Eric van Lustbader, page 20
“Obviously, that’s our next stop,” Jenny said. “What about the coin?”
Bravo held it between his fingertips, feeling its deep ridges. He turned it slowly, examining both its face and obverse. “First off, it’s not a reproduction. It’s very old—ancient, in fact. I think it will tell me where in Venice my father is sending us.”
“You mean you don’t know?”
“Not yet.” He smiled into her concerned face. “Don’t look so gloomy, I’ll find the answer. When it comes to my father’s codes I always have.”
His heart beat fast. He was holding the confirmation in his hands. He was on a long journey, one that would keep him connected to his father even after death, for they had played this game often enough during Bravo’s childhood—a game of codes, each one exponentially more difficult to crack than the last. At least, that was how it had seemed to Bravo when he was growing up. Now he knew that the lessons his father had taught him in code breaking must have been leading up to this moment. Had Dexter Shaw foreseen his death? Surely not, surely he’d been ensuring that when the time came he’d have a successor.
Bravo closed his fist around the coin. It had been warmed by the sun and by his own blood. The coin, the paper with the quotation, even the Zippo lighter had taken on far more importance. They were not simply the last remnants of his father’s life. As cold and dead as he was, they carried the heat of life, the joy he’d experienced each and every time his father had challenged him to match wits. These clues brought him closer to his father than he had been since his childhood—a time when the world had made sense, when he and his father were tied together by the ever more complex and puzzling series of codes, as if they were the only two people in the universe.
Bravo and Jenny moved slowly back to where their shoes lay baking on the pale sand and sat for a time, watching swimmers in the piscina. From a plastic portable radio next to a bare-breasted sunbather came a plaintive pop song by Mylene Farmer. A group of children played in the sand, digging and building a wall from time to time undermined by the water. A pair of German women, pale-skinned and hollow-chested, walked the surf, talking of a pair of shoes they’d seen in a shopwindow. The scent of crepes and wine mingled with the salt tang. The heat of the sun baked into them, drying their clothes, the water evaporating to gritty salt on their skin.
At last, they pulled on their shoes and left the beach and its unique piscina. As they mounted the seawall, Bravo pulled out his cell phone and called the airline, making a reservation on the last flight to Venice.
“I suppose I shouldn’t have sent Camille away. We need transportation back to Paris,” he said when he severed the connection. “We’ll walk into the new city and ask someone for directions to a rental car office.”
The Old City was dense with tourists, slowing their trek through its packed streets, but at last they caught sight of the main gate.
“Now’s the time to be on our guard,” Jenny said.
Bravo nodded and began to walk toward the gate, but he swung around as her hand gripped his arm.
“I’m going first,” she said and almost at once raised a hand to stop his intended protest. “It won’t matter what argument you use, the outcome will be the same.” Her gaze was as steady as it was serious. “You think I’m not up to it, but I promise you I am.”
“You did a helluva job protecting me and Camille on the motorway,” Bravo said, matching her serious tone. “I guess I didn’t tell you that before.”
“No,” Jenny said, “you didn’t.”
She let go of him and strode purposefully past. He followed her as she snaked her way through the throng of sightseers streaming through the gate and out onto the cobbled road beyond which stretched the bus-filled car park.
They had to pause, waiting for a gap in the slow crawl of cars backed up along the road. The air was stifling with the accumulation of sun, baking stone and exhaust emissions. People were everywhere: tourists in twos, fours, and larger groups; bicyclists on errands or just out for exercise; children laughing, crying or screaming; exasperated parents tugging at their little hands. Sweet scents came to them of ice cream, sticky candy and cheap cologne. Jenny turned, saw coming toward them a group of perhaps fifteen children between the ages of eight and nine. They were accompanied by three adults, one at their head, one behind, and the third walking alongside.
A gap was opening up in the traffic flow and she was turning away when she saw movement in the corner of her eye. The third adult had broken into a lope, leaving the group of children behind. The other two adult supervisors were paying him no mind, which told Jenny they didn’t know him, he’d been using the children as camouflage.
Grabbing Bravo, she plunged headlong into the gap in the traffic, but they were no more than halfway across the blisteringly hot road when she saw the bicyclist bearing down on them. It was a two-pronged attack.
There was no more time for speculation. The cyclist had a length of wicked-looking polished wood in his hand and was lifting it in preparation of delivering a blow. She had to act now.
Pushing Bravo aside, she stood tall, waited for the downswing of the stick and, moving her arm in parallel to its arc, grabbed it and, at the same time, drove the cocked elbow of her other arm into the cyclist’s throat. She kicked the front wheel and the bicycle went over, taking its rider with it.
“Run!” she shouted to Bravo. “Run!”
Together, they took off along the road in the same direction as the traffic flow. Horns blared and voices were raised in outrage as they darted in and out between the cars. Risking a glance behind them, Jenny saw the first man had grabbed the fallen bicycle. He swung aboard and took off after them. In one hand he brandished a large gun.
They ran as fast as they could, but because they had to watch out for the lurching cars, stopping and starting as they brushed against them, it was slow and perilous going. The cyclist was gaining on them rapidly. Jenny looked around for alternate escape routes, but the crowd pressed in at every direction. They’d be sitting ducks for the cyclist, unless… She moved them into the thickest part of the throng, using the people around them as a shield.
But at that moment, another, even greater danger presented itself. A silver BMW X5 SUV appeared in the carpark, racing toward them from the opposite direction.
“The vise is complete,” Bravo said without rancor.
There was no time for evasive manuevers—the oncoming BMW was upon them. In a moment, Jenny thought, they’d be dead meat, and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.
* * *
Chapter 13
Jenny, tensed and determined to do what she could to protect Bravo from the Knights’ attack, saw the driver’s head pop out of the side window.
“Get in!” he shouted.
Even while she was wondering what Anthony Rule was doing here, Bravo called out, “Uncle Tony!”
Rule risked a quick glance at the cyclist and at once saw the raised gun. “Get in, the two of you! Hurry!”
Jenny opened the SUV’s door, placing her body as a shield between Bravo and the gunman. A shot rang out, piercing the window, shattering the glass. Jenny pushed Bravo’s head down behind the metal as she bundled him into the backseat. The instant she jumped in, Rule took off. With a fierce blare of his horn he stopped two oncoming cars in their tracks and caused a minor fender bender as the vehicle behind them couldn’t stop in time. He turned the wheel over, they jumped the low concrete divider between the road and the car park and, with more room to maneuver, he accelerated into the vast cobbled apron behind the line of tour buses. By this time they’d left the gunman far behind, a fact remarked on by Rule as he checked the rearview mirror.
“I’d have run over the bastard if I’d been alone,” he said. Then he chuckled low in his throat. “But if I’d been alone he never would have been here, would he?”
“Speaking of which,” Jenny said tartly, “what are you doing here?”
“Wait a minute,” Bravo said, “you two know each other?”
“You’re welcome,” Rule said to Jenny as if Bravo hadn’t asked the question. Then, when he saw her frown, his eyes flicked to Bravo in the mirror. “What was I thinking? She’s the Ice Goddess, after all.”
“The Ice Goddess. That’s what the other Guardians call me,” Jenny muttered darkly.
“You give them sufficient cause,” Rule said.
“Oh, yes,” she said, rising to the bait, “it’s always my fault, isn’t it?”
“And here’s a newsflash for you, kiddo, it isn’t only the Guardians.”
“Why should I give a crap?”
Rule shrugged, as if to say that if she didn’t want to take his advice, it was of no moment to him.
Bravo observed this dialog with a growing sense of astonishment. Not only did his father have a life kept secret from him, so did Uncle Tony.
“Shaken up, Bravo?” Rule said, as if reading his thoughts.
“Give me a minute.”
Rule drove them out of the rear of the car park and into the new city, turning this way and that as if he were in a video game, making sure their enemies couldn’t follow them. Of course, it made perfect sense that Uncle Tony was a Gnostic Observatine. Bravo had always called him Uncle Tony not because he was related but because he was so close with Bravo’s father.
“You still haven’t told us what you’re doing here,” Jenny pursued doggedly. “It can’t be coincidence.”
“Coincidence doesn’t exist in the Voire Dei, does it, kiddo?” Rule shook his head. “No, I was following the trail of the second key.”
“The second key?” Bravo said.
Uncle Tony nodded. “There are two keys to the cache. Your father had one, Molko had the other. Molko was taken by the Knights, tortured and killed. We have to assume they have the second key.”
“So it has turned into a race,” Bravo said.
“In a sense,” Uncle Tony said. “Except that the Knights don’t yet know the location of the cache. Only your father knew it.”
“That’s why I was being tailed all the way from New York to Washington,” Bravo said. He thought of Rossi making sure they wouldn’t be shot when they fled Jenny’s house, the rubber bullet with which Jenny had been shot at the cemetery. Now he had confirmation of his theory that the Knights hadn’t been sent to kill them; they needed to find out the location of the cache. “But Jenny and I took care of that before we came here.”
“What you need to understand,” Rule said, “is that the Knights of St. Clement are like a hydra—lop off two heads and four more take their place.”
“They can’t have a bug on Bravo,” Jenny said. “He’s got nothing on him he had in Washington, not even his clothes.”
Bravo leaned forward, his forearms across the back of the driver’s seat. “Except for the few things my father left me, and no one except me had any knowledge of where they were or their significance.”
Jenny nodded. “They must be using another method to track you.”
“What do I do, then?” Bravo said.
“Keep to the plan. Trust your father. That’s all you can do,” Uncle Tony said. “Meanwhile, Jenny here has your back.”
He accelerated past two cars stuck behind a laboring truck. “Sorry about your dad. He was one of a kind—a great man and the best friend I ever had.”
“Thanks,” Bravo said, “that means a lot to me.”
“I know you were Dexter Shaw’s oldest friend inside the Order,” Jenny said. “Is that why you’re here?”
“And you thought it was to check up on you,” Rule said with a not unkind snort. He was a tall, rangy man, with the rough and ruddy skin of an outdoorsman. His hair was going gray at the temples and was brushed forward in the style of a Roman senator. “Well, I don’t blame you. Kavanaugh took it into his head to light out after you.” A livid scar, slightly raised and ropy, ran down the left side of his jaw like an exclamation mark. “I’d say ‘poor Kavanaugh,’ if only the bastard had deserved it.”
Jenny looked at him for a moment, then turned away to stare out the window.
Rule pursed his lips as if he had just tasted something rotten.
“Kavanaugh made a mistake, let’s leave it at that,” Bravo said. He had grown increasingly uncomfortable with their occasional verbal slaps, and he meant to put a stop to it. “Right now, what we need most is a lift to Paris. We’ve got a flight out of Charles de Gaulle at nine p.m. for Venice.”
Anthony Rule nodded. “Only too happy to be of service.” Though he was in his late fifties, time had been kind to him. He had lost none of the casual good looks that had naturally attracted women all his life. “Bravo, to be honest, Dex’s death was a shock to me, but it was hardly a surprise. I think by now you must know what I mean. Dex knew he was marked for death, knew his murder was possible, perhaps even inevitable. That’s the brutal nature of our war against the powers of evil and corruption. I wish it could be otherwise, but until the Knights of St. Clement are annihilated, it can’t. It’s as simple as that.”
“It seems to me that an enmity that has survived for centuries would be anything but simple,” Bravo said.
“Listen to the expert.” Rule shook his head. “Instead of waxing philosophical, you should be concentrating that brilliant mind of yours on how the Knights have been able to keep tabs on you.”
“My father—and Jenny’s—both believed there was a traitor inside the Haute Cour,” Bravo said. “Do you?”
Rule shot a quick glance at Jenny in the rearview mirror. “I see you’ve been doing your job in other ways as well, kiddo.”
Bravo noticed that Jenny had returned from her sullen contemplation of the road. At last, Uncle Tony had her full attention.
“Do you have any idea who the traitor is?” Jenny said.
“That was Dex’s obsession,” Rule said darkly. “As for me, my attentions are elsewhere. I have no opinion.”
They were on the motorway now, heading back to Charles de Gaulle Airport. Rule exited the motorway and, slowing considerably, joined the traffic on the secondary road. He took one of his periodic reads of the cars in the side mirror and made two quick turns. “Okay, we’re clean.”
They were now on a long, relatively straight stretch of road that was perfect for keeping an eye out for tails.
“They want our secrets, Bravo,” Rule continued. “But they especially want one secret—the one your father was guarding with his life.”
“But I don’t even know what that secret is.”
“Of course you don’t. Jenny doesn’t know what it is, and neither does the majority of the Order. But I do.” The entrance to the motorway came up fast on his left. Rule was already in the left lane, but there was a broken-down car blocking the entrance and he zoomed past without being able to get on.
Jenny had already turned her torso half around so that she could look through the rear window.
“What’s going on?” Bravo said.
Rule sat a little forward, his body tense. “We’ve got a problem.”
“Picked up another tail.” Jenny moved slightly closer to Bravo on the backseat to improve her view. “White Mercedes coupe three cars back.”
Rule nodded. “That’s the one, but my concern is that it might not be the only one.”
“What makes you say that?” Bravo asked.
“The broken-down car that was blocking the motorway entrance,” Jenny said.
“It kept us on this road,” Rule said. He turned the wheel hard, and the X5 skidded slightly. He pressed the accelerator to the floor, and they were thrown backward into their seats.
“Now we’ll really see what this can do,” Rule said. “I have a twelve-cylinder engine in here that should let us do everything but take off.”
Up ahead, Bravo saw a red Audi move over to the left and accelerate to match their speed.
“It’s a box, all right,” Jenny called out.
Rule nodded again. “They’ve got us front and rear. Better fasten your seat belts, children.”
He wove in and out of the traffic, cutting his lane-changing within a hairsbreadth of disaster. He was deliberately going faster than the traffic flow, and now it was easy to see the two Knight vehicles—the Audi in front, the Mercedes behind.
All at once, the Audi slowed. Rule stepped on the brakes, skidding slightly, and he shifted down to compensate. An instant later, they were slammed by the Mercedes, and he accelerated directly at the Audi. The Audi, smaller and lighter by far than either the BMW or the Mercedes, skittered to life, staying in front of them.
“This isn’t good,” Rule said. “I have to assume they want us on this road for a reason.”
No sooner had he said this than he saw the semi idling up ahead. Its rear doors gaped open, a steel ramp extending down from it.
“That’s why they put us in a box,” Rule said. “They want to herd us into the semi.”
To their left loomed the off-ramp to the motorway. Rule waited until the last possible instant, then he swerved for it. A gray Renault was lumbering along the exit ramp when the driver saw the BMW X5 on a collision course. The Renault’s horn blared furiously even as it slewed out of the way. Rule accelerated up the off-ramp and onto the motorway.
They had lost both the Audi and the Mercedes, but now the BMW was heading the wrong way. Horns sounded and brakes screeched as disbelieving drivers struggled to get out of the way without slamming their vehicles into other cars or the guard rails. Mercifully, there was a breakdown area that Rule used to make a screeching U-turn, pulling out into the disjointed traffic flow before his passengers had a chance to catch their breath.
They were by this time northwest of Chartres, and at the exit for the town of Dreux, Rule cut across the entire motorway to take the off-ramp. As he slowed the X5, he pulled out a cell phone and made a brief call, his voice so low that neither Bravo nor Jenny could hear what he said.
