The Fraternity of the Stone (10 page)

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PART TWO

PILGRIMAGE

STRANGE NEW WORLD

Chapter 1.

Ahead, Drew saw streetlights muted by the rain. He entered the outskirts of Quentin and veered from the main road, using side streets, avoiding the straight route through town where a hostile observer would be most likely to expect him to pass. At the far end of Quentin, he returned to the main road and continued south.

The clock on the dashboard was different from the type he'd been used to in cars in 1979. Instead of a circular face with arrows, this had a row of green glowing digits and letters, which made him feel as if he faced the cockpit of an aircraft. Another change he'd have to adjust to. 5:09 a.m. Dawn would come soon, he thought, anxious to get as far from Quentin as he could before it was light.

The man secured in the passenger seat began to groan. Drew glanced at him with concern, not yet prepared for him to wake up. Then the reason for the groan became obvious - the tourniquet had been on too long. He had to stop at the side of the road and loosen the belt, allowing the leg to get some circulation. Blood flowed from the wound and trickled onto the floor. The van was filled with a sick-sweet coppery odor.

He opened his window and drove ten minutes longer, peering through the rain on the windshield, then stopped again to refasten the tourniquet and once more proceeded. It occurred to him that this road was as likely a place for the team to be watching for him as the central route through Quentin, so as a further precaution, he turned left at the next intersection. A narrower road took him through several mountain valleys, winding past storm-shrouded peaks, climbing, dipping. He passed a few small towns, seeing their once familiar New England quaintness as if through the freshness of foreign eyes. A white peaked church aroused associations with the great New England preachers, Cotton Mather, Edward Taylor, Jonathon Edwards, though they of course had not achieved their greatness in Vermont. Edwards reminded him of the famous sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," and he discovered that he'd begun to pray out loud.

"Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."

Forgiveness, though, was not the issue. Survival was. Atonement was. Temptation? Yes. And evil.

At dawn, the road he was on intersected with another, and turning right, he proceeded south again, always south, toward Boston and Father Hafer. As the storm eased off, becoming a mist, a road sign told him that his route had taken him across a river into New Hampshire. That was all right. To get to Boston, it was quicker to cut through the bottom of New Hampshire anyhow. But now as he entered towns, he began to see sporadic traffic, occasional people on the streets, the world waking up to go about its business. He'd have to perform his errands before too many witnesses had a look at him. Though he hadn't slept since the previous night, the sensory bombardment of seeing the world again kept him fully awake. Soon the sun was high enough to burn off the mist that remained from the storm, and he noticed a sign for a picnic area up ahead. This early - 8:14, the clock said - the place wouldn't be occupied, and he needed to stop again to loosen the wounded man's tourniquet.

The picnic area was small but attractive. A dense line of woods concealed it from the road. Five redwood tables were dispersed amid a grove of chestnut trees, their leaves turned autumn brown. A white-stone path led to a narrow log bridge that went across a stream toward a seesaw and swing.

He stopped beside the first table and admired the glinting stream - no doubt unexceptional to jaded eyes, but to Drew, it was sensational - and then got to work. This time, he sensed a change in his prisoner.

Drew's defensive instincts took charge. He aimed the Mauser, staring at his prisoner's face. The man's eyelids came open; not completely, somewhat listlessly, but nonetheless open.

"Don't move," Drew said. "I'm not sure how awake you are, but in case you feel lucky, you ought to know we're alone here. I'll shoot if you force me to."

The warning got no response.

"You hear me?" Drew asked.

No answer.

"Do you understand?"

No reply.

There was one way to find out how groggy the man truly was. Drew waved his free hand in front of his prisoner's face, then abruptly touched his index finger against the tip of the prisoner's nose. This technique was favored by referees in boxing matches. If a boxer was fully conscious, his eyes would automatically follow the movement of the finger.

That happened now.

"You're awake all right," Drew said. Words came easier the more he talked. "Pay attention. I have to loosen the belt on your leg. It's in your best interest not to try kicking me while I do it. I'd only have to give your wound a punch to calm you down."

The prisoner studied him harshly. "Go ahead. Loosen the belt."

Drew did.

The prisoner squinted out the window toward the

picnic tables. "Where's this? We still in Vermont?"

"New Hampshire."

"Ah." The man licked his cracked lips.

"What's wrong?"

"If we're all the way to New Hampshire, I guess i can't expect... "

"Your friends to find you? No, I wouldn't count on it."

The man stared down at his leg. "How bad?" Drew shrugged. "The bullet went straight through. It missed the bone."

"That's something to be thankful for, isn't it? I've got a first aid kit in the back. If you wouldn't mind."

Drew thought about it. "Sure. Why not?"

The man seemed surprised.

"And you'll be thirsty from loss of blood. I'll open one of those Cokes. Too bad they're not cold."

Drew cleaned the wound, disinfected and bandaged it. He swabbed crusted blood off the man's forehead, then tilted an opened Coke can against his lips. "Don't swallow too much at once. I don't want you sick."

The man blinked, incredulous.

Thirsty, Drew opened a Coke for himself. After six years of nothing to drink but water, milk, and fruit juice, the carbonated beverage was cloyingly sweet. "How bad's your pain?"

"I've had it worse."

"No doubt."

"If I need to" - he sounded indignant - "believe me, I can take more."

"Of course, but even so..." Drew opened two small sealed packs of aspirin from the medical kit and pushed four pills between the man's lips.

"Why all the help?"

"Let's just say I'm a good Samaritan."

"Tell me another one. You wouldn't have brought me along unless you wanted to question me. You think you've invented some new technique? I'm supposed to crack up from all this kindness?"

Drew sighed. "Okay, if you insist, let's get down to it. What you're thinking now is that as long as I need information, I'll keep you alive. So you're weighing your life against the pain I'd give you to make you talk. Under those conditions, you're prepared to suffer the maximum. Or maybe you're planning to tell me whatever lies you think I might be dumb enough to accept. But then again, maybe the lies aren't such a good idea. After all, if I believed them and decided that I didn't have any further use for you, I might just finish you off. Are you with me so far?"

The man stayed silent.

Drew spread his hands. "If I had chemicals - sodium amytal, for instance - I could make you tell me whatever I wanted. But when it comes to torture, your survival depends on keeping your mouth shut. So here's the point. I don't intend to torture you, and I don't intend to kill you."

"What kind of - ?"

"As far as I'm concerned, you're a hired hand. You were just doing your job. The person who hired you is the one responsible, not you."

"I don't know what the hell - "

"All right, I'll make it simple. When you hit the monastery, did you know who I was? Were you told about my background?"

"I get it." The man scowled. "This whole thing's a trick to get me to tell you who - "

Drew shook his head. "I did my best to explain. Then settle for this. In case you haven't guessed, I'm not just a monk. I'm not an amateur. Whatever I do with you, I want you to know it'll be professional. And I expect your standards to be the same. No panic, no stupid moves, no sloppiness. All right?"

The man looked baffled.

"For instance," Drew said, "I'm going to fasten the tourniquet again. Then I'm going to cover you with a sleeping bag up to your shoulders. You'll pretend to be asleep. We're going to drive till we find a service station. I won't leave the van. I'll talk to the attendant from my window. I need to buy something from him. And you'll keep pretending to be asleep. Otherwise, if you make a commotion, in all good conscience I'll have to stop you."

"Aside from that? You said no killing, no torture."

"You've got my word."

"But you still figure you can make me talk?"

"That's right."

"This I have to see."

Drew smiled.

As he drove from the picnic area, he felt assaulted by the noise and commotion of increased traffic. The cars seemed even smaller than he remembered them, a legacy from the gas crisis in the mid-seventies. But then two enormous motorhomes went by, and he recalled predictions from 1979 that fuel-squandering vehicles would be a thing of the past.

Apparently not. The motorhomes were followed by a luxury car, the style and name of which he didn't recognize (had the gas crisis ended? Had a new cheap plentiful fuel been developed?), and then by a big convertible. He didn't understand - convertibles had been discontinued before he entered the monastery. What had happened to cause the turnaround?

He reached a series of fast-food drive-ins. Offensive to him in the seventies, he'd nonetheless been used to them, familiarity rendering them invisible. But now, to his unaccustomed perspective, their ugliness was overwhelming. A sign advertised a special on something called a taco pizza. And what on earth were Chicken McNuggets?

He found a service station. Gas was a dollar twenty per gallon, fifty cents higher than the outrageous price he remembered from 1979, and yet cars still crowded the road.

"I feel like I've come here from Mars."

The man beside him said, "What?"

Or maybe this was Mars.

Drew parked the van near the service station pumps. "Close your eyes and keep quiet. Someone's coming."

Drew bought a radiator hose from a young attendant, using cash from the wallet that he'd taken from the man on the hill. As he drove past the pumps toward the street, he tossed the hose onto his prisoner's lap. "Here. Got a present for you."

Despite the restraining safety belts, the man almost jumped. "What the hell is this for?"

"Why are you upset? Don't you like surprises?"

"I said, what's it for?"

"Take a guess."

"It's used to beat somebody and not leave marks! But you said you wouldn't - "

"Right. No beating. Wrong guess. But keep on trying. It'll help pass the time."

"And aren't we going back the way we just came?"

"To that picnic area."

"I get it now."

"Get what?"

The man squirmed. "Holy God, you're crazy!"

Drew stared at him. "I wish you wouldn't take the name of the Lord in vain."

Chapter 2.

They reached the deserted picnic grounds. Concealed from traffic by the wooded stretch along the road, Drew backed the van until it was almost against a chestnut tree. He shut off the engine and stepped out, smiling. "Be right back," he promised, and cheerfully waved the radiator hose.

He shoved one end of the hose on top of the van's exhaust pipe, opened the rear door, and bent the hose until its opposite end was inside the van. Restarting the engine, he backed toward the chesnut tree so the rear door was secure against the hose. He left the engine running. The van began to fill with dense blue acrid exhaust.

The man became hysterical. "Christ, I was right! You are, you're fucking nuts!"

"Get too excited," Drew said coldly, "and you won't be able to hold your breath."

The man's eyes widened. Surrounded by haze, he started coughing.

Drew used the sleeping bags to seal the cracks around the back door. He made sure the windows were rolled up tightly. As a parting thought, he switched on the radio. "How would you like some music?"

He'd expected something more strident than heavy-metal rock. But what he heard instead was: "Linda Ronstadt and the Nelson Riddle Orchestra," an announcer said.

Against a lush arrangement typical of Frank Sinatra's Capitol recordings from the Fifties, Ronstadt (whose raw-throated versions of "When Will I Be Loved?" and "Back in the U.S.A." Drew vividly remembered) began to sing a standard from the Forties. He felt his sanity tilt.

His prisoner's coughing snapped him back to normal. The exhaust was thicker inside the van.

"Can't breathe," the man said. "Don't.

Drew closed the door. He walked in front of the van, along the white-stone path to a log bridge spanning a stream, where he dropped a few pebbles into the water. The air smelled cool and sweet.

With apparent indifference, he glanced back toward the van. The interior was obscured by haze, but he could nonetheless see the man writhing in the passenger seat. More important, the man could see him. Drew stretched his arms and leaned against the railing on the bridge. From the van, he heard screaming.