The Lucifer Gospel

31

The seaplane flew low over the dark, rich blue of the Caribbean at just over a hundred knots, the sculpted boat hull of the fuselage less than five hundred feet above the calm rolling sea. The sky above the high-set wings was almost perfectly clear, and the horizon ahead was a sharp, steady line except for a speeding dark island of squall far to the west.

Daffy’s two big Lycoming engines filled the cockpit with a steady, powerful roar, and the plane seemed to fly by itself. Hilts’s fingers on the old-fashioned throw-over yoke barely exerted any pressure, his free hand only rarely reaching up to the overhead knobs and throttles to make an occasional adjustment. They were an hour and a half out of Hollaback Cay, heading south above the Tongue of the Ocean.

They’d spent the better part of a week preparing for their dive on the Acosta Star, shuttling back and forth between Hollaback Cay and Nassau gathering equipment, including the bright yellow Inspiration Closed Circuit Rebreathers packed into the cargo area behind them. They’d gone to the library and museum on Shirley Street and studied the archives files of the Nassau Guardian, researching the Acosta Star and the details of her sinking almost fifty years before. They also spent a great deal of time with Tucker Noe, taking notes about the area immediately surrounding the dive site and consulting Lyman Mills’s personal chart library. According to the old bonefish guide the ship wouldn’t be hard to find if they knew what to look for; he’d taken accurate bearings from the old lighthouse, and while the sunken hull was hidden in the lee of the reef for twenty-three hours a day, there were several identifying markers on the reef itself that, seen from the air, would enable them to pinpoint the location to within a few hundred yards. It was Noe’s estimation that a dive of only forty feet or so would put them on the main deck of the ship.

Over the years Lyman Mills had collected an impressive collection of Acosta Star memorabilia, including old cruise brochures, schedules, and passenger lists, engineering drawings of the ship’s construction, and half a dozen photo albums from passengers who’d cruised on the ship at various times during her career. One of the most useful of these had been a detailed set of scrapbooks that once belonged to Paulus Boegarts, or Paul Bogart, as he liked to be called, a half Dutch, half American who’d been professionally associated with the ship through almost all of her incarnations. Using all of this information Finn, Hilts, Lyman Mills, and Tucker Noe spent several days and nights developing a strategy for the underwater penetration of the vessel.

The M.V. Acosta Star was by far the largest vessel ever to have sunk in the Caribbean. At 758 feet overall and 37,000 gross tons, she was 150 feet longer and 1,800 tons heavier than her nearest rival, the Bianca C., which had gone down just off the coast of Grenada. By wreck diving standards the Acosta Star was a monster, and like any monster it would have to be treated with caution, care, and a great deal of respect. A ship a hundred feet wide and the length of two and a half football fields would have been confusing in broad daylight with a deck plan; after fifty years and a hundred feet down in the deep-seas gloom, the interior of the vessel was going to be a very dark, dangerous, sharp-edged and coral-encrusted labyrinth.

In theory the dive didn’t pose any insoluble problems. The bottom depth was a hundred feet in clear water, an easy depth even for simple scuba. With rebreathers they would have almost triple the time they’d have with ordinary tanks-better than three hours-and with their constant mix of oxygen and nitrogen, the rebreathers gave them even more time by removing the need to decompress on the way up. They’d be wearing full face masks with Ocean Technology Buddy Phones to let them communicate underwater and have the best tank-mounted and handheld lighting units available. They even had a GEM systems portable magnetometer that would ping for the wreck, find it, and instantly provide its exact location via the Global Positioning System.

According to the passenger lists, Bishop Principe had taken the Gelderland Deluxe Suite on the Upper Promenade Deck. Pierre DeVaux, alias Peter Devereaux, had occupied cabin A-305, one level below the Main Deck on the port, or left, side of the ship, about one hundred and fifty feet from the bow of the ship and two decks below Bishop Principe. Given the way the ship had reportedly gone down, this would put Devereaux’s cabin on the “outer,” ocean side of the reef. Martin Kerzner, the supposed Israeli Intelligence agent traveling on the false Canadian passport, had been on the deck below Devereaux in cabin B-616 on the inner, or reef side of the ship. To go from one cabin to the other would involve entering the ship through one of the main hull hatches leading into the Acosta Star’s central lobby, located on either side of the ship. From there they would follow the wide lobby stairs up to Bishop Principe’s suite on the Upper Promenade Deck, then down to Devereaux’s cabin on A Deck. If necessary they could then use the lobby stairs again to descend to B Deck.

If the stairs were blocked by debris, they had two alternate routes: one down the purser’s companionway, the other using one of the two elevator shafts on the port and starboard sides of the lobby. Theoretically it was a walk in the park.

“You realize that realistically this whole thing is insane, don’t you?” Hilts said. “You’ve never done any wreck diving at all.”

“I used to free dive into cenotes in the jungles of Quintana Roo. Two hundred feet,” Finn countered. “How long can you hold your breath, Hilts?”

“That’s not the point,” the pilot answered.

“That’s exactly the point. I’ve used scuba and rebreathers, my dive limit is around two hundred and fifty feet, and on top of that I’ve done cave diving, which is at least as complicated as wreck diving, and you know it.”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“For a woman? Is that what you’re saying?” Finn queried hotly.

“No, of course not, but…”

“No buts.”

“I’ll need someone on the surface.”

“You’ll need someone below. It’s the prime directive, you know that too: never dive alone.”

“This isn’t some safety-groomed resort wreck, Finn. It’s not going to have all the dangerous spots neatly defanged. Remember, Tucker said there were sharks as well. Tigers. Bulls, mean ones.”

“Which is why we brought along shark repellent and a pair of Mares air guns. Relax, Hilts. I can handle myself. In the Roo I had to deal with snakes as thick as your arm and spiders the size of dinner plates. That doesn’t include the fire ants and the really gross scorpions. Relax, you’ll live longer,” she repeated.

“All right,” he muttered, but he didn’t seem to relax at all. Finn stared out through the side window of the airplane. More than once she’d found herself wondering why they were making the dive at all; the chance that they’d find anything on board after almost fifty years was minimal. When you got right down to it, what could you find? DeVaux, or Devereaux, had apparently discovered something that he thought was evidence that Luciferus Africanus had somehow traveled from the deserts of Libya to the central United States, perhaps bringing the Lucifer Gospel with him on his journey.

Unless the mysterious monk had brought a physical artifact to prove his claim, or explicit directions to where such artifacts could be found, they would be no further ahead. Rolf Adamson and his people had set them up for the violent killing of Vergadora, both to hide the knowledge of Pedrazzi’s murder in the desert and to compromise anything they might discover about Devereaux’s find. Without the Gospel, or at the very least a clue to its whereabouts, they would have no evidence of Adamson’s motive for killing Vergadora and attacking them.

The only other option left to them if the dive came up empty would be to go to Lawrence, Kansas, and see if there was any trace of Devereaux’s discovery there. It was possible that he’d left some kind of clue at the Wilcox Classical Museum at the university, but once again, a lot of time had passed. The chances were very slim.

“Check the GPS,” said Hilts, peering out through the windscreen. “We should almost be there.”

Finn checked the readout on the little box mounted on her side of the cockpit: 22°25’N, 77°40’W.” She relayed the numbers to Hilts.

“Then we are there,” Hilts said. “Look for the lighthouse.”

And suddenly it was there, less than a mile away, a solid white line against the sky poking up from the rough scrub of a coral cay no more than a hundred yards long, the lee end trailing off into a line of breakers and foam that marked the low breaking edge of a reef. The reef itself stretched away, slightly curving, the breakers marking its course for three-quarters of a mile, pointing almost due west toward the coast of Cuba. Hilts knew that with another five hundred feet of altitude he would be able to see the coast no more than ten or twelve miles away. It wasn’t a particularly comforting thought, even with the Bahamian markings and the idiotic cartoon duck painted in full color on the nose. Daffy wasn’t going to impress a Cuban Flogger-B MiG armed with Kedge-class laser-guided air-to-surface missiles. He had a vague memory of the payload. About seven hundred pounds of high explosive. Each.

“I’m putting her down,” he said nervously.

Finn kept her eyes on the glittering, sun-splashed surface of the shimmering ocean in front of them. Maintaining a steady eighty miles per hour, Hilts dropped the nose evenly and took them down to zero feet. Still keeping up the speed, he touched her down, the keel of the boat hull biting into the highest wavelet of the negligible chop.

The initial stutter and shakes turned into rattling machine guns and then pounding fists and hammers as the hull skipped over the surface before surrendering the lift of the wings to the buoyant hull. As Hilts throttled back the Lycomings on the wings above them, Daffy settled into the water, an ugly duckling once again after his brief flight as a swan. Pushing the rudder and easing the yoke to the left, Hilts turned the aircraft and headed them closer to the tiny island.

“Keep an eye out for any broken water or signs of a reef,” the pilot warned. They pulled around until the lighthouse was dead ahead, a tall white pillar burning in the sun, topped by a slightly smaller bright red turret marking the light itself. Twenty yards to the right of the slightly flared base of the structure was a small windowless hut. The walls of the little building were whitewash bright, the roof terra-cotta red. Twenty yards farther still and they could see the gray-brown bulk of a rough concrete jetty. There was a clear line visible between the deep ocean and the lighter blue green that marked the shallow water of the reef. If the Acosta Star was almost flush against the coral wall, the way Tucker Noe said, it would be almost invisible unless they were right on top of it.

“How close are we going to get?” asked Finn.

“Just on to the shallows, give something for the anchor to bite into. The Widgeon’s got a real shallow draft, but I don’t want to take any chances. We can take the inflatable in to shore.” Packed into a suitcase-sized carrier was a ten-foot Aquastar dive dinghy with a separate, battery-powered ten-horsepower short-shaft outboard.

He finally switched off Daffy’s engines and they slid easily toward the shore, barely buffeted by the light breezes. Finn slipped back into the rear compartment, popped the hatch, and grabbed the anchor. At Hilts’s signal she dropped the twin shovel device and paid out the line. The anchor bit cleanly at fifteen feet and Finn cleated down the line. Daffy turned into the wind, riding easily on the calm water. Twenty minutes after that, the dinghy inflated with its electric pump, and with the little battery-powered outboard clamped to the rubber boat’s plastic transom, they scooted in to shore.

“Washed up on a desert island,” said Hilts as they reached the coral shingle and hopped out onto the narrow, quartz sand beach.

“Hardly that,” Finn said and laughed. The sand was almost uncomfortably hot under her feet, and even with her sunglasses on she had to squint. “According to the charts we’re fifteen miles east of Cuba and right on the edge of one of the main shipping channels from South America.”

“You’re spoiling the fantasy,” moaned Hilts melodramatically. “Sun-baked island, beautiful woman… what more could a guy want?”

“In the first place, get a life, and then get the water, the rest of the diving gear, and the magnetometer array, which is back in the airplane. You’re going to have to make another trip,” she said with a grin.

“What about you?”

“I’m the beautiful woman, remember? I think I’ll go exploring and then wait for the big he-man to catch us lunch.”

They spent the next hour settling in. The hut was a miniature slum, filled with junk from passers-by, including Cuban boat people who’d scrawled their own version of Viva Fidel on the inner walls. A shipwrecked crew of Haitian refugees had left behind chalked messages in French and the dried-out remains of a dead cat. The floor was littered with everything from the ashes of a long-dead fire to an ancient copy of Fortune magazine with a feature story extolling the management style of pre-scandal Enron. Finn found a jumbo-size empty box of Nigerian Fele-Fele condoms and a four-color pamphlet from the Buff Divers nude scuba diving association head office in Katy, Texas.

“I guess we weren’t the first,” said Finn, flipping through the brochure.

“Crossroads of the world,” said Hilts, lugging their dive gear under cover and wrinkling his nose at the faint, musky odor given off by the dead tabby in the corner. “If we had time I’d clean the place out.” In her exploration Finn had discovered that the lighthouse itself was locked up tight; their was no light keeper, so the light was either automatic or out of service. The padlock on the door looked reasonably new and the woodwork seemed well maintained, so she was betting on automatic.

“It might get a little cool at night,” Hilts commented. “Maybe we should sleep on the plane.”

“I’d rather camp on the beach,” said Hilts. “We’ve got sleeping bags.”

“Whatever.” The pilot shrugged. It was obvious he didn’t like the idea.

“What’s the matter, afraid of wild boars or something?” Finn asked.

“Daffy’s our only way off this chunk of coral; I’d like to stay close, that’s all.”

“We’re a long way from Libya,” said Finn.

“You think Adamson’s forgotten all about us?” Hilts responded. “They slaughtered Vergadora in his villa and they tried to kill us in Paris. These people are serious.”

“What are they after? It’s not like we found some kind of buried treasure.”

“If I was going to put money on it I’d say that thing you have around your neck,” answered Hilts, pointing to the Lucifer medallion. She’d bought a chain for it at a jewelry shop in Nassau.

“Kill for this?” she scoffed, fingering the silver-dollar-sized medallion.

“Kill for what it means. You heard that old rabbi in Italy. There’s been lots of speculation about Luciferus Africanus and his legion over the years, but that’s the first hard evidence. It’s proof of his theory, or Adamson thinks so. At the very least it’s the kind of thing that could get some interest going, maybe some scholarly competition, and I think he’d be willing to kill if he could stop that.”

“You think he’s that crazy?”

“It seems to run in his family. Schuyler Grand insisted that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a Jew, a communist, and the Antichrist all wrapped up in one. Great place to start a political dynasty.”

“I’m hungry. What did you catch us for lunch, O great hunter?”

“Here,” he answered. He reached into a cooler at his feet and threw Finn a foil-wrapped bundle. She snatched it out of the air, found a place at the edge of the beach to sit down, and unwrapped the package.

“Peanut butter?”

Hilts sat down beside her and handed her a dewy can of Kalik. She popped the top and took a sip of the ice-cold, honey-flavored beer.

“Arthur wanted to make us something exotic with cilantro and kiwi fruit in it. Peanut butter sounded more efficient.”

“The Wonder Bread’s a nice touch. I’m surprised he had it.”

“So was I. Arthur refers to it as one of his master’s ‘aberrations.’ Apparently Mills insists on egg-salad sandwiches made with Miracle Whip on Wonder Bread. Drives Arthur nuts.”

“I’d say so,” said Finn, and took another sip of the Kalik.

“He’s eighty-six or something. Doesn’t seem to have hurt.”

“Good genes.”

“I’ve got a theory,” said Hilts, tearing off a chunk of his own sandwich and chewing thoughtfully as he stared out toward the reef. “Health food is like chiropractors. Once you start on either you get addicted, you wind up in some kind of weird symbiosis with them. People who believe in magnets and crystals and high colonics and feng shui too. Best to stay away from them in the first place before you catch them like some kind of disease.”

“And you think Rolf Adamson is crazy,” she said and laughed.

“What I really think is that single-minded obsessive and very rich people can be dangerous. They start to believe that just because they think something is right and true makes it so. What Senator William Fulbright once referred to as the arrogance of power.”

“So how are we supposed to fight against that?” Finn responded wearily. “He’s got everything and we’ve got nothing.”

“In the same speech Fulbright quoted an old Chinese proverb: ‘In shallow waters dragons become the prey of shrimp.’ ” He shrugged. “He was talking about Vietnam and American vulnerability in a war we didn’t know how to fight, but maybe the same thing applies here; we can do things Adamson can’t. We can fly under the radar while he’s always in the spotlight.”

“You’re just trying to make me feel better and change the subject at the same time.”

“I’m not sure I even know what the subject was.”

“Your approval of Wonder Bread. Which is disgusting, by the way.”

“We couldn’t all be brought up in whole-grain heaven in… where was it, Columbus?”

“That’s right,” she answered. She looked out over the sea, then turned to Hilts, a serious expression on her face. “Are we kidding ourselves about this? A ship that’s been missing for half a century, evidence of something that’s just a myth to the rest of the world? Why us when no one else has managed to find it over the last two thousand years?”

“I used to know a guy who bought lottery tickets all the time. I told him he was crazy, the odds were stacked against him, he didn’t stand a hope in hell. Didn’t faze him in the least. You know what his response was? He said, ’Somebody’s gotta win, and you can’t win if you don’t play.’ He was right.”

“Did he ever win?”

“Not that I know of.” Hilts smiled. “But the point is, he could have. He was in the game, not just on the sidelines. He was a player. That’s what we are.”

“You’re a romantic, Virgil; an incurable romantic.” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. He blinked, then blushed furiously.

“Hilts,” he answered. “Just Hilts.”

They finished lunch and then loaded the magnetometer array into the inflatable.

“You seem to know what you’re doing,” said Hilts, watching as she stowed the equipment in the stern of the little boat.

Finn shrugged off the compliment. “I’ve used them before on my mother’s digs in Mexico and Belize, usually on land. They’re really nothing more than sophisticated metal detectors.”

They took the boat out to the reef line then turned and began to cruise parallel to the little island, keeping just outside the broken line of white water that marked the coral shoals where the Acosta Star had gone down, at least according to Tucker Noe. They made one run to calibrate the magnetometer pod dragging behind them, accounting for the presence of the Widgeon, then turned and came back along the same line. They found what they were looking for with remarkable ease. The ping in Finn’s headphones was almost deafening.

“Are you sure?” asked Hilts.

“It’s something pretty big. Either Tucker Noe was right and it’s the Acosta Star or it’s leftovers from the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

“Not something organic?”

“Not unless the reef is made out of cast iron instead of coral,” she answered, shaking her head.

Hilts took out the Garmin portable GPS locator Mills had lent him and took a reading that identified their exact location, then tossed out a lead line to get some idea of the depth they were looking at. The line slacked at slightly less than fifty feet.

“How can it be that shallow?” asked Finn. “We know they’ve had other divers here before-nude ones from Katy, Texas. Surely they would have spotted something this big.”

“Maybe not,” said Hilts. He pointed to the lead line, dragging away to the north, pulling out of his hands. “We’re at the tag end of the reef and there’s quite a current; we’re almost in the channel. Sport divers wouldn’t come this far unless they were looking for something in particular.”

The small waves lapping at the side of the rubber dinghy were cold. Finn looked up. The sun was dying in the west, somewhere beyond Cuba now; the further side of the afternoon. It was still light enough to dive, but not for long. It would take the better part of an hour to get suited up and prepared, and they’d already had a hectic day. She trailed her hand in the tropical water. Beneath her fingers the wreck of the giant ship waited silently, as it had for half a hundred years, secrets still locked within her wave-torn, coral-encrusted hull. She looked to the south; there was a deepening streak of silvery gray. Storm clouds were gathering over the distant horizon.

“Tomorrow?” said Finn.

“Tomorrow,” Hilts answered. “If the weather holds.”