The Fraternity of the Stone (39 page)

The shadow reached into his coat, pulling out a key. Drew hadn't known quite how to act, but now he followed his instincts, deciding to play it casual. Good buddy time.

"Hey, Mike." His voice echoed.

The shadow turned, on guard, toward this dark corner.

"What?"

"Hey, don't get panicky," Drew said heartily. "It's your old classmate. Drew. I've been waiting to talk to you. Man, I'm in trouble. Please, you've got to listen. I need your help."

Mike stiffened, staring toward the darkness. "Drew?"

"Remember those Colorado jack rabbits Hank Dalton made us use for target practice at the school? How Hank's dog used to eat them?"

"No. It can't be you." There was fear in Mike's voice.

"How about that coffin Hank used to keep our guns in?"

"Christ, it is!"

"Good to see you, man."

"But how did you find me?"

"I'll tell you later. Right now, you've gotta help me. Find me a place that's safe. Man, I'm in shit."

"Oh, sure, I'll help. The thing is, who else is with you?"

"With me? Why would - I just told you. Who'd be with me when I'm in trouble?"

"Yeah?" The shadow glanced around nervously.

"How many years has it been?" Drew asked. "Enough to make us wonder where our youth went, huh?" He took a chance and stepped from the darkness, holding out his hand in greeting. "For God's sake, will you help me out?"

"You're sure nobody's with you?"

As Drew came closer, Mike's likeness to him became more unsettling. "With me? What makes you keep asking that?"

"Because, good buddy" - Mike held out his hand and grinned - "it's been so long that - "

"Yeah?"

"- I heard you were dead."

Mike lunged in Drew's direction. Heart thumping, Drew crouched protectively. Boards suddenly clattered behind him, from the end of the alley where he'd been hiding. Startled, sensing a trap, Drew pivoted sideways, ready to defend himself not only from Mike but from men who'd been guarding Mike in case Drew showed up. I walked right into it! Drew thought in alarm.

But no one lunged from the end of the alley.

Instead, Mike seemed as startled as Drew. Freezing in mid-attack, staring toward the clattering boards, he seemed convinced that Drew had lied about being alone. Jerking back, on guard against unseen assailants, he cursed and swung around sharply, racing toward the opposite end of the alley, unaware of the Irish setter that emerged from the dark to nose at something beneath the boards it had toppled.

Chapter 12.

Drew scrambled in pursuit. He had to keep Mike in view. His lungs burned, but he knew that in this maze of alleys, courtyards, and tunnels, Mike needed only seconds to make Drew lose him. Mike knew all the twists and turns. He'd no doubt scouted the place for dozens of emergency places in which to hide. Mike ducked around the alley's corner. Wary, Drew pulled out his Mauser. Mike might continue running away - or he might stop abruptly, taking Drew by surprise as Drew charged around the corner after him. Drew had to reduce his speed, cautiously rounding the corner, using up precious seconds. He didn't think Mike would have a handgun on him. Why would Mike take the risk of destroying his cover if someone happened to bump against a gun beneath Mike's coat in a throng of students leaving class?

But a knife? Mike could easily carry one. A stiletto in his boot, or a pocket knife. No one would question that. For that matter, Mike didn't need any weapon except his hands. Like Drew, the man could kill with one sharp blow to the chest or the larynx.

But Mike didn't attack as Drew crept around the corner. Instead, Drew saw him racing down the continuation of the alley. His chest heaving, Drew rushed after him. Even in the shadows, he had a sufficient target to shoot at. But he didn't dare. Not only because of the noise, the commotion it would cause, a crowd, the police. But because he might kill Mike instead of wounding him. And Mike had to be kept alive to answer Drew's questions.

Mike charged around another corner; Drew followed. Beyond a courtyard, its gaslamp hissing, he saw Mike veer past a greenhouse made from storm windows, then sprint inside an imitation English manor. Now Drew could rush ahead again. As he entered the building, he bumped past a man coming through a door to the left. The man toppled back inside his apartment, sprawling hard on the cracked linoleum floor. "Watch where the hell you're - !"

Drew didn't hear the rest. He was already through the building's central hallway and banging out the exit door, not worried that Mike might be lurking behind it because before the door had swung shut he'd seen his double charging ahead across another lamp-lit courtyard. This one had a sandbox and swing set.

The building beyond it was a barn. But instead of darting into it, Mike swung to the right, rushed down another alley, leaped over a bicycle, raced left past a wishing well, and, with a furtive glance behind him, scurried down wooden steps to the basement entrance of a looming Victorian house.

The door creaked as Drew stalked into the basement. He wasn't surprised when he faced another corridor. The floor was earthen, like the one he'd seen earlier. Doors lined the hallway. Only half the dangling bare bulbs were illuminated.

At the far end, Mike lunged through another door. Rushing after him, Drew heard the crunch of broken glass beneath his shoes. He frowned. The earth floor should have absorbed his weight. The fragments of glass should have been squeezed down into the earth instead of cracking now.

The detail troubled him, but he couldn't become distracted. There was too much else to think about. He was gaining on Mike, and in the alley outside this house or in the next courtyard, he had a good chance of catching him. Drew neared the door through which Mike had disappeared.

He aimed the Mauser, pushed the door open, and faced a brick wall directly in front of him. A hurried glance showed another wall on his left, behind the door. He darted right. The door swung shut. His bowels contracted as absolute darkness smothered him. Oh, Jesus, he prayed. Spiders scuttled inside his stomach. Total darkness.

Frantic, he pressed his back against the wall, and though his lungs ached after his urgent chase, he struggled not to breathe. Because the rasp of his breath could now get him killed. Oh, Jesus and Mary. He was trapped inside a black room.

The broken glass on the earth floor of the hallway outside made sense now. Most of the dim bare bulbs in the ceiling out there hadn't been illuminated. Mike, in rushing along the hallway, had hit at the bulbs, smashing them. That accounted for the broken glass Drew had heard beneath his shoes.

The extinguished bulbs had been at this end of the hallway - the approach to the door through which Drew had entered this black room. If the entire hallway had been lit, Drew might have been able to see inside this room and notice where the light switch was and turn it on to find where Mike was hiding. Or maybe Mike wasn't even here. He might have ducked out a now-unseeable door and left Drew to think he was trapped in here with an equally unseeable opponent. Mike might be racing out of the complex by now while Drew tried to guess if he was in danger.

But Drew had to assume that Mike was here. The implications made his heart contract. A completely black room. He knew the situation well - from the black room in the airplane hangar at the Rocky Mountain Industrial School. Fighting in the dark had been their chief instructor's specialty. And Hank Dalton had mercilessly drilled his students in the principles of that unnerving form of combat. But Mike had been trained just as thoroughly. Drew was fighting someone just as good. He was fighting himself.

Chapter 13.

In Colorado, Drew and the other students - including Mike and Jake - had gone to the gym as usual for their first class at 8 a.m. They'd studied the double doors through which Hank Dalton always pushed the gleaming copper coffin. Though proud of their eighteen-year-old maturity, they nonetheless felt the anticipation of children about to play with toys. Soon Hank would open the coffin and give them their weapons, urging them to see who could take apart and reassemble them in the shortest time. Jake was always fast. But Drew and Mike were faster, rivals in this as in everything else, their physical similarities seeming to make them want to test their resemblance in other ways.

That morning, they waited for the class to begin. Fifteen minutes later than usual, Hank Dalton came through the double doors. But without the coffin.

"Outside on the double!"

The sharp edge in his voice made the students think that Hank was angry at them. Anxious not to make him angrier, conditioned to be obedient, they snapped to attention and ran through the double doors, down a corridor, and outside, where they squinted from the morning sun toward an unmarked bus parked in front of the obstacle course. The motor was rumbling.

"What are you gawking at?" Hank barked. "You never seen a bus before?" At once he grinned and scratched his leathery cheek. "It's time for a little field trip. Hustle aboard."

Relieved that Hank wasn't angry, everybody scrambled in, and with Hank himself driving, they left the chain-link fence of the compound, following a dirt road into the mountains.

Two hours later, after a seemingly aimless route, with nothing but pine trees and sagebrush to look at, Hank drove through the open gate of another chain-link fence and parked in front of a corrugated-metal airplane hangar. There were no other buildings. In the distance, a small dirt airstrip cut through the scrubgrass of this small valley.

Not that the students had a chance to study the place. Hank hustled them into the hangar, and that was the last they saw of the sun for what they later learned was twenty-five days.

He shut the door and marched the students forward. They bumped against each other in the dark.

"Having problems with your eyes?" Hank asked. "Well, we'll fix that. You'll soon think the dark is home." He laughed good-naturedly.

Indeed, as their eyes adjusted to the dark, the students glanced around with interest. Helped by hints of light that showed through the cracks in the metal walls, they noticed something large in the middle of the building - so large that it might have been a one-story house without windows.

"Wonder what that is," someone murmured.

"All in good time," Hank answered, directing them toward a shadowy area to the right of the structure. Here they found a row of bunkbeds, each with two dark sheets and one dark blanket, and on top of each blanket, the top and bottom of a plain black garment.

"Pajamas?"

"More or less." Hank's voice drifted out of the shadows. "Strip and put them on. They'll be your uniform."

More puzzled, the students obeyed. Their eyes adjusted further to the shadows, allowing them to see that Hank had changed from his usual cowboy boots, faded jeans, denim shirt, and battered stetson to the loose black pajamas.

"You'd better get some rest now. 'Cause from here on in we'll train at night."

Rest? In the middle of the day? Drew didn't feel tired, and yet he yawned as soon as he stretched out on his bunk.

Abruptly he wakened to Hank's voice echoing from a loudspeaker somewhere in the hangar.

"Rise and shine."

At night?

"He sounds like God," someone said.

Supper - or was it breakfast? - consisted of rice and fish in something that tasted like oyster sauce. It was followed by tea.

The training began immediately. Hank led them to the back of the hangar, where, by feel, they learned that sandbags had been stacked against the wall. Drew heard Hank move, leaning toward something beside the bags, and at once, a pale yellow light came on behind them from the opposite side of the hangar. It struggled through the otherwise absolute darkness toward the sandbags.

Hank shrugged, looking Oriental in his black pajamas. "Even the night has stars. And a moon, though of varying brightness. Unless there are clouds. And then you believe in demons."

Drew's eyes strained, fighting to admit as much as possible of the pale yellow light on the other side of the hangar. He was amazed at how much better he began to see the sandbags against the wall; his imagination learned to add the dimensions concealed by the shadows.

Hank instructed them on the proper way to hold a throwing knife. For hours, he made them hurl the knives against the sandbags. He made them hurl straight razors, Japanese throwing stars, even sticks, ashtrays, and rocks.

The exercise didn't seem to be a rehearsal for killing, though often Drew felt confident that his opponent would have been felled by the deep blow of his knife. Rather, as Hank clapped his hands, the purpose seemed to be the speed with which they hurled the object on command and the accuracy with which the object struck.

"Because you can't know in the dark if your target's dead," Hank barked. "The instant you hear your weapon hit, you've got to assume your enemy's been distracted and - "

But the "and" was apparently for the next day - or night, given the reversal of their normal schedule - because Hank interrupted himself to correct the throwing stance of one student.

He made them turn their backs to the sandbags. Now, when he clapped his hands, the group had to pivot in order to throw.

He shouted commands about their balance, the need to keep their feet spread - not too much, just the width of the hips. And to keep their legs bent, so their knees -in that flexible position - could act as a better pivoting mechanism. They learned to hunch slightly forward, so their hips could help the body twist better.