by Brian Lumley
The room had. filled up; there was an air of nervous anticipation, expectancy, imminent action. Trace struggled upright unaided, might have fallen (or at least made out that he might), found Amira beside him, holding him up. He said, ‘That’s, uh! OK,’ and shrugged himself free. Three swaying paces took him to the table. He sat heavily, slowly turned his head to scan the others already seated. Two of them were in wheelchairs, seemed only half-conscious. No need to ask who they were, but Trace checked them out anyway.
One would be Greek and the other Turkish, he knew that much, but it didn’t help him decide which was which. Dressed in robes the same as his own, they even seemed of a similar design to Trace, though much darker, of course. And he felt a certain grim satisfaction: the same man, Khumeni, might well indeed be father to all three. But he wasn’t. Amira sat beside one of them, spoonfeeding him and ignoring her own food; the man called Lou looked after the other one. Then there was Decker, seated at the far end of the table.
The thug with the panama sat on Trace’s left; his hat lay in his lap now while he slurpingly cleaned up a bowl of soup. Two other men cut of much the same cloth sat to the right of Trace, completing the scene. Khumeni didn’t join them but went to stand beside the window while they ate, his back to the room; the house-boy ran to and fro bringing food and drink.
Trace deliberately continued to act half-crippled throughout the meal and wasn’t required to speak to anyone; but in any case, there wasn’t a deal of conversation. He noticed Amira’s eyes on him from time to time – frowning? Perhaps his act was fooling her, too. But while it must have appeared that he ate slowly and with difficulty, in fact he was packing as much food inside him as he could comfortably hold. Something told him he was going to need all the strength he could muster.
Finally Khumeni adjusted shades until the light was dim, turned from his window, began to speak:
‘You are all my guests in this venture,’ he husked without preamble. ‘Until tonight, anyway. For tonight – ’ he shrugged, ‘– I have a little business in the desert – following which all of you will be paid according to previous arrangements. Gentlemen – ’ he paused briefly to nod in Amira’s direction. ‘Excuse me, and Madame, of course – we are going on a “dig”! I know the spot intimately, also that great wealth lies below. Something of that, too, shall be yours for your troubles, if it is all I expect it to be.’
Liar! thought Trace. That’s the same patter you dished out in 1936! And it had more or less the same effect: there was a sudden hush, an intense silence, only broken when the man with the panama tossed his spoon down clatteringly upon the table. ‘Buried treasure?’ he said, his voice harsh with greed. And the way he had said it, it had not been a question but a statement of fact.
Khumeni’s eyes blazed on him. ‘That which I seek is my business. No more interruptions, if you please … When we are finished here – that is, when I have done with talking to you – you will all prepare to leave. Be sure to take everything you brought into this house out with you, leave nothing behind. We travel thus: myself in the ambulance, with Mr Decker driving. Miss Halbstein will attend to her three charges in the body of the vehicle. Mr Lou Gabella and friends will bring up the rear in the ex-Army landrovers standing at the side of the house. They are not in bad order, these vehicles, and carry spares. The way is not long, but the country is rough and I want no breakdowns or emergencies; therefore we travel slowly, at between twenty-five and thirty miles per hour. There may well be military check-points along our route, so have your papers ready. However, I expect no trouble and will not invite any; if you have weapons, please rid yourselves of them as soon as we are in the desert. Only Mr Vittori will retain his weapon, a machine-gun which we have already hidden away in one of the landrovers.’ He paused, looked pointedly at the sour-faced man with the panama. This must be Vittori; he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, nodded his acknowledgement.
‘When we get to the nunnery,’ Khumeni continued after a moment, ‘we shall lock its sweet sisters of mercy away in one of their own dormitories, make ourselves comfortable and complete certain precautionary measures. Then we wait for the fall of night before moving on to … the secret place. Then, too, we shall have the additional pleasure of the company of Professor Halbstein, who has been of great assistance to me. He too shall be specially rewarded. However, two of you will be required to stay behind at the nunnery until we return. Someone must guard the Mother Superior and her brood.’
‘Not me!’ said Decker and Gabella almost simultaneously. They had already been seduced by the thought of treasure. Vittori was hot on their heels: ‘I’m coming, too,’ he growled.
Watching Khumeni’s face, Trace thought he saw his eyes light up in a smile,-as if someone had thrown a log on a low-burning fire. ‘Very well,’ he slowly nodded, ‘then it’s decided: Mr Rosco and Mr Lancing will remain at the nunnery.’
The two men on Trace’s right remained silent, staring back at Khumeni where he gazed at them quizzically. ‘You are satisfied to remain behind?’ he finally queried.
‘No comment,’ one of them shrugged at last. ‘We’re pros, been in this game a long time. We been paid already, good money. You rip people off – or try tao, or even get the urge to – and sooner or later you gets ripped off. Honour among thieves, you know? We do what you say.’
Khumeni nodded. ‘Very well. And of course there shall be something for you from the spoils. Now, are there any questions?’
Only two or three hundred! thought Trace.
‘No? Good! Well then, let’s be at it. I want to be out of here within the hour, and at the nunnery near Bethsaida by two-thirty.’ He turned away, loped quickly across the room and out of a door, was gone …
At 2:25 P.M. exactly, the gates to the house with the high-walled gardens were opened and the ambulance, followed by a pair of drab, grey-green landrovers, exited in clouds of dust. The sun, glancing off the vehicles’ mirrors, windows and one or two polished surfaces, glinted blindingly in the eyes of an observer where he watched from the parapet of a minaret in Jenin three-quarters of a mile away.
Dressed in combat clothing and wearing the insignia of a Colonel in the Israeli Army, he lowered his binoculars, rubbed at his eyes for a moment and turned to a Captain who stood beside him. ‘That’s them. Get on the radio and pull out any check-point personnel or border-patrols on their route. Pull ’em back, out of the way. I don’t want any interfering with them. Then radio the nunnery and let them know what’s happening. They’ll know what to do …’
‘Yes, sir!’ The Captain saluted, ducked through an arched doorway into a small circular room, spoke urgently to the signalman seated there at a table bearing his radio.
The Colonel stayed on the parapet, again trained his binoculars on the tiny convoy, listened to his orders going out in the clipped jargon of radio-procedure. He frowned and pursed his lips. Three vehicles like a trio of dusty beetles, one big one and two little ones, crawling in the blazing sun. Three very important beetles, with a very important cargo. But what was it? The Colonel sucked his teeth, held the binoculars with one hand, patted his right-hand breast pocket, just to be sure his orders were still in there and he wasn’t dreaming all of this. Talk about weird tasks!
His orders had come direct from the C-in-C himself, but he was only obeying a joint-instruction, co-ordinating and answering a joint plea. And the counter-signatories to that were – simply unbelievable! It was only a scrap of paper, of course, and the Colonel’s copy only a photocopy at that – but he would dearly love to keep it, if only for posterity. He couldn’t keep it: the papers were Top Secret and when the job was finished they must be destroyed. But … oh, those signatures!
Among them had been those of the Israeli premier himself, the Archbishop of Canterbury, His All-Highness the Dalai Lama, Masaki Shan, the One Priest of Ko-su-Ku on Hokkaido, even the Pope! Strange indeed, devilish strange. But the Colonel would have to let it go at that – without ever knowing just how close he’d been …
For Trace the first half of the trip went well enough, but the rest of it was a nightmare. He had wondered why he and his ‘brothers’ were made to lie on mattresses on the floor of the ambulance, but he wasn’t kept wondering for long. Somewhere along the way, shortly after Nazareth, which the little convoy skirted, decent road turned first to dirt track then to boulder-strewn scrub and desert as they toiled up into foothills and headed for the heights north of Galilee. Trace was fairly well able to look after himself and hang on to the various fixtures, bat Amira was kept more than busy attending to her two.
There was little or no opportunity for talking, not with the vehicle rattling and bouncing about like this, and certainly not with Khumeni sitting up front. Where the way was especially difficult he would look back, scowling through the tinted partition, but other than that he stared straight ahead and studied the terrain. And so, finally, they came to the lonely nunnery where it looked down across the Sea of Galilee, only a mile or so from those ancient ruins which were once Bethsaida.
Bethsaida. Yes, and the Lord had cursed that place, too: Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum. A trinity of doom. And now Trace wryly wondered: for what they had harboured in His life, or for what He had known they would harbour in some distant future – this present time – when His life if not His work in the world was finished? For now Ab, Guigos, Khumeni was come here again; them and all the others he had been and was, returned to the holy land once more and for the last time to renew himself.
By the time the ambulance trundled to a halt, its inside was unbearably hot. Then, when Decker came and let down the ramp at the rear, Amira was glad to be able to climb out into sweet fresh air rising from the lake. Finally the four Mafia types came and carried out Trace and the other two into bright but pleasingly cool daylight; wheelchairs were unfolded and all three ‘invalids’ seated in them; now Trace could look about and get some sort of idea where he was and what the country looked like.
In fact the view was wonderful, quite awesome, and Trace was actually sorry he wasn’t better able to enjoy it. Rising from the valley of the lake below, a cliff of raw yellow rock extended in a slow curve for miles east and west, gradually bending into the walls of a basin about the lake’s contours. Weathered at its rim, the cliff had been rounded into massive domes of rock, between two of which the nunnery seemed suspended over a scree and pebble-strewn slope that gradually grew steeper until, far below, the cliffs went sheer to the lake.
Monks and nuns, thought Trace, of whatever denomination; all of them seem to have this predilection for high, near-inaccessible places …
The convoy had fetched its halt on a sort of levelled plateau, slightly higher and set back from the dizzy front. Rough, low walls of uncemented stone protected unwary wanderers against approaching its rim too closely. From the plateau down to the nunnery’s single arched entrance in an olive-shaded enclosure where a spring. welled up from the rock, wide shallow steps had been hewn from the dome itself. And standing at the head of those steps, her forearms crossed in front of her waist and disappearing into the wide sleeves of her habit, the Mother Superior smiled on all and waited as the beast at last stepped forward to introduce himself.
‘Khumeni,’ he said, extending a hand from the sleeve of his brown robe. ‘George Khumeni.’
‘Our benefactor,’ said the Mother Superior, still smiling - but she made no attempt to take Khumeni’s hand. And then Trace noted that her smile seemed frozen on her face, as if painted there. Khumeni noted it, too.
He quickly turned from her, cast anxious eyes at the rocky slopes and ridges all about, peered closely at the dust and grit of the levelled area where the vehicles were parked. In the shadow of his cowl, his eyebrows came together in a frown over his ravaged nose. He turned back to her, questions growing on his lips –
- Which she at once cut off with: ‘You are all welcome here. I am Anna Chinnova, the Mother Superior, and the sisters are all waiting to meet you below.’ But still she made no attempt to offer her hand.
Khumeni was nervous, alert, on guard. He lifted his head and sniffed the air sharply, loped this way and that, several paces in each direction, for a few seconds. And then again he turned to her and asked: ‘Are there others here? Have others been here – recently?’
‘Others?’ she raised her eyebrows. ‘Your friend Professor Halbstein is here, but – ’
Khumeni ignored her, turned to his men. ‘There’s something here I don’t like. A feeling. Something has been wrong ever since we left Jenin. No barriers on the roads, no patrols. Too easy altogether! Vittori, get down there and find Halbstein. And you – ’ he grabbed Anna Chinnova’s arms, shook her, ‘– what outside communications do you have? A radio? A telephone?’
‘How dare you!’ she gasped, struggling free of his grip. Brown eyes in her cream face grew cloudy with anger. ‘Are you mad?’
‘Telephone!’ Khumeni snapped again, his voice changing, becoming clotted and guttural. ‘Where is it? Take me to it at once!’ He turned to his party. ‘The rest of you, get these three below – and see no harm comes to them.’ Again he grabbed the Mother Superior’s arm. ‘Lead on!’ he commanded, half-pushing, half-dragging her down the steps.
Vittori had gone ahead with his short-barrelled machine-gun, unfolding its skeletal metal butt as he raced down the steps. At the bottom he’d rounded up a dozen indignant nuns under the olive trees, then left them crowded there to run into the nunnery. As Khumeni and the Mother Superior reached the bottom, Vittori reappeared with a bearded, slender white-haired man of about fifty-five years of age. Amira’s father.
Khumeni nodded a curt, sour greeting, said to Vittori: ‘Now search for a telephone or radio – and if you find one or both destroy them!’ He rounded on the muttering Italian nuns. ‘You lot – a dozen of you, I see, like brainwashed disciples – be quiet!’ And to his men: ‘Get them inside, lock them up.’ He pushed Anna Chinnova after them. ‘This old cow, too!’
He shouted more instructions, and leaving the three men in their wheelchairs under the olive trees, his hired thugs hurried to obey. Only then did the beast turn his attention to Amira and her father where they hugged and patted each other. Trace was seated close enough to hear what he said:
‘These men of mine are paid for, bought,’ Khumeni gurgled, quietly threatening, ‘and so they will do exactly as I say. I fear no treachery from them. But you two, father and daughter both, were coerced. I know you fear and hate me, and I know why – because you know me! Well, know this, too:
‘If you have done anything to interfere with my plans I shall see to it that you die slowly and in ways you cannot possibly imagine! Is that perfectly clear? Is it understood? Good! Then help me get my sons inside.’
Inside the nunnery Trace and his ‘brothers’ were wheeled down stone corridors and through stone rooms to the front, and out on to a balcony that looked out over the Sea of Galilee. As soon as they had been left alone and the door was closed on them, Trace got up, limped to the balcony’s ornate stone wall and looked over it - and immediately wished he hadn’t. The view was vertiginous. There was nothing below but thin air, and far, far down, rocks and water. Trace could climb like a monkey but he wasn’t a fly! Even if he had thought to make an escape, this wouldn’t be the place to try it.
Then he tried the stout wooden door and found it locked, finally turned his attention to the other two where they sat in their wheelchairs. They were awake now but still looking very rough. They didn’t look much – considering they were sons of the antichrist! He spoke to one of them, who looked at him blankly, sickly, opened his mouth and tried to speak, gave several croaks and finally coughed something out in Turkish. Trace stared at him a moment longer, saw that his eyes weren’t quite focusing, shrugged frustratedly and turned to the other. Greek, this one, but he did understand a few words of English. If Trace had had a smattering of Greek they might have got somewhere, but his knowledge of the language was zero. In the end he gave it up.
An hour went by, the
n two, by which time Trace’s patience was short as the fuse on a 5th of November firework. But at least he had been able to exercise some of the stiffness out of his joints, until he now felt about half-way back to normal. His flesh was still weak, yes, but all of his will was back. And some anger. And a lot of fear. For as the sun dipped toward the horizon and the shadows began to lengthen, so an atmosphere was building, and it was one fraught with an unknown weirdness that Trace felt walking on his skin like poisonous spiders.
He went to the door again, went in anger with his fist raised – and the door opened in his face before he could strike it. Khumeni stood there. He looked at Trace’s raised, clenched fist and smiled. Under his cowl his face twisted and his eyes burned like coals, and that was his smile. And away in the west clouds passed over the face of the sun and threw the high balcony into shadow …
Standing face to face with the beast, Trace felt a sudden compelling urge to strike him. But that would be like spitting at the sun to put it out, or trying to carve a diamond with an eraser. He knew it, but still he wanted to drive his fist into Khumeni’s face, ruin his rotting nose beyond repair. He wanted to – but the burning eyes under that cowl held him transfixed, immovable.
Then Khumeni reached out, took Trace’s fist in long, bony fingers, drew it down to hang naturally at Trace’s side and left it there. And Trace sensed the terrible strength in those fingers, sensed what they could command, and knew that indeed Khumeni could tear him limb from limb – or have him torn.
Khumeni advanced a single pace on to the spacious balcony, and Trace backed off a step before him. The beast turned his back and closed the door, and almost in contempt paused before turning back again. ‘You continue to surprise me,’ he rasped. ‘Your anger, so great. But why?’