David Morrell - Brotherhood of the Rose

by Brotherhood of the Rose(lit)

  "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--2' "I know. He's the closest we have to a father."

  In the clearing, a man blurted instructions into a field radio. The choppers suddenly left their safe position at the far end of the valley and rushed toward the clearing, their roar growing louder. Chris saw the German shepherds on guard at the rim of the trees. "All right," Saul said. "Those men are close enough to the tunnel. Let's get out of here."

  He scrambled back. Chris followed, watching Saul push the radio transmitter again. "Another surprise." Chris barely heard him in the sudden explosion from the cliff behind him. The shock-wave pushed him forward, pressing his ears. A rumble came next, a swelling crash of rocks and earth as the cliff fell toward the men in the clearing. He heard their screams. "That ought to take care of the rest of them," Saul said. Running, he dropped the transmitter. "What about the choppers?"

  "Trust me."

  They raced through sagebrush. Chris tasted dust, squinting from the sun. In the rapidly approaching roar of the choppers, he wondered if the other side of the bluff would end at another cliff. Instead Saul led him down a wooded slope toward a different valley. In the shadowy cover of trees, Chris felt the sweat cool on his forehead. "The choppers'll take a minute to work out their strategy," Saul said, breathing quickly. "One'll probably land to look for survivors."

  "'that leaves three." The fallen pine needles muffled Chris's steps. "They'll have to guess we were on that bluff. They'll head for this valley."

  "On foot, we can't get away before they bring in reinforcements. They'll use other dogs to track us."

  "Absolutely right." Saul reached the bottom, splashing through a stream, charging up its bank. Chris followed, his wet pants clinging cold to his legs. Ahead, Saul stopped in a thick stretch of timber. He tugged at fallen logs and tangled underbrush. "Quick. Help."

  Chris heaved the logs. "But why?" Then he understood. He pulled a rotten stump -away and saw a sheet of plastic wrapped around a bulky object. Before he could ask what it was, Saul unwrapped the sheet.

  Chris almost laughed. A trail bike-thick wide tires and heavy suspension. "But how'd you-?"

  "I use it to get in and out of here. I don't take chances by leaving it around the cabin." Saul raised it, guiding it past the deadwood they'd pulled away. He pointed through the trees. -Over there. A game trail cuts across the valley." He glanced toward the increasing roar of the choppers. "They'll separate to search different sectors of the valley."

  Chris helped him. "But the noise from their engines'll stop them from hearing the bike. They'll never spot us if we stay beneath the trees."

  "Get on." Saul turned the key and kicked the throttle. The bike coughed. He kicked the throttle again, and the bike droned smoothly. "Here, take the rifle."

  "It's no help against a chopper."

  Saul didn't answer. He flicked the clutch, toed the gearshift, and twisted the accelerator. The bike lurched forward, jolting on the bumpy ground. Chris crowded against him, grinning as they swerved through a maze of trees. Shadows flickered. At the game trail, Saul drove faster. Feeling the rush of wind on his face, reminded of when they were kids, Chris almost laughed.

  He froze when he heard a thunderous roar directly above him. Glancing up, he saw a grotesque shadow swoop past a break in the trees. The game trail sloped up. At the top, as Saul raced through a tiny clearing, Chris stared back across the valley. He saw two choppers diverging to search the far and middle sectors. At this other end, the chopper that had just surged past had apparently failed to see them.

  The game trail angled down now. Steering, Saul followed the-twists and turns. Chris heard the chopper again. "It's doubling back. Rechecking something!"

  The game trail reached a swath of grass that stretched from one side of the valley to the other.

  Saul stopped the bike. "They'll see us if we try to cross. But we can't stay here. If we wait till night, they'll have time to bring in another team with dogs."

  Overhead, the wind from the chopper rustled the nearby trees. Chris braced himself for the impact of fifty-caliber machine gun bullets.

  Saul took the Springfield from him. "I wasn't sure how they'd come for me. On foot or with choppers." He pulled the Springfield's bolt, catching the round he ejected, replacing it with a round he took from his pocket. He shoved the bolt in place again.

  he revved the accelerator, urging the bike from the trees, racing across the meadow. Glancing back, Chris saw the chopper pivot, darting in their direction. "They've seen us!"

  Saul twisted the handlebars, veering back toward the trees. Machine gun bullets tore at the ground. The chopper swept over them, its obscene silhouette blotting out the sun. At once, the glare came back. Saul raced the bike into the forest. Jumping off, he aimed through branches toward the chopper as it twisted sharply above the meadow.

  Chris said, "A Springfield can't shoot that chopper down."

  "This one can." Belly exposed, the chopper began a strafing approach to the trees, zooming larger. Saul pulled the Springfield's trigger, absorbing the recoil. In wonder, Chris saw the chopper's gas tank explode. He leapt for cover, shielding his eyes. Chunks of fuselage and canopy, of struts and blades erupted amid a roaring fireball in every direction across the meadow. The bulk of the fuselage hung perversely. It suddenly crashed.

  I drilled the core from the ballet, filled it with phosphorus, and put a plug in to keep the air from setting it off," Saul said. "The other choppers..."

  "They'll head this way. They'll search this end of the valley. We'll go back the other way. Where they've already searched."

  Saul grabbed the bike. Chris quickly got on. They rushed back along the game trail. Twenty seconds later, the remaining choppers roared past toward the flaming wreckage in the meadow.

  Eliot clutched the greenhouse phone, his tall gaunt body stooped, his forehead aching. I understand," he said impatiently. "No, I don't want excuses. You weren't successful. That's what matters, not why you failed. Clean up the mess you made. Use other teams. Keep after them."

  He still wore his black suit and vest, a chest-high apron draped over them. "Of course, but I assumed your team was equally good. It seems my judgment was wrong. Believe me, I'm sorry."

  Setting down the phone, he leaned against a potting table, so tired he thought his knees would buckle.

  Everything was going wrong. The hit on the Paradigm Foundation should have been simple, one man to blame, a man who couldn't say he was following orders if he was killed when he tried to fight off his captors. Simple, Eliot thought. Meticulously planned. He'd chosen Saul because he was Jewish, because the hit had to be blamed on someone other than Eliot, so why not the Israelis? He'd arranged for Saul's previous jobs to go badly-a cleaning lady coming into a room when she shouldn't have, for example-to make Saul seem as if he was out of control. Sending Saul to gamble in Atlantic City had been another way of compromising him. Saul had to fit the behavior of an agent who'd gone bad, a rogue beyond salvage. A brilliant, careful plan.

  Then why had it gone wrong? After a career of avoiding mistakes, have I finally started to make them? he thought. Have I finally gotten too old? Did I delude myself into thinking that, because I sabotaged Saul's three previous jobs, he was in fact no longer resourceful?

  For whatever reason, the plan was almost a disaster now. Saul's escape had jeopardized everything, creating new problems, drawing more attention to the Paradigm hit. An hour ago, the White House had callednot an aide but the president himself, enraged that his best friend's murder was still not avenged. If everything had gone as planned, if Saul had been silenced, the president would have be
en satisfied, turning his attention to the Israelis, blaming them for engineering the assassination. Now, instead of getting the answers he wanted, the president was asking more questions, digging, probing. If he ever learned who'd actually ordered the hit... An irony struck him. Chris, by violating the sanction, had committed the cardinal sin. But Saul-though he didn't know it-had committed an even greater sin.

  Its secret had to be maintained. He picked up the phone and dialed his assistant at Langley. "Put this on the wire. Every network. KGB, MI-6, all of them. "Subject: Abelard sanction. Reference: Church of the Moon, Bangkok. Violator Remus sighted by CIA in Colorado, USA."' Eliot told his assistant the coordinates. ""Remus has evaded execution. Request assistance. Remus helped by rogue CIA operative Saul Grisman, cryptonym Romulus. Agency requests Romulus be terminated with Remus."' "Perfect," his assistant said.

  But hanging up, Eliot wondered if it was. Cursing the news from Colorado, he felt threatened, apprehensive. Not only had Saul escaped. Worse, Chris was with him. Eliot blanched. Since no one else had known what Chris was doing, they'll suspect me, he thought. They'll want to know why I turned against them.

  They'll come after me.

  His hand shook as he dialed again. The phone buzzed so often he feared he'd get no answer. The buzzing stopped, a husky voice responding. "Castor," Eliot said. "Bring Pollux. Come to the greenhouse." He swallowed thickly. "Your father needs you."

  When the moon came out, they left the ravine where they'd buried the trail bike under rocks and earth and fallen branches. They wouldn't need it anymore. As twilight turned to dark, they hadn't been able to steer it safely through the trees. Of course, another hit team using dogs would find the bike, but Saul and Chris would be far away by then. In the moonlight, they worked their way across a meadow, staying low to hide their furtive silhouettes. They reached the upward draw they'd chosen at dusk when, studying Chris's terrain map, they'd planned their route. They climbed the rocky chasm, never speaking, never glancing behind them, always listening for uncharacteristic sounds from the valley below them. Since the attack on Saul's cabin, they'd traveled twenty miles through three connecting valleys. Chris's spine ached from the shock of the trail bike's wheels on bumps and branches. He enjoyed the exertion of climbing, the release of tension in his muscles.

  At the top, they rested, sprawling out of sight in a rocky basin, the moon illuminating their sweaty faces. "If this were Nam, we wouldn't have a chance." Saul kept his voice low, catching his breath. "They'd send a surveillance plane with a heat sensor."

  Chris understood-the trouble with a heat sensor was it picked up animal as well as human body temperature. In Nam, the only way to make a sensor practical had been to spray poison from planes and kill all the wildlife in the jungle. That way, if a sensor registered a blip, the heat source had to be human. Chris recalled the unnatural silence of a jungle without animals. But here there was too much wildlife for a heat sensor to be useful. The forest sounds were constant, reassuring, the brush of leaves, the whisper of branches. Deer grazed. Porcupines and badgers scavenged. But if the noises ever stopped, he'd know something had spooked them. "They'll bring in other teams," Chris said. "But only to flush us out. The real trap's in the foothills. They'll watch every ranger station, every road and town around here. Sooner or later we, have to come down."

  "They can't surround the entire mountain range. They'll have to be selective. The nearest foothills are south and west of here."

  "So we'll go north."

  "How far?"

  "As far as we have to. We're at home up here. If we don't like the way things look, we'll just keep moving farther north."

  "We can't use the rifle to hunt. The shot would attract attention. But we can fish. And there'll be plants - stonecrop, mountain sorrel, spring beauties."

  Saul grimaced. "Spring beauties. Well, I needed to lose weight anyhow. At least the dogs can't track us up sheer cliffs."

  "You're sure you're in condition for this?" Chris grinned. "Hey, what about you?

  That monastery didn't make you soft, I hope,"

  "The Cistercians?" Chris laughed. "Make me soft? They're the toughest order in the Catholic Church."

  "They really don't talk?"

  "Not only that. They believe in brutal daily work. I might as well have spent another six years in Special Forces."

  Saul shook his head. "The communal life. Did you ever think about the pattern? First the orphanage, then the, military, next the agency and the monastery. There's a common denominator."

  "What?" "Segregated disciplined cadres. You're addicted."

  "Both of us. The only difference is you never took the extra step. You were never tempted to enter a Jewish monastic order."

  "Didn't those Cistercians teach you anything? There's no such thing as a Jewish monastic order. We don't believe in retreating from the world."

  "That's probably why you stayed in the agency. It's the nearest thing to monasticism you could find."

  "The quest for perfection." Saul frowned in disgust. "We'd better get moving." He pulled a compass from his pocket, studying its luminous dial. "Why does Eliot want to kill you?"

  Even in the night, Chris saw the angry glow on his brother's face. "Don't you think I keep'asking myself? He's the only kind of father I've got, and now the bastard's turned against me. Everything started after a job I did for him. But why?"

  "He'll make sure he's protected. We can't just go to him and ask."

  Saul clenched his teeth. "Then we'll go around him."

  "How?" They swung toward a sudden far-off rumble. "Sounds like something blew up," Saul murmured. "Dummy." Chris laughed.

  Saul turned to him, confused. "That's thunder." Thirty minutes later, as they climbed to the bottom of a jagged ridge, the stormclouds scudded overhead, obscuring the moon. in a sudden stinging wind, Saul found a protective lip of rock. Chris squirmed beneath it as the rain hit. "Go around him? How?"

  But Saul's reply was drowned by more thunder.

  Castor AND POLLUX Saul tensed. Crouching on a roof, concealed by the dark, he stared toward the street below him. Cars flanked the curbs; lamps glowed behind curtains in apartments. He watched a door come open in a building across the street. A woman stepped out: midthirties, tall, trim, elegant, with long dark hair, wearing navy slacks, a burgundy blouse, and a brown suede jacket.. Saul studied her features in the light above the door. Her skin was smooth and tanned, her high strong cheeks accentuated by a beautiful chin, an exquisite forehead, a sensual neck. She'd often been mistaken for a model.

  Saul knew better, though. He crawled back from the waisthigh wall at the edge of the roof, then stood and opened the maintenance door that led to a ladder and finally stairs. For an instant, he recalled his escape from the tenement in Atlantic City, racing from the roof down the stairs to the street where he'd stolen the Duster. This time, after he hurried unnoticed down the stairs of this attractive apartment building, he glanced both ways along the street and passed the parked cars to follow the woman.

  She walked to his left, reached a streetlight, and turned the corner. Saul heard the echo of her high-heeled shoes as he crossed the street and went around the corner after her. A cruising taxi made him nervous. An old man walking a dog aroused his suspicion.

  Halfway down the block, the woman entered a doorway. Saul came nearer, glancing through a window toward redchecked tablecloths in the booths of a small Italian restaurant. He paused as if to study the menu on the wall beside the entrance. He could wait close by for her to come out, he thought, but he saw no acceptable hiding places. All the buildings on this street were businesses. If he stayed in an alley or jimmied a lock to get up on another roof, the police might find him. As well, he didn't want to confront her on the street. Too dangerous. In a way, by going in the restaurant, she'd solved a problem for him.

  When he entered, he heard an accordion. Candlelight glowed off polished oak. Silverware clinked amid muted conversations. He scanned the busy room, smelling garlic and butter.
Peering past a waiter carrying a tray, he concentrated on the corners in the rear. As he expected, she sat with her back to a wall, facing the front but near an exit through the kitchen. Her waiter had taken the other place settings. Good, Saul thought, she planned to eat alone.

  The Maitre d' came over. "Do you have a reservation, sir?"

  "I'm with Miss Bernstein. In that corner." Smiling, Saul passed him, crossing the room. His smile dissolved as he stopped before the table. "Erika."

  She glanced up, confused. Abruptly her brow contorted in alarm.

  He pulled out a chair and sat beside her. "It isn't polite to stare. Keep your fingers on the edge of the table. Away from the knife and fork, please."

  "You!"

  "And please don't raise your voice."