The Knights of the Cornerstone (29 page)

“You saw it?”

“Oh, yes. Might have been the earthquake that did it. The camera crew bottomed out. The river ran dry. Then just like that it was flowing again. Washed right over the damned camera boat. Cleared the deck. She’s still moored out there, but there’s no one left on board, although they’ve still got the cameras rolling on those towers they built on the far shore.” He laughed out loud, and then looked at his watch. “One minute, thirty seconds now,” he said. “Bob Postum is wowing them with those two trebuchets, so we want to have our turn. Now if you look hard down toward the base of that lower machine,” he said, “you can see that they’ve got a Humvee parked there on the turnout. That’s what they’re using to winch that ballast box up. Look there! They’re connecting her to the winch.”

Calvin watched through the binoculars, spotting the small figure of Bob Postum standing behind the trebuchet with his arms crossed. Calvin wondered whether a marksman with a high-powered rifle couldn’t simply shoot the
man dead right there on the mountainside and end this whole thing before someone else was hurt—someone besides Postum.

“There’s some power in those Humvees,” Taber said appreciatively. “Fifteen seconds! Here we go! Ten, nine, eight—watch it now! Don’t look away! Two, one!”

For a moment nothing changed. The ballast box rose a couple of more feet, nearly to the top, while the slingend dipped. But then the ground shook, as if from another small earthquake, and the hillside twenty feet below the trebuchet blew outward in a silent cloud of rock and dust. A second later there was the muffled sound of the explosion, and then the roar of the avalanche.

Calvin could see men falling to the ground and others scrambling up the hill to safer ground. The Humvee lurched forward, still winched to the trebuchet, the driver evidently trying to put some distance between him and the hillside. The rocking ballast jerked the trebuchet sideways, though, and the entire machine slammed down onto the top of the Humvee, burying it in a tangle of wooden spars.

The edge of the cliff appeared to be crawling now, collapsing in on itself, the Humvee and the trebuchet sliding with it, picking up speed until what looked to be several acres of hillside avalanched downward in a second cloud of rock and dust. When the wind whirled the dust away, it was evident that the turnout was gone, the road destroyed. The second trebuchet still stood in place, although it was canted forward and had slipped around sideways. Calvin watched it, willing it to fall, but very quickly a couple of men were tying lines to it, setting up to drag it away from the brink.

“There’s the driver,” Taber said, pointing, and Calvin saw a man crawling up the hillside, moving like a big, slow lizard. Somehow he had jumped or fallen out of the
Humvee. A tire-size rock suddenly let loose above his head and bounded downward, right over him, starting another small avalanche. He held on for a moment and then started crawling again.

“Hell,” Taber muttered.

“What?” Calvin asked. “Did we want him dead?”

“No, we want that second trebuchet.”

“Leastways they can’t drive down into town now,” Calvin said.

“And we can’t drive out. But you can bet they’ll quit playing around now. They made their point and now we’ve made ours, although it fell a little short. They’ll try harder with that second machine.”

The remaining trebuchet lurched sideways, seeming to square itself with the hillside as they dragged it upward and away from the precipice, towing it with a vehicle that was hidden from view. And in a moment it was apparently on solid ground again, and they were pounding away at the corners of the base with sledgehammers—knocking in wedges, probably, to steady and level it.

“This is it,” Taber said. “Let’s go inside.”

Calvin and Taber went back up the dock and in through a big wooden sliding door. Taber’s house was the same vintage as the Lymons’ house, although it had a better view downriver, and it looked down on the Temple Bar, so that they could see over the ramparts now at the men still working, going in and out across the bridge. There were heavy steel shutters over the Temple windows, and the wooden door had been barricaded with a steel panel.

The television set was turned on in the living room, and sitting on the coffee table lay what looked like a small, theater light board, with a dozen faders and glowing red lights. Calvin realized that the television screen was
actually a monitor. At the moment there was a moving picture of the interior of the mint, scanning the hoard of coins, then focusing on the door in the passage. The door still stood open, which still seemed to Calvin to be strange under the circumstances. The camera image winked out, revealing the lamplit passage, looking uphill. It was dark farther up, but he could see the tail end of the rail line set into the stone floor. The image was replaced by a picture of the doors in the far wall of the mint—the riverside doors. Then the mounds of coins reappeared, the open door, and the passage again, except that now, way off in the distance, there were three bobbing, firefly specks of light. “Here they come,” Taber said.

Shadowy figures appeared in the passage, moving downhill into the lamplight—three men wearing helmets with lamps, two of them walking ahead, holding shotguns. Calvin recognized Defferson and Yorkmint. The third man was Bob Postum, with the brim of his helmet pulled down to shade his eyes. Postum had gotten down the passage fairly quickly, given that he had been up top a few minutes ago. They hesitated outside the open door, looking into the room, the shotguns ready.

“Go on in,” Taber murmured, his hands hovering over the switches in front of him. “Help yourself. Fill your pockets.”

After a moment they stepped forward warily, swiveling the shotguns in front of them, evidently expecting resistance rather than the wide-open door. Right inside they stopped again, this time obviously stupefied, staring at the ocean of silver as if they had fallen into a trance.

“Go farther in”
Taber muttered.

And then, as if in agreement, they moved forward, no longer warily, but greedily, hunched over and staring.
The electric light from the string of bulbs played over the mounds of silver coin and ingots, which looked endless from the point of view of the camera: mounds and stacks and hummocks and pyramids of silver—a moonlit desert landscape, stretching on into the shadowed depths of the cavern. Postum stopped and turned his head to look at the open door, as if making sure of the way out. It was impossible to make out his expression in the dim light, whether it was of satisfaction or doubt. It seemed to Calvin as if there was something strange about him—as if he’d put on weight, or was wearing clothes that were slightly too small.

“One more step,” Taber muttered. “Get on with it.”

“He’s wary,” Calvin said. “He’s wondering why the door’s been left open.”

“Greed trumps wariness here,” Taber said, his hand on one of the switches, and sure enough, as if Postum couldn’t help himself, he bent over to heft a big ingot. He turned it over and inspected the writing stamped into the bottom, then looked up, as if he had something to say and was trying to find the words. Defferson was moving around through the silver, lost in the gloom farther back. York-mint had fallen onto his knees and was running his hands through a mountain of coins. Behind Postum the tunnel door dropped down into place, pressing itself into its niche with what must have been an audible noise, because Postum looked back sharply, set down the silver, and strode toward it, saying something back over his shoulder.

“Heaven help me,” Taber said. He looked at Calvin, his face pale. “Later on, remind me of the way they burned Shirley Fowler’s store, and the way Postum killed Lamar Morris.” His hand moved on the faders. The camera winked away, the scene changing to reveal the doors in the back wall, beyond which the river flowed. The doors began
to open, sliding upward, and immediately river water was rolling in beneath them, flooding into the cavern and down across the steeply sloped floor. Again the camera switched away, focusing again on the door into the tunnel, which was still closed tight. Postum and Defferson worked to raise it, pushing their hands against it and leaning into it, trying to slide it upward. Yorkmint searched frantically around the floor, looking for a lever, maybe, but finding nothing but the shotgun he’d brought in with them. He picked it up and tried to jam the barrel under the door. Their mouths worked as they shouted at each other.

After a moment, when the water was knee-deep, they slogged away, clambering up the heaps of coin. Again the camera cut away. The river doors were fully opened, the arched doorways hidden behind the two torrents of water, which were rapidly filling the cavern, vast as it was. Taber looked at Calvin, whose face must have revealed the horror that he felt. “That’s Bob Postum you’re worrying about,” he said.

“I’m not worrying,” Calvin said. “It’s just …
is
it Postum?”

“Sure it is. The man’s greed personified. He got those trebuchets up and running and then came down the tunnel with the others. I’ll bet ten dollars he’s got a railcar waiting to come down. One thing, though, if you’re squeamish—if he can tread water, he’ll make it out of there alive. There’s an outlet, and if he doesn’t panic he’ll be swept out in the current. He’s got the advantage of bulk, so he’ll float.”

“But what if it’s
not
him? What if it’s someone who
looks
like him?” Calvin watched the monitor for another moment. The coins were submerged, the water still apparently flooding in through the doors. Then someone swept past at the bottom of the screen. It was a big man—not Yorkmint or Defferson, but not Postum, either. His hat
was gone and his beard was half pulled away from his face where the spirit gum had given out. He slapped at the water, struggling to stay afloat, catching the false beard in his flailing hand and pulling it away, his face pudgy and moonlike now, his eyes terrified. He swirled out of view again, and there was nothing to see but dark water.

Calvin realized that Taber was talking on his cell phone now. “Out by the river gate,” he was saying. “That’s right, three of them.” Then he stopped and looked sharply at Calvin. “Nettie didn’t give you that veil, did she?”

“No,” Calvin said. “She told me that you sent Doc Hoyle out to get it. She didn’t give it to him, either.”

“I sent Doc Hoyle out there to see what he could do for Lymon. He’s got no business with the veil. He shouldn’t give any kind of damn about it.”

Before Taber could say anything more, Calvin was out the door and loping past the wharf. They had sent a fake Bob Postum down the tunnel because the actual Bob Postum had someplace else to be.

C
alvin ran down across Taber’s little stretch of beach and had just passed the end of the dock when there was a shattering concussion. Something hit him in the head, and he slammed onto his shoulder in the sand. Water and debris rained down around him, and he curled up, shielding his head, his ears ringing with the reverberations of what must have been the fall of a monstrous stone. When he wiped his face, his forearm came away smeared with blood and water. He felt his forehead gingerly and found the wound at his hairline—a flap of skin torn away and hanging. He pressed it back into place, his head beginning to throb, and tried standing. He found that he wasn’t going to pass out, and so stepped toward the dock, where a ragged terry cloth beach towel hung on a nail driven into one of the pier pilings. He yanked it down and dipped it into the river, wrung it out, and blotted the blood out of his eyes again, then pressed the towel hard against the wound, feeling half stupefied.

He saw what had hit him—a big, jagged splinter of wood blown off the dock in the impact. The dock had been shattered by the falling stone, and the end of it was pushed up out of the water like a broken ski ramp. The fireboat, its starboard side hammered in, was slipping away in the current, the mooring lines dragging dock pieces along with it as it drifted toward the island.

Taber’s door slammed, but there was no time for idle talk. Without looking back, Calvin waved with the towel and jogged away around the curve of the bay, his head pounding with each step. Taber shouted something after him, but he waved his hand again, watching the scene out on the river where a pontoon boat with a camera mounted on it zipped alongside the slowly spinning fireboat, shooting the wreck from the decorated side, the painted plywood and oars still foolishly intact, spared by the stone. Someone on the camera boat tossed a big canister aboard and the fireboat went up in a whoosh of flame.

On the island Knights were running down the dock, and as the burning wreck drew near, they pushed it away with long poles, but it edged back in, dangerously near the gas pumps. Someone had started up the water cannon engine moored to the ferry dock, but it was so close to the wreckage that when the cannon let go it blasted burning pieces out across the water, nearly taking out the camera boat and its crew, knocking men and equipment into the river and spinning the fireboat safely out toward midstream, a burning wreckage of knocked-apart plywood. A ski boat with a couple of Knights on board put out from the island, angling around into the river to recover the burning fireboat, the whole scene drifting out of sight.

Calvin took the towel away from his forehead. Apparently the bleeding had slowed down. He used his teeth to
tear through the hem of the towel, and then ripped off a long strip, which he tied around his forehead as tightly as he could. He threw the rest of the towel aside and set out again, skirting half a dozen riverside houses, his head still throbbing, and the wound sharply painful now that the initial numbness was wearing off.

The heightening pain seemed to clear Calvin’s mind, and he thought about the rat Mifflin had told them about. Ten dollars said it was Hoyle. Postum had left his car in the lot at Beamon’s because he didn’t need it: Hoyle was giving him a lift into New Cyprus, probably in the trunk of his own car, which, if it was true, meant that Postum had been in New Cyprus for hours, maybe biding his time, maybe up to something more. The Bob Postum up on the hill with the trebuchets was another fraud.