The Templar Throne

28

Holliday turned the elapsed time bezel on his old Luminox wristwatch for two hours and then he and Sister Meg inputted their position into the two GPS handhelds, using the larger unit on the Deryldene D as a base guide. According to the big unit, Lake Wallace was located a mile and a half down the beach and six hundred yards inland across the low scruffy dunes.

The weather station, which employed five of the six permanent residents of Sable Island, was a mile farther down the curving arm of the crescent. There were a small handful of offshore oil rigs in the ocean several miles away from the island, but with the sandbar already evacuated in the face of the coming hurricane it was unlikely they would be interrupted.

It took them almost half an hour to reach the turn point indicated by the GPS. The fine dark sand was more difficult to walk in than either one of them had expected. It would take another ten minutes to reach the lake. That in turn meant it would take the same amount of time, if not longer, to make the return journey, and they still hadn't reached the lake.

That left them with an hour at most to discover an artifact that probably didn't exist and maybe wasn't even there-and even if it was there, it had been buried in the sand for seven hundred years. The odds of finding it were infinitesimal. They found a narrow windswept pathway leading up between the dunes. Finally they reached the summit and paused to take a breath.

Ahead of them now the sky on the horizon was a roiling vision of chaos, as though the sky itself was being torn and bruised. On the island they could now see the narrow oblong lake and the broad stretch of the southern beach, ten times as wide as the northern beach where the Deryldene D had grounded.

The sea between the beach and the horizon was a frothing horror, huge waves rising on the outer banks then roaring like freight trains across the inner sandbars to finally crash and break along the sand.

No wonder there had been so many wrecks here over the centuries; any ship foundering on the outer banks would be pounded into kindling, and anyone who survived the wreck itself would almost certainly be drowned before he reached the shore.

"This is madness," said Holliday. "We'll never find the damned thing. We should go back to Halifax and wait out the storm, then come back."

"There's no time for that," answered Meg grimly. "The hurricane will flood into the lake and the True Ark will be under the water again." She trudged forward, hitching her backpack higher on her shoulders, her feet sinking into the soft, fine sand. On the crest of a dune covered with some kind of thistle and rough eelgrass a trio of shaggy Sable Island ponies watched them, their long unkempt manes flying raggedly in the rising wind.

How many hurricanes and for how many generations had the wild horses' bloodlines survived? And how could Sister Meg be so sure that the treasure her precious Blessed Juliana had brought here would be submerged? According to the book he'd read on the train, Lake Wallace had steadily been getting smaller over the passing centuries. The original high-water mark could be very high by now in relation to the modern lake.

He knew exactly why, of course, and it wasn't the first time he'd seen the incredible streak of stubbornness coming from the red-haired nun. The iron faith of the True Believer. Darwin couldn't be right because the Bible never mentioned evolution, dinosaurs or cave men and strongly suggested that the sun revolved around the earth. Holliday checked his watch again. He estimated that it would be another five minutes of slogging before they reached the midpoint of the lake. He made the simple calculation.

In the final analysis the trek from the Deryldene D would take a total of forty minutes. That would leave them with barely the same amount of time for their search if they wanted to get back to the boat within the two-hour limit. Somehow he doubted that Gallant was a great fan of grace periods.

Holliday looked out over the rolling, deep green monstrosity of the open Atlantic and the hurricane hurtling inexorably down on them. It was close enough now that he could easily see the blinding, jagged spikes of lightning flashing across the jet black base of the clouds like a Goya vision of Apocalypse.

Holliday felt something curl and curdle in his guts. Fear or warning? Maybe both. The fight- or-flight instinct the Neanderthal hunter felt when confronted by his first charging mammoth or saber- toothed Tiger. They slid down the pathway leading to the floodplain of the lake. The wind was rising in gusts, dragging up brief clouds of gritty sand into their faces. He checked his watch one more time. Another few minutes gone. He cursed under his breath. Meg half turned.

"Did you say something?"

"No, nothing," he responded. She continued the slide down to the bottom of the dune and Holliday dutifully followed.

The hell brewing on the horizon was almost enough for him to force Meg's hand and abandon her, but he knew he couldn't bring himself to do it. They reached the floodplain and walked across the salt-encrusted hardpan toward the edge of the water. It was summer and the lake's edge was fringed with grasses and other low plants.

The wind was beginning to blow hard now, building wavelets on the dark water. Meg looked left and right and then behind her. The winter high-water mark was clearly visible. There was a shallow lip and perhaps twenty feet or so of slightly darker sand between the lip and the lakeshore. Meg paced back until she had reached the high-water lip in the sand, then went back twenty feet more. She looked left and right again, judging the rough midpoint of the lake. She paced off fifty feet to the left and stopped.

"This is the midpoint," she said firmly. She dropped her pack onto the ground, unstrapped the folding shovel and took the headphones for the metal detector out of her pack and plugged them into the device's console. Holliday followed her across the sand and did the same thing. Finally they were ready. Holliday looked at his watch.

"We've got thirty-seven minutes to locate this thing and dig it up. If we haven't hit pay dirt in half an hour we're leaving. Agreed?"

"Whatever you say." Meg nodded absently, her attention focused on adjusting the metal detector's arm brace.

"I mean it," warned Holliday. "One minute more than that and I'll leave you here." He nodded toward the massive storm front rapidly descending on them. "I don't want to be here when that thing hits."

"I heard you the first time," answered Meg. She scooped up her pack with her free hand and hung it over one shoulder. "I'll go right, you go left."

"All right," answered Holliday, but she was already moving, the headphones clamped around her ears. He shook his head, watching her go, then fitted on his own arm brace and put on his headphones. He turned and began walking, moving slowly and methodically, swinging the disc of the detector back and forth in a sweeping motion a few inches above the sand.

The Sable Island book he'd read on the train had gone into minute detail about the geology of the place. Sable Island was a product of the last ice age. As the glaciers withdrew, sand was deposited in front of the retreating ice. In Sable's case the formation was referred to as a sand dump, and a very large one, deposited over a thick layer of Tertiary Period sediment, which eventually produced pockets of oil, hence the offshore drilling platforms.

The point being that there was no bedrock or any other kind of rock on Sable Island and hence no minerals. If the metal detector pinged and the LED gauge on the console gave him a reading, it was either the remains of an old shipwreck or Meg's True Ark.

He lifted his wrist and glanced at his watch yet again. He felt his jaw tighten. Ten minutes eaten up and the hurricane ten minutes closer; this had gone from insane to dangerous. A woman in the clutches of some sort of religious rapture was going to kill them all. There was no True Ark. He heard a sharp cry, dulled by the wind and the muffling headphones. He turned. Meg was standing three hundred yards away in the distance, waving her arms and yelling. He tore off the headphones as she yelled again. He barely made out the words.

"I found something!"

Holliday stared at the small, frantically waving figure in the distance.

"You've go to be kidding," he whispered. He saw her drop to her knees and begin to scrabble at the sand, digging it out with the little folding shovel. Holliday heaved the metal detector over his shoulder and ran. A minute later he reached her position, chest heaving. The sand was blowing in the freshening wind and stinging his eyes. He stared into the foot-deep hole in the sand.

"It was like a miracle!" Meg said raggedly as she dug. "The meter went off the scale and the headphones went from a steady ping to a long tone in an instant and I knew it was here! I knew it!"

"What metals?" Holliday asked.

"All of them! That's what is so incredible! Bronze, gold, silver! Even tin. It was reading some kind of heavy metals as well, probably copper or nickel or lead."

"Most likely lead; they used it for drainpipes back then, or tin maybe."

"Help me dig," ordered Meg.

Holliday stripped off his backpack and unlimbered his own shovel. He checked his watch. Twenty minutes left. He dropped down on his knees across from Meg and began to work at the caked, dark sand, widening and broadening the hole. At two feet Meg's shovel hit something with a hollow thump.

Holliday flopped forward onto his stomach. He reached down into the cavity and started sweeping the sand off whatever it was with his outstretched fingers. A few seconds later a carved design appeared, deeply carved into a dark gray metal slab. An engrailed cross, the ancient mark of the Saint-Clairs. Below it was an almost runelike series of letters. Some sort of motto:???o???????.

"That's not Latin, or French," said Meg, a confused look on her face.

"It's ancient Greek," said Holliday, who'd seen the phrase before. "In Latin it's usually rendered as In hoc signo vinces-By this you shall conquer-meaning the cross. The Emperor Constantine saw the phrase in a dream the night before the Battle of Milivian Bridge in A.D. 312. He won the battle and the phrase became his motto thereafter. It was also the motto of the Knights Templar."

"It's the True Ark," whispered Meg, her voice reverent. "We actually found it."

"My, my," said Holliday. "Imagine that." Sister Meg gave him a sharp look.

"Help me dig," she said.

They swept away more sand, then dug carefully around the slab. It took ten minutes, half the remaining time, to reveal that the slab was actually a rectangular box roughly three feet long, eighteen inches wide and a foot high, about the size of an ossuary coffin used for relic bones in the medieval era and apparently made with sheet lead, the inset lid tightly soldered. They managed to lift the surprisingly lightweight container out of the hole and set it down. Both Holliday and Meg examined it closely. The box was perfectly sealed.

"A simple carpenter's cup," whispered Meg, eyes wide.

"Sorry?" Holliday said.

"The Grail," said Meg. "It was a simple carpenter's cup, not some fine jewel. The True Ark is like that."

"I thought you were quoting from an Indiana Jones movie, the one that had Sean Connery in it." Holliday looked at his watch. Five minutes left. Good timing. He stood up and brushed sand off his jeans. He'd been an utter fool.

"How can you be so blasphemous at a time like this?" Meg asked, scowling, still kneeling in front of the box.

"Because I don't believe any of it," said Holliday, his voice bitter. "The whole damned thing has been impossibly convenient. The bald guy in Prague to give it all a sense of urgency, the Irishman O'Keefe and the Mary Deare just where they needed to be, the rubbing in Iona, the hymn, and then you find exactly what you've been searching for after looking for ten or fifteen minutes and only buried a couple of feet deep. There's a saying for it: if it's too good to be true, it probably isn't." Holliday shook his head wearily. "Let's cut the crap, sweetheart. This whole thing has been a crock right from the start and I fell for it hook, line and holy sinker." He reached down, picked up his pack and slung it over one shoulder. He looked down at Meg. She was rummaging for something in her pack. "It was all window dressing, and pretty expensive window dressing at that," he said. "I don't know quite what you're up to, but I hope it was worth it."

He began to turn away as Meg stood up and then he froze. She had a heavy Stechkin APS 9mm pistol in a two-handed grip, rock solid and pointing in the general vicinity of his heart. It was the pistol of choice for Russian Special Forces in Afghanistan. He'd seen plenty of them in the hands of Taliban insurgents himself. Trophies from a lost war.

"Mother warned me that it wouldn't work," said Meg, the gun never wavering. "But I thought it was worth a try."