Riptide (43 page)

H
atch stood on the wide old porch of the house on Ocean Lane. What had been merely a weatherman’s threat the day before was
fast becoming reality. To the east, a heavy swell was coming in over the sea, creating a torn line of breakers on the reefs
of Breed’s Point. On the opposite side of the harbor, beyond the channel buoys, the surf flung itself again and again up the
granite cliffs beyond Burnt Head Light, the boom of the rollers carrying across the bay in measured cadences. The sky was
slung across with the ugly underbelly of a massive foul-weather front, the clouds churning and coiling as they raced across
the water. Farther offshore, an evil patch of surf seethed about Old Hump. Hatch shook his head; if the swell was already
smothering the bald rock, it was going to be a hell of a blow.

He gazed down toward the harbor, where a few vessels from the protest flotilla were already returning: smaller boats, and
the million-dollar craft of the more cautious trawler captains.

Closer to home, movement caught his eye: he turned to see the familiar stubby form of a Federal Express van nosing into the
lane, wildly out of place as it bumped down the old cobbles. It stopped in front of his house, and Hatch came down the steps
to sign for the package.

He stepped back into the house, tearing open the box and eagerly removing the thick plastic packet inside. Professor Horn
and Bonterre, standing beside one of the pirate skeletons, stopped talking when they saw the package.

“Straight from the Smithsonian’s Phys Anthro lab,” Hatch said as he broke the plastic seal. Pulling out the bulky computer
printout within, he laid it on the table and began flipping pages. There was a heavy silence as they leaned over the results,
disappointment palpable in the air. Finally Hatch sighed and flung himself into a nearby chair. The professor shuffled over,
eased himself down opposite Hatch, rested his chin on his cane, and eyed Hatch meditatively.

“Not what you were looking for, I take it?” he asked.

“No,” Hatch said, shaking his head. “Not at all.”

The professor’s brows contracted. “Malin, you were always too hasty to accept defeat.”

Bonterre picked up the printout and began flipping through it. “I can not make foot or head of this medical jargon,” she said.
“What are all these horrible-sounding diseases?”

Hatch sighed. “A couple of days back, I sent off bone sections from these two skeletons to the Smithsonian. I also included
a random sampling from a dozen of the skeletons you uncovered in the dig.”

“Checking for disease,” Professor Horn said.

“Yes. As more and more of our people began to get sick, I began to wonder about that mass pirate grave. I thought the skeletons
might be useful in my examination. If a person dies of a disease, he usually dies with a large number of antibodies to that
disease in his body.”

“Or
her
body,” said Bonterre. “Remember, there were three ladies in that grave.”

“Large labs like the Smithsonian’s can test old bone for small amounts of those antibodies, learn exactly what disease the
person might have died from.” Hatch paused. “Something about Ragged Island—then and now—makes people sick. The most likely
candidate to me seemed the sword. I figured that, somehow, it was a carrier of disease. Everywhere it went, people died.”
He picked up the printout. “But according to these tests, no two pirates died of the same illness. Klebsiella, Bruniere’s
disease, Dentritic mycosis, Tahitian tick fever—they died of a whole suite of diseases, some of them extremely rare. And in
almost half the cases, the cause is unknown.”

He grabbed a sheaf of papers from an end table. “It’s just as mystifying as the CBC results on the patients I’ve been seeing
the last couple of days.” He passed the top sheet to Professor Horn.

COMPLETE BLOOD COUNT

“The blood work’s always abnormal, but in different ways with each person. The only similarity is the low white blood cells.
Look at this one. Two point five thousand cells per cubic millimeter. Five to ten thousand is normal. And the lymphocytes,
monocytes, basophils, all way down. Jesus.”

He dropped the sheet and walked away, sighing bitterly. “This was my last chance to stop Neidelman. If there was an obvious
outbreak, or some kind of viral vector on the island, maybe I could have persuaded him or used my medical connections to quarantine
the place. But there’s no epidemio-logical pattern among the illnesses, past
or
present.”

There was a long silence. “What about the legal route?” Bonterre asked.

“I spoke to my lawyer. He tells me it’s a simple breach of contract. To stop Neidelman, I’d have to get an injunction.” Hatch
looked at his watch. “And we don’t have weeks. At the rate they’re digging, we’ve only got a few hours.”

“Can’t he be arrested for trespassing?” Bonterre asked.

“Technically, he’s not trespassing. The contract gives him and Thalassa permission to be on the island.”

“I can understand your concern,” the professor said, “but not your conclusion. How could the sword itself be dangerous? Short
of getting sliced open by its blade, I mean.”

Hatch looked at him. “It’s hard to explain. As a diagnostician, sometimes you develop a sixth sense. That’s what I feel now
A sense, a
conviction,
that this sword is a carrier of some kind. We keep hearing about the Ragged Island curse. Maybe this sword is something like
that, only with a real-world explanation.”

“Why have you discarded the idea of it being a real curse?”

Hatch looked at him in disbelief. “You’re joking, right?”

“We live in a strange universe, Malin.”

“Not
that
strange.”

“All I’m asking is that you think the unthinkable. Look for the connection.”

Hatch walked to the living room window. The wind was blowing back the leaves of the oak tree in the meadow. Drops of rain
had begun to fall. More boats were crowding into the harbor; several smaller craft were at the ramp, waiting to be hauled
out. The whitecaps flecked the bay as far as the eyes could see, and as the tide began to ebb a nasty cross-sea was developing.

He sighed and turned. “I can’t see it. What could strepto-coccal pneumonia and, say, candidiasis, have in common?”

The professor pursed his lips. “Back in 1981 or ’82, I remember reading a similar comment made by an epidemiologist at the
National Institutes of Health.”

“And what was that?”

“He asked what Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii could possibly have in common.”

Hatch turned sharply. “Look, this couldn’t possibly be HIV.” Then—before the professor had gathered himself for an acerbic
reply—Hatch realized what the old man was getting at. “HIV kills by exhausting the human immune system,” he went on. “Letting
in a host of opportunistic diseases.”

“Exactly. You have to filter out the pestilential noise, so to speak, and see what’s left.”

“So maybe we’re looking for something that degrades the human immune system.”

“I did not know we had so many sick on the island,” Bon-terre said. “None of my people are ill.”

Hatch turned toward her. “None?”

Bonterre shook her head.

“There. You see?” Dr. Horn smiled and rapped his cane on the floor. “You asked for a common thread. Now you have several leads
to follow.”

He stood up and took Bonterre’s hand. “It was very charming to meet you,
mademoiselle,
and I wish I could stay. But it’s coming on to blow and I want to get home to my sherry, slippers, dog, and fire.”

As the professor reached for his coat, there came the sound of heavy footsteps hurrying across the porch. The door was flung
open in a gust of wind, and there was Donny Truitt, his slicker flapping open and rain running down his face in thick rivulets.

A flash of fire tore the sky, and the heavy boom of thunder echoed across the bay.

“Donny?” Hatch asked.

Truitt reached down to his damp shirt, tearing it open with both hands. Hatch heard the professor draw in a sharp breath.

“Grande merde du noir,”
Bonterre whispered.

Truitt’s armpits were spotted with large, weeping lesions. Rainwater ran from them, tinged pinkish-green. Truitt’s eyes were
puffy, the bags beneath blue-black. There was another flash of lightning, and in the dying echo of thunder Truitt cried out.
He took a staggering step forward, pulling the sou’wester from his head as he did so.

For a moment, all inside the house were paralyzed. Then Hatch and Bonterre caught Truitt’s arm and eased him toward the living
room sofa.

“Help me, Mal,” Truitt gasped, grabbing his head with both hands. “I’ve never been sick a day in my life.”

“I’ll help,” said Hatch. “But you need to lie down and let me examine your chest.”

“Forget my damn chest,” Donny gasped. “I’m talking about
this!
”

And as he jerked his head away from his hands with a convulsive movement, Hatch could see, with cold horror, that each hand
now held a mat of thick, carrot-colored hair.

C
lay stood at the stern rail of his single-diesel dragger, the megaphone upended in the fore cabin, drenched and useless, shorted
out by the rain. He and the six remaining protestors had taken temporary shelter in the lee of the largest Thalassa ship—a
ship they had originally tried to blockade.

Clay was wet to the bone, but a feeling of loss—of bitter, hollow loss—penetrated far deeper than the damp. The large ship,
the
Cerberus,
was inexplicably vacant. Either that, or the people on board had orders not to show themselves: despite boat horns and shouts,
not a single figure had come on deck. Perhaps it had been a mistake, he thought miserably, to target the largest ship. Perhaps
they should have headed for the island itself and blockaded the piers. That, at least, was tenanted: about two hours before,
a series of launches had left the island, loaded with passengers, angling directly away from the protest flotilla toward Stormhaven
at high speed.

He looked toward the remnants of his protest flotilla. When they had left the harbor that morning, he’d felt empowered with
the spirit: as full of conviction as he’d ever felt as a young man, maybe more. He had been certain that, finally, things
would be different for him and the town. He could do something at last, make a difference to these good people. But as he
gazed about at the six bedraggled boats heaving in the swell, he admitted to himself that the protest, like everything else
he had tried to do in Stormhaven, seemed doomed to failure.

The head of the Lobsterman’s Co-op, Lemuel Smith, threw out his fenders and brought his boat alongside Clay’s. The two craft
heaved and bumped against each other as the rain lashed the sea around them. Clay leaned over the gunwale. His hair was plastered
to his angular skull, giving his already severe appearance a death’s-head cast.

“It’s time to head in, Reverend,” the lobsterman shouted, grasping the side of his boat. “This is going to be one humdinger
of a storm. Maybe when the mackerel run’s over we can try again.”

“By then it’ll be too late,” Clay cried over the wind and rain. “The damage will be done.”

“We made our point,” said the lobsterman.

“Lem, it’s not about making a point,” said Clay. “I’m cold and wet, just like you. But we have to make this sacrifice. We
have to
stop
them.”

The lobsterman shook his head. “We’re not going to stop them in this weather, Reverend. Anyway, this little Nor’easter may
do the job for us.” Smith turned a weather eye upward and scanned the sky, then turned to the distant land, a mere ghost of
blue vanishing into the driving rain. “I can’t afford to lose my boat.”

Clay fell silent.
I can’t afford to lose my boat.
That was it in a nutshell. They didn’t see that some things were more important than boats or money. And perhaps they never
would see. He felt a strange tight sensation around his eyes and realized, vaguely, that he was crying. No matter; two more
tears in an ocean. “I wouldn’t want to be responsible for anybody losing his boat,” he managed to say, turning away. “You
go on back, Lem. I’m going to stay.”