Paul Christopher - The Templar throne

"I'm not sure I'm comfortable with this," said Meg as they sat down at the bar. She was dressed in reasonably fashionable jeans and a man's white shirt with the tails out, but the look of disapproval on her face said it all: this was not a woman who spent a lot of time in bars.

"You don't look very comfortable with it, either," said Holliday. "You'd better lighten up or this isn't going to work."

"Why do we have to come to a place like this to find a boat?" Meg asked.

A bartender wearing a Cross the Line Your Ass is Mine T-shirt with a picture of a mean-looking bull behind a barbed-wire fence on it took their orders; a virgin Caesar for Meg, which seemed to be a uniquely Canadian version of a Bloody Mary that used clam juice instead of tomato juice, and a local Glen Breton straight up for Holliday. Holliday waited for their drinks to arrive before answering the question. Giant speakers suddenly started belting out a bawling rendition of Stompin' Tom Connors's "Bud the Spud," a song about a potato trucker.

"We went over it on the train," said Holliday. "This Sable Island place is protected. You can't legally make landfall there, so a legitimate hired boat wouldn't take you; you'd get your boat confiscated. But it's almost impossible to land a boat there anyway because of the currents and the tides; that's why anyone who does go to the island flies in."

"Then we rent a plane."

"I can't fly. Can you?"

"As a matter of fact, I can," she said primly. "Light planes anyway. I got my license when I was a kid. Single engines. My dad owned a Piper Cherokee."

"When was the last time you flew?"

"A while ago."

"How long is a while?"

Meg shrugged. "High school."

"No, thanks. The planes they use have special soft wheels for landing on the beach. You up for landing on sand?"

"I guess not."

"So it's a boat."

"But why here?"

"Because that guy I was talking to at the last place suggested we come here."

The last place was a hole- in-the-wall called Buddy's Bar and Grill back in Bedford Basin at the extreme end of the harbor. The owner had been surprisingly specific; after giving Holliday and Meg a once-over he told them that if you ever wanted things moved between point A and point B without government interference, go to the Benbow and wait for Arnie Gallant.

Arnie's nickname was Super Mario, and for good reason; he was squat, dark, broad-shouldered and had a heavy Groucho Marx mustache, just like the character in the video game, and to make the comparison even closer he wore brown workman's coveralls most of the time. Apparently Arnie Gallant loved wang dang thangs more than life itself, and this being Wednesday evening he was almost sure to make an appearance.

Holliday had taken the time to find a book about Sable Island at a bookstore near their hotel in Toronto and he'd read it on board the train to Halifax. The book was called A Dune Adrift and chronicled the life and times of the deadly sandbar from its glacial origins to the present.

It was a fascinating story, but it certainly wasn't a pleasant one. The shifting crescent of sand, once a hundred miles long, was located at the center of every dangerous current and wind system in the Atlantic, perched on the edge of the continental shelf, its hidden shallows directly in the path of burgeoning hurricanes and perfect storms blowing in off the Grand Banks and Bermuda, a lurking trap for all sorts of shipping since man first crossed the Atlantic Ocean. A lot of lives and dreams had ended on Sable Island.

The place sounded decidedly unpleasant, and the more Holliday read the less he wanted to go there. If their quest for the True Ark hadn't stirred up such a deadly maelstrom of interest ensnaring him, Holliday would have opted out of the chase long ago. Now it was too late; he'd gone too far and was in too deep to give up. He still wasn't sure he believed in the existence of the ark, but other people-powerful ones-sure as hell did.

"Keith's IPA, my love, and a bucket of thangs." A man in his late forties or early fifties plopped himself down on the bar stool next to Holliday. He looked like a scaled-down version of a defensive tackle: all shoulders and chest. He had dark curly hair, graying at the temples, a bull neck, big hands and a bushy mustache that was almost a joke. He wore bright red half-glass bifocals and his black eyes twinkled as though he'd just told a particularly dirty joke. His Keith's arrived in a stubby bottle without an accompanying glass and he took a long draw. He put down the bottle with a contented sigh and sucked the foam out of his mustache with his lower lip. He glanced at Holliday.

"You'd be Buddy's Doc," he said, peering over the funny little glasses.

"How'd you know that?" Holliday smiled.

"The Pirates of the Caribbean eye patch is a dead giveaway," said the man. He took another swig of Keith's. A red plastic basket lined with wax paper and filled with glistening, sauce-covered chicken wings was set down before him. He stripped the meat off one with practiced ease, wiped his mouth with a napkin and washed the chicken wing down with some more beer. He tossed the stripped bones back in the basket. "You want to rent me and my boat for some illicit purpose, as I understand it," he said. The strange twanging accent wasn't far off from Stompin' Tom and "Bud the Spud."

"Who said anything about illicit?" answered Holliday.

Arnie laughed. By the sound of it he was at least a pack a day man.

"You want a lesson in how not to catch the lobsters that are no longer there and that no one can afford these days, is that it?" Gallant picked up another wing, sucked off the meat and took another slug of beer.

"Maybe we want to go sightseeing," Holliday said and shrugged. He took a small sip of the single malt. It was good, with a strange butterscotch aftertaste. "Bud the Spud" came to an end, but Stompin' Tom went on; something that rhymed "glory" and "dory."

"Look. I'm not a cop, you're not a cop, so why don't we cut the bull and get down to business?" Gallant went through his wing routine again.

Holliday stared at Gallant for a moment. The squat little man looked like something out of a Grimm brothers fairy tale. He had to be the real thing.

"We want you to take us to Sable Island."

"That's against the law," said Gallant, eyes twinkling merrily. He ate another wing. As far as Holliday could tell the glory-dory song was a fisherman's version of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."

"Like you said, illicit."

"Illicit's expensive," said Gallant.

"I can pay."

"Why do you want to go to Sable?"

"Is that any of your business?"

"My boat, my business," Gallant said with a shrug. "My price."

"We're looking for something," broke in Meg. "Something lost on Sable Island."

"Buried treasure on Sable Island? Now, that's original. Any particular boat you're looking for? There's about five hundred of them." He ate another wing. "They even had one in the 1920s where a ship struck a submerged wreck and was wrecked itself." He tossed the bones in the basket and took another hit of the honey-colored beer. "You're crazy. The whole island moves, nothing stays in one place-that's why it's so dangerous."

"We know where to look," said Meg.

Holliday glanced at her curiously; this was the first he'd heard of a location. Now what was going on?

"What is it that you're looking for?" Gallant asked.

"A religious relic. Not a treasure really."

"Not gold doubloons or Blackbeard's pearls or the like, then," said Gallant, grinning.

"No," said Meg, her voice serious.

Gallant ate another chicken wing and then another, thinking, staring at the rows and tiers of bottles behind the bar. Finally he turned to Holliday.

"There's nothing like that on Sable Island," he said. "There's a hell of a lot of sand and a few ponies left over from God knows when, but there's no religious relics there. If there had been they'd have been found long ago. There's nothing even faintly religious about Sable. You're talking fairy tales." He paused. "But that's your business, not mine. You're playing some sort of game or fulfilling some fantasy or following some treasure map some idgit sold you off the Internet-well, that's fine too, but know this, whoever you are, Sable Island is no joke and it's no fantasy either. It's a serious, dangerous place surrounded by serious, dangerous waters. Go there and you go there at your peril."