Crucified (36 page)

Connections?

Having discarded his disguise and showered himself clean, Wyatt stood drying his hair at the window in a hotel bathrobe.

Darkness fell by the minute. Though he loved New York, this city ignited the historian in him: layer on layer of life lived by a hundred generations. A bored boy at boarding school, Wyatt had
become
Sherlock Holmes, attacking the plots and puzzles with pen and paper at hand, jotting down his guesses to out-think the great detective. Here he was where it all began, for Edinburgh was the birthplace of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the university beyond the Royal Mile had introduced the author to Dr. Joseph Bell, the model for Holmes.

In "The Crooked Man," Holmes tells Watson, "It is one of those instances where the reasoner can produce an effect which seems remarkable to his neighbor, because the latter has missed the one little point which is the basis of the deduction."

Click.

Wyatt's thoughts were broken by the unlocking of the door behind him.

He didn't know it yet, but his mental walk through Old Town had given him the clues he needed to solve the motive behind the vicious murders of those connected to the
Ace of
Clubs.

"Wow," said Liz. "The Beast turned into Prince Charming, thanks to a kiss from me."

"If that's what you call kissing."

"Get dressed, Sawney. The game is afoot. I called my researchers while you were singing in the shower to see what they found. Here's a map." She held it up. "And here are the directions to the place we're going."

"Fife?" guessed Wyatt.

"A salvage yard over there has the torpedo."

Where do old ships go to die? Where do ghost ships give up the ghost? It used to be that they would slip away to Inverkeithing, a bay that bit into a point on the north shore of the Firth of Forth. A few miles north of Inverkeithing is Dunfermline, Scotland's former capital. Robert the Bruce, Scotland's greatest hero because of his triumph over the loathed English at Bannockburn, is buried there. The breastbone of his skeleton is sundered, for the Bruce asked on his deathbed that his heart be cut out of his chest and carried by crusaders to the Holy Land.

Dunfermline is the heart o' Scotland.

And Wyatt's heart. . .

Thum-thum . . .

Thum-thum . . .

. . . was in his throat, for he knew he could be closing on the solution to a biblical puzzle that had taken several innocent lives.

Thum-thum . . .

Thum-thum . . .

He was excited . . .

This
was what he was about.

Inverkeithing is one of Scotland's oldest royal burghs, but nothing can stand in the way of progress. Once James Watt invented the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution was under way, transforming the hamlets of this shoreline into something hellish. Farmland was overlaid with looming shale heaps.

The collieries sent a cloud of coal grime drifting across the countryside. When oil replaced coal, a thousand chimneys spouting steam and flare-stacks blowing ribbons of flame usurped the mudflats. Vast power stations rose to feed them juice, and Rosyth—a graveyard that once contained a vault for storing corpses to save them from the ghouls supplying the anatomists of Edinburgh—became one of the Royal Navy's predominant warship docks.

Thus Inverkeithing, the heart of heartless shipbreaking.

HMS
Dreadnought
in 1923.

The
Olympic,
the
Titanic'
s sister ship, in 1937.

The
Mauritania
in 1965.

Those—-along with a doomed armada of rusty aircraft carriers, battleships, destroyers, freighters, tankers, and fish processors—reached the end of the line in the dissection yards of Inverkeithing. There, magnetic cranes tore the guts out of hulls, and boat anatomists sliced them up like loaves of bread to the crash of metal shears on steel and the rasp of cutting torches. This is known in the trade as "making razor blades."

"How'd you find the torpedo?" Wyatt asked in the car. They were driving north from Edinburgh, past the airport and over the soaring span of the Forth Road Bridge.

"Wartime bombs, shells, and torpedoes must be reported so they can be defused. Back in the 1950s, a weekend diver exploring the seabed discovered it off Fife. My researchers dug up the demolition record, then followed the paper trail."

"Do we know it's the right torpedo?" Wyatt asked.

"It was pulled from the sea exactly where we thought it would be—at the end of a straight trajectory from the
Black
 
Devil
past the oncoming destroyer. Explosives experts determined that the pistol—the device that blows the warhead—was a dud, and the TNT had been swapped for canisters of junk."

Wyatt grinned. "Yep, it's the torpedo."

"Evidently, the Germans had lots of problems with the weapon. It was common for guidance systems, pistols, and depth-keeping gauges to be defective. Plus, there was factory sabotage. Once it was declared safe, the torpedo was released to the scavenger."

"Why was it never sold for scrap?"

"The diver who found it was the son of the salvage yard owner. The owner's brother died in the Battle of the Atlantic when a U-boat sank his vessel with a torpedo. The owner saved the torpedo from scrap as a memorial to his dead brother."

"Thank you, Jesus," Wyatt said, clasping his hands.

At the end of the bridge, the road pressed on between Rosyth and Inverkeithing. Time and tide wait for no man, the proverb warns, and like the highway branching east along the coast of Fife, time and tide were passing Inverkeithing by.

The town made no tourist's list of "must-sees," and these days, most big boats are broken up in Asia, where labor is cheap and environmental safeguards lax. At Alang, India, ships crawl in at high tide and beach when the tide ebbs out. A horde of hungry workers sludge through the mud and break the vessels apart with hammers and pry bars.

How does Inverkeithing compete with that?

The salvage yard was off the docks of a run-down harbor besieged by warehouses, storage tanks, and housing estates.

In daylight, it would be the color of rust, but tonight, the foggy pen was haunted by big, black machines. As they drove in through the open gate, Wyatt could make out the silhouettes of fragmentizers for breaking vehicles down to their basic components, mobile shears and baling presses for offsite destruction, and a separation plant to channel scrap to monstrous heaps of copper and brass, zinc, aluminum, stainless steel, and plastic-coated wires. The breakers' yard was surrounded by derrick cranes. A ship was half dissected, like the good old days, but it was a minnow, not a whale.

The man advancing to meet them could have swung a clay-more at the Battle of Culloden. With his greasy hair, barrel chest, and forearms as thick as Popeye's, he would look awesome decked out in full Highland tartan. If only he weren't clad in grubby overalls.

"Thanks for staying open after hours," Liz said, shaking his massive paw.

"Aye, but you mentioned rrrriches," said he, rolling the
r
through a Scottish burr.

"Wyatt Rook," Wyatt said, offering his hand. It came back feeling like the victim of a baling press.

The salvage man led them across a minefield of puddles, dog shit, and junk fumbled by forklifts to the beckoning door of a Nissen hut. Wyatt wished he'd worn gumboots.

Though he never got to sail on Captain Cook's
Endeavour,
Wyatt was reminded of the poop deck of that vessel—whatever a poop deck was—as he gazed around the inside of the hut. The floor was planking from a windjammer, and the artifacts clutter-ing it had circled the globe in the days when the sun never set on the British Empire. The sleek torpedo from the
Black Devil
seemed out of place in this world of crow's nests atop main-masts; tide clocks, sextants, and signal flags; steering wheels, portholes, buoys, and binnacles; octants and figureheads of bare-breasted mermaids.

"Whatever treasure you seek, it's long gone," said the Scot.

"I did some digging, as you see."

The torpedo stretched along the floor for a length of twenty feet. It wasn't mounted. Not at more than three thousand pounds. The scavenger had removed the nose to get at the components. Basically, a torpedo has six parts: warhead, pistol, depth-control device, propulsion and guidance systems, and outside shell. U-boat submariners used to joke they were in the scrap-metal business, and in this case, the joke was on them.

The warhead had been replaced with canisters of scrap, one of which lay open on a workbench.

"Nothing but nuts and bolts. Same with the other cans. They were X-rayed by bomb men back when I found the torpedo off Fife. Tonight, I used a portable scanner to check again. The rest of the parts follow this Nazi blueprint exactly."

The Scot ruffled a sheet on the bench.

"Nuts and bolts, and
nothing
else?" Wyatt pressed.

"Well, there are spikes in that one, if you want to get picky."

"Spikes? You mean nails?"

"Aye."

"Open it up!" Wyatt said.

+ + + 

The canister was soldered shut to make it watertight. The scavenger used a blowtorch to melt the seal, then cracked the container open as gingerly as he could. Spikes by the hundreds clattered onto the bench, along with a pouch stuffed with documents wrapped around three more nails.

"The Judas package!" said Liz.

Most of the papers were Werner Heisenberg's notes for Hitler's atomic bomb. But some of the sheets appeared to be a letter from Rommel, with a map that detailed the wall of a building in Tobruk. Wrapped inside those documents were several parchments and a map of a city that must have ceased to exist as drawn a long time ago.

Jerusalem?

That would explain the three nails.

No wonder some religious fanatic with scars through his palms was willing to kill anyone to get hold of these. Of all Christian relics, what could be more significant than the nails actually used to crucify Christ?

Thumthumthumthumthumthum ...

Wyatt's heart surged from the adrenaline, but that was nothing compared to the jackhammer beat that overtook it as he examined one of the nails.

"Can it be?" he wondered.

A sudden thump to his side broke his train of thought, for the Scot had crumpled to the floor as if having a heart attack.

Only as Wyatt bent over him did he spot the dart in his neck.

Then . . .

"What the hell?"

. . . he felt a sharp jab, too.

The light went dark and the floor came up to meet him.

Clang . . . clang . . . clang . . .

Wyatt emerged from his blackout to the sound of metal clanging on metal and the sight of bars caging his eyes.

He couldn't move his head. It was bolted to the wall. And his mouth had been invaded by some sort of bridle with four wicked prongs gouging his cheeks and tongue. From the taste of it, blood dribbled down his jaw.

His wrists and ankles were also fastened to the wall, cuffed by U-shaped clamps that kept his feet together and stretched his hands as wide as Christ's on the cross. He was lucky. That's as close as he came to crucifixion.

Clang . . . clang . . . clang . . .

The Scot, on the other hand, was being nailed to the floor.

The salvage man was also clamped in a Christ-like pose, but he had a ball stuck in his mouth, instead of a witch's bridle. The demon who had ambushed them with a dart gun was kneeling beside the supine man with a hammer raised in his hand. Down came a blow hard enough to drive the nail flat against the palm.

Clang . . .

Surely the Scot was screaming, yet not a peep escaped his mouth.

Clang . . . clang . . . clang . . .

The tortured man thrashed and writhed.

All Wyatt could do was watch.

And wait his turn.

How many paintings of hell had he seen? Every rendition of the Last Judgment showed monsters, demons, and tortures await-ing sinners who didn't embrace Jesus. As an agnostic, Wyatt doubted that he would encounter such a fate after death. So it was ironic that he seemed doomed to suffer it here instead.