The Lucifer Gospel fr-2

by Paul Christopher

  “I guess we’re fifty years too late to find out whatever his secret was,” said Hilts.

  “Maybe not,” Finn said quietly, her light falling across the little round table. “What’s that?”

  The surface of the table had a skin of silt and sediment, but there was obviously something underneath. Finn waved her hand back and forth just above the tabletop, unsettling the thin layer and dispersing it.

  “Playing cards?” said Hilts, looking confused behind his mask.

  “I bet they’re Kem brand,” said Finn. “My father used them when he played bridge on his digs in the jungle. They’re made out of cellulose acetate or something; that’s why they haven’t disintegrated.”

  The cards were tucked into the aluminum rim of the table in two groups, like poker hands, faceup. One set was at the top edge, the other set to the left. The top set had six cards, the set on the left had five. “He wasn’t playing poker, that’s for sure,” said Hilts, looking down at the cards.

  “He wasn’t playing any game,” replied Finn.

  “A message?”

  “He was locked in here, he knew he was going to die, and he took the time to do this. He had to have had a reason.”

  “A three, an eight, another three, a pair of twos, and a five in one hand, a pair of eights, the jack of diamonds, and another pair of twos, clubs and spades.” He paused. “What kind of message is that?”

  “The only one he could leave. We just can’t decipher it.” She checked her computer again. “And we don’t have any time left. Take some pictures and let’s get topside.” The suck and blow of the current was beginning to take its toll in the cabin, pushing sediment up and obscuring visibility.

  Hilts nodded, unzipped the big ninja pocket on his vest and took out the compact DC500 Mills had purchased for him in Nassau. He took a full set of general pictures of the cabin using the internal flash, then concentrated on the table and its two hands of cards. “There’s something else there,” said Hilts, pointing to the center of the table. Finn waved her hand, sweeping away more of the brown sandy grit, and a gleaming line of gold appeared.

  “It’s a chain,” she said, picking it up. It was a little more than two feet long, the links finely made. The clasp was still intact but there were two end links torn open. “It’s as though someone tore it off someone else’s neck,” said Finn.

  “Take it and let’s get going,” Hilts replied. He took a shot of the dangling chain and then Finn stowed it away in her vest. Hilts stowed the camera again, then turned and made his way out of the cabin, Finn holding her light so that it shone over his shoulder as he reeled in the safety line on their way back. Even in the lower corridor the increase in the tidal surge could easily be felt, and now there was the steady booming sound transmitted down to them as heavy waves hammered into the side of the reef. By the time they reached the Main Deck foyer again the surge had become truly fierce, the current pushing them from one side to the other, slamming them against the bulkheads as the ocean breathed through the gaping entrance doors. The weather on the surface was clearly closing in. Finn thought about the rubber dinghy and the half mile of sea that lay between them and landfall at the lighthouse.

  Silently the couple angled their way across the lobby, fighting against the bursting current as it tried to push them tumbling back. Finn knew that their margin of safety was slowly slipping away. Another ten minutes or so and they’d be in real trouble. She’d heard a hundred stories of divers who were within sight of the surface but doomed never to reach it because they let their dive run too long. No air was no air, and the human body could only survive for so long before the lungs sucked a fatal dose of drowning seawater. At least with the rebreathers they wouldn’t have to make decompression stops after such a long period on bottled air.

  “Getting bad,” Hilts commented, trying to pull and glide his way to the entrance. He finally reached it. Finn came in behind and above, hanging on to the upper edge of the broad hatch in the side of the ship. Outside the sea had darkened perceptibly, the sun from above cut by at least half. The strength of the tidal surge plucked at their buoyancy vests, the harsh current moving first in one direction, then rebounding to the other. There was roughly a ten-second pause of relative calm between them. “We’ll have to time it exactly right if we want to get back to the anchor line in one piece,” instructed Hilts. The line was snugged around the lifeboat davit four decks up. If they missed the calm between the surge and its backwash they’d either be slammed mercilessly against the hull or swept out into the channel. Finn had always been curious about traveling to Cuba, but not enough to be a waterlogged corpse washed up on one of her white sand beaches.

  “What about a safety line?” Finn suggested.

  Hilts shook his head. “Too much drag. It would slow you down. Just wait for the pause and then swim like hell. If you feel the return stroke coming, find something to hang on to, quick, got it?”

  “Got it.”

  They waited in the entranceway as the surge poured in through the opening, sweeping them back. As it faded Hilts hit the green full buoyancy button on his vest and shot out through the hole, rising quickly out of sight. Hilts counted to herself. At ten she tensed and waited. The surge came again, passed through, heading for the wall of the reef, and then the movement stilled again. Finn hit the green button on her own vest, kicked hard and rose up through the water, watching for Hilts’s waiting figure by the anchor line. She decided on her way up the huge, curving side of the hull that if he wasn’t there she’d simply keep on going up to the surface and pray she’d arrive within a reasonable distance from the inflatable. She tried not to think of the hundred other possibilities, none of them good.

  She kept her mask up as she slipped up the barnacle-and-coral-encrusted side of the ship, keeping herself well off, trying to judge the strength of the surging current at her back, wondering if she had enough time left before it smashed her against the hull. With her vest at full rise, the shells and fire coral with its poisonous, jellyfish stingers and its spiky exoskeleton would tear her to ribbons. Suddenly the line of the open deck appeared and there was Hilts, hand out to grab her just as the surge hit, pushing them both hard. Finn managed to weather the beating of the surge using her free hand to hang on to the anchor line and then it was momentarily calm again.

  “I didn’t think I was going to make it,” she said, her breath coming harshly.

  “I was having my doubts there for a second as well,” Hilts replied, the sound of his voice crackling and breaking up in her ear with a hiss. “And we’re not out of it yet.” He let go of the line with one hand and pointed upward. Finn stared. Fifty feet above them the water was in a torn fury, the vortices of the waves smashing in all directions, filling the water with bubbling turbidity. Finn knew the surface was quickly turning into a nightmare. The approaching storm was almost upon them; they had to reach shelter soon or they’d be in very bad trouble.

  “We’ve got to get topside-now,” she said.

  “No argument from me,” agreed Hilts. “Let’s go.”

  They waited for the next surge to pass then followed the line up to the top, hanging on with one hand and guiding their progress with the other. Amazingly the inflatable had ridden out the rising weather and hadn’t swamped. Finn’s head broke the surface and she saw that things were worse than she’d thought. Through the beaded water on her face mask she could make out the far horizon. It was a black horror of scudding clouds that seemed to rise up like a terrible wall. They’d surfaced in the middle of a raging, moaning gale, and from the looks of the horizon the gale was only a taste of much worse to come. She tugged the mask up and over her face as Hilts reached the surface beside her. Both of them clung to the dangling side ropes of the dinghy as the cold rain lashed at them with talons of icy spray. Suddenly, impossibly, there was the sound of a bullhorn close by. They turned toward the sound and stared in disbelief.

  It was Rolf Adamson, fifty yards away, standing spread-legged on the corkscrewing
rear deck of a Viking 56 supercruiser yacht with the name Romans XII across the transom. He had the bullhorn in one hand and a pump-action shotgun dangling from the other. “Mr. Hilts, Miss Ryan! Please! You must come out of there instantly, I insist! You’ll catch a chill if you’re not careful!”

  33

  A damson was dressed in white duck trousers, a blue denim shirt, and black Topsiders without socks. He sat on the far side of the boat’s large and lavishly decorated salon in one of the big tan leather club chairs scattered around, a cut crystal tumbler full of single-malt whiskey in one hand and the Lucifer medallion in the other. Beside him, in jeans and a Harvard sweatshirt, was Jean-Baptiste Laval, the supposed expert in Coptic inscriptions. Finn and Hilts, dressed in long fluffy bathrobes with Romans XII embroidered across the right chest, sat together on one of the long low leather couches arranged around the bulkheads. Adamson gestured at the bathrobes with the hand holding the medalion. “You understand the significance of the name, don’t you?” he asked.

  Finn spoke before Hilts had time to open his mouth. “Of course,” she said mildly. “It’s from the Bible. Romans twelve, verse nineteen. Vengeance is Mine sayeth the Lord.”

  Adamson was impressed. “Very good, Miss Ryan. I had no idea you came from such a religious family.”

  “I didn’t. Just a reasonably literate one,” said Finn.

  “It’s actually Romans XII the second, to be really accurate,” Adamson said and smiled. “My grandfather owned the first one. A Boeing fifty-foot Bridgedeck. He used to come out to Cay Sal Bank with Joe Kennedy and Cardinal Spellman to bonefish before they went on to Havana.”

  “Your grandfather. This would be Schuyler Grand, the wacko radio evangelist?” asked Hilts. Finn wondered how smart it was to overtly provoke a man with a shotgun up against his chair.

  “That’s correct, Mr. Hilts.”

  “Doesn’t sound like the Schuyler Grand I knew,” the photographer answered.

  “That’s the point, Mr. Hilts, you didn’t know him. Few did. He was a very complicated man.”

  “He was crazy,” said Hilts flatly.

  “He certainly was.” Adamson smiled. “He was crazy as a bedbug, but there was nothing crazy about his patriotism. He believed that America was the greatest nation in the world and that it had been created to lead the rest of the planet away from godless communism and into the light of true democracy.”

  “That story’s a little out of date,” said Hilts. “All the people who sang that tune are dead and gone, from Stalin all the way down to Richard Nixon.”

  “The names have changed but the enemies haven’t,” Adamson answered. “America is faltering once again and it needs a strong patriotic leader to save it. A man of God. A man for God.”

  “Why do I get the idea that man is you?” said Hilts sourly.

  “Do you know what a killer culture is, Mr. Hilts, Miss Ryan?”

  “Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun. Barbarism as a culture,” offered Finn.

  “Osama bin Laden,” said Hilts.

  “Most people find the idea abhorrent. They think that a barbarian is simply someone who hasn’t seen the light. But that’s not the case. There are killer cultures all around us but we’re too vain, or isolationist in our thinking, to believe it. There is no way that Islam and Christianity can ever coexist. We are both killer cultures. Cultures who kill their enemies as a way of life. Hitler knew that, but his vision was too shortsighted. If he’d made war only on his true enemy-Communism-he would have captured half the world and lived to a ripe old age. The Prophet said to ‘make slaughter’ on the Infidel and Christian dogma tells us to ’smite the anti-Christ.’ There can be no middle ground. This is a crusade. One way of thinking must win in the end. And we’re losing, except we refuse to recognize that fact. We no longer have the highest standard of living in the world. Workers in Canada and places like Brunei earn better wages. Korea has better longevity statistics. Cuba’s population is more literate. Progress has been turned into a dirty word and our president would rather see us as asexual Puritans. We have turned ourselves into a nation of scapegoat seekers who look for their cultural pleasure in reality shows that are anything but. I intend to put a stop to that and the Lucifer Gospel will help me do it.”

  “You’re as crazy as your grandfather,” growled Hilts.

  “Why do I get the idea that both of you are crazy?” Finn asked angrily. “There’s a hurricane coming and the two of you are talking politics.”

  The broadloom deck beneath her feet was tilting back and forth in long slow swells and the sound of the wind outside seemed louder every second. It was dark enough for the overhead lights to be on in the huge, low-ceilinged room, and rain scratched harshly against the long, teardrop-shaped windows. The whole boat yawed back and forth, turning on its anchor chain, keeping its bow into the wind.

  “Don’t worry about the hurricane, Miss Ryan. So far the weather people have it listed as a tropical storm. They haven’t even given it a name. I’m afraid you won’t live through it anyway. As for myself and my companions, this boat is capable of slightly more than fifty miles an hour running ahead of the wind, and run we shall as soon as we’ve disposed of you.”

  “So where does he fit in to all of this?” Hilts asked, nodding toward Laval.

  “I don’t think that’s any of your business,” said the Frenchman.

  “Brother Laval is a Jesuit,” said Adamson. “Which means that above all he is a logical man. Brother Laval no longer works for the Church. He works for me.”

  “So, Laval, I guess that means that money talks and God walks.”

  “Very witty, Mr. Hilts,” replied the monk. “Perhaps you should get a job as an action hero.”

  “How did you find us?” Finn broke in. “You couldn’t have followed us.”

  “We didn’t. We followed your friend, Mr. Simpson.”

  “I’d never met him before I came to Cairo,” Finn protested.

  “Simpson is the reason we hired you, Miss Ryan,” said Adamson. “Simpson’s been part of this since the beginning.” He laughed. “Since before the beginning really.”

  “what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Rumors about a Gospel written by Christ have existed almost from the time of His Crucifixion,” said Adamson. “And rumors like that have always had a political currency. My grandfather was aware of that fact. In the late twenties, when the Vatican was in serious financial trouble, my grandfather, among others, came to their aid. An exchange of information regarding the Lucifer Gospel was made. It’s a very long story and I have neither the time nor the inclination to tell it now, but suffice it to say that eventually governments became involved. Mussolini’s, ours, and the British, who basically held the reins of power in the Middle East at that time.”

  “Simpson.”

  “Simpson.” Adamson nodded. “The Lucifer Gospel, had it surfaced at that time, could have seriously altered the balance of power immediately prior to World War Two. It could have crippled the Vatican’s newly acquired tax base and it could have brought America into the war at least a year, if not two years, earlier.”

  “Water under the bridge,” commented Hilts.

  “Not really. When DeVaux reappeared in 1959 with news of the Gospel, the Cold War was at its height. The revelation of the Gospel’s existence and its existence within the United States would have had an enormous impact. Jack Kennedy, should you need reminding, was a Catholic.”

  “The Pope killed Kennedy?” Hilts laughed. “That’s a new one!”

  “His Catholicism may well have been a contributing factor to his death.”

  “You think this lost Gospel is still that important?”

  “Our own government thought so, Miss Ryan. DeVaux died for it on the Acosta Star.”

  “Kerzner, the Canadian?” said Finn, remembering Lyman Mills’s theory.

  “Your father was his control officer, Miss Ryan. Kerzner was CIA. His real name was Joseph Turner. He wasn’t Canadian, of course, but by the
n DeVaux was an American university professor and the Company’s mandate didn’t include assassinating our own people, as you are well aware, Mr. Hilts. Not back then, at any rate. His job was to find out what DeVaux was selling the bishop, and barring that, to kill both of them, which he did. Now it’s your turn.”

  “We didn’t find anything either,” said Finn.

  “That remains to be seen,” said Adamson. He took a small sip from his glass. “Not that it matters to you.” A pair of heavyset men in dark clothing appeared at the doorway to the big cabin.

  “What are you going to do to us?” asked Finn.

  “I’m not going to do anything, Miss Ryan, God is.”

  By the time they were taken out onto the rear deck of the yacht, the rain was coming down in ragged torrents and the visibility was nonexistent. The ocean around the boat had been torn to ribbons, a mass of broken, spume-flecked chop and huge rolling waves that vanished in the sodden curtain of rain to break like thunder in the hidden distance. The sky overhead was a black roiling mass of clouds driven to madness.

  “The robes, please,” said Adamson. They stripped them off, leaving them in their bathing suits. There was no sign of their dive vests or other equipment. The inflatable had vanished and the float plane was gone. “Follow the sound of the breakers. That’s Cay Lobos,” said Adamson, shouting to make himself heard over the sound of the storm. “ Micah, verse three, chapter three: ‘Who also eat the flesh of my people, and flay their skin from off them; and they break their bones, and chop them in pieces, as for the pot, and as flesh within the caldron.’ That’s what the coral is going to do to you, and if that’s not enough, the highest point on the island is twelve feet above sea level. During the last half dozen hurricanes in this area the storm surge was twice that. You two are about to have an unfortunate accident.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Finn asked, shivering. “You have the medallion. Without it we have no proof of anything. You have what you wanted.”