House of Acerbi (god's lions)

by John Lyman

  “Yes, of course. But how did you accomplish this?”

  “We scanned it into our computers.”

  “Uh-uh.” Diaz rubbed his hands together as he looked around at the others and waited.

  Lev’s expression collapsed when the sudden realization of what Diaz was getting at struck him like a sledgehammer.

  “Oh no … no!” Lev fell back in his seat as sweat began to pour down his face.

  “Daddy?” Ariella rushed to his side. “What is it? Are you ok … is it your heart?”

  Lev looked up to the ceiling and prayed out loud. “Oh, God, forgive us!”

  “Daddy … talk to me.”

  “I can’t believe we were so stupid! We destroyed the book … but not the words. The book still exists. We downloaded it into our computers!”

  “That’s right,” Diaz said. “And because of the internet, anyone with a modest amount of talent will be able to hack into your system and download it. For a man like Rene Acerbi, it would have been child’s play.”

  Lev continued staring over his head at the beamed ceiling in the tomb-like silence that had descended over the dining hall. Diaz had seen right through an error that they had failed to notice for over a year, and it only took him a few minutes to do it. Doubt and fear crept into Lev’s mind. What else had they missed? An error like this was bound to have consequences. Worst case scenario-Satan’s time clock for Armageddon had just been reset.

  Lev felt everyone’s eyes on him as he reached for a bottle of wine and poured his glass all the way full.

  “What’s done is done, Professor,” John said, grabbing his father-in-law by the shoulder. “None of us caught that one … not even Daniel. If you think back on it, we were all having a hard time concentrating whenever the book was out in the open. It definitely had some kind of power to affect our thinking at the time. We were pretty much in survival mode back then.”

  Leo watched as Lev seemed to withdraw into himself, avoiding eye contact with the other members of the team. “Come on, Lev. You’re not the only one who’s responsible here. We all agreed that uploading the contents of the book was essential. Now is not the time to dwell on problems that lie in the past. This can be overcome. Right now we need to focus on Acerbi, but we need to be smart about the way we go about it. There are forces at work here we don’t yet understand. We need to gather a lot more information before we take any action that could backfire on us if we go about it the wrong way.”

  Lev held his head in his hands and answered without looking up. “It’s your call, Leo.”

  “Ok. Well, first, I think we should send an encrypted copy of that folder Martha found to Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv, and then we need to start making preparations for getting away from here as quickly as possible. Acerbi’s tendrils run deep, and it’s only a matter of time before he links us to Sarah’s rescue. Let’s all get some sleep and meet back down here at five in the morning.”

  CHAPTER 36

  The first explosion came in the early predawn hours, at a time when the body’s internal clock is primed to enter its deepest period of sleep. Jolted from their beds, those who had been awakened by the blast found themselves temporarily frozen in the foggy, dream-like world that exists between fantasy and reality upon awakening.

  Predictably, Alon and Nava were the first to make it out of their rooms. Armed with Uzi submachine guns, they ran barefooted down the hallway wearing only their T-shirts and shorts. John and Ariella were right behind them, each carrying small.22 caliber Berettas they always kept on their bed stands. The little guns had been a gift from Moshe. It was the same type of weapon he had carried when he was a katsa in the Mossad. Dismissed by other intelligence agencies as being too small, the Israelis were the only ones who still used the tiny Beretta. For them, it was still the weapon of choice for skilled marksmen who knew their craft well but wanted to maintain a low profile. Ariella thought back to what a seasoned weapons instructor had once told her. “A bullet is a bullet … no matter what caliber it is.”

  In less than a minute, the entire castle was awake as everyone gathered in the upstairs hallway. A second blast, larger than the first, rocked the grounds outside the castle.

  Alon grabbed John at the front door. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Outside!”

  “We don’t know who’s out there yet … the roof!” Alon’s eyes were bulging and the veins in his forehead were popping to the surface. He was like a caged animal, waiting to pounce on something … anything. The two of them took off running for the stairs and continued up the round stairwell until they reached a doorway that led out onto the castle’s ramparts. Once through the door, they spotted several members of the castle’s security force aiming their weapons down at the grounds below. Pausing to catch their breath in the cold night air, they peered through the ancient arrow slits. The entire area at the bottom of the hill was awash with pools of flame, while other areas remained cloaked in shadow where anything could be hiding.

  Ephraim’s voice crackled over the radio. “Lev … Alon … come in. We’re under attack down here!”

  “How many?”

  “Can’t tell. We just lost power. There’s a big fire in the center of the compound by the barn. I’m with my wife and son inside our house. We’re headed down into the tunnels.” Another explosion interrupted the conversation. “I think someone’s outside our front door. I’ll call you back.”

  Another pop, one much smaller than the first explosion, sent a shower of sparks into the air around the landing pad. Through the smoke, they could see the small blue helicopter engulfed in flames. The last pop they had heard was the chopper’s fuel tank exploding as the tail section separated and fell to the ground. A rain of fuel sent little rivers of fire outward toward the barn until something inside ignited and the entire structure erupted in a blaze that raged out of control.

  In a matter of minutes, Alon and John were joined by the rest of the team at the top of the castle. Looking down on the compound below, they winced as one house after another erupted in flames.

  Lev grabbed a radio and called the man in charge of the security force guarding the perimeter. “Do you see anything?”

  “No, sir! None of the motion sensors around the property picked up anything. The dogs were quiet and the laser defenses weren’t activated … no one has seen a single attacker!”

  “Anything in the air?”

  “Nothing. The communications center reported that the radar is clear. The only thing our listening posts picked up all night was the sound of crickets until the first explosion almost knocked their earphones off.”

  Lev squinted down into the blackness enveloping the fields around the castle. Two scenarios immediately came to mind. Either the compound below was self-destructing for some reason, or they were under attack from an invisible enemy. A third explanation entered his mind, one even more frightening. Was it possible that someone on the inside was behind this?

  As quickly as the attack began, it stopped.

  A string of loud expletives could be heard coming from the base of the castle wall. Peering over the edge, they could see Nava tramping down the hill. Still barefooted, she was wearing a long T-shirt that hung down to her knees and had an Uzi submachine gun slung over one shoulder.

  “That’s one mad little pilot,” Alon said with a quiet sense of awe. “Someone just destroyed her helicopter. That machine was her baby.” Alon quickly disappeared down the stairwell and was soon seen running down the hill after her.

  Lev stared down at the burning wreckage. “I have a feeling that we’ve just received a warning.”

  “A warning?” John pointed at the flames below. “You call that a warning?”

  “Whoever did this could have done much worse. Our presence here has stirred up a hornet’s nest.”

  “You think Acerbi is behind this?” Leo asked.

  “Probably. He and his people are on the verge of taking over the world, and after Sarah’s escape they may su
spect that we’ve just learned who they are and what they’re up to.”

  “Why didn’t they destroy the castle? Why just the helicopter and a few houses?”

  “Good question, Cardinal.” In the darkness of the castle’s ramparts, Lev struck a match. His bearded face was bathed in an orange glow tinted by thick bluish smoke that curled up from the tip of his cigar. “Whatever just hit us seems to have stopped for now. It looks like the sun is just starting to come up. Let’s get everyone together and begin moving out. I suggest we gather up all the supplies we can carry and follow the river south to the coast where we can meet the yacht.”

  “That river winds through some pretty rugged country … and then there are those gangs of armed thugs out there roaming the countryside right now.”

  “I know. I had planned on scouting the area from the air this morning, but that plan just went up in flames. Damn, we really needed that helicopter.”

  Lev’s radio crackled to life. “Professor, are you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “The sensors along our northeast border are going crazy. So are the ones on our eastern perimeter. We can see armed men just across the river, and … “

  “And what?”

  “And there are three large helicopters inbound from the north.”

  “How long until they’re here?”

  “About five minutes, sir … if we’re lucky.”

  CHAPTER 37

  From his chateau, Rene Acerbi was talking on the radio to the commander of a flight of three Blackhawk helicopters as they swooped in low over the river. Breaking formation, two of the Blackhawks suddenly peeled off and circled around so that they could attack the castle from the opposite direction.

  On the ground, gunfire aimed at the commander’s helicopter erupted from the trees bordering the vineyards. The door gunner in the Blackhawk immediately returned fire with an M-134 mini-gun, a fearsome weapon with a cyclic rate of fire of 50 rounds per second. In a scorching hail of bullets, the guns on the ground were quickly silenced as the chopper flew by overhead.

  Swinging around from the south, the other two choppers took aim at the castle and let loose with a fusillade of rockets from their side pods. In rapid succession, the rockets impacted at regular intervals along the ancient walls of the castle, and when the smoke had cleared, a medieval piece of history was nothing more than a scorched pile of unrecognizable rubble at the top of the hill.

  Inside the commander’s chopper, the pilot frowned as they came to a hover above the smoking remains of the little blue chopper at the base of the hill.

  “Looks like something happened down in the compound before we got here, sir.”

  The commander frowned. “What did you say?”

  “The compound seems to have taken a hit before we arrived.”

  “A hit? Are our men encountering much resistance on the perimeter?”

  “None … they’ve already made it across the river and are advancing through the vineyard.”

  “What about the gunfire we received from the tree line?”

  “It came from one of their radar-guided ground-to-air weapons. Apparently, it was unmanned and was set to fire automatically.”

  Back at the chateau, Acerbi keyed the microphone and called the leader of his forces on the ground. “What’s the body count down there, captain?”

  “There are no bodies, sir.”

  Acerbi practically screamed into the microphone. “What do you mean no bodies?”

  Everyone listening over the radio could hear the tremble in the man’s voice when he answered. “I mean there’s no one here, sir. The site is completely deserted!”

  Everyone from the compound was running. Ahead of them, the floor of the tunnel angled down and then up again as it wound through the earth beneath the countryside. There were almost sixty people making their way through the underground labyrinth, including half a dozen children. Behind them, they could feel the ground shake from time to time with explosions, making them run even faster as they looked back over their shoulders.

  “How far do we have to go, Ephraim?” Leo huffed.

  “These tunnels go on for miles, Cardinal. They were dug back in the 13th century by villagers trying to escape from all the marauding armies that were sweeping across this part of France. It was the time of all the religious massacres.”

  Now, as they ran, it was beginning to look like history was repeating itself. Twenty minutes earlier, when they had learned that armed men were approaching the compound from across the river to the north, Lev had given the order for everyone to flee. With three inbound helicopter gunships supporting a large, well-coordinated ground assault force, it didn’t take a military genius to figure out that the attackers would overwhelm the castle’s defenses within minutes.

  When Lev had originally purchased the property, Ephraim had showed him the medieval tunnel system. Right away, they both saw that the tunnels would provide a perfect escape route if the compound was ever attacked. The Israelis always had a backup plan.

  In keeping with their pre-planned exit strategy, everyone, including those stationed around the perimeter, had escaped down into the tunnel system before making their way to a rendezvous point under the castle. Once they had all gathered together, Moshe performed a quick head-count as Ephraim began leading the entire assemblage into the depths of the labyrinth. After walking for forty-five minutes, they entered a large, cavern-like space that contained a shallow pool of clear, aquamarine water.

  “We need to stop for a minute,” Ariella said. “The children need to rest.”

  Lev clinched an unlit cigar in his teeth and surveyed the space. “Ok, but only for a couple of minutes. If the same men who just attacked the castle have discovered the tunnels, they could already be down here searching for us.”

  “It won’t be easy for them,” Ephraim said. “The tunnels under the castle fan out in all directions. They’ll have to know which way we went if they want to come after us.”

  “What about the Carmela?” Leo asked.

  “I radioed Alex about our situation before we left the castle. He agrees that we should follow the Aude River to the coast. They’ll be waiting for us offshore in the speedboats.”

  “How are we going to travel down the river with all of these people, especially the children?”

  “There’s a river barge tied up downriver that belongs to a friend of ours,” Ephraim said. “We just have to make it to that barge and get everyone onboard without being seen. From there, we should be able to make it all the way to the Mediterranean.”

  Carrying a heavy duffle bag full of weapons, John walked over and dropped the bag on the ground next to Leo. Breathing in the musty smell of the tunnels, he looked over his head at the roof of the cavern. “Have you two noticed that, whenever we’re all together, we end up underground somewhere?”

  They both stared back at him for a second before the two of them burst out laughing.

  Leo slapped him on the back. “I don’t know how you do it, John. You always make me laugh at the most inappropriate times.”

  Chuckling to himself, Lev reached to light his cigar before he caught himself. The smell of cigar smoke would be a dead giveaway. No sense in giving their pursuers a cigar-scented trail to follow. “Let’s keep moving. There’s a side tunnel up ahead that exits under the ruins of an old abandoned castle.”

  Moving on through the twisting tunnels, they reached a steep stairway carved into soft white stone. Looking up, they saw a faint light and began to climb until they reached several massive stone blocks that had tumbled down into the tunnel, leaving only a tiny crawl space between them and the daylight beyond. One by one, they all squeezed through, ending up outside among the crumbling ruins of a long-forgotten castle.

  A sudden gust temporarily blinded Leo, and as he turned to shield his eyes, he spotted Lev standing behind a large block of stone, trying to light his cigar.

  “Where are we?” Leo shouted against the wind.

  “You�
�re standing in the ruins of a 12th century Cathar fortification.” Lev pointed across the valley to a column of smoke rising into the sky. “That’s what’s left of our castle.”

  Against a clear blue sky, Leo could see the dense black smoke rising from a hilltop in the distance. Instinctively, he scanned the vicinity for helicopters and listened for the distinctive staccato-like chop of whirling rotor blades. It looked like the choppers were gone … at least for now.

  Walking to the edge of a cliff, Leo could see that the weathered ruin of this medieval castle lay next to a sheer rock wall overlooking the river. It was obvious that its builders had taken advantage of its natural defensive position, for it would have been suicide to mount an assault up a sheer cliff, even though, unbeknownst to Leo, the details of history had spared this particular castle from ever being attacked.

  Seven hundred years ago, the castle’s residents had abandoned it in place and fled for their lives in advance of a marauding army that had swept across the land putting everyone to the sword, even women and children. Rather than war, it had been stone masons who had reduced the castle to rubble when they had quarried its stone over the years for the construction of houses in a nearby village.

  Leo felt a chill run down his spine when he surveyed the large cracked stone and looked out over the golden fields below. Ever since he had first arrived in this area of France, a vague feeling of uneasiness had been tugging at him. There was something about this place that had troubled him, something that he had been unable to put his finger on … until now.

  It was at that moment, on a cliff with the wind in his face, that Leo was suddenly struck with the realization of where he was standing. It was here, in this exact part of France, that the Catholic Church had begun its depraved descent into one of the darkest chapters in its long history, for this had once been the land of the Cathars.