Thriller (20 page)

was just plain scary. Instead, she opted for late-night TV, counseling and rigorous exercise. Still, it was easy to see why Audra

might need medication.

The pills gave Maura something to work with. Assuming

Audra was in therapy, her shrink might know about Alec. The

problem would be getting the doctor to break professional confidence. Perhaps, she thought, smiling savagely, Dr. Simon

Rubenstein had a son.

She glanced at her watch. There were nine hours left. Pocketing one of the empty pill bottles with Rubenstein’s office address, she slipped outside through the basement door, and

disappeared into the cool mist of the early-morning woods.

Hack left a small shoe box, per Maura’s instructions, at the Holiday Inn reception desk. He knew David well and had no trouble honoring her request. Once inside her car, Maura transferred

the loaded .38 special to her jacket pocket. Hack, always slightly

paranoid and as eccentric as he was brilliant, had a small arsenal hidden around his apartment. In addition to the gun, he had

information in the form of printouts regarding Alec Meadows.

Meadows had no actual studio or warehouse in his own name

or the name of his company, and his office in downtown L.A.

didn’t sound like a place David would be kept. Also included was

a list of twenty properties in southern California owned by people named A. Meadows. One of them, Hack had circled—perhaps a cabin of some sort, he noted, in the Los Padres National

Forest north of Ventura. It was owned by an A. R. Meadows—

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Alec’s initials. She checked a map and estimated the drive there

and back would be five hours. There were eight left before the

surgery.

Dr. Simon Rubenstein had an unlisted home number, but

Hack was working on finding it and his home address. Meanwhile, Maura went to the shrink’s office in Hollywood, only a few

blocks from George’s surgicenter. The building was locked. She

could hang around and wait for Rubenstein, or go with the only

lead she had—the place in the mountains.

She called George at home, at the office and on his cell, but

got only machines. Dr. George Hill, plastic surgeon to the stars,

was never out of touch. He was avoiding her, and that meant he

was still ambivalent as to what he would do when the moment

of truth came. She left testy messages on each of his phones, letting him know in no uncertain terms what his life would be like

if anything happened to their son because of him. Then she

filled up the tank of her Camry and headed toward the freeway.

It took a stop at a Los Padres Forest ranger station, and some

blind luck, but finally, nearly two and a half hours after she left

L.A., she pulled onto Eagle’s Nest Road, two miles west of Frazier Park. She had just four and a half hours to find David.

Number 14 was painted on a piece of wood nailed to a tree.

The house, a cabin, just as Hack had suspected, was a tiny, ramshackle place with junk in the dirt yard—hardly the sort of property the Meadows were likely to own. Maura parked down the

drive and approached through the woods. At the edge of the

clearing, she took the .38 from her pocket. At almost the same

moment, she felt a gun barrel pressed firmly against the back of

her neck.

“Drop it!” a bass voice growled. “Now, turn around. Slowly!”

The gun was a hunting rifle with a telescopic site. The man

was huge—six-six at least, with a dense red beard. Maura looked

up at him defiantly.

“Where’s my son?” she demanded.

“Lady, the only son you’ll find around here is mine. Luanne?”

154

A frumpy woman came into the yard, hand in hand with an

unkempt two-year-old.

Maura felt ill.

“Is your name Meadows?” she asked, her voice hoarse and

shaky.

“
Ambrose
Meadows if it’s any business of yours. Now, what’n

the heck are you doin’ here?”

One hour.

Devastated that she had rolled the dice with her drive to Los

Padres and lost, Maura drove back to L.A. in heavy traffic. Her

pistol was back in her jacket pocket. Calls to her ex-husband’s

various lines brought no response except the answering service.

“Perhaps you forgot,” the operator said firmly, “but Dr. Hill

doesn’t allow any calls to the surgicenter while he is operating.”

Maura groaned. It was the great doctor’s crowd-pleasing policy that every patient was his only patient. She made no attempt

to threaten the woman, but instead cut into the breakdown lane

and sped back to Simon Rubenstein’s office building and ran up

three floors to his office. A man she assumed was Rubenstein,

squat and egg bald with a kind, wise face, was just locking the

door behind him.

“Dr. Rubenstein?”

“Yes?”

“I have a gun. Please step back into your office or I swear I’ll

shoot.”

If the psychiatrist was the least bit frightened, it didn’t show.

He turned the key the other way and held the door open for her.

Maura escorted him to his back office and closed the door behind them.

Thirty minutes.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” she said, “but I need help.”

“I don’t carry any drugs, but you don’t look as if that’s your

problem.”

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Maura took out the letter from the kidnappers and handed it

to him. He read it thoughtfully.

“I snuck into the Meadows estate and found prescriptions

with your name on them. But before that, I was in hiding when

Alec Meadows raped his wife. He’s behind this. Either he wants

to hurt his wife or discredit my ex-husband. She’s due to be operated on in just a few minutes, and I don’t know where my

son is.”

She had begun to cry.

“Please put the gun down,” Rubenstein said with calm force.

“Have you gone to the police?”

“It said not to. I…I thought I could find David before—”

“And do you know if Dr. Hill will disfigure Audra as this note

demands?”

“I…I don’t know, I really don’t. Now, please, the surgery’s

scheduled to begin in just a few minutes.”

“I believe I can help you,” Rubenstein said, “but first you

must trust me and somehow stop the operation. How fast can

you cover four blocks?”

Maura knew that George was as meticulous about his surgical schedule as he was about everything else. Stunned by what

Rubenstein had shared with her, Maura vaulted down the stairs

of his office three at a time, and out onto the street, dodging

through dense pedestrian traffic like a halfback.

It was exactly four when she reached the gleaming glass-andwhite-brick surgicenter. The doors were locked, the foyer dark.

Without hesitating, she kicked in a plate-glass window, punched

out the shards and clambered inside. The operating rooms were

at the rear. One was in action.

“Mrs. Hill, you can’t go in there,” a nurse said as Maura

rammed through the O.R. door. It was 4:05. Audra Meadows

lay draped on a brilliantly lit table, her face prepped with antiseptic.

George, the Emperor, gowned, masked and gloved, stood be-
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side her, a large syringe poised in his hand. There was another,

similar syringe on the stainless-steel instrument tray. One of

them probably contained some sort of anesthetic. The other?

“Maura!” he cried. “What the—?”

Ignoring him, she raced over to Audra. The woman’s eyes

were rheumy from pre-op medication.

“Maura, you can’t be in here,” George said.

Ignoring him, Maura bent low beside his patient.

“You poor baby,” she whispered. “I know what’s been happening, Audra. I know and I’m going to help you. Everything is

going to be all right. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I…understand.”

“Okay. Now tell me, where are you keeping my son?”

George shook his head in disbelief.

“I can’t believe Audra Meadows would want to do this to herself.”

The police had called with reassurance that a SWAT team had

picked up David exactly where Audra said he was being held—

in a friend’s little-used cottage in the hills above Malibu. The man

she hired to do the kidnapping and guard David was under arrest, as was Audra, herself, although a judge had already promised Dr. Rubenstein she would be remanded to his service for a

full evaluation.

“Her psychiatrist called it complex post-traumatic stress disorder,” Maura explained. “Since well before her marriage she’s

had a pathologic love/hate relationship with her sadistic husband. He’s the one who forced her into having all those surgeries. I guess the years of sexual and mental abuse finally pushed

her over the edge. She believed if she were disfigured, Alec would

reject her, and then she’d be free. Maybe she just couldn’t deal

with cutting her own face or even hiring someone to do it, or

maybe she thought that with your skill, no scar was permanent.”

A young detective entered the room, motioning for George.

“Dr. Hill, I need to take a statement from you.”

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George got up to follow the detective and Maura stopped him.

“George,” she said, “you had one syringe in your hand and I

saw another on the tray. Were you going to go through with it?

Was the one you were holding filled with alcohol?”

George smiled. “Well, Maura, what do you think?”

He then turned and walked away.

The Brotherhood of the Rose
is a special book for David Morrell. It was his first
New York Times
bestseller. Later, it was the

basis for an NBC miniseries. The “rose” in the title refers to

the ancient symbol of secrecy as depicted in Greek mythology. Clandestine councils used to meet with a rose dangling

above them and vowed not to divulge what was said
sub rosa
,

under the rose. The “brotherhood” refers to two young men,

Saul and Chris, who were raised in an orphanage and eventually recruited into the CIA by a man who acted as their foster father. Having spent time in an orphanage himself,

Morrell readily identified with the main characters.

When
Brotherhood
was completed, Morrell so missed its

world that he wrote a similarly titled thriller,
The Fraternity

of the Stone
, in which he introduced a comparable character,

Drew MacLane. Still hooked on the theme of orphans and

foster fathers (Morrell thinks of this as self-psychoanalysis),

he wrote
The League of Night and Fog
in which Saul from the

first thriller meets Drew from the second.
Night and Fog
is thus

a double sequel that is also the end of a trilogy. Morrell intended to write a further thriller in the series and left a deliberately dangling plot thread that was supposed to propel

160

him into a fourth book. But his fifteen-year-old son, Matthew,

died from complications of a rare form of bone cancer known

as Ewing’s sarcoma. Suddenly, the theme of orphans searching for foster fathers no longer spoke to his psyche. Morrell

was now a father trying to fill the void left by a son, a theme

later explored in several non-
Brotherhood
novels, especially

Desperate Measures
and
Long Lost
.

These many years later, Morrell still receives a couple of

requests a week, wanting to know how the plot thread would

have been secured and asking him to write more about Saul.

When this anthology was planned, Morrell was specifically

asked about a new
Brotherhood
story. He resisted, not wanting to go back to those dark days. But Saul and his wife,

Erika, returned to his imagination and refused to leave. The

plot thread—an unexplained attack on Saul’s village—has

been tied. Perhaps both Morrell and his readers will now

find closure. There wasn’t room to include Drew and his

friend, Arlene, but fans will sense them, unnamed, in the

background.

One other element is included, too—for what would a

Brotherhood
story be without the Abelard sanction?

At the start, Abelard safe houses existed in only a half-dozen

cities: Potsdam, Oslo, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Alexandria and

Montreal. That was in 1938, when representatives of the world’s

major intelligence communities met in Berlin and agreed to

strive for a modicum of order in the inevitable upcoming war by

establishing the principle of the Abelard sanction. The reference

was to Peter Abelard, the poet and theologian of the Dark Ages,

who seduced his beautiful student Heloise and was subsequently

castrated in family retaliation. Afraid for his life, Abelard took

refuge in a church near Paris and eventually established a sanctuary called The Paraclete, in reference to the Holy Spirit’s role

as advocate and intercessor. Anyone who came for help was

guaranteed protection.

The modern framers of the Abelard sanction reasoned that the

chaos of another world war would place unusual stress on the

intelligence operatives within their agencies. While each agency

had conventional safe houses, those sanctuaries designated

“Abelard” would embody a major extension of the safe house

concept. There, in extreme situations, any member of any agency

162

would be guaranteed immunity from harm. These protected

areas would have the added benefit of functioning as neutral