The Brotherhood of the Rose (12 page)

"I can't. He's afraid to get in touch with me."

"With you?"

"The mole. I've always said there was one. From the agency's beginning. Someone who infiltrated us at the start, who's been compromising us ever since. Someone close to me is using what Saul tells me, using it to try to get at Saul."

"But why?"

"I don't know why he's so important he has to be killed. What he's discovered, or whom he threatens. I won't know till I catch the mole. It isn't easy. I've been looking since 1947.

I have to find Saul, though. I have to insure his safety."

"How? If he won't get in touch with you, if he's afraid the mole will intercept his message."

Eliot set the rose down. -There's an egg in the basket."' Chris felt the jet lurch. Eliot said, "That message arrived in Rome four days ago. Addressed to you. I think from Saul."

Chris nodded. "I don't know what it means," Eliot said. "For God's sake, don't tell me. Even this rose might have ears. But if it's from Saul and it tells you where to find him, use it. Go. Be careful. Bring him in."

"One Black Prince to rescue another?"

"Exactly. Your surrogate father is asking you to save your surrogate brother. If you're looking for a reason not to kill yourself, you've found it."

Chris turned to the window, eyes narrowed, more than just from the sun. He brooded-all thoughts of suicide canceled by concern for his brother. His heart quickened. Saul needed help. Beside that, nothing else mattered. His brother needed him. He'd found the only reason that could make him want to live.

He turned to Eliot, his voice grim. "Count on it."

"Ironic," Eliot said. "A hit team's chasing Saul, and everyone else is chasing you."

"You'll appreciate the complexity."

"I'll appreciate it more when Saul is safe. What country should I tell the pilot to fly to?"

"Home."

"What city?"

Chris considered. The safety-deposit box was in Sante Fe, but he couldn't go there directly. He had to land close to it, yet far enough away to lose a tail. He had to be evasive in case this conversation was being monitored. "Albuquerque."

Eliot straightened, his ancient eyes bright, signaling he recognized deception and approved. "Has it occurred to you?" Chris said.

Eliot frowned. "I don't understand."

"That hybrids are usually sterile." The jet descended through the clouds.

The Sangre de Cristo mountains loomed in the distance. Snow still capped the peaks, the slopes dark with oak and fir. Despite the blazing sun, the air felt dry.

Chris walked along the narrow street, passing flat-roofed, adobe houses with red slate trim and walls around gardens. Through a gate, he saw a bubbling fountain. Pifion trees provided shade, the green oil their needles contrasting with thel_ earth tones of the houses.

Pausing at the end of the block, he glanced back down the street. He'd chosen this expensive residential section of Sante Fe because he knew it would be quiet-little traffic, few pedestrians. The isolation made it easy for him to check on anyone following him. He took for granted that, if the KGB or MI-6 or any of the other networks hunting him had spotted him, they'd never have let him wander the streets this long. They'd simply have killed him right away. He had to conclude, then, that they weren't close.

For Saul, though, he'd been willing to take the risk. His eyes gleamed. For his brother, he'd take any risk. He'd gladly make himself a target to draw out someone besides his hunters.

The mole. Whoever was intercepting Eliot's messages to Saul. Whoever wanted Saul dead. The questions nagged him. What had Saul done, or what did he know? This much was clear. Since Chris was not supposed to report to Eliot for fear of a leak, the only way the mole could get his hands on-Saul was by following Chris. But so far Chris had seen no evidence of surveillance.

Glancing behind him again, he passed a house with a courtyard and veranda partly concealed by junipers. He peered toward the mountains, crossed a street, and approached a Spanish cathedral. Climbing the high stone steps, pulling the iron ring on a huge oak door, he entered a dark cool vestibule. The last time he'd been here was in 1973. In honor of its hundredth anniversary, the church had been extensively restored that year. Since then, as he'd hoped, it hadn't changed. The vaulted ceiling, the stained glass windows, the Spanish design around the stations of the cross remained as they had been. He walked to the marble holy water fountain, dipping his hand in, genuflecting toward the distant golden tabernacle on the altar. Crossing himself, he went to the row of confessionals on his left, beneath the choir loft, at the back of the church, his footsteps echoing on the smooth stone floor.

The confessional in the corner drew him. Nobody sat in the nearby pews. He heard no muffled voices from inside, so he opened the ornate door, stepped in, and closed it behind him.

The church had been shadowy, but the narrow penitent's cubicle was totally dark, its musty smell stifling. Out of habit, he silently recited, "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was..." He recalled the monastery, his sins, his plan to kill himself, and stopped. His jaw hardened. He couldn't be distracted. Saul alone mattered. Instead of kneeling to face the screen behind which a priest would normally be hidden, he quickly turned and reached toward the top right corner. In the dark, his fingers searched. All these years. He sweated, wondering if he'd been foolish. What if a carpenter, repairing the confessional, had discovered... ? He pulled the loose molding from the seam where the wall met the ceiling and grinned as he touched the key he'd wedged into the niche years before.

The bank had been designed to look like a pueblo: flatroofed, square, with support beams projecting from the top of the imitation-sandstone walls. Two yucca plants flanked the entrance. Traffic blared. In a restaurant across the street, a businessman sat at a middle table, facing the window and the bank. He paid for his lunch and left, ignoring another businessman who came in and sat at the same middle table, facing the window and the bank. All along the street, other members of the surveillance team seemed a part of the normal pattern. A young man handed out advertisements. A truck driver carried boxes into a building. A woman browsed through a record store, close to a window. Lingering as long as seemed normal, they left the area, replaced by others.

In the restaurant, the businessman lit a cigarette. He heard a short muffled beep from the two-way radio in his pocket, no more obtrusive than a doctor's paging device, the signal that Remus had been sighted along the street. Peering through the heat haze toward the entrance to the bank, he saw a woman come out, her hand raised to shield her eyes from the sun. A man wearing tan clothes passed her, going in. As a waitress brought a menu, the businessman reachld in his pocket, pressing the radio's transmitter button twice.

Remus was in the bank.

Chris passed the security guard and a row of cages with signs for Deposits and Mortgages, descending the stairs at the back. Indian sand paintings hung on the walls. He reached a counter, gave his key to a clerk, and wrote John Higgins on a bank-form. He and Saul had opened an account here in 1973, depositing a thousand dollars, leaving instructions that the rent for the safety-deposit box should be deducted from the account. Chris hadn't been back here since, though he knew Saul contacted the bank each year to make sure the account and the box hadn't been put on inactive status. The clerk stamped the date on the bank form, initialed it, and pulled out a list of renters, comparing signatures. "Mr. Higgins, I'm supposed to ask for a password."

"Camelot," Chris said.

Nodding, the clerk marked an X beside the name on the list. He opened the counter's gate and led Chris through the vault's massive door to a long high wall of safety-deposit boxes. Lights glared. As the clerk used both the bank's key and Chris's key to unlock a box, Chris glanced to the end of the hall toward a floor-to-ceiling mirror. He didn't like mirrors. Often they were also windows. Turning his back to it, he took the closed tray the clerk gave him and went to a booth.

As soon as he'd shut the door behind him, he checked the ceiling for a hidden camera. Satisfied, he opened the tray. The hand-written message was coded. Translated, it told him, Santa Fe phone booth. Sherman and Grant. He memorized a number. Shredding the message, putting it back in the box, he took a Mauser from the tray and tucked it beneath his jacket behind his belt at his spine. He pocketed the two thousand dollars he'd left here for an emergency.

While the businessman ate his salad, he stared through the window toward the bank. The blue cheese dressing tasted stale. A Ford van stopped before him at the curb, blocking his vision. Sunlight glinted off the windshield.

The businessman swallowed nervously. Come on. Hurry up. Get that damned thing moving.

Standing, he peered beyond the van, reached in his pocket, and pressed the transmitter button three times.

Remus was leaving the bank.

Chris put the Sante Fe map in his pocket as he stepped in the phone booth at the intersection of Sherman and Grant streets. Cars rushed by. Shoppers paused at the windows of trendy boutiques. He shut the door and muffled traffic noises. Though he didn't smile, he felt amused, assuming this location with its combination of street names--Civil War generals-had been chosen by Saul as a joke. We'll soon be together again, he thought. His chest swelled, but he couldn't allow his eagerness to distract him. Putting coins in the slot, he dialed the number he'd memorized. A recorded voice told him the time was 2:46. If an enemy had subdued Chris and forced him to reveal the message in the safety-deposit box, the man would have been baffled by the significance of hearing the time.

Unless he'd kept Chris alive to question him further, he couldn't have learned that the specific time meant nothing. Any hour would have been important, the announcement a signal to Chris to study the walls of the phone booth. Among the graffiti, he found a message to Roy Palatsky, a boy he and Saul had known at the orphanage. He glanced away at once. In case, despite his precautions, he was being watched, he didn't want to betray his fascination with the graffiti. In code, the obscene message told him where to find Saul.

"He made a call," the businessman said on the scramblerprotected long-distance line. "He must have received directions. We could pick him up now."

"Don't. A call's too obvious." Eliot's voice sounded thin and brittle from his Falls Church, Virginia, greenhouse. "These two men have private codes dating back to when they were five years old. That call was likely a bluff to tempt you to show yourselves. What if all he learned was directions to go to another spot where he'd learn still other directions? Don't interfere with him. The only way to capture Romulus is to follow Remus. For God's sake, don't let him see you."

Chris flew higher, skirting a cloud bank, watching the mountains below him. Snow-capped peaks, connected by saddlelike ridges, stretched as far as he could see. Ravines splayed down in all directions. He put the rented Cessna on automatic pilot while he studied a topographical map, comparing its contour lines with the rugged terrain below him. Valleys alternated with mountains. Streams cascaded.

On the wall of the phone booth, the coded message had given him numbers for longitude and latitude, as well as instructions how to get there. He'd gone to the Santa Fe library, where he'd learned that the coordinates referred to a section of mountain wilderness to the north, in Colorado. Renting this plane at the Sante Fe airport had been easy. He'd used the alias on his pilot's license, had paid a deposit and bought insurance. He'd filed a flight plan to Denver, indicating he'd return in three days. But once in the air, he'd gradually veered from his flight plan, northwest, toward the coordinates in the wilderness.

The sky was brilliant. He felt good. The cockpit muffled the engine's drone. He compared a deep long valley to a similar pattern on the map and glanced ahead toward another valley, oval, with a lake. His coordinates met near the lake. He'd almost reached his destination. Checking the sky around him, pleased that he saw no aircraft, he smiled and thought of Saul.

At once he attended to business, slipping on his bulky parachute. The plane soared closer to the valley. Aiming toward a mountain beyond the lake, he locked his controls on target, opened his door, heard the roar of the engine, and felt the surge of the wind. He had to struggle to brace the door against its force.

Pressing his shoes against the lower section of the plane, he leapt out past the wings struts, twisting, buffeted. His stomach rose. Gusts of air pressed his goggles against his face. He couldn't hear the plane, now. All he heard was the hiss as he fell-and a roar in his ears. His helmet squeezed against his skull. Clothes flapping, arms and legs stretched out for balance, he fell horizontally, facing the abrupt enlargement of the landscape. The lake grew. But he quickly achieved a sense of stasis, blissful, almost anesthetizing. If he closed his eyes, he no longer had the sense of falling. Rather he felt suspended, floating, relaxed. In jump school, his instructors had warned him about this deceptive, dangerous sensation. Hypnotized by the almost sexual massage of the wind, some jumpers waited too long before they pulled their ripcord.

Chris understood the attraction. He'd been apprehensive before his first jump, but from then on, he'd looked forward to the pleasure of the others. Now his pleasure was moderated by his need to be with Saul. Eagerly he pulled the ripcord, waited, felt the chute unfold from his back and the lurch as the nylon blossomed, supporting him. He hadn't worried about the chute. Last night, after buying it from the local jumpers' club, he'd spread it out, arranging the lines before he packed it. He'd never have trusted someone to do that for him any more than he'd have let someone clean a weapon and load it for him. Swaying in the wind, he glanced toward the peak beyond the lake and saw the tiny outline of his plane-on automatic pilot-approaching the mountain he'd aimed it toward. He gripped the parachute lines and leaned to the right, angling away from the lake, veering toward a meadow. He saw a cabin above a slope of pines, braced in the V between two Cliffs.