Artifact Page 2

  Ray tested the rope. “Hold it taut at the bottom,” he told Frik as he handed the end to the Afrikaner. Moments later, Ray was effortlessly scaling the wall, working his way upward toward the small barred window.

  “Keep your eyes open, my little miss,” Frik said, holding on to the rope. “We can’t be sure someone won’t come looking for those buddies of yours.”

  “They weren’t my buddies,” Peta said, more sharply than was necessary.And I’m not your little miss! She needed to release some of her pent-up fear and guilt. This was hardly an auspicious beginning to her adulthood. She knew that she’d had to kill to avoid being killed herself, but that didn’t mean she liked playing God…any more than she liked being patronized.

  Above her, Ray had reached the window. First he pulled the magnesium strips from his pocket and wrapped them around the bases of the three bars farthest from the rope. After that, he took the explosive from his belt, tamped some of the aluminum–iron oxide compound around each of the bars, and lit a long match. He touched the flame to a fuse attached to the magnesium strips, then, with the skill of a coconut thief, slid a dozen yards down the rope. A series of crisp sizzles followed, each accompanied by a flash of light. Darkness returned.

  When Peta’s eyesight had adjusted, she saw that there were huge scorch marks on the masonry below the window, and the bars had been bent out of the way. Ray was already halfway down the rope.

  As soon as the stuntman reached ground, Arthur eased his spare frame through the window and followed suit. When his feet touched solid ground, he stopped for a moment as if the physical effort had worn him out. He bent over and took several deep breaths, then straightened up.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Taking their cue from Arthur, the four of them raced, as fast as his slower pace would allow, down the hill toward Grenada Yacht Services and the comparative safety of theAssegai .

  The gated compound of GYS was unattended after midnight. Peta watched Frik use his membership key on the entry gate’s massive lock. As she walked inside and heard Frik click the lock shut behind her, she became aware of the silence. She realized, with wonder and what was almost a sense of discomfort, that no alarm had been raised at the prison. She was wrenched out of her thoughts by the sight of a large gun emerging out of the shadows.

  “Evening, Frik.”

  Peta breathed a sigh of relief as she recognized the voice and short, slight figure of Emanuel Sheppard, an old friend and freelance boat captain who seemed to live at GYS. “I see you brought some company.”

  “Actually, amigo, if you know what’s good for you, you didn’t see anyone,” Frik replied.

  A sly look washed onto Manny’s face and rolled away again with the tide of his easygoing nature. Peta had known this man her entire life, and had never seen a single person rattle him. Everybody seemed to trust him implicitly. She was sure that he knew almost every secret on the island, and just as sure that not one of them would ever pass his lips. If you pushed him, the most you’d get was a sly glance and a tall story about his days in the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States security forces.

  The group hurried along the creaking boards of the Grenada Yacht Services piers until they came to the two-masted beauty of theAssegai .

  Frik’s Great Danes, Sheba and Maverick, greeted them ebulliently as they clambered on board, though Peta knew that the animals would not be so friendly were their master not in the group. Frik wasted no time in starting the engines. Still on the dock, Manny cast off the tie lines, and the yacht began a stately drift, aided by the motors, which thrummed to life.

  “Happy New Year, all,” Manny called out in a stage whisper. Then softer, “It was nice not seeing you again.”

  As they cleared the harbor, Arthur turned to Peta. He bent down to lift her into the air. Still too weak to do so, he simultaneously hugged and reprimanded her.

  “Happy as I am to see you, girl, I want to know what you’re doing here.” He released her and looked at the others. “This is hardly a child’s game.”

  The warmth Peta had felt with Arthur’s arms around her instantly dissipated. “Damn it, Arthur, I’m not a child. Tell him, Ray. Tell him why I’m here.”

  “This was all her idea,” Ray said, somewhat grudgingly. “She planned the operation—”

  “And set it up,” Peta interrupted. “I killed two men so theseboys here could play Scaramouche meets Robin Hood,” she went on. “Killed. As in dead. William—”

  “Natalie’s William?”

  Peta nodded. “He’s lying on the ground up there with his carotid sliced by one of your scalpels. And Joe—” She put her hands over her face.

  “I’m sorry, Peta,” Arthur said quietly. After a moment he added, “What are we waiting for? I, for one, could use a drink.”

  In short order, the three men were seated around Frik’s large wooden outdoor table, where a bottle of Westerhall rum, a dish of nuts, three highball glasses, and a bottle of guava juice awaited their return. Peta cynically assumed the last was her reward.

  Arthur poured himself a short glass, adding juice, rather than his usual straight-up tumblerful. “It’s been a long time,” he said. “Happy birthday, Peta. Happy birthday to both of us.”

  No one said much more until the rum was half gone. Peta sat away from the other three, on a locker which, she presumed, held life jackets. The spot was ideal in that she was close enough to see and hear them, yet far enough away from them to deal with the distraction of her own thoughts, which were none too pleasant. Every once in a while, a flying fish arced from the water, its silvery scales flashing in the moonlight, or a star shot across the heavens. She took solace in those signs, telling herself that the universe had forgiven her trespasses against it.

  To port, she could see that they were rounding the peninsula of Point Saline. In a few minutes, the lights of the Cuban encampment would be visible, and the great black expanse of the airstrip they were building.

  Her mind returned to the events which led up to tonight.

  Why had Arthur, her father’s godson, insisted upon playing hero and martyr? Sure, he was a Marryshow and thus by nature a political beast, but as much as she adored him, she sometimes wondered about his sanity. Everybody knew he was none too fond of Prime Minister Bishop and his Communist regime, but so what? Arthur was a doctor, for God’s sake, not a warrior or a politician. He could have kept his nose clean. Then he wouldn’t have been arrested, and she wouldn’t have had to kill two people.

  She stopped. There was no point to those thoughts. She turned away from the receding coastline of her home and focused on her three shipmates. While they were unique in many ways, and two of them weren’t Grenadian, they were typical of Grenada’s male population, who were die-hard chauvinists. Arthur was less so than most, at least in their private moments, but in the company of men he acted little better than the rest, who adored females of all shapes, sizes, colors, and ages but believed them to be creatures of service, there to nurture them and to bed them. Like the others, he had no quarrel with women entering nurturing professions. They could become doctors and nurses and teachers. Anything else, law for example, or engineering, was a man’s domain.

  Like drinking rum, which, too, was some pathetic rite of manhood, she thought as they started on the second half of the bottle. Westerhall was as close as they could get to pure alcohol, so it was none too surprising that their tongues loosened. They began to regale each other with a succession of stories of prior adventures which grew more daring and less believable in inverse proportion to the amount of rum left in the bottle.

  By five minutes to midnight, they were well into their next bottle. In their drunken state, they seemed to have completely forgotten that Peta was there.

  “We are the best,” Frik said, raising his glass.

  “The very best,” Ray agreed, doing the same.

  “Uh-huh.” Arthur tilted his glass in their direction.

  Frik started to hold forth. Peta stopped listening until the end of his pronouncement. “…Daredevils Club,” he said. “We’ll meet every year…. New Year’s Eve’s a good time. Swap stories. See which of ushas taken the biggest risk. Whatcha think, guys?”

  Peta glanced at her watch in the moonlight. Thirty seconds and it would be 1983. She rose to her feet and approached the table. “Happy birthday, Arthur,” she said.

  “Happy birthday, Peta,” he echoed.

  “And happy New Year…everyone.” She turned toward Arthur. “Are we all going to meet at Danny’s Grotto for our birthdaysand the Daredevils Club.”

  “Not you, little Miss Sweet Sixteen,” Frik said, grinning inanely. He looked at the others. “You’re a succulent piece of meat, but you’re a kid. Besides, we don’t play women’s games.”

  “S’right,” Ray added. “You’re just a kid. I’m not gonna be responsible for a kid risking her life on a stupid stunt. Especially a girl.”

  “What doyou say, Arthur?” she asked, in a voice so soft that she seemed to be shouting. “Do you also think I have to grow balls to be a Daredevil? You’re a plastic surgeon. You could make me some. Or is killing two men enough to prove that I’m as tough as you are?”

  “She makes sense, gentlemen,” he said, looking at Frik and Ray. They shook their heads vehemently. He turned back to Peta. “I’m outvoted,” he said. He had begun to slur his words. “Besides, I promised your father that I’d keep you out of harm’s way.” Clearly exhausted and more than a little drunk, he put his head down on the table, in the crook of his elbow, and fell asleep.

  Peta looked back at the small spot on the horizon that was Grenada. She imagined she could hear music and shouting as, all along Church Street, bells rang out.

  “Happy New Year, assholes,” she said, loudly this time. Then, disgusted, walked toward the prow of the boat and stared into the vast, dark ocean that lay ahead.

  1

  TRINIDAD, DECEMBER1999

  After a full day on the platform observing the core samples being raised at the Dragon’s Mouth test drill site, what little patience Frikkie Van Alman might have had to begin with had dissipated.

  He wouldn’t have been there at all, but the crew, skittish to begin with, had been downright nervous since the drill had passed through an undersea cavern. Frik was not renowned for his vast store of patience, but he could not ignore the continuing gloom among his workers. At the other sites there was always music, always someone dancing, someone hiding a joint or a bottle of beer. Here, the only sounds were the wind and the sea, the mechanical whirring of the drill, and the padding footsteps of workers who, morose and silent, moved with the speed of turtles.

  “What’s eating at them, Blaine? Give me your best guess.”

  Frik thought of Eduardo Blaine as his wholly owned subsidiary. The Venezuelan ran the only hotel in San Gabriel and managed the ferries that brought workers out to this site in the Dragon’s Mouth, the northern channel into the Gulf of Paria. He was also a pretty fair diver and knew how to fly the helicopter which transported the owner of Oilstar to this jack-up drilling rig.

  “They don’t care for work in the Dragon’s Mouth.” Blaine made a weak attempt at a smile. “Tell you the truth, I’m not too crazy for it myself.”

  Before Frik could say any more, the drill returned to the surface and its load of sludge and rock was tipped onto the platform for examination. He had ordered a core sample of the floor of the cavern, wanting more evidence that there would be oil under it before he went to the trouble—and expense—of having another section of pipe sent down to keep any oil from flowing into this new cavern.

  Lying on top of the mud were four irregularly shaped objects such as he had never before laid eyes upon. He had the immediate impression of the turquoise he’d known as a child in South Africa, but these were a bluish green color that he couldn’t quite identify.

  He walked over to the silt pile and stretched out to touch them.

  “Don’t touch, Mr. Frik! Bad stuff!”

  Frik looked around to see who had spoken and saw the backs of his workers as they scattered, all except Eduardo.

  “He’s right, Señor Frik. Better not to touch.” In a show of bravado, the Venezuelan moved to Frik’s side. “See where they come from first. Make sure they’re not Obeah, or the Obeahman might get us.”

  “Don’t tell me they’ve got you convinced about their kaffir bogeyman.” He’d dealt with enough shamanistic beliefs in his boyhood on the veldt that he was unimpressed by the men’s fear that the objects might be fetishes. Besides, when he’d first been told of the local superstitions, the anthropologist he’d talked to had said that this particular myth predated the arrival of the Africans and their Obeah worship. It was probably, in fact, as old as the first Arawaks to cross the gulf from Venezuela on their migration northward.

  Frik got up abruptly and strode over to the drill assembly. The bit looked like a giant apple corer, almost twenty inches in diameter. Hand on the side of the drill, he glanced through the base of the derrick to the water fifty feet below.

  “I’m sending the camera down. I want to see the bottom of the bore hole.”

  He set up the feedback equipment, attached the underwater video camera to a cable, and lowered the assemblage down the well. As it descended, he focused on the small screen that would show what the camera found. Despite the sophistication of the equipment, the image was grainy and cloudy with silt from the drilling process. It got even worse when, about seventy feet below the seabed, the camera passed through the hole in the roof of the cavern.

  The light from the camera rig vanished into the cavern, which was apparently too large for the illumination to reach the walls. A large, indistinct fish swam in front of the lens, and the floating debris drifting away from the drill hole made it look as if he had suddenly picked upWhite Christmas on the monitor.

  Frik’s frustration mounted. There was little chance on this monitor that he’d be able to distinguish any turquoiselike fragments which might have remained in the undersea cavern. The only way to be sure was for someone to dive down and enter the cave. Fortunately, the presence of the fish assured him that there was an entrance other than the hole his men had drilled.

  “I’m not going down there,” Blaine said, anticipating what Frik had in mind.

  “You’ll go where I tell you to go,” Frik said, “but you’re right. I need you around to fly me off this rig.” He yelled out the names of the few workers he knew. “You want to be paid?” he shouted when no one appeared.

  One by one, the men returned. They clustered in small, silent groups, far from the strange objects.

  “All right now. Who’s going down?”

  Nobody moved. “You. Charles.” Frik stared into the man’s eyes. “You just volunteered. You, too, Abdul. Get your gear. Find the opening to that cavern. If there are any more pieces down there, bring them up. There’s a bonus for each one you find.”

  The men did as they were told. When they had been lowered into the water, Frik said, “The rest of you bastards, no pay today. Tomorrow you work like men or—”

  “They don’t want to work here anymore,” Blaine said.

  “The hell they don’t.” Frik took his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed the lab.

  “Trujold? Frik. Listen carefully. I want you to get the speedboat and bring your ass over here.”

  “I’m not going anywhere near your boats,” Trujold said. “Your dogs’ll eat me alive.”

  Frik thought for a moment. “All right. I’ll send Blaine for you. It’ll only take him a few minutes in the chopper, so don’t mess around.”

  “What’s the emergency?” Trujold asked.

  “None yet.” Frik looked at the indistinct image on the screen. “But I smell one coming on.”

  2

  The helicopter carrying Paul Trujold moved quickly toward the Oilstar drilling platform where Frik’s men had been testing drill sites in the Dragon’s Mouth. The passage earned its name from the toothy spears of rock that pierced the surface of the water and connected the dots between Trinidad’s Chaguara Peninsula and the coastal range of the Venezuelan mainland. Many a ship’s hull had been chewed by those teeth when her captain didn’t know the waters, or he was caught by a storm. Given that history, why would Frik think it surprising that some parts of the Dragon’s Mouth were also believed by the locals to be haunted or cursed?

  “Sorry to pull you out of the lab,” Frik shouted over the slowing thump of the blades as he reached up and helped Paul out of the chopper.

  Such courtesy, Paul thought. Must be something mighty important. “What’s going on?”

  “I sent a couple of divers down. Only one of them came back, and he died kicking and screaming on the deck before he could tell us a thing.”

  “Sounds like a bad case of the bends.” Must have shot straight to the surface without a decompression stop. What could spook a diver enough to do that? Paul winced at the thought of nitrogen bubbles fizzing through his bloodstream, ending in an air embolism to the brain. “No sign of the other?”

  Frik shot him a look. “I told you. Only one came back. And the other’s tank would have run out long ago.”

  Paul always felt an uncomfortable sense of obligation around Frikkie, to whom he owed a great deal of money, borrowed for his daughter’s long years of schooling. The debt forced him to stick around, but it didn’t change the fact that he neither liked nor trusted his boss. What’s more, Frik always made Paul, younger by a decade, feel like the older of the two. Somehow the older man had maintained the toned body of a man twenty years younger. Piercing blue eyes and even white teeth gleaming from a perpetually tanned face, dark hair just beginning to gray at the temples. Paul was shorter, darker, heavier, and, in the looks department, somewhat further down the evolutionary tree. All the way back to Amphibia class, he thought. A newt—no, a frog…waiting in vain for the princess’s kiss that would turn him into a Frik. Tough. Single-minded. An expert manipulator.