7

by Van R. Mayhall Jr.

  “We have this translated from the cuneiform: ‘Evil must be sealed at the Mount; Good will serve the Seven,’” he said.

  Cloe let the translation wrap around her as she considered it. Without more, it seemed almost as incomprehensible as the cuneiform. She balanced herself in the speeding boat; her neck hurt, and her shoulders were sore from the tension. Nonetheless, they were making progress.

  “Albert, I’m sorry. I know you and the curator have been working with the monks night and day on this, but it doesn’t ring any bells with me. Even so, I can’t come back just yet. I want to be with you, but I sense this trip to New Orleans is critical,” responded Cloe.

  “What have you learned?”

  As Cloe filled him in on what had happened, she realized she really knew nothing more than when she had arrived other than that some bad actors wanted to kill a strange group of people. She didn’t know why or what it could have to do with her mission.

  “The sentence you have is absolutely fascinating,” said Cloe, ruminating on the language. “It has both the words seven and seal in it that the German said he saw. But the seven what? What is the mount? How will evil be sealed?”

  “In Revelation, the personification of evil, the devil in the form of the beast, was cast into the abyss for a thousand years,” the monsignor explained. “In other words, Jesus and the forces of good defeated evil and cast it away. That’s the thousand-year cycle we have talked about.”

  “In a sense, evil was sealed away from mankind in the abyss,” said Cloe. “But where is the mount, and who or what are the seven?”

  “Is the abyss a real place and is it near the mount? I think we have to assume the term ‘mount’ refers to a mountain or hill of some sort,” posited the monsignor. “As you know, the Bible is full of mounts—for example, the Mount of Olives and Mount Calvary.”

  “Right. Much of significance in the Bible occurred on or around one of these mounts, but what does that get us? Some were not even real mountains. Calvary itself was more of a rock formation than a true mountain.”

  “If Father Sergio were here with us, he’d tell us we need a working theory,” said the monsignor. “I think we need to find seven souls who can lead good against evil, and the end game will occur at some mount. How’s that for vague?”

  “Well, it’s at least a theory that fits the known facts,” said Cloe, smiling, thinking of her affection for Serge. Then she thought about Zack and his cohorts. The seven, she thought. Is that it?

  “In my opinion, you should get to the end of whatever you are doing in New Orleans and then come to Reykjavik as soon as possible,” replied the cleric. “That’s where the action will be. We will need you. The curator and I will continue on the translation, but you are critical to that work.”

  Stung by the mild rebuke from her friend, Cloe wondered whether she was just chasing phantoms or if what was happening was a key to the solution. Her initial, although indirect, contact with Zack and the rest left her with a clear notion that they were involved. Was it possible? Doubt yanked at her sleeve.

  Gathering herself, she said, “Albert, we will join you in Reykjavik as soon as I run this down. I’m on to something here, and the attack on us proves it. Why would anyone try to hurt us unless what we’re doing matters?”

  “Cloe, right now, there’s no accounting for what people do. Sometimes, random just happens. But you do what you must, and we’ll look for you in Iceland.”

  CHAPTER

  65

  The cabin cruiser entered the narrow channel in the northwest quadrant of the lake. Cloe watched her assistant deftly pilot the vessel through the shallow waters. A string of orange markers became visible as white dots on the radar guided them.

  Leneau had regained his senses and had given Jeanne a bearing that led them to their current location. “Port Louis,” was what he had said.

  Now he stood next to her, swaying a bit but watching carefully as she guided his baby into the bayou at the end of the channel.

  “Easy here,” he whispered. “The channel silts up and is very shallow. Stay toward the right bank.”

  They had not seen the go-fast since they had left the fog bank, but J.E. and Jacob were armed and on alert. Leneau had slept solidly for the forty minutes or so it had taken them to arrive at whatever this Port Louis was and awakened somewhat refreshed if groggy from the painkiller. He was very sore but determined.

  “Where are we?” asked Cloe. “I know this is west of Madisonville, but what is this place?”

  “Port Louis is a development project that was probably started in the early to mid-eighties. It was meant to be a modern, upscale mixed-use project but has fallen on hard times and now has a few camps on the bayou that empties into the lake. I have a little place here,” said Leneau. “It’s very isolated.”

  Cloe looked ahead and could see the bare silhouette of a string of what looked like two-story townhouse-styled structures in the low light emanating from the windows of two of them. The rest, maybe ten to twelve structures, struck her in the darkness as long vacant and possibly abandoned.

  “Here,” said Leneau, pointing to one that was completely blacked out.

  Jeanne nudged the craft toward the dock and coasted in. Soon they were tied up and helping Leneau off the boat. J.E. and Jacob stood as sentries. Cloe looked back and saw the lake-effect fog rush up the little channel behind them, blanketing everything. Whoever was after them would not find them this night.

  ***

  “Good Lord!” was all Cloe could say as she gazed at the huddled menagerie seated in the glow of a hurricane lamp in the living room of Leneau’s camp. They looked like a group of refugees discovered by the border patrol.

  A young man stood, walked toward her, and said, “Dr. Lejeune, I presume. I’ve been anxious to meet you.”

  “You must be Zack,” she replied. “We need to get Mr. Leneau to bed. He’s been wounded.”

  “Oh no!” cried Doris, arising from her camp chair and coming to her father. Her mother, who had been laying out sheets and blankets for the night, joined her to help him toward a nearby bedroom.

  “He needs a hospital!” screamed Mrs. Leneau.

  “No,” said her husband. “I’ll be fine. Just put me down on the bed so I can rest.”

  Introductions were made, and then Zack asked, “What happened?”

  As Cloe filled him in, she took in the group before her. Zack’s eyes said he had seen many things in his young life. Louie looked rough and talked tough. Mel and Zack meant something to each other. The others just looked lost.

  “Well, Mr. Leneau is a pretty tough bird and certainly game,” said Zack, after hearing of the attack on the water. “When the dirty boys came for us at his home on Esplanade, he saw what was happening and got all of us out through an old coal chute in the rear of the house. He took us to his boat at West End, and here we are.”

  Cloe looked at the jumble of human beings and at the giant bulldog. She took note of the boy. The dog always maneuvered to be between him and her, an occasional low growl escaping his throat.

  “Hello, ma’am,” said the child.

  “Hi, Robby,” Cloe responded, remembering his name from her assistant’s phone call. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I’m a little tired and hungry, but we have work to do, don’t we?”

  “Yes, we do,” Cloe replied. “We’ll have some snacks that Mr. Leneau brought, and then we need to talk.”

  As J.E. distributed the treats, Cloe sat down in the middle of the odd group. She paused to examine them further while they tore into the food, refreshing themselves. They looked completely ordinary—except when she looked at Louie, she wanted to hold her purse a little tighter, if she had had a purse.

  Finally, she asked, “Who are all of you?”

  “We’ve told you who we are individually,” said Zack. “The
only thing that makes us special and that we have in common is the card. Seven of us have the card. We’ve told you about the giant or angel or whatever he was who gave it to us.”

  Cloe watched as each of the seven reached into pockets or purses and produced the cards. She took the one held up by the boy. The front side said “7.” She turned it over and saw there were lines of very small markings on the back.

  “What in the world?” she said to herself. She peered at the minute marks and then held the card near the lamp. They look a little like tiny insects in some kind of formation.

  She held it closer to the light, “My God! It’s cuneiform!”

  J.E., Jeanne, and Jacob looked at each other, and J.E. asked, “How is that possible?”

  “What’s cuneiform?” asked Mel. “I thought the lines were just some type of decoration on the card.”

  “Okay. It seems we have a story to tell you,” said Cloe.

  After she told them about the journal, the cuneiform passages, and the trip to Uruk, the little living room was hushed.

  “So what does it say?” asked Mel. “Can you read it?”

  “No, it’s an ancient form of writing that very few people can decipher, and then it takes study,” Cloe responded. “My friends are developing a key to translating it, but it’s not finished.”

  “Mom, look at all the cards,” said J.E.

  Cloe assembled all seven cards on the nearby kitchen table. She gazed at them for a long moment.

  “I don’t know what they say, but whatever it is, it’s the same on all the cards. The formations of wedges are exactly the same,” said Cloe.

  J.E. took a picture of one of the cards with his cell phone and then said, “I’ll e-mail this to the monsignor. He may be able to get something off this.”

  Zack leaned forward and said, “We don’t know what it says, but what does it mean?”

  Cloe looked around the living area. The faces surrounding her were wide-eyed and frightened. This was too much.

  “How …?” one of them asked tentatively.

  Cloe considered the question and the astounding fact that the same ancient cuneiform she was studying from the journal also appeared on the back of these seven strange cards. These cards had driven them to New Orleans, for what they still did not know. Who the hell are these people?

  Finally, she said, “I don’t know how and I don’t know what it says specifically, but what it means is we are somehow linked together and we have work to do … together.”

  “What work?” asked a suspicious Louie.

  “I’m not certain yet, but I believe it has to do with the trouble,” said Cloe. “I have a feeling we’ll know for sure soon.”

  CHAPTER

  66

  The Vatican jet rose from the runway at Louis Armstrong International Airport and headed east, clawing for altitude. By any standard, the jet was overloaded, and if it had not been a private, diplomatic airplane, it would not have been permitted to take off. It had a full fuel load and more passengers than it was certified to carry. Somehow, Sky had made the taxi and the liftoff.

  The seven were aboard, as was Robby’s mom. Cloe had insisted that Leneau stay behind, although he argued forcefully against it. In the end, he needed to attend to his wound. Mrs. Leneau and Doris stayed with him. Jeanne Richard returned to her work at the library. The biggest problem was Bully. When the dog figured out he wasn’t making the trip, he raised hell. It was as if a miniature Brahma bull had been set loose in the living room of the Leneau camp. He had to be restrained as a tearful Robby was pulled away. J.E. and Jacob used all their combined strength to hold Bully back. Finally, the dog was somewhat subdued, and the traveling group left.

  “Well, this looks like old times, Dr. Lejeune,” Sky had said when he greeted them—to which a weary Cloe replied:

  “Light ’em up, Sky. We have work to do.”

  The sleek jet climbed to forty thousand feet, rushing toward the rising sun. Red and orange streams of light colored the cabin. Cloe thought about the events on the lake and the voice giving commands on the speedboat. Was that a trick of the fog?

  Cloe examined the back of Robby’s card and shivered in the cool of the jet’s interior. She pulled a sweater from her bag and draped it around her shoulders. She glanced back at the seven, alert and probably wondering what they were doing. Her eyes dropped again to the card.

  “How can this be?” she asked, more to herself than to anyone else.

  Captain Jacob was sitting across from her at the table at the front of the executive jet.

  “God’s hand,” he said.

  “What’s that?” asked Cloe.

  “Sometimes, the only answer to things is that it’s the hand of God at work,” said the soldier.

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “Ma’am, I live in a tiny nation that by all odds should not exist. I have fought many battles for our very survival,” he said. “I have seen God’s hand too many times not to believe.”

  Cloe looked around at the strange, courageous group of people in the aircraft. Young, old, male, female—all together to see the end, whatever that end might be. Could this be God’s bicep poised to hammer evil? She did not know.

  “But how can five-thousand-year-old cuneiform be on the back of what looks like a modern business card?” she asked.

  “Perhaps it’s there to say something to you,” said Jacob.

  “You think this is a message to me?”

  “Why not?” responded the Israeli. “Someone has to be the tip of the spear. Your destiny may be to defeat this evil. Everything you have ever done in your life may have put you in position to be here,” said Jacob. “In my culture, a single individual from time to time has been positioned or was thrust into the role of making a huge difference. Look at Moses or Noah. Ordinary people, yet God decided they would make a difference. Perhaps God has decided you will make a difference.”

  “How can I know?” asked Cloe, shaken. “I’m certainly no Noah or Moses.”

  “You can’t,” responded Jacob. “It’s the faith thing.”

  “Good will serve the seven,” echoed Cloe.

  “That’s part of what the monsignor said has been translated,” said J.E., who had been listening to the conversation between Cloe and Jacob. “The question is whether our seven is the seven.”

  “I certainly can’t tell you for sure,” said Zack from across the aisle. “But this group is special and has a certain power about it.”

  “Power? What do you mean?” asked Cloe.

  Zack related the events at the coffeehouse.

  “I can’t say how or why, but evil was defeated in that small way at that time,” said Zack. “We joined together and prayed. Evil backed down.”

  “Hmmm, evil defeated,” mused Cloe, looking out at the layers of clouds and light outside the window.

  “The strength we had as a group was like a physical force,” said Zack. “I’ve never experienced anything like it before.”

  “Well, whatever it was, I’m not sure it would help us today. We seem to be arrayed against an adversary who is powerful enough to drive events worldwide. I don’t see how seven random souls could stand against it,” said Cloe.

  “Perhaps,” said J.E. “But you know three hundred Spartans stood against two hundred thousand Persians at Thermopylae and would have won, except a lowlife betrayed them, allowing the Persians to get above and behind them.”

  “I would have to add that a small boy named David was sent out to meet the Philistine champion Goliath, and he defeated him with a sling and a small, smooth stone,” said Jacob.

  “Point taken,” said Cloe. “Still, this is the twenty-first century, and things like that don’t happen.”

  “Well, you might say they don’t happen until they do,” replied Zack. “Nine/eleven could not happen until it did. Our hist
ory is full of firsts.”

  Cloe observed the earnest faces of the three young men seated around her.

  “Are you saying God has sent you to defeat this evil?” she asked directly.

  With a defeated look, Zack said, “I don’t honestly know. But I do know this without fail. We have been chosen for something. It has to do with what you’re doing. Perhaps your translation will give us more.”

  Again, the translation. Cloe felt guilty she was not working on it. It might be the answer to everything. She stood and felt disoriented.

  “I’m going to check on Robby,” she said.

  She headed for the rear of the airplane where they had made a bed between two seats for the boy. Robby’s mother was in her seat, dead asleep. She envied her innocent slumber. The poor woman is exhausted. We all are.

  Then she heard it. It was low and almost inaudible at first over the sound of the engines. The hair on the back of her neck stood up, and she froze, her eyes fixed on the rear of the plane. She took another step, and the growl came again, louder this time.

  Cloe leaned over and looked around the set of seats where they had made Robby’s bed. She came face-to-face with the clear brown eyes of a hundred-pound English bulldog, who filled the entire space between the seats. She jumped backward.

  CHAPTER

  67

  “She’s gone,” said Icar into the sat-phone link.

  “How can you know that?” asked the Burnt Man from the rear of the speedboat. “She and her pals were just here on the north shore. We’re very near to catching up to them. We will catch them.”

  “You’re too late,” responded the voice on the phone. “They’re gone. You have been outsmarted.”

  The Burnt Man was silent. He had been so close to confronting the lady doctor. The damn fog had prevented him from catching her. How could Icar know what he himself did not know—here, on the scene? He had long recognized that his boss knew things of which he had no knowledge and that no human could know. Was it spies or does he just somehow know? He was trapped between the lady doctor’s escape and Icar’s superior information sources. Now what?