Fraternity of the Stone

by David Morrell

  "Of course!" the priest said. "The Carthusian charterhouse, La Grande Chartreuse."

  "A man was scheduled to visit it, I'd been told. His car was described to me. Even the number on his license plate. I was to kill him." Drew bit his lip. "Have you ever been to La Grande Chartreuse?"

  Father Stanislaw shook his head.

  "It's extremely remote. In the Middle Ages, the founding monks selected its location carefully. They thought that the world was going to hell, which it always seems to be doing. They wanted to get away from the corruption of society, so they marched from the lowlands of France up into the Alps, where they built a primitive monastery. The Pope objected. After all, in the Middle Ages, what was the point of being a priest if you lived in deprivation?

  "God seemed to side with the Pope by sending an avalanche onto the monastery, destroying it. But you've got to give the monks credit. They simply moved the monastery a safe distance lower, protected from snow-slides but still secluded from the world. And over the centuries, they built a magnificent cloister. It reminded me of a medieval castle. A mighty fortress for God.

  "When the order spread to England, the monks were martyred by Henry the Eighth. Because he wanted a divorce and the Pope refused, Henry formed his own church, made himself its leader, and decreed that the divorce he craved was divinely sanctioned. When the Carthusian monks in England objected, Henry put them to death in the cruelest manner he could devise. They were hanged, cut down near death, disemboweled but left sufficiently alive for them to see their guts being eaten by dogs. Molten metal was poured into their body cavities. Their corpses were drawn and quartered, boiled, then thrown into ditches."

  "You describe it vividly," Father Stanislaw said, his voice calm. "What happened at La Grande Chartreuse?"

  Drew began to sweat. He could not fight down his emotion. "My assignment was to plant explosives at the side of a winding road that sloped up toward the monastery. The location was carefully chosen. A cliff on the far side. A steep drop on the near side - toward me, where I was waiting on the opposite slope. After I planted the explosives at night, it took me half the next day to climb out of sight through gorges until I reached the opposite bluff. The mountains were thick with snow. A few miles either way, I could have been skiing. If only I had been." Drew shook his head. "But I crouched behind bushes, my boots in the snow, my parka not really warm enough for the weather, and as I watched my breath drift up before my eyes, I studied that winding road. Because soon, my target car wound up toward the monastery. The occupant was sightseeing, you understand. Taking in the local attractions. Of course, he could never have gone inside the cloister itself, never have seen the hermit monks. But he could tour the perimeter and walk through the central court and perhaps provide a generous donation in exchange for a sample of the famous Chartreuse liqueur." Drew felt the cold even now; he heard the squeak of the snow beneath his boots and recalled the stillness in those terrible claustrophobic mountains.

  Blinking, he abruptly returned to the motel room, Arlene, and the priest. "I'd planted the explosives on the far side of the road. Against the cliff. The thrust of the blast would send the car toward me, toward the cliff on the side that faced me. And the car, in flames, would fall. But this is the clever part. Someone at Scalpel must have thought long and hard about it. I'd been given a camera. Through its telephoto lens, I was to study the bend in the road that led up through the mountains. And when the car I was looking for came around the bend, when I made doubly sure it was the right car by verifying the number from the front license plate, I was to start taking pictures."

  "That's all? Just take pictures?" Father Stanislaw stood and began to pace the room.

  "Not quite all. You see, the trigger mechanism on the camera was also the trigger for the explosive. The camera had a motor-driven shutter, designed for rapidly repeating exposures as long as I kept the button pressed down. Click, click, click. The bomb went off. The car veered sideways, toward me. Its gas tank burst into flames. And remember, the shutter kept clicking. I saw a telephoto image of everything. Just as the car began to topple over the cliff, a door in back flew open..."

  "And?" Arlene watched him anxiously.

  Drew's voice rose. "God showed me a sign. He sent me a message."

  "What?" Father Stanislaw roared the word. "You can't be serious?"

  "But He did." Drew's voice was suddenly calm. "You believe in the bolt of light that toppled Saul from his horse on the road to Damascus, don't you? Saul, the sinner, who understood at once that God was telling him something, who changed his life that instant to follow the way of the Lord. Well, this was my bolt of light. My sign from God. I'd call it a miracle, except a miracle's supposed to make you feel good and this...

  A kid fell out. A boy. I've studied the photographs often. The boy was... "

  "What?" Again the voice was Arlene's.

  "... identical to me."

  She stared at him. "You mean you noticed a resemblance. The same coloring perhaps. And size. Boys at the same age tend to look alike."

  "No, it was more than that. I'm telling you the resemblance was uncanny. When he grew up, he could have been my double back at the college. While I went out and killed."

  "Executed. Punished. Stopped them from doing it again." Father Stanislaw's tone was harsh. "Speak precisely. Don't exaggerate. You were under stress. You have to make allowance for..."

  "The circumstances? For the moment? Listen, the moment is all I think about. That kid... me... tumbling from the car. Horror in his eyes."

  Drew fumbled in his pants pocket, yanking out the four wrinkled photographs he'd taken with him from the monastery. He thrust them at Father Stanislaw. Arlene leaned quickly toward the priest to see them.

  Drew's face was tormented. "They're all I kept from my former life. Before I joined the Carthusians, I went to every place I'd hidden money, passports, weapons. I got rid of them. I canceled everything about my former existence, erased myself, even to the point of making it seem as if I was dead."

  Shuddering, Drew glanced at the photographs. He knew the images by heart. "The one on top is me. In Japan in 1960. It was taken in the garden behind my parents' house. Three days before they were murdered."

  Father Stanislaw set it aside.

  "The next one," Drew said, "is my parents. Again, the same location, three days before they were killed. The others I took in seventy-nine below La Grande Chartreuse. After I detonated the explosives and the boy fell from the car. I had a section of the boy's photograph enlarged, to show his face. The picture's grainy, sure. And the smoke from the explosion was drifting in front of him, and snow had started to fall. But I think you get my point."

  The priest peered up from the photograph, staring toward Drew. His hands quivered. "At first, I thought this third photograph was a poor reproduction of the first. I thought it was - "

  "Me. But it isn't. If you look closely, really closely, you'll see it isn't. I tried to tell myself that the resemblance was coincidental. As Arlene said, kids often tend to look alike. But this is more than just a vague similarity. This is... "

  "Unnerving."

  "I'm just getting started. Look at the last photograph. I took it after the car had toppled from the cliff. But the car didn't drop all the way down the gorge. It snagged on an outcrop, its front end angling down, and by then, flames from the gas tank were streaking across the snow. That's when the two front doors burst open, and two adults leaped out. My instructions had been specific. Take as many photographs as you can. So despite my shock at seeing the boy, I stared through the viewfinder, aiming the telephoto lens, pressing the button, and then I realized God was still giving signs." His voice broke. "The man and woman looked like my parents. Were my parents."

  "But they're in flames," Father Stanislaw said.

  "Look closely!" Drew urged.

  "I am!"

  "They are my parents. I know they aren't, but they are. I couldn't get a focus on their faces when they leaped from the car. But before the
y burst into flames, their faces were quite distinct. On the cliff, on that freezing bluff, I was sure they were my mother and my father."

  The room became silent.

  "Of course -I don't mean any offense - we don't have any way to verify the comparison," Father Stanislaw

  said. "I grant that the boy from the car, even with the distortion of the smoke and the falling snow, could be your counterpart. At first, indeed, I thought it was you. But allowing for the coincidence, isn't it possible that your imagination carried you away? Could you have made the logical leap from the boy who looked like you, to the man and woman who, well, you imagined looked like your parents?"

  "I know what I saw." Drew's voice was hoarse. "Finally I couldn't keep my finger pressed on the shutter button any longer. I lowered the camera. Across the gorge from me, the flames reached their faces. The gas tank exploded. My mother and father disintegrated. Just as in 1960. Only this time, I was the man who'd killed them."

  "The circumstances were different."

  "Were they? What we call a mercenary on their side is an operative on ours. I was the same as the man I'd been hunting. I was my enemy. Pieces of their bodies tumbled down the gorge, their clothes and flesh in flames. I smelled them. And on the top of the cliff, silhouetted against the snow, I saw the grieving face of the boy - I wasn't looking through the telephoto lens anymore, but I seemed to see his tears in close-up. My tears. After nineteen years, my need for revenge had caught up with me. And nothing mattered anymore. Except to beg God's forgiveness; to save my soul."

  Arlene touched his shoulder. He flinched, then gratefully accepted her comfort.

  "To save your soul?" Father Stanislaw said, his voice raised in astonishment. "All the time you were an operative, you felt religious?"

  "I had my own religion. The justice of the Old Testament's angry God. But God had a different idea. I'm more honored than Saul on the road to Damascus, thrown from his horse by a bolt of light. God sent me not one but two signs. He's certainly generous. Everything I've described happened in maybe ten seconds, though it seemed to take forever. The blast rumbled through the mountains, and as its echo dwindled, I heard something else - the shriek of the boy across the gorge from me, raising his hands to his face, trying to shut out what he'd just seen, his parents in flames. He screamed through his fingers. And after that? God's third sign to me. It wasn't enough that I'd recognized myself, that I'd come full circle and killed the parents I'd set out to avenge. As the rumble of the blast diminished, as the boy choked on his own screams, as the silence returned, I heard a chant.

  "Later, I understood why. It was January sixth. The Feast of the Epiphany - when the Magi saw Christ and saved His life. Because the Wise Men, having seen the baby Jesus, having seen a light of their own, refused to go back to Herod and reveal where Christ could be found, though they'd promised Herod they'd do so. That, it seems to me, is why the Church decided that the Epiphany should be a major feast. Not because the Wise Men saw the baby Jesus, but because in a way they were double agents, who finally made a choice about which side to believe in. Just as I made a choice that day.

  "The monks, in honor of the Magi and that crucial day in Christ's continuing existence, must have scheduled a special convocation. Above me, from the chapel in the cloister in the mountains, I heard their chant. Their hymn in honor of that anniversary. It drifted down through the chasms, past the peaks, obscuring the echo of the explosions and the screams. The hymn praised God's will, His infinite foresight, His all-encompassing plan. But the words weren't nearly as powerful as the sound of those eerie voices, those hermits who'd divorced themselves from the falsehoods of the world.

  "My knees bent. I found myself kneeling, staring toward that boy across the gorge from me. He tried to scramble down the cliff to find his parents. I wanted to stand up from the bushes that hid me and shout to tell him not to, that he'd fall and kill himself. Grow up! I wanted to shout. Hunt the man who murdered your parents! Who murdered my own! Come after me! And that's when I became religious. It was either that... or kill myself." He paused, exhausted.

  Arlene studied his anguished face. Lovingly, she put an arm around him.

  "And after that?" Father Stanislaw asked.

  "I wandered for three days through those mountains. The length of time had appropriate religious overtones, don't you think? Of course, I didn't realize what I was doing. Later, it amazed me that I'd never dropped the camera. I don't know how I lived or where I slept or what I ate.

  "It snowed while I wandered. I'm sure the authorities must have searched the area. But the storm hid my footprints. Was that a lucky coincidence, or another sign from God? I don't remember where or how I went. The next clear image I have is a village low in the mountains, smoke drifting up from chimneys, children skating on an icy pond, horse-drawn sleighs jingling down a road. Postcard stuff. And I later found out that I'd somehow walked a hundred kilometers, which is why the local police never linked me with the murders below La Grande Chartreuse. I collapsed in front of a chalet. An old woman there took me in. She fed me soup and bread and the sweetest pastries I've ever tasted."

  "Three days?" Arlene asked. "That's how long you wandered through the mountains? But... "

  Father Stanislaw completed her thought. "Your assignment had been two missions in forty-eight hours. The deadline for the second mission had passed."

  "At the start, I didn't think about the implications. I was alive, and that in itself amazed me. Not to mention the vision I'd had. The sight of my parents - myself- the circle closing, vengeance leading to... That boy, when he grew up, would hunt for me. When I was well enough to travel, I went to Paris to reach my contact. On the way, I checked back issues of newspapers to find out who my victims had been. The man, it turned out, was an American businessman, an oil executive, who'd brought his wife and son to France for a long-postponed vacation. The papers described the killings as senseless. I agreed. Of course, what you read in the papers isn't always true. But what if... ? I had the feeling that something was terribly wrong. What would an oil executive and his family have to do with terrorism? What motive could possibly justify those killings? I needed answers. I wanted to go to ground. To reach a safehouse. To rest. I guess God's messages hadn't quite come through. I still had some worldliness, and self-centeredness, left in me. That ended soon."

  Father Stanislaw pursed his lips. "Because you'd screwed up. And now you were suspect."

  2

  In Paris, Drew left the train station, blending with the crowd. He walked to the next arrondissement, making sure that he wasn't followed, and only then used a public phone. Perhaps a needless added precaution, but under the circumstances advisable.

  He called the number he'd been given when he'd first arrived in France - a week, a lifetime ago. He let it ring four times, then broke the connection and called that number again. The husky male voice that answered in French announced the name of a dress designer shop.

  Drew responded in French as well. "My name is Johnson. I bought two dresses for my wife a week ago. One fit, the other didn't. I want a second appointment."

  The proprietor gushed, "But yes, we later suspected that something was wrong with the second fit. We tried to contact you, but you weren't available. All we could do was hope that you'd call. We value your business. Can you possibly see us as soon as possible? We'd like to study the dress and find what went wrong."

  "I'm free this afternoon."

  "As you may remember, we're in the process of moving. Our new location... "

  Drew memorized the directions. "Within an hour,'' he said.

  The old house was made of stone and covered with vines. It was two storeys high, with smoke swirling from the chimney. A fallow vegetable garden stretched to the left, two barren apple trees to the right. And beyond, the frigid, ice-covered Seine. Despite the ice on the water, Drew heard the subtle hiss of the river's current. He smelled dead fish and sulphurous smoke from factories upriver.

  His breath coming out in v
apor, he strolled around to the back as if he belonged here. The door creaking, he stepped inside a narrow hallway, smelling French bread, warm and fresh. His mouth watering, he opened a second door that took him into a shadowy kitchen.

  He saw steam rise from a kettle on a large iron stove and felt a hand shove him forward while another hand twisted a pistol against his kidney. A third hand grabbed his hair from behind, touching a knife to his Adam's apple.

  "You'd better have a fucking good explanation, boyo."

  He flinched and tried to turn to see them, but they restrained him. Nor could he speak, his breath knocked out of his lungs as they threw him hard across the kitchen table, frisking him roughly.

  He didn't have a weapon. The assignment hadn't called for one, and there'd been no need to go to his cache in Paris. Not that it would have mattered if he had.

  "Why are- "

  He didn't have the chance to finish his sentence. They dragged him off the table, held him in the air, and let him go. He struck the floor with his face. At once, they jerked him to his feet, thrusting him through an open doorway into a living room. He toppled onto a dusty, threadbare sofa. It smelled of mildew.