"And his compet.i.tion?"

"Of the eight families there are only three in real contention."

"Who are they?"

Kate Sinclair opened up the expensive little clutch and took out a folded piece of paper. She handed it to Patchin. He unfolded the note and read the short list of names. His eyes widened.

"My G.o.d," he whispered, staring at the little slip of paper.

"Precisely." Sinclair smiled coldly.

"But the one at the top, that's . . ."

Kate Sinclair lifted a bony finger to her bright red lips, silencing him.

"Can you still help me?" Sinclair asked.

Joseph Patchin stared at her, wondering what kind of terrible snake pit he had stumbled into. He tried to shrug it off. In for a penny, in for a pound; the kind of thinking that got Bernie Madoff a hundred and fifty years in the slammer. He swallowed hard.

"I'll see what I can do."

The sea was black gla.s.s. The only motion of the dark water was a slow, rolling swell that gave the thirty-two-foot lobster boat a faintly nauseating corkscrew twist that was turning Meg a faint shade of green. The Deryldene D was making a steady twelve knots and had been doing so ever since leaving Halifax at dawn, almost seven hours ago. Above them the sky was a featureless gray slab.

"I was expecting worse weather than this," said Holliday, standing beside Gallant at the wheel and looking out over the slowly undulating sea. Laid out on the windscreen shelf in front of the wheel was a group of high-tech instruments, including a depth finder, a side-scanning sonar array, a fish finder, a color radar screen, and a marine radio.

"You know the expression 'the calm before the storm'?" said the maritimer.

"Sure," said Holliday.

"This is it," Gallant answered flatly.

"There's a storm coming?" Meg asked anxiously, perched on the bait box close to the transom.

"We're in a high-pressure system that's moving with the swell. We meet a low-pressure system and you get what's called a cyclonic effect. Down south they'd call it a tropical storm. It's how you get hurricanes."

"Please tell me we're not heading into a hurricane," pleaded Meg.

"Maybe not a hurricane yet, but odds are it'll become one before long. They've already evacuated the island and the offsh.o.r.e rigs nearby; they don't do that for an ordinary storm. The only question is when she hits," answered Gallant.

"Best guess?" Holliday asked.

Gallant shrugged and stroked his mustache. "Trying to guess what the sea's going to do is a fool's game," said the lobsterman. "But from my experience and the Doppler radar I'd say we've got a few hours yet."

"You're saying that Sable Island is deserted now?" Meg asked.

"For what it's worth," answered Gallant. "I've never seen one, but the captain of the QE2 ocean liner reported a ninety-two-foot wave nearby. That's the height of a ten-story building. Sable's barely thirteen feet above sea level. I sure as h.e.l.l wouldn't want to be anywhere on the island when a wave like that hits."

"We should check all that equipment you bought," said Holliday pointedly. Meg nodded. Holliday led the way through the small hatchway- like door to the left of the wheel down three narrow steps.

There was a galley with a propane stove and burners on the left and a fold-up Formica table on the right with a vinyl-covered banquette against the starboard bulkhead. Everything in the little s.p.a.ce seemed coated with a light sheen of old cooking oil and there was the distinct odor of boiled fish in the air. Holliday edged his way through the galley, ducking low, and stepped into the forward cabin.

The equipment was made up of two collapsible camping shovels, a pair of bright yellow, handheld Lowrance Safari GPS units and two very-high-end Garrett metal finders, smaller mine-detector-style versions of the big Garrett metal detector gates used in airports and secure facilities. They were lightweight and computerized.

Holliday sat down on the neatly made bunk against the port-side bulkhead and waited for Meg to join him. They were sitting in the bow now and the sliding, mild roller-coaster movement of the Deryldene D on the light swell was more p.r.o.nounced. Meg's color deepened and she put a hand on her stomach.

"What do you want to check?" she said, obviously irritated. "The batteries are fully charged and the salesman calibrated the detectors for copper, bronze and iron as well as gold and silver. Those are the most likely metals the ark would have been sheathed in."

"I wanted to talk with you privately," answered Holliday.

"About what?" Meg swallowed. "And make it quick. I need some fresh air as soon as possible."

"All right. One quick question. When we were in that bar where we met Gallant you said you knew where the ark was buried. How is that possible since you didn't know about Sable Island until a few days ago?"

"My, my, aren't you the suspicious one," said Meg. She swallowed again and closed her eyes briefly as a wave of nausea hit her.

"Call it professional curiosity," said Holliday.

"Okay," she said and nodded. "To satisfy your curiosity." She took a deep shuddering breath to control her seasickness. "Hopefully it won't bruise that delicate male ego of yours, but I'm a historian as well, and sometimes I can figure out puzzles too."

"What puzzle?" Holliday asked.

"The painting in Prague. The one by Cranach. You couldn't figure out the six monks around the well, remember?"

"I'm with you so far."

"You told me there's a freshwater lake on Sable Island, right?"

"Lake Wallace. There's a spring somewhere but it's mostly rainwater runoff, which is why the water level rises and falls so dramatically, at least according to that book I read."

"But would it have been there in the time of the Blessed Juliana and Saint-Clair?"

"Presumably."

"Don't you see? Lake Wallace is the well," said Meg, managing a faint smile of triumph.

"And the six monks?"

"s.e.xt," answered Meg.

"Pardon?"

"It's the most important of the canonical hours," explained Meg. "It's even sacred to the Jews. s.e.xt is the sixth hour of the day. Originally s.e.xt was seen as dawn, but by the Blessed Juliana's day and the advent of clocks, prime, the first hour of the day, was arbitrarily set at six a.m. and s.e.xt officially became noon, the time Christ was crucified. s.e.xt was also St. Benedict's most sacred time for prayer, and St. Benedict was the patron saint of the Templars. That's where Jean de Saint-Clair and the Blessed Juliana hid their holy treasure. The six o'clock position on the face of a sundial or a clock. We'll find the True Ark at the six o'clock position on the sh.o.r.e of Lake Wallace."

"Well, I'll be d.a.m.ned," whispered Holliday.

26.

Dr. Rafi Wanounou, a professor of medieval archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, sat under the fly tent that served as his office, sweating profusely and doing paperwork, most of which was scattered over the rough plywood table in front of him.

Through the open end of the tent he could see the entire archaeological site of the 4000 B.C. cult temple that had served the nomadic tribes pa.s.sing through the desert. Beyond the ruins of the old temple where his students were laboring like busy little ants under the broiling sun, Rafi could see the white salt rime on the beaches and the blue-green expanse of the Dead Sea.

If he squinted he could faintly see Jordan ten miles away on the other side, and with a pair of good binoculars he could even make out the five-hundred-foot block of halite that was usually referred to as Mount Sodom.

It was well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit and it was almost time to call in the kids for lunch and a hydrating break and maybe even a trip to one of the springs surrounding the nearby Ein Gedi Oasis for a swim. Rafi sighed. The Chalcolithic period of Hebrew history was hardly his area of expertise, but like the rest of his colleagues in the department he had to lead his fair share of field trips to give the students experience doing site work.

Rafi sighed again; he was also worried about Peggy. She was only in her first trimester but he was already fretting over her. He had even been considering making the arduous hundred-kilometer journey back to Jerusalem later in the afternoon, even though Ein Gedi was hardly within commuting distance. Fifty miles on secondary desert roads in Israel wasn't like the same distance on a freeway in the United States. On the other hand, Peggy was worth it; in fact, meeting and falling in love with Peggy Blackstock had been the best thing that had ever happened to him; even his mother thought so, even though he'd married a shiksa who hadn't changed her name when they got married. He smiled; convincing Reyna Wanounou of anything was a small miracle, even his father said so.

Rafi reached down to the cooler underneath his table and pulled out a plastic bottle of Neviot spring water and twisted off the cap. He took a long swallow and then another. Peggy wasn't used to the extreme heat of an Israeli summer and that was worrying him, too. He grinned. It was a fundamental part of the Jewish psyche to worry about one thing or another. Presumably Peggy hadn't reached that part of the conversion process yet.

He heard the sound of a vehicle coming down the approach road to the temple site. There was a heavy note to the engine, more like the sound of a truck. Rafi slipped on his old Serengeti Driver sungla.s.ses and stood up. He went to the open end of the tent and stood in the blinding sunlight. He watched as the vehicle came down the winding approach road. It was a Humvee in mottled desert camouflage. The Humvee was Israeli Defense Force.

The squat, boxy, armored all-purpose vehicle pulled up beside the fly tent. It was an M1145 model, the one the U.S. Army was using to replace the original version. Whatever branch of the service it came from they had pull in the motor pool. As far as Rafi knew there weren't more than a handful in the country. During his mandatory stint in the military they were still using Jeeps.

An officer climbed out of the pa.s.senger seat and two grunts got out of the back. They were all wearing identical tan uniforms but the officer had three olive branch pips on his green shoulder tabs; a full colonel. The grunts had the triple stripes of staff sergeants on their sleeves. All three were wearing the dark green berets of Military Intelligence Command.

The colonel had a holstered Desert Eagle pistol on his belt; the sergeants both carried futuristic- looking Tavor a.s.sault rifles. The colonel approached Rafi. The man looked to be in his late fifties, his square face seamed and lined, the hair at his close-cropped temples grizzled salt and pepper. The two grunts took up positions on either side of him and slightly behind. Their eyes shifted like wolves', always in motion. They were the colonel's bodyguard; whoever he was, the colonel was high on the food chain.

"My name is Abraham Ben- El'azar. I am with IDF Intelligence," said the colonel. "I am looking for Professor Rafi Wanounou."

"That would be me," answered Rafi. "What can I do for you?" he asked, curious.

"It's your wife, Dr. Wanounou. I'm afraid she has been kidnapped."

Peggy Blackstock walked slowly along Mahane Yehuda Street in central Jerusalem, alternately taking photographs and shopping for dinner and anything else that looked good in the shuk Machaneh Yehuda, the city's famous open-air market. She'd already picked up some fresh dates, pistachios and a bag of meat-and-potato-filled "cigars," the Moroccan version of pierogies and one of Rafi's favorites.

Peggy smiled, thinking of her sometimes too serious husband. He'd be out of his mind with worry out there by the Dead Sea if he knew she was shopping alone.

In Rafi's mind she'd changed from the adventurous girl photographer who'd spent two months in the Amazon rain forest with the Matis Indians learning how to use a blowgun and going through the Kampo frog poison ritual--Kampo being the oily sweat of the Amazon monkey frog and a drug that was a combination of methamphetamine and the world's most powerful laxative--all to get her photo story.

Somehow the act of getting pregnant had stripped her of all her toughness and turned her into a delicate flower of womanhood who would wither away if exposed to direct sunlight. On the one hand, it was sweet and romantic; on the other hand, it was a little bit overprotective and claustrophobic, not to mention just plain silly.

Even more worrying to her professorial husband would be the fact that she was shopping alone in the shuk. The shuk Machaneh Yehuda had been the site of three terrorist suicide bombings in two attacks between 1995 and 2002 and still had barrier checkpoints with armed guards at both the Agrippas Street entrance and the entrance at the Jaffa Road end of the market. It was a ridiculous precaution, of course, and basically just for show. The shuk was a rabbit warren of alleys and side streets and anyone who wanted to get into the market unnoticed wouldn't have the slightest trouble.

Peggy wandered through the noisy throng, looking at the tiny shops standing cheek by jowl with each other. A store selling nothing but halvah in different flavors next to a dealer in Judaica, a barbershop beside a backgammon club so crowded that its tables spilled out onto the already crowded street. A discount CD store next to a fancy jewelry boutique. She glanced upward to the second and third floors of the old buildings. She knew from her research that a lot of the apartments and lofts above the shops were now occupied by artists, writers and musicians. The shuk was in transition, going from simply popular to trendy. Greenwich Village in the desert. It was a little sad.

There were two policemen approaching, threading their way easily through the crowd. They were wearing their short-sleeved light blue summer uniforms, at odds with the variety of colorful exotic costumes all around them. One was a plain-faced, middle-aged man, the other a younger woman.

Peggy brought up the Nikon and took a few quick shots. The two cops came to a stop directly in front of her, blocking her path. The crowd broke around them like the current of a river giving way to a boulder in midstream. Shopkeepers paused in the middle of their noisy sales pitches, sensing a bit of drama. Peggy was a little confused; as far as she knew there was no law in Israel against taking pictures of cops. It wasn't as though they were Mossad or anything.

"Peggy Blackstock?" the male cop asked. Peggy noticed that the female had her hand on the holstered b.u.t.t of the Jericho 915 on her hip. She also noted that neither one of them had any rank insignia.

How the h.e.l.l do they know my name? Peggy thought.

"Yes," she said.

"I am Pakad Yakov Ben- Haim of the Israeli Police, Headquarters Division."

A pakad--what was such a high- ranking officer like a chief inspector doing wearing a patrolman's uniform?

"What can I do for you, Chief Inspector? I hope you don't mind me taking your picture." The cop ignored the question.

"Please come with us," said Ben-Haim quietly. "It's about your husband. I'm afraid there has been an accident."

Their first sighting of the lonely island was nothing more than a distant smudge on the eastern horizon, balanced on the curving edge of the world, a frighteningly dark ma.s.s of clouds in the background, so dark at the spreading base that it was almost black.

"Once we make landfall you're not going to have much time," cautioned Gallant. "A couple of hours at most." The burly lobsterman with the Groucho mustache shook his head. "Any longer than that, you're on your own and I'm gone."

Holliday glanced at Meg, expecting some kind of plea or argument, but she said nothing, simply looking blankly and without expression through the windscreen of the Deryldene D's cabin, staring at the slowly forming smudge on the horizon. Holliday found himself hypnotized by the cold, black, roiling clouds that formed a background to the image of the island. It was like staring at a vision of the future, and the future wasn't good.

They continued east for another hour and a half, the island growing steadily more visible as they approached. Meg had gone below, overcome by her seasickness. At first Sable looked much bigger than it actually was, an illusory desert island shaped in a long crescent, its narrowing arms pointing toward the New World, Arcadia.

Slowly but surely the illusion faded; this was no island of palm trees and beautiful native girls; it was a windswept desolate sandbar, its back to the open sea, its center a spine of wandering dunes barely held together by the tough gra.s.ses and bushes that somehow clung to life through the seasons.

A steady wind was blowing from the east, and nearing the sh.o.r.e Holliday could see the blowing wisps of sand rising from the crests of the dunes like wind-borne snow in the middle of a blizzard.

The Deryldene D suddenly seemed to lurch in its onward course, the bow swinging abruptly to the south. Gallant cursed under his breath and turned the wheel hard back to port.

"What was that?" Holliday asked.

"That's the reason so many ships went down on Sable," said Gallant, grunting with effort as he dragged on the wheel, one eye looking ahead, the other focused on the digital depth finder. "It's called a gyre. Out west they call it a skook.u.mchuck."

"What on earth is a skook.u.mchuck?"

"A vortex," said Gallant, fighting the wheel.

There are four main currents that flow around Sable Island. The Labrador Current, the St. Lawrence Outfall and the Nova Scotia Current running south along the island's southeastern sh.o.r.e, and the much more powerful and deeper Gulf Stream flowing north along the outer sh.o.r.e.

As huge volumes of water race past the island they set up a whirling Coriolis effect, creating spinning currents of water just below the surface. Sailing ships of the past riding the Gulf Stream up from the Caribbean on their way home to Europe would suddenly find themselves torn off course and thrown up on the ocean- facing banks and bars, while ships heading along the Atlantic Coast to New York and points south would find themselves cast up on the inner beaches.

A map of Sable Island shows hundreds of known wrecks almost evenly divided between the two sh.o.r.es with a slight advantage held by the Gulf Stream coast, probably caused by ships running before the storms. Gallant nodded toward the instruments in front of him as he struggled with the wheel.

"Keep an eye on the echo sounder," he instructed. "Read me the depths every ten seconds. If you see a yellow-white patch ahead of us, call it out. Same for port and starboard, got that?"

"Got it," Holliday said and nodded.

With Holliday calling out the numbers they moved steadily toward the island, Gallant guiding them toward the starboard end of the crescent-shaped strip of sand. At some point Meg came up from the cabin, but Holliday barely noticed. She looked toward the sh.o.r.e, then went back down into the cabin and retrieved the two metal detectors and their backpacks. Holliday kept reading off the numbers.

The hidden sandbars threatening to ground them were all at right angles to the sh.o.r.e, which Holliday found strange, but this was no time to ask questions; Gallant was concentrating hard on the approaching coast. The water beneath them became shallower and shallower. Two hundred yards from sh.o.r.e it was barely eight feet. At a hundred yards it was six feet, and at twenty-five yards it was barely four.

"What's the draft on this thing?" Holliday asked.

"Three feet three inches," said Gallant. "We'll ground in a few seconds."