The Lucifer Gospel

by Paul Christopher

  “I’m not sure. At first I thought it might just have been a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “You believe Mr. Hilts’s story?”

  “I’m still with him, aren’t I? And Simpson’s involvement seems to be through me, or my father. I don’t have all the answers yet.”

  “And you think those answers might be on the Acosta Star?”

  “Some of them. One thing I do know is that we’re in a hurry. The passports we’re using aren’t going to last forever. We need proof to take to the authorities. At least something to show that we didn’t have anything to do with Vergadora’s murder. The ship is the next step, that much is clear.”

  “I don’t think your Martin Kerzner with the Canadian passport and Peter Devereaux not turning up as a survivor is a coincidence any more than you do, Mr. Mills.” Hilts offered his own smile. “And I think you’re curious as hell to find out.”

  The writer lifted his glass, took one of the ice cubes and cracked it between a set of remarkably strong teeth for a man of his years. He chewed on the broken chips for a moment, then swallowed. He put the glass down on the table again with a hard clunk.

  “We’ll need something stronger than iced tea and lemon.” He grinned, then turned and looked back over his shoulder. Almost by magic Arthur the servant immediately appeared.

  “Yes, sir?” the man said, shimmering into the room.

  “Do we have any Kaliks in the refrigerator, Arthur?”

  “I’m sure we do, sir.”

  “Then why don’t you fetch us some,” said Mills. “Then my new friends and I can get down to work.”

  31

  The seaplane flew low over the dark, rich blue of the Caribbean at just over a hundred knots, the sculpted boat hull of the fuselage less than five hundred feet above the calm rolling sea. The sky above the high-set wings was almost perfectly clear, and the horizon ahead was a sharp, steady line except for a speeding dark island of squall far to the west.

  Daffy’s two big Lycoming engines filled the cockpit with a steady, powerful roar, and the plane seemed to fly by itself. Hilts’s fingers on the old-fashioned throw-over yoke barely exerted any pressure, his free hand only rarely reaching up to the overhead knobs and throttles to make an occasional adjustment. They were an hour and a half out of Hollaback Cay, heading south above the Tongue of the Ocean.

  They’d spent the better part of a week preparing for their dive on the Acosta Star, shuttling back and forth between Hollaback Cay and Nassau gathering equipment, including the bright yellow Inspiration Closed Circuit Rebreathers packed into the cargo area behind them. They’d gone to the library and museum on Shirley Street and studied the archives files of the Nassau Guardian, researching the Acosta Star and the details of her sinking almost fifty years before. They also spent a great deal of time with Tucker Noe, taking notes about the area immediately surrounding the dive site and consulting Lyman Mills’s personal chart library. According to the old bonefish guide the ship wouldn’t be hard to find if they knew what to look for; he’d taken accurate bearings from the old lighthouse, and while the sunken hull was hidden in the lee of the reef for twenty-three hours a day, there were several identifying markers on the reef itself that, seen from the air, would enable them to pinpoint the location to within a few hundred yards. It was Noe’s estimation that a dive of only forty feet or so would put them on the main deck of the ship.

  Over the years Lyman Mills had collected an impressive collection of Acosta Star memorabilia, including old cruise brochures, schedules, and passenger lists, engineering drawings of the ship’s construction, and half a dozen photo albums from passengers who’d cruised on the ship at various times during her career. One of the most useful of these had been a detailed set of scrapbooks that once belonged to Paulus Boegarts, or Paul Bogart, as he liked to be called, a half Dutch, half American who’d been professionally associated with the ship through almost all of her incarnations. Using all of this information Finn, Hilts, Lyman Mills, and Tucker Noe spent several days and nights developing a strategy for the underwater penetration of the vessel.

  The M.V. Acosta Star was by far the largest vessel ever to have sunk in the Caribbean. At 758 feet overall and 37,000 gross tons, she was 150 feet longer and 1,800 tons heavier than her nearest rival, the Bianca C., which had gone down just off the coast of Grenada. By wreck diving standards the Acosta Star was a monster, and like any monster it would have to be treated with caution, care, and a great deal of respect. A ship a hundred feet wide and the length of two and a half football fields would have been confusing in broad daylight with a deck plan; after fifty years and a hundred feet down in the deep-seas gloom, the interior of the vessel was going to be a very dark, dangerous, sharp-edged and coral-encrusted labyrinth.

  In theory the dive didn’t pose any insoluble problems. The bottom depth was a hundred feet in clear water, an easy depth even for simple scuba. With rebreathers they would have almost triple the time they’d have with ordinary tanks—better than three hours—and with their constant mix of oxygen and nitrogen, the rebreathers gave them even more time by removing the need to decompress on the way up. They’d be wearing full face masks with Ocean Technology Buddy Phones to let them communicate underwater and have the best tank-mounted and handheld lighting units available. They even had a GEM systems portable magnetometer that would ping for the wreck, find it, and instantly provide its exact location via the Global Positioning System.

  According to the passenger lists, Bishop Principe had taken the Gelderland Deluxe Suite on the Upper Promenade Deck. Pierre DeVaux, alias Peter Devereaux, had occupied cabin A-305, one level below the Main Deck on the port, or left, side of the ship, about one hundred and fifty feet from the bow of the ship and two decks below Bishop Principe. Given the way the ship had reportedly gone down, this would put Devereaux’s cabin on the “outer,” ocean side of the reef. Martin Kerzner, the supposed Israeli Intelligence agent traveling on the false Canadian passport, had been on the deck below Devereaux in cabin B-616 on the inner, or reef side of the ship. To go from one cabin to the other would involve entering the ship through one of the main hull hatches leading into the Acosta Star’s central lobby, located on either side of the ship. From there they would follow the wide lobby stairs up to Bishop Principe’s suite on the Upper Promenade Deck, then down to Devereaux’s cabin on A Deck. If necessary they could then use the lobby stairs again to descend to B Deck.

  If the stairs were blocked by debris, they had two alternate routes: one down the purser’s companionway, the other using one of the two elevator shafts on the port and starboard sides of the lobby. Theoretically it was a walk in the park.

  “You realize that realistically this whole thing is insane, don’t you?” Hilts said. “You’ve never done any wreck diving at all.”

  “I used to free dive into cenotes in the jungles of Quintana Roo. Two hundred feet,” Finn countered. “How long can you hold your breath, Hilts?”

  “That’s not the point,” the pilot answered.

  “That’s exactly the point. I’ve used scuba and rebreathers, my dive limit is around two hundred and fifty feet, and on top of that I’ve done cave diving, which is at least as complicated as wreck diving, and you know it.”

  “It’s too dangerous.”

  “For a woman? Is that what you’re saying?” Finn queried hotly.

  “No, of course not, but . . .”

  “No buts.”

  “I’ll need someone on the surface.”

  “You’ll need someone below. It’s the prime directive, you know that too: never dive alone.”

  “This isn’t some safety-groomed resort wreck, Finn. It’s not going to have all the dangerous spots neatly defanged. Remember, Tucker said there were sharks as well. Tigers. Bulls, mean ones.”

  “Which is why we brought along shark repellent and a pair of Mares air guns. Relax, Hilts. I can handle myself. In the Roo I had to deal with snakes as thick as your arm
and spiders the size of dinner plates. That doesn’t include the fire ants and the really gross scorpions. Relax, you’ll live longer,” she repeated.

  “All right,” he muttered, but he didn’t seem to relax at all. Finn stared out through the side window of the airplane. More than once she’d found herself wondering why they were making the dive at all; the chance that they’d find anything on board after almost fifty years was minimal. When you got right down to it, what could you find? DeVaux, or Devereaux, had apparently discovered something that he thought was evidence that Luciferus Africanus had somehow traveled from the deserts of Libya to the central United States, perhaps bringing the Lucifer Gospel with him on his journey.

  Unless the mysterious monk had brought a physical artifact to prove his claim, or explicit directions to where such artifacts could be found, they would be no further ahead. Rolf Adamson and his people had set them up for the violent killing of Vergadora, both to hide the knowledge of Pedrazzi’s murder in the desert and to compromise anything they might discover about Devereaux’s find. Without the Gospel, or at the very least a clue to its whereabouts, they would have no evidence of Adamson’s motive for killing Vergadora and attacking them.

  The only other option left to them if the dive came up empty would be to go to Lawrence, Kansas, and see if there was any trace of Devereaux’s discovery there. It was possible that he’d left some kind of clue at the Wilcox Classical Museum at the university, but once again, a lot of time had passed. The chances were very slim.

  “Check the GPS,” said Hilts, peering out through the windscreen. “We should almost be there.”

  Finn checked the readout on the little box mounted on her side of the cockpit: 22°25’N, 77°40’W.” She relayed the numbers to Hilts.

  “Then we are there,” Hilts said. “Look for the lighthouse.”

  And suddenly it was there, less than a mile away, a solid white line against the sky poking up from the rough scrub of a coral cay no more than a hundred yards long, the lee end trailing off into a line of breakers and foam that marked the low breaking edge of a reef. The reef itself stretched away, slightly curving, the breakers marking its course for three-quarters of a mile, pointing almost due west toward the coast of Cuba. Hilts knew that with another five hundred feet of altitude he would be able to see the coast no more than ten or twelve miles away. It wasn’t a particularly comforting thought, even with the Bahamian markings and the idiotic cartoon duck painted in full color on the nose. Daffy wasn’t going to impress a Cuban Flogger-B MiG armed with Kedge-class laser-guided air-to-surface missiles. He had a vague memory of the payload. About seven hundred pounds of high explosive. Each.

  “I’m putting her down,” he said nervously.

  Finn kept her eyes on the glittering, sun-splashed surface of the shimmering ocean in front of them. Maintaining a steady eighty miles per hour, Hilts dropped the nose evenly and took them down to zero feet. Still keeping up the speed, he touched her down, the keel of the boat hull biting into the highest wavelet of the negligible chop.

  The initial stutter and shakes turned into rattling machine guns and then pounding fists and hammers as the hull skipped over the surface before surrendering the lift of the wings to the buoyant hull. As Hilts throttled back the Lycomings on the wings above them, Daffy settled into the water, an ugly duckling once again after his brief flight as a swan. Pushing the rudder and easing the yoke to the left, Hilts turned the aircraft and headed them closer to the tiny island.

  “Keep an eye out for any broken water or signs of a reef,” the pilot warned. They pulled around until the lighthouse was dead ahead, a tall white pillar burning in the sun, topped by a slightly smaller bright red turret marking the light itself. Twenty yards to the right of the slightly flared base of the structure was a small windowless hut. The walls of the little building were whitewash bright, the roof terra-cotta red. Twenty yards farther still and they could see the gray-brown bulk of a rough concrete jetty. There was a clear line visible between the deep ocean and the lighter blue green that marked the shallow water of the reef. If the Acosta Star was almost flush against the coral wall, the way Tucker Noe said, it would be almost invisible unless they were right on top of it.

  “How close are we going to get?” asked Finn.

  “Just on to the shallows, give something for the anchor to bite into. The Widgeon’s got a real shallow draft, but I don’t want to take any chances. We can take the inflatable in to shore.” Packed into a suitcase-sized carrier was a ten-foot Aquastar dive dinghy with a separate, battery-powered ten-horsepower short-shaft outboard.

  He finally switched off Daffy’s engines and they slid easily toward the shore, barely buffeted by the light breezes. Finn slipped back into the rear compartment, popped the hatch, and grabbed the anchor. At Hilts’s signal she dropped the twin shovel device and paid out the line. The anchor bit cleanly at fifteen feet and Finn cleated down the line. Daffy turned into the wind, riding easily on the calm water. Twenty minutes after that, the dinghy inflated with its electric pump, and with the little battery-powered outboard clamped to the rubber boat’s plastic transom, they scooted in to shore.

  “Washed up on a desert island,” said Hilts as they reached the coral shingle and hopped out onto the narrow, quartz sand beach.

  “Hardly that,” Finn said and laughed. The sand was almost uncomfortably hot under her feet, and even with her sunglasses on she had to squint. “According to the charts we’re fifteen miles east of Cuba and right on the edge of one of the main shipping channels from South America.”

  “You’re spoiling the fantasy,” moaned Hilts melodramatically. “Sun-baked island, beautiful woman . . . what more could a guy want?”

  “In the first place, get a life, and then get the water, the rest of the diving gear, and the magnetometer array, which is back in the airplane. You’re going to have to make another trip,” she said with a grin.

  “What about you?”

  “I’m the beautiful woman, remember? I think I’ll go exploring and then wait for the big he-man to catch us lunch.”

  They spent the next hour settling in. The hut was a miniature slum, filled with junk from passers-by, including Cuban boat people who’d scrawled their own version of Viva Fidel on the inner walls. A shipwrecked crew of Haitian refugees had left behind chalked messages in French and the dried-out remains of a dead cat. The floor was littered with everything from the ashes of a long-dead fire to an ancient copy of Fortune magazine with a feature story extolling the management style of pre-scandal Enron. Finn found a jumbo-size empty box of Nigerian Fele-Fele condoms and a four-color pamphlet from the Buff Divers nude scuba diving association head office in Katy, Texas.

  “I guess we weren’t the first,” said Finn, flipping through the brochure.

  “Crossroads of the world,” said Hilts, lugging their dive gear under cover and wrinkling his nose at the faint, musky odor given off by the dead tabby in the corner. “If we had time I’d clean the place out.” In her exploration Finn had discovered that the lighthouse itself was locked up tight; their was no light keeper, so the light was either automatic or out of service. The padlock on the door looked reasonably new and the woodwork seemed well maintained, so she was betting on automatic.

  “It might get a little cool at night,” Hilts commented. “Maybe we should sleep on the plane.”

  “I’d rather camp on the beach,” said Hilts. “We’ve got sleeping bags.”

  “Whatever.” The pilot shrugged. It was obvious he didn’t like the idea.

  “What’s the matter, afraid of wild boars or something?” Finn asked.

  “Daffy’s our only way off this chunk of coral; I’d like to stay close, that’s all.”

  “We’re a long way from Libya,” said Finn.

  “You think Adamson’s forgotten all about us?” Hilts responded. “They slaughtered Vergadora in his villa and they tried to kill us in Paris. These people are serious.”

  “What are they after? It’s not like we fo
und some kind of buried treasure.”

  “If I was going to put money on it I’d say that thing you have around your neck,” answered Hilts, pointing to the Lucifer medallion. She’d bought a chain for it at a jewelry shop in Nassau.

  “Kill for this?” she scoffed, fingering the silver-dollar-sized medallion.

  “Kill for what it means. You heard that old rabbi in Italy. There’s been lots of speculation about Luciferus Africanus and his legion over the years, but that’s the first hard evidence. It’s proof of his theory, or Adamson thinks so. At the very least it’s the kind of thing that could get some interest going, maybe some scholarly competition, and I think he’d be willing to kill if he could stop that.”

  “You think he’s that crazy?”

  “It seems to run in his family. Schuyler Grand insisted that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a Jew, a communist, and the Antichrist all wrapped up in one. Great place to start a political dynasty.”

  “I’m hungry. What did you catch us for lunch, O great hunter?”