21.

They reached Mull shortly after one thirty in the afternoon, ditched the boat and managed to find a taxi in Fionnphort to take them to Tobermory and the little seaplane port on the bay. From there they took a Cessna Caravan to Glasgow and managed to catch a direct flight via Air Transat to Pearson International in Toronto.

By that evening, hungry and a little tired, they were half a world away from the sacred Isle of Iona and booking themselves into the Royal York, a twenty-eight-story chateau-style edifice from the twenties with more than a thousand rooms and its own apiary capable of producing seven hundred pounds of honey a year, or so said the brochure.

Once upon a time it had been the largest hotel in the British Empire and came by its "royal" name honestly, having hosted three generations of the Royal Family on a number of occasions, from the Duke of Windsor to Princess Diana, with a few proper kings and queens in between.

The hotel also had the advantage of being directly across the street from Toronto's old Union Station, a monstrous granite leftover from the Grand Central era that looked more like the British Museum than the British Museum did. There were trains departing for Montreal throughout the day and an evening overnight train to Halifax.

Despite the paranoid "ultra-surveillance" movies loved by Hollywood, Holliday knew that in reality you didn't retask satellites to look for people like them in places like Toronto, and tracking credit cards wasn't as simple as it looked for Jason Bourne and his ilk. Holliday gave them at least a couple of days' grace before whoever was tracking them got their bureaucratic ducks in a row. Taking the train would confuse things even more, especially if they paid for their tickets in cash. Before that, however, Holliday had an old friend to see.

Steven Braintree, a professor of medieval history at the University of Toronto, had an office on the top floor of a neo- Corinthian building at the corner of Bloor Street and Avenue Road that looked more like an old-fashioned bank or insurance company than a university faculty building. Appropriately enough, the Royal Ontario Museum was located directly across the street. The Center for Medieval Studies building was one block west of the exact center of the city at Yonge and Bloor, the division of east and west, uptown and down.

Braintree's office was a free- form collection of stacks of books, scatterings of files and snowstorms of paper littered over every flat surface in the twelve-by-twelve room, filling sagging bookcases, overflowing from filing cabinets and seeping out of cardboard boxes on the floor. There was a plastic model of a knight in armor on the windowsill beside a dying aspidistra on the radiator with a single drooping purple flower. The flower still had its tag from the nursery and the knight's shield had been replaced by a Quidi Vidi beer bottle cap from the Newfoundland microbrewery of the same name.

The office was under the eaves of the old stone building and without air- conditioning. At this time of the year Toronto was usually as hot as New York. The grimy windows were glued shut with a hundred-odd years' worth of paint and a solid Scots-Presbyterian regard for keeping heat in over the winter.

Braintree was just about as wilted as the aspidistra on his radiator. He was wearing jeans and a Chaucer is my Homeboy T-shirt. His long dark hair was lank and stringy from the heat, with a few more streaks of gray since Holliday had last seen the man. Sitting at his desk, the professor stared owlishly at Holliday from behind a fashionable pair of dark plastic- framed gla.s.ses, his hands tented under his frowning mouth as he listened to the tale of Jean de Saint-Clair and the Blessed Juliana.

"The poem is certainly interesting," he murmured. "As you know, medieval codes and cryptography are something of a specialty with me."

"You think it's a code?" Meg asked.

"It's awkward enough to be one," said Braintree, glancing at the red-haired nun. "One of the ways you can tell an old- fashioned code is through the awkwardness of its construction. The key words have to be there even though they don't really fit."

"Such as?" Holliday asked.

"It's mostly in the second verse," replied the young professor. He repeated the second stanza of the prayer aloud, emphasizing what he felt were the key words: "Save us from Satan's royal vengeance once more / And give us Mary's holy wings to fly / Us to the farther sable sh.o.r.e / Then we shall keep thy treasures safe / In Arcadia's pale enclosing arms once more." He shook his head. "It's just not right." He turned away and started rummaging through a toppling pile of books on the floor behind him.

"What do you mean?" Meg urged. "It's just not right?"

"According to you this was written in the early thirteen hundreds. About the time of the Lay of Havelock the Dane."

"Who?" Meg asked.

"What," corrected Braintree. He pounced on a thin book bound in pale brown buckram. "Aha!" he said. "The Clarendon Press edition, 1910. Quite valuable. Thought I'd misplaced it."

"What?" Holliday said.

"Exactly," said Braintree. "I thought I said that already. The Lay is a what not a who."

"What does it have to do with our prayer?" Meg asked, frustrated.

"As I said, it's awkwardly constructed. Poetry, songs, prayers, verse of any kind was almost always written in eight-syllable rhymed couplets, like the Lay of Havelock the Dane, or Chaucer." He grinned, sticking out his chest, and recited, "Bot I haf grete ferly that I fynd no man / Dat has written in story how Havelock his lond wan."

"Easy for you to say," Holliday said and laughed. Middle English had never really been his thing.

"It's about a Danish prince who settles in the town of Grimsby in England--his lond wan, so to speak. Shakespeare's source for Hamlet." Braintree cleared his throat. "The point is your Jean de Saint-Clair and this Blessed Juliana either didn't write your prayer at all or wrote it for purposes other than prayer."

"The original was in French," said Holliday.

"Doesn't matter," said Braintree. "Conventions in French poetry at the time were identical--rhymed couplets were the only way to go. If they actually meant it to be a proper prayer, that's the way it would have been written.

"And as I said before, some of the word a.s.sociations are strained--'Satan' and 'royal' would never be used together unless there was some second meaning, as you suggested. Same with the farther sable sh.o.r.e. Sable is redundant; in French it means sand, all sh.o.r.es are sandy, at least in poetic terms.

"There had to be a reason for its use. The same goes for Arcadia's pale enclosing arms. Arcadia was a paradise, a place where anything grew. It was early propaganda to get people to uproot themselves and travel to the so-called farther sh.o.r.e to colonize the New World. Pale enclosing arms doesn't sound particularly inviting."

"So what does the prayer refer to?" Meg asked.

"Nova Scotia," said Holliday. "Arcadia."

"Check out a map. Nova Scotia looks like a lobster that's missing a claw. No pale enclosing arms." Braintree paused, suddenly struck by a thought. "But there is a place that fulfills all the criteria. In fact, it's perfect. If Jean de Saint- Clair and this Venetian ship of his were crossing the Atlantic to the farther sh.o.r.e, they'd be almost certain to at least go by it, if not actually run into it. It's got pale enclosing arms, that's for sure."

"Where is it?" Meg asked.

Braintree pushed away a pile of papers on his desk, revealing a black-cased Hewlett-Packard laptop. He hit a few keys then peered myopically at the screen, pushing his gla.s.ses down low onto his nose and looking over them.

"Forty-three degrees ninety-five minutes north by fifty-nine degrees ninety-one minutes west," he said. "Often referred to as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. At least three hundred and fifty shipwrecks since 1583. That's a lot of firewood, kids. A thirty-mile-long sandbar shaped like a sickle moon right in the middle of nowhere. Sable Island."

Located approximately a hundred miles off the coast of Nova Scotia, Sable Island was a long, curving, low-lying arc of sand shaped very much like a compound bow, its center thicker than the two flared ends. The enormous spit was perched within a mile or two of the edge of the continental shelf and was right in the middle of the whirling vortex of currents, tides and winds where the Labrador Current met the Gulf Stream head-on.

The island was on the exact track of the first trade routes to the Atlantic Coast and the Caribbean, on the edge of the Grand Banks, where Basque fishermen had come to fish five hundred years before. The island had probably been first discovered by Eric the Red in the early eleventh century.

It was also the first landfall of major storms, fog banks, hurricanes and rogue waves as they approached the North American continent, the furious winds, currents and tides altering its shape as the years went by.

In modern times it had become the focus of oil exploration, and one failed rig had been established on the island years before. Several other working rigs were located nearby. The island's only permanent residents were a team of four government workers who maintained the automatic lighthouses located at either end of the sandbar and also cared for the feral ponies that seemed to thrive there.

The only other occupant was a lone researcher who lived in a makeshift shack and studied the strange ecology of the island. Visitation was banned without a permit and the only way on or off the island was via a special soft-tired small plane that landed on the beach. Any unauthorized approach resulted in a fine.

The few people who did visit were usually ecotourists there to see the feral horses on tours organized by the Sable Island Trust. It didn't quite fit the description of a desert island since there were several brackish ponds and small lakes, the largest being Lake Wallace close to the center of the sandbar. Without the fresh water, the ponies, about four hundred of them, would have been unable to survive.

Although no one was quite sure of the horses' origins, the best historical guess was that they were the result of the Great Expulsion of Acadians in the early seventeen hundreds. The horses were booty, their transportation to Sable Island organized by Thomas Hanc.o.c.k, uncle to the much more famous John Hanc.o.c.k, signer of the Declaration of Independence, a fact that seemed to interest Meg a great deal.

"We have to go," said Meg urgently. "As soon as possible. The ark is there, I know it."

"Hold on for a minute. We're not running a race," said Holliday.

"You'll have to sneak in," warned Braintree. "You could land in jail."

"We're past that, I'm afraid," said Holliday.

"It is intriguing," mused Braintree, sitting back in his chair and putting his feet up on a rickety stack of books. "The True Ark is one of those juicy medieval urban legends that probably has at least its big toe based in fact. Maybe more."

"It's quite real," said Meg firmly.

"So is the Shroud of Turin," Braintree said and smiled, "except it's a fake along with all those bits and pieces of the True Cross and miraculous vials of the True Blood you can find in cathedrals all over the world. If you put it all together the cross would have been as big as a skysc.r.a.per and Christ would have bled enough to fill a supertanker."

"You're not a believer, are you?" Meg said.

"I'm a medieval scholar," Braintree said with a shrug. "I believe in history and what it can teach us."

"You don't believe in G.o.d?"

"I didn't say that."

"You don't believe that the word of G.o.d is true as it is written."

"I've never seen anything G.o.d wrote," Braintree said and smiled, obviously enjoying the argument. It was only irritating Holliday. Somehow tracking down an old Templar knight had taken him from the frying pan into some sort of murderous fire yet again, and now his companion was having a theological debate. On top of everything else, he wasn't sure he liked the slightly fanatical tone in Sister Meg's voice, or the true believer's gleam in her eye. He'd seen the same look coming from Taliban suicide bombers in Afghanistan and Hutu machete killers in Rwanda.

"You don't believe that the Gospels are the word of G.o.d?"

"They might be somebody's interpretation of what that somebody thought was the word of G.o.d, but that's as far as I'd go."

"And isn't history just 'interpretation,' as you call it?"

"Of course," Braintree said and laughed. "In real terms neither the past nor the future exists, only the single ever-changing instant of the immediate present, so everything is open to interpretation."

"There's that word again," said Sister Meg, as though she'd scored some sort of point. "Interpretation."

"Why are we having this discussion at all?" Holliday said finally, standing up.

"The True Ark is real," said Meg firmly, almost as though she was trying to convince herself. "It exists! The Grail, the Crown, the Shroud and the Ring."

"There's only one way to find out for sure," said Holliday. "Let's go and look for the d.a.m.n thing and leave poor Professor Braintree to his Chaucer."

"Let me know how it all turns out," said the long-haired young man as they said their good-byes. "Nothing I like better than being proven wrong."

They took the old cage elevator down to the main floor and went through the heavy oak doors and into the bright sunlight. They went down the wide granite steps to the sidewalk.

Holliday saw the setup in a split second and knew there was absolutely nothing they could do about it. Two men at the corner walking toward them, both dressed in dark suits, dark shoes and dark gla.s.ses. Two more just like the first pair coming from the other direction.

At the curb a dark blue Econoline blocked their way to the street, a man standing at the open sliding door with his hand tucked into the pocket of a windbreaker far too warm for the sunny summer weather. A man in jogger's clothes coming down the steps behind them, hand in a f.a.n.n.y pack in front of him and what looked like an iPod earbud in one ear but was most likely a radio. He came up behind them fast, blocking their way back.

"Into the truck, Colonel Holliday. You and the woman. Any arguments, any conversation at all and I'll Taser the h.e.l.l out of you. Got it?"

"Got it," said Holliday.

The man behind them herded Holliday and Meg toward the open door of the Econoline. The man standing beside the sliding door took a step to the side. Six men and a truck, but no obvious show of official muscle. One of those quiet hijackings n.o.body noticed until they saw it on the news the next day.

Three more steps and it would be too late. Who were they? Not cops. Cops were never this quiet about their work. The Blackhawk people? Maybe, but they were taking one h.e.l.l of a risk. Canada might be America's best friend, but it was still a foreign country and it wouldn't take kindly to paramilitaries operating on sovereign soil.

"What do we do?" Meg whispered, obviously frightened.

"We do what we're told," said Holliday. "We get into the truck."

Which was exactly what they did.

22.

"h.e.l.lo? Is anybody there?" Meg's voice came out of the darkness, croaking and dry from whatever drug they'd been given after getting into the van.

"I'm here," answered Holliday. His voice was just as scratchy as hers. He had a splitting headache and his tongue was glued to the roof of his mouth. The room was pitch dark. He had no idea how much time had pa.s.sed since they'd been picked up off the downtown Toronto street.

The back of the van had been dark and smelled of gasoline. Somebody had been waiting for them inside, and the man standing at the door had climbed in after them. They'd each been given a shot. Holliday had fought it off for long enough to hear voices speaking and somebody say, "Four-oh-one to four hundred and then north." Directions obviously, but he had no idea where to. Presumably somewhere north of the city.

"Doc?" Meg's froggy voice again.

"I'm here."

"Where are we?" There was a rattling sound. Holliday tried to move his arms and heard the sc.r.a.pe of metal on metal. He was handcuffed to a bed. From the sound of her voice Meg was about ten feet away.

"Are you handcuffed to a bed?"

"Yes, I think so," she responded, her voice clearing a little.

Holliday inhaled. Cedar, without a doubt, and lots of it. Overhead, forming vaguely out of the darkness, he could see roof beams. Outside there was a distant sound. Slapping water. A high-pitched whine. A boat? Water-skiing?

"I think we're on a lake or a river somewhere," said Holliday. "Maybe a cottage. I can hear a motorboat."

There was a pause and then Meg's voice again. "I can hear it, too."

Holliday turned his head left and right. To the left there was a faint, square outline of light. A boarded-up window perhaps. To the right, almost out of his line of sight, was a bright red dot of light. He tried to move his arms. Nothing but the metal sound and the harsh pinch of his wrists against steel. These weren't joke- shop cuffs--they were the real thing; the only way out was going to be a key. Even so, somebody was being very careful--two sets of handcuffs per person. The same somebody who'd cuffed him knew his record. He could have done a lot of damage with even one free hand.

Holliday kept listening. The motorboat sounds faded. He could hear wind blowing in trees. The softer rustling note you got with evergreens. No traffic noises. They were definitely off the beaten track.

A door opened and the room was flooded with daylight. Ten by twelve up under the rafters, wood plank floors and two single iron beds with ticking covers on thin mattresses. A baby minder on a night table, the source of the red light in the darkness. A man stepped into the room, alerted by their voices--the one in the jogging clothes, except now he was wearing denim shorts and a T-shirt that read Pizza in twenty minutes or a free lap dance. Now can I get into Canada? on the front. Some sort of inside joke.

"Funny, I guess," said Holliday, reading the shirt as the man took off one set of handcuffs.

"Listen up," answered the man in the T-shirt. "Get out of the other cuffs, get your friend out of hers and come downstairs. Breakfast in fifteen. There's a bathroom at the top of the stairs if you have to go." He tossed a small plastic key tag onto Holliday's chest. The man's accent was as flat and Midwestern as a Kansas cornfield.

Breakfast. So at least a day had pa.s.sed. Holliday picked up the key tag and got to work on his other hand.

The main floor of the cottage was large and lavish. Holliday had seen places like it in Vermont and Connecticut; big family summer homes without families anymore, put on the weekly or monthly rental market to pay their way. The kitchen was immense, one wall of windows looking down onto a broad tree-lined lake. A set of steps from a large back deck led down to a dock. There was an old wooden Chris-Craft speedboat tied up, the kind that cost as much as a Bentley these days. The cottage appeared to be perched on a rocky outcropping surrounded by mature cedars.

A man was at work at a butcher block cutting table between the stove and a large maple kitchen table. The chairs were well polished and original pine arrowbacks. Pricey antiques popular in the sixties or thereabouts. The table was set for three, two on one side, the third directly across from the other two. There were tall gla.s.ses of freshly squeezed orange juice at each place setting. In the center of the table was a complete coffee service and a large sterling silver toast rack already filled with thick slices, half b.u.t.tered, half dry. There was n.o.body else in the room but there was a man in a suit sitting on an Adirondack chair on the deck. He had a short-stocked MAG-7 shotgun in his lap. Still no clue to the nationality of their abductors; the MAG-7 was made in South Africa.