by Jim Hougan
They sailed the same night on a broad reach into the Gulf of Venice, then came about at the end of the Istrian Peninsula. Turning to the southeast, they headed for the Dalmatian coast, where there were hundreds of islands and thousands of inlets that would hide them.
There was no doubt in Dunphy’s mind that the Agency would find them. The border guard at Glorenza would be questioned, and word would get around about the old guy in Trieste, and the young couple who were with him, who’d paid all that cash for the Stencil. And then they’d look for them, tasking the overhead spy satellites for saturation coverage of the Adriatic.
Which meant that most of their sailing was done by night, with layovers in crowded marinas and sheltered bays. And in the course of this, something strange began to happen.
Gomelez found happiness.
For what may have been the first time in his life, the old man experienced joy, the pure joy that a dog feels running free. “The last time I felt this way,” he told Clem, “was in ’36—and then they blew me up!”
With Clem as captain, they sailed a zigzag route past hundreds of islands with strange-sounding names: Krk, Pag, Vis, and Brac˘. In a fishing village on the island of Hvar, they painted the hull black, but Dunphy knew that wouldn’t be enough. The ship’s silhouette and rigging were distinctive, and so were its sails. It was just a matter of time before someone in the Washington Navy Yard found the boat in a satellite photograph. Dunphy could see it: a nerdy image analyst who’d been told the Agency was looking for a terrorist, sitting behind a Fresnel screen at a long table in a warehouse with blacked-out windows, staring at pictures. And then: a photo of the Split marina, its waters carpeted with sailboats, and there—in the lower right-hand corner—a ketch whose red mainsail, while reefed, runs like a capillary down the boat’s centerline. Bingo! An intelligence medal for the analyst, black helicopters for Dunphy and his friends.
But there was nothing to be done about it. They were as safe at sea as anywhere else, and probably safer. The only other thing they might do was split up, and Dunphy wasn’t about to suggest that. Gomelez needed them, and Clem wouldn’t have heard of it.
By now, she loved him like a father. And it was hard not to feel that way about him. He had a sly sense of humor and, for a man whose life had been a prison, an astonishing repertoire of stories. Night after night, as the Stencil slid across the waves, Gomelez kept them spellbound with a narrative that tacked through his life as if every person and event had brought with them a change in the wind.
They might have gone on this way for quite a while. Dunphy was even becoming a decent sailor. But soon, the old man’s anemia began to bring him down. Clem repeatedly urged him to let them put in to shore, so that she could get him the B12 injections he so badly needed.
Gomelez shook off the idea. “I’ll admit, I was just beginning to get interested in London again—thanks to you, my dear. But that’s a very subversive development. And it’s not why we’re here.”
Dunphy disputed this with the old man as he helped him down to his cabin. “You can’t be the last of them,” he said. “A line like that—there must be dozens of people who can claim Merovingian descent. Even if it is far removed, they’re still—”
Gomelez shook his head. “There’s only one line that matters,” he said, taking off his shirt in preparation for bed. “And it’s by this sign that you’ll know it.” Slowly, he turned toward Dunphy, so that the younger man could see the mark upon his chest—a red splash about the size of a hand, in the shape of a Maltese cross. “My birthmark,” Gomelez explained. “All of us have had it, going back . . . forever. So you see, it’s not just a question of paperwork. And that brings me to something else, Jack. When I go, there’s something I want you to do for me. Something I need a you to do.”
In the days that followed, Gomelez became progressively weaker, and as he did, the weather turned. A damp and unseasonable cold settled upon the coast. The sky grew overcast. And it began to rain.
Dunphy welcomed the change. Cloudy skies would neutralize overhead surveillance and give them a chance to slip farther down the coast. Despite the forecasts, then, it was agreed that they should head out to sea as soon as night fell. And so they did, running parallel to the mountainous coast on a broad reach.
The Stencil was moving faster than it ever had, heeling well to port, with the wind filling its sails from the west. Dunphy was at the tiller, holding a course for Dubrovnik, while Gomelez remained below, sleeping. Clem moved about the deck, with the confidence of one who’d grown up on boats, adjusting the rigging.
The seas were high, but not so high as to seem dangerous. A bigger worry was the lack of visibility brought on by the darkness and the rain. While there were no rocks or spindles in their path, they knew they weren’t the only ship at sea, and a collision could be disastrous.
So they kept a close watch on the shifting darkness, screwing up their eyes to slits, blinking furiously against the rain. There was lightning, now, and more lightning, conjuring images that burned on the backs of their eyes, long after the light had gone. Again and again, the tumbling coast of Dalmatia flashed in front of them until, quite suddenly, Clem’s voice rang out and Dunphy saw her pointing dead ahead.
He squeezed up his eyes against the rain, but there was nothing to be seen—until a thread of lightning tore a hole in the sky and left it sizzling. It was then, with the ozone all around him, that he saw it—a pitch-black squall coming at them like a bowling ball the size of Manhattan. There was nothing to do but keep the bow of the boat heading into the wind, and Dunphy did this as well as he could. But the squall was pregnant with a wave that had no business in the Adriatic. Seeing it approach, growing taller and darker against the night, watching it assume a mortal inevitability, Dunphy shouted to Clem to tie herself off—but it was too late. The sea lifted them in its arms, dragging them out of the trough of the wave, pulling them higher and higher until, it seemed, they were higher than any wave could possibly be. And for a long moment, they balanced there, with the Stencil a’s bowsprit pointing toward heaven like a lance. Then the wave rolled out from beneath them, and the little boat fell back into the sea and pitchpoled.
It seemed as if everything had happened in a single second. One moment, Dunphy had been straining to see what lay ahead, then he was soaring toward heaven—then he was cast back down to drown. The water was so cold it ripped the air out of his lungs, and then he was under it, drowning in the darkness, his legs hopelessly tangled in the rigging. He swung his arms this way and that, as much to find Clem as to free himself, but there was no up, no down—and no way out. He was drowning. He was dying.
And then, as suddenly as it had pitchpoled, the Stencil righted itself, so that its hull was once again in the water. In an instant, Gomelez came staggering out of the cabin, coughing, growling, the blazon on his chest bared to the wind. Rushing to Dunphy’s side, he dragged the younger man on board and helped to free him from the ruined rigging.
“Where’s Clementine?” Gomelez shouted.
Dunphy scrambled to his feet and looked wildly around. The air and the sea were at war with each other, and the boat’s mast was in splinters, the mainsail hanging overboard. Dunphy took this in at a glance as he rushed from one side of the boat to the other, searching the water desperately for his Clementine. But there was nothing, and no one. Just the night and the angry air, and the limitless Adriatic. She was gone.
And then he saw her, maybe twenty yards away, facedown in the water, rising and falling on the swells. He didn’t think about it. He didn’t even kick off his shoes. He just threw himself into the water and began windmilling through the waves as if they were enemy soldiers who stood between him and the woman he loved.
The boat was in irons now, heading up into the wind, halyards clattering against the deck, slashing the air, but the boat was going nowhere. Even so, the seas were so bad it took Dunphy almost five minutes to get to her and bring her back.
And by then she wasn’t breathing. Gomel
ez dragged her aboard, and Dunphy clambered onto the deck. At a glance, Dunphy saw that she’d been struck on the head, by the boom or the bow, and that she was bleeding. But there was nothing to be done about that.
Dropping to her side, he brushed the blood away with his hand and tried to remember how the drowned might be brought back to life. Laying her on her back, he lifted her chin and pushed back on her forehead in an effort to clear the airway through her throat. Then he pinched her nostrils closed with his fingers and, putting his mouth over hers to form a seal, delivered two slow breaths. He could feel her chest rise, and fall back. But there was no other movement. And then it seemed her heart was still.
So he tried again, and again, alternating rescue breathing with CPR, compressing her chest with the palms of his hands, pumping rhythmically, desperately trying to kick-start her heart. And breathing for her, too, until twenty minutes had passed and Dunphy, exhausted, rolled away, unable to do any more.
She was gone. And with her, the fulcrum of his world.
“Let me try,” Gomelez said, and sinking to the deck on his old man’s knees, he lowered his face to hers and exhaled, then drew back . . . and again, and again, his long hair mingling with hers and fanning out over her cheeks.
Dunphy was sitting, stunned with despair, on the smashed cabin top when he heard her cough, and cough again. And then her voice, bewildered, asking, “What happened? Where was I?”
In the morning, Gomelez was gone. His frail body lay in the bunk with his eyes closed, as if he were asleep. But there was no breath left in him. With tears streaming down her cheeks, Clementine drew the sheet over the old Merovingian’s face.
It was a moment that all of them had known would come, and they were prepared for it. That the boat was a wreck did not matter.
They sat for hours in the open sea, a hundred yards offshore, flaunting the Stencil a’s position during the very time that satellite surveillance was likely to be the most intensive. Then they put in to a nearby cove, and while Clem gathered pine boughs from the shore, Dunphy laid Gomelez out upon the deck and carried out the promise that he’d made.
With only a hammer and screwdriver to hand, he performed a crude trepanation on the old man’s skull, releasing his soul in a Merovingian rite as ancient as the bloodline itself. “Free at last,” Dunphy whispered.
When Clem returned, they banked the old man’s body with branches of pine and soaked it all in gasoline. Then they fashioned a slow fuse, using candle wax and string, and lit it.
“They’ll have seen us by now,” Dunphy said. “The whole coast is under surveillance, so they’ll be on their way by now. And when they get here, they’ll see what’s happened, and they’ll know it’s all over for them.”
Moving forward, Dunphy raised the little boat’s jib and tied it off. Then he set the self-steering gear on a course for Jerusalem and, with Clem by his side, slipped into the water. Together, they swam for shore as the smoke began to rise from the floating funeral pyre behind them. Within a minute or two, they were standing on the beach, watching the boat as the rigging caught fire and the ruined mainsail burst into flames. Even so, it continued sailing, heading out to sea—when, suddenly, a dark shadow swept silently across the beach, and looking up, Dunphy and Clem saw an unmarked black helicopter race silently toward the burning sailboat, only to hover haplessly in the smoke above it.
“It’s over,” Dunphy said, and taking her hand, started walking toward a fishing village down the beach.
Clementine shook her head. “I don’t think it’s over,” she said.
Dunphy looked at her.
“I think it’s just beginning,” she told him.
He wasn’t sure what she meant. But, for a moment—when their eyes locked—he could have sworn he saw something in them that didn’t belong there. A reflection, perhaps, of the Stencil a’s jib, or a trace of blood from the blow she’d suffered the night before. Whatever it was, the mote had a shape, and in the instant he beheld it, he could have sworn that it was neither of the things that he’d imagined, but something else. Something that wasn’t there before. Something of Gomelez.
About the Author
JIM HOUGAN has won awards for investigative journalism. He is the author of three nonfiction books, is an Alicia Patterson and Rockefeller Foundation fellow, and is the former Washington editor of Harper’s magazine. He has reported for NPR’s “All Things Considered” and has produced documentary films for “Frontline,” “60 Minutes,” A&E, and the Discovery Channel. With his wife, Carolyn, he has co-written a series of books under the pseudonym John Case, including the New York Times bestseller The Genesis Code. They live in Afton, Virginia.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2000 by James Hougan
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-084626-8
ISBN-10: 0-06-084626-7
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EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780062103253
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