Riptide

A smile spread over Neidelman's face. 'Excellent. Can I give you a dividend?'

Hatch handed over his glass. 'That wasn't the only opposing voice I heard in town,' he continued. 'I have an old friend, a teacher of natural history, who thinks we're going to fail.'

'And you?' Neidelman asked coolly, busy with the port, not looking at him.

'I wouldn't be in it if I thought we'd fail. But I'd be lying if I said today's setback didn't give me pause.'

'Malin,' Neidelman said almost gently as he returned the glass, 'I can't blame you for that. I confess to feeling a moment of something like despair when the pumps failed us. But there's not the slightest doubt in my mind that we'll succeed. I see now where we've gone wrong.'

'I suppose there are even more than five flood tunnels,' Hatch said. 'Or maybe some hydraulic trick was played on us.'

'Undoubtedly. But that's not what I mean. You see, we've been focusing all our attention on the Water Pit. But I've realized the Water Pit is not our adversary.'

Hatch raised his eyebrows inquiringly, and the Captain turned toward him, pipe clenched in one fist, eyes glittering brightly.

'It's not the Pit. It's the man. Macallan, the designer. He's been one step ahead of us all the way. He's anticipated our moves, and those who came before us.'

Placing his glass on a felt-topped table, he walked over to the wall and swung open a wood panel, revealing a small safe. He punched several buttons on the adjoining keypad, and the safe door swung open. He reached inside, removed something, then turned and laid it on the table in front of Hatch. It was a quarto volume, bound in leather: Macallan's book, On Sacred Structures. The captain opened it with great care, caressing it with long fingers. There in the margins, next to the printed blocks of text, appeared a neat little hand in a pale brown wash that looked almost like watercolor: line after line of monotonous characters, broken only by the occasional small, deft mechanical drawing of various joints, arches, braces, and cribbing.

Neidelman tapped the page. 'If the Pit is Macallan's armor, then this is the soft joint where we can slip in the knife. Very soon now, we'll have the second half of the code deciphered. And with it, the key to the treasure.'

'How can you be so sure this journal contains the secret to the Pit?' Hatch asked.

'Because nothing else makes sense. Why else would he have kept a secret journal, not only in code, but written in an invisible ink? Remember, Red Ned Ockham needed Macallan to create an impregnable fortress for his treasure. A fortress that would not only resist looters, but would physically endanger them by drowning, or crushing, or whatever. But you don't create a bomb without knowing how to disarm it first. So Macallan would have had to create a secret way for Ockham himself to remove his treasure when he chose: a hidden tunnel, perhaps, or a way to defuse the traps. It stands to reason Macallan would keep a record of it.' He leveled his gaze at his guest. 'But this journal holds more than just the key to the Pit. It gives us a window into the man's mind. And it is the man we must defeat.' He spoke in the same low, strangely forceful tone that Hatch remembered from earlier in the day.

Hatch bent over the book, inhaling the aroma of mildew, leather, dust, and dry rot. 'One thing surprises me,' he said. 'And that's the thought of an architect, kidnapped and forced to work for pirates on some godforsaken island, having the presence of mind to keep a secret journal.'

Neidelman nodded slowly. 'It's not the act of a fainthearted man. Perhaps he wanted to leave a record, for posterity, of his most ingenious structure. I suppose it's hard to say what motivated him, exactly. After all, the man was a bit of a cipher himself. There's a gap of three years in the historical record, following his leaving Cambridge, during which he seems to have disappeared. And his personal life as a whole remains a mystery. Take a look at this dedication.' He carefully turned to the title page of the book, then slid it toward Hatch:

With Gratefulle admiration

For shewing the Way

The Author respectfully dedicates this humble Work

To Eta Onis

'We've searched high and low, but haven't been able to determine the identity of this Eta Onis,' Neidelman went on. 'Was she Macallan's teacher? Confidante? Mistress?' He carefully closed the book. 'It's the same with the rest of his life.'

'I'm embarrassed to say that, until you came along, I'd never even heard of the man,' Hatch said.

'Most people haven't. But in his day he was a brilliant visionary, a true Renaissance man. He was born in 1657, the illegitimate but favored son of an earl. Like Milton, he claimed to have read every book then published in English, Latin, and Greek. He read law at Cambridge and was being groomed for a bishopric, but then apparently had some kind of secret conversion to Catholicism. He turned his attention to the arts, natural philosophy, and mathematics. And he was an extraordinary athlete, supposedly able to fling a coin so that it rang out against the vault of his largest cathedral.'

Neidelman stood up, returned to the safe, and placed the volume within it. 'And an interest in hydraulics seems to extend through all his work. In this book, he describes an ingenious aqueduct and siphon system he designed to supply water to Houndsbury Cathedral. He also sketched out a hydraulic system for locks on the Severn canal. It was never built—it seemed a crazy idea at the time—but Magnusen did some modeling and believes it would have worked.'

'Did Ockham seek him out deliberately?'

Neidelman smiled. 'Tempting to think so, isn't it? But highly doubtful. It was probably one of those fateful coincidences of history.'

Hatch nodded toward the safe. 'And how did you happen to come across that volume? Was that also a coincidence?'

Neidelman's smile widened. 'No, not exactly. When I first started looking into the Ragged Island treasure, I did some research into Ockham. You know that when his command ship was found floating derelict, all hands dead, it was towed into Plymouth and its contents sold at public auction. We managed to dig up the auctioneer's list at the London Public Records Office, and on it were the contents of a captain's chest full of books. Ockham was an educated man, and I assumed this must be his personal library. One volume, On Sacred Structures, caught my eye; it stood out among the maps, French pornography, and naval works that made up the rest of the library. It took three years, on and off, but we finally managed to track that volume down in a heap of rotting books in the undercroft of a half-ruined kirk in Glenfarkille, Scotland.'