The Last Templar - Страница 62

Ultimately, though, she knew it was pointless to try and justify it. It was something she felt inexplicably compelled to do.

One concern she couldn't smother was about Reilly. She thought about him a lot. She wondered how he was and where he was. She thought about the way she had abandoned him and run off like a thief in the night and found it hard to rationalize. It had been wrong, horribly wrong, and she knew it. She had endangered his life. She'd left him out there, in the middle of nowhere—and with a sniper on the loose. How could she have done something so irresponsible? She wanted to know he was all right; she wanted to apologize to him, to try to explain why she'd done it, and it pained her to think that this was one blow for which she would never be able to make amends, at least not as far as he was concerned. But she also knew that Vance had been right when he had said that Reilly would hand their discovery over to people who would bury it forever—and that was something she couldn't live with. Either way, she realized, their relationship had been doomed—ironically, by the very thing that had brought them together.

Presently, with a six-foot swell rolling lazily under it, the Savarona turned to begin yet another run down the premapped grid. Tess's gaze drifted away from the cables and up to the horizon, where wisps of dark clouds were intruding on an otherwise clear sky. She felt a tightness in her chest.

Something else had been nagging at her ever since the night she had driven off with Vance. It was an unsettling feeling that was always there, clawing away at her from the inside, never letting go, and, with the completion of each trawling run of the Savanna, it got harder and harder to ignore: was she doing the right thing? Had she thought things through enough? Were certain secrets better left buried? Was pursuing the truth in this case a wise and noble quest, or was she helping unleash a terrible calamity on an unsuspecting world?

Her doubts were cut short by the appearance of Vance's tall figure. He stepped out from the wheelhouse and joined her at the railing. He seemed annoyed.

"Nothing yet?" she asked.

He shook his head. "After this run, we'll have to clear out of here for the day." He stared out, sucking in a chestful of ocean air. "I'm not worried, though. Three more days and we'll have covered the entire search area." He turned to face her and smiled. "We'll find it. It's out there, somewhere. It's just playing hard to get, that's all."

His gaze was distracted by a faint buzzing in the distance. His eyes narrowed as he scanned the horizon, his brow furrowing when he spotted the source of the noise. Tess followed his eye line and saw it too: a

tiny dot, a helicopter, skimming the surface of the sea several miles away, on a seemingly parallel heading. Their eyes remained locked on it, tracking it as it followed a straight course before banking away. Within seconds, it was out of sight.

"That's for us, isn't it?" Tess asked. "They're looking for us."

"They can't do much out here," Vance said, shrugging. "We're in international waters. Then again, they haven't exactly been playing by die rules, have they?" He glanced up at the bridge, where an engineer was entering the control room. "You know what's funny?"

"I can't imagine," she said dryly.

"The crew. There's seven of them, and two of us, which makes nine," he mused. "Nine. Just like Hughes de Payens and his gang. Poetic, don't you think?"

Tess looked away, failing to find anything even remotely poetic in what they were doing there. "I wonder if they ever had the same doubts."

Vance arched an eyebrow as he cocked his head and scrutinized her. "You're not having second thoughts, are you?"

"Aren't you?" She was aware of the tremor in her voice and could see that Vance picked up on it.

"What we're doing out here, what we might find . . . doesn't it worry you in the least?"

"Worry?"

"You know what I mean. Haven't you stopped to think about the shock, the chaos this could bring?"

Vance scoffed dismissively. "Man is a pitiful creature, Tess. Always desperate to find something or someone to worship, and not just by himself, no—it has to be worshiped by everybody, everywhere, at any cost. It's been the bane of man's existence since the dawn of time . . . Worried about it? I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to liberating millions of people from an oppressive lie.

What we're doing is a natural step forward in man's spiritual evolution. It'll be the beginning of a new age."

"You talk about it as though it's going to be greeted with parades and fireworks, but it's the exact opposite, you know that. It's happened before. From the Sassanids to die Incas, history's riddled with civilizations that just collapsed after their gods were discredited."

Vance was unmoved. "They were civilizations built on lies, on shifting sands—just like ours. But you worry too much. Times have changed. The world today is a bit more sophisticated than that."

"They were the most advanced civilizations of their time."

"Give those poor souls out there some credit, Tess. I'm not saying it won't be painless, but . . . they can handle it."

"What if they can't?"

He held his palms out in a mock helpless gesture, but there was nothing helpless about his tone. He was dead serious. "So be it."

Tess's eyes stayed locked on his for a moment before she turned away. She stared out toward the horizon. Wisps of gray clouds seemed to be materializing out of nowhere, and, in the distance, whitecaps were now flecking an otherwise uniformly dark sea.

Vance leaned against the railing next to her. "I've thought about this a lot, Tess, and, on balance, I have no doubt that we're doing the right thing. Deep down, you know I'm right."

She didn't doubt he'd thought about it a lot. She knew he'd been consumed by it both academically and personally, but he'd always considered it from a distorted point of view, through a lens that was shattered by the tragic deaths of his loved ones. But had he thought deeply enough about how something like this would affect virtually every living soul on the planet? How it would put into question not just the Christian faith, but the notion of faith itself? How it would be seized upon by the enemies of the Church, how it would polarize people, and how millions of true believers would quite possibly lose the spiritual core that sustained their lives?

"They'll fight it, you know," she declared, surprised by a hint of hope in her voice. "They'll bring experts out of the woodwork to discredit it, they'll use everything they can think of to prove that it's just a hoax, and given your history ..." She suddenly felt uncomfortable elaborating that point.

He nodded. "I know," he calmly agreed. "Which is why I'd much prefer if you presented it to the world."

Tess felt the blood drain from her face. She stared at him, taken aback by his suggestion. "Me . . . ?"

"Of course. After all, it's as much your discovery as it is mine, and, as you said, given that my recent behavior hasn't been exactly—" he paused, searching for the most appropriate term "—praiseworthy ..."

Before she could formulate an answer, she heard the big ship's engines wind down and felt it suddenly slow to a crawl before turning into the breeze. She spotted Rassoulis emerging from the bridge and, in the swirling fog of her mind, she heard him calling out to diem. Vance kept his eyes locked on her for a moment before turning to the captain, who was gesturing excitedly for them to join him and yelling what she thought sounded like, "We've got something."

Chapter 73

Standing quietly at the rear of the bridge, Reilly watched as De Angelis and the Karadeniz's skipper, a stocky man by the name of Karakas who had dense black hair and a bushy mustache, leaned over the patrol boat's radar display and selected their next target.

There was no shortage of them. The dark screen was lit up with dozens of green blips. Some of them had small, digital alphanumeric codes tagged on, which indicated a ship with a modern transponder. Those were easier to identify and rule out, using Coast Guard and shipping databases, but they were few and far between. Overwhelmingly, the contacts on the screen were just anonymous blips coming from the hundreds of fishing boats and sailing craft that crowded this very popular strip of coastline. Figuring out which one of them was carrying Vance and Tess, Reilly knew, wouldn't be easy.

This was his sixth day at sea, which, as far as Reilly was concerned, was already plenty. It had become quickly obvious to him that he wasn't a sea dog, not by a long shot, but at least the sea had been reasonably well behaved since they'd started their search and, mercifully, the nights were spent on dry land. Each day, they would sail out of Marmaris at the break of dawn and work their way up and down the coastline from the Gulf of

Hisaronu to the area south of the Twelve Islands. The Karadeniz, a SAR-33 class patrol boat, gleaming white with a wide, slanted red stripe on its hull next to the words Sahil Gvenlik in bold, unmissable letters— the Turkish Coast Guard's official name—was lightning quick and reasonably comfortable and was able to cover a surprisingly large patch of sea over the course of a day. Other boats based at Fethiye and Antalya were scouring the waters further east. Agusta A-109 helicopters were also involved, performing visual sweeps at low altitude and alerting the speedboats to promising sightings.