The Aztec Heresy

by Paul Christopher

  Run-Run McSeveney had felt the vibration of her passage down in the engine room and had burst out onto the deck below Hanson’s position. Both men saw the danger immediately.

  ‘‘The bluidy bampot! What in the name of God is he thinkin’?’’

  The trawler was a long liner, running two sets of lines from the masts. Each line was connected to a pair of steadying otter boards beneath the water to keep her depth constant. The lines were separated into sublines, or ‘‘snoods,’’ each of the snoods carrying hundreds of baited hooks. Running two lines like this one, the trawler could be dragging literally thousands of deadly hooks through the water at an unknown depth. A diver snagged on the lines could be torn to shreds in seconds or just as easily dragged for miles and drowned.

  Hanson hurled himself down the companionway ladder to the bridge and lunged toward the large red button on the main console beside the throttles. He hammered his palm down on the button again and again, sounding the big Kahlenberg S2 air horns, sending out a deep-throated wail that could have come from a speeding freight train bearing down on the fishing boat.

  ‘‘Why doesn’t the pikslikker change course?!’’ Hanson bellowed, swearing in Danish.

  Run-Run appeared on the bridge, chest heaving.

  ‘‘The geggie hoer-slet isn’t going to stop!’’

  ‘‘Weigh anchor!’’ Hanson yelled. Run-Run jumped to the console and hit the main winch controls and the anchor chain began to wind up forward with agonizing slowness. Hanson knew they didn’t have much time. As soon as he felt the slight shudder of the big Danforth fluke anchor pulling from the sandy bottom, Hanson pulled the twin throttles down, taking the powerful diesels from idle to all ahead full in a split second. As soon as the big converted tug gained a fractional headway Hanson spun the big wheel hard to port in a desperate attempt to cut the trawler off. It was going to be very close.

  Finn was swimming down the exposed side of the wreck when she caught a hint of movement at the edge of her vision and heard a heavy clanking sound. Looking up, she spotted Guido banging the back of his air tank with the handle of his dive knife and waving his right arm up and down: the signal for danger. Spotting her looking, he turned and pointed to the east. Finn stared.

  There was a huge shadow above them coming in at a high rate of speed, and in the shadow’s wake glinted a thousand points of light deep in the water. It took her a few seconds to realize what she was seeing. The shadow was a trawler heading toward the Zodiac and the twinkling flares in the water were bright steel fishhooks catching the light of the morning sun. The hooks were spread out in a line at least five hundred feet across and coming closer by the second.

  Billy appeared on her left, the camera hooked to his dive belt. He grabbed her by the arm and pushed her down toward the sandy bottom. She nodded and kept pace, finding a shallow niche under the curving side of the wreck. An instant later Guido joined them.

  The thundering of the trawler’s engine was pounding in Finn’s ears now. Guido signaled, three fingers of one hand hooked into a claw. He pointed up and Finn nodded, realizing what he was trying to tell her and Billy: if there were enough hooks in the array of connecting lines trailing behind the trawler, they could easily have enough power to hook the wreck and pull it over on them, crushing the three divers underneath the hull. There was no chance of reaching the surface without being impaled. There was no place to go unless they tried to make it to the lip of the blue hole a hundred feet away.

  Then Billy spotted another avenue of escape. He squeezed Finn’s shoulder and turned her around, pointing. At her feet she could see a faint dark and jagged line where the hull met the sand. Twisting, all three divers turned themselves downward in the water and began to dig frantically at the sand with their bare hands. The pounding of the trawler’s engines was even louder now. On the bottom the ragged hole in the hull of the San Anton grew fractionally larger and Finn saw what it was: the remains of an old gun port in the stern section, now half buried. A way into the ship.

  Running at a full twelve knots, the anchor winch howling and the diesels thundering, the Hispaniola headed directly at the trawler. The tug was almost twice the size of the trawler, and even a glancing blow from the Hispaniola would capsize her. The trawler never faltered; a few moments later the Zodiac and the Diver Down buoys disappeared under her foaming bow. Hanson altered course fractionally. It was too late to ram the trawler but there was still a chance.

  ‘‘There’s na name on the blaigeard’s bow!’’ Run-Run yelled over the sound of the engines. ‘‘The fannybawz is a gedgie pirate!’’

  Hanson risked a quick look. The engineer was right; the trawler’s name, along with her license registration, had been obscured with heavy grease or paint. If she escaped out into the Florida Straits she’d disappear in a few short hours into fleets of fishing boats that plied these waters.

  ‘‘How close are we?’’

  ‘‘Hundred yards,’’ answered Run-Run with an experienced eye. ‘‘We might take her in the stern but it’ll be a near thing with the anchor dragging at us like it is.’’

  ‘‘How much chain is still out?’’

  Run-Run looked down at the winch gauge. ‘‘Twenty feet,’’ he called out.

  ‘‘That should do it,’’ Hanson said with a tight, angry grimace on his face. ‘‘Hang on, old man!’’

  Hispaniola seemed to rise to the occasion, her bow leaping upward as the anchor chain shortened and the drag on her forward momentum changed. The big tug shouldered through the water, the sea churning up a broad wake behind her as she raced forward, coming within a few short yards of clipping the stern of the other vessel.

  ‘‘Nowt on transom neither, the cladaire bastrid! ’’ Run-Run yelled out as they passed. Out of the corner of his eye Hanson saw that the engineer was right; the name and home port on the stern had been obscured as well.

  There was a staggering lurch as the Danforth anchor and its heavy chain connected with the twin cables stretched out from the trawler’s outriggers, tearing through them and snapping the heavy mahogany booms into broken, splintered stumps on the smaller ship’s deck.

  The cables tore away, wrapping around the anchor chain as the Hispaniola dragged the long lines and the multiple hook snoods away from the dive sight. Still moving at full speed, the fouled anchor came banging up out of the water to rest against the hull, trailing the cables like dragging lengths of seaweed.

  Hanson put the Hispaniola into a broad turn, taking them around the jagged mass of North Rock, then slowed and finally stopped. Now on the starboard side, the trawler was pounding off into the distance. There was no question of going after her; the propeller would eventually foul in the dragging lines, and it was more important to see to the safety of Finn and the others. Hanson lifted the binoculars, aiming them at the position where the Zodiac had been. There were only a few pieces of floating wreckage to mark the spot.

  ‘‘Can ye see anything?’’ McSeveney said anxiously.

  ‘‘No, nothing,’’ Hanson answered. ‘‘Not a damn thing.’’

  12

  Cardinal Enrico Michelangelo Rossi, assistant secretary of state for the Vatican, strolled down the central pathway in the immense Cortile del Belvedere, the Courtyard of the Belvedere, heading toward the huge bronze statue of a pinecone, the famous Pigna, which had once been a centerpiece of one of the court-yard’s many fountains. The fountains were long gone, the Belvedere now transformed into a simple lawn with one of Arnaldo Pomodoro’s gold-tinted, brightly reflective Sfera con Sfera, or Sphere within a Sphere, as though trying to prove the ‘‘New’’ Church’s humble simplicity.

  The old man smiled at the thought. He was walking through the most valuable piece of property in Rome, surrounded by buildings of immense architectural significance and filled with priceless works of art, all paid for by the sweat of the brows of millions of the impoverished. All of it ws tax-free and based on a promise of immortality and paradise that had to be one of the world’s great fairy ta
les and insurance sales pitches combined.

  Cardinal Rossi was, above all things, a practical man; faith in the Church was the bedrock of his life. Faith in a benevolent god or any god at all was something else again. He saw no conflict in this. Thomas the Apostle had doubted the Resurrection until he felt Christ’s wounds for himself. Rossi would believe in Heaven and Hell when he arrived at one destination or the other. Until then he would reserve judgment, knowing that the work he did on this earth was work to further the safety of the Church and not incidentally his own ambitions within it.

  The man walking beside him was dressed in the plain robes of a parish priest, a costume he had no right to wear but one that gave him easy access to the Vatican and anywhere else he chose to go in Rome; there was nothing that sank into the background of the city’s awareness more than the sight of a Catholic priest. He had dark hair and wore thick glasses. His most recent service to the cardinal had been the execution of a book dealer in Paris.

  The cardinal spoke softly.

  ‘‘It went well?’’

  ‘‘There were no problems.’’

  ‘‘The book?’’

  ‘‘He’d already given it to them.’’

  ‘‘How do you know?’’

  ‘‘I saw them go into the store earlier. They came out with a small package wrapped in paper. I assumed it was not a coincidence.’’

  ‘‘Then why kill him?’’

  ‘‘You told me to.’’

  ‘‘To prevent them discovering the location of the ship.’’

  ‘‘I was too late to do the one so I did the other.’’

  ‘‘You’re sure it was them?’’

  ‘‘The same people I followed in Seville, yes. The pretty one with the red hair and the English lord.’’

  ‘‘Their continued existence complicates things. There is a long skein connecting the parties to this. It would be a disaster to Cavallo Nero if the skein led back to me. It would be a disaster for the entire Church. We cannot be tied to events in any way.’’

  ‘‘I’m always at your disposal, Eminence,’’ said the man in the thick glasses.

  The cardinal frowned at the thought that the man might be making a play on words at his expense.

  ‘‘Like a faithful hound, is that it?’’

  ‘‘We are all the Dogs of God,’’ the false priest answered.

  ‘‘That is hardly the point,’’ replied the cardinal. He stopped below the raised stone platform holding the aging greenish bronze pinecone and stared up at it, trying to remember what the religious significance of it was and failing. So many saints, sinners, and signs in the heavens. It was hard to keep track of this place’s long and convoluted mythology. It seemed to change with each passing year. Once St. Christopher had been revered, and now he was just a million small medals hooked over a million truck drivers’ rearview mirrors. Even St. Valentine had been debunked, apparently nothing more than an invention of Geoffrey Chaucer and his Parliament of Fools.

  ‘‘I wonder who the patron saint of murderers is?’’ Cardinal Rossi asked himself.

  ‘‘Saint Guntramnus,’’ said the man standing beside him. ‘‘He called a doctor to cure his dying wife, and when the doctor couldn’t help her, Guntramnus slit his throat with a razor.’’

  ‘‘Trust you to know,’’ murmured the cardinal. He turned and began to walk back down the path to Pomodoro’s shining statue of a shattered sphere. ‘‘Contact Guzman. Tell him about these treasure seekers. They must be dealt with discreetly and with dispatch. No errors this time.’’

  ‘‘As you wish.’’ The man nodded.

  ‘‘Bene,’’ said the cardinal. ‘‘Now leave me.’’ He gave the assassin a two-fingered blessing. A group of tourist nuns in old-fashioned wimpled habits fluttered by like a flock of pink-faced black-and-white seagulls, inevitably plump. He gave them another blessing and each one paused, bowed, and made a brief sign of the cross, muttering a quick ‘‘God have mercy’’ as they passed by. He turned back to the man with the thick glasses, but he was already gone.

  ‘‘Go with God,’’ he said, not meaning a word of it.

  Cat Cay is a private island just south of Bimini that advertises itself as one of Henry Morgan’s treasure havens, a key base for Confederate blockade runners, a PT boat base during the Second World War, and the place where the Duke of Windsor introduced ‘‘Kiltie’’ fringed Oxford golf shoes and Argyle socks to the unsuspecting public.

  In actual fact, it is a small, nondescript island in the Bimini chain closest to Miami, and was a well-known rendezvous and storage depot for rumrunners during Prohibition as well as a convenient spot for small- and big-time mobsters and politicians to congregate when they wanted to gamble and womanize. It also has great tuna fishing. Hemingway’s last novel was set in the area, as the nouveau riche locals tell you endlessly. Its most recent development has come at the hands of the Rockwell family, the lowest bidders on most NASA contracts, including the Space Shuttle and its attendant problems over the years.

  The island is shaped like a two-pronged fishhook with the fat part at the south end and the skinny part to the north. The fat part contains the nine-hole golf course once patronized by the Duke of Windsor and his patterned socks when he was governor general of the Bahamas during World War Two. The abdicated king played endless rounds of golf while his hawk-faced American wife popped over to Miami for a spot of unsupervised shopping.

  Anyone with a well-aimed Big Bertha driver can hit a ball right across the island and into either the Atlantic or the Florida Straits, depending on which way they’re facing. These days twenty-five thousand dollars gets you onto Cat Cay and a little more than half that amount keeps you there as long as the membership committee approves of the depth of your bank account and the length of your boat or your executive jet. In their time Al Capone, Meyer Lansky, Richard Nixon, Bebe Rebozo, and Spiro Agnew all loved to visit Cat Cay. The limestone speck’s only other claim to fame is the invention of the tuna tower, an aluminum platform attached to a boat and used to spot fish.

  James Noble stood at the tee on the seventh hole at Windsor Downs, put down his Maxfli Black Max ball, and angrily whacked the five-dollar -a-shot orb three hundred yards away over the trees and across the beach, and into the ocean.

  ‘‘What the hell is the matter with you?’’ Noble asked his son, who was acting as his caddy. Although smoking on the course was strictly forbidden under club bylaws, the pharmaceutical magnate lit up a Cohiba Straight Pyramid cigar and sucked it into life on the end of his Dunhill lighter.

  ‘‘I did exactly what you said,’’ answered Harrison Noble.

  ‘‘I told you to solve the problem, not announce it to the entire goddammed world. A fishing trawler? Jesus, Harrison!’’ The elder Noble put down a second ball and sent it after the first.

  ‘‘I was trying to make it look like an accident.’’

  ‘‘Did it work?’’

  ‘‘I didn’t hang around to find out.’’

  ‘‘So you might have done the job after all?’’

  ‘‘I don’t know yet.’’

  ‘‘And the trawler?’’

  ‘‘Haitian. One of the people the Mexican suggested.’’

  ‘‘If they’re still alive they’ll know someone’s onto them.’’

  ‘‘There’s no proof they even found anything. ’’

  ‘‘Find out.’’

  ‘‘How am I supposed to do that?’’

  ‘‘Carefully,’’ said the older man, putting down another ball. This time he tried to put it somewhere on the fairway between the tee and the green. It hooked to the left and wound up between the rough on the beach side and a yawning sand trap fifty feet away. He hated golf and was no good at it. He only played it because the casino didn’t open until seven in the evening and his cardiologist had told him to exercise more.

  He sucked on the cigar, hauling a huge cloud of sweet smoke into his lungs. He snorted out the smoke like a cartoon bull and stared at his son. I
t made him wonder about the human genome. Where James Noble was cold-blooded, Harrison Noble was hotheaded. Where the elder Noble was devious, the younger was foolishly transparent. The tree was strong, the branch was deadwood. His son was a blunt instrument. It was time to use him like one.

  ‘‘Have them followed. Keep your distance. Don’t do anything until I tell you to.’’ He paused and took another heave on the cigar. ‘‘When the time comes, kill them. All of them. Dead this time.’’

  ‘‘You told me all this before.’’

  ‘‘This time listen to me.’’

  Noble stomped off down the fairway, his son trailing behind him, humping the nine-thousand -dollar Louis Vuitton golf bag on his shoulder.

  The lab on the Hispaniola had been converted from the original officers’ wardroom on the oceangoing tug. It was located directly behind the lounge on the main deck, running almost all the way back to the stern and almost the full width of the vessel amidships. It was low-ceilinged, brightly lit, and had half a dozen rectangular portholes port and starboard. The outer perimeter was laid out with narrow counters for supplies and instrumentation, with the center of the room taken up by an eight-by-ten-foot translucent acrylic-topped examination table, diffusely lit from underneath. In Finn Ryan’s mind it was the heart of everything they were doing.

  She stood at the table wearing shorts and her favorite Thurman Café T-shirt. There was a large angry-colored bruise on her left leg and a long scrape on her right arm, but other than that she’d survived the trawler’s attack relatively unscathed. Guido had fared a little worse, with half a dozen stitches on his cheek, which he thought might wind up giving him an attractively rakish dueling scar, and Billy walked with a painful limp from a stretched tendon. It had been a near miss for all three of them, and if Briney Hanson hadn’t been able to sever the long line cable when he did, the wreck of the San Anton might have proved to be their watery grave. By the time Eli Santoro suited up and dived on the wreck, the five-hundred -year-old hulk was tipping dangerously toward the nearby blue hole, dragged there by a dozen or so snoods from the trawler’s long line, which had fouled in the remains of the sunken ship’s superstructure. As it was, the way in through the shattered hull had disappeared as the ship pitched over, and Eli had been forced to find another entrance into the wreck to rescue his friends, coming into the hull through the forecastle ‘‘sacre,’’ a narrow port used to allow a cannon to fire directly forward. With the ship now dangerously unstable, there had been no time for a full-fledged inventory, but Finn had managed to retrieve one artifact from the half-destroyed captain’s cabin before they surfaced once again. The artifact now sat on the examination table before them.