Comes a Horseman (60 page)

Brady squeezed his eyes shut.

“I do; 'course I do.” His throat felt on the verge of rupturing. “But listen . . . if something
should
happen . . . if—”

“We made a fort!” Zach blurted, interrupting.

“Zach, I want you to hear me, okay? There are things I want you to know.”

“I already know.” Speaking too fast, wanting his dad to shut up about
something happening
.

Brady searched for words that would capture his son's attention without terrorizing him.

Before he found them, Zach said: “You love me. And Mom loved me. And I'll be all right with Uncle Kurt and Aunt Kari. And we'll all meet again someday . . . in heaven.”

“Son, I—”

“But I don't
want
that to be where we meet again!” He was nearly yelling. Brady could hear the tears he could not see. Zach sniffed. “Mom's already there! That's enough! No more! Not you!”

Brady could hear Kari in the background, sounding concerned, comforting. There was a bumping sound, something muffled. He expected Kari to come on the line, asking what he'd said to Zach to make him hysterical. Instead, Zach's whispered words floated into his ear.

“You promised.”

“Sometimes, things are just . . .”

“You promised.”

Silence.

He did; he promised. He did not want to leave Zach. And he
could not
leave Alicia. His chest ached with the intensity of an open wound, but it had nothing to do with his physical injuries.

“Zach?”

“Yeah?”

“Can you hold on just a minute? Okay? Hold on . . .”

He set the handset on the bed. He pressed his palm over his mouth and paced to the corner of the room.

This was too hard. Saying good-bye.

He pictured Zach, holding the phone to his ear, listening intently, his heart wedged in his throat.

He loved his son's voice, always had. It was small and innocent. From the time he was in first grade, Zach had read to him. Every day, Brady looked forward to those twenty minutes.

And why was he thinking this? Why now?

He heard Zach reading to him, from Dr. Seuss to . . . more recently . . .

The words filled his mind as though his son were in the room, saying them then and there.

Dylan Thomas. Zach had selected the book of poetry from the school library. Brady had thought it was a little mature for a fourth grader, but Zach read it. And he had asked intelligent questions as well as making astute observations.

His favorite was: “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

“That's about death, right?” Zach had asked.

“That's right. It's about not letting death take you without a fight. Love life enough to shake your fist at death and say, ‘Oh no, you don't!'”

“Did Mom do that?”

“Oh yeah, she loved life.” He had pulled Zach close. “Sometimes the fight is short and sometimes we lose it, but life is always worth fighting for.”

Had he said that? Yes, and even then, after Karen's death, he had meant it.

Fight. Don't give up.

He strode to the bed and picked up the phone.

“Zach?”

“Dad?”

“I made you a promise, and I'm going to keep it if there's any way I possibly can. I have to do something very dangerous. There's no way around it. Somebody's life depends on it. But I'm going to be careful, and I'm going to fight anybody who tries to hurt me. Okay?”

“I just want you back.”

“I want to come back. I love you, son.”

“Love you too.”

“See you later.” And that was the truth. One way or another, it was. He cradled the phone.

Hope. You again? Well, welcome back.

Despair is a merciless tormentor.

It prevents your mind from finding a way out of dark places. It had told Brady his task was hopeless, and he had believed it. But he saw now that it wasn't.

He knew precisely how he was going to conquer the labyrinth and find Alicia.

77

I
t was a few minutes past ten when he pushed through the Gloria's back door into the hotel's rear parking lot. The sun had sauntered away two hours ago, allowing a soft, black blanket to settle over the city. Spots of light from street lamps and porch fixtures radiated against the yellow and red rock of low buildings and the gray of cobblestone, which had been set in place thousands of years before electricity's assault on man's circadian rhythm. He climbed into the Peugeot, fired it up, and burned two semicircles of rubber onto the asphalt. The car bottomed out as it bounded over a curve and into an alleyway that ran behind the hotel, parallel with Latin Patriarchate Street. His head banged against the roof—just another pain. He ached all over: some areas throbbed, others shot daggers through him. He gritted his teeth and ignored his body's pleas for relief and help.

He steered toward the seminary, remembered seeing a five-and-dime in the other direction, and veered in a wide U-turn. The Peugeot's right wheels thumped onto a curb, then off again. A couple, walking hand in hand, backed onto a manicured lawn, though Brady had not brought the vehicle anywhere near them.

Up a block, then into the tiny lot in front of the store. Half-expecting the resistance of a dead bolt, he
yanked
the door open. A brass bell rattled and flew off its hook. It landed in a display of olives, tinkling in protest before lying still. A boy about Zach's age stopped sweeping the floor to behold Brady's entrance.

“Sorry,” Brady said. A quick glance around showed him a store packed with every conceivable touristy desire. “Aspirin!” he called out to the boy, who dropped the broom and zipped down an aisle. Brady followed and grabbed the first bottle he saw with the words “pain reliever.” He ripped off its cellophane seal, uncapped the bottle, and dumped its contents into his mouth. He crunched on the pills and began swallowing the chalky pulp. He strode to a glass-doored cooler, pulled out a can of something, and poured it into his mouth. Aspirin paste loosened from his molars and the roof of his mouth and flowed down his throat. The carbonated beverage he'd selected foamed at the back of his throat and bubbled up into his sinuses. He held it in and swallowed it back.

Grimacing, he found the boy watching him, gape-jawed.

“Duct tape?” he asked, croaking the words. He gulped from the beverage can, asked again, “Duct tape?”

The boy turned his body without taking his gaze off Brady and walked to another aisle.

Brady found the tape and took a roll. He almost snatched up a flashlight and then realized he would not need it, not this time. On the way out, he dropped a handful of bills and coins on the counter.

He was in the seminary's front parking lot thirty seconds later. It was nearly deserted at this hour. He killed the engine in a slot not far from the drive leading to the labyrinth entrance. No light guided travelers down the ramp; it was dark and almost invisible. Watching for pedestrian traffic, thinking he'd rush through the first basement door after someone opened it and coerce his way through the second, he sat in the car and stripped off his shirt. He pulled out a length of duct tape without tearing it off and wrapped it tightly around his torso, where his ribs felt bruised and broken. He wound it around again and again, until he was encased from navel to mid-sternum in a stiff cast of vinyl. He climbed out of the car and bent and twisted until he'd formed enough grooves in the tape to give him some flexibility.

He opened the trunk with the key and in the glow of a small light saw his hope: the bag containing Alicia's CSD. He tugged it out, opened it on the asphalt. In the bowl of the inverted helmet, he found a metal box the size of a modem. This was the computerized brain of the CSD, he knew. It would mount like a belt buckle at his waist. Another box was the device's hard drive, for recording crime scene walk-throughs. He could not care less about chronicling the next hour, but he did not know if the CSD required information stored on the hard drive to function properly, so he hooked it up. He pulled out the helmet and discovered an assortment of attachments stored in the case around and under it. After some experimentation, he found a spot on the helmet for everything. He turned the now-heavy contraption in his hands and nodded; it coincided with his memory of it on Alicia.

His heart leaped when he could not squeeze into the CSD's gloves and armbands, which contained buttons that controlled the helmet's lighting and heads-up display. Finally, he wriggled into them, ripping only one seam. He hoped the vest, which acted as wiring harness and accessory mount, and the helmet were not as customized to Alicia's smaller form as the gloves and armbands were. He slipped them on with no problem.

Reassured, he pulled off the helmet. He returned the CSD bag to the trunk. He leaned through the Peugeot's front door and retrieved the Kimber and the duct tape. He taped the grip of the gun, played out a foot of tape, and wrapped the end around his right wrist. He squeezed the strip of tape between his wrist and the gun into a tight cord. He held out his arm, watching the gun dangle. With a snap of his wrist, the pistol was in his hand. He would be able to operate the CSD controls without fumbling with his weapon.

Donning the suit reminded him of every place the German had punished him, even through the dulling effect of the analgesic. He stood erect and drew a deep breath. His lungs were tight under his taped torso, but the sharp pain from his battered ribs was no longer a distraction.

Leaving the car keys under a floor mat, he shut the door and the trunk lid, picked up the helmet, and trudged down the drive. In the eight or nine minutes it had taken him to tape himself and suit up, no one had approached Scaramuzzi's lair. He wondered if the place closed down at night, or if the organization it housed limited its errand running to daylight hours to reduce the chance of detection.

At the metal door, he hoisted the helmet and lowered it over his head. He seated it into the O-ring that rested on pads over his shoulders. Blackness. No displays, no lights indicating the status of the device. He remembered that the faceplate was opaque; the suit had to be powered up to activate the pixels that allowed the wearer to either see through the faceplate or view other images, depending on the CSD's settings. He didn't understand the technology, but Alicia had tried to explain it to him once. He recalled her saying the vest contained two battery cells, located above each kidney. Alicia had said that each charge was good for five hours of heavy use. She had charged them after the Ft. Collins walk-through—he remembered working around the charging unit as he made piles of crime scene photos and reports in Alicia's hotel room. But he had no power and no CSD.

Don't give me this!
he thought, instantly on the brink of panic.

He wiggled the helmet, shifted it around. He felt it slide easily in the groove of the O-ring. He rotated it, felt resistance, pushed harder. There was a
click
as it snapped into place. Light flickered in his eyes, and he was looking out through the helmet's faceplate. Instead of darkness, however, he could see the metal door and the stone bricks around it and the keypad box as well as he had in daylight. He recognized the day-for-night quality from the laptop display of Alicia's walk-throughs. Spending as much time as he had with those walk-throughs, he knew the high-tech gadgetry he now controlled—a DNA MEM microchip for rudimentary microanalysis of biological material left at a crime scene, infrared for thermal imaging, infrared and deep-ultraviolet laser to see . . .

His mind jumped from the academic to the practical. He flipped open the keypad box beside the door. Same design as the keypad on the inner door: rubber, lighted from behind, laid out like a telephone's numeric pad. He glanced at his left forearm and positioned the fingers of his right hand over the CSD's controls. He focused on the keypad once more. His index finger touched a button on the suit. A white-hot light blasted against the keypad and wall and bounced back into his face; the concave screen in front of his eyes dimmed to compensate. Instinctively, he snapped his head around to survey the upward slope of the drive. Bright as day, but he knew it wasn't optically adjusted to allow him to see in the darkness: he had activated the helmet's intense halogens. Anyone within sight would think a bonfire was blazing beside the seminary. He pressed down with his index finger again. The lights dimmed away; the screen reverted back to day-for-night mode.

He waited without moving for a full thirty seconds.

Then he saw the flashing blue lights, flittering on the trees, against the wall of the seminary, growing brighter by the second.

78

F
ather Randall sat at a small table among the street vendors and their carts. Even at this late hour, the vendors displayed their wares, hoping to catch the tourists whose body clocks had not caught up with local time. All around him hung colorful scarves, quilts, and rugs. He particularly enjoyed watching the flicker of the lighted cloth stars that more closely resembled Chinese lanterns than novelties from the Via Dolorosa. Gentle violin chords drifted from the open doorway behind him. His friend Nissim Ben-David's daughter playing, becoming quite adept. He sipped from a china cup of milky almond tea—his favorite treat in all the world. It always calmed him, and this evening, he needed calming. In the past few days, Luco had become a loose canon, ordering Pip's murder and now, he understood, actually kidnapping one of the Americans who'd come to investigate crimes in their country.

He set down the cup and glanced at his watch. He could spare only a few more minutes in this tranquil environment. The Gathering would start soon—with a pseudo-mass officiated by Luco himself. Randall felt a headache coming on just from thinking about that atrocity. Beforehand, he wanted to catch Luco to discover his intentions for the Americans. He hoped they weren't as nasty as he suspected. He let his lids fall down over his eyes. The music felt like a breeze on his cheek.