Riptide

'Yeah. Scylla is the system on board the ship. Charybdis is the one on the island.'

'Network testing's finished,' Neidelman explained. 'Once the island installation is complete, all we have to do is dump the programming to Charybdis. Everything is tested here first, then downloaded to the island.' He glanced at his watch. 'I've got some odds and ends to attend to. Kerry, I know Dr. Hatch would like to hear more about your and Dr. St. John's work on the Macallan codes. Malin, I'll see you topside.' Neidelman left the stateroom, closing the door behind him.

Wopner returned to his manic typing, and for a minute Hatch wondered if the youth planned to ignore him completely. Then, without looking away from the terminal, Wopner picked up a sneaker and hurled it against the far wall. This was followed by a heavy paperback book entitled Coding Network Subroutines in C+ +.

'Hey, Chris!' Wopner yelled. 'Time for the dog and pony show!'

Hatch realized that Wopner must have been aiming at a small door set in the far wall of the stateroom. 'Allow me,' he said, stepping toward the door. 'Your aim's not so good.'

Opening the door, Hatch saw another stateroom, identical in size but completely different in all other ways. It was well lit, clean, and spare. The Englishman, Christopher St. John, sat at a wooden table in the center of the room, pecking slowly away at a Royal typewriter.

'Hello,' Hatch said. 'Captain Neidelman volunteered your services for a few minutes.'

St. John stood and picked up a few old volumes from the desk, a fussy expression creasing his smooth, buttery face. 'A pleasure to have you with us, Dr. Hatch,' he said, shaking his hand, not looking at all pleased with the interruption.

'Call me Malin,' said Hatch.

St. John bowed slightly as he followed Hatch back into Wopner's stateroom.

'Pull up a seat, Malin,' Wopner said. 'I'll explain the real work I've been doing, and Chris can tell you about all those dusty tomes he's been lifting and dropping in the back room. We work together. Right, old chum?'

St. John compressed his lips. Even out here on the water, Hatch sensed a certain air of dust and cobwebs about the historian. He belongs in an antiquarian bookshop, not on a treasure hunt, he thought.

Kicking aside the detritus, Hatch pulled a chair up next to Wopner, who pointed to one of the nearby screens, currently blank. A few rapidly typed commands, and a digitized picture of Macallan's treatise and its cryptic marginalia appeared on the screen.

'Herr Neidelman feels that the second half of the journal contains vital information about the treasure,' said Wopner. 'So we're taking a two-track approach to break the code. I do the computers. Chris here does the history.'

'The Captain mentioned a figure of two billion dollars,' Hatch said. 'How did he arrive at that?'

'Well now,' said St. John, clearing his throat as if preparing for a lecture. 'Like most pirates, Ockham's fleet was a ragtag collection of various ships he'd captured: a couple of galleons, a few brigantines, a fast sloop, and, I believe, a large East Indiaman. Nine ships in all. We know they were so heavily laden they were dangerously unmaneuverable. You simply add up their cargo capacities, and combine that with the manifests of ships Ockham looted. We know, for example, that Ockham took fourteen tons of gold from the Spanish Plate Fleet alone, and ten times that in silver. From other ships he looted cargoes of lapis, pearls, amber, diamonds, rubies, carnelian, ambergris, jade, ivory, and lignum vitae. Not to mention ecclesiastical treasures, taken from towns along the Spanish Main.' He unconsciously adjusted his bow tie, face shining with pleasure at the recital.

'Excuse me, but did you say fourteen tons of gold?' Hatch asked, dumfounded.

'Absolutely,' said St. John.

'Fort Knox afloat,' said Wopner, licking his lips.

'And then there's St. Michael's Sword,' St. John added. 'An artifact of inestimable value by itself. We're dealing here with the greatest pirate treasure ever assembled. Ockham was brilliant and gifted, an educated man, which made him all the more dangerous.' He pulled a thin plastic folder from a shelf and handed it to Hatch. 'Here's a biographical extract one of our researchers prepared. I think you'll find that, for once, the legends don't exaggerate. His reputation was so terrible that all he had to do was sail his flagship into harbor, hoist the Jolly Roger, and fire a broadside, and everyone from the citizens to the priest came rushing down with their valuables.'

'And the virgins?' Wopner cried, feigning wide-eyed interest. 'What happened to them?'

St. John paused, his eyes half closed. 'Kerry, do you mind?'

'No, really,' said Kerry, all impish innocence. 'I want to know.'

'You know very well what happened to the virgins,' St. John snapped, and turned back to Hatch. 'Ockham had a following of two thousand men on his nine ships. He needed large crews for boarding and firing the great guns. Those men were usually given twenty-four hours, er, leave, in the unfortunate town. The results were quite hideous.'

'It wasn't only the ships that had twelve-inchers, if you know what I mean,' Wopner leered.

'You see what I have to endure,' murmured St. John to Hatch.

'Terribly, terribly sorry about that, old chap,' Wopner replied in a travesty of an English accent. 'Some people have no sense of humor,' he told Hatch.

'Ockham's success,' St. John continued briskly, 'became a liability. He didn't know how to bury such a large treasure. This wasn't a few hundredweight in gold coin that could be slipped quietly under a rock. That's where Macallan came in. And, indirectly, that's where we come in. Because Macallan kept his secret diary in code.'

He patted the books under his arm. 'These are texts on cryptology,' he said. 'This one is Polygraphiae, by Johannes Trithemius, published in the late fifteen hundreds. It was the Western world's first treatise on codebreaking. And this one is Porta's De Furtivus Literarum Notis, a text all Elizabethan spies knew practically by heart. I've got half a dozen others, covering the state