The Fraternity of the Stone (52 page)

"But how many Gods can there be? The Ayatollah thinks his God is the one and only. The Hindus think theirs is. The Buddhists. The Jews. The Muslims. The Catholics. The Protestants. The aborigines who pray to the moon. God sure gets around. And He sure seems to want a lot of killing. How many millions have died for Him? You say history's the record of God's will? To me, it's an uninterrupted sequence of holy wars. And each side was absolutely certain it was right! Totally confident that if they died for their faith they saved their souls! Well, how many true causes can there be? How many heavens? Last night, Uncle Ray told me that to stop the Ayatollah, he considered it justifiable to make the Ayatollah seem to be attacking the Catholic Church. The priests who died, he said, would achieve salvation because of their unknowing sacrifice. Ray didn't even believe in God, yet he used religion to defend his actions. Madness. Religion? Save us from the sins we commit in the name of religion."

Father Stanislaw shuddered. "Then you vindicate the Ayatollah?"

"No more than I vindicate you. Or Ray. To kill in self-defense I can understand. I've done it myself in the last two weeks. But to kill for the sake of a principle? That's inexcusable."

"Then we don't disagree."

Drew felt his heart pounding. "How can you say that?"

"Because we protect the Church," Father Stanislaw said, "it is self-defense."

"The Church shouldn't need protecting. If God stands behind it - or any other religion - He'll make sure it survives. Without violence. He sent you a test. You failed. I told you, I'll pray for your soul."

Drew walked away.

"I'm not finished yet!" Father Stanislaw said.

Drew kept walking.

Father Stanislaw followed. "You can't refuse my offer!"

"I did." In the shadows, gravestone led to gravestone.

Father Stanislaw kept after him. "There's something I haven't told you."

"It won't make a difference."

"Remember, I said this ring was almost identical to Richard's? The ruby's the same. The gold band and setting. The insignia. The intersecting sword and cross."

Drew passed a mausoleum.

"But there's a crucial difference." Father Stanislaw walked close behind him. "The stone tilts up. And beneath the stone, there's a tiny compartment. Within, there's a capsule. The poison is instantaneous. Because if one of the order should ever be captured, he must guarantee that no outsider can threaten us. Our secret must be kept. I can think of no other instance in which suicide would be justified. Surely you understand what I'm telling you. If we're prepared to kill ourselves to protect the order's secret, we're prepared to go to other extremes."

Drew continued through the dark.

"My friend, if you don't stop right now and agree to join us, I'll be forced to kill you. No outsider can ever know about us."

Drew didn't turn. "You want me to make it easy for you? I'm supposed to try to fight? So you'll feel justified? Like hell. In the back - that's how you'll have to kill me. And you'll be doing me a favor. Because if I die refusing you, I'll have a good chance of saving my soul."

"Don't force me to do this," Father Stanislaw said. "I've grown to like you. Even to admire you."

Drew didn't stop.

"Your choice is final?"

Walking, Drew studied murky tombstones.

"Very well then." Father Stanislaw sighed.

"You know I'm not a threat to you. I'd never tell."

"Oh, certainly, I have no doubt. You'll never tell."

Drew felt an icy tickle between his shoulderblades, where the knife or the bullet would strike. Self-defense, he thought. It's not a sin if I protect myself.

The spit of a silenced pistol was terribly close behind him. He dove to the right, scrambling around a marble angel of death, drawing his Mauser.

Instead of another spit, he heard a groan. He reversed his direction, spinning the opposite way around the angel, risking exposure to fire.

The risk was needless.

Father Stanislaw sagged toward the grassy mound of a grave. His silenced pistol went off. With a muffled report, it tore up grass on top of the grave. He fell across the grass, his head toward the gravestone. Trembled. And lay still.

Drew tensed, scanning the darkness.

A shadow moved. He held his breath, crouching.

The shadow emerged, coming closer.

Jake.

EPILOGUE:

'AND FOR YOUR PENANCE... "

THE WANDERERS

Chapter 1.

An hour later, Drew entered the townhouse in Beacon Hill. "We'd better get going," he told Arlene.

She seemed surprised. "Right now?"

"Our business is finished. It's safer not to stay in town."

The woman who'd taken care of Father Stanislaw asked if the priest would be returning.

"No. He's been called away on an urgent matter. He asked me to thank you for all your kindness. He thanks your friends and the man who lent us this house. I've put the sports car in the garage." Drew gave her the keys to the car and the house. "May God be with you."

"And with your spirit."

"Deo gratias."

Chapter 2.

"What's going on?" Arlene demanded. "Why the rush?"

In the night, Drew walked with her around the corner.

She stopped, confused, when she saw where the Oldsmobile was parked. "But you said Father Stanislaw had been called away."

"In an ultimate sense, he was. He's dead." "He's what?"

"Someone shot him." Drew gestured toward the Oldsmobile's trunk. "The body's in there." "Shot him?" "Saved my life." "But who?"

Drew opened the passenger door. Jake grinned. "Sis, how about a hug?" She burst into tears.

Chapter 3.

Jake had changed little. His mustache was still as red as ever, his hair thick, crinkly, and red, his forehead high, handsome. He wore outdoor clothes. Hiking boots. A nylon pack sat beside him.

"They wanted my death to look like an accident - to keep you from asking questions, Sis. I was supposed to take a fall while I was climbing. They forgot how good I am." Jake grinned. "I made the idiots with me take the fall and got my ass away from there."

"I wish you'd told me. You could have sent a message to me somehow and let me know where you were, so I wouldn't worry."

"But suppose they questioned you? If they gave you amytal, even though you're my sister, you'd have had to tell them where I was the same as they used amytal to make me tell them Drew was still alive and in the monastery. I couldn't risk contacting you. I kept checking for news about a hit on the monastery. Nothing in the papers or on television. I started to wonder. Had something gone wrong with the hit? Had Drew survived? I couldn't go to you, Sis, but I knew there was one place Drew would go if he was out. Maybe not right away, but eventually. The same place I found him in seventy-nine."

"My parents' graves."

"And now we're together," she said. But for how long? Drew wondered.

Chapter 4.

Leaving Boston, they drove the Oldsmobile back to Pennsylvania, to Bethlehem, to Arlene's Firebird where they'd left it at a long-term parking garage. The journey, three hundred miles, took most of the night. Along the way they stopped near the grave of Stuart Little to bury Father Stanislaw in the dark on a cold, high, wooded slope.

Before they covered the body, they removed his priest's clothes, a St. Christopher medal around his neck, and his ring. As Drew had done when he'd lowered Uncle Ray's body into the Bay, he silently recited the prayers for the dead. Maybe God is truly forgiving, he thought. Maybe He makes allowance for those who worship Him too fervently. As a gentle rain began to fall - possibly in blessing - Drew turned away.

In Bethlehem, at 4 a.m., Arlene roused a sleepy garage attendant, redeemed her Firebird, and followed Drew and Jake in the Oldsmobile to a secluded bank of the Lehigh River. In the rain and dark, they pushed the priest's car and its weapons down a steep embankment into a deep part of the river. With its windows open, the car sank quickly.

Drew pulled Father Stanislaw's ring from his pocket, traced his finger along the intersecting cross and sword on the ruby, and hurled it far out into the river. In the gloom, he never saw where it disappeared.

The rain fell harder, obscuring dawn. They headed east, crossing the Delaware River into New Jersey, where finally exhaustion forced them to pull in at a roadside rest area. Drew slept fitfully, squirming from nightmares, until the blaring horn of a passing semi-truck startled the three of them fully awake, upright, just after 11 a.m. Weary, anxious, they continued eastward.

Throughout the afternoon, the news on the radio repeated the details about the attack on Uncle Ray's mansion, and his mysterious disappearance. A former intelligence official, committed to fighting terrorism, he was rumored to have been kidnapped, killed by terrorists in reprisal for his lifelong vendetta.

A separate story from State College, Pennsylvania, announced that the body of a man found four days ago in the cellar of a student rental complex resembled photographs of an international assassin known as Janus. Preliminary reports revealed that this mercenary had been using various cover identities, including that of Andrew MacLane, a member of a disbanded government anti-terrorist group, who'd disappeared in 1979. MacLane, it was theorized, had been killed by Janus because their coincidental resemblance allowed Janus to assume MacLane's identity. Hunting MacLane, a dead man, the authorities would thus be misled from the actual target of their search.

Taking turns driving, Drew, Arlene, and Jake reached New York and waited until night before scouting Twelfth Street. The brownstone was not being watched. Drew wasn't surprised; with Uncle Ray gone, Risk Analysis destroyed, and Janus exposed, there'd be no reason for anyone to stake out the house. Neither Drew nor Arlene had given their names to Opus Dei. The fraternity didn't know that Father Stanislaw was dead. Arlene could not be linked to Risk Analysis. Nor to Drew. Nor Drew to her. Going in seemed safe.

But cautious by nature, they entered the brownstone through a building on Eleventh Street, leaving that building's rear, crossing a narrow garden in a walkway where Arlene had once tried unsuccessfully to grow flowers.

The kitchen smelled musty. Arlene opened windows, checked the refrigerator - she'd thrown out anything that would spoil before she'd left to go to Satan's Horn, at the start of her search for Jake - and opened several cans of tuna that she kept in the cupboard.

"You still won't eat meat, huh?" she kidded Drew.

He didn't smile at the tease. "It's the last habit I kept from the monastery."

Not quite.

Jake seemed to understand. "I'd better leave you two alone."

Chapter 5.

Drew glanced across the table toward Arlene.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

He didn't answer.

"Do I make you nervous?" she asked.

"How could you possibly make me nervous?" He smiled and took her hand.

"Because I made you promise when this was over we'd talk."

He remembered the promise and sobered. "Yes, we'd talk."

"About the future. Us. I don't want you to feel any pressure," she said. "I know you have to make a lot of adjustments. After six years in a monastery. But there's something we used to have. To share. It was special. Maybe one day we can have it again."

"One day," he echoed dismally.

"Do you want to go back to the monastery? Is that what you're trying to tell me?"

"No. I won't go back. I can't."

"Can't?"

He couldn't bring himself to explain. He'd promised when this was over they'd talk. But he couldn't subdue his apprehension that this wasn't over. Explain? Ruin what might be their last peaceful moments together? Instead, he walked over, embracing her.

Without a word, they went upstairs to her bedroom.

And at last made love.

He felt no guilt. What Arlene had once said was true: His vow was really one of celibacy, not chastity. Given the Church's attitude toward communal property, a member of a religious order wasn't so much forbidden to have sex as not to marry. The restriction was legal, not moral, to prevent a wife from wanting to share what her husband worked for, the Church's assets.

Otherwise, the restriction was only one of self-denial. And at the moment, weary, heartsick, Drew didn't care about self-denial. It occurred to him that two human beings who chose to give comfort to each other, to ease each other's pain, couldn't possibly be committing wrong.

Naked, his body against hers, feeling her warmth, her lean, lithe, muscular response to his thrusts, her breasts and pelvis returning his thrusts, hard yet soft, demanding yet giving, he felt a completeness in himself.

The feeling was sensual, yes. Erotic, yes. But it was more. For beyond the physical pleasure, this sharing of each other cast away his loneliness, his anguish, his sense of imminent doom. In this long eternal instant, he no longer felt damned.

But eternity was shattered. The present cruelly insisted as Drew heard the phone ring.

He pivoted from Arlene's body, staring toward the phone on the bedside table.