'You will.' Mendoza raised his voice. 'Father General, can you hear me?'
A pause. 'Is that you, Marco?'
'Yes. They're here, all accounted for. I'm sending them out.'
'Marco?' said a stunned Zeb. 'I thought your name was Osvaldo.'
He ignored her. 'Raise your hands and step out of the cave.'
'You made a vow,' said Sister Chantal, stunned.
After the initial shock, nausea swirled in Ross's gut. He couldn't believe what was happening. He had allowed this man, who had pretended to be his friend, to undermine his already impossible quest to save Lauren. Now, when against all the odds he had found what he sought, he was to be denied. All the anger, frustration and grief he had suppressed since the night of her injury erupted within him. He had never known rage like it. He leapt at Mendoza, lunging for the rifle, taking him by surprise.
'What have you done?' he roared, as he flung the man to the ground and wrestled him for the rifle. 'What the fuck have you done?' In his rage, he had no idea how long they fought, but when he had finally wrested the gun off Mendoza and pointed it at the man who had betrayed them, his whole body was trembling.
Then he glanced at Mendoza's right leg and froze.
Mendoza's jeans had ridden up over his boots, revealing a transmitter strapped to his shin. But it was the thick scar above his right ankle that stunned Ross and revealed the full extent of Mendoza and Torino's duplicity. He had seen that scar once before, through a haze of blood on the night Lauren had been injured, moments before she had been thrown from the landing and broken her neck.
Ross had never wanted to kill anyone before but in that instant, as he looked down at the man who had destroyed Lauren's life, he wanted to kill Mendoza – or whatever the bastard's name was. As his finger tightened on the trigger, a soldier rushed in behind him, rifle butt raised, and bludgeoned him across the head. Ross collapsed, the pain so intense he clamped his eyes shut to dull its white glare. A second blow turned the white to black.
59
As Feldwebel Fleischer and his soldiers dragged Kelly away and led his companions out of the caves at gunpoint, Torino smiled at the man who, for the last few weeks, had used the name Osvaldo Mendoza. At that moment, in the euphoria of triumph, he felt genuine affection for his half-brother. 'You did well, Marco.'
'Who are the soldiers, Father General?'
Torino waved a hand dismissively. 'Swiss Guard. The Holy Father sent them to protect me in the jungle. Now, tell me everything, Marco. What happened on the river before Iquitos? I was worried until I got your satellite text warning about La Boca del Inferno.'
'Things didn't go as planned. The three men I hired to frighten Kelly's party were supposed to flee when I fired a warning shot. Make me look a hero. But they were amateurs and got greedy.'
'Greedy?'
'Their leader, Raul, heard Kelly talking about the priest's book and assumed it led to treasure. He and the other two tried to get it for themselves.'
Torino frowned at his half-brother. 'You killed them?'
'I had no choice. Raul was going to shoot the nun and you said she might be valuable.' Bazin shrugged. 'In the end it made me more credible with Kelly and the others. And I had contingencies in place.'
Torino nodded. 'They worked well, Marco. Both the GPS transmitter on the boat and the one on your ankle worked like a charm. I was a little concerned, though, when the satellite signal began to break up. One of the soldiers had to track you over the last few days. But he says you left a good trail, especially through the sulphur caves.'
'Did you find the lost city?'
'What? No.' Torino had no interest in lost cities.
'There's gold there.'
Torino shook his head. 'This is more valuable than gold.' He turned back to Kelly and the others, who were being corralled by the soldiers into an area enclosed by rocks and trees. 'What can you tell me about this place? What have you learnt?'
'It's incredible. Just drinking the lake water and eating the plants can cure you.' Bazin paused for a moment, as if overcome. 'When we got to Iquitos I was getting excruciating headaches, one of the symptoms the clinic told me to watch for if the cancer spread to the brain. They were the worst I've known, even with powerful painkillers. I had them all day every day. Then I drank the water here and the next morning the pain had gone. I've never felt better. I'm cured. I know it.' He lowered his voice. 'Even the testicle the surgeons removed is growing back. The scar has virtually disappeared. It's like God laid his hand on me, washed away my sins and gave me a second chance. And it's not just me.' Torino listened as Bazin told him how the garden had healed Kelly's broken wrist and corrected Nigel Hackett's and Zeb Quinn's eyesight. 'Drink the water. Eat the fruit. See for yourself.'
'I will,' Torino said. 'What else?'
'Speak to the nun. She knows most about this place. According to her, any living thing dies when it's taken out. Even the water goes stale.'
'It loses its power to heal outside the garden?'
'So she says.'
'How was Kelly going to heal his wife, then?'
'Last night I heard him and Zeb talking together. He showed her a strange rock that Sister Chantal gave him. It's in his backpack.' Bazin pointed into the caves. 'She got it from in there.'
Torino walked into the damp cave and his excitement increased. The pools, the waterfall and the tunnel of blood were exactly as they were in the Voynich. He peered into the gloom and saw white shapes flitting in the shadows. The Eves that Falcon spoke of in his manuscript and his testimony, he thought. As he had feared, this place presented problems for the Church as well as opportunities. He turned to the glowing tunnel and remembered the passage that described how the conquistadors had died.
Bazin pointed to the tunnel. 'When I came in here this morning Ross was up there.'
Torino didn't disguise his surprise. 'Up there? Are you sure?'
'I saw him climbing down. Said I wouldn't believe what he'd seen up there.'
Torino's eyes followed the glittering path until it disappeared and anticipation coursed through him. He approached the tunnel and studied the crystals encrusting the entrance. Then he bent down and put his hand into the rushing stream, noting the crystal rocks on its bed, the shards in the pools and the phosphorescent water flowing out of the cave into the lake. 'What did Dr Kelly see up there?'
'There wasn't time to ask him. But he said he was trying to find out what was behind this place's miraculous powers.'
'We know what's behind the garden's miraculous powers. God.' Torino thought of the mysterious radix in Father Orlando's testimony to the Inquisition. 'But it won't do any harm to understand the agent God might be using. I must talk with Dr Kelly and Sister Chantal. But first I want to make a few observations of my own.'
60
The next morning
'If we're trespassing, why don't they just kick us out?' Zeb demanded.
'I know,' said Hackett. 'They've no right to keep us here.'
'The Father General can't let us leave,' said Sister Chantal, bitterly. 'Not until he's decided what to do with this place – and us.'
Ross had slept fitfully, drifting into and out of consciousness. When he finally woke, the excruciating pain in his head had gone. The soldiers had corralled them within a copse of trees near to where Father Orlando's remains were buried. The trees and four boulders formed a natural enclosure, over which the soldiers had erected a tarpaulin. Within this makeshift pen, each had been laid out on the mossy ground, their ankles and wrists secured with plastic ties. The soldiers had fed them and allowed them to use the latrines they had dug in the corner of the garden, but there was no doubt that they were prisoners. When he opened his eyes Ross saw two soldiers unpacking and stacking an arsenal of weapons beneath another tarpaulin shelter.
'Christ, look at the stuff they've brought with them,' said Hackett, craning his neck for a clearer view.
'What are those things with fuel tanks attached to them?' asked Zeb.
'I think the
y're flame-throwers,' said Hackett. 'But what about those yellow parcels? One of their packs was full of them. Christ, what the hell did they expect to find here? They can't have thought we were that dangerous.'
'I don't think the weapons were meant for us,' said Ross, thinking of the Voynich and what had killed the conquistadors in the tunnel of blood.
'You okay? How's your head?' Zeb asked him.
'Fine.' Ross almost missed the pain. It had helped focus his rage and, right now, rage would have felt a hell of a lot better than despair.
'This place is amazing. Your swelling and bruising's already gone.' She cocked her head. 'There's Osvaldo – or whoever the hell the son-of-a-bitch really is. You sure he was the guy who hurt Lauren?'
Ross shifted as Mendoza stepped out of one of three tents by the lake. He felt his fury return. 'Positive.'
'The priest called him Marco – Marco Bazin,' said Hackett. 'The bastard's going through our backpacks now.'
As Ross lay on the ground, he thought of Lauren, helpless on her hospital bed. God, he missed her. He yearned to call his father and ask how she and the baby were. He had come so close to saving them; he had held their salvation in his hand. He no longer cared about the source or the caves. He only wanted Lauren back. As he watched Bazin retrieve the rock crystal and Father Orlando's damaged notebook, he stoked the rage burning within him. He still found it hard to believe Torino's duplicity: a so-called man of God offering him sympathy and requesting his wife's notes – in a hospital chapel of all places – after he had ordered the burglary responsible for Lauren's injuries. There was no way Ross was leaving this garden without the one thing he had come for: the means to save his family. If Torino wanted war, then so be it.
Bazin turned towards them, stepped over Hackett and pulled a knife from his belt.
'Come to stab us in the back again, have you?' said Hackett.
Bazin ignored him and turned to the soldiers. 'Gag them. The Father General doesn't want them communicating.' He knelt down and cut the plastic ties on Ross's and Sister Chantal's ankles. 'He wants you two to talk, though.' He grabbed their wrists and pulled them to their feet. 'Come.'
61
'Tell me something, Osvaldo,' Kelly demanded, as Bazin led them to Torino.
'My name is Marco.'
'Okay, Marco, my loyal and trustworthy friend, tell me how much Torino's paying you. How much does a lowlife bag of shit like you cost?'
The other man's tone infuriated Bazin. The scientist, an atheist who believed in nothing, had no right to assume he was superior to him. 'The Father General's paying me nothing. I'm doing this to cleanse my soul. This is God's work.'
'No,' said Sister Chantal. 'This may be the Father General's work but it is not God's.'
'What would you, a traitor to the Church, know about God's work?' said Bazin.
Kelly stared at him. 'You're doing this because you think it's right?' Bazin pushed him on, but Kelly hadn't finished. 'Remember our chat about deeds being everything? You said that only God and the Church can judge if a man's deeds are good or bad. Tell me one thing. How the fuck does your God justify you putting my wife into a coma?' He clenched his teeth so hard that his jaw muscles bunched. 'I can't believe Juarez died saving your life. His was worth infinitely more than yours. Christ, I can't believe I saved your fucking life. Instead of pulling you out of the bat shit I should have left you to your fellow cockroaches.'
Bazin burnt to make the geologist understand the righteousness of his deeds. 'You weren't supposed to be in the house, and I didn't mean to hurt your wife but the Superior General needed her files. She got in the way.'
'Really? And those men you killed on the boat? The ones you set up to join our gang, to spy on us? Did you intend to kill them?'
'No.'
'Christ,' said Kelly. 'In that case, I hope you do intend to kill me.'
Bazin sighed. 'No, my friend, you don't. I was once paid to kill. I was good at it, too. Some said I was the best. I've lost count of how many men I intended to kill but I know they're all dead.'
'Is that you speaking now, Marco, or the Scourge of God? It's getting hard to tell the difference.'
The geologist's refusal to understand him, and his arrogant assumption that only he was right, incensed Bazin. He had been justified in betraying Kelly and the others. Having seen the garden, and experienced its power, he knew it was too important to be left in the hands of men like him. Or those who had betrayed Rome, like Sister Chantal. Even Hackett would let the drug companies exploit it for money. Only the Holy Mother Church could and should channel its power. Only his half-brother, the Black Pope, was qualified to know how best to use it. Bazin reassured himself that he had served the Church well, and that his redemption was certain.
As he pushed Kelly and the nun through the entrance to the forbidden caves, he saw his half-brother emerge from the dark recesses of the antechamber. The Superior General held a folder in his right hand and was smiling.
'Look,' Torino said, as he walked closer. 'No limp. This place is truly miraculous. I want you both to tell me all about it.' He waved the folder towards the glowing tunnel. 'I especially want to know what's up there.'
'Why should we tell you anything?' Kelly asked.
Bazin frowned at him, unwrapped the crystal and handed it to Torino. 'Ross, the Superior General holds the fate of your wife in his hands. If I were you I'd tell him whatever he wants to know.'
Torino studied the shard. 'Have you the notebook?'
Bazin passed it to him. 'It's damaged, but most of it's still legible. The part you asked about is at the end.'
'Thank you, Marco. Please wait outside. I'll call if I need you.'
62
Torino had never felt so empowered and sure of his destiny. When he had woken this morning, cured of his limp, it was as if God's own blood flowed in his veins. And now, when he opened Father Orlando's notebook and scanned the last section, he knew he was close to exceeding even his most lofty ambitions.
'When did the Catholic Church start employing thieving, deceitful murderers?' said Kelly.
Torino glanced up from the notebook and watched his half-brother leave the cave. 'Marco has proved himself a loyal servant of the Church.' He smiled. 'Please, Dr Kelly, let us put any unpleasantness behind us. It was never my intention to harm your wife and unborn child, and if this crystal is as powerful as Sister Chantal believes, the damage can be reversed. There's no reason for any more animosity between us.'
'No reason for any animosity?' Kelly held up his bound wrists. 'You're holding us captive.'
'That's a precaution. To make sure we all understand each other before I let you return home.' Torino turned to Sister Chantal. 'Sister, you need feel no anger either. Father Orlando Falcon's original intention was to tell the pope of his discovery. He believed only the Holy Mother Church could be trusted with his garden.' He frowned. 'Regretfully, Rome didn't appreciate his discovery then, but now the Holy Father himself wants to embrace it within the bosom of the Church.'
'He's sanctioned all you've done?' she said incredulously.
Torino ignored her question. 'Sister, Father Orlando wanted the garden to be in safe hands, and now it will be. You should be satisfied.'
'What the hell are you going to do with it?' demanded Kelly. 'Turn it into a miraculous theme park? A Lourdes that genuinely cures people? Grant admission to people if they convert to Catholicism?'
'He won't do that,' said Sister Chantal. She spat the words. 'He can't let the world know about this place. It doesn't fit with Rome's doctrine.'
The Source Page 26