The bubble slowly disappeared around her. She took one last breath and pulled Dafydd to the trunk area near the rear window. She yanked open the rear hatch handle, and it slowly opened outward. She grabbed the collar of Dafydd’s shirt and pulled him behind her out through it, then up, up to the blue, clear air above.
They popped up and she gasped.
“Dafydd. Dafydd. Breathe. Please breathe.”
He was dead weight in her arms. Silent. He was not breathing. His face and lips were blue. She was at the end of the long pier. There were no ladders. She swam to one of the pilings and held on with her leg as she tried to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in the water. He kept sinking down, away from her, so she grabbed his collar again and swam as hard as she could back to the shore. She pulled him up on the sand far enough so his torso was out of the water and began CPR and mouth-to-mouth again.
A minute. A trickle of water escaped his mouth. A good sign. She alternated chest pumps with breaths. Thirty compressions. Two breaths. As she’d been taught.
Five minutes. His skin was colder. A deeper blue. His eyelashes were so long. So beautiful.
“Please, Dafydd,” she begged. “Please wake up.”
She bent over him and tried, again and again, to breathe life into him.
Ten minutes. She was exhausted. Breathing into him as hard as she could made the world spin. Her hands were numb from pressing on his broad chest. She ripped open his shirt, bent forward, put her ear on his soft, cold skin and listened one last time for a heartbeat.
Nothing.
She sat back on the sand, her own heart wrenched from her body. A long wail, like that of an animal, began to emerge from deep inside her. With no beginning and no end, the sound moved through her, around her, composed of every bit of pain, loneliness, sadness, regret, and betrayal she had ever felt, and would ever feel again. When the sound finally ended, she was empty. Dead. There was no Carys left. Just a shell where her soul had once been. She fell backward, flat on the warm sand. She could feel the blood coming from the back of her head. The darkness closed in again.
6
Friday, June 29
Carys slowly opened her eyes, and her vision was blurry. She felt drugged. She was in a bed, underneath a thin sheet. She wiggled her feet and looked down at herself. She wore a white nightgown. As her eyes slowly cleared, she saw that she was in a hospital room. Annie was asleep in the chair next to her. The light coming through the window shade was dim. Dawn or dusk? Her right arm felt stiff. She looked down at it. She was hooked up to an IV. She touched the back of her head. Covered in bandages. There was no pain. Annie stirred and then woke up with a jolt.
“Hey,” Annie said, trying to smile. “How are you feeling?”
“Dafydd,” she said, still not fully conscious.
“I know,” said Annie. “Honey, I’m so sorry.”
“JJ,” she said.
“The police are trying to find him,” said Annie. “He still doesn’t know his father’s…been shot.”
“No,” she said, struggling to sit up. Her head nearly exploded, and she lay back down. “He tried to kill me. He hired Gyles. He killed Dafydd…” She tried to get out of the bed, but Annie pushed her gently back down.
“Hold on,” said Annie. “Lie down. Tell me what happened.”
“JJ showed up at the tribal office,” she said. “He said his father called him. I got in his car to come to the hospital after Harper and Clark were shot by that Englishman, and Dafydd followed in the Range Rover. He pulled off to a pond. He had a gun. He knocked us out and put us in the Rover and drove it off the pier. Dafydd…”
She tried to sit up again. Annie pressed her back.
“Dafydd’s gone, honey,” said Annie.
Her vision began to close in, and she leaned her head back on the pillow.
“Carys, stay with me,” said Annie. “Stay with me. Did JJ say where he was going?”
She struggled against the heavy weight of consciousness.
“No,” she said. “Oh my god. Annie, he killed him. He was next to me in the water. I couldn’t save him. JJ tried to kill me, too. He thought we’d both drown in that car. But Dafydd…”
“Carys,” said Annie. “Did JJ say anything that might tell us where he went?”
“He has everything. The manuscripts. The sword. The translation. And…” she said, “Dafydd. He killed Dafydd. He’s dead. He’s dead. How can…?”
Annie leaned over and embraced her. Carys began to weep.
“Try to calm down,” said Annie. “You’re in rough shape. The doctors say you have a concussion. You shouldn’t get your heart rate up.”
“JJ hated Harper,” she said through her tears. “He hated him. For abandoning him and his mother when she was so sick.”
“We’ll catch him,” said Annie.
“How long have I been out?”
“Since yesterday afternoon, when they brought you in,” said Annie. “Some guys found you next to that lake. You lost a lot of blood. They stitched you up. They want to keep you for another day.”
Just then, the door opened and a nurse came in. She greeted Carys half-heartedly, checked her vitals, and was about to leave when she turned back to them.
“Ms. Jones, did Mr. Harper have any other next of kin? Other than his son?” the nurse asked.
“No. None that I know of,” she said. “How is he?”
The nurse’s expression went blank. She looked at Annie.
“Thank you,” said Annie to the nurse. “We’ll get that information to you in a few minutes.”
She turned to Annie as the door closed. Annie put her hand on her arm.
“I’m so sorry,” said Annie. “I was going to tell you when you felt a little stronger.”
“No,” she said. “He can’t be.”
She wept deeply and inconsolably. Annie was quiet, and handed her tissue after tissue.
They were gone. Nicola. Harper. Dafydd. They had been snuffed out. By Frank. By Gyles. Ultimately, by JJ.
“This can’t be happening,” she said. “How can he be dead? How can they all be dead? It’s not possible.”
“Harper bled out during surgery,” said Annie. “The bullet severed an artery, and they just couldn’t stop the bleeding.”
She tried to breathe her way back to composure. There wasn’t time for tears. She had to do something.
“JJ won,” she said. “He got what he wanted. His father never found what he was looking for.”
“That’s not important right now,” said Annie. “The only thing that matters is that you get better.”
“It is important,” she said through the last of her tears. Then fear replaced her sorrow.
“Annie, Gyles will be back,” she said. “I have to tell the tribe. He knows the tomb is here. Gyles knows about the tribe. He’ll come for the burial site. Can you get Mike Heath? I need to talk to him. How is Sachem Clark?”
“She’s going to survive, but it was touch and go for a while,” said Annie. “You are going to need to talk to the police at some point.”
“I have to call Dafydd’s family.” She closed her eyes, and the sobs threatened to come up again.
“I’ll take care of it, I promise. Please sleep a little longer,” said Annie. “I’ll track down Heath. I’ll have him come by in a couple of hours.”
Carys couldn’t fight off the sleep that descended on her like a heavy blanket.
She woke to a soft knock on the door. Heath was peering at her through the window. She motioned him in.
“I’m not supposed to be talking to you,” said Heath. “Police said they want to talk to you first.”
“Thank you for coming,” she said. She tried to smile but it hurt too much. “Did Annie tell you what happened?”
“I heard Mr. Harper didn’t make it,” said Heath.
“It was his son.”
“His son?” asked Heath.
“His son, JJ, was the one who attacked me,” she said. “He was behind all of this. He paid a man named Martin Gyles to stop his father’s search for that grave. Gyles sent the man to the council office. And now JJ has the Morfran manuscript and the sword. And Gyles knows that the burial site is here.”
“What do you mean he knows?” demanded Heath. “I thought you said that you were the only people who knew about it. The whole deal we made was based on that.”
“We…I was wrong,” she said. “I had no idea, no way to know that JJ and Gyles knew the burial site was here. I just found out yesterday.”
She closed her eyes against the throbbing pain in her head.
“I brought hell down on your people. But you can scream at me later. I need you to know something. Gyles will come for the grave.”
“Why? Is he an obsessed archaeologist, too? Does he want to ruin my tribe as well?” snarled Heath.
“He wants what’s in the grave,” she said. “He doesn’t care about the tribe.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Heath. “It’s an old skeleton. It’s not like it’s worth killing over now that the sword and manuscript have been stolen. Those were the only things worth any money.”
She paused, confused. Was it possible they still didn’t know about the treasure buried with that skeleton? Then she remembered that they hadn’t read Morfran’s journal. They’d seen only the translations she’d provided. And none of them mentioned the true identity of the man in the grave or what his son had buried with him. For a split second, she considered withholding the rest of the story. But Mattakeese lives were in danger, and they deserved to know why.
“This is going to sound crazier than anything you’ve ever heard in your life,” she said. “But I assure you that it is the historical, verifiable truth.”
“What now?” asked Heath sternly.
“The man buried in that grave you’re hiding, that you’ve been hiding for fifteen hundred years. He wasn’t just any man.”
“Who was he?” asked Heath.
She tried to pull herself up into more of a sitting position, but the pain of movement made her lie back down.
“He was a general in the wars against the Anglo-Saxons in the sixth century,” she said. “He became famous, and then he became a legend. Stories were told over the years, almost none of them true. But there’s one story that is true. It’s in another ancient manuscript that we have—or had. The one that started this whole search. It was written by the warrior’s personal priest, a man named Lestinus, who traveled with him.”
“So we have the skeleton of a general from the Dark Ages. Again, who but an archaeologist or a historian would care?”
“This general’s sword, the one you had in your vault,” she said. “That sword had a name. In Welsh, it was called Caledfwlch.”
She paused and took a deep breath.
“In English, it’s Excalibur,” she said.
Heath stood absolutely motionless. For a long minute, there was no sound except the hiss of the IV pump next to her bed.
Then Heath snorted—a half laugh. He rolled his eyes to the ceiling.
“I hope you feel better soon, Carys,” said Heath. “I’m sorry about Mr. Harper.”
He started moving toward the door.
“Wait,” she said. “Everything else we’ve told you so far is true. I’ve verified Lestinus’s manuscript myself. The man in the grave is King Arthur.”
She was now Harper. Trapped in a hospital room, trying to convince someone she wasn’t crazy. She had to convince them. They needed to know and prepare before Gyles came back.
Heath pulled open the door to her room.
“Wait,” she said.
He stopped and turned toward her.
“You have to believe me,” she said. “Your tribe is in danger. How can I convince you?”
“Well, unless he’s got Guinevere buried next to him, you probably can’t,” said Heath.
Her mind spun, trying to think of something she could say to make him at least consider her story. She couldn’t prove anything she was claiming without the monk’s manuscript. Without that, the Mattakeese would have no reason to believe they had King Arthur on their land.
Then it came to her. They didn’t need to believe it was King Arthur. They just needed to believe they and their families were in danger. That, when all was said and done, was what had gotten her to go to Wales and take up the hunt in the first place.
“He’s buried with a considerable treasure,” she said. “Probably worth millions of dollars—triply valuable because it’s buried with King Arthur. And the monk’s manuscript, the Morfran manuscript, the ring he’s buried with, and the sword form airtight proof that he is who I say he is.”
Heath stood silently.
“It’s not the King but his treasure that Gyles will be coming for,” she said.
“Gyles wouldn’t be able to find the gravesite even if he does come back,” said Heath. “It’d take him years.”
She didn’t want to have to spell it out for him, but he didn’t understand what they were up against.
“If I had to guess exactly how he’ll do it, I’d say he or one of his thugs will come here, take a councilor or a councilor’s family member hostage, and threaten to kill them unless the tribe reveals the location. It won’t be a bluff. You already saw how willing he is to kill people. He’s already killed many.”
Heath’s face lost some color, but he stood rigid, unswayed.
“Look, even if you don’t believe it’s King Arthur, the things buried there are as real today as they were then,” she said. “A metal detector will prove the treasure is there—your tribe didn’t have the technology to make any type of metal when the King was buried.”
Heath’s expression turned curious.
“You can prove me right or wrong in two hours,” she said. “Please just go look for yourself.”
Heath’s eyes bored into hers. Then he pulled open the door.
“I’ll let you know what we find,” said Heath. Then he left, and Carys was alone with her dread and sadness and a crushing headache.
7
Saturday, June 30
The texts Gyles received the previous evening had been vague yet, each in its own way, quite specific.
From Alahwi: “We are coming.”
From Client A: “Have the manuscript. Thanks for nothing.”
And then there was the call. A detective at Scotland Yard had phoned Gyles on his official business line, asking him to come to their offices for a conversation.
“We’ve received some information about an artifact that we need your help with,” said the detective. It was bullshit. He had checked, and the investigator worked in the homicide division, not art and antiquities.
That had sealed the deal. JB was done.
Gyles cleaned out the numbered bank accounts, transferred the cash to an offshore account. Took his small black paper notebook—hackproof—with his client names and cell phone numbers, and shredded everything else. Both of his careers were over—just as soon as he finished this one last job.
The bag he kept packed for just this sort of thing, but which he had never had occasion to use, was on the seat next to him. Fake passport. Fake credit cards. Ten thousand euros and ten thousand U.S. dollars. Several burner phones. An entirely new life in a small leather carry-on bag.
The ferry rolled mightily in the English Channel. He hated being on the water. Seasickness. He sat up on deck, in the fresh air, keeping the horizon in sight. It was the only thing that helped. He’d be in Calais in a few hours. Then, well, he hadn’t quite decided. Probably Switzerland. It was remarkably easy to disappear ther
e.
When he hadn’t heard from Tommy, he’d texted Patrick to find out what happened. It was worse than he could have imagined. Tommy dead. Manuscript and translation gone. Harper dead. Burial site location still unknown. But those natives knew where it was. And he was sure as hell going to get them to tell him.
The manuscript, the tomb, the treasure, the deal with the Saudi prince, they were all still out there, waiting for him. But so were Alahwi and his men, and they were on the move. He was going to have to pay them off. That was increasingly obvious. But he couldn’t do that without the manuscript and treasure. Keeping his cash reserves intact had never been more crucial now that both of his revenue streams had been shut down. He was going to need that cash to live. To survive.
He would figure it all out. He just needed more time. But first he had to find a place to hide. Just for a little while.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Carys had spent the previous afternoon and most of the morning telling half-truths to the police about Dafydd’s death and her near drowning. She did not like the way the cops were looking at her as they questioned her. Annie did her best to deflect any questions she knew would lead them to the real motives for their trip to Cape Cod, and whenever they pressed too hard, she feigned amnesia about the details. JJ was nowhere to be found, of course, and there was no way for her to prove that what she was saying was true. The Mattakeese were being as opaque as she was. The cops advised her not to leave the area when she was released. Annie assured them that she’d stay put.
About noon, Heath returned to her hospital room. He was slightly pale, with a nervousness hiding just below his subdued surface.
“There was metal there,” said Heath. “Lots of it.”
“Did you dig it up?” she asked.
The Ghost Manuscript Page 40
