The Fraternity of the Stone (32 page)

"You believe that?" Drew glared.

"Apparently you don't."

"There was a time when I would have."

"But?" Father Stanislaw asked.

Drew didn't answer.

"At last," Father Stanislaw said, "We're there. The part I don't know about." He sighed. "After graduating from the Rocky Mountain Industrial School - a remarkable facility, I'm informed - you worked for Scalpel. From sixty-nine to early seventy-nine, you engaged in retaliatory strikes against whatever terrorists attracted your director's wrath. Sometimes, too, the strikes weren't after but before the fact. Preemptive. Made necessary by reliable intelligence reports. Terrorist activities were nipped in the bud, so to speak. Your urge to avenge your parents should have made you even more zealous. What happened? Why did you suddenly enter the monastery?"

Drew glanced toward the floor.

"No. Answer him," Arlene said. "I want to know as much as he does." She turned Drew's face, making him look at her. "What about Jake? Is he involved?"

Drew saw lhe anguish in her eyes. He hated what he had to tell her. "Eventually."

*

PART SIX

CHARTREUSE

MIRROR IMAGE, DOUBLE EXPOSURE

Chapter 1.

"The assignment was complicated."

"When?" Father Stanislaw asked. "Be specific."

"In January of seventy-nine. In fact, I remember feeling puzzled - because I'd never been sent on a mission quite like it before."

Father Stanislaw prompted him. "What made it unusual? Its hazards?"

"No. The timing. You see, I hadn't been given one job, but two, and they had to be completed within forty-eight hours. They were both in France, so that didn't pose a problem, getting from one location to the next within the time limit. The difficulty was the method I was told to use. The same in each case. And in the first job, the geography was troublesome."

Drew paused, distressed, sorting through information, trying to organize it. Arlene and Father Stanislaw watched him intently. At last he continued.

"The other thing that made the assignment unusual was that I didn't get a briefing on my targets. Usually, I was told what the criminal was being punished for. How many innocent people he'd killed. What maniac he was working for. I learned all about his habits, his vices. And that made it easier. It's not hard to kill vermin."

Drew paused again, then resumed. "Sometimes the method of execution was left up to me. Long-range sniping. A car-bomb in imitation of the bombs the terrorists so enjoyed setting off. Poison. Lethal viruses. The method was usually appropriate to the crime. But in this case, the mission had to be accomplished in a certain way. And as I said, there were in fact two missions. With a deadline. Quite unusual."

"That didn't bother you?"

"In Colorado, I was trained not to question orders. And after you've killed as many times as I have, when you think you're justified, you're bothered by nothing. Except... "

Arlene leaned forward. "Tell him everything. How you received your orders."

"I needed a cover that allowed me to disappear at any time for as long as a week without attracting attention. A job was out of the question, too restricting, too many people to account to. But I had to do something. So I lived in a college town and became a student. The cover was easy. I was always good at school. I've always enjoyed taking classes. Liberal arts. Literature mostly. I got a B.A. from one institution, then moved to another and got a second B.A. By then, I was too old to be an undergraduate, so I moved to a third school and got a master's degree. In fact, I have two of them, and I was working on the third when... "

"I still don't see the advantage of that cover," Father Stanislaw said.

"A student can be anonymous. But you have to pick a school that's large. The Big Ten was my preference. A college town, the type where the students outnumber the local population. The students are transient, so if I came to town and stayed for a year or two, then transferred to another school, and then another, well, a lot of students did that - I wasn't unusual. I took only large lecture courses, and I never chose the same seat, so if the lecturer didn't keep attendance records - and I made sure he wasn't the type who did - I wouldn't draw attention when I disappeared for a couple of days.

I've always been a loner, so it wasn't hard for me to resist making friends with other students. The friends I did have, professionals like Arlene and Jake" - he smiled at her- "were all I needed. Between semesters or at term breaks, I went to visit them. At school, I was invisible. The only risk to my anonymity was, I went to a local gym every morning, to make sure I stayed in shape to be able to handle my assignments, and I went to a crowded diner every day at one, a bookstore at four, and a neighborhood grocery at seven."

"Why take the risk? Why those particular places and times?"

"I had to. The times were chosen arbitrarily. The places themselves didn't matter. I could have substituted a movie theater for the bookstore, and a desk at the library for the grocery. What did matter was the routine. So a courier would have several chances to contact me easily and, more important, inconspicuously. At the diner, someone might sit next to me and leave a Canadian quarter as a tip for the waitress. Or at the grocery, a woman might ask for Mexican beer. That would be my signal to go to my apartment as soon as I could. If a dish towel was over the sink, I'd know to look beneath my bed, and in my suitcase, I'd find everything I needed to get to where I was going. Plane tickets, a passport, identification under another name. Cash in various currencies. An address in a foreign city."

"Weapons?" Father Stanislaw asked.

"No," Drew said emphatically. "Never weapons. They were always made available to me from my contact at the foreign address. While I was gone, a lookalike would take my place and keep to my routine. It wasn't hard to make the switch. No one really knew me. Sure, they saw me. Mostly from a distance, though. I was merely part of the scene. The students and the locals didn't know me. That way, with someone doubling for me, a blur at the edge of the crowd, I had an alibi if something went wrong."

Father Stanislaw gasped.

"What's wrong?" Drew asked.

"Don't stop. You're telling me more than you think."

Drew glanced at Arlene. "What does he mean?"

"The pieces are coming together." Her voice was low. "I agree. Keep going. What about the assignment?"

He breathed deeply. "I received instructions to go to France but to do so indirectly, through London, where my double took my place. He went on a tour of literary landmarks - Stratford, Canterbury, that sort of thing, what a graduate student in English would find amusing. I'd been to those sites already, so if I had to account for my stay in England, I could do so easily. But while my alibi was being established, I flew to Paris, using another name, and received my instructions. Above Grenoble in the Alps of France, I learned that there was a monastery."

"Of course!" the priest said. "The Carthusian charterhouse, La Grande Chartreuse."

"A man was scheduled to visit it, I'd been told. His car was described to me. Even the number on his license plate. I was to kill him." Drew bit his lip. "Have you ever been to La Grande Chartreuse?"

Father Stanislaw shook his head.

"It's extremely remote. In the Middle Ages, the founding monks selected its location carefully. They thought that the world was going to hell, which it always seems to be doing. They wanted to get away from the corruption of society, so they marched from the lowlands of France up into the Alps, where they built a primitive monastery. The Pope objected. After all, in the Middle Ages, what was the point of being a priest if you lived in deprivation?

"God seemed to side with the Pope by sending an avalanche onto the monastery, destroying it. But you've got to give the monks credit. They simply moved the monastery a safe distance lower, protected from snow-slides but still secluded from the world. And over the centuries, they built a magnificent cloister. It reminded me of a medieval castle. A mighty fortress for God.

"When the order spread to England, the monks were martyred by Henry the Eighth. Because he wanted a divorce and the Pope refused, Henry formed his own church, made himself its leader, and decreed that the divorce he craved was divinely sanctioned. When the Carthusian monks in England objected, Henry put them to death in the cruelest manner he could devise. They were hanged, cut down near death, disemboweled but left sufficiently alive for them to see their guts being eaten by dogs. Molten metal was poured into their body cavities. Their corpses were drawn and quartered, boiled, then thrown into ditches."

"You describe it vividly," Father Stanislaw said, his voice calm. "What happened at La Grande Chartreuse?"

Drew began to sweat. He could not fight down his emotion. "My assignment was to plant explosives at the side of a winding road that sloped up toward the monastery. The location was carefully chosen. A cliff on the far side. A steep drop on the near side - toward me, where I was waiting on the opposite slope. After I planted the explosives at night, it took me half the next day to climb out of sight through gorges until I reached the opposite bluff. The mountains were thick with snow. A few miles either way, I could have been skiing. If only I had been." Drew shook his head. "But I crouched behind bushes, my boots in the snow, my parka not really warm enough for the weather, and as I watched my breath drift up before my eyes, I studied that winding road. Because soon, my target car wound up toward the monastery. The occupant was sightseeing, you understand. Taking in the local attractions. Of course, he could never have gone inside the cloister itself, never have seen the hermit monks. But he could tour the perimeter and walk through the central court and perhaps provide a generous donation in exchange for a sample of the famous Chartreuse liqueur." Drew felt the cold even now; he heard the squeak of the snow beneath his boots and recalled the stillness in those terrible claustrophobic mountains.

Blinking, he abruptly returned to the motel room, Arlene, and the priest. "I'd planted the explosives on the far side of the road. Against the cliff. The thrust of the blast would send the car toward me, toward the cliff on the side that faced me. And the car, in flames, would fall. But this is the clever part. Someone at Scalpel must have thought long and hard about it. I'd been given a camera. Through its telephoto lens, I was to study the bend in the road that led up through the mountains. And when the car I was looking for came around the bend, when I made doubly sure it was the right car by verifying the number from the front license plate, I was to start taking pictures."

"That's all? Just take pictures?" Father Stanislaw stood and began to pace the room.

"Not quite all. You see, the trigger mechanism on the camera was also the trigger for the explosive. The camera had a motor-driven shutter, designed for rapidly repeating exposures as long as I kept the button pressed down. Click, click, click. The bomb went off. The car veered sideways, toward me. Its gas tank burst into flames. And remember, the shutter kept clicking. I saw a telephoto image of everything. Just as the car began to topple over the cliff, a door in back flew open..."

"And?" Arlene watched him anxiously.

Drew's voice rose. "God showed me a sign. He sent me a message."

"What?" Father Stanislaw roared the word. "You can't be serious?"

"But He did." Drew's voice was suddenly calm. "You believe in the bolt of light that toppled Saul from his horse on the road to Damascus, don't you? Saul, the sinner, who understood at once that God was telling him something, who changed his life that instant to follow the way of the Lord. Well, this was my bolt of light. My sign from God. I'd call it a miracle, except a miracle's supposed to make you feel good and this...

A kid fell out. A boy. I've studied the photographs often. The boy was... "

"What?" Again the voice was Arlene's.

"... identical to me."

She stared at him. "You mean you noticed a resemblance. The same coloring perhaps. And size. Boys at the same age tend to look alike."

"No, it was more than that. I'm telling you the resemblance was uncanny. When he grew up, he could have been my double back at the college. While I went out and killed."

"Executed. Punished. Stopped them from doing it again." Father Stanislaw's tone was harsh. "Speak precisely. Don't exaggerate. You were under stress. You have to make allowance for..."

"The circumstances? For the moment? Listen, the moment is all I think about. That kid... me... tumbling from the car. Horror in his eyes."

Drew fumbled in his pants pocket, yanking out the four wrinkled photographs he'd taken with him from the monastery. He thrust them at Father Stanislaw. Arlene leaned quickly toward the priest to see them.

Drew's face was tormented. "They're all I kept from my former life. Before I joined the Carthusians, I went to every place I'd hidden money, passports, weapons. I got rid of them. I canceled everything about my former existence, erased myself, even to the point of making it seem as if I was dead."

Shuddering, Drew glanced at the photographs. He knew the images by heart. "The one on top is me. In Japan in 1960. It was taken in the garden behind my parents' house. Three days before they were murdered."

Father Stanislaw set it aside.

"The next one," Drew said, "is my parents. Again, the same location, three days before they were killed. The others I took in seventy-nine below La Grande Chartreuse. After I detonated the explosives and the boy fell from the car. I had a section of the boy's photograph enlarged, to show his face. The picture's grainy, sure. And the smoke from the explosion was drifting in front of him, and snow had started to fall. But I think you get my point."