Читать книгу The Eden Legacy - Will Adams - Страница 8

The tiger shark reappeared while Knox and the rest of his dive-team were at three metres, finishing their decompression. It circled several times, looking unnervingly interested, but then the inflatable arrived to pick them up, and the noise and churn of its outboard seemed to deter it, for it turned and swam away.

The Maritsa was chugging slowly towards them as they surfaced. It usually stayed well clear of the wrecksite, partly from respect for the nearby reefs, made doubly dangerous by the freak waves that sometimes came out of nowhere along this coast, but mostly to make it hard for anyone watching to mark the site of the wreck with a notional X. But the stern crane was the easiest way to recover artefacts the size of the anchor, which meant positioning directly above it.

As an archaeologist, Knox was accustomed to taking plenty of time examining artefacts in their context before recovering them; but that wasn’t possible here. They only had the Maritsa for six weeks, and once they were done they couldn’t lock this site up as they could on land, put a fence around it and hire security guards until the following year. It would be open season for any unscrupulous treasure hunter with some scuba gear or even an industrial dredge, so they needed to recover what they could, while they could.

They climbed the starboard gangway, stripped off on the stern deck, hosed themselves down with fresh water. A door banged open on the strengthening wind, and Ricky Cheung emerged from the conference room, puffing at one of his evil roll-ups. Ricky was the head of this salvage operation, an overweight Chinese American in his mid-fifties with perpetually tired eyes, as though he’d just woken. He waited a moment for a fair-haired woman in outsized sunglasses and a baseball cap to follow him outside, with Maddow the Shadow, his personal cameraman, bringing up the rear. Ricky spotted Knox and waved cheerfully, then led his small party over. ‘The hero of the hour,’ he beamed. ‘Great job down there.’

‘Thanks,’ said Knox.

Ricky nodded, turned to the fair-haired woman. ‘This is the one I was telling you about, Lucia,’ he said. ‘Matthew Richardson. Though everyone calls him Danny for some reason.’ He turned to Knox with a frown. ‘Why is that, actually?’

‘My father was Matthew too,’ said Knox, with practised ease. ‘Calling me Daniel saved confusion.’ In truth, he’d been such a mess for the first few months after Athens, especially from Mikhail Nergadze’s brutal murder of his fiancée Gaille, that he’d often not responded when people called him by his new name. At work one time, Miles—one of the few people who knew the truth about his past—had grown so exasperated by this that he’d yelled out his real name instead, provoking the obvious questions from his new colleagues, forcing him to come up with an explanation on the hoof. His handlers at MI5 had been admirably understanding about it, retrospectively tweaking his new identity to make Daniel his middle name; and he’d been Daniel ever since, except in interviews and other formal contexts.

‘Must have been one hell of a thrill,’ said Ricky. ‘Finding that anchor, I mean.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Knox.

‘Most archaeologists go their whole career without ever making a find like that.’

‘Quite.’

Ricky’s expression clouded briefly, as though he suspected Knox was making fun of him; but he quickly brightened again. ‘Lucia is here to write an article about me,’ he said.

‘About the salvage, actually.’ She removed her sunglasses, showing off striking blue eyes. She was in her mid-forties, at a guess, with an attractive, open face and the kind of pale freckled skin that needed protection from the Madagascan sun.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Knox.

‘I’ll leave you two together, if I may,’ said Ricky. ‘All those questions you had about history and archaeology, Danny Boy’s your man.’ He nodded cordially to them both, then walked briskly over to the stern crane, where the hoisting of the anchor was just getting underway, and barked out redundant orders for Maddow the Shadow to capture for posterity.

‘What a wretch!’ scowled Lucia. ‘That’s your triumph he’s stealing.’

‘He’s been working towards this for thirty years,’ said Knox. ‘I’ve been here less than a week.’

‘I’ve never met a man who talked about himself so much,’ she said. ‘I thought he must be a flamenco singer. You know: aye, aye, aye, aye, aye.’

Knox smiled politely. He knew better than to give a journalist easy copy about dissension in the ranks. ‘You have some questions for me?’ he suggested.

‘Yes.’ She gave him a warm smile, calibrated to win his sympathy. ‘I’m a travel writer really, you see. It’s how I pay for my holidays. I come to a place like this for a month with lots of ideas for possible features, but I’m never quite sure which will pan out and which won’t.’

‘I understand.’

‘I was supposed to be heading down to the Eden Nature Reserve today.’

‘The Kirkpatricks’ place?’

‘You know them?’

Knox gave a noncommittal shrug. ‘They’re pretty wellknown along this coast.’

‘They were supposed to have left a message letting me know when would be a good time to visit. But there was nothing at my hotel, and so I wanted to bag another story, just in case. My concierge suggested I come out here, and even arranged it for me, which was terrific of him; but of course I never had the chance to do any background reading, and your boss is a hard man to interrupt once he gets going. All that stuff about China and the treasure fleets—honestly, I had no idea what he was talking about half the time.’

Knox nodded. Ricky was notorious for giving lectures rather than interviews. ‘So you’d like a little background?’

‘That would be wonderful. Yes.’

‘Okay,’ said Knox. ‘Then let’s head on back to thirteenth-century China.’