The Brotherhood of the Rose

by David Morrell

  As soon as he’d shut the door behind him, he checked the ceiling for a hidden camera. Satisfied, he opened the tray. The handwritten message was coded. Translated, it told him, Santa Fe phone booth. Sherman and Grant. He memorized a number. Shredding the message, putting it back in the box, he took a Mauser from the tray and tucked it beneath his jacket behind his belt at his spine. He pocketed the two thousand dollars he’d left here for an emergency.

  6

  While the businessman ate his salad, he stared through the window toward the bank. The blue cheese dressing tasted stale. A Ford van stopped before him at the curb, blocking his vision. Sunlight glinted off the windshield.

  The businessman swallowed nervously. Come on. Hurry up. Get that damned thing moving.

  Standing, he peered beyond the van, reached in his pocket, and pressed the transmitter button three times.

  Remus was leaving the bank.

  7

  Chris put the Santa Fe map in his pocket as he stepped in the phone booth at the intersection of Sherman and Grant streets. Cars rushed by. Shoppers paused at the windows of trendy boutiques. He shut the door and muffled traffic noises. Though he didn’t smile, he felt amused, assuming this location with its combination of street names—Civil War generals—had been chosen by Saul as a joke. We’ll soon be together again, he thought. His chest swelled, but he couldn’t allow his eagerness to distract him. Putting coins in the slot, he dialed the number he’d memorized. A recorded voice told him the time was 2:46. If an enemy had subdued Chris and forced him to reveal the message in the safety-deposit box, the man would have been baffled by the significance of hearing the time. Unless he’d kept Chris alive to question him further, he couldn’t have learned that the specific time meant nothing. Any hour would have been important, the announcement a signal to Chris to study the walls of the phone booth. Among the graffiti, he found a message to Roy Palatsky, a boy he and Saul had known at the orphanage. He glanced away at once. In case, despite his precautions, he was being watched, he didn’t want to betray his fascination with the graffiti. In code, the obscene message told him where to find Saul.

  8

  “He made a call,” the businessman said on the scrambler-protected long-distance line. “He must have received directions. We could pick him up now.”

  “Don’t. A call’s too obvious.” Eliot’s voice sounded thin and brittle from his Falls Church, Virginia, greenhouse. “These two men have private codes dating back to when they were five years old. That call was likely a bluff to tempt you to show yourselves. What if all he learned were directions to go to another spot where he’d learn still other directions? Don’t interfere with him. The only way to capture Romulus is to follow Remus. For God’s sake, don’t let him see you.”

  9

  Chris flew higher, skirting a cloud bank, watching the mountains below him. Snow-capped peaks, connected by saddlelike ridges, stretched as far as he could see. Ravines splayed down in all directions. He put the rented Cessna into cruise mode while he studied a topographical map, comparing its contour lines with the rugged terrain below him. Valleys alternated with mountains. Streams cascaded.

  On the wall of the phone booth, the coded message had given him numbers for longitude and latitude, as well as instructions how to get there. He’d gone to the Santa Fe library, where he’d learned that the coordinates referred to a section of mountain wilderness to the north, in Colorado. Renting this plane at the Santa Fe airport had been easy. He’d used the alias on his pilot’s license, had paid a deposit and bought insurance. He’d filed a flight plan to Denver, telling the rental company he’d return in three days. But once in the air, he’d gradually veered from his flight plan, northwest, toward the coordinates in the wilderness.

  The sky was brilliant. He felt good. The cockpit muffled the engine’s drone. He compared a deep long valley to a similar pattern on the map and glanced ahead toward another valley, oval, with a lake. His coordinates met near the lake. He’d almost reached his destination. Checking the sky around him, pleased that he saw no aircraft, he smiled and thought of Saul.

  At once he attended to business, slipping on his bulky parachute. The plane soared closer to the valley. Aiming toward a mountain beyond the lake, he locked his controls on target, opened his door, heard the roar of the engine, and felt the surge of the wind. He had to struggle to brace the door against its force.

  Pressing his shoes against the lower section of the plane, he leapt out past the wing’s strut, twisting, buffeted. His stomach rose. Gusts of air pressed his goggles against his face. He couldn’t hear the plane now. All he heard was the hiss as he fell—and a roar in his ears. His helmet squeezed against his skull. Clothes flapping, arms and legs stretched out for balance, he fell horizontally, facing the abrupt enlargement of the landscape. The lake grew. But he quickly achieved a sense of stasis, blissful, almost anesthetizing. If he closed his eyes, he no longer had the sense of falling. Rather he felt suspended, floating, relaxed. In jump school, his instructors had warned him about this deceptive, dangerous sensation. Hypnotized by the almost sexual massage of the wind, some jumpers waited too long before they pulled their ripcord.

  Chris understood the attraction. He’d been apprehensive before his first jump, but from then on, he’d looked forward to the pleasure of the others. Now his pleasure was moderated by his need to be with Saul. Eagerly he pulled the ripcord, waited, felt the chute unfold from his back and the lurch as the nylon blossomed, supporting him. He hadn’t worried about the chute. Last night, after buying it from the local jumpers’ club, he’d spread it out, arranging the lines before he packed it. He’d never have trusted someone to do that for him any more than he’d have let someone clean a weapon and load it for him. Swaying in the wind, he glanced toward the peak beyond the lake and saw the tiny outline of his plane approaching the mountain he’d aimed it toward. He gripped the parachute lines and leaned to the right, angling away from the lake, veering toward a meadow. He saw a cabin above a slope of pines, braced in the V between two cliffs.

  The meadow enlarged abruptly. As he settled down, it seemed to swoop toward him. With a jolt, he hit, the impact shuddering through him as he bent his knees and toppled sideways, absorbing the shock along his hip, his side, and his shoulder. The chute billowed in the wind, dragging him across the meadow. He surged to his feet, tugging the chute lines, pulling them toward him while he rushed to meet the nylon hood and compact the chute, restraining the wind’s resistance.

  “You’re out of practice,” a husky voice said from the shelter of the pines.

  Recognizing it, Chris turned, feigning irritation. “What the hell? You think you can do it better?”

  “I sure can. I’ve never seen a crummier landing.”

  “The wind was against me.”

  “Excuses,” the voice said. “The sign of an amateur.”

  “And criticism’s the sign of an ungrateful son of a bitch. If you didn’t have so much to say, you’d come out here to help me.”

  “Definitely not the tough guy I used to know.”

  “Tough or not, I’m the closest thing to a brother you’ve got.”

  “No argument. Even with your faults, I love you.”

  Chris’s throat ached with affection. “If you’re so damned sentimental, why don’t you show yourself?”

  “Because I can’t resist making an entrance.”

  A husky dark-haired man stepped slowly from the forest. Six feet tall, solidly muscled, with chiseled chin and cheek and forehead, the man grinned, his dark eyes glinting. He wore high-laced boots, faded jeans, and a green wool shirt that matched the pines. He carried a bolt-action Springfield rifle. “Eight years, Chris. God, what’s the matter with us? We never should have separated.”

  “Business,” Chris said.

  “Business?” Saul answered, the word tinged with disgust. “We let it ruin us.”

  Eager, Chris hurried toward him, clutching his folded parachute. So much to know, to say. “What’s happened?
Why are they trying to kill you?”

  “Business,” Saul said again. “He turned against me.”

  “Who?” Chris had almost reached him.

  “Can’t you guess? The man we figured never would.”

  “But that’s impossible!”

  “I’ll prove it to you.”

  But suddenly only one thing had significance. Chris dropped the parachute, staring at Saul’s rugged handsome face. Hardly able to breathe, he opened his arms and hugged him. Straining, they seemed to want to crush each other’s chest and back and muscles, to absorb each other’s life.

  He almost wept.

  Their embrace was interrupted. Turning, they peered through a cleft in the pine trees toward the explosion that echoed through the valley as the plane Chris had flown disintegrated on the mountain.

  10

  “No, you’re wrong! He’s not against you!” Chris held his parachute, helmet, and goggles, running up the game trail through the pines. “He asked me to find you!”

  “Why?”

  “To help you! To bring you in!”

  “Why?” Saul asked again.

  “It’s obvious. The mole kept intercepting Eliot’s instructions to you.”

  “Mole,” Saul scoffed. “Is that what Eliot told you?”

  “He said the only way to bring you in safely was for me to act alone.”

  “He couldn’t find me, but he knew I’d try to get in touch with you. He set you up to lead him to me.”

  From the shadowy woods, Chris saw the cabin brilliant in the sun, small, its long walls chinked with mud, its roof slanting up toward the merging V of the cliffs behind it. “How’d you find this place?”

  “I built it. You chose the monastery. I prefer this cabin.”

  “But it must have taken you—”

  “Months. Off and on. After every assignment, when Eliot sent me to Wyoming or Colorado, I slipped away and came back here. I guess you could say it’s home.”

  Chris followed across the scrub-grass clearing. “You’re sure no one knows about this place?”

  “I’m positive.”

  “But how?”

  “Because I’m still alive.” Saul glanced toward the valley’s far horizon. “Hurry. We don’t have much time.”

  “For what? You’re not making sense.” Puzzled, Chris left the sun’s glare, entering the musty shadows of the cabin. He had no chance to appreciate the simple handmade furniture. Saul led him past the sleeping bag on the floor toward the back wall, opening a roughly planed door. Chris felt the cool dank air of a tunnel.

  “It’s a mine shaft.” Saul pointed toward the dark. “That’s why I built the cabin here. A den ought to have two holes.” He turned to the fireplace. Striking a match, he lit the kindling beneath the logs in the hearth. The kindling was dry, but the logs were wet with sap. The flames spread, sending thick smoke up the chimney. “I probably don’t need the smoke. No harm in being sure, though. Leave your chute,” he told Chris. “Here’s a flashlight.” Saul led him into the tunnel.

  In the flashlight’s beam, Chris saw his frosty breath. Timbers supported the roof of the tunnel. An old pick and shovel lay against the wall to the left. A rusted wheelbarrow leaned on its side. Saul touched a dull glint of metal in the moist cold stone. “Silver. Not much left.”

  The flashlight showed the end of the tunnel. “Here. We have to climb.” Saul squeezed through a niche in the rock. He reached up, wedged his boot in a crack, and scrambled out of sight.

  Chris followed, scraping his back in the narrow cleft. The stone felt slimy. He had to put the flashlight in his pocket. Then he realized he didn’t need it. Above, a narrow beam of light attracted him in the dark—a long way up. Saul leaned toward an outcrop above him, blocking the light. When Saul shifted, Chris could see the light again. “You think I was followed?”

  “Of course.”

  Chris reached for a rock. “I’m sure I wasn’t.”

  “The surveillance team would have been the best.”

  The rock broke from Chris’s hand, rumbling down the niche. He froze. “But nobody knew I was looking for you.”

  “Eliot did.”

  “You keep blaming Eliot. Next to you, he’s the only man I trust.”

  “Exactly. Your mistake. Mine too.” Saul’s voice was bitter. His silhouette disappeared beyond the narrow shaft of light.

  Chris scrambled higher. The beam of light became larger, brighter. Sweating, he squirmed from the niche and lay on a funnel of weathered rock, its smooth slope warmed by the sun. He peered toward Saul, who crouched above him, shielded by sagebrush, concentrating on the valley. “But I saw no other planes.”

  “Around you,” Saul said. “Sure. But above you? A spotter plane at forty thousand feet? The pursuit team would have held back, flying slowly, out of sight. Till they got instructions.”

  Chris crawled to him, hunching beneath the sagebrush. “You set me up,” he blurted angrily. “You could have met me anywhere.”

  “That’s right. But here, with elaborate precautions, you’d be convinced. I had to prove it to you.”

  “Prove what?”

  “I think you know.”

  Chris heard a far-off drone—then another and still others, louder, amplified by the echo of the towering cliffs. Through a distant pass, he saw glinting specks swoop nearer. Choppers. Hueys. Four of them. He flashed back to Nam and muttered, “Jesus.”

  Below him, smoke swirled from the cabin’s chimney. Across the valley, the Hueys roared closer, assuming attack formation. The lead chopper fired a rocket. Exhaust whooshing, the missile streaked down, exploding in the clearing before the cabin. Earth flew, the blast stunning. The other choppers soared nearer, releasing rockets.

  Above their rush, Chris heard the repeated cracks of fifty-caliber machine guns. The cabin blew apart. Concussions thundered through the valley. The choppers swooped closer, strafing the crater where the cabin had stood. Even on the bluff, Chris’s ears throbbed.

  “Two failed attempts against me. This time they’ve got to make sure.” Saul clenched his teeth.

  The choppers pivoted from the flaming wreckage, skimming the tips of the pine trees, hurrying toward the meadow beside the lake. Blades glinting, they hovered twenty feet above the meadow. A rope flipped from each, dangling toward the grass. A man wearing pale outdoor clothes, an automatic rifle slung across his back, appeared at an open hatch. He gripped the rope, rappelling to the ground. Other men, like spiders from dragonflies, slipped down from other ropes. In the meadow, they unslung their rifles, spreading in a semicircle, their backs to the lake. “By the book,” Chris said.

  “They’re not sure we were in the cabin. They have to assume we’re still a threat. How many?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Check.” Saul pointed. Chris saw a man in one chopper lower a dog in a sling. A German shepherd. A second dog descended from another chopper. On the ground, two men stopped aiming their rifles and squirmed back to free the harnesses from the dogs. Relieved of their cargo, the choppers retreated to the far end of the valley.

  Every elite corps preferred a different breed. The Navy Seals used hunting poodles. The Rangers liked Dobermans. “German shepherds. Special Forces.” Chris’s throat felt dry.

  The dogs ran with the two men toward the trees. The other men aimed, ready to provide covering fire. A group of four darted toward the trees, then five and another five.

  Chris scanned the trees, waiting for the men to appear. “We don’t have a chance. All I’ve got is this Mauser. You’ve got just that bolt-action Springfield. Even if we were properly armed—”

  “We won’t have to fight.”

  “But those dogs’ll track us into the tunnel.” Chris turned toward the basin behind him, watching the niche from which he’d climbed. “The men’ll find where we went. They’ll order the choppers to strafe this bluff. Then they’ll climb up here and finish the job.”

  “Believe me, we’re covered.”

  Chris opened his
mouth to object, then froze as Saul gestured abruptly toward the trees. A man stepped out, presumably inviting shots so the other men would have a target. As the decoy approached the smoking wreckage, a second man showed himself, then a third. “They’re feeling confident. The dogs must have followed our scent directly to the cabin.” Saul watched the lead man point toward the wall of rock behind the shattered logs. “He’s found the tunnel.”

  “We have to get out of here.”

  “Not yet.”

  “For Christ’s sake—”

  Five men joined the first man. Cautious, they came near the cliff. From the top, Chris couldn’t see them now. Droning, the choppers continued hovering in the safety of the far end of the valley. Saul squirmed back, pausing at the smooth rock funnel that sloped down to the niche. Careful not to show himself, he listened. Chris frowned, puzzled.

  Saul abruptly grinned and pointed toward sounds from the niche. Chris didn’t understand why Saul seemed pleased. Then he did as Saul pulled a radio transmitter from his pocket, pushing a button.

  Bracing himself, Chris felt the earth shake. A roar burst up from the tunnel. Spinning, he peered toward the cabin’s wreckage below the cliff. Chunks of rock flew across the clearing. Dust swirled.

  “Six down, ten to go,” Saul said.

  “You rigged explosives in the tunnel.”

  “Eliot always said make sure you protect your escape route. Now I’m turning his rules against him. Have I convinced you he wants to kill me?”

  Chris nodded sickly, staring toward the trees below him. The other men ran from the pines toward the rumble of falling rock in the tunnel. “No one else knew I was looking for you. He used me.” The implications made his stomach feel like ice. “He tried to kill me too. Goddamn it, why? He’s like—”