown-ups. They think they are good at what they do. And then they find a child who is better. And not only that. He is an English child. Not an Americano!” Garcia chuckled and Alex wondered how much he had been told. “It makes them feel uncomfortable. It’s the same all over the world.”

“I didn’t ask to be here,” Alex said.

“But still you came. They would have been happier without you.”

The boat creaked. A light breeze had sprung up, rippling the flags. The sun was sinking faster now and the whole sky was turning to blood. Alex looked at his watch. Ten to seven. The twenty minutes had passed quickly. He scanned the surface of the ocean but there was no sign of Turner or Troy.

Another five minutes passed. Alex was beginning to feel uneasy. He didn’t know the two agents well, but guessed they were people who did everything by the book. They had their procedures, and if they said twenty minutes, they meant twenty minutes. They had been underwater now for twenty-five. Of course, they had enough oxygen for an hour. But even so, Alex wondered why they were taking so long.

A quarter of an hour later, they still hadn’t come back. Alex couldn’t disguise his fears. He was pacing the deck, looking left and right, searching for the tell-tale bubbles that would show them coming up, hoping to see their arms and heads breaking the surface of the water. Garcia hadn’t moved. Alex wondered if the old man was even awake. A full forty minutes had passed since Turner and Troy had submerged.

“Something’s wrong,” Alex said. Garcia didn’t answer. “What are we going to do?” Still Garcia refused to speak and Alex became angry. “Didn’t they have a back-up plan? What did they tell you to do?”

“They tell me to wait for them.” Garcia opened his eyes. “I wait an hour. I wait two hours. I wait all night…”

“But in another ten or fifteen minutes they’re going to run out of air.”

“Maybe they enter the Devil’s Chimney. Maybe they climb up!”

“No. That wasn’t their plan. And anyway, they’ve left all their equipment behind.” Suddenly Alex had made up his mind. “Have you got any more scuba gear? Another BCD?”

Garcia stared at Alex, surprised. Then he slowly nodded.

Five minutes later, Alex stood on the deck dressed only in shorts and a T-shirt, with an oxygen cylinder strapped to his back and two respirators-one to breathe through, the other spare-dangling at his side. He would have liked to put on a wetsuit, but he hadn’t been able to find one his size. He would just have to hope that the water wasn’t too cold. The BCD he was wearing was old and it was too big for him, but he had quickly tested it and at least it worked. He looked at his instrument console; pressure gauge, depth gauge and compass. He had 3000psi in his air tank. More than he would need. Finally, he had a knife strapped to his leg. He probably wouldn’t use it and would never normally have worn it. But he needed the reassurance. He went over to the side of the boat and sat down.

Garcia shook his head disapprovingly. Alex knew he was right. He was breaking the single most critical rule in the world of scuba-diving. Nobody ever dives alone. He had been taught scuba by his uncle when he was eleven years old and if Ian Rider had been here now he would have been speechless with anger and disbelief. If you get into trouble-a snagged air hose or a valve failure-and you don’t have a buddy, you’re dead. It’s as simple as that. But this was an emergency. Turner and Troy had been gone for forty-five minutes. Alex had to help.

“You take this,” Garcia said suddenly. He was holding an out of date dive computer. It would show Alex how deep he was and how long he had been down.

“Thanks,” Alex said. He took it.

Alex pulled his mask down, pushed the mouthpiece between his lips and breathed in. He could feel the oxygen and nitrogen mix rushing into the back of his throat. It had a slightly stale taste but he could tell it wasn’t contaminated. He crossed his hands, holding his mask and respirator in place, then rolled over backwards. He felt his arm knock against something on the side as the world spun upside down. The water rushed up to greet him and then his vision was pulled apart like a curtain opening as he found himself plunging into the water.

He had left enough air in the BCD to keep him afloat and he made one last check, getting his bearings on the coastline so that he would know where to swim to and, more importantly, how to get back. At least the sea was still warm, although Alex knew that, with the sun rapidly setting, it wouldn’t be for long. Cold is a dangerous enemy for the scuba-diver, sapping the strength and concentration. The deeper he went, the colder it would get. He couldn’t afford to hang around. He released the air from the BCD. At once the weights began to drag him down. The sea rose up and devoured him.

He swam down, squeezing his nose and blowing hard-equalizing-to stop the pain in his ears. For the first time he was able to look around him. There was still enough sunlight to illuminate the sea and Alex caught his breath, marvelling at the astonishing beauty of the underwater world. The water was dark blue and perfectly clear. There were a few coral heads dotted around him, the shapes and colours as alien as anything it’s possible to find on the earth. He felt completely at peace, the sound of his own breathing echoing in his ears and each breath releasing a cascade of silver bubbles. With his arms loosely folded across his chest, Alex let his fins propel him towards the shore. He was fifteen metres down, about five metres above the sea bed. A family of brightly coloured groupers swam past him; fat lips, bulging eyes and strange, misshapen bodies. Hideous and beautiful at the same time. It had been a year since Alex had last gone diving and he wished he had time to enjoy this. He kicked forward. The groupers darted away, alarmed.

It didn’t take him long to reach the edge of the cliff. The sea wall was of course much more than a wall; a seething mass of rock, coral, vegetation and fish life. A living thing. Huge gorgonian fans-leaves made of a thousand tiny bones-waved slowly from side to side. Clumps of coral exploded brilliantly all around him. A school of about a thousand tiny silver fish flickered past. There was a slither of movement as a moray eel disappeared behind a rock. He glanced at the dive computer. At least it seemed to be working. It told him he had been down for seven minutes.

He had to find the entrance to the cave. That was why he was here. He forced himself to ignore the colours and sights of the underwater kingdom and concentrate on the rock face. The time he had spent taking his bearings before the dive paid off now. He knew more or less where the tower at the Casa de Oro stood in relation to the boat and swam in that direction, keeping the rock wall on his left. Something long and dark flashed past high above him. Alex saw it out of the comer of his eye but by the time he had turned his head it was gone. Was there a boat on the surface? Alex went down another couple of metres, searching for the cave.

In the end, it wasn’t hard to find. The entrance was circular, like a gaping mouth. This impression was heightened when Alex swam closer and looked inside. The cave hadn’t always been underwater and over a period of time-millions of years-stalactites and stalagmites had grown, needle-sharp spears that hung down from the ceiling and protruded up from the floor. As always, Alex was unable to remember which was which. But even from a distance there was something menacing about the place. It was like looking into the open mouth of some giant, undersea monster. He could almost imagine the stalactites and stalagmites biting down, the whole thing swallowing him up.

But he had to go in. The cave wasn’t very deep and apart from the rock formations it was empty, with a wide, sandy floor. He was thankful for that. Swimming too far into an underwater cave, at sunset, on his own, really would have been madness. He could see the back wall from the entrance-and there were the first of the metal rungs! They were dark red now and covered in green slime and coral, but they were clearly man-made, disappearing up the far wall and presumably continuing all the way to the top of the Devil’s Chimney. There was no sign of Turner or Troy. Had the two agents decided to climb up after all? Should Alex try to climb after them?

Alex was about to swim forward when there was another movement just outside his field of vision. Whatever he had seen before had come back, swimming the other way. Puzzled, he looked up. And froze. He actually felt the air stop somewhere at the back of his throat. The last of the bubbles chased each other up to the surface. Alex just hung there, fighting for control. He wanted to scream. But underwater, it isn’t possible to scream.

He was looking at a great white shark, at least three metres long, circling slowly above him. The sight was so unreal, so utterly shocking, that at first Alex quite literally didn’t believe his eyes.

It had to be an illusion, some sort of trick. The very fact that it was so close to him seemed impossible. He stared at the white underbelly, the two sets of fins, the down-turned crescent mouth with its jagged, razor-sharp teeth. And there were the deadly, round eyes, as black and as evil as anything on the planet. Had they seen him yet?

Alex forced himself to breathe. His heart was pounding. Not just his heart-his whole body. He could hear his breath, as if amplified, in his head. His legs hung limp beneath him, refusing to move. He was terrified. That was the simple truth. He had never been so scared in his life.

What did he know about sharks? Was the great white going to attack him? What could he do? Desperately, Alex tried to draw on what little knowledge he had.

There were three hundred and fifty known species of shark but only very few of them were known to have attacked people. The great white-carcharodon carcharias-was definitely one of them. Not so good. But shark attacks were rare. Only about a hundred people were killed every year. More people died in car accidents. On the other hand, the waters around Cuba were notoriously dangerous. This was a single shark…

…still circling him, as if choosing its moment…

…and it might not have seen him. No. That wasn’t possible. A shark’s eyes are ten times more sensitive than a human being’s. Even in pitch darkness it can see eight metres away. And anyway, it doesn’t need eyes. It has receptors built into its snout which can detect even the tiniest electrical current. A beating heart, for example.

Alex tried to force himself to calm down. His own heart was generating minute amounts of electricity. His terror would guide the creature towards him. He had to relax!

What else? Don’t splash. Don’t make any sudden movements. Advice given to him by Ian Rider came echoing back across the years. A shark will be attracted to shiny metal objects, to brightly coloured clothes, and to fresh blood. Alex slowly turned his head. His oxygen cylinder had been painted black. His T-shirt was white. There was no blood. Was there?

He turned his hands over, examining himself. And then he saw it. Just above the wrist on his left arm. There was a small gash. He hadn’t even noticed it, but now he remembered catching his wrist on the side of the boat as he fell backwards. A tiny amount of blood, brown rather than red, twisted upwards out of the wound.

Tiny, but enough. A shark can smell one drop of blood in twenty-five gallons of water. Who had taught him that? He had forgotten, but he knew it was true. The shark had smelled him…

…and was still smelling him, slowly closing in…

The circles were getting smaller. The shark’s fins were down. Its back was arched. And it was moving in a strange, jerky pattern. The three textbook signs of an imminent attack. Alex knew that he had only seconds between life and death. Slowly, trying not to make any disturbance in the water, he reached down. The knife was still there, strapped to his leg, and he carefully unfastened it. The weapon would be tiny against the bulk of the great white and the blade would seem pathetic compared to those vicious teeth. But Alex felt better having it in his hand. It was something.

He looked around him. Apart from the cave itself, there was nowhere to hide-and the cave was useless. The mouth was too wide. If he went inside, the shark would simply follow him. And yet, if he made it to the ladder, he might be able to climb it. That would take him out of the water-up the Devil’s Chimney and onto dry land. True, he would surface in the middle of the Casa de Oro.

But no matter how bad General Sarov might be, he couldn’t be worse than the shark.

He had made his decision. Slowly, keeping the shark in his sight, he began to move towards the cave’s entrance. For a moment he thought the shark had lost interest in him. It seemed to be swimming away. But then he saw that he had been tricked. The creature turned and, as if fired from a gun, rushed through the water, heading straight for him. Alex dived down, air exploding from his lungs. There was a boulder to one side of the cave and he tried to wedge himself into a corner, putting it between himself and his attacker. It worked. The shark curved away. At that moment, Alex lunged forward with the knife. He felt his arm shudder as the blade cut into the thick hide just under the two front fins. As the shark flickered past, he saw that it was leaving a trail of what looked like brown smoke. Blood. But he knew that he had barely wounded it. He had managed a pinprick, nothing more. And he had probably angered it, making it all the more determined.

Worse, he was bleeding more himself. In his attempt to get out of the way, he had backed into the coral, which had cut his arms and legs. Alex felt no pain. That would come later. But now he really had done it. He had advertised himself: dinner, fresh and bleeding. It was a miracle that the great white hadn’t been joined by a dozen friends.

He had to get into the cave. The shark was some distance away, out to sea. The cave entrance was just a few metres away to his left. Two or three kicks and he would be in-then through the stalactites and stalagmites and onto the ladder. Could he do it in time?

Alex kicked with all his strength. At the same time he was thrashing with his hands and cursed noiselessly as he accidentally dropped the knife. Well, it would do him no good anyway. He kicked a second time. The entrance to the cave loomed up in front of him. He was in front of it now but not inside…

…And he was too late! The shark came hurtling towards him. The eyes seemed to have grown bigger. The mouth was stretched open in a snarl that contained all the hatred in the world. Its mouth was gaping, the dreadful teeth slicing through the water. Alex jerked backwards, twisting his spine. The shark missed him by centimetres. He felt the surge of water pushing him away. Now the shark was in the cave, but he wasn’t. It was turning to attack again, and this time it wouldn’t be confused by the rock wall and the boulders. This time Alex was right in its sights.

And then it happened. Alex heard a metallic buzz and, in front of his eyes, the stalagmites rose out of the floor and the stalactites dropped out of the ceiling, teeth that skewered the shark not once, but five or six times. Blood exploded into the water. Alex saw the dreadful eyes as its head whipped from side to side. He could almost imagine the creature howling in pain. It was completely trapped, as if in the jaws of a monster even more dreadful than itself. How had it happened? Alex hung in the water, shocked and uncomprehending. Slowly the blood cleared. And he understood.

Turner and Troy had been wrong a second time. Sarov had known about the Devil’s Chimney and he had made sure that nobody could reach it by swimming through the cave. The stalagmites and stalactites were fake. They were made of metal, not stone, and were mounted on some sort of hydraulic spring. Swimming into the cave, the shark must have activated an infra-red beam which in turn had triggered the ambush. Even as he watched, the deadly spears retracted, sliding back into the floor and ceiling. There was a hum and the body of the shark was sucked into the cave, disappearing into a trap. So the place even had its own disposal system! Alex was beginning to understand the nature of the man who lived in the Casa de Oro. Whatever else he might be, Sarov left nothing to chance.

And now he knew what had happened to the two CIA agents. Alex felt sick. All he wanted to do was get away. Not just out of the water but out of the country. He wished he had never come.

There was still a lot of blood in the water. Alex swam quickly, afraid that it would attract more sharks. But he paced himself, carefully measuring his ascent towards the surface. If a diver rises too quickly, nitrogen gets trapped in the bloodstream causing the painful and potentially lethal sickness known as the bends. That was the last thing Alex needed right now. He spent five minutes at three metres’ depth-a final safety stop-then came up for air. The whole world had changed while he had been underwater. The sun had rolled behind the horizon and the sky, the sea, the land, the very air itself had become suffused with the deepest crimson. He could see Garcia’s boat, a dark shadow, about twenty metres away and swam over to it. Suddenly he was cold. His teeth were chattering-although they had probably been chattering from the moment he had seen the shark.

Alex reached the side of the boat. Garcia was still sitting on the deck with a cigarette between his lips but didn’t offer to help him out.

“Thanks a bunch,” Alex muttered.

He slipped off his BCD-the oxygen tank came with it-and heaved it onto the boat, then pulled himself out of the water. He winced. Out of the water, he could feel the wounds that the coral had inflicted on his limbs. But there was no time to do anything about that now. As soon as he was standing on the deck, he unhooked his weight belt and dumped it to one side along with his mask and snorkel. There was a towel in Turner’s bag. He took it out and used it to rub himself dry. Then he went over to Garcia.

“We have to go,” he said. “Turner and Troy are dead. The cave is a trap. Do you understand? You have to take me back to the hotel.”

Garcia still said nothing. For the first time, Alex noticed something about the cigarette in the man’s mouth. It wasn’t actually lit. Suddenly uneasy, Alex reached out. Garcia fell forward. There was a knife sticking out of his back.

Alex felt something hard touch him between his shoulder blades and a voice, which seemed to have trouble with the words it was saying, whispered from somewhere behind him.

“A little late to be out swimming, I think. I advise you now to keep very still.”

A speedboat which had been lurking in the shadows on the other side of the diving boat roared to life, lights blazing. Alex stood where he was. Two more men climbed onboard, both of them speaking in Spanish. He just had time to glimpse the dark, grinning face of one of Sarov’s macheteros before a sack was thrown over his head. Something touched his arm and he felt a sting and knew that he had just been injected with a hypodermic syringe. Almost at once, the strength went out of his legs and he would have collapsed but for the invisible hands that held him up.

And then he was lifted up and carried away. Alex began to wonder if it would have made any difference if the shark had reached him after all. The men who were carrying him off the boat were treating him like someone who was already dead.