Eric van Lustbader, page 21
Within six minutes they were in Dreux. It was a small industrial town filled with hulking foundries, refineries, sprawling factories where televisions, boilers and chemicals were manufactured. Not surprisingly, it was an ugly and vaguely depressing place, despite its trees and flower beds. The stern and forbidding Gothic St. Pierre’s Church was one of the few surviving medieval buildings to remind those with a sense of history that Dreux had once belonged to the counts of Vexin and the dukes of Normandy.
“All the counts of Vexin were members of the Order in their time,” Rule said. “In this way, Dreux still belongs to us. These are my people, I can vouch for every one of them.”
They were met outside St. Pierre’s by a slim young man in jeans and a T-shirt, whose eyes were completely hidden by a pair of glasses with reflective lenses. Ignoring Bravo and Jenny completely, he exchanged keys with Rule. He went straight to the BMW and drove off.
The interior of St. Pierre’s was cool and dim. The air was faintly tinged with incense and massed voices raised in hypnotic liturgical chant. Rule led them to a particularly gloomy side chapel dominated by the emaciated figure of Christ, body bent backward, eyes raised heavenward.
They stood close together, listening for hurried footsteps or stealthy movement in the shadows. Bravo felt the Voire Dei close around them, as if they had sunk beneath the Bay of St. Malo. From time to time, he saw small groups of tourists, or a priest striding past on some unknown business, and he was struck by how removed he felt from them. It was as if they existed in an old, dim print he was being shown. And he thought Jenny was right, he could never go back to their reality.
At length, Rule took off his sunglasses and said very softly to Bravo, “You must listen to me closely because I suspect that there may be no other time for me to tell you what your father entrusted me to say. The secret the Order has guarded for centuries, the secret Rome has wanted above all others is this: we have a fragment of the Testament.”
“Testament?” Bravo said. “What testament?”
Rule’s eyes flashed with a kind of fervor Bravo had never before seen. “The Testament of Jesus Christ.”
Bravo’s heart seemed to give a painful lurch against his rib cage. “Are you serious?”
“Never more so,” Rule said.
A priest walked by, saw them and nodded with a smile. All three fell silent until he had disappeared from view.
When Rule spoke again, his voice was both lower and more urgent. “Tell me, Bravo, in your studies have you come across the Secret Gospel According to Mark?”
“Of course,” Bravo nodded. “In 1958, a scholar discovered it in the library of the Mar Saba monastery near Jerusalem. He found a handwritten text on the endpapers of a 1646 edition of Isaac Voss’s ‘Epistolae genuinae S. Ignatii Martyris.’”
Rule grinned. “Full marks, as usual.”
“And they came into Bethany,” Bravo recited from the Secret Gospel. “And a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and said to him, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me.’ But the disciples rebuked her. And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightaway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him…”
Rule laughed. “Of course, your eidetic memory.”
“Basically, the Secret Gospel has been derided by Bible scholars because it depicts Jesus as a miracle worker, which runs counter to formal Church doctrine. It describes in detail how Jesus resurrected not only Lazarus, as is told in the eleventh chapter of Clement, but this boy and others as well.”
“That’s correct,” Rule said. “And so dangerous was the Secret Gospel deemed that it was secretly suppressed by the Church in the fourth century, and then destroyed. Or so they thought.”
“This is one of the secrets in the cache my father was guarding?”
“That’s right,” Rule said.
“Are you saying that you think it’s true?”
“I know it is,” Rule said, “because the fragment of the Testament of Jesus Christ confirms it. This is why it is vital that it and the other documents so closely guarded for centuries not fall into the hands of the Knights of St. Clement, for they will surely destroy all trace of them as if they had never existed.”
“If what you’re saying is true,” Bravo said, “then why are you holding on to this secret? It’s not only a religious artifact—it’s an archeological miracle, a part of history. Why not reveal it to the world?”
“Bringing the Testament to light would violate our basic tenets, and this we will not do.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s not only the Testament that we possess,” Rule said. “We also have the Quintessence.”
“What?” Bravo had started, as if pricked by a needle.
Rule nodded. “You heard me.”
“The fabled fifth element,” Bravo breathed. “Medieval philosophers were convinced that the celestial regions were composed of earth, air, fire, water and the Quintessence—the essence of life itself. I always assumed that the Quintessence was a myth, like alchemy and turning water into wine.”
“It’s quite real, I assure you,” Rule said.
“But what exactly is it? Can you see it, feel it, taste it, or is it beyond man’s ability to observe and to quantify?”
“In His Testament, Jesus describes it as an ‘oil,’ but that term may or may not bear a resemblance to what we think of as oil.” Rule leaned in, lowered his voice. “What makes the fragment of the Testament so explosive, so potentially dangerous to the Church, is that in it Jesus writes that it is by means of the Quintessence that he resurrected Lazarus and the others.”
“But that goes against Church doctrine. The scriptures say that Jesus resurrected Lazarus by His divine power.”
“Indeed, that has been the accepted interpretation since time immemorial,” Rule said. “But the Testament of Jesus Christ clearly states that it is the Quintessence that brings Lazarus back to life. Christ makes no mention of a divine power.”
Bravo was stunned. “Wait a minute—”
“Yes, yes, you see the mind-boggling implications. If it was the Quintessence that resurrected Lazarus and not Jesus’s divine power, then the stories of him being a healer, the stories that the Church has systematically repressed, are true. And it might also be true that when he died his disciples resurrected him using the Quintessence.”
Bravo’s mind was reeling. At last he understood. “The entire structure of the Catholic faith would crumble because it would call into question whether Jesus was, in fact, the son of God.”
“This is why over the centuries kings have been assassinated, regimes have been toppled, countless lives have been lost, blood has been spilled.” Periodically, Rule tried to decode the shadows beyond the columns. “Your father told me he read the Testament, authenticated it. There is no doubt it’s a fragment of the Testament of Jesus Christ, none at all.”
Bravo stood absolutely immobile. To someone with his training, the idea of finding even a fragment of the Testament of Christ was akin to suddenly unearthing the Holy Grail. And, on top of that, to have the Quintessence, as well! The very possibility that Uncle Tony was right took his breath away.
“If the Order has had the Quintessence for all this time, if it actually exists,” Bravo said, “then why didn’t you use it to heal the sick and infirm?”
“That precise point was the subject of much heated debate in the twelve hundreds between Fra Leoni, the Keeper, and Fra Prospero, the Order’s Magister Regens.” Rule kept shifting his gaze to areas of the interior. “Two reasons for keeping the Quintessence secret prevailed over all the others: One, man was not meant to be immortal, or even to have his lifetime unnaturally extended. Two, news of the Quintessence would bring out the worst in people. What do you suppose would happen? A stampede, a panic in the general populace. But it would never get that far, because the rich and the powerful would contrive to steal it, to keep the secret for their own benefit, to extend their own lives. By applying the Quintessence at intervals they would live virtually forever.”
Bravo’s mind was moving at lightning speed. This was why the Knights were in a sudden lather to find the cache—the Vatican was pushing them to find the Quintessence. The pope was gravely ill. Was he ready to die? If so, the Quintessence was his only hope. The closer the pope came to death, the more pressure the Vatican would put on the Knights, the more of their power would be wielded. He’d have to remember that. Even in this day and age, the Vatican’s power was a net flung far and wide across the globe wherever Christ had been introduced.
“And so power, already concentrated, would become ever more so,” Rule continued. “And then there would be governments, rogue individuals, terrorists who would wish to use the Quintessence for their own ends, rather than for the betterment of mankind. Unmitigated disaster.” He shook his head sadly. “No, the Quintessence is too powerful for mankind—it only seems like a gift, but that’s the nature of all corrupting influences.”
“If you feel that way, then why not destroy it?”
“It’s not up to me, is it? But any archeologist will tell you—I’m sure you know this and are testing me—it would be criminal to willfully destroy such a miraculous artifact from the time of Christ. Jesus himself held the Quintessence in his—”
Some movement Rule had been looking for must have occurred because he said, “Come now, quickly, quickly!” and with his arms he guided them deeper into the shadows of the chapel. Groping along the plaster of the rear wall, he found a small glass knob and, pulling on it, opened a small door.
Pushing them into the dark doorway, he said, “This passageway will take you to a side entrance. There are a number of turns, but the door to the outside will be at the far end, not along either wall.”
“Who did you see?” Jenny said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Bravo said. “Come on, Uncle Tony.”
“I’m not going with you.” Rule put the set of keys the young man had given him into Jenny’s hand.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Jenny said. “I’m not going to let you—”
“You’ll do your job,” Rule said shortly, “which is to protect Bravo with your life. Leave these people to me. Besides, you have a plane to catch, and if I don’t provide a diversion you’re never going to make it.”
“I won’t leave you,” Bravo said. “You taught me never to run from a fight, and I sure as hell am not going to start now.”
Rule put his hands on Bravo’s shoulders. “I appreciate the sentiment, Bravo, really I do, but sentiment has no place in the Voire Dei.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“You’ll learn soon enough that I’m right.” He gripped Bravo all the harder. “In any case, we all have our roles to play in this war, and yours is safeguarding the Testament and the Quintessence. You’re the Keeper: at all costs, you must remember that.”
Rule stared into Bravo’s eyes. He had the knack of making you feel as if you and he were the only two people in the world. “Since Dex’s murder and the deaths of the other members of the Haute Cour, we’ve been virtually leaderless and terribly vulnerable. If you fail to find the cache or—worse—if the Knights of St. Clement should wrest it from you, we’ll be undone. They’ll have in their possession all the secret knowledge we have acquired. With the promise of the immortality the Quintessence provides, they could create unprecedented havoc—they will have the wherewithal to entice key personnel within governments, economic combines or even terrorist organizations to do their bidding. They could become an unstoppable force, subverting world policy on every level.”
Jenny closed her fist over the keys.
Rule nodded to her gratefully. “The car’s a black Audi cabriolet—very sporty, good cover.” He told them where it was parked. “Now go!”
He fairly pushed them into the darkness. Then he closed the door and, turning, prepared to meet the Knights he’d seen entering the church.
“The man with the gold teardrop stud in his left ear.”
“I see him,” Bravo said.
He and Jenny were standing in the dimness of the church’s side doorway. Late afternoon sunlight, thick as honey, laid down long shadows. Across the street, leaning against the front fender of the white Mercedes, was the Knight with the gold teardrop stud in his ear. He was trying to look nonchalant, but his eyes were hard and flinty as they scanned each individual that came into range.
“Go to the car as if nothing’s the matter.” Jenny was all business now. “The important thing is to walk at a normal pace—not too fast, not too slow—and don’t look for him.”
“He’ll see me, and he’ll come for me.”
“I’m counting on it,” she said. And then as Bravo was about to walk away, she added, “As long as he doesn’t suspect you’re on to him we’re okay, understand?”
He nodded and left the protection of the recessed doorway, striding out into the white glare and the deep blue shadows that lapped at his ankles. His heart thumped hard and there was a buzzing in his ears that caused him to walk stiff-legged and a bit too fast. He caught himself and, with an effort, he relaxed, slowed down.
There was movement all around him, and he found the most difficult part was not to look in the Knight’s direction. He thought of the essential mystery of film or TV actors that had fascinated him when he was a child: how they had trained themselves to ignore the camera completely. Now he was in the same situation, forced to ignore the man with the gold stud.
“As long as he doesn’t suspect you’re on to him we’re okay, understand?”
He stepped off the curb. Checking for oncoming vehicles, he strode across the street. He could see the black Audi cabriolet, its cloth top up. So far as he could determine, there was no one around it. But how can you be sure? He kept going, his pace remaining constant, though his nerves were screaming.
Movement flickered in the extreme corner of his eye. It was coming from his left, the direction in which he and Jenny had seen the man with the stud in his ear lounging against the white Mercedes.
He’s coming!
He kept his focus on the nearby Audi. He told himself that he trusted Jenny, trusted her expertise, trusted her plan. In any event, it was too late for doubts. He’d committed himself and there was no turning back.
Three steps, four, and then a hand gripped his shirt, the long, slender fingers curling, the nails digging into his flesh. He turned, saw a flash of metal—the gold stud—and, below, another metallic flash from the drawn gun raised into a patch of brilliant sunlight.
There was just enough time to take in the look of triumph on the Knight’s narrow face before his black eyes rolled up. Jenny, who had come up behind him without making a sound, caught him under the arms just as he collapsed and together, she and Bravo half dragged the man onto the curb.
In response to the inquiring look a passing couple gave them, Jenny said, “Our friend had too much wine at lunch.” The couple hurried on, in no mood to have their vacation interrupted.
Leaving the unconscious Knight propped up against an iron fence, Jenny and Bravo got into the Audi and drove away.
They reached Charles de Gaulle without further incident but with little time to spare, which was just as well since neither of them had any appetite for waiting around the airport for the Knights to find them again. In any event, Jenny, on somber lookout from the moment they exited St. Pierre, was convinced they hadn’t been followed from Dreux.
All the way to the airport Anthony Rule had been on both their minds, though perhaps for different reasons. Rule had been like Bravo’s second father and, in fact, on occasion had stood in for his best friend when Dexter Shaw had been unable to attend his son’s school play or athletic meet. Rule, who was unmarried and childless, had openly reveled in his relationship with Bravo, imparting bits of wisdom or tricks for any and all of the physical disciplines the young boy was studying. So it wasn’t difficult to understand why Bravo adored him. What seemed obvious now had never occurred to Bravo at the time: namely, that it was no coincidence that Uncle Tony was proficient in all the disciplines he was learning to master and only too delighted to help Bravo toward further success.
“It must have been interesting having Anthony in your life,” Jenny said as they were cruising the car park, trying to decipher the confusing signs. The French seemed to have a fetish for making their airports as difficult to navigate as possible. “What was it like?”
“It was great.” Bravo pointed to what looked like a space at the far end of the row. “He was like my father, without all the baggage between a father and son.”
“Well, that was an answer I wasn’t anticipating.”
“What’s with you and Uncle Tony, anyway?” Someone had parked a car over the dividing line and the spot was too small even for the cabriolet “Do you mix it up like that with all your superiors?”
Jenny shrugged. “More or less, but I can tell you that none of them are like Anthony Rule.”
“Don’t tell me you have a thing for him.”
She winced. “Not in the least.” A spot opened up in the next row, and they pulled in. She sat for a moment, unmoving, staring straight ahead at nothing.
Bravo had seen that five-mile stare before, and he knew her mind was working overtime. By now he understood that she had a difficult time revealing anything of herself, and when she did, as she had at Mont St. Michel, she immediately withdrew into the anonymity of her self-made armor.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to—”
“Shut up,” she interrupted in a rush. It was as if once she’d begun she wanted to make certain she said what was on her mind. “I respect Anthony tremendously—he and your father were two of the really good guys. Because of that, it’s painful when he ridicules me.”
“He ridicules you because he likes you,” Bravo said.
“Really?”
He nodded. “He used to do it to me, too.”
She had turned to look at him, to make certain he was being sincere. It gradually dawned on him what a terrible price she’d paid for maintaining her position in the Order. She had developed an assumption that when she was with a man she was bound to be the butt of endless jokes.
