"No," said Brennan. "But I knew that RhineHydraulik was weak and Aquadyn was vulnerable. Again, I told you that at the time, just as I told Bertone at the bank." The Irishman shook his head sadly.
"Now a fundamentalist Christian organization that has a private army of its own is a business partner of the Holy See. If we withdrew our interest in Rhine-Aqua in this market we'd lose billions. If Rex Deus sold their interest there would be a run on the stock and we'd lose billions again. If they want to, Rex Deus can put the entire Catholic Church into a vise."
"I am aware of all of this," answered Spada. "Which is precisely why we need some leverage with them. They must be controlled or dealt with some other way."
Brennan looked mildly amused at the cardinal using such strong language.
"You'll have to be clearer than that," said the priest. "It's not as though I've got too many Antonin Peseks out there. I can't order up assassinations like a meal in a restaurant."
"Forget that for the moment," said the cardinal, abruptly changing the subject. "We were talking about Holliday. What about the Canadian incident?"
Brennan shrugged. "At this point it is still unclear. The group that abducted Holliday and the woman has not been identified, although it is likely that their attackers at the lakefront property were Blackhawk." Brennan drained the last of his drink and began crunching ice cubes between his teeth.
"We're missing something," said the cardinal. "This is too great a concentration of force from too many directions to be about a semi- mythical religious relic." The old man frowned, his thin lips drawn down, his eyes cold and thoughtful.
A sudden gust of wind shook the branches of the hedge around the pool. As a child Spada was sure that sound was the voices of the dead whispering and heralding disaster. He shivered, shrinking into the heavy robe. Maybe he still believed it. "Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten."
"Begging your pardon, Eminence?" Brennan said, confused.
"A verse from the Holy Scripture, Father Brennan. James, chapter five to be precise."
"I'm not sure I take your meaning."
"This whole thing is about money. I can smell it." The cardinal thought for a moment, his head bowed, almost as though he was at prayer, something he hadn't done in a very long time. "A year or so ago you heard a rumor making the rounds in Washington about something called Ironstone. Sinclair's name was involved. Did you ever discover anything else about it?"
"A little, and it wasn't about money. As far as I know it was the code name for some kind of military response to the threat of a major act of terrorism on American soil."
"Nothing that would affect us, though."
"Not directly, no," said Brennan.
A young priest appeared in the doorway into the villa. He stood hesitantly for a moment and then came forward to where Spada and Brennan were sitting. One of Brennan's boys, certainly, if his dark good looks were anything to go by. He stopped and bowed to Spada and then turned to Brennan.
"Is ea anois, an bhfeadaim cunamh leat, Michael?" Brennan asked. Spada smiled for the second time since Brennan had arrived. The Irishman was speaking Gaelic, a requirement for all his couriers. A nice touch for keeping secrets, even from a cardinal, like the Navaho Windtalkers used by the U.S. Marines during World War Two. The young man responded, speaking rapidly. Spada couldn't understand a word. The message was brief. When the young man was done he bowed respectfully to Spada and then departed.
"What was that all about?" Cardinal Spada said as the young man disappeared into the darkness of the villa beyond the French doors. "Or am I allowed to ask?"
"The situation regarding Holliday has changed direction. His cousin Peggy and her husband have vanished into thin air."
28
Holliday turned the elapsed time bezel on his old Luminox wristwatch for two hours and then he and Sister Meg inputted their position into the two GPS handhelds, using the larger unit on the Deryldene D as a base guide. According to the big unit, Lake Wallace was located a mile and a half down the beach and six hundred yards inland across the low scruffy dunes.
The weather station, which employed five of the six permanent residents of Sable Island, was a mile farther down the curving arm of the crescent. There were a small handful of offshore oil rigs in the ocean several miles away from the island, but with the sandbar already evacuated in the face of the coming hurricane it was unlikely they would be interrupted.
It took them almost half an hour to reach the turn point indicated by the GPS. The fine dark sand was more difficult to walk in than either one of them had expected. It would take another ten minutes to reach the lake. That in turn meant it would take the same amount of time, if not longer, to make the return journey, and they still hadn't reached the lake.
That left them with an hour at most to discover an artifact that probably didn't exist and maybe wasn't even there-and even if it was there, it had been buried in the sand for seven hundred years. The odds of finding it were infinitesimal. They found a narrow windswept pathway leading up between the dunes. Finally they reached the summit and paused to take a breath.
Ahead of them now the sky on the horizon was a roiling vision of chaos, as though the sky itself was being torn and bruised. On the island they could now see the narrow oblong lake and the broad stretch of the southern beach, ten times as wide as the northern beach where the Deryldene D had grounded.
The sea between the beach and the horizon was a frothing horror, huge waves rising on the outer banks then roaring like freight trains across the inner sandbars to finally crash and break along the sand.
No wonder there had been so many wrecks here over the centuries; any ship foundering on the outer banks would be pounded into kindling, and anyone who survived the wreck itself would almost certainly be drowned before he reached the shore.
"This is madness," said Holliday. "We'll never find the damned thing. We should go back to Halifax and wait out the storm, then come back."
"There's no time for that," answered Meg grimly. "The hurricane will flood into the lake and the True Ark will be under the water again." She trudged forward, hitching her backpack higher on her shoulders, her feet sinking into the soft, fine sand. On the crest of a dune covered with some kind of thistle and rough eelgrass a trio of shaggy Sable Island ponies watched them, their long unkempt manes flying raggedly in the rising wind.
How many hurricanes and for how many generations had the wild horses' bloodlines survived? And how could Sister Meg be so sure that the treasure her precious Blessed Juliana had brought here would be submerged? According to the book he'd read on the train, Lake Wallace had steadily been getting smaller over the passing centuries. The original high-water mark could be very high by now in relation to the modern lake.
He knew exactly why, of course, and it wasn't the first time he'd seen the incredible streak of stubbornness coming from the red-haired nun. The iron faith of the True Believer. Darwin couldn't be right because the Bible never mentioned evolution, dinosaurs or cave men and strongly suggested that the sun revolved around the earth. Holliday checked his watch again. He estimated that it would be another five minutes of slogging before they reached the midpoint of the lake. He made the simple calculation.
In the final analysis the trek from the Deryldene D would take a total of forty minutes. That would leave them with barely the same amount of time for their search if they wanted to get back to the boat within the two-hour limit. Somehow he doubted that Gallant was a great fan of grace periods.
Holliday looked out over the rolling, deep green monstrosity of the open Atlantic and the hurricane hurtling inexorably down on them. It was close enough now that he could easily see the blinding, jagged spikes of lightning flashing across the jet black base of the clouds like a Goya vision of Apocalypse.