The Stolen Chalicel (30 page)

Shattered, Sinclair looked away and stared at the fire. The word “drowned” reverberated in his mind. He could feel his lungs constrict and the beginnings of a familiar respiratory pinch of hyperventilation in his chest.
His darling girl, drowned!

Sinclair was aware of a faint rattling sound. He looked down and saw that his hand was clutching the side table, where a teacup was vibrating against its saucer. He put his scotch down.

The faces before him blurred. Important men in dark suits were typing into portable notebooks. They didn’t look up. He was flushed, hot. His shirt was buttoned too tightly against his neck. A black wave of claustrophobia hit him like a tsunami. Then the room began to swirl around.

“Mr. Sinclair! Are you all right?” Dame Constance asked, leaning toward him. She sounded like she was underwater.

“Just need some air,” he gasped, and stood up unsteadily.

“Can we get you anything?” she asked.

“No. Please excuse me,” he managed to say as he bolted toward the exit. “I’m sorry, I’ll be right back.”

Sinclair groped for the door handle and found his way out onto the hall landing. The military officers stood aside, allowing him to pass, then closed the door after him.

The corridor was quiet. He stood at the top of the main staircase. A quick glance over the banister made him dizzy again. Red-carpeted
steps spiraled down three stories to the ground floor. He had a quick mental image of pitching over the railing, tumbling over and over until he crashed onto the black-and-white marble entrance hall below. The vision was so vivid that he backed away and flattened his back against the wall.

He stood still, eyes closed, trying to regain his equilibrium. If he could calm his breathing for a moment, the vertigo might pass. But a second wave of claustrophobia welled up in him. It was a full-scale attack! He had to get outdoors, and quickly!

He forced himself away from the wall and clutched his way down the three flights of stairs, his knees trembling with each step. He slammed through the door and rushed out into the freezing garden.

It was better outside. He bent over to get blood into his head, gulping down the cold air. Squatting, with his face inches from the turf, he tried to breathe slowly through his mouth, forcing oxygen into his lungs. He felt as if his chest was going to explode.

“Delia!”
he cried.

It came out as a gasp. Foolish to call out her name like that, but perhaps she would know he was trying to communicate.
Even if she were dead.

Just then, on the verge of crushing despair, he saw a clear image of Cordelia’s face in his mind. She was laughing, her hair swinging over her shoulder. He knew she was still alive. She hadn’t drowned.

That was the turning point. His vision sharpened and the fresh air cleared his head. He managed to fight back the panic. Finally, carefully, he stood up and took his first deep breath. And then another.

As the air filled his lungs, he noticed his surroundings for the first time. He was in a large enclosed garden rimmed on all sides by a high stone wall. The vegetation was dormant and the flowerbeds had been pruned and mulched. There was an oblong carpet of grass—a croquet lawn with the iron hoops still in place from the summer season.

The sun had dropped and it was bitter cold. But he needed to stay a moment longer to give himself time to recover. Why did this claustrophobia keep happening? Every time he thought his condition was under control, he had another attack.

Sinclair had been cursed with this ever since his young wife had
died on a snowy night, crushed to death in the wreckage of their car. For years now, his response to extreme stress was shortness of breath and claustrophobic hyperventilation.

It didn’t take Sigmund Freud to tell him he was physically reliving the horror of his wife’s death over and over. The attacks occurred whenever someone he loved was in danger. If he could deal with the situation, all was well. But if he was powerless to help, he usually fell victim to the debilitating symptoms.

He had tried many times to bring the attacks under control. There were breathing exercises and mental training. But it inevitably welled up again. He thought about the scene he had created upstairs with the British officials. Everyone had a weakness, but why did his have to be so
visible
?

Now that he was feeling better, it was time to think about helping Cordelia. He strode around the garden, breathing deeply, filling his nostrils with the damp Scottish air. He beat his arms for warmth as he walked.

The wooden side door to the castle opened and squealed on its hinges. Sinclair looked over to see who had followed him, and VerPlanck walked out. The man looked like hell. His face was gray and his eyes were red-rimmed. He walked across the croquet lawn, moving quickly toward Sinclair.

“Pardon me, John,” VerPlanck said. “Forgive me for intruding . . .”

“
What?
I have to think. . . .”

“I’m sorry, but they need you back upstairs,” VerPlanck told him. “The American officials have arrived.”

Unknown Location, English Channel

T
HE SHIP WAS
moving with a steady rhythmic motion. Cordelia could feel the deck sway under her as she sat there. It was pitch black. She figured that she was probably being held captive in the hold and there must be a door or a hatch somewhere.

She moved her legs and realized that there was nothing constraining her. No one had tied her up, probably because she had been unconscious.

Cordelia tried to stand up, but the pain in her head was excruciating, so she crouched down again. Better to take it in stages. Crawl before you walk.

Feeling along the filthy floor on her hands and knees, she touched debris that stuck to her palms. In the dark, her fingers encountered something sticky—probably a grease spot. She wiped the substance on her skirt and kept going. If there was a vertical wall, it might be possible to lean on it and stand up.

Suddenly, her fingers stubbed against a hard surface. It was the side of the ship. The metal was so cold it hurt, but she leaned on the wall and managed to pull herself erect. It took all her concentration to stay upright. Why was she so weak?

Cordelia knew she had to get out of there quickly. Her fingers brushed along the surface, blindly feeling for a door. She finally touched
a light switch. The shape was instantly recognizable and she flipped it on. Bright light flooded the area.

There was nothing in the vast space except a generator and a pile of tarp in the corner. The shape of the hold—squat and wide—suggested some kind of trawler. The stench of rotten fish confirmed this. Her shoes, high-heeled pumps, were on their sides next to the tarp, abandoned like two orphans—a patch of vomit distressingly close to them.

She walked over, put them on, and suddenly felt more prepared for whatever came next.

Could she escape? Only one door was visible, toward the back of the hold. Cordelia walked over and turned the handle. It moved! But suddenly the door was wrenched open from the outside.

A tall, heavyset man stood there in a black rain slicker, hair plastered down on his forehead. A pistol was pointing at her.

“Where do you think you are going?”

Cordelia sat in the captain’s wheelhouse wrapped in a blanket. The gunman had handed her a bowl of lukewarm soup and a hunk of bread, and she forced the food down, despite her lingering nausea and dizziness.

The fishing trawler was in the open ocean now and, by her estimate, traveling at about twelve knots. Even inside the pilothouse it was freezing cold. The scratchy gray blanket was not really thick enough to keep her warm and smelled of motor oil and fish.

The man steering the craft placed himself between Cordelia and the instrument panel, blocking her access to the maritime radio. She couldn’t see the electronic navigation system either. But she had some information—the GPS on her watch showed that they were somewhere off the English coast.

Her abductors were rough-looking guys in their mid-thirties. There were only two of them. One was the gunman from the museum; the other looked like a genuine fishing captain. He was dressed in foul-weather gear and a knitted cap and piloted the craft with considerable skill.

Neither man took much interest in her; they seemed intent on getting to their destination quickly, and kept checking their watches. She was only cargo to them. Cordelia observed the men for a while and then drifted off to sleep. There appeared to be no immediate danger here.

Cordelia stood on the deck of the fishing vessel, shivering, still feeling woozy. Whatever drug they had given her was wearing off slowly. It had been more than sixteen hours since the abduction.

Out on deck, it was absolutely
frigid
. She clutched the dirty blanket closer to her, but the wind was cutting right through the fabric. The pitch and roll of the boat was a dead giveaway—they were far from land. No sign of a coastline, a lighthouse, or even a maritime buoy.

The two men who had abducted her were peering out into the night, waving a flashlight back and forth. In the narrow beam, she could see the waves churning into sharp peaks.

The men appeared to be searching for something. Their backs were turned, so she took the opportunity to look around for a gun, a cell phone, anything at all. But all she saw were some messily coiled lines.

There was no way to escape. Swimming in this chop would be suicidal. The water temperature would sap her strength before she got ten feet. So she sat down on a stationary locker and hugged herself to control the shivering.

If she had to guess, judging from the amount of time they had been traveling and the speed of the boat, she’d say by now they were well out of the English Channel. Cordelia purposely crossed her arms over her chest to glimpse the dial of her watch. The digital GPS read latitude N 48
°
19
'
, longitude W 5
°
18
'
.

After years of being on ships, figuring out a geographic location was second nature to Cordelia. She estimated they were off the coast of Brest, France—an area known for its fishing boats. But calculating her position gave her absolutely no idea where they were headed.

The ship could travel farther along the coastline to Spain’s Cape Finisterre, the western edge of the European continent—named after
the Latin
finis terrae
. After that, it could be North Africa or the Straits of Gibraltar to the Mediterranean.

“There she is!” one of the men shouted, pointing out over the railing. “Get the fenders in. Portside.”

A white light was approaching. The orb got larger, until Cordelia realized she was looking at the cabin lights of a ship. Within moments a gigantic white yacht loomed up alongside the fishing vessel. It was a beauty—two hundred feet or more. Classical lines. A Feadship. Exquisite woodwork. Fabulously expensive.

“Ahoy,
Khamsin
!” the gunman shouted.

Khamsin?
Wasn’t that the name of a wind in the western Sahara? Sinclair had told her about it.

“Come on,” her captor said, turning to Cordelia. “Time to meet the boss.”

“Fine.” Cordelia sounded a lot braver than she felt.

The two men grabbed her blanket and flung it aside. Then they seized her arms and hoisted her up on the lip of the fishing vessel. Apparently they were going to pass her from one boat to the other. In this kind of weather, a ship-to-ship transfer would be difficult. She would have to leap from one deck to the other in treacherously slippery leather shoes! The greatest risk was that she might fall overboard and be crushed between the hulls of the two boats.

She balanced her feet on the narrow rail as the huge yacht bucked in front of them like a horse in a rodeo. The two men held her arms as a crewman on
The Khamsin
reached down for her. When the two ships were level, the tugboat crew propelled her toward the other deck. The man on the yacht caught her and hauled her up.

She slid and fell against him, clinging to his sweaty neck. His strong arms gripped her and held fast. She was repulsed. The wet wool of his peacoat had the pungent smell of Turkish tobacco and beer.