RELIQUARY
Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Lincoln Child dedicates this book to his daughter,
Veronica
Douglas Preston dedicates this book to
James Mortimer Gibbons, Jr., M.D.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the following people for helping, in myriad ways, this book see the light of day: Bob Gleason, Matthew Snyder, Denis Kelly, Stephen de las Heras, Jim Cush, Linda Quinten, Tom Espensheid, Dan Rabinowitz, Caleb Rabinowitz, Karen Lovell, Mark Gallagher, Bob Wincott, Lee Suckno, and Georgette Piligian.
Special thanks to Tom Doherty and Harvey Klinger, without whose guidance and diligent effort
Thanks also to everyone on the Tor/Forge sales force for all their hard work and dedication.
We would also like to acknowledge all those readers who have supported us, whether it be by calling during radio or television interviews, speaking with us at book signings, sending mail both conventional and electronic, or simply by reading and enjoying our books. Your enthusiasm for
To all of you—and to those of you who should have been mentioned, but were not—our deepest thanks.
We listen to the unspoken, we gaze upon the unseen.
—Kakuzo Okakura,
PART ONE
OLD BONES
REL-I-QUARY
SNOW TESTED HIS regulator, checked both air valves, ran his hands along the slick neoprene of the suit. Everything was in order, just as it had been when he last checked it, sixty seconds before.
“Another five minutes,” the Dive Sergeant said, cutting the launch to half speed.
“Great,” came the sarcastic voice of Fernandez over the sound of the big diesel. “Just great.”
Nobody else spoke. Already, Snow had noticed that small talk seemed to die away when the team neared a site.
He looked back over the stern, watching the froth of the Harlem River spread out behind the propeller in a brown wedge. The river was wide here, rolling sluggishly under the hot gray haze of the August morning. He turned his gaze toward the shore, grimacing slightly as the rubber cowl pulled at the skin of his neck. Towering apartment buildings with broken windows. Ghostly shells of warehouses and factories. An abandoned playground. No, not quite abandoned: one child, swinging from a rusty frame.
“Hey, Divemaster,” Fernandez’s voice called to him. “Be sure you got your training diapers on.”
Snow tugged at the ends of his gloves and continued looking toward the shore.
“Last time we let a virgin out on a dive like this,” Fernandez continued, “he shit his suit. Christ, what a mess. We made him sit on the transom all the way back to base. And that was off Liberty Island, too. A frigging Cakewalk compared to the Cloaca.”
“Fernandez, shut up,” the Sergeant said mildly.
Snow continued to gaze over the stern. When he’d come to Scuba from regular NYPD, he had made one big mistake: mentioning that he’d once worked a Sea of Cortez dive boat. Too late, he’d learned that several of the Scuba team had at one time been commercial divers laying cable, maintaining pipelines, working oil platforms. To them, divemasters like him were pampered, underskilled wimps who liked clear water and clean sand. Fernandez, in particular, wouldn’t let him forget.
The boat leaned heavily to starboard as the Sergeant angled in closer to shore. He cut the power even further as they approached a thick cluster of riverfront projects. Suddenly, a small, brick-lined tunnel came into view, breaking the monotony of the gray concrete facades. The Sergeant nosed the boat through the tunnel and out into the half-light beyond. Snow became aware of an indescribable smell wafting up from the disturbed waters. Tears sprang involuntarily to his eyes, and he stifled a cough. In the bow, Fernandez looked back, sniggering. Beneath Fernandez’s open suit, Snow could see a T-shirt with the Police Scuba team’s unofficial motto: We dive in shit and look for dead things. Only this time it wasn’t a dead thing, but a massive wrapped brick of heroin, thrown off the
