But more than that, she was smart, and Cole couldn’t wait to get her take on their code problem. She might see something they had missed. Another pair of eyes looking at things was just what they needed.

Theo began to clear the dishes off the table.

Riley lifted her plate. “Let me help you.”

“Not on this boat, lady,” Theo said as he took the plate from her hand. “You are our guest.”

Cole slid out of the dinette. “I’ll be right back. There’s something I want to show you.”

He entered his cabin and sat on the bunk. With the door ajar, he could still hear the clank of Theo stacking the dishes and the voices coming from the galley.

“Well, Miss Riley,” he heard Theo say, “it looks like you’ve had quite an effect on our Dr. Thatcher. Most of the time, he is so suspicious of people he won’t even talk to them.”

“Doctor?”

“Well, don’t ask him to write you a prescription, but he does have a Ph.D.”

Cole listened. The silence on the other side of the bulkhead stretched out for several beats. He wished he could see her face. He grabbed the box that held the journals and returned to the galley.

When he set the box on the table, she stared at it. Then she lifted her eyes and squinted as though trying to focus on his face. “Theo tells me you have a doctorate?”

“Yeah.”

“In what?”

“Maritime archeology.”

“From where?”

“Texas A&M.”

“I –” she started to say, stumbled and tried again. “I didn’t figure you for an academic.”

He shrugged. “I loved the learning part, but I can’t say as I’ve figured out the making a living part. Tried teaching at East Carolina University, but it seems the rest of the department thought I was a nut case. I hated meetings. Never went to their faculty parties or the get-togethers at the local pub. Weekends, I was always out diving or fishing. Did three years, long enough to know I’d never make tenure from that lot. Then Theo came along, and I quit for good. I’ve never regretted it.”

Theo turned from the sink, wiping his hands on a dish towel, and announced in a loud voice, “I feel like a walk.” When Riley wasn’t looking, he flashed an exaggerated wink in Cole’s direction and grabbed his backpack. “Riley, would you mind if I take your dinghy ashore? That way I can fetch our rubber ducky at the dock when I make the return trip. Dr. Thatcher here has a way of losing dinghies.”

“Sure, Theo. Take it.”

Cole asked his first mate to retrieve the shoes and clothes he had left hidden under a sea grape tree on the beach, as well. Once Theo had disappeared out of the galley, Cole shifted his position on the vinyl settee seat. He knew he should say something, but he wanted it to be the right something, and he was drawing a blank.

“So, is North Carolina home?” Riley asked, finally breaking the silence.

“No. I was raised by my mom in Fort Lauderdale. Like I said, my dad was British, but he and my mom broke it off when I was a baby. He moved back to England.”

“Did you know him?”

 “I only met him once.” He was conscious of his hands resting on the metal box in front of him, “He sent cards and letters from abroad, but when I was about twelve, he came to the States.”

“That’s tough on a kid — growing up without a dad.”

“So they say.” Cole shrugged. “I didn’t think I was deprived. Adults lived on the periphery of my world. My mom worked at the hospital all the time, so I didn’t see her much either. I just wanted to go surfing and fishing and diving. Can’t say I missed him until I actually met him.”

“Really? Why?”

“Well, when he showed up, I thought he was great! You know, the accent and all. He took me out to a fancy restaurant on the ocean and told stories about his travels through Europe, behind the Iron Curtain, tales of close calls with military police, secret codes, and smuggled packages.  He never admitted it, but I figured him for a real life James Bond.”

“Was he?”

“Not quite Bond, but I did learn later, after he died, that he had worked for MI-6 in the eighties. He was a courier and cryptanalyst. Must have been something he didn’t like about the business, though, because he spent the last twenty years of his life writing books and articles that ripped the international intelligence community — and he especially ragged on the Brits and their Official Secrets Act.”

“You seem to know him pretty well.”

Cole opened the box and pulled the journals. “You know, I never saw him again. But after that one night, we stayed in touch through the mail. No email. He was old fashioned, you know.  Bit of a Luddite. He sent me stuff — packages with books about codes and cyphers. After that, he included secret messages in all his letters. Taught me to decipher his letters and how to encrypt my own to send back.  All that stuff about secrets and spycraft was pretty cool to a twelve-year-old. When I got older, in high school and later in college, his letters became these rants about what was wrong with the world and well, I stopped writing back.”

“Why?”

“I thought he was crazy. My father had this world view that I found very disturbing at first — about how this small minority of super-powerful, wealthy people have been attempting to control western civilization for hundreds of years.”

“So that’s where you get it from.”

“It? What do you mean ‘get it from’?” Cole stopped and took a deep breath. He could feel his pulse pounding in his neck. He had to stop the knee-jerk defensive reaction this time.  “Riley, I realized I was wrong. He wasn’t crazy. He wrote about them in his books, too, and they killed him for it.”

She looked away then.  He was losing her. It sounded nuts when he said it out loud. “Listen, I know how that sounds, and I know that crazy people always insist they’re the sane ones. But these people, they’ve counted on that. They’ve gone by different names. Everything from the Illuminati to the Masons, but names don’t matter; they’re still all secret societies. These guys are from old money. They’ve infiltrated the CIA, NSA, NRO, DIA – the entire alphabet soup of intelligence agencies, including the secret ones people like you and me have never heard of. They own Homeland Security. Hell, they created it. These aren’t just some guys with a fancy handshake who meet at the lodge to drink beer. We don’t know what really happened at Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, the Kennedy assassination, or even on 9/11 – these guys have been controlling the flow of intelligence for decades and all for one end: to make sure our country gets into another very profitable war. My father showed me they have not gone away.” He took a deep breath; it had all poured out of him in such a rush, he hadn’t even paused to inhale.

She didn’t say anything. Seemed to be a habit of hers. She wouldn’t speak until she had thought about what she wanted to say. Any other time, he’d find that quality refreshing. But not today. The silence dragged out. Then she pushed back her chair, stood, and headed for the door.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Bourges des Saintes

March 26, 2008

10:15 p.m.

“Who the fuck does he think he is?” Spyder said when he jumped from the Fish n’ Chicks’ aft swim platform onto the town wharf. “It’s our boat and after we do all the work of upping the anchor and docking alongside, he sends us to town to fetch his shit.”

He watched as his brother reached for the stone pier. The mottled hand missed the steel cleat he’d been aiming for, and Spyder had to grab at the waistband of his brother’s pants to keep him from falling into the water. “Jesus H. Christ, Pinky. You’d think you never been on a boat.” He dragged his brother up onto the concrete surface of the commercial wharf.

“He wants some privacy,” Pinky said. He stood and brushed bits of gravel off his white pants.