Paul Christopher - The Lucifer Gospel

“You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?” said Mills.

Hilts nodded. “I’ve given it a lot of thought.”

“And you, Miss Ryan, where do you fit into all of this?”

“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.”

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.”