The Fraternity of the Stone (33 page)

The priest peered up from the photograph, staring toward Drew. His hands quivered. "At first, I thought this third photograph was a poor reproduction of the first. I thought it was - "

"Me. But it isn't. If you look closely, really closely, you'll see it isn't. I tried to tell myself that the resemblance was coincidental. As Arlene said, kids often tend to look alike. But this is more than just a vague similarity. This is... "

"Unnerving."

"I'm just getting started. Look at the last photograph. I took it after the car had toppled from the cliff. But the car didn't drop all the way down the gorge. It snagged on an outcrop, its front end angling down, and by then, flames from the gas tank were streaking across the snow. That's when the two front doors burst open, and two adults leaped out. My instructions had been specific. Take as many photographs as you can. So despite my shock at seeing the boy, I stared through the viewfinder, aiming the telephoto lens, pressing the button, and then I realized God was still giving signs." His voice broke. "The man and woman looked like my parents. Were my parents."

"But they're in flames," Father Stanislaw said.

"Look closely!" Drew urged.

"I am!"

"They are my parents. I know they aren't, but they are. I couldn't get a focus on their faces when they leaped from the car. But before they burst into flames, their faces were quite distinct. On the cliff, on that freezing bluff, I was sure they were my mother and my father."

The room became silent.

"Of course -I don't mean any offense - we don't have any way to verify the comparison," Father Stanislaw

said. "I grant that the boy from the car, even with the distortion of the smoke and the falling snow, could be your counterpart. At first, indeed, I thought it was you. But allowing for the coincidence, isn't it possible that your imagination carried you away? Could you have made the logical leap from the boy who looked like you, to the man and woman who, well, you imagined looked like your parents?"

"I know what I saw." Drew's voice was hoarse. "Finally I couldn't keep my finger pressed on the shutter button any longer. I lowered the camera. Across the gorge from me, the flames reached their faces. The gas tank exploded. My mother and father disintegrated. Just as in 1960. Only this time, I was the man who'd killed them."

"The circumstances were different."

"Were they? What we call a mercenary on their side is an operative on ours. I was the same as the man I'd been hunting. I was my enemy. Pieces of their bodies tumbled down the gorge, their clothes and flesh in flames. I smelled them. And on the top of the cliff, silhouetted against the snow, I saw the grieving face of the boy - I wasn't looking through the telephoto lens anymore, but I seemed to see his tears in close-up. My tears. After nineteen years, my need for revenge had caught up with me. And nothing mattered anymore. Except to beg God's forgiveness; to save my soul."

Arlene touched his shoulder. He flinched, then gratefully accepted her comfort.

"To save your soul?" Father Stanislaw said, his voice raised in astonishment. "All the time you were an operative, you felt religious?"

"I had my own religion. The justice of the Old Testament's angry God. But God had a different idea. I'm more honored than Saul on the road to Damascus, thrown from his horse by a bolt of light. God sent me not one but two signs. He's certainly generous. Everything I've described happened in maybe ten seconds, though it seemed to take forever. The blast rumbled through the mountains, and as its echo dwindled, I heard something else - the shriek of the boy across the gorge from me, raising his hands to his face, trying to shut out what he'd just seen, his parents in flames. He screamed through his fingers. And after that? God's third sign to me. It wasn't enough that I'd recognized myself, that I'd come full circle and killed the parents I'd set out to avenge. As the rumble of the blast diminished, as the boy choked on his own screams, as the silence returned, I heard a chant.

"Later, I understood why. It was January sixth. The Feast of the Epiphany - when the Magi saw Christ and saved His life. Because the Wise Men, having seen the baby Jesus, having seen a light of their own, refused to go back to Herod and reveal where Christ could be found, though they'd promised Herod they'd do so. That, it seems to me, is why the Church decided that the Epiphany should be a major feast. Not because the Wise Men saw the baby Jesus, but because in a way they were double agents, who finally made a choice about which side to believe in. Just as I made a choice that day.

"The monks, in honor of the Magi and that crucial day in Christ's continuing existence, must have scheduled a special convocation. Above me, from the chapel in the cloister in the mountains, I heard their chant. Their hymn in honor of that anniversary. It drifted down through the chasms, past the peaks, obscuring the echo of the explosions and the screams. The hymn praised God's will, His infinite foresight, His all-encompassing plan. But the words weren't nearly as powerful as the sound of those eerie voices, those hermits who'd divorced themselves from the falsehoods of the world.

"My knees bent. I found myself kneeling, staring toward that boy across the gorge from me. He tried to scramble down the cliff to find his parents. I wanted to stand up from the bushes that hid me and shout to tell him not to, that he'd fall and kill himself. Grow up! I wanted to shout. Hunt the man who murdered your parents! Who murdered my own! Come after me! And that's when I became religious. It was either that... or kill myself." He paused, exhausted.

Arlene studied his anguished face. Lovingly, she put an arm around him.

"And after that?" Father Stanislaw asked.

"I wandered for three days through those mountains. The length of time had appropriate religious overtones, don't you think? Of course, I didn't realize what I was doing. Later, it amazed me that I'd never dropped the camera. I don't know how I lived or where I slept or what I ate.

"It snowed while I wandered. I'm sure the authorities must have searched the area. But the storm hid my footprints. Was that a lucky coincidence, or another sign from God? I don't remember where or how I went. The next clear image I have is a village low in the mountains, smoke drifting up from chimneys, children skating on an icy pond, horse-drawn sleighs jingling down a road. Postcard stuff. And I later found out that I'd somehow walked a hundred kilometers, which is why the local police never linked me with the murders below La Grande Chartreuse. I collapsed in front of a chalet. An old woman there took me in. She fed me soup and bread and the sweetest pastries I've ever tasted."

"Three days?" Arlene asked. "That's how long you wandered through the mountains? But... "

Father Stanislaw completed her thought. "Your assignment had been two missions in forty-eight hours. The deadline for the second mission had passed."

"At the start, I didn't think about the implications. I was alive, and that in itself amazed me. Not to mention the vision I'd had. The sight of my parents - myself- the circle closing, vengeance leading to... That boy, when he grew up, would hunt for me. When I was well enough to travel, I went to Paris to reach my contact. On the way, I checked back issues of newspapers to find out who my victims had been. The man, it turned out, was an American businessman, an oil executive, who'd brought his wife and son to France for a long-postponed vacation. The papers described the killings as senseless. I agreed. Of course, what you read in the papers isn't always true. But what if... ? I had the feeling that something was terribly wrong. What would an oil executive and his family have to do with terrorism? What motive could possibly justify those killings? I needed answers. I wanted to go to ground. To reach a safehouse. To rest. I guess God's messages hadn't quite come through. I still had some worldliness, and self-centeredness, left in me. That ended soon."

Father Stanislaw pursed his lips. "Because you'd screwed up. And now you were suspect."

Chapter 2.

In Paris, Drew left the train station, blending with the crowd. He walked to the next arrondissement, making sure that he wasn't followed, and only then used a public phone. Perhaps a needless added precaution, but under the circumstances advisable.

He called the number he'd been given when he'd first arrived in France - a week, a lifetime ago. He let it ring four times, then broke the connection and called that number again. The husky male voice that answered in French announced the name of a dress designer shop.

Drew responded in French as well. "My name is Johnson. I bought two dresses for my wife a week ago. One fit, the other didn't. I want a second appointment."

The proprietor gushed, "But yes, we later suspected that something was wrong with the second fit. We tried to contact you, but you weren't available. All we could do was hope that you'd call. We value your business. Can you possibly see us as soon as possible? We'd like to study the dress and find what went wrong."

"I'm free this afternoon."

"As you may remember, we're in the process of moving. Our new location... "

Drew memorized the directions. "Within an hour,'' he said.

The old house was made of stone and covered with vines. It was two storeys high, with smoke swirling from the chimney. A fallow vegetable garden stretched to the left, two barren apple trees to the right. And beyond, the frigid, ice-covered Seine. Despite the ice on the water, Drew heard the subtle hiss of the river's current. He smelled dead fish and sulphurous smoke from factories upriver.

His breath coming out in vapor, he strolled around to the back as if he belonged here. The door creaking, he stepped inside a narrow hallway, smelling French bread, warm and fresh. His mouth watering, he opened a second door that took him into a shadowy kitchen.

He saw steam rise from a kettle on a large iron stove and felt a hand shove him forward while another hand twisted a pistol against his kidney. A third hand grabbed his hair from behind, touching a knife to his Adam's apple.

"You'd better have a fucking good explanation, boyo."

He flinched and tried to turn to see them, but they restrained him. Nor could he speak, his breath knocked out of his lungs as they threw him hard across the kitchen table, frisking him roughly.

He didn't have a weapon. The assignment hadn't called for one, and there'd been no need to go to his cache in Paris. Not that it would have mattered if he had.

"Why are- "

He didn't have the chance to finish his sentence. They dragged him off the table, held him in the air, and let him go. He struck the floor with his face. At once, they jerked him to his feet, thrusting him through an open doorway into a living room. He toppled onto a dusty, threadbare sofa. It smelled of mildew.

The room was brighter than the kitchen. Logs blazed in a fireplace. The dingy drapes were closed. A well-worn carpet covered the middle of the floor. The only other furniture was a rocking chair, a stand-up lamp with no shade, a battered coffee table with circular water stains, and an empty bookshelf. Rectangular marks on the wall, rimmed by grime and dust, showed where pictures once had hung.

He straightened on the sofa, facing his assailants. "You don't understand." His heart pounded. "I was told to come here. I wasn't breaking in."

The tall one hissed. He wore a woodsman's sweater and hiking boots, gesturing with his knife. "No, boyo, you don't understand. We know you're supposed to be here. What we don't know is why the fuck you didn't finish your assignment."

The second man - he had a mustache, massive shoulders, and a brown-checkered sport coat straining against his muscles - held a.22 Hi-Standard pistol with a silencer attached to it. An executioner's weapon. "How much did they pay you not to do it?"

"How did they contact you?" the third man said. In contrast with the others, he sounded genteel. He was thin and wore a business suit. His delicate hands opened a satchel, taking out a hypodermic and a vial of liquid, setting them carefully on the coffee table.

Their questions came so fast that, as soon as Drew opened his mouth to answer the first, he was interrupted by the second and third.

"Did you compromise the network?" the first man demanded.

"How many operatives are in danger? How much did you tell them?" the second man snapped.

"Tell who?"

"If you insist." The third man filled the hypodermic. He pressed the plunger, freeing air bubbles. "Take off your coat. Roll up your sleeve."

"This is crazy." Drew's stomach burned. He shook his head. "All you had to do was simply ask. You don't need all this... "

"His feelings are hurt," the second man said. "He wants us to be polite. He thinks we're here for coffee and croissants." The man flicked the switch on the stand-up lamp. The sudden stark light emphasized the anger on his face. "Just in case you still don't get the message, I want you to see this coming " He clenched fist was suddenly magnified.

Drew's head jolted back against the sofa. His blood tasted coppery. Stunned, he jerked his hands to his mouth. He touched the sticky warmth of his blood, feeling his lips ache and swell.

"Is that polite enough for you? Maybe not." The second man kicked Drew's left shin. Groaning, Drew dropped his hands in pain to massage the leg, and the man punched his mangled lips again. Drew's head snapped back.

"You were given questions to answer," the third man said, his voice reedy, approaching with the full hypodermic. "I'd prefer that we didn't waste time waiting for the amytal to take effect. Please, save me the trouble. Why didn't you finish the job?"