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I could get used to this,” Sam said, staring into the fire.
“I’ll second that,” Remi replied.
They’d decided to accept their host’s invitation to spend the night at the hut. As the sun dipped toward the horizon Sam strolled the beach and gathered burnable driftwood while Remi used their host’s collapsible bamboo fishing rod to snag a trio of snapper from the surf. By the time night fell they were lying against a log before a crackling campfire, their stomachs full of braised and sea-salted fish. The night was clear and black, with diamond-speck stars filling the sky. Aside from the swoosh-hiss of the surf and the occasional rustling of palm fronds, all was quiet.
Their host hadn’t been joking about the wine cellar, which, though barely larger than a closet, sported two dozen bottles. They’d chosen a Jordan Chardonnay to complement Remi’s catch.
They sat and sipped and watched the stars until finally Remi said, “You think they’ll find us?”
“Who, Arkhipov and Kholkov? Not likely.”
For the airline tickets, the hotel, and the rental car they’d used a credit card attached to a twice-removed Fargo Foundation expense account. While Sam had no doubt Bondaruk’s hatchet men had the resources to eventually unravel the financial trail, it wouldn’t happen, he hoped, before they were gone.
“Unless,” he added, “they already have a lead that points them here.”
“There’s a cheery notion. Sam, I’ve been thinking about Ted. That Russian—Arkhipov—he was going to kill him, wasn’t he?”
“I suspect so.”
“Over wine. What kind of man would do that? If Rube’s right, Bondaruk’s filthy rich. What he’d gain from selling the Lost Cellar would be pocket change. Why is he
willing to kill for it?”
“Remi, for him murder comes naturally. It’s not a last resort; it’s a ready option.”
“I suppose.”
“But you’re not convinced.”
“It just doesn’t add up. Is Bondaruk a wine collector? A Napo leonophile, maybe?”
“I don’t know. We’ll check.”
She shook her head, frustrated. After a few moments of silence, she asked, “So where do we start?”
“We have to make some assumptions,” Sam replied. “First, that Selma’s right about the Goat’s Head being a landmark; and second, that Boehm and his team would have chosen the most uninhabited part of the island to set up shop. This coastline certainly fits the bill. At first light, we pile our gear into the dinghy—”
“Not the plane?”
“Don’t think so. Boehm’s vantage point would have been from the surface. From the air a goat’s head could look like a duck’s foot, or a donkey’s ear, or nothing at all.”
“Good point. Erosion’s going to be a problem. Sixty years of weather could change a lot.”
“True.”
The Bahamian Archipelago was a spelunking and cave-diving paradise, Sam knew, and there were four general types of cave systems: blue holes, which came in both the open ocean and inshore variety and were essentially great tubes plunging hundreds of feet into the ocean or an island’s rock strata; fracture-guided caves, which followed the natural fissures in the bedrock; solutional caves, which formed over time by rainwater mixing with minerals in the soil to dissolve the underlying limestone or calcium carbonate bedrock; and finally, garden-variety sea caves, formed along cliffs by thousands of years of pounding surf. While these systems rarely went any deeper than a hundred feet, they were also usually spacious and offered sheltered underwater entrances—precisely what one might look for when scouting for a spot to hide a mini submarine.
“You missed one,” Remi said. “An assumption, I mean.”
“Which is?”
“That all this isn’t just a goose chase—or to be exact, a wild Molch hunt.”
They woke at dawn, had a breakfast of wild grape, fig, and pigeon plums, all of which they found growing wild within a hundred yards of the hut, then piled their gear into the inflatable dinghy and set out. The trolling motor wasn’t going to help them set any speed records, but it was fuel efficient and powerful enough to get through the reef line and to navigate the inshore tides. By the time the sun had lifted free of the horizon, they were tooling north along the coast, parallel to the reef line. The water was a crystalline turquoise, so clear they could see rainbow-hued fish skimming along the white sand bottom twenty feet below.
As Sam steered, staying as close to the shore as possible, which ranged from fifty to one hundred yards, Remi sat in the bow, alternately scanning the cliffs through her binoculars and taking shots with her digital SLR camera. Occasionally she would call for Sam to come about and make a repeat pass of a rock formation as she tilted her head and squinted her eyes and took more pictures before eventually shaking her head and giving him the okay to proceed.
The hours and the coastline slipped by until around noon they found themselves nearing the island’s headland and Junkanoo Rock; beyond that, on the northern shoreline, lay Port Boyd and the island’s more populous western areas. Sam turned the dinghy around and they headed south.
