Gray turned to Wallace. “What about Saint Bernard? Were you able to find anything about the man or the founding of the abbey that might be useful?”
“A couple of items. Bernard was closely associated with the Knights Templar. He even authored the Templar rules and was instrumental in getting the Church to recognize their order. He also instigated the Second Crusade.”
Gray weighed that information. The Knights Templar were considered to be the keepers of many secrets. Could this be one of them?
Wallace continued, “But one item stood above all the others, the story of a miracle. One that happened here. It is said that Bernard became deathly ill from an infection, but as he prayed before a statue of the Virgin Mary, it bled milk that healed him. It became known as the Lactation Miracle.”
Rachel closed her book. “Another example of a miraculous healing.”
“Aye, but that’s not even the interesting part,” Wallace said with a sly cock of one brow. “According to the story, the statue that bled the milk … was a Black Madonna.”
Gray took a moment to absorb the shock of it. “A Black Madonna healed him …”
“Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?” Wallace said. “Maybe it was allegorical. I don’t know. But after Malachy’s death, Saint Bernard became a major advocate for the worship of the Black Madonna. He was instrumental in starting the cult.”
“And that miracle occurred right here.”
“Aye. Definitely suggests that the dark queen’s body might have been transported here to Clairvaux—along with the key.”
Gray hoped he was right, but there was only one way to know for sure. They had to get into that prison.
12:43 P.M.
Clairvaux, France
Seichan headed through the woods.
Her scouting expedition to Clairvaux had produced few results. Wearing cold-weather hiking gear, she had binoculars around her neck and a walking stick. Just a young woman out for a day’s hike. Only this traveler packed a Sig Sauer in a holster at the small of her back.
The prison and former monastery lay in a valley between two wooded ridges. According to Rachel, it was common for the Cistercian order to build their monasteries in such remote locations. Preferring an austere lifestyle, the monks withdrew to woodlands, mountaintops, even marshes.
Out of the way, it also served as a good prison site.
Seichan had hiked completely around the perimeter of Clairvaux, noting the position of all the guard towers, the rows of walls, the steel pickets, and the razor-sharp rolls of concertina wire.
It was a fortress.
But no castle was impenetrable.
A plan was already building in her head. They would need uniforms and passes and a French police truck. She had left Kowalski at an Internet café in the neighboring village of Bar-sur-Aube. Through a Guild source, he was gathering a list of the names of both prisoners and guards, including their photos. She believed she could have everything ready by tomorrow. Morning visiting hours would allow one or two of them to get inside. The rest would need to come in the marked truck with fake photo credentials.
Still, there remained many variables. How long would they need to be in there? How would they get out? What about weapons?
She knew they were moving too fast, too recklessly.
Seichan suddenly ducked behind the thick bole of a white oak. She couldn’t say why she felt the need to hide.
Just a prickling at the base of her neck.
She knew better than to ignore it. The human body was a big antenna, picking up signals the conscious mind often missed, but the deeper part of the brain, where instinct was rooted, continually processed them and often sounded the alarm.
Especially if trained from childhood, like Seichan, whose survival had depended on listening to those darker folds of awareness.
As she held her breath, she heard the crackle of dried leaves behind her. Ahead, a rustle of branches. She dropped into a crouch.
She was being hunted.
Seichan knew that spotters had followed them to France. Before leaving England, she had reported in with her contact. Magnussen knew their destination. The tail had picked them up again in Paris. It hadn’t taken Seichan long to spot them.
But she would have sworn no one had followed her from Bar-sur-Aube after she dropped off Kowalski. She had left her car parked at a roadside rest stop and headed into the woods alone.
Who was out there?
She waited. Heard the rustle behind her again. She fixed the location in her head. Pivoting out, she took in the view in one unblinking stare. A man with a rifle, camouflaged, crept through the woods, clearly military-trained. Even before she was done pivoting, she snapped out her arm. The steel dagger flew from her fingertips. It shredded through the leaves and impaled the hunter through the left eye.
He fell back with a cry.
She rushed forward and closed the distance in four steps. She slammed her palm into the hilt, driving it deep into his brain.
Without slowing, she snatched his rifle and continued upslope.
A boulder lay near the ridge. From her earlier survey, she had the entire terrain mapped in her head. Reaching the shelter, she slid and flipped over on her belly. She came to rest in a sniper’s crouch, her eye already at the scope.
A ping ricocheted off the boulder near her head.
She heard no gunshot, but the round’s passage had brushed through a pine branch. Needles puffed. She fixed the trajectory through the scope, spotted a solid shadow moving through a dappled one, and squeezed the trigger.
The rifle spat with no more noise than the snap of a finger.
A body crashed. No scream. A clean head shot.
Seichan moved again.
There would be a third.
She ran along the ridgeline, triangulating the most likely spot for a third assassin. She kept to the high ground. The map of the terrain overlay her vision, like the heads-up display inside a helmet.
If she had been setting up an ambush in this region of the woods, there was a tempting roost ahead. A lightning-struck dead oak with a hollowed-out trunk. If she had hiked another thirty yards, she would have moved into its field of fire. The other two assassins, sensing their prey about to stumble into the snare, must have let their guard down and closed in prematurely, foolishly exposing themselves in their haste.
Surely Magnussen would have warned them of their target’s lethality.
But these were men, mercenaries with egos to match.
She was only a woman.
She came at the tree from behind, from upslope. She slipped to it without disturbing leaf or twig.
Planting her rifle an inch from the back of the dead oak, she fired through it. A cry of surprise and pain erupted as a body fell out of the tree’s hollow on the far side. She came at him with her dagger.
He was burly, smelled of grease, his face stubbled with a black beard. He cursed at her in Arabic with a heavy Moroccan accent. She had the dagger at his neck, intending to interrogate him, to find out why she had been ambushed and who had sent them.
She could make him talk. She knew ways.
Instead, she dragged her knife across his throat, below the larynx, a silent kill, and kicked him in his face. There was no need to interrogate him, she realized. She already knew the answers to her questions.
Something had changed. A kill order had been sent by Magnussen. Catching her alone in the woods, they’d tried to take her out first.
She pictured Gray and the others. She ran headlong toward the parking lot. They had no idea.
She reached to a pocket and flipped open her phone. She jabbed in the number she had memorized.
As it was picked up, she let all her anger ring out. “Your operation! Just so you know, it failed!”
1:20 P.M.
Rachel stood with Wallace in a hotel garden at the heart of Bar-sur-Aube. She checked her watch. Kowalski and Seichan should have been here by now.
She stared out toward the street. The p
lan was to meet for lunch, to go over plans. They had rooms booked here. The hotel—le Moulin du Landion—had been stylishly converted out of a sixteenth-century water mill. The original canal still ran through the gardens, turning an old wooden waterwheel.
She should have been charmed by the place, but all she felt was ill. Her head pounded, her throat burned, and her fever was getting worse. She finally slumped and sat on one of the patio chairs.
Gray returned from the lobby. He shook his head as he approached. “No one picked up the keys.” He noted her sitting, and his face tightened with worry. “How are you feeling?”
She shook her head.
He kept staring at her. She knew what he was thinking. Seichan had sketched a general plan for entering the prison. They would attempt it tomorrow morning. Gray clearly wondered if she’d make it that long.
Suddenly Seichan appeared, passing from the street through the garden gate. She searched all around. The woman, always hyperalert, seemed especially edgy now. Her eyes were rounder, her gaze more flighty.
Gray must have noted the same. “What’s wrong?”
She frowned at him. “Nothing. Everything’s fine.” But when she noted they were missing one person, she tensed again. “Where’s Kowalski?”
“I thought he was with you.”
“I left him in town to do some research while I scouted the woods.”
“You left Kowalski to do research?”
Seichan dismissed the skepticism. “It’s all grunt work. I left instructions a monkey could follow.”
“Yet we’re still talking about Kowalski.”
“We should go look for him,” Seichan said.
“He’s probably found a bar open for lunch. He’ll find his way back here eventually. Let’s talk about what we’ve all learned today.” Gray motioned to Rachel’s table.
Seichan didn’t seem happy with that decision. She remained standing, pacing, keeping a constant vigil. Rachel noticed a muscle in her face twitch when the waterwheel squeaked.
The woman was drawn tight, but eventually she took a seat.
Gray questioned her on the plans for tomorrow. They all kept their voices to a low murmur, heads bowed together. As Seichan listed everything they would need, Rachel grew more and more dismayed. A thousand things could go wrong.
Her headache grew to a stabbing agony behind her right eye, painful enough that she began to feel nauseated.
Without missing a beat of the conversation, Gray placed his hand on top of hers. He hadn’t even looked in her direction. It was an instinctual gesture of reassurance.
Seichan noted it, staring down at his hand—then she suddenly swung toward the street and tensed. She went dead still, like a cheetah before it charges.
But it was only Kowalski. He came sauntering into view. He lifted an arm in greeting, opened the garden gate, and crossed toward them. He was puffing on a cigar, carrying a pall of sweet-smelling smoke with him.
“You’re late,” Gray scolded.
He merely rolled his eyes.
Wallace used the interruption to voice his own concern about the plans for tomorrow. “This is a bloody long shot. It will take perfect timing and lots of boggin’ luck. And even then, I doubt we’ll make it to those abbey ruins.”
“Then why don’t we just take the tour?” Kowalski asked and slapped a brochure on the table.
They all stared down at a tourist pamphlet. It displayed a picture of an old arched colonnade with a fancy marquee above it.
Rachel translated the French. “The Renaissance Association of Clairvaux Abbey conducts tours of the prison.”
They all stared over at Kowalski.
He shrugged. “What? Got that thing shoved in my face. Sometimes it helps not to blend in.”
In Kowalski’s case, that was an understatement. No one could mistake him for a local.
Rachel skimmed the rest of the brochure. “They conduct tours twice daily. Costs two euros. The day’s second tour begins in an hour.”
Wallace took the brochure and flipped through it. “Such a short tour won’t allow us much time for a thorough search, but we could get a cursory sense of the place.”
Gray agreed. “It’ll also let us get a peek at the security from the inside.”
“But on this tour,” Seichan warned, “we’ll be searched. We won’t be able to bring any weapons inside.”
“No one will,” Gray said with an unconcerned shake of his head. “With all the armed guards surrounding us, we’ll be safer than we’ve ever been.”
Seichan looked far from convinced.
2:32 P.M.
So the bitch lived.
Four kilometers outside the town of Troyes, Krista crossed the grassy field toward the unmarked helicopters. The two stolen Eurocopter Super Pumas were already being loaded for the mission. Eighteen men in combat gear waited to load up. Technicians had finished equipping both birds with the necessary firepower.
A spotter on the ground reported that the targets were on the move. They had commissioned a tour of the abbey ruins and were headed to the prison. She had hoped to have dispatched Seichan before moving forward. The woman was too much of a wild card, but Krista had more than enough firepower and men to deal with her.
It just made it harder.
So be it.
Her orders were to acquire the artifact and eliminate the others. She intended to do that, but after the recent disasters, she also recognized how precarious her standing had become in the organization. She recalled the threat behind the cold words on the phone. Any failure from here would end in her termination. Yet she also knew that just meeting those expectations would not serve her.
After all that had gone wrong, she needed a win, a trophy to present to Echelon. And she intended to get it. If the Doomsday key was present among the ruins, she would force the others to find it for her, then eliminate them.
With the key in hand, her position in the Guild could be resecured.
Keeping that goal in mind, she left nothing to chance. Her targets had no weapons and no means of escape. Not while trapped in the heart of a maximum-security prison. Once her assault started, the prison would be locked down.
They would have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
She signaled her squad to board their aircraft.
It was time to crash this party.
29
October 14, 2:40 P.M.
Clairvaux, France
Gray knew they were in trouble.
Security at the prison proved to be iron-tight, even for the private tour group. Their passports were logged in, their packs hand searched, and they had to pass through two metal detectors, followed by a full-body wanding. Guards armed with rifles, batons, and holstered sidearms held positions throughout the main facility. More men patrolled the outer yard with massive guard dogs.
“At least they skipped the cavity search,” Kowalski groused as they cleared the last checkpoint.
“They’ll do that on the way out,” Gray warned him.
Kowalski glanced his way to make sure he was joking.
“This way, s’il vous plaît,” their tour guide said with a wave of her mauve umbrella. The representative from the Renaissance Association was a tall, no-nonsense woman in her midsixties. She was dressed casually in khaki pants, a light sweater, and a burgundy jacket. She made no effort to mask her age. She had a weathered look to her, her gray hair pinned back over her ears. Her expression seldom mellowed from stern.
Down a hall, they came to a set of double doors that led out to an inner courtyard. Sunlight splashed over the trimmed lawns, manicured bushes, and gravel paths. After the high security, it was as if they’d suddenly stepped into another world. Sections of crumbled stone walls, half-covered in ivy, crisscrossed the two-acre expanse, along with angular mounds that marked old foundations.
Their guide led them across the yard, trailed by an armed guard. She waved her umbrella toward the walls. “These are the last remnants of the original monasterium vetus. Its
square chapel later became incorporated into the larger abbey church with its vast choir and radiating chapels.”
Gray took it all in.
On the tour bus ride there, the woman had given them a brief history of the monastery and its founder. They knew most of it already. Except for one telling detail. Saint Bernard had built the monastery on his own family’s land. Because of that detail, he would certainly have been well aware of the topography, of any hidden caves and grottoes.
Had he chosen this exact spot for a reason?
Gray noted Rachel staring down at the ground, too, surely wondering the same.
Off to the side, Seichan kept her gaze higher, toward the surrounding walls of the prison and its watchtowers. The ruins were completely enclosed on all four sides. Her expression remained grim.
Seichan caught him studying her. She held his gaze as if she were about to say something. Though outwardly stoic, the tinier muscles in her face, those beyond most people’s voluntary control, seemed to shift through an array of emotions, blurring into an unreadable confusion.
She finally turned away as the tour guide spoke. “Come, come. We’ll move next to the beautifully preserved lay building. It offers us a wonderful example of monastic life.”
She headed to the far side of the yard where a three-story stone building sheltered in the corner. It was fronted by archways and pierced by small doors and windows.
“The lower level housed the monastery’s calefactorium, or communal day room,” she explained. “Its design is ingenious, très brillant! Beneath the pavement ran a series of flues from hidden cellars. Fires below would warm the cold monks after prayers or night offices. Here they could also grease their sandals before they began their day.”
As she went on to explain more about daily monastic life during the Middle Ages, Gray studied the stones under his feet.
So the monks were proficient engineers and tunnel makers.
He also remembered Wallace’s assertion that such monasteries and abbeys were often riddled with secret passageways.
Did any of them survive?
The Doomsday Key and The Last Oracle with Bonus Excerpts Page 35