Circle of Bones: a Caribbean Thriller

by Christine Kling

  Cole secured the pilothouse house door behind him, removed his yellow oilskin jacket and hung it on a bulkhead peg. Theo sat in the helmsman’s chair, his bare feet propped up on the dash, his tablet on his lap. Cole rested his arm on the back of Theo’s seat and stood still, checking the glowing red instruments, and admiring the dark sea visible though the wheelhouse windows. The big six-cylinder Cummins purred along as she always did under Theo’s care.

  “Can you take the con for a while?” Cole asked.

  “Sure, Cap’n. Why don’t you try to get some sleep?”

  He glanced back through the bulkhead door into the galley. Riley sat on the dinette bench, her head bowed over the chart, her hair hanging forward shielding half her face. She’d ducked back into the galley as soon as everything on deck was secure. Now, she was poring over the chart, trying to narrow the search area. Cole watched her slide the tip of her forefinger in a quick half circle, tucking the hair behind her ear. He saw a flash of white where her teeth pressed into her lower lip.

  Without turning to face his first mate, he said, “I don’t think I could fall asleep right now.”

  On the periphery of his vision, he saw Theo twist around and glance aft.

  “Yeah,” Theo said. “Sure has improved the scenery around here.” He made a couple of loud sniffing noises. “And the smell.”

  Cole lifted his arm in a panic and pulled the fabric of his T-shirt to his nose.

  Theo dropped his head forward and his shoulders bounced with his quiet laughter. He looked up at Cole and shook his head. “Oh mon,” he said. “You got it bad.”

  With his open hand, Cole thwacked his first mate on the back of the head, but he could still hear the muffled laughter when he left the wheelhouse for the galley.

  “How’s it going?” he asked when she looked up at him.

  “Okay,” she said. Then, after dropping her gaze back to the chart, she added, “Do you always beat your crew?”

  He sighed. She didn’t miss much.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said.

  “That’s a good start.”

  He thought he could see a hint of a smile on her face when he sat down on the bench across from her. Leaning over the metal box, he withdrew one of the leather journals. “It might help if you read some more of this. You’ll get an idea of how the old man thought.” He fanned the pages with his thumb. Less than half of the book contained his father’s neat writing. “This is the last one. He started it in the fall of 2002. The world was still reeling from September 11th. This was before the Iraq invasion, but the no-bid contracts to rebuild were already a done deal.” He shook his head. “The old man was really on a roll.” Cole sat next to her. He spread the book out on the table and flipped open the pages. “Start here,” he said.

  Dear son,

  Your country is now asking itself how such a thing could have happened without the intelligence services having foreseen it. The finger-pointing has started. Many are using the phrase “Faulty Intelligence” to lay blame at that fraternity’s door. You may wonder why the brethren don’t object? Because in peacetime, much attention had been focused on the vast secret budgets of the intelligence infrastructure. But this now offers them the opportunity for a counter-attack. They can give the excuse that their warnings could have come sooner had not their budgets been cut and their needs for new technology and manpower been ignored. Also, the warnings they did give were ignored by politicians who chose not to listen. Or so they claim.

  In fact, what intelligence was handed over to the decision makers of both your country and mine was filtered through THEIR hands. Their numbers are small and they dwell in the shadows, but their influence is vast. Our leaders can only make decisions based on what they know — and the members of this inner circle decide what flows through that pipeline. One would think that the Americans would begin to wonder why it is that every time some significant military event takes place, the American intelligence community is wrong-footed. Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, 9-11. Faulty intelligence, indeed. But the fault is not a cock-up nor a lapse of any kind. It is intentional and secretive. It is THEIR work. Secrecy is power. It puts this power in the hands not of democracy, but of this monied aristocracy that profits from their advance knowledge of when and where your country will go to war.

  I know you will find this difficult to believe. How could THEY have known and allowed thousands to die just to persuade your country to go to war? Take this from an old hand who has seen it all. My experience shows that with intelligence matters, the more bizarre the claim, the more likely it is to be true.

  Cole placed his finger on the last sentence on the page. “Every time I read that last line, I think about the way my father died. I think about Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian spy who died of polonium poisoning in London, or the story of the Bulgarian killed by the umbrella that shot poison pellets. I know it sounds mad to say that this old British gentleman was assassinated by the members of some secret cabal simply because he had discovered the whereabouts of a sixty-year-old submarine, but there it is: the more bizarre the claim, the more likely it is to be true.”

  “Cole, listen,” she said. “I’m willing to spend this day with you guys looking for whatever this is that your father wants you to find. I’ll be honest, the connection to Skull and Bones has piqued my interest. But I don’t think the them you’re talking about is Bones. I just can’t swallow this whole conspiracy theory that you and your father have inhaled without chewing. I’m a slow eater, Cole. Anyway, why don’t you go get some rest and leave me to read this.” She flipped to the first page of the journal and started to read. After a few seconds, when he had not moved, she turned to him. “Go on. If I find something, I’ll call you.”

  Cole closed the door to his cabin, lay down on his bunk fully clothed, and laced his fingers behind his head. He stared up at the overhead. Sleep, he thought. Yeah, right.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Portsmouth, Dominica

  March 27, 2008

  8:15 a.m.

  Riley awoke to the loud rattle of the anchor chain feeding out through the steel hawse pipe. She’d fallen asleep face down on the table, and when she sat up, she had to peel the damp paper chart off her cheek. James Thatcher’s journal lay open atop the chart, her right wrist still resting in the center of the pages. She checked her watch — it was after eight o’clock. Stretching her arms high over her head, she opened her mouth in a big, ear-popping yawn. Sunlight streamed in through the exterior door that led out to the side deck, and she heard unintelligible voices outside. It must be the guys up on the foredeck, she thought.

  She slid off the bench, stepped through the forward door, and admired the view through the eight windows that graced the rounded front of the Shadow Chaser’s classic pilothouse. She saw the two of them standing out in the brilliant glare on the foredeck — Cole in khaki shorts, white T-shirt, hiking boots, and a faded blue baseball cap and Theo in long plaid shorts bunched at his waist with a length of rope and sporting dark mirrored sunglasses. They were an odd pair, she thought. Theo was tall enough to be a professional basketball player, but the bit of leg showing between his shorts and his flip-flops looked bird thin. Cole’s legs, on the other hand, were thicker, his calves knotted with muscle.

  She chuckled to herself and wondered what her friend Hazel would say if she could see her here gawking at those shoulders and the waistband where Cole’s T-shirt was tucked into his shorts. She would undoubtedly ask why Riley had sent him packing last night, and then add that if she was going to turn that down, she really should go buy a cat.

  “It’s not that simple,” she said aloud, and she wasn’t at all sure if she was speaking to Hazel, her brother, or herself. She remembered the light in Cole’s eyes a few hours ago as he spoke about his father’s journals and this crazy theory that somebody, somewhere had known what Al-Queda was up to and had suppressed the information. And somehow that was tied to some World War II wreck? One minute, this whole thing seemed po
ssible, even logical — and the next minute, she felt like she had fallen down the rabbit hole.

  Beyond the two men rose a jungle-covered headland with the ruins of another stone fort. Beneath that, the bay swept round to the buildings of the town nestled at the base of the green hills.

  So, they’d arrived in Prince Rupert Bay and that was the town of Portsmouth on shore. Her memories of this place harkened back to a much simpler time in her life. Back when her father was posted in Barbados, her dad had taken them on a business trip. They’d flown in a seaplane to Antigua so he could visit the consular offices there. He’d done his business in the morning in St. John’s, and by afternoon they were aboard a borrowed sloop headed down island.

  That had been a glorious week. In those days, she and her brother still reveled at the chance to spend time alone with their father. Once they managed to separate him from his briefcase, they had gone for morning swims in the crystalline water and laughed while cooking fresh-caught kingfish and fried plantains. They’d climbed to spectacular waterfalls and stood still in the cool mountain air waiting with binoculars for a glimpse of the native wild parrots. Here off Portsmouth, their little sailboat had been accosted by dozens of boat boys offering to row them up the Indian River. Michael had selected the littlest boy, Galen, and it had taken him more than an hour to row them up the dark jungle tunnel that was the river.

  Where twenty years ago, theirs had been the only sailboat in the anchorage, the big trawler was now anchored among dozens of yachts, and the only boat boys she saw were older men in wooden fishing boats that sported big Yamaha or Honda outboards on their transoms. Even Dominica changed.

  Out of habit, Riley looked around the wheelhouse for the GPS to check their position. Above the helm, a big computer screen displayed a color chart of the anchorage. In bold black letters along the bottom of the screen, she read their position in latitude and longitude: 15º34’45.07N: 61º27’39.12W.

  She was still staring at the numbers a couple of minutes later when Cole walked in.

  “Good morning, Miss Maggie Magee,” he said.

  “Hey,” she said without taking her eyes off the instruments.

  “How are you feeling this morning?”

  She heard his question but her mind was elsewhere. She wondered if it was possible. Though reading those pages in Thatcher’s journal had given her a sense of one facet of the man, she still wasn’t sure about these puzzles. He had been meticulous about building his arguments about the cabal. He cited names, dates, places. Were these numbers just a coincidence or was this going to tell them where to look on the Indian River?

  “It’s amazing the way you do that,” Cole said.

  When she turned to look at him, his face was no more than six inches from hers. She took a step back, her heart hammering, and she felt her face flush with heat. The tufts of brown hair that poked out from under his baseball cap were damp and she could smell the fresh scent of his shampoo. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “The way you focus like that. You shut out everybody and everything.”

  “But –” she pointed at the GPS screen, then cleared her throat. “Look at our latitude.”

  “Okay. I see it. That’s supposed to mean something?”

  “You didn’t spend all night looking for patterns or repetitions in numbers or text like I did. The first number is fifteen. Make you think of any of the coins?”

  “You’re kidding, right? It is a 1915 nickel, but he sent that to me years ago.”

  “But I’m sure he remembered. The man who wrote the journal pages I read last night didn’t forget any details. What about the next number - the minutes?”

  “Thirty-four? I don’t see what that has to do —” he stopped and Riley saw the creases around his eyes deepen. He relaxed the squint and smiled. “Okay. It’s 322 again, isn’t it? This time we add the digits differently. Keep the three, then two plus two equals four.”

  “Good. You’re starting to get the hang of this.”

  “I was a little rusty. It’s been a few years since the old man sent me puzzles like this. But I think you’re definitely on to something here.”

  “Remember in the old days of sailing ships, how sailors were not able to calculate their longitude? They used to just sail a latitude heading straight east or west until they hit land. Maybe this time, we sail the latitude until we hit the river.”

  “We need the big-scale chart of the bay,” Cole said. At the rear of the wheelhouse was a small chart table. He pulled out a wide drawer beneath the table and began thumbing through a thick stack of charts. When he found what he wanted, he pulled it out, grabbed some navigation tools, and headed into the galley.

  Rather than showing the whole island, this chart showed only the big crescent-shaped bay and several miles of coastline on either side. Cole placed his fingers at the side of the chart about two inches apart, like the legs of a little man. “This,” he said, “is one minute of latitude which is equivalent to one nautical mile.” He dragged his fingers from west to east across the chart and the spread included the whole of the Indian River and half the town of Portsmouth. “It’s not precise enough.”

  “Right. We got the first number from the nickel and that gives us the degrees. The French Angel gives us the second number which is the minutes. But latitude is measured in degrees — each of which is divided into sixty minutes, and then the minutes are divided into sixty seconds. If we can figure out what number to use for the seconds, we’ll have it down to within one sixtieth of a mile.”

  “Do you think we use the third coin?” Cole asked.

  Riley lifted the big silver half-dollar out of the box. “The year is 1964,” she said. “That doesn’t work for minutes. Sixty four is too high a number.”

  “Should we add six plus four?”

  “That might work,” she said. Riley picked up the stainless steel dividers and spread the two legs of the instrument like the legs of a geometric compass. She then positioned the instrument on the latitude markings at the edge of the chart. She measured and found the mark for 15º34’10.00N. Cole set the parallel ruler on the mark and they saw that it ran south of the river and did not intersect.

  “That won’t work, either,” Cole said.

  “What else is in that box?”

  Cole dragged the box closer to him. “My father used to send me letters with some kind of surprise inside. It was sort of like getting the prizes in the cereal boxes. It wasn’t valuable stuff. Just cool. Like this.” He lifted out a St. Christopher’s medal. “Maybe this is telling us to go to the island, St. Kitts? The real name of that island is St. Christopher.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “The problem with that theory, though, is that the old man never went to St. Kitts. And he sent me that medal when I was twelve — before he even started his research about the Surcouf. See the phrase on the medal — Saint Christopher Protect Us? That was the key to a simple alphabet cipher. I wrote the letters of the alphabet above those letters and then deciphered the text to read his letter. He started with simple ones like that and as the years went by, they grew more challenging.”

  “What about the coins? How did he use them?”

  “Well, the first one was the Kennedy fifty-cent piece. For that one, I had to use a bifid cipher. You know, that’s where you create a five by five matrix of numbers. In that case I used the date, 1964 and for the fifth number, I had to play around with the fact that it was a fifty-cent piece. I eventually tried 19645 and that worked. You write those five numbers down and across and it produces twenty-five squares. Then you fill in the alphabet, and each letter winds up with a pair of coordinates.”

  “Okay. And what about the Indian Head nickel?”

  “That one? Let’s see. That one was more complex, and he used it twice. The first time, it was a Gronsfeld cipher using the word Indian and a key series of numbers.”

  “Wait a minute,” Riley said. “You say he used the Indian coin twice?”

  Cole ope
ned his mouth to answer her, but he froze, and then reached for the dividers.

  Riley beat him to it. She scooped up the instrument and placed one point on the latitude line that crossed the chart, then she squeezed the legs until the other leg was right on the mark for 15º34’15.00N. She slid the instrument across the chart and placed one leg on the black latitude line that ran beneath the Indian River. With that leg anchored, she swung the other in an arc as though drawing a circle. When her arc touched the line on the chart that indicated the river, she stabbed the end of the dividers into the chart. “There,” she said. “I don’t know what it is we’re looking for, but I’m willing to bet we’ll find it right there.”

  At that moment, she heard Theo’s feet padding down the side deck. He poked his head in the door. “Dinghy’s in the water, Captain. All’s ashore that’s goin’ ashore. My cousin Zeke’s waiting with his van. A quick trip through customs and immigration, and we’re off. ”

  “Oh shit,” Riley said. She’d known this moment was coming and she’d been dreading it.

  “Did I say something wrong?” Theo asked.

  Riley wiggled her hand back and forth in the air. “It’s just that I’ve got a teensy, little problem with my passport.”

  “Like what?” Theo asked.

  Cole sighed. “Like she doesn’t have one.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Aboard Fish n’ Chicks

  March 27, 2008

  8:25 a.m.

  Diggory awoke to the sound of a man’s voice shouting in French. In response to the Frenchman, he heard the whiny shrieking of the brother he had come to think of as the Freak.

  He rose and pulled on the khaki pants that he had folded with care and hung up in the cabin’s tiny closet. He grabbed his wallet and slipped it into his back pocket. Shirtless and in bare feet, he climbed the steps, crossed through the main salon and opened the sliding door to the aft deck. Some four feet above the Freak, on the stone quay stood a heavyset man wearing a white uniform with brass buttons and epaulets. His face flushed red as he shouted that because they were docked there, he had to put his ferry boat on the end of the quay. There would be other ferry boats arriving soon, he screamed while shaking his fist at the blotchy-skinned barbarian, and they needed to move their boat now.