Rembrandt's Ghost (32 page)

“Zwijn,”
said Pieter.

Aragas let out a little hoot of delight. “You call me a pig? I’ll have you know I’m a devout Muslim. I pray six times a day.”

“Your only god is your greed,” said Khan, standing at Pieter’s side.

“As your only god is war.”

“Revolution,” corrected Khan.

“Rhetoric,” replied Aragas, sneering as he turned away. He went back to Finn and smiled widely. “Tell your uncle or whoever he is to tell me where the treasure is or the four men you see behind me will kill all your friends and then rape you.”

“Touch her and you die,” said Pieter. His voice was frosted with authority.

Aragas reached into his suit jacket and took a small snub-nosed revolver out of his clamshell shoulder harness. “I have helicopters. I have men with machine guns. I have people in London who do my bidding. In Holland too. You are no match for me, I’m afraid, Mr. Boegart.”

“It was your people,” said Finn, suddenly understanding. “Outside the Courtauld.”

“You blew up my boat!” Billy said.

“Of course,” said Aragas. “I had Khan’s contacts abroad under surveillance. They led me to you. I thought you would lead me to your wandering uncle here and to the treasure I’ve been searching for all these years. My gold.”

“You’re insane,” said Hanson grimly.

“Who cares?” Aragas replied. “I’m the one who is about to blow off the top of Miss Ryan’s charming little head unless her relative speaks up.” He lifted the barrel of the pistol and pulled back the hammer. He half turned his head and barked a terse order to the men ten feet behind him. “If anyone interferes, kill them.”

With unbelievable speed, Khan swept the heavy automatic out from under his shirt. The automatic Finn had been carrying when he pulled her from the colony of jellyfish. His swift hand squeezed the trigger once and the right lens of Aragas’s sunglasses shattered into sun-twinkled powder. The front of the policeman’s suit turned pink in the haze of blood that erupted from the rotund man’s head. The Borsalino flew off and huffed into the bright blue sky.

Pieter Boegart yelled loudly. “Down! Everyone, down!”

One of the four soldiers standing behind Aragas’s slumping corpse managed to get out his Glock and fire a stream of bullets that stitched across Khan’s chest, killing him instantly, but that was all. Everyone else did as Pieter Boegart ordered and dropped to the floor of the clearing.

The
gonne
, a primitive hand-cannon, was being used by Chinese infantry as early as A.D. 1300 and perhaps even earlier. Together with technological developments, like the invention of the repeating crossbow, it changed the face of modern warfare forever.

The first
gonnes
used bamboo tubes but they were quickly replaced with iron and bronze barrels roughly eighteen inches long and fitted with heavy wooden stocks that could be braced in the fork of a tree or some other stable object, including specially made rest cradles.

Filled with black powder, tamped and wadded, the
gonne
fired an iron ball weighing between six and sixteen ounces, fired by applying a slow match to a touchhole at the rear of the barrel. The
gonne
was generally accurate over a range of a hundred meters or slightly more than three hundred feet. Roughly half the distance from the screening trees at the edge of the clearing.

Six hundred years before the four elite soldiers from the Singapore STAR unit set foot on the island, such weapons were capable of blowing a hole the size of a human fist through polished steel armor and chain mail. The thin Kevlar vests worn by the four men offered absolutely no protection at all as the twenty men fired off their
gonnes
in a grisly volleying progression that rattled across the clearing and sent up huge clouds of reeking yellow smoke.

Within the cloud of smoke and flying iron, the four men were eviscerated, flayed, and turned inside out, transformed from living human beings to scattered bloody offal on the ground in a matter of seconds. More than half the round shot tore into the soldiers, but the
gonne
, not being the most accurate of weapons, totally missed what was left of the soldiers and several scattered pounds of red-hot metal skipped through the smoke and struck the waiting helicopter.

The canopy disintegrated, along with the pilot, and after a split second, a thousand pounds of high-octane jet fuel exploded, vaporizing what was left of the machine in a white-hot instant. The earsplitting explosion carried off across the huge echo chamber of the caldera, the aircraft’s dying moments repeating themselves again and again in a fading roar.

The smoke was carried away, and coughing in the sulfurous haze, the survivors climbed to their feet as the score of hidden soldiers came out of the surrounding forest to stand by their leader. The Island of Storms had claimed one more wreck and a half dozen new victims.

“Dear God,” said Briney Hanson, looking at the spot where the four men had been. There was nothing but a huge red smear and behind it the scorched pyre of the burning helicopter’s shattered remains.

“It’s time for you to go,” said Boegart, helping Finn rise to her feet.

She stared down at the torn body of Khan, the automatic still in his dead hand. “What about him?” she said. “He saved my life.”

“We’ll take care of him,” said the red-bearded man gently. “Come with me.”

With the ancient, silent soldiers flanking them in two lines the little group of survivors went back up the path and slipped into the narrow mouth of the cave. Looking straight ahead, Pieter led them to the blowhole and down the long sloping vent tunnel to the sea.

As promised the boat was there, an old-fashioned clinker-built design with eight oars, two sails, and a mast that was easily raised into place. It waited for them on the rising tide that filled a broad low-ceilinged cave that looked out to the open sea, moored to a natural stone bollard that rose out of a long, narrow ledge. There was water for ten days in tall jars and food for twice that long.

“Which one of us takes the helm?” Billy asked Briney Hanson.

“We’ll take turns,” answered the older man, smiling.

“You remember my directions?” Pieter said.

Billy nodded. “Small bear behind, Sirius and the big dog ahead.”

“Second star to the right and straight on till morning,” said Finn. She leaned over and kissed the red-bearded man on the cheek.

As the tide rose higher, the wind began to sigh and Finn felt the salt breeze stinging her eyes. Old Willem’s music. “There wasn’t enough time,” she said to him as the others clambered into the longboat.

“There never is, child. That’s just the way of the world, I’m afraid.”

“It isn’t fair,” she said, the tears coming freely.

“Life isn’t fair. But it’s precious, so hold on to it as long as you can, right to the end of the adventure.” He kissed her softly, then smiled. “Tell my nephew he was right about the bird.” He touched her cheek. “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” she answered, but he was already gone.

It was raining in Amsterdam—a hard rain, tapping with bony, insistent fingers at windows and roofs and doors. An unhappy downpour of the kind that might lead some people to spend the afternoon alone in a bar, thinking dangerous thoughts.

Finn and Billy stood in Willem Van Boegart’s cabinet of curiosities, the room that he’d asked the great Dutch master Rembrandt to disguise for him when he painted the merchant’s portrait. The portrait that in the end had sent them halfway round the world.

True to Pieter’s word, four days of sailing with Sirius over the bow had brought them to the northern coast of Sandakan, and from there, after enduring a few days of notoriety in the news, that had been the end of it. Hanson, Tomi, and Run-Run McSeveney were beached in Jakarta, looking for another ship with little hope of finding one, while Finn and Billy had returned to Amsterdam to wrap up Pieter Boegart’s affairs and sell the
Herengracht
house to recoup the losses Billy had suffered when his sailboat was blown up. Derlagen was on his way to the house with documents for them to sign. Neither Finn nor Billy had said a word about the island or the vast treasure hidden there.

Billy wandered around the little room, idly picking up items and putting them down again. He hefted a gigantic leathery egg that supposedly belonged to some extinct bird, then put it down again. Finn stood by the secret doorway into the room, watching her friend and thinking about the recent past.

“I had a fantasy, you know,” said Billy with a wistful note in his voice. “From the moment your friend at the Courtauld…” He searched his memory for the name.

“Professor Shneegarten,” prompted Finn.

“That’s the fellow!” Billy said. “Shneegarten!” He picked up the bell jar with the mummified head inside and peered through the glass. He put it back down on the display table and moved on.

“A fantasy,” Finn reminded him.

“That’s right,” said Billy, nodding. “Ever since your professor peeled back that dodgy canvas and revealed the real Rembrandt underneath, I had this fantasy that we’d find old Willem Van Boegart’sfortune, then go off and buy some wonderful salvage ship and sail the seven seas looking for buried doubloons and pieces of eight and high adventure. I even had a name. We’d call ourselves the Treasure Seekers and make television documentaries about our voyages. We’d have sponsors like your American race car drivers. A French wine company to give us a lifetime supply. Endorsements for hair gel and tooth powder and fast cars, that sort of thing. Buy a parrot and call it Captain Flint. Johnny Depp would go deep-sea fishing with us.”

“A little more treasure and a little less adventure,” laughed Finn. “I’d take the hair gel. Forget the parrot. They make too much mess.”

“It was such a lovely dream,” sighed Billy.

Finn’s gaze traveled around the room. She frowned. “He mentioned it twice,” she said finally.

“What?”

“On the island. You said it was like the Maltese Falcon, only real. And then just before we left he said, ‘Tell my nephew he was right about the bird.’ ”

“I don’t get it,” said Billy

“In
The Maltese Falcon
, everyone runs around looking for a bird they think is really a thinly disguised treasure, paint over solid gold or diamonds or something. They’re all willing to kill to get it, and in the end, it turns out to be a phony. The fat man starts hacking away at it with a pocketknife but it’s just lead.”

“Sidney Greenstreet. He plays the fat guy, Kaspar Gutman.”

“You said the treasure in the cave was like the Maltese Falcon, only real.”

“I still don’t see,” said Billy, looking at her quizzically. “You’re talking in circles.”

“Not circles,” said Finn, excitement rising in her voice. “Layers. Like ghosting the Rembrandt with a cheap phony…”

Billy stared. He looked around the room at the ornate, heavily plastered ceiling and the walls. Vines, birds, all sort of creatures, large and small. “A jungle,” he whispered.

“A treasure in the jungle.” Finn grinned. “He told us. He said we still had the
Herengracht
house, that the cabinet of curiosities should be more than enough for everyone.” Finn found a long midshipman’s dirk that might have been used by young Willem Van Boegart on his first voyage. She took the slender knife to the wall and dug down through the plaster. The powder spilled. She dug away at a large plaster gem, scraping deeply. Suddenly a deep ruby slash appeared against the white surface of the wall.

Working cautiously now she scraped carefully down revealing a bloodred gem the size of a robin’s egg. A fortune by itself, and there were a hundred, no, a thousand more. She dug the needle blade into a flat piece of the wall between ornaments and scraped away a six-inch square. It gleamed bright gold beneath the plaster covering.

“This was what Rembrandt hid,” said Finn, staring. “It’s the room itself! The whole room is the treasure!” She scraped harder with the dirk. The six-inch square became a foot.

Somewhere in the distance, a doorbell rang.

“That must be Derlagen,” said Finn.

“I’ll tell him to go away,” said Billy. “We’ve got some renovating to do.” He paused at the secret doorway. “I wonder what time it is in Jakarta.”