Paul Christopher - The Templar throne

"This way," urged Holliday. He took Meg by the hand again and led her to the battlement tower.

The stairway offered some protection from the rain and cold as they descended. At the bottom of the stairs, as Holliday had hoped, there was a hallway that followed the line of the castle wall. Fifty feet along the narrow tunnel was an iron-strapped arched door way.

Holliday took a deep breath, then pushed down on the latch and pulled. The well-oiled door opened without a sound. The present occupant of the castle, Lord Levan, clearly took care of his property. They stepped out into the rain again.

"Hurry," said Holliday; reflexively he looked back over his shoulder, expecting to see a figure in black Kevlar step out and mow them down with his MP5. So far there was nothing.

"It's slippery," complained Meg as they threaded their way down the sloping field of boulders and loose, rain-slick stones.

"So is spilled blood," answered Holliday. It took them almost fifteen minutes to climb down. Any minute now one of the armed response team would stick his head over the side of the castle wall and spot them.

At the base of the cliff the terrain flattened to a layered shingle of rock that ran down to another sandy shelf, which stood less than a foot above the present sea level and was obviously submerged at full high tide. The heavy rain had flattened out the sea and it was absolutely flat without any swell at all.

"Look!" Meg yelled, raising her voice over the drumming chatter of the pounding rain. She pointed. Two hundred feet farther along the dark slick shingle and barely visible in the drifting sheets of rain, Holliday could make out a set of stone steps that led down to the narrow beach.

The steps were roughly cut and probably as old as the castle. A smugglers' beach, ensuring that his lordship in the castle had a ready supply of French brandy in both peace and war. A wreckers' beach as well; Cornwall was famous for its wreckers and their famous prayer: Oh please Lord, let us pray for all on the sea But if there's got to be wrecks, please send them to we.

"Come on!" Holliday said. They ran down the plateaulike shingle, slipping and sliding on the rock until they reached the steps. They paused for a moment, getting their bearings, then started down. The visibility was getting worse by the minute. The only way Holliday knew they'd reached the bottom of the steps was when his foot crunched on the pea gravel of the beach. The rain slowed briefly, and out of the gloom, hanging between sea and sky, an apparition loomed.

A man in a classic old sou'wester and a sloping rubber rain hat stood in the center of an eighteen- foot lapstrake-planked lobster boat, hauling on a steel-bound wire jigging line with two canvas- gloved hands. An enormous gray-bellied conger eel of perhaps twenty pounds appeared on one of the triple barbed hooks.

Deftly the man doubled up the line around one elbow, taking the strain, freeing the other hand to pick up a three-foot gaff and catching the barbed hook in the snakelike creature's gill, just behind the small stiff pectoral fin. Barely pausing, the man twisted his wrist with one smooth motion and flipped the two- foot-long conger into the bottom of the boat. The fisherman was no more than fifty feet from shore.

Holliday turned and looked back the way they'd come. The cliff and the castle high above were barely visible, no more than shadows in the rain. He couldn't see them but he knew the armed response team was there, in the castle, going from room to room. There wasn't much time. He turned back to the man in the fishing boat, hailing him.

"Hey!" Holliday yelled, cupping his hand beside his mouth. The fisherman paid no attention.

"The rain is coming in from the south," called Meg. "He can't hear you."

"Unless he looks this way in the next minute or two we're going to be screwed."

In answer Meg extended her lower jaw a little, stuck her thumb and index fingers into the corners of her mouth and blew out a classic, three- note come-hither whistle. The fisherman looked up instantly, startled by the familiar school yard call, eyes scanning the shoreline. He had the dark-eyed, black-haired and faintly Basque good looks of what Holliday's uncle Henry used to call Black Irish.

Holliday raised his arm and gestured for the man to bring the boat to shore. The fisherman balked at first, but Holliday dug into his pocket, pulled out his wallet and took out a hundred-euro note, waving it over his head. The fisherman shrugged, brought in the rest of his jigging line and then pulled up a small aluminum Danforth anchor. It seemed to take forever.

"Come on, come on!" Holliday whispered.

He gave another anxious look toward the castle battlements; still nothing. He turned back toward the dark waters of the English Channel.

The fisherman sat down, fitted the pintles of his oars into the locks and let the blades fall into the flat gray sea. He backwatered, turning the oars in opposite directions, and the boat turned smartly, bow toward the shore. The fisherman pulled strongly and the boat headed inshore, slicing through the water.

The man at the oars neared the beach, and after a single look back over his shoulder he backwatered the boat again, this time bringing it all the way around so the stern of the boat was facing Holliday and Meg, a tantalizing ten feet away. Holliday could see the neatly painted name on the transom: Mary Deare.

Even from a distance Holliday could see the twinkle in the man's black eyes and the smiling narrow face. The fisherman reminded Holliday of Otter in The Wind in the Willows. Charm was second nature to a man like this.

"What can I do for you two soggy castaways?" The accent was definitely Irish but not the Dublin lilt that Holliday was familiar with. "Two" became "tuh" and "soggy" became "saggy" in a sleepy, easy drawl.

"Get us off the island. Fast!" Holliday called out.

"And wha' whou' tha' be wirt to ya?" The fisherman grinned.

"Name your own price," called back Holliday. "Just get us the hell out of here."

"That's the sort of price a poor fisherman wants to hear," replied the man at the oars. "What's the matter, the Devil himself on your tail?"

"Worse," yelled back Holliday, hoping that the guy was as Irish as he sounded. "British Specials with machine guns."

"Bugger me, Jack," said the fisherman, eyes widening. "Is that for true?"

"In about two minutes they're going to start coming down that cliff behind us on ropes like something out of James Bond, and that is most definitely for true," answered Holliday.

"Never did have much use for the feckin' limeys, 'specially the Bluebottles; climb aboard, friends, and step lively." The fisherman gave three hard backstrokes with the oars and the stern of the boat ground its way onto the beach. Holliday and Meg stepped into the boat.

Half a dozen conger eels were writhing in an inch or so of rainwater in the bottom of the dinghy, mouths gasping for air, the long slimy bodies thrashing hard as they suffocated. Lying flaccidly between the footboards were small bulbous squid. The bait. Holliday and Meg sat down and Meg drew up her feet, looking at the giant, slug-shaped fish.

The fisherman pulled strongly on the oars and they moved off, the Irishman grimacing with exertion. Within two minutes the island had vanished behind the cloak of rain. A stubby rusted hulk began to take shape in front of them. It was no more than sixty feet long with a high wheelhouse amidships and a raised afterdeck behind. A short, dark funnel rose from the middle of the afterdeck. There was a mast crane and rig close to the bows; it was some kind of coastal trawler.

"What's that?" Meg asked.

The fisherman glanced over his shoulder then turned back to face his passengers, his features smiling proudly.

"That's me old girl the Mary Deare, last of the old Clyde puffers, and I'm her captain, Sean O'Keefe, yeah?"