The Fraternity of the Stone (7 page)

Well, what are you waiting for? he asked himself. You want to hang around, go to mass?

The instant the next bolt flashed, Drew charged from the open doorway. At once rain lashed his face. Keeping his ax away from him, he dove to the oozing mud behind a sculpted cedar bush. The rain drenched his robe, soaking frigid through to his skin. Almost instantaneous thunder shook the sodden earth beneath him, Despite the assault on his senses, a portion of his consciousness registered the unfamiliar sweetness of the air, the forgotten sting of the wind - feelings formerly ordinary to him, now powerfully sensual after long seclusion. But he didn't have time to savor them or to realise how much he'd missed them. He pawed at his mud-splattered eyes, studying his next destination. When lightning flashed once more, he'd already braced himself, skittering through slippery puddles, thudding behind a compost heap. Its fetid odor made him gag, yet it too was unexpectedly welcome.

Though the rain was cold, he started to sweat. Where next? His ultimate destination was the brooding forest beyond the garden, but he had to approach it in a zigzag fashion - to a narrow equipment shed, then a watery furrow between rows of harvested corn, their wilted stubble helping to shield him. His heart pounded sickeningly. But he couldn't sprint more than ten feet during any blaze of lightning. He didn't dare remain in motion when the spotter was able to see through the night scope again. Another flash. He darted from the corn rows, sprawling in mud behind a straw-covered mound where potatoes had been grown. He quickly scrunched his eyes shut, protecting them against a fierce new blaze of lightning. When thunder roared, he opened them again. The interval between lightning and thunder was lessening, only two seconds apart, the center of the storm coming closer. Good. He needed all the distraction that it could possibly give to the spotter.

He studied the dark. Blinking through the cold heavy rain, he chose his next cover, a waist-high stretch of raspberry bushes. Lightning gleamed, and he lunged, but slipped on ooze and lost his balance, landing on his face, water spewing up his nostrils, cramming his mouth. He coughed, unable to breathe, rolling toward the raspberry bushes. Darkness enveloped him. He snorted, desperate to clear his nose and mouth.

Had he reached the bushes in time? Had the spotter seen him? Adrenaline spurted into his stomach; his lungs heaved. He shook, exhausted, as if he'd been sprinting for several miles. With his face to the sky, he let the rain wash his eyes, his nose, his lips. He swirled water around in his mouth, released it, then let the rain fill his mouth again and swallowed, tasting its sweetness, luxuriating in the relief to his swollen throat.

He had to keep moving! First to a row of grapevines along a wooden frame.

And after that...

At last he burst through the undergrowth, gaining the protection of the forest. Gobs of mud sagged from his scalp, his face, and his robe. Chunks slid down his arms, collecting on his fingers, plopping onto the dead leaves at his feet.

But he'd been successful. He hadn't been seen by the spotter.

By definition. If the spotter had seen him, he'd be dead by now.

He struggled to catch his breath. I'm out. I'm free. Now all that remained was to push through the forest, to use its cover and get away.

Where to? For a moment, the question stunned him. In his former life, he'd have automatically sought refuge with his network, Scalpel. But Scalpel in the end had become his enemy. To survive, he'd made Scalpel believe he was dead.

Then where else could he turn? A sudden spark of long and forcefully subdued affection told him to get to Arlene. She would help him, he knew. They'd once been lovers. Despite the separation of years, he was willing to risk that because of what they'd shared, he could count on her. And reaching her, he'd also reach Jake, her brother. Jake, his friend.

Yet reluctantly he had to dismiss them. If in the old days his obligation would have been to contact his network, that obligation still existed, but not to Scalpel; instead, to his present network, the Catholic Church. He had to warn the Church about the hit on the monastery. He had to let the Church decide how to deal with the crisis. The Church would protect him.

But with a goal now in mind, he still didn't use the cover of the forest to get away. Instead, he faced the hill behind the monastery, its looming wooded shape made visible by another blaze of lightning. While darkness cloaked him again, he didn't understand his hesitation.

Escape was before him - his chance to get away and warn the Church. Then why did he feel compelled... ?

He stared with greater fierceness toward the hill, realizing what he had to do, a strenuous priority insisting. The spotter. Yes, he had to get his hands on the spotter, to make him talk. The man would logically have chosen a vantage point where the trees would not impede his view. That suggested he'd hide with a clearing before him. But after years of living in its shadow, Drew was quite familiar with the contour of that hill. Even in the darkness and the storm, he could pinpoint the three major clearings at the top of the slope, the three most likely vantage points.

If indeed there was a spotter. He had no proof; he was still assuming.

But there was one way to know for sure.

And one way to learn why the death team had been sent here - to find out who was to blame.

Chapter 23.

The storm intensified. Ignoring the stunning impact of the rain, he stalked through the forest, veering past stumps and deadfalls, aiming toward the greater blackness of that hill.

He clutched his ax so hard that his knuckles ached, reached the base of the hill, and walked in a semicircle around it. At its back, he climbed. Trees thrashed him, their branches bent by the wind. He grabbed at saplings, branches, bushes, anything to pull himself up through the mire.

At the summit, he didn't worry about making noise; the din of the storm was louder than any sound he could have made, even an angry scream. He began to creep, using the shelter of bushes and dangling limbs.

From a careful vantage point, he decided that the trees behind the first clearing weren't being used as a hiding place. He stepped back into the woods and approached the second clearing. Below the hill, despite the shroud of rain, specks of light were visible from the monastery. It probably looked the same as on any other night. Except that it wasn't a monastery any longer. Someone had made it a house of death.

He studied the cover behind the second clearing, decided that it too wasn't occupied, and turned to approach the third, when an unnatural ripple among the trees attracted his attention back toward the second clearing. His nerve ends quickened. Squinting from a flash of lightning, he saw a dark nylon sheet supported at head level like a makeshift tent, its sides and back tilted halfway to the ground to prevent rain from slanting under it. Its four ends were tied to the base of trees, the ropes tugged viciously by the wind. A tall upright stick held up its flapping middle. Of course. A spotter wouldn't have wanted the trouble of carrying even a compact tent up here. But in case of bad weather, a nylon sheet would have taken little room in a knapsack. Not as comfortable as a tent, but comfort wasn't the point.

He had to wait for the next bolt of lightning. The effect was like glimpsing sporadic images caught by a strobe light. Under the nylon sheet, through the space between the low sides and the ground, he saw a man's legs and hips - hiking boots, jeans, a sheathed knife on a belt.

Darkness. Drew crouched to peer up beneath the back of the sheet at the rest of him.

Lightning, and he saw the man's upper torso. Tall and muscular, wearing a knitted watchman's cap, a padded nylon vest, and a heavy outdoor shirt, the colors dull to blend in with the forest. The man peered down the slope toward the monastery. He used an infrared scope - its long, wide outline easily recognizable - mounted upon a bolt-action sniper's rifle attached to a swiveling tripod. With the next flash of lightning, the man turned away from the scope, rubbed his eyes, and drank from a Thermos that he'd propped along with a knapsack in the crook of a tree.

Drew backed off, rain streaking across his face. He glanced at the ax in his hand and decided that he couldn't attack by rushing beneath the tilted back of the nylon sheet. That posture would be too awkward. There was too much risk of his slipping in the mud or nudging the sheet and warning the man.

No, Drew thought, there had to be a better way.

He watched the nylon sheet being buffeted by the wind and nodded, creeping toward the right, toward the rope that attached one corner of the sheet to a tree. He felt the knot and recognized its shape. A slip knot. Strong and dependable, it could nonetheless be easily released by a quick tug on the free end of the rope.

He did so now. His plan was to trap the man inside the sheet and knock him unconscious with a blow from the blunt end of the ax. But instead of collapsing, the sheet was caught by the wind and driven upward, exposing the man to the storm. As lightning shattered a nearby tree, the man whirled in surprise and noticed Drew.

The ax was useless now. Too heavy, too slow. Drew dropped it, lunging, but surprise was still in his favor, for the man seemed startled not only by the upraised sheet but as well by what confronted him - the righteous eyes of a raging monk, his ascetic face an image of terror, his robe so dripping with mud that he might have been a nightmare sprung from the earth.

The hit on the monastery had shown that the team was professional, but even so, the spotter screamed reflexively, and at that moment, Drew screamed as well, the traditional Zen outcry, intended to distract his opponent while helping Drew to focus the strength he released along with the air from his lungs. He hadn't engaged in hand-to-hand combat for years, but his daily exercises, in part involving the dance steps of martial arts, had kept his reflexes tuned. Those dance steps had been practiced for spiritual reasons. But some things apparently could never be forgotten. His prior instincts returned with alarming precision.

To an untrained observer, what happened next would have seemed even quicker than the thirteen seconds it took to occur. Blurred movements would have been confusing, almost impossible to distinguish from each other.

But to Drew - and no doubt to his opponent - the passage of time became amazingly extended. As a champion tennis player paradoxically sees the ball approach across the net with the bulk and lethargy of a beach ball, so these men confronted each other as if they were giants in slow motion.

Drew struck the heel of his palm against his opponent's chest, directly above the heart. The blow should have shattered his enemy's ribcage, thrusting bone splinters inward to impale both heart and lungs.

It didn't happen. Through the heel of his palm, Drew felt at once what was wrong. His opponent's padded nylon vest was so filled with down, or more likely quick-drying Thinsulate, that it had absorbed the force of the blow. A grunt from the man indicated that damage had been done, but not enough to incapacitate him.

Drew's opponent had already braced himself, bending his knees, supporting his back against a tree. Drew had to thrust with the heel of his other palm, this time toward the throat. But his opponent responded. As lightning blinded Drew (but presumably his opponent as well), he sightlessly sought to deflect the blow that he knew would be aimed at his heart.

He'd used his right hand first. So now he thrust his left palm upward, tilting it slightly inward, anticipating that his opponent - having been struck at the heart -would have to respond from the opposite half of his body.

Drew's left palm struck his opponent's lunging right arm at the elbow, dislocating it. The force of the impact caused them both to reel off-balance in the mud. Drew heard the man's groan. His enemy slipped, colliding with him, entangling his dislocated arm in the bib of Drew's muddy robe. The bib was large enough that it could have been used as a sling.

As darkness returned, they found themselves locked together, chest to chest. Drew smelled the garlicky sausage that the man had eaten. The unfamiliar stench of meat was nauseating.

He pushed, then braced himself, his enemy pushing back. They skittered one way, then another, sliding across the mud, their breathing strident.

Drew felt his opponent reaching backward, groping for something on his hip.

He remembered.

The knife sheathed on his opponent's belt.

Prepared to grab for the hand that would hold the knife, Drew frantically changed his mind. He had to strike sooner. He needed a weapon.

The weapon was close at hand. Oblivious to the significance he grabbed the crucifix that dangled on a chain around his neck. He clutched Christ's head and rammed the long slender base of the crucifix up his opponent's widened right nostril.

The storm unleashed its full fury. As if condemning what Drew had done, the sky blazed with so many jagged bolts of lightning that Heaven itself seemed fractured.

The man wasn't dead. Drew hadn't expected him to be. But such an invasion to a bodily orifice would produce shock. Predictably, the man straightened in agony, wailing, beginning to shake. Amazingly, his survival mechanisms continued to function, his free hand lunging with the knife.

Still locked against the shuddering body, Drew parried the knife, its blade slicing through the sleeve of his robe, and jabbed the web of skin between his thumb and first finger up hard against the man's throat, hearing the windpipe crack.

Lightning struck beside him, disintegrating the nearest tree. The roaring brilliance stunned him, lifting him off his feet. While splinters lanced him, he and the man were thrown from the forest. They tumbled into the clearing, rolling down the slope, twisting over each other, now Drew on top, now the man, thumping to a stop against a boulder. Drew gasped from the impact. Straining to disengage the man's arm from his robe, he peered down at the gloom-obscured face, touched the vein on the side of the neck, and realized that the man was dead.