“What have you got, Maurice?” Jack said.
“It’s amazing, Jack. The destruction debris is just below the surface. Jason thought there was less chance of finding intact material here on land than underwater, but there you go.” He leaned over and handed Rebecca the pot. “One for the conservation lab.”
“Thanks, Uncle Hiemy. Aysha sends her love, by the way.”
“Show them your big find, Maurice,” Jason said.
Hiebermeyer peered at them, his eyes gleaming with excitement, evidently too preoccupied with the site to think of Aysha’s love or anything like that. He took off his little round glasses and wiped them on his shirt, then lifted his sombrero, running his hand through his thinning hair. “All right,” he said, putting the glasses and hat back on. “Where we are now, where I found that pot, is a pretty lavish house, a merchant’s dwelling no doubt. So,” he said, walking as he spoke, “I cross the street here, I go up this brick revetment, and then I step over this stone threshold into this very substantial courtyard.” He strode quickly in a straight line parallel to the boardwalk back in the direction they had come, turned left and walked another ten meters or so, and then did the same again, describing three sides of a square. “There are holes about five meters in, undoubtedly once containing wooden posts that held up a sloping roof, and here in the center, we find a raised stone plinth over a meter high.” He clambered up the plinth, and stood in the middle. “Any ideas?”
“Some kind of peristyle courtyard?” Rebecca said. “An exercise ground?”
“In Port Royal? The only exercise that was done here was in the taverns and the whorehouses. No other ideas? Well, when I first started uncovering this, it reminded me of a simple predynastic temple complex that Aysha and I excavated near Karnak in Egypt, with a central raised platform for a statue of the god and a covered courtyard around it for worshippers.”
“But you’re not in predynastic Egypt,” Rebecca said. “You’re in seventeenth-century Port Royal.”
“Indeed. As I keep having to remind myself. And then, as we excavated further, I found this.” He reached down under a protective wooden cover and pulled up a mass of rusted chain, with shackles hanging from it. “This shackle is for the neck, these ones for the ankles, and these ones the wrists. By ratcheting it at the back, you could tighten them so they drew together, undoubtedly causing the victim excruciating pain. There are apertures for shackles to be chained to the rock at seven farther points around this plinth, allowing eight people to be held together here at one time.” He put down the chains and gestured around. “This was the slave market of the Royal Africa Company, and this plinth is where people in chains were inspected like cattle and auctioned off.”
“Good God,” Jeremy said. “I had no idea that went on here as well.”
Jason stepped down into the courtyard and walked across to join Hiebermeyer. “This was one of the lucrative sidelines for the merchants of Port Royal that I was talking about. The Royal Africa Company wasn’t allowed to sell slaves directly to the Spanish, but the merchants could buy them and then sell them on themselves covertly at a profit, paying the pirates to ship them to rendezvous points off the coast of Spanish America, where they would be met by the buyers. Some of the slaves sold here would have ended up in the silver mines in what is now Bolivia, just about the nearest thing to hell that existed on earth at that time.”
“Those slaves could have been your ancestors, Jason,” Rebecca said quietly, her arms crossed and her voice wavering. “This must be hard for you.”
“So Port Royal wasn’t the pirate theme park of the tourist brochures after all,” Jeremy murmured.
“Most decidedly not,” Hiebermeyer said. “And even after the city was lost to the sea and the pirates were outlawed, this was where the English authorities brought those they captured to be executed, leaving them hanging in gibbets on the spit until all that was left was their bones. These less pleasant truths of history are what stripping away the surface has revealed to us.”
“That’s archaeology for you,” Jeremy said. “The good, the bad, and the ugly. We can’t shirk from it.”
“There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing,” Hiebermeyer said. “But this time I’m glad Aysha isn’t with me. Egyptian mummies are one thing, but finding the shackles used on slaves only a few hundred years ago is another.”
Jack watched Jason reach down and pick up the chains. His own Howard ancestors had been complicit in the slave trade, not as slavers themselves but as tobacco and sugar merchants, part of the triangle of trade between England, Africa, and the Americas that was dependent on slavery. The Howard fortune, the money that had paid for the old manor house at the IMU campus where Jack had his office, was built on the Howard success in that trade. Rebecca knew that too, and he could see that confronting the stark reality of what had gone on here was upsetting her.
Jason weighed the chains in his hands and bowed his head for a moment. Then he cast them down, took a deep breath and walked back toward the others. “Okay. Let’s get over to the finds shed. Rebecca and Jeremy, if you don’t mind, there’s a big job bubble-wrapping some of the more delicate items and stowing them in the cellars of the old naval buildings where we keep our equipment. Jack, we need to get Costas and Dr. Lanowski to boot their robot up and come down with us to the foreshore for our dive. The tanks should be filled in half an hour or so, and with this weather system now looking even more likely to hit us, I want to be in the water as soon as possible after that. Let’s go.”
* * *
A few minutes later, Jack and Jason were walking down toward the foreshore, passing the line of the old defensive walls with their rusted cannon, and then the huts that served as the finds conservation lab. Jack had taken a few moments to look at the extraordinary range of intact artifacts brought up from underwater, including pottery vessels, glass, pewter, silver cutlery, and silver and gold coins of all possible denominations and origins for the period, but dominated by gold escudos and silver pieces of eight from the Spanish Main. Jason peeled off, talking quickly to a lab-coated assistant at the entrance to the conservation lab, and then hurried back alongside Jack. “We need to batten down the hatches before the hurricane hits. There are outdoor freshwater storage tanks that need to be sealed over.”
“Remember, we’re all here to help. That includes me.”
“Thanks. We’ll need every pair of hands we can get.”
Out in the channel, a steady procession of fishing vessels, yachts, and pleasure cruisers were making their way toward Kingston Harbor, moving from the open ocean into more protected waters in advance of the bad weather. Jack scanned them, and turned to Jason. “Do you ever get prying eyes? I mean, from out in the harbor?”
“There are always one or two watching the excavation. Over the past few days we’ve noticed one big cruiser that’s come by repeatedly, slowing down with binoculars trained. Probably some rich guy with time on his hands, but we do kind of ask for it, as we issue press releases when we find anything, and there’s a lot of local interest.”
“What about at the site, on land?”
“Only one incident I can think of. We had a guy volunteering in the finds hut a couple of weeks ago. We have an outreach program to get local people involved, helping with washing and cataloging pottery finds. He was educated, not a local, and was asking a lot of questions about you, though that’s not uncommon when people who’ve read your books see that we’ve got the IMU logo all over our equipment. He became agitated when I couldn’t give him the time he wanted, and we had to get our security guards to remove him. I remember he claimed to be some kind of seminarian, from Portugal. Why do you ask?”
Jack pursed his lips. “Do you get the IMU security emails?”
“I’m not on the grid. I wasn’t sure whether I was meant to be. I’m only a research associate.”
“That was an oversight. I’m fixing it now.” Jack pulled out his phone and tapped a message to Ben at IMU security. “And you’ve just becom
e an adjunct professor. That’s one appointment I can make without having to go through the board of directors.”
“Much appreciated, Jack. That’ll give me a bit more clout here in Jamaica. So do you have a security concern?”
Jack described the call he had received about the Star of David from the bogus Portuguese professor, and then Maria’s account of the background to the Altamanus. “So you can see we’re not the only ones on the trail. What we don’t know yet is how seriously to take it as a threat.”
“The security guards here are a bit more attentive as a result of our altercation with the volunteer. And of course there’s the Jamaica Defense Force base, which keeps crime here at zero. But the fishing hamlet at Port Royal is a sleepy place, and without something more definitive, I don’t think we could excite much interest among the local police.”
Jack stopped and turned to him. “There is one thing Maria mentioned that I wanted to run by you. Have you ever heard of an island called Santo Cristo del Tesoro?”
Jason paused. “Yes, I have. But it’s a bit of a mystery. It crops up several times in the pirate documents in the Jamaica archives, among those I found when I was researching Henry Avery for you. Supposedly it was a secret place established by the Inquisition when the Portuguese ruled in the Caribbean in the sixteenth century. It was heavily fortified, but the pirates were cautious of it for another reason too, with rumors of torture chambers and execution, of nobody who strayed there coming out alive. Even during the heyday of the pirates the Inquisition was still regarded with fear, probably a result of the Jews such as the Brandão family coming here having escaped its clutches, and telling stories of torture and interrogation and burnings at the stake.”
“Do you believe in it? The island?”
“Supposedly it wasn’t far off the coast of present-day Colombia, and was surrounded by treacherous currents. That much rings true, because the clockwise Caribbean Current and the anticlockwise Colombia-Panama Gyre coincide about thirty miles off the Colombian shore, not a place you’d want to be sailing if you could avoid it. The abyssal plain in that basin is more than three thousand meters deep until close inshore, but there are volcanic outcrops that might break the surface, and one of them could have formed a small islet that has escaped all the surveys. That part of the Caribbean is surprisingly poorly known. You can’t see it on Google Maps because that was the route drug traffickers took to fly cocaine out of Colombia, and the DEA and the CIA restricted satellite coverage.”
“But the pirates knew where it was?”
“The name means Christ of the Treasure, and supposedly refers to some great treasure of the Church that they stored there. Henry Avery was intrigued and scouted the place out, but took one look at the fortifications and stayed away.”
“They would have found it empty of treasure, as it wasn’t what they stored there that gave the island its name, but what they hoped to store there,” Jack said.
“It sounds as if you know something I don’t.”
“How much time have we got?”
“About fifteen minutes until the tanks are filled.”
“When we were with Maria, we didn’t just talk about the Brandão connection. What do you know about the Holy Grail?”
“The Holy Grail? Only the King Arthur stuff. The medieval fantasy.”
“Okay. We’d better sit down.” They had reached a wooden bench beside the foreshore. Jack filled Jason in on the story that Maria had told him, describing the ancient background to the cup, the extraordinary saga of its voyage to Tangier and Porto and then across the Caribbean, Father Vieira and his refuge in the High Andes, the Altamanus and Maria’s worry about their ruthlessness and power even today, and finally Father Pereira and his community. Jason listened intently, occasionally interjecting, and when Jack had finished, he got up, raising an arm in acknowledgment to the team members who had just offloaded their breathing gear from the back of a truck.
Then he turned back to Jack, his expression serious. “So you and Costas are really going to Bolivia?”
“Tomorrow, on the IMU Embraer. Everyone else is staying here to help you, including Rebecca and Jeremy.”
“It’s reassuring that you’re not taking them along too. Potosi is a bad place. A really bad place. If there’s one town where you can still get a sense of what it was like in Port Royal during the colonial era, it’s that one. There’s something about that mountain. It exerts a huge allure, but it destroys the lungs of everyone who works in it and seems to cast a dark shadow over the place, turning good men to bad. The Spanish knew it, and it remains the same today. You’re going to have to be on your guard.”
“Father Pereira is sending one of his people to guide us.”
“Just do what you have to do and get out of there as quickly as you can. And take some breathing gear if you’re intending on spending any time inside the mountain.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
“It looks like we’re good to go.”
Jack turned and saw Costas coming down the slope with Little Joey perched on his shoulder, Lanowski beside him carrying his laptop and a virtual reality headset. They looked like a pair of teenagers about to try out their latest radio-controlled toy. Beside them the team members had laid out three e-suits, the all-weather Kevlar-reinforced drysuits that were IMU’s signature equipment, allowing Jack and Costas to penetrate places of extreme cold and heat where conventional diving gear would not have worked. The water here was warm and the depth shallow, but there were many reasons for using the e-suits: the full face-mask helmet and visor allowed them to talk via intercom, the computer-controlled buoyancy system would keep them from sinking into the silt and stirring up the visibility, and the oxygen rebreather rigs they would be using today also meant that they would not be producing any bubbles, something that was potentially damaging to a fragile overhead environment and dangerous to those beneath it.
Jack turned and looked out at the site. Extending beyond the foreshore was a jetty and dive platform that would allow them to enter the water without having to slog through the mud. The surface of the water was a reflective sheen, slowly undulating, belying the wonders that lay beneath and also the storm that was set to sweep through in a matter of hours.
Jason turned to him. “When Costas gets here, I’ll give you both a briefing on what we’re about to see. I told you in my message before you got here that we’d found something underwater that will answer your question about that Star of David symbol and the Brandão family. I promise you, Jack, this is going to be one of the dives of your life.”
15
Jack adjusted the tilt of his e-suit visor, optimizing the refraction of light through the lens to give him the most realistic view of the seabed outside. He dropped several meters below the surface, following a yellow baseline that had been staked into the sea floor as it gradually sloped away out of sight into the bay. At first all he could make out of sunken Port Royal was a haze of green-brown silt, but then he started to pick out features: a course of bricks sticking out of the silt to the right, and to the left the low masonry foundation of a wall. It was the familiar image from the first photographs by divers in the 1960s, showing what was left after the buildings close inshore had been salvaged by survivors of the 1692 earthquake, and then had been degraded by natural decay and erosion. Farther offshore the ruins survived to a greater height, and as he reached the fifty-meter mark on the baseline, now at a depth of eight meters, he began to see more substantial remains around him, walls of brick and masonry that rose for several courses above the seabed, shrouded in silt. Ahead of him a large sector was visible where the outlines of rooms and passageways could be made out; it looked like an open-area excavation on land, left to fill naturally with sediment after the recording had been completed.
Jason’s voice came through the intercom. “That’s where we were working before the earthquake struck in July,” he said, finning alongside Jack. “Most of the buildings here had wooden upper structures, so very litt
le of that survives. What we’re looking at is a street-front tavern and probably a place where prostitutes worked; not organized enough to call it a brothel but really quite similar to what you’d see at Roman Pompeii, for example. The big difference here was that Port Royal was more like a Wild West frontier town, with dirt streets and fairly hasty structures that were probably originally envisaged as temporary, but that had been expanded into larger complexes by the time of the earthquake.”
“That’s one reason why the destruction was so extensive.”
“Both on land and underwater,” Jason replied. “We think most of the buildings were shaken to pieces even before the land subsided, and that the initial salvage would have been a bit like picking up debris from a shipwreck, retrieving timber and other flotsam from the surface and the shoreline. The exception was the merchants’ quarter we’re heading toward now. There, a fault line running parallel to the shore caused a whole block of buildings on the seafront to drop out of sight intact before the earthquake had a chance to shake them up. It must have been horrifying for the people, most of whom can’t have made it out alive. Then in the earthquake this July, another fault line opened up at ninety degrees to that one and revealed it all to us. I can still barely believe what I saw when I first dived there after all the silt had settled. You and Costas have found a lot of amazing stuff in your career, but this has got to be up there with the best of them. Prepare to be amazed.”
Jack turned to check that Costas was following behind them, seeing his headlamp in the haze and beside it the miniature form of Little Joey hovering in the water. He turned back and followed Jason farther down the baseline, heading toward the point where the seventeenth-century wharf and shoreline was located. Jason had come to a halt in front of a wide dark patch in the seabed, a sudden drop-off. As Jack approached, he could see that it was a rectangular pit at least ten meters wide extending out into the channel, with lights shining into it from a gantry partway along. He reached the edge and stared down, taking in as much as he could in the gloom and the silt. Jason had been right about their discoveries in the past, but nothing he had seen before could have prepared him for this. It was an astonishing sight.
Inquisition Page 18
