The Tenth Circle (24 page)

Port of Gibraltar

“This is about the
Mary Celeste
, no doubt,” Fernán Andrade said to Zarrin from the window that overlooked the sprawling Port of Gibraltar from the breakwater on the north side.

“Educated guess?”

“The only thing that truly brings people my way,” Andrade told her, slapping his hefty stomach forcefully with both palms. He had a thick shock of white hair and icy-blue eyes that glistened in the light.

Zarrin gazed about his elegant office, focusing on wood-paneled walls papered with any number of nautical charts, as well as photographs and drawings tracing the port’s growth and development. “And yet you were the longest-serving Captain of the Port in history.”

“And I’d still be if politics hadn’t intervened, the damn Brits. Replaced me with a goddamn bureaucrat, they did. Let me keep the office like I’m on display in a museum. Anyone with a historical inquiry is directed to me and those inquiries, invariably it seems, involve the
Mary Celeste
. I feel like the Flying Dutchman, doomed to repeat the same stories forever.”

“Not today,” said Zarrin.

Located at a crossroads of Mediterranean and Atlantic shipping lanes, on a strait traversed by over seventy thousand vessels per year, the Port of Gibraltar had become a stopover for any number of commercial, shipping, leisure, and even private craft. The local airport, into which Zarrin had flown, was located a few minutes from the harbor, the story of which was elegantly told by the pictures hanging from Fernán Andrade’s walls. The early eighteenth century had seen the port as little more than a British garrison. But the opening of shipping lanes to the West and back as the decades wore on cast its strategic location in an entirely new light.

Andrade bypassed his elegant collection of photographs in favor of a detailed schematic of the port and surrounding waters from the late nineteenth century. “The
Mary Celeste
was found in the Bay of Gibraltar,” he said, pointing to a spot on the drawing southeast of the port. “Right about here, where she was taken under tow by a nearby twin brigantine called the
Dei Gratia
and brought to a spot not more than a hundred yards from where we stand right now.”

“What if I told you I know what happened to the crew, why they abandoned the ship for no explicable reason?”

Andrade looked utterly unimpressed. His massive jowls wobbled. “And which theory would you be fronting? Thievery by pirates gone wrong? The captain being double-crossed by someone to whom he’d agreed to sell the ship’s cargo of valuable alcohol for spirits? Another ship the
Mary Celeste
had stopped to help, only to be seized herself? The British government smuggling something on board the captain caught wind of and wanted no part in? Which will it be?”

“How about none of the above?”

Andrade looked as if he didn’t know what to make of Zarrin’s answer or of her. “And what is it you know about the
Mary Celeste
that has escaped history this many a year?”

“That the answers I’m looking for can’t be found on her decks or in her cargo holds. They lie somewhere else entirely.”

“And where’s that?”

“Another ship,” Zarrin told him.

Branson, Missouri

McCracken could feel Carroll’s eyes still boring into him from back near the town hall, the bright sun glistening off the light-colored pavement now riddled with cracks and fissures. The elm and oak trees swayed gently in the breeze on either side of the street, their shadows splayed against windows behind which Carroll’s gunmen were perched.

They’d wait until he was halfway down, whatever hesitation McCracken felt lost in that certainty along with the fact that the boy’s life would be claimed as well. Which meant nothing to men like Carroll, of course, who’d now firmly moved from I-know-best-what-the-country-needs mode to cover-his-ass mode.

Meet the new breed, same as the old breed. Like the song says. Kind of.

“Can you hear me, Andrew?” Blaine asked, sweeping his gaze from side-to-side as he eased the wheelchair on slowly. “Andrew?”

The boy remained dazed, drugged as well probably, and didn’t so much as stir. The sun burned into McCracken, making him feel even warmer in the cool air, and he hoped it would ease Andrew’s trembling in the wheelchair. They had targeted the boy to insure his involvement, to better set him up.

Targeted a kid.

They deserved what was coming to them, what he was about to unleash while the gunmen felt safe and secure behind the windows above, ready to let go with a cross-fire fusillade that would cut him and Andrew apart. Carroll playing his final card, knowing McCracken well but not well enough.

Blaine glanced back at him, glimpsed Carroll and his men backing away, toward the protective cover of the once-pristine town hall, now marred with faded trim and peeling paint. Carroll reached the shade of the portico, almost lost to sight.

McCracken reached into the pouch threaded through his belt, its contents having escaped the pat-down just as he expected. He came out with a handful of what looked no more threatening than black marbles maybe the size of a quarter in diameter. He knew the shooting wouldn’t start until he was dead center in the street, not until Carroll was safely back inside the town hall. With that point fast approaching, Blaine opened his hand and tossed the marbles forward, the motion probably not even registering with those sighting him in their crosshairs.

Except they weren’t marbles at all. And, as soon as Blaine released them, metallic wings sprouted from both sides of each and they flew off, in all directions at once.

Captain Seven’s bug bombs, identical to the one Blaine had seen tested back in Sunnyside Yard, sped through the air like crazed bumblebees, working even better than advertised in utilizing their artificial intelligence technology to speed toward the positions currently held by Carroll’s shooters. Before those men could register anything amiss, the bug bombs pierced the windows. Honing in on targets their software had claimed and zeroed.

And then the blasts started, one after another, melding into one seamless, explosive stream, almost surreal in its impact and results. McCracken had seen what mines could do in the battlefield and what IEDs could do on roadsides.

But neither of those was anything compared to this.

The screams, the ones that had time to come anyway, didn’t last very long and the blood, bone matter, and body parts bursting through the glass was like nothing he’d ever seen before. Filling the air and showering down through the smoke that hid them for a time. The bitter, coppery stench of blood claimed Main Street’s air, Americana gone to hell. And, yet strangely, whatever Captain Seven had packed into his tiny killing machines seemed to have no blast residue odor at all. Blaine smelled only burned wood and scorched steel, realized his own ears were rippling toward momentary deafness from the percussions, even as he shoved Andrew’s wheelchair across the square, shielding the boy as best he could.

McCracken managed to scoop up an assault rifle coughed from a window amid chunks of its former wielder without missing a step. He recorded the fact that the fifteen bug bombs he’d unleashed had all done their damage short of the town hall, meaning Carroll and three of his men remained to be dealt with.

Blaine crashed through a door leading into what had once been an apothecary shop recreated from times long past, dragging Andrew’s wheelchair inside behind him. The boy had still not stirred, but his eyes sought McCracken’s out, full of shock and terror. He smoothed Andrew’s hair, laying a hand as tenderly as he could manage on his shoulder.

“I’m a friend of your father’s,” he said.

Port of Gibraltar

“The
Dei Gratia
,” Zarrin finished.

Fernán Andrade poured each of them a glass of port wine from a crystal carafe. “Got this all figured out, have you? More of the crazy talk I’ve been hearing all my life now.”

“I don’t think so.”

The office he had kept after being relieved of service as captain of the port offered a near-total view of the facility. The sun streamed through the windows facing the sea, reflecting off Andrade’s baby-like face, which looked as though it had been pumped with air.

“You can’t buy this in any store in the world,” Andrade proclaimed proudly, as he tilted the glass to his lips and savored a sip. “It’s made truly special by the addition of Aragonez, or Tinta Roriz, from northern Portugal.”

Zarrin joined him. Alcohol intensified the symptoms of her Parkinson’s, particularly in the hands, and didn’t mix well with her medications, so she seldom drank at all. But she needed to make an exception today. The wine tasted sweet and fruity, too sweet at first, until her pallet adjusted and she found herself longing for her next sip.

“You like it,” beamed Andrade. “I can tell. It’s of the Alentejo vintage, produced from thick, dark-skinned berries.”

Zarrin took another zip.

Andrade raised his glass in the semblance of a toast. “To the
Dei Gratia
and whatever fool’s errand that brought you here.”

“Captain Briggs of the
Mary Celeste
abandoned ship because he thought he was carrying something deadly in his cargo holds, something that was leaking from a few of the barrels that had ruptured.”

“Did he now?”

“He was trying to save his crew from something that wasn’t there.”

“You’re saying the ship wasn’t carrying seventeen hundred barrels of alcohol?”

“No, that’s exactly what she was carrying: as a decoy, to draw attention away from the ship that really had a deadly cargo stocked in her holds.”

“The
Dei Gratia
.”

“Sailing from New York just a few days after the
Mary Celeste
.”

“With a comparable number of barrels loaded with petroleum in her holds,” Andrade nodded, as if impatient with her telling of the tale. “I’ve heard much of this before and so has the world.”

“Neither you nor the world has heard everything.”

“And what’s that.”

“It starts with the lost colony of Roanoke… .”

“That’s quite a story,” Andrade said, when Zarrin had finished, refilling his glass of port. “Another?” he said holding up the carafe.

She realized she’d nearly finished hers as well, checking her hands to find them still steady. “No more for me, thank you.”

“I can’t say I’ve ever heard anything like it, and I’ve heard just about everything. The
Mary Celeste
nothing more than a decoy? Some secret weapon carried in the hold of a sister ship?”

“And you don’t believe a word of it.”

Andrade smirked and started to pour another glass, then realized he’d already done so. “Well, there were rumors from around this time of the British being in league with Napoléon III to take the throne back in France. He may have had more friends in the Commonwealth than he had back home, and imagine the British salivating at the prospects of having a voice eminently friendly toward their interests running France.”

“The problem is Napoléon III was sick, dying, by the time both the
Mary Celeste
and
Dei Gratia
set sail,” Zarrin pointed out.

“Sick, yes, but he didn’t know he was dying. And a man who’d lived his life with that name and so much power would never believe he could be felled by anything as mundane as illness. He would do anything necessary to regain his crown, and that includes this plan to use a legendary weapon to help his cause.” Andrade clapped his hands. “Bravo. Congratulations are in order.”

Zarrin felt her hands trembling, but when she looked down they were still. She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth that seemed coated in chalk.

“For what?”

“Coming closer to the truth than anyone who’s ever come to Gibraltar. You’ve done it, my good woman, solved the mystery. Unfortunately for you, that comes with a price, not a prize.”

Andrade’s words reached her only in splotches with brief gaps of emptiness between the syllables. It felt as if she was nodding off for one second, only to reawaken in the next before darkness claimed her altogether.

Branson, Missouri

The only gunmen who remained would be holed up down Celebration City’s Main Street inside the town hall. Andrew Ericson was under no danger from any of Carroll’s other shooters—Captain Seven’s bug bombs had seen to that. So Blaine need only concern himself with these final three gunmen and used the heavy smoke still drifting with the wind down Main Street for camouflage.

He drew no fire from inside the building at the edge of the square until the smoke cleared thirty feet away and pistol fire burned the air toward him. Difficult shots to manage under any conditions, much less on a moving target with the carnage left behind in McCracken’s wake crystallizing in view through the dissipating smoke.

He neutralized their assault with three-shot bursts fired from the assault rifle he’d salvaged from the street strategically toward the first-floor door and second-story windows where it had originated. Then instinct took over, his experience in battle having imbued Blaine with almost a sixth sense for survival. He didn’t think, didn’t reason, didn’t plan. Just moved into the flow, letting the moment guide him. No one survived this many, or even any, gunfights by thinking. Thinking meant delays and delays provided the space and time the shooters needed to right themselves and their aim. Thinking was for preparation and training, not battle.

Battle belonged to the moment.

McCracken crashed through the cracked open door from the side, assault rifle twisting on the gunman’s exact position and hitting him with a quick burst that plastered the man to the wall and left him slumping down it. Along with thinking, emotion had vanished. These were men who were about to shamelessly kill a young boy, already party to untold harm done to the country. They were targets and nothing more, a means to an end.

And that end was Robert Carroll.

In that moment, McCracken was glad he had no bug bombs left. This was the way he wanted it, the way he did it the best. Up close and personal, as all wars from time immemorial ended one way or another. Boots on the ground. The surreal nature of a firefight when the senses of hearing and sight vanish behind a haze that grew impossible to describe as soon as it passed. Blaine felt that haze envelop him, entered it.

He rushed up the stairs, firing strategically to force motion and when it came he shot it down as if the bodies were no more than air to be superheated and pierced with rounds that were essentially miniature bombs themselves. Wreaking havoc with the body once they entered. He leaped over one with a stitch of gore carved in his midsection and then another with bloody holes up his spine, having taken the fire when he turned to run. McCracken surged to the only closed door along the hall, stopping short of twisting inside it.

Bursting through the open door immediately across the hall from it instead.

Robert Carroll managed to get off one harmless shot before McCracken knocked the pistol from his hand with the assault rifle’s barrel and then rammed the stock just hard enough into his face to shatter his nose. A torrent of blood burst from both nostrils and the head of the Gap slammed backward against the wall, suspended there with knees bent.

“Fuck you, McCracken!” he wailed, both hands held to his face.

“That the best you can do?”

“You think you’ve won? You think this means anything?”

“What I think is you’re part of a plot that’s already killed a whole lot of innocent Americans. I think you got your hands on the kind of soldiers who use Afghanis and other civilians as target practice and painted bull’s-eyes all over our own country. And I think the worst is yet to come.”

Carroll slumped the rest of the way down the wall, eyeing McCracken hatefully and blowing thick wads of matted blood from his nose. “You’re fighting for the wrong side. One day you’ll wake up and realize things stopped being black and white a long time ago, back when dinosaurs like you still roamed the earth. It’s gray out there now, and the sooner you realize that, the sooner you’ll actually be able to able to do some good that lasts.”

“There are a whole lot more than three shades to the world, Carroll.”

“How many do you remember from Vietnam, son? How many did you assassinate in Operation Phoenix toward no end that mattered? How many others did you knock off since? Where’d that get you?”

“Here.”

“Go to hell, McCracken.”

“Not before you.”

“It’s called the Ozark Wildcat,” McCracken said, straddling the wooden rails of Celebration City’s wooden, retro roller coaster to which he’d just finished tying Robert Carroll on a straightaway that flattened out after the first drop. “Funny thing about coasters like this. They work almost entirely on gravity. Get the cars rolling and off they go, plenty of juice to get them this far anyway.”

Carroll looked over Blaine’s shoulder, as if expecting to see the cars cresting over the nearest rise. “I already told you I’m pulling the plug on this, son, already gave you the name of the asshole you need to visit. What else do you want?”

“You to get what you deserve.”

“The great McCrackenballs doesn’t kill helpless innocents.”

“You’re not helpless, Carroll, and you’re anything but innocent. You went too far, crossed the proverbial line. You made your choice and you’ll make the same one again down the road, given the chance I’m not going to give you.”

Carroll’s expression tightened in panic that quickly turned to resolve. “How am I supposed to clean up this mess if you leave me here to freeze, you son of a bitch?”

McCracken grinned down at him. “Oh, you won’t freeze; I promise. And this mess is mine to clean up now.”

There was just enough juice left in the backup batteries to get the cars still stacked at the Ozark Wildcat’s starting line moving. McCracken watched them fly down the first drop, picking up enough momentum to coast up the spiraling rise and then disappear over it, gathering speed as they hit the straight stretch on which he’d tied Robert Carroll.

Blaine was already heading for the apothecary shop where he’d left Andrew Ericson when he heard a single languishing scream followed by the thud of impact and crash of cars tumbling off the tracks.