“How quickly can you get results?” Garza asked.
“Sterile microsurgery will be required to access the uncontaminated interior of the follicles — with something like this, DNA contamination can be a huge problem. After that, we have to do a PCR on it, and then sequence it. It’s time consuming — and a lot depends on whether there’s still contamination in the samples that has to be teased out.” He seemed to hesitate.
“What is it?” Garza asked.
“I didn’t want to say anything before,” Weaver said. “But now that I’ve actually seen these hair follicles and viewed the pattern of pores under the scope, I’m almost certain.”
“Certain about what?”
“About what kind of, ah, animal this vellum is from.”
“Well?” Garza said. Why was he being so coy?
Weaver licked his lips. “Human.”
For a moment, the lab went silent.
Brock laid down his pen. “You can’t be serious.”
Weaver said nothing.
“I’m sorry, but there must be some mistake,” Brock continued. “There are simply no examples of human skin being used for vellum.”
Garza glanced over at him. “Are you sure?”
“Quite. For monks to flay a human and use his skin for vellum is unthinkable. No Christian of the time would have done that, even to a pagan enemy. That sort of cruelty wasn’t invented until the twentieth century.”
“What about Viking raiders?” Garza asked. “Or other pagan tribes of the time, perhaps? Maybe they made their own vellum from the skin of Christian monks.” He cast a smirk at Brock.
“Absolutely not. The Vikings didn’t read books — they burned books. But more to the point, the desecration of the human body after death was not part of Viking or pagan culture, either. They might rape your wife and burn you alive in your house, but they would never mutilate a corpse.” Brock paused. “If you want my considered opinion, gentlemen, you are grievously in error.”
Weaver looked down at the tiny box of clear plastic that held the two follicles. “Say what you will. I think it’s human.”
“Get those tests started right away,” Garza said.
28
Amy awoke Gideon at eleven thirty. The wind was still blowing, and the weather report indicated worse was on the way. He went through the usual first-mate chores of raising the anchor, arranging the paper charts in their proper order, and checking the electronics to make sure they were working properly. He was pleased at how quickly he had mastered these numerous but relatively simple chores.
At midnight, they eased out of the mangrove swamp into the choppy waters of the bay. It was a dirty night, sand blowing across the water in stinging clouds, neither moon nor stars. It took another half an hour to reach the inlet, which was boiling from the storm surge — and then they were in the open sea.
The swells were suddenly terrifying, great rolling beasts coming one after the other, the crests foaming white, spray and spume blown forward by the wind.
“This is perfect,” said Amy, at the helm. She was adjusting the gain on the radar, back and forth.
“Perfect? You’re joking, right?” Gideon was already feeling queasy. During the encounter with the Horizonte, he’d been too busy — and too scared — to feel seasick. That wasn’t the case at present. This was not going to be a good night.
“The radar’s practically green with sea return, and the waves are almost as high as our boat. They’re going to have a hell of a time seeing us on their radar.”
“If you say so.”
The boat plowed through the water at ten knots. Beyond the pilothouse windows, hammered with rain, there was nothing — no horizon, no stars, no sense of orientation, just a thundering blackness. The swell was coming from behind, and each foaming crest shoved the bow down and pushed their stern sideways in a sickening corkscrew motion, Amy fighting the wheel to stay the course. The chartplotter showed them as a tiny black arrow on a sea of white, moving away from shore until their lonely speck was the only thing on the screen. Gideon tried to adjust the gain on the radar as Amy had previously showed him, but there was only so much he could do in a sea like this.
About one o’clock, a strange sound came from below: a kind of stuttering vibration that shivered the hull.
“Damn,” said Amy, looking at the dials. The boat started to slew sideways and she fought with the wheel, throttling one engine down and the other up.
More stuttering, and the boat slewed again. Amy worked the controls, muttering under her breath, and then the shuddering stopped.
“Port engine’s out,” she said. “I’ve got to go below. Take the wheel.”
“Me? I don’t know what I’m doing!”
“Listen to me: don’t let the boat go broadside. Every wave will try to push your stern around — you’ve got to turn the wheel the opposite way — push it back. But don’t overcorrect, either.”
She pointed to the dual throttles. “You only have one engine — starboard, the right throttle. Try to maintain twenty-one hundred rpm. You might need to throttle up or down depending on whether you’re climbing and descending a wave. Got it?”
“Not really—”
She went below. Gideon grasped the wheel, peering into the darkness. He couldn’t even see the waves in front of the bow. But there was a growling sound behind him, and the stern began to rise with the hiss of breaking water. His hands felt frozen on the wheel. The bow was pushed down, down, the nose burying itself in the water. And then the stern was shoved sideways — violently.
“Fuck!” He turned the wheel against the movement, goosing the throttle; the boat began to straighten out, and then abruptly swung the other way, the bow rearing up as the stern sank into the trough. Fighting the wheel to true it up, he could hear things crashing in the galley. He turned the other way, fighting his own overcorrection, easing off the throttle.
That was only the first wave. Now the terrifying process began again.
Even worse, he was about to be sick. Fumbling with the side window latch, he managed to get it open with one hand, the rain lashing in, trying to keep his other hand firm on the wheel. He stuck his head out the window and retched unhappily. He was hardly done heaving when the next crest shoved the boat sideways again, the water sweeping over the stern and jamming the bow down. He pulled the wheel around; the boat skidded, too much yet again, and he quickly swung it back the other way, the boat weaving drunkenly through the combers.
He heard a muffled yell from Amy, below.
The next wave he handled a little better, pausing to puke again between the swells. On the chartplotter he could now make out their destination, ten nautical miles distant, creeping toward them. This was crazy. They should have stayed in the bay, waited for the storm to blow over.
And now something else was happening. He could hear a hesitation in the rumble of the remaining engine — a kind of stuttering sound. The needle of its rpm gauge began to chatter and drop. He throttled up but that only made it worse, the engine faltering. He quickly throttled back down and it seemed to stabilize. But the rpms had subsided to fifteen hundred — and he could feel the power of the sea taking over as the boat’s forward motion faltered.
The next wave came harder, bashing the stern around and tilting the boat viciously. He threw the wheel to the left, and the boat came around — sluggishly. The next wave hammered them again, pushing the vessel farther around, almost broadside.
The engine coughed, rumbled, coughed again.
“Amy!” he cried. “What’s going on!” But the roar of the wind and sea snatched the words away.
And then the engine quit totally. There was a sudden loss of vibration, a vanishing of the low-frequency throb — leaving only the roar of the sea and wind.