Diggory bowed his head, feigning deference. He saw on the floor between himself and the table was an inlay of mosaic tiles depicting the infamous 322.

Out of the silence, their voices erupted. “Read it. Read it. Read it!” they shouted.

He took a step forward and looked down at the parchment on the table. Before his eyes could focus on the writing in the dim light, they began shouting again.

“He can’t. He can’t. He can’t!”

Then a short character dressed as a Devil ran into the room cackling like a deranged monkey. He danced around Priest beating him with the forked tail of his costume. At first, Diggory raised his arms to fend off the blows. The others were shouting and waving noisemakers, which sparked in the near darkness when they spun them round and round. The noise was just as painful as the whipping, but he lowered his arms and stood straight, his eyes focused on the man behind the table, the man in the robe. Uncle Toby.

The eyes staring out through the mask were so dark they looked black in the candlelight. The holes in the plastic were large enough he could see pouches of pinkish skin sagging beneath the eye sockets. While the noise swirled around them, their gazes remained locked, even when the older man’s right eye flashed white as the eyeball wandered off as though looking at someone on the far side of the room. The left eye continued to stare fixedly into Diggory’s eyes, questioning him, watching to see if he was worthy.

The robed man reached behind him, then raised a cup shaped like a human skull with the cranium sawed off. A dark red liquid sloshed onto the table.

He looked from the cup to the older man’s face, and while the wandering eye still showed only white, the man’s good eye shone with the challenge. He did not speak a word aloud, but Diggory thought he could hear the old man’s thoughts.

Bastard, he seemed to say. Who let you in amongst the chosen ones?

Diggory took the cup from the man’s hands. He wasn’t about to let some old man stop him now. Not after all he had been through to get into this place. Better not to think, just get it over with. He tipped the cup up and drained it in one swift move, the flat metallic taste causing his throat to close. The cup clattered to the table, and he forced the liquid back down his throat.

He stared back at the black eye. There, old man, you see? A barbarian, no more. I’m one of you now.

The skin around both the good eye and the wandering eye crinkled with condescension.  Never. Fool. You don’t belong here.

One of the brawny, near-naked men grabbed his arms from behind, dragged him across the room and shoved him to the floor in front of the Pope. A slippered foot rested on a stone skull. He understood what they wanted him to do, but the thought of it caused his stomach to roil. He lowered his head. With lips that barely brushed the silk, he kissed the foot.

This would be the last time, he thought. His day was coming. Someday, they would all be kneeling in front of him. Especially that old fool Uncle Toby.

His handlers jerked him to his feet again and propelled him over to the Spanish Knight, whom he realized belatedly, was meant to be Don Quixote. Again, they pushed him to his knees. The Don raised a heavy sword above Diggory’s head and brought it down fast as though he were about to take off his head. Diggory didn’t flinch. He couldn’t.

The sword came to rest on his right shoulder. Then the Knight swung it over to his left shoulder.

“I dub thee Thor, Knight of the Order of Skull and Cross Bones.”

CHAPTER FIVE

At sea off Guadeloupe

March 25, 2008

12:35 p.m.

“Are you all right?” Riley called out after she cut the engine. Her boat ghosted to a stop.

“Yeah. Sure am glad to see you, though. Don’t know how much longer I would have lasted.”

The man’s face was deeply tanned, and even though his brown hair was slicked back against his skull, she could see the streaks of sun-bleached blond. His legs moved like shadowy blue scissors beneath the sparkling surface, and he was breathing hard from the exertion of swimming.

Riley unsnapped the shackle on the gate at the stern and motioned the man around to the boarding ladder. “You can climb aboard back here. Just duck under the dinghy.” Her inflatable hung in davits above the water.

As he swam to the stern, she scanned the water looking for another boat. All her senses were on high alert. She’d read that incidences of piracy were very rare in these waters, but all her years of training made her suspect everyone and everything. There was not another boat in sight.

He pulled himself onto the swim step aft. He was stark naked except for a gold coin on a chain around his neck. Where the chain crossed his collarbone, two words were tattooed onto the brown skin, written in a script she couldn’t read from this distance.

It wasn’t as though she had never seen a naked man before; in seven years in the service, the sight of buck naked men had grown too common around whichever Marine House she was calling home. She averted her eyes, more out of courtesy than modesty — but not before noticing he had no tan lines on his stocky, muscular body.

“Wait there,” she said.

She was standing by the boat’s companionway, and she backed her way down the ladder, her eyes flicking right to check for the dive knife she kept in a scabbard lashed to the bulkhead.

She tossed him a large beach towel.

“Here.”

“Thanks,” he said, and he flashed her a wide, white-toothed grin. “Sorry I didn’t dress for the occasion.”

He was standing out there drying himself off, in no hurry to cover himself.

“You saved my life, you know. I mean it. Thank you.”

She didn’t say anything to that. Didn’t know what to say. He was exaggerating. She’d seen those muscular thighs. The boat wasn’t that far off the island. Swimming to shore in flat water like this would be no problem for a man in that kind of shape.

“I’m glad you’re all right,” she said as she busied herself straightening up the main salon. Not that it needed straightening, but she had a naked man in her cockpit. She reached for her mug on the table and drained the last of her now-cold coffee. She certainly wasn’t feeling sleepy anymore.

After grabbing a couple of bottles of water out of the fridge, she climbed back into the cockpit. She was glad to see he was wearing the towel wrapped around his waist now. She narrowed her eyes trying to read the tattoo. The curling script spelled Carpe Diem.

When she glanced up at his face, his sea-green eyes were alight, daring her to ask about the tattoo.

She handed him the water instead and watched his Adam’s apple bob as he drained half the bottle. What sort of person would get a tattoo of the phrase “Seize the day” in Latin?

When he tilted his head back to drink from the water bottle a second time, she leaned in and examined the coin he wore. The words on it were French; Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.

“So, how’d you wind up out here swimming in your birthday suit?”

He smacked his lips in pleasure, handed her the empty bottle and shook his head. His brown hair curled on his neck well below his ears. “Stupid.”

She waited for him to add more. If he thought he could get away with that short an explanation, he was mistaken. She waited him out.

“I was in a runabout,” he said at last. “Fishing. Was gonna run down to the Iles des Saintes. I was, you know, enjoying the clothing optional lifestyle when I stepped to the rail to take a leak and –” He shrugged.

“So, what happened to your boat?”

“Beats me. Last I saw her, she was headed that-a-way.” He pointed west. “Rental boat.” Shrugging, he said, “I guess it may wind up in Yucatan.”

She thought she heard something Southern, a little redneck-like in his speech. “And your name?”