Holliday felt something curl and curdle in his guts. Fear or warning? Maybe both. The fight- or-flight instinct the Neanderthal hunter felt when confronted by his first charging mammoth or saber- toothed Tiger. They slid down the pathway leading to the floodplain of the lake. The wind was rising in gusts, dragging up brief clouds of gritty sand into their faces. He checked his watch one more time. Another few minutes gone. He cursed under his breath. Meg half turned.
"Did you say something?"
"No, nothing," he responded. She continued the slide down to the bottom of the dune and Holliday dutifully followed.
The hell brewing on the horizon was almost enough for him to force Meg's hand and abandon her, but he knew he couldn't bring himself to do it. They reached the floodplain and walked across the salt-encrusted hardpan toward the edge of the water. It was summer and the lake's edge was fringed with grasses and other low plants.
The wind was beginning to blow hard now, building wavelets on the dark water. Meg looked left and right and then behind her. The winter high-water mark was clearly visible. There was a shallow lip and perhaps twenty feet or so of slightly darker sand between the lip and the lakeshore. Meg paced back until she had reached the high-water lip in the sand, then went back twenty feet more. She looked left and right again, judging the rough midpoint of the lake. She paced off fifty feet to the left and stopped.
"This is the midpoint," she said firmly. She dropped her pack onto the ground, unstrapped the folding shovel and took the headphones for the metal detector out of her pack and plugged them into the device's console. Holliday followed her across the sand and did the same thing. Finally they were ready. Holliday looked at his watch.
"We've got thirty-seven minutes to locate this thing and dig it up. If we haven't hit pay dirt in half an hour we're leaving. Agreed?"
"Whatever you say." Meg nodded absently, her attention focused on adjusting the metal detector's arm brace.
"I mean it," warned Holliday. "One minute more than that and I'll leave you here." He nodded toward the massive storm front rapidly descending on them. "I don't want to be here when that thing hits."
"I heard you the first time," answered Meg. She scooped up her pack with her free hand and hung it over one shoulder. "I'll go right, you go left."
"All right," answered Holliday, but she was already moving, the headphones clamped around her ears. He shook his head, watching her go, then fitted on his own arm brace and put on his headphones. He turned and began walking, moving slowly and methodically, swinging the disc of the detector back and forth in a sweeping motion a few inches above the sand.
The Sable Island book he'd read on the train had gone into minute detail about the geology of the place. Sable Island was a product of the last ice age. As the glaciers withdrew, sand was deposited in front of the retreating ice. In Sable's case the formation was referred to as a sand dump, and a very large one, deposited over a thick layer of Tertiary Period sediment, which eventually produced pockets of oil, hence the offshore drilling platforms.
The point being that there was no bedrock or any other kind of rock on Sable Island and hence no minerals. If the metal detector pinged and the LED gauge on the console gave him a reading, it was either the remains of an old shipwreck or Meg's True Ark.
He lifted his wrist and glanced at his watch yet again. He felt his jaw tighten. Ten minutes eaten up and the hurricane ten minutes closer; this had gone from insane to dangerous. A woman in the clutches of some sort of religious rapture was going to kill them all. There was no True Ark. He heard a sharp cry, dulled by the wind and the muffling headphones. He turned. Meg was standing three hundred yards away in the distance, waving her arms and yelling. He tore off the headphones as she yelled again. He barely made out the words.
"I found something!"
Holliday stared at the small, frantically waving figure in the distance.
"You've go to be kidding," he whispered. He saw her drop to her knees and begin to scrabble at the sand, digging it out with the little folding shovel. Holliday heaved the metal detector over his shoulder and ran. A minute later he reached her position, chest heaving. The sand was blowing in the freshening wind and stinging his eyes. He stared into the foot-deep hole in the sand.
"It was like a miracle!" Meg said raggedly as she dug. "The meter went off the scale and the headphones went from a steady ping to a long tone in an instant and I knew it was here! I knew it!"
"What metals?" Holliday asked.
"All of them! That's what is so incredible! Bronze, gold, silver! Even tin. It was reading some kind of heavy metals as well, probably copper or nickel or lead."
"Most likely lead; they used it for drainpipes back then, or tin maybe."
"Help me dig," ordered Meg.
Holliday stripped off his backpack and unlimbered his own shovel. He checked his watch. Twenty minutes left. He dropped down on his knees across from Meg and began to work at the caked, dark sand, widening and broadening the hole. At two feet Meg's shovel hit something with a hollow thump.
Holliday flopped forward onto his stomach. He reached down into the cavity and started sweeping the sand off whatever it was with his outstretched fingers. A few seconds later a carved design appeared, deeply carved into a dark gray metal slab. An engrailed cross, the ancient mark of the Saint-Clairs. Below it was an almost runelike series of letters. Some sort of motto:???o???????.
"That's not Latin, or French," said Meg, a confused look on her face.
"It's ancient Greek," said Holliday, who'd seen the phrase before. "In Latin it's usually rendered as In hoc signo vinces-By this you shall conquer-meaning the cross. The Emperor Constantine saw the phrase in a dream the night before the Battle of Milivian Bridge in A.D. 312. He won the battle and the phrase became his motto thereafter. It was also the motto of the Knights Templar."
"It's the True Ark," whispered Meg, her voice reverent. "We actually found it."
"My, my," said Holliday. "Imagine that." Sister Meg gave him a sharp look.
"Help me dig," she said.
They swept away more sand, then dug carefully around the slab. It took ten minutes, half the remaining time, to reveal that the slab was actually a rectangular box roughly three feet long, eighteen inches wide and a foot high, about the size of an ossuary coffin used for relic bones in the medieval era and apparently made with sheet lead, the inset lid tightly soldered. They managed to lift the surprisingly lightweight container out of the hole and set it down. Both Holliday and Meg examined it closely. The box was perfectly sealed.
"A simple carpenter's cup," whispered Meg, eyes wide.
"Sorry?" Holliday said.
"The Grail," said Meg. "It was a simple carpenter's cup, not some fine jewel. The True Ark is like that."
"I thought you were quoting from an Indiana Jones movie, the one that had Sean Connery in it." Holliday looked at his watch. Five minutes left. Good timing. He stood up and brushed sand off his jeans. He'd been an utter fool.
"How can you be so blasphemous at a time like this?" Meg asked, scowling, still kneeling in front of the box.
"Because I don't believe any of it," said Holliday, his voice bitter. "The whole damned thing has been impossibly convenient. The bald guy in Prague to give it all a sense of urgency, the Irishman O'Keefe and the Mary Deare just where they needed to be, the rubbing in Iona, the hymn, and then you find exactly what you've been searching for after looking for ten or fifteen minutes and only buried a couple of feet deep. There's a saying for it: if it's too good to be true, it probably isn't." Holliday shook his head wearily. "Let's cut the crap, sweetheart. This whole thing has been a crock right from the start and I fell for it hook, line and holy sinker." He reached down, picked up his pack and slung it over one shoulder. He looked down at Meg. She was rummaging for something in her pack. "It was all window dressing, and pretty expensive window dressing at that," he said. "I don't know quite what you're up to, but I hope it was worth it."