Chain of Souls (Salem VI) (27 page)

They climbed out of the taxi and Master Viphop waited for the driver to pull away before he took them to a second taxi and told them to get inside. Master Viphop gave the man directions and they pulled away from the terminal, but instead of leaving the airport, they wound around several of the interior roads and ended up at a smaller building with several private jets parked on the other side.

"You go here," the monk said, and he handed them a slip of paper with an airplane's tail number written down.

"Where are they taking us?" Amy demanded, her voice taking on a hint of alarm.

Again, Master Viphop glanced at the driver and shook his head. "Go," he said. "Hurry."

"But who's paying?" Amy said, still not moving. "We don't have this kind of money!"

"Not worry," Viphop said. "Many, many people pay, and we pray for good thing." He nodded toward John.

John had been sitting quietly and not saying a word. He felt like a man swimming in a huge ocean on the darkest night of the year, but now he turned toward the monk and nodded. "Thank you," he said.

John and Amy went into the small private terminal, showed piece of paper with the tail number to the woman behind the reception desk, who pointed to one of the planes, a small Lear parked at the end of the row. They went outside the rear door and onto the tarmac, where they could see two pilots doing a walk-around check of the aircraft.

As John walked up, one of the pilots turned and gave a welcoming nod. "If you're ready to go, sir, we can be wheels up in ten minutes."

John was surprised to see what he thought was a British Army uniform. He held out his hand. "You are?"

"Major Howard Prentice, sir."

John looked at him in momentary confusion. "Are you here on official business?"

"No, sir. I happen to be a chaplain in Her Majesty's Army, but I'm also licensed to fly jets. I'm on leave. This flight has nothing to do with the British military. It's against regulations to wear the uniform when I'm on my own time, but in this case I thought it might provide a little insurance in case we needed help defusing a difficult situation."

"Like what?"

"I think you'd know that better than I would, sir. Best if we get you and the lady on board so we don't have that risk."

John nodded and went up the steps on to the small jet, and Amy came after. Master Viphop came as far as the top step where he bowed again.

"I wish you great success against all evil," he said, then disappeared out the door and back down the stairs.

A moment or two later Major Prentice and the co-pilot were both back aboard, the doors were closed and the jet was moving toward the end of the taxiway to begin its takeoff. Almost as quickly as they turned onto the main runway, the engines cycled up to full throttle and the plane shot forward. They were off the ground just a few moments later, and John sat back in his seat and closed his eyes. He knew he ought to be feeling a huge measure of relief because there was no doubt in his mind the Coven had more people than just the two in the bathroom whose job it was to try and stop him.

He didn't fully understand what had happened to him at Auschwitz and in the Killing Fields outside of Phnom Penh, but he thought that relieving the torment of those spirits must have been a blow to the Coven all by itself. He also understood that in some way those spirits provided him with the power he needed to face Jessica Lodge. He just hoped whatever power he had was going to be enough to defeat Jessica and bring Sarah safely home.

Amy interrupted his thoughts when she reached out and put her hand on his arm. "I know we have a lot to talk about," she said, her voice soft and tentative.

He closed his eyes as the emotions he had been trying and mostly succeeding in keeping buried suddenly welled to the surface. "Yes," he said.

"I know you're very disturbed that I held things back, but I hope you can understand I thought I had good reasons.

"When were you planning on telling me the truth?" he demanded, finally turning to look at her.

"I wanted to so many times, but I couldn't seem to pick the right moment."

"What about after we made love? Was that about us or was it really just some Wiccan ritual?"

Amy closed her eyes and a tear tickled out of the corner of one eye. "I would never have slept with you for any reason other than wanting to be with you. That came from my heart. Do you believe that?"

John shook his head. "I wish I did. I don't know who anybody is anymore or why they do what they do. I don't trust anybody I see because I wonder if every one of them works for the Coven. I don't know whether you really worked for the FBI, or who Lisa Giles takes her orders from. I don't know who sent this jet to pick us up or who ordered Master Viphop or Rabbi Czarnecki to meet us and take us places.

"Who's pulling the strings? I know somebody is. Are they good guys or bad guys? I don't even know who I am anymore because of the things that have happened to me. I just know I need to get my daughter back, and when that's done I need to sort my life out, starting with getting some honest answers."

"What happened to you back at the Killing Fields?"

"You know what happened," John snapped. "I was invaded by spirits. I don't know how many—hundreds of thousands, maybe millions—and they screamed and cried, and I couldn't stand it."

"And what stopped the screaming?"

John looked at her, feeling his anger and resentment and self-pity all bubbling up and mixing together, and knowing them for exactly what they were, but feeling that he richly deserved to feel that way. "She was there and she forced me to touch the skulls."

"Rebecca?"

John nodded.

"She forced you?"

John pressed his lips together in anger, but finally he said. "She made me trust that it was the right thing to do."

Amy nodded. "I thought it was her. I felt something there."

"I'm tired of trusting, Amy. I've spent my life digging up the facts, and I need to find the facts here."

"What if there are no facts? What if there are just a bunch of beliefs in an un-provable God or gods or Superior Being, and what if those beliefs are all different except in one thing, and that is that they believe in the sanctity of life and in the positive direction of the universe? In other words, they believe in creation and the possibility of love and compassion, as opposed to destruction and hatred. What if that's all you can get?"

"There still have to be people in charge. There's money for a jet, so there has to be some kind of organization."

"What if it's just a few anonymous donors and a loose, informal gathering of like-minded people?"

John shook his head. "I don't believe it. I've never seen anything like that in my life."

"Maybe there's a first time for everything."

John shrugged. Maybe she was right, but part of him cried out for some kind of answer, some sense the bottom line where he was dealing with facts as opposed to supposition and belief. He felt a terrible blast of loneliness, but in the absence of something he could prove to himself, some hard base on which he could sustain a belief in the rational aspects of everything he was doing, he ultimately preferred solitude. "That's not good enough," he said after a few seconds.

He closed his eyes, reclined his seat, and slept for several hours until the co-pilot touched his arm to wake him. "Excuse me, sir, but we'll be setting down in Abu Dhabi for refueling. Be on the ground about thirty minutes and then off again. Have to ask you to sit up and prepare for landing."

John sat up, rubbed his eyes, and looked out the window at the sand-scorched Mideast flatness extending in all directions.

"I'll be getting off here, and there will be a new co-pilot for the last leg into London," the co-pilot said. "And we'll be bringing some food on board. Sandwiches or wraps, mainly, if you have any requests."

John shook his head. "I'll eat whatever you've got," he said, and felt the plane begin to lose altitude as it began its approach toward Abu Dhabi.

The jet came in for a gentle landing, and they waited in the baking heat for the fuel trucks to top off their tanks. The co-pilot got off, and a bearded man got on, bringing a cooler packed with sandwiches, as well as hummus, baba ghanoush, and fresh fruit.

John looked out the window as the plane began to taxi again, his thoughts turning bitter and ever inward. It seemed to him that the parched desert landscape of Abu Dhabi mirrored what he felt inside, his sense of emotional aridity, a feeling as if his connections with other people and even with himself had been scorched away. He felt isolated and untouchable in one sense, and in another as if his sense of self, his individuality had been completely subsumed by the spirits or souls that flowed into him almost like an unstoppable river churning into his mouth and down his throat, the volume impossible to contain and beyond measure yet still pouring into him and into him alone and yet somehow being contained.

As they reached the end of the runway and moved into position for takeoff, Amy touched his arm. "John?" she said.

He turned to look at her, and whatever she saw in his eyes seemed to be all the answer she needed. She pulled her hand away as if she had been burned and turned to look out the opposite window. John looked at her for another second and thought he could see the shiny track of a tear as it slid from her eye and ran down her cheek.

JOHN SLEPT FOR ANOTHER THREE OR FOUR
hours, and woke up again when the new co-pilot tapped him on the arm. "Food, sir?" the man asked, holding out a couple of sandwiches.

John stretched. "How much more time to London?"

"About two hours."

John took one of the sandwiches that was labeled chicken salad. "Thank you," he said as he tore off the wrapping and took a big bite. He took a bag of chips from a proffered basket and also a Diet Coke. As soon as he started eating he realized how hungry he had been and quickly wolfed down the sandwich and the bag of chips.

Amy was sleeping, so he stood up to stretch his legs, went to the bathroom, and on his way back decided to go up to the cockpit. As he started walking in that direction he felt a sudden lethargy, and his body seemed very heavy. He wondered if he'd been sitting on the plane so long that he'd developed a blood clot. It seemed hard to think suddenly, but his brain told him that a blood clot would not make him sleepy.

He went to the cockpit door and pushed it open, needing to tell the pilot that he was feeling strangely ill. When he looked at the back of the pilot's head, at first it made no sense. He saw the small hole in the man's skull and the trickle of blood that ran down to his collar and that had spread along his shoulder and dripped on to floor.

He blinked hard several times thinking his brain wasn't working right because he couldn't be seeing this. He looked over at the co-pilot who had turned to glance over his shoulder.

"Wha—" John said. He was trying to get the question out of his mouth, but his lips and tongue felt like they were covered with glue. "What issss?" he said again, hearing the words slur.

"Change of plans," the pilot said. "Go sit down before you fall down."

John closed his eyes for just a second, but when he opened them again he was sitting on the floor looking up at the copilot. He shook his head trying to clear it, wanting to tell the man that he had expected the Coven to make its move and that he had known that somehow this was supposed to happen, but before he could even try to form a sentence in his mind everything went dark.

He woke up sometime later in the back of a vehicle of some type. His throat was parched, and he had a splitting headache as if he was coming off a very long bender and was horribly hung-over. He felt the road rocking beneath him, heard the bump of tires hitting rough spots in the road. The co-pilot was looking down at him with a placid expression.

"Welcome to England," he said as he brought a hypodermic syringe into sight and stabbed it into John's arm. Darkness returned.

When he woke up a second time he was sitting upright. His head still pounded, his vision was blurred, and he had a sense of heaviness in his limbs as if he weighed hundreds of pounds. He was sitting at a table of some sort and he could make out the shapes of a number of other people facing him across the table.

He closed his eyes very slowly and opened them again, hoping to clear his vision, then he moved his tongue around the inside of his mouth trying to generate enough saliva to speak. "Jessica?" he said, his voice barely more than a whisper and as rough as a shoe being scraped across stones.

"Yes, John."

He closed his eyes again, tried to gauge the amount of drugs that had to be in his system. Some kind of serious tran-quilizer, he guessed. Every motion, every thought felt like it was being dredged through a vat of syrup.

"I guess you were expecting me," he whispered.

"We have known for some time you would show up here."

He nodded, trying without seeming to do so to test his arms and legs, determine how he was bound, and get a sense of whether he could fight the drugs in his system.

"And Sarah?" he rasped. "Is she here?"