Reckoning

by James Byron Huggins

  Sarah twisted the blade in her hand. Already, she was comfortable with it, and the thought amazed her. "It's strange," she remarked, absently, "how much thought men put into killing each other."

  Gage stared somberly at the blade, then looked off towards the darkened ridge.

  Sarah spoke quietly, felt her heart and breath catch with the question. "Can you beat him?"

  Silence.

  "I don't know," Gage replied, eyes narrowing with the thought. "If I hurt him badly enough, he'll try for Ai Uchi."

  "Ai Uchi?"

  "Mutual death," Gage said simply. "It's a samurai concept that dates from feudal Japan. Basically, it's a tactical move to strike a death blow while receiving a death blow. For him, Ai Uchi would be a great victory. Take a deadly blow to give a deadly blow. Ai Uchi."

  Upon the ridge, a cold wind howled through gray unseen trees.

  Sarah lowered her head, heard the words again and again in her mind.

  "... Ai Uchi ... It would be easy ... A great victory for him ... Mutual death ..."

  Gage was silent, and she longed to reach out to him to comfort, and to be comforted. But then she stiffened, remembering that surrendering to deeper feelings would only complicate things. It would distract him. And he had enough distractions.

  Gray eyes softening, Gage watched her face. She raised her head, gazing back at him, hiding nothing. After a moment he smiled, somewhat sad and tender. She reached out to lightly brush back his hair from his forehead. He seemed to share her thoughts. He leaned closer to her, wrapping an arm around her shoulders, whispering into her ear.

  "Don't be afraid," he said softly. "We'll be alright. I'll bring an ending to this.”

  Sarah leaned her head on his shoulder, feeling the moment, and nodded slightly. One hand went up to find his arm, and she held him in silence. The gray, familiar cold swept down from the barren stands on the surrounding hills. And Sarah heard the wind raking limbs; a dry, whispering chorus.

  Gage was silent. But, from his weary demeanor, and his slightly bowed head, she knew that he was worried, worried that perhaps he was outmatched, facing a force he could not defeat.

  Enough, she decided. Enough of this. Sadness and doubts and fears won't help. Only action can help. This only makes us feel worse.

  She leaned back, slid down from her perch on the woodpile, reaching again for his arm.

  "Come on. I'll bet dinner's ready."

  Gage nodded, rising to his feet. "And I bet Barto has already eaten it."

  She laughed easily, slipping her hand into his.

  *

  Alone, Gage stared at a pale, haggard moon, ignoring the cold night wind that embraced him, alone with thoughts even colder.

  Slowly, stiffly, he rubbed his hands together, feeling the thick bandages around each wrist that covered the last thin wounds his hands had sustained in combat with Sato. Impulsively, he tugged at the straps, loosening the gauze.

  At the first exposure of the sensitive skin to the night air he hastened the movement, finally freeing his wrists and hands completely to the coldness. He stared at his healed hands, curling the fingers, testing, clenching and unclenching.

  Emerging like a ghost from the dark, Malachi was suddenly and quietly beside him. Gage hadn't heard the approach but revealed no surprise. He had already learned that the professor could sometimes move with the casual silence of an Indian in what seemed an unconscious stealth.

  Malachi smiled at him, casual and relaxed, then leaned against a porch beam.

  "It's a good night." Gage turned slightly to lean back against the opposite post.

  Malachi laughed. "Yes. I have forgotten how much I missed the night sky." He paused. "It was part of my greatest pleasure in archeological digs, particularly in the Negeb, where the sky is never more beautiful."

  "I guess you've seen just about every place there is to see," Gage said finally. "You've traveled a lot. Probably even more than me."

  "Oh, yes," the old man answered with a smile, "but nothing changes, really. It has always amazed me to see how familiar all the distant countries of the world can appear. The Carpathian mountains, for instance, in Northern Romania are virtually identical in size and design to the Appalachians of North Carolina. And in Israel the plains of Giliead are the same as the eastern deserts of Arizona. The world is not so dissimilar, you know, from where we stand. Nor is history, for that matter. There is nothing new, even in this situation that has not happened before."

  He fell quiet a moment, studying the terrain.

  "Like this, for instance," Malachi continued easily, his gaze sweeping along the ridge. "The terrain here reminds me of the Valley of Elan in the Shephelah, where one of Israel's greatest battles took place." He gestured toward the hill. "It was a battle of military might against a single man's faith. And upon that ridge stood Goliath, the greatest warrior the world had ever known."

  Gage shifted to look at the ridge, somehow drawn in by the old man's mesmerizing authority.

  Malachi pointed gravely to the center of the ridge, concentrating.

  "All of Israel trembled at the feet of the giant, Israel's most feared enemy. Standing over nine feet tall, he was customarily armed with an iron sword, a unique and superior weapon for that era. And to make him almost invulnerable he was armored within a long breastplate of brass and bone and leather that weighed almost two hundred pounds." Malachi lowered his arm again, stared at the ridge a moment as if he could behold the haunting vision. "He had never known defeat."

  Gage stared at the ground, slightly to the side and away, where the darkness was deepest.

  "It was an epic battle between David, a simple warrior, and Goliath, almost a god among those who surrounded him. But the battle did not begin in that contest. No, it began years earlier, when David had chosen to worship the Hebrew God. And it began when Goliath chose to serve Dagon, a demon." He was silent a moment. "No, it did not begin in the valley. It only ended there, in the plain between the two mountains. But the true battle had begun years earlier, when each man had chosen the road he would walk in life, setting themselves on the path where their destinies would collide.

  Casually, as if the rest of the story did not matter, as if it were a small and inconsequential tale shared without meaning by two friends, Malachi pushed his hands into his pockets and lowered his gaze to sweep the glade.

  "It's an old story, and I'm sure you know the rest," he said easily, abruptly looking down with an old man's solemn, steady gaze.

  "David took his head, in the end."

  *

  THIRTY-ONE

  Tired, muddy, and angry, Kertzman sat a hot cup of coffee on the dash, stared sullenly at the charts propped precariously and crookedly against the steering wheel. During the day he had tried six different locations, all of them large pieces of property, heavily wooded with deep ravines, the perfect tactical ground.

  He had found nothing. Just six middle-age or retirement-age couples living out the good life in the Catskills. Kertzman had methodically, ploddingly, checked them all out, one by one. Parking his car at a distance and stalking cautiously through the woods, he used the topography map for reference until he located the houses. Then, standing in the cold or lying atop a small hill, he had watched through a pair of 7x50 Tasco surveillance binoculars, reading a 366-foot field of vision at 1,000 yards.

  A range-finding reticle in the binoculars provided him with a digital readout of distance, informing him whenever he moved closer than 100 yards to any of the homes. That, at least, had given him some small satisfaction. Because it told him that he had managed to make a positive identification of all residents at over 300 feet, mentally checking occupants against the pictures of Gage, Malachi Halder, Sarah Halder, or Bartholomew O'Henry that he had memorized.

  He hadn't wanted to move any closer to the homes, risking a chance detection by the occupants or the hungry attention of guard dogs. He certainly didn't want to endure the ordeal of making explanations to any county sheriff's deputies. Mainly b
ecause anything he said would make it back to Washington before nightfall. And as far as the NSA knew, he was supposed to still be in New York City.

  Allowing them to know his exact location would reveal his true strategy. So he had moved slowly, carefully on the homes, keeping his distance until he could eliminate an estate from his list. Then, with his Vietnam-era stalking instincts in full glory, he had slid back through the woods to his car, moving stubbornly on to the next site.

  Not surprisingly, the phone company offered nothing from the listed homes; no telephone calls to Allied Air Transport, Professor Halder's house, his daughter's apartment, or to anyone else even remotely related to the situation. And, although Kertzman was not surprised, the disappointment caused him to shake his head in frustration.

  This guy didn't leave much behind. And he was getting tired of finding nothing.

  On top of that dead end, checking the estates one by one was turning into a time-consuming activity. And he was bone-tired. Kertzman told himself that in a few minutes he would head back to the hotel, get some sleep, do it again tomorrow. But he was plagued by the worry that he was wasting his time, that he had gone in the wrong direction.

  Patience, he thought. You're going to have to earn this guy.

  Tomorrow.

  He nodded with the thought.

  Tomorrow he'd check four more locations. Maybe five.

  Patience …

  *

  "So what are we looking at?" Barto asked. "I know it's a mixture of Latin and German words with a few numbers. But it's a simple code. And they're the hardest to break."

  "I know," Gage answered, pointing to the marks on Simon's letter. "The Greek with hyphenated numbers refers to the Latin edition of the Old Testament book of Job. Each book of the Bible has a different language designation. Job is Greek. Genesis is Spanish. Revelation is English, and so on. The first number is the chapter, the second is the verse, the third is the number order of the word in the sentence. I can find the word without any problem, but I have to use a dictionary for the translation." He paused. "Sometimes that Latin part screws me up. So many different endings to words. I wish Simon would have come up with a better way of doing this. But he was really worried about his messages getting discovered. He wanted something difficult to decipher."

  Sarah sat at the table, watching them work. Gage had pulled a German dictionary from a bookcase and was checking words while Barto leafed through an English edition of the Old Testament. Gage had told him that a Latin edition of the Bible was on the shelf. Barto said he didn't need it and continued the translation with his memory, mentally rewriting the English into Latin to discover what word was needed.

  "Wait a second," Barto said after 30 minutes.

  Gage looked up. "What?"

  "There's a Latin article for 'at' and then a four-digit number, with a letter."

  "That's a direction," Gage answered. "When you have a four-digit number and letter after that, it's always a direction. The Latin is just to confuse things. But the letter is always reversed for the true direction. 'N' means 'South.' TZ' stands for 'West.'"

  Sarah waited patiently, watching as they worked together on the cryptic note. Gage thumbed back and forth through the dictionary, checking and rechecking the words.

  She stretched her arms, looked at Malachi reclining, reading the Bible while they worked.

  She smiled faintly at the old man, noticing how noble he seemed under the light of the reading lamp. The sight caused her pain as she thought of how terrible their situation was, how far they had come, and how far they had yet to go before they might know any decent life again.

  She looked at Gage, intent in his task of deciphering. Though he seemed unaware of her gaze, she knew he was always aware of her, the way she looked, the smallest mannerisms. She loved him for it. And then she felt a fresh wave of pain as she wondered how great a price he would pay to defend them. She remembered the power of their enemies, how they had murdered Simon, terrorized Rome, and finally pursued them into these mountains. It seemed inconceivable that anyone could overcome such an awesome measure of organized power.

  Resisting the depression, she looked again out the darkened window. Somewhere, poised in the dark with the long sniper rifle and night visor, or night scope, Sandman waited, watched. He would stay there, patiently and silently, until midnight when Chavez would relieve him. Then Gage would relieve Chavez at dawn, and Sandman would take again to the woods at noon, relieving Gage. In the late afternoon Gage would patrol with Chavez, letting Sandman rest before his evening watch began.

  Sarah had grown accustomed to the unaltering routine. She had ceased to worry about any of them, even Gage, so inured was she to the sight of loaded weapons and tactical discussions and the survivalist attitude of these hardened ex-soldiers.

  Trying not to seem obvious, she studied Chavez, who stood beside the kitchen counter, methodically cleaning his M-16. The rifle was disassembled, parts laid carefully on the counter, and the silent Mexican was stoically cleaning and checking the pieces as he cleaned and checked them each night, a routine that had not varied since he had arrived.

  Chavez moved like a machine, unceasing in his methodical dedication. And Sarah noticed that he was always careful to have another fully loaded, fully functional weapon beside him while he was cleaning the rifle.

  Out of all of them, Chavez was the most unceasing. He reminded her of a watchdog, always wandering the house, the grounds, the hills, even when it was not his turn to stand watch. Sometimes he would join Sandman on the hill in the early evening and wouldn't return until the next morning, cold and wet from the brutal winter night, working through both shifts.

  Sometimes, when he did seem to need rest, he would sit in the chair beside the fire, the large black M-16 at his side. He would never stare into the fire, though he seemed to enjoy its heat.

  Clearly, he was even more obsessed about security than either Sandman or Gage, but he never spoke about it, or about anything else, for that matter. His was a silent concern, a dedication he released by action, spending much more time in the woods than in the house.

  Sarah had long ago concluded that none of them were comfortable in a building. They preferred to be outside, using the woods – the ‘terrain,’ as they called it, to their advantage. They considered a house a liability. Sandman had said that no building on earth was defensible and quaintly referred to the cabin as a "death-trap."

  Gage was more relaxed about it, not as compelled as the others to remain outside. Though in the past few days, even when he was resting, he was never without the Hi-Power that he had carried in the Hall of Ancient Languages.

  "OK," Barto murmured after another hour. "I think I got the Latin."

  Malachi turned his head, rose from his chair to approach the table.

  "Yeah, I got the German," Gage replied. "Let's put it together and see what it looks like."

  In a weird blend of numbers and letters the message seemed to take shape. Gage shifted words around for five minutes, seeming to change them by feel rather than by any legitimate deciphering.

  "No," he muttered, "that's not what he meant ... It would be this. He does that a lot. I'll put this here ... There, I think that's it."

  Barto stared at the message for a moment, his lips moving without sound.

  Sarah leaned forward. "Well? Are you going to share it?"

  Barto glanced up, wide-eyed behind his glasses. "Oh, yeah," he mumbled.

  He looked down again, reading,

  "In the arms of the Father, the Abomination sleeps. Yet, by the grace of our Lord, it shall be destroyed. Remember, God will not be mocked. You must travel South from Merano to Ortles. And find the north path up the slope. At the level of clouds, you will find the family crypt of Santacroce against the wall. Roll away the stone, enter the grave, and you will find the prophecy. Destroy it, my son. Destroy it. God will not be mocked. I will pray for you with such passion as I have loved you. Be well. Remember ..."

  Quietly Barto la
id the message down, sat back.

  Gage said nothing. His face was set in stone.

  Even Chavez had ceased cleaning his weapon. He hadn't looked up, but the Mexican was frozen in an unnatural stillness of intense listening, of concentration. The room seemed heavy, almost smothered, vibrating with an intensifying atmosphere of sadness.

  Gage closed his eyes, leaned his head back.

  "Yes," whispered Malachi. "It would be the perfect place ..."

  Barto turned his head. "Where?"

  "It is the old country of Simon," Malachi said. "It is near Bolzano where he was raised. Beside Bolzano lies the small town of Merano, and south of it rests the mountain of Ortles. It is in the Italian Alps. It is not a particularly high or majestic peak. Not a site for tourists. And for the most part it is ignored. It is only twelve thousand feet high. And in ancient times it was well traveled because it allowed access to the river path that led to the Valley of Po, and from there to Milan. Though I have never walked the mountain myself, I know from Simon that its inhabitants are very secretive and have, for centuries, claimed specific caves on the north side as family crypts. It is an ancient tradition, and the Italian government has ceased feuding over the matter. From this message it is clear that somewhere on the north face there is a familiar path. And at the level of the clouds, perhaps at four to six thousand feet, is the family crypt of Santacroce. On that path. And within that crypt we will find the book."

  Malachi turned and walked to the window, staring out. His shoulders allowed a slight sagging that almost frightened Sarah, though from what she could see of his profile, he maintained his rigid strength.

  Gage opened his eyes, took a breath.

  "I'll leave tomorrow night," he said. "I'll make the necessary arrangements in the morning. Chavez and Sandman will stay with all of you while I go after this book."

  He nodded, affirming.

  "Then we'll put an end to this."

  *

  Even though he was exhausted, Kertzman forced himself to go through the routine procedures for sanitizing, for shaking any surveillance on the way back to the hotel. He drove for 40 minutes, doubling back a half-dozen times, taking an occasional side street, an alleyway, checking for vehicles that stayed with him.