Douglas Preston - The Obsidian Chamber

The watch went around to murmurs and nods.

“You can buy a Caddy for the price of that watch,” said Filipov. “This man is loaded.” He looked around. “It means giving up your Boston holiday, but there may be some serious money to be made here.”

“Money?” asked Dwayne Smith, the first mate. “Like a reward?”

“Reward? Shit. No reward would be anything near what we might get if we handled this in another way.”

“What other way?” Smith asked.

“Ransom.”

Filipov stood at the lazarette hatch, staring down at the mystery man shackled to the cleat in the bottom of the hold. The man had been with them for ten days, but they knew as much about him now as they had when they’d hauled him on board. Which was nothing. The man appeared to be sleeping, but Filipov wasn’t sure. For the first few days after they’d fished him from the water, he’d been sunken in a kind of deep stupor. That was to be expected after almost dying of hypothermia. They had taken good care of him, keeping him warm, feeding him broth when he was able to take it, bandaging his wounds and broken knuckle, making him comfortable. Then he had run a high fever for three days — again, nothing surprising in that. But the crew began to get nervous, worrying that if they were stopped by the Coast Guard and boarded it would be all over.

To minimize that possibility, Filipov had taken the Moneyball beyond the Schoodic Peninsula, deep into the wildest coastline in the United States: Downeast Maine, with its thousands of uninhabited islands, coves, and estuaries. Filipov knew the coast well, and he also knew the habits of the Coast Guard. For days now they had been meandering from gunkhole to gunkhole, keeping well out of the cruising and shipping lanes and moving only at night. But the atmosphere aboard ship had continued to sour, especially when, after the mystery man’s fever cleared up and he seemed to be on the road to recovery, he still hadn’t spoken: not a single word. It was almost as if he were brain-damaged — which was a possibility, after being almost drowned. But in the few times he’d had a chance to look into the man’s silvery eyes, Filipov had seen an alert intelligence. He felt in his bones the guy was cognizant. So why wouldn’t he talk? What had he been doing floating in the water? And what about his wounds? It almost looked like he’d been mauled by a bear, with long tearing scratches, lacerations, and bite marks.

It was damned unnerving to everyone on board.

Now the man was lying in his usual position, eyes closed. Filipov stared at him, his hand in his pocket, toying with the man’s gold ring. He was sure the answer, or at least some answer, lay in the crest or symbol engraved in that ring. It was a strange emblem, showing a weird vertical cloud with a five-pointed star inside it, lightning bolt shooting down, striking a lidless cat’s eye inside of which was the number 9 in place of the pupil. To Filipov it looked vaguely military. Smith, his first mate and the resident computer guru, had spent hours on the Internet looking for a match, without success. The same was true of the bizarre medallion around the man’s neck, although that looked less official, almost familial or perhaps even medieval. Smith had also tried to get an Internet match on the man’s face. That had failed, as well. The problem was the man had almost died and his face was so haggard and drawn that he probably didn’t look enough like his former self for the software to find a match.

The key to this man’s identity was that ring; Filipov was sure of it.

He stared at the man, his anger growing. The son of a bitch was holding out on them. Why?

He stepped into the hold and walked up to the man. He lay there, eyes closed, shackled to the cleat, asleep. Or rather, pretending to sleep. And even as Filipov stared, those eyes slowly opened, revealing two glittering silver coins with pinpoint black pupils. He looked more like a ghost than a human being.

Filipov leaned over him. “Who are you?”

Those eyes looked into his own, with what Filipov felt was a kind of insolence. The man had started out almost dead, but now Filipov was sure he must have recovered more than he was letting on.

“I’m going to dump your ass back in the ocean. How about that?”

To his surprise, the man spoke for the first time. The voice was barely more than a whisper. “The repetition of that threat is becoming tiresome.”

Filipov was taken aback by the quiet smoothness of the voice, the southern accent, and the distinctly arrogant tone.

“So you can talk! I knew you were screwing with us. All right, now that you found your tongue: who are you?”

“The real question is, who are you ? Ah, but never mind: I already know the answer.”

“Oh yeah? So who am I then, you little prick?”

“You’re the unluckiest man alive.”

With a curse, Filipov kicked him in the ribs. But even with that, the man’s expression never changed, those eyes never shifting from his own.

Captain Filipov stood at the chart table to the left of the helm, staring over Smith’s shoulder as the man worked his laptop computer. He was explaining his latest failed attempt to match the engraving on the mystery man’s ring with something on the Internet. “Whatever it is,” Smith was saying, “it’s not on the surface web, not on the dark net. I used the best image-matching software available. It ain’t fucking there.”

Filipov nodded, staring at the image on the screen: a photo they’d taken of the ring. The boat was lying off Bunker Cove, south of Great Spruce Island. It was a protected anchorage for a dirty night, the swell coming from the northeast, rain splattering the pilothouse windows.

“Want a beer?” Smith asked.

“Not right now.”

Smith scraped the chair back and went below; a moment later he returned, a beer in one hand. He took a long swig.

“Whoever this asshole is,” said Filipov, sitting down at the computer, “he wants to be anonymous. Why won’t he tell us his name?”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

He stared at the design. Weird cloud; lightning; cat’s eye; nine. And suddenly an idea came to him. He winced at the obviousness of it. “A cat has nine lives.”

“Yeah?”

“So this group, whatever it is, is all about survival. Nine lives.”

“Okay.” Smith took a pull from his beer.

“And this cloud. You ever see a cloud like that?”

“It’s strange. Sort of like a thunderhead.”

“Maybe it’s not a cloud at all.”

“So what is it, then?”

“A ghost.”

Smith peered at the image of the ring on the screen, squinting, and then grunted. “Maybe.”

Filipov took the real ring out of his pocket and looked at it, turning it in the dim light of the pilothouse. “Ghost. Star. Nine lives. Lightning. Okay. So the image isn’t on the web. But perhaps a description of it is.”

Filipov started Googling the words “ghost,” “star,” “nine lives,” “lightning.” And almost immediately he got a hit. It was a small article in an FBI newsletter, Hall of Honor , devoted to agents killed in the line of duty. It was dated three or four years back, and it described the funeral of a Special Agent Michael Decker, who had been killed “In the Line of Duty as the Result of an Adversarial Action.” The article described the funeral and noted some of the attendees. Filipov read through it, then stopped at one passage:

In addition to the American flag, the coffin displayed the emblem of the elite Ghost Company to which Decker belonged — a ghost on a blue field, decorated with a star, throwing a thunderbolt at a cat’s eye with the number nine as its pupil, symbolizing the nine lives that all members of the Ghost Company were alleged to have by virtue of their training, determination, and experience. The Ghost Company was a highly secret, tight-knit, specialized descendant of the army’s now-defunct “Blue Light” detachment, and was created specifically to operate in classified, highly dangerous, and at times unsanctioned theaters of engagement. The Ghost Company’s window of service was relatively brief. “Blue Light” as a whole later developed into the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment — Delta Force. Special Agent Decker was one of a small, decorated group of agents who joined the FBI after serving in the Ghost Company.