The Emerald Scepter

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Marzak watched Cait get into her Honda and he started the engine of his rental car. He was parked across the street from her Alexandria apartment. His Washington Redskins baseball hat was pulled down low over his platinum hair and aviator sunglasses shielded his eyes.

He pulled out behind Cait, keeping back a couple of car-lengths. He followed her out to the Beltway, then toward Washington, expecting her to head for Georgetown, but she bypassed the city, and drove over the Bay Bridge, then south on the eastern shore of Maryland.

The change in expectations heightened his hunting instincts, especially as the countryside grew more rural and houses farther apart. She pulled over a couple of times, once into a gas station where she talked to someone in the office, then kept going.

He would pounce as soon as he sensed that the moment was right.

When Cait turned off the country road onto a narrow blacktop road that led into the woods, he knew that moment would come very soon.

Cait’s decision had been impulsive.

She had every intention of driving into Georgetown to begin her research, but she changed her mind at the last second. She had been thinking about the treasure, and its long voyage from Afghanistan and across the ocean, when she remembered the fate of the Kurtz yacht.

The boat had ended up as a restaurant on the Eastern Shore of Maryland according to Sutherland’s Prester John file. Cait thought the rediscovery of the yacht and its connection to the treasure would be another whole chapter in her book, and she felt herself irresistibly pulled to visit it.

She wandered the back roads, and was about to give up her search when the gas station attendant told her the restaurant had closed years before, but the boat was still there on the shore. She could hardly contain her excitement when she saw the faded old sign on the leaning post.

The Yachtsman Seafood Restaurant.

She ignored a No Trespassing sign and turned onto the road. Trees and bushes whipped both sides of her car and the wheels bumped over broken blacktop that looked like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

The rank smell of the bay became stronger as she drove deeper into the woods. She traveled another quarter mile, rounded a curve and saw the old yacht Kurtz had named after his dead wife. Barely visible on the stern were the words: Sweet Priscilla. Cait stared at the yacht, trying to reconcile the rotting old derelict in front of her with the sleek ocean-going vessel she had seen in the old photographs.

She got out of the car and walked toward the vessel, which had been drawn up onto land. She could see the sparkle of bay water beyond the marsh that bordered the shore. She walked past another restaurant sign, this one hanging by a single nail, and stopped at the bottom of a wooden ramp leading onto the deck. She tested the ramp with her foot to make sure it wouldn’t break under her weight, and walked up it.

Cait stopped in front of a gaping doorway. The doors lay in pieces on the deck. She stuck her head through the portal only to recoil at the over-powering smell of rot and mold. Her eyes could pick out interior details in the light coming through the windows and holes in the walls. She saw some old beer cans and assumed they had been tossed there by fishermen. There were broken tables and chairs, indicating that this once had been a dining room. Birds had built nests in the ceiling beams and decorated the floor with their droppings.

She was overcome by a sense of incredible sadness. Despite the nastiness of her surroundings she found herself being drawn further into the boat.

If only this old wreck could talk, what a story it would tell, she thought.

She walked through the dining room into a space that must have been a lounge.

Light streamed through the windows illuminating the old bar and overturned tables and stools. She tried to picture the bar filled with alcohol-fueled laughter and the clink of glasses, but the task was beyond her imagination. It was clear that this was a fool’s errand. The interior of the boat had been gutted of any trace of Kurtz or his treasure.

She turned and walked out of the lounge, engrossed in her thoughts.

As she stepped through the doorway into the dining room, her heart jumped at a glimpse of movement off to her right and the sound of a creaking board. Before she could react, she felt a quick stabbing pain hitting her shoulder.

Her scream caught in her throat as the intense searing pain surged through her body. Her legs turned to rubber, her knees buckled, and the floor came up to meet her. As she lay on the floor with her limbs twitching involuntarily, she had the vague sensation of something hard and cold pressed against her neck, then came a soft puffing sound and a black curtain fell over her eyes.