The Pegasus Secret (38 page)

Lang opened his eyes and gawked in surprise. He could have gone back in time. Silver Hair stood in the doorway wearing a suit of chain mail over which was a white surcoat open at the sides with a red Maltese cross emblazoned on the front. Pointed shoes of steel covered his feet.

“Don’t tell me,” Lang said. “You’re on your way to ask the wizard for a heart.”

The Templar looked at Lang blankly. “I beg your pardon?” Then he scowled. “I gather you are referring to my attire,” he said stiffly. “Templars dress traditionally when in the temple.”

Temple? Had Lang been kidnapped by mad Shriners? He wished.

Silver Hair stepped aside. Behind him was another man, this one in what looked like a monk’s cassock. Bare ankles were visible above the flip-flops. He was holding a plate from which came the unmistakable aroma of food. Lang suddenly remembered he hadn’t eaten since breakfast of
whatever day it was that he had been taken prisoner.

Silver Hair said, “You are hungry, no doubt. The cellarer had something brought up from the refectory. It is humble fare, a local dish of salt cod, but you will find it nourishing.”

The man in the monk’s outfit set a wooden platter on the bed. It smelled even better. White meat swimming in vegetables.

“Go ahead, eat,” Silver Hair entreated.

Lang looked from him to the man who had served me. “Got a fork?”

Silver Hair shook his head. “The fork was not used until the sixteenth century. We use only the knife, as did our predecessors. We try to eschew the vanities of the modern world.”

That explained the chamber pot.

“Okay,” Lang said, eyes on the wooden trencher with the wonderful fragrance, “we won’t tell Miss Manners.”

The man in the brown habit set the food in front of Lang.

“Afraid you’ll have to do the best you can without eating implements, Mr. Reilly,” Silver Hair said. “I think you can understand our reluctance to furnish you a knife.”

Lang was hungry enough not to care. He scooped up a piece of the fish in his fingers and plopped it into his mouth. He hadn’t eaten many things that had tasted so good. He was nearly finished as Sliver Hair and his companion backed out of the room.

“Until later, then,” he said as the door closed.

A second later the lock clicked.

Lang was draining the liquid from the platter when the room began to spin. The outlines of the corners got fuzzy and the planks in the floor lost definition. His head was suddenly too heavy to hold up. They had seasoned dinner with something besides herbs.

But why, Lang wondered as his world again grew dim. They could hardly interrogate him if he was asleep.

And he was too sleepy to care.

Location unknown
Time unknown

Only his still-full stomach told Lang he had not been unconscious more than a few hours. A bright light was shining in his eyes. Although awake, he was lethargic, and his head weighed a ton.

“Back with us, I see,” said a voice from behind the light. “Time for you to answer a question or two.”

Lang struggled to get up to a sitting position. “I get to make one phone call before my final answer, right?”

There was no response. Clearly Silver Hair had better things to do than watch American TV.

“I want to know two things, Mr. Reilly: How did you find our secret and to whom did you send that letter?”

“Right,” Lang said. “And as soon as I tell you, I walk out of here. Wherever ‘here’ is.”

“Something can be arranged, I’m sure.”

Something like a bullet in the back of the head.

But Lang said, “I’ve got a few questions of my own. Like, if you wanted to keep the secret of Blanchefort, why have a virtual map of it painted by that guy Poussin?”

“You test my patience, Mr. Reilly, but I will give you an answer as a demonstration of our good faith. We have always faced a choice: risk committing the secret to writing or risk it being lost if enough of our members succumb to any number of unpleasant possibilities. Centuries ago, plague; today mass destruction by heathen terrorists the West does not have the fortitude to destroy first. It was not
unreasonable, then, in Poussin’s time, the first half of the seventeenth century, to want some sort of record as to where our . . . discovery might be found. Along with the oral parts of our initiation rites, a picture would serve to find the precise location.”

Lang’s interest made him forget how groggy he was. He sat up a little straighter. “How did you know Poussin wouldn’t give away your secret?”

The light shifted enough for Lang to be able to make out Silver Hair’s silhouette. He seemed to be sitting but there wasn’t anything in the room to sit on besides the bed. Had they brought in a chair?

“Poussin was a Freemason.”

“So?”

“Freemasonry is a tool of our order, its members at our bidding. We control it worldwide, always have. Most men of prominence up until nearly the present were Masons, your George Washington, most of your country’s founding fathers, for example. Through it we knew nations’ most intimate secrets. We don’t intend to experience another 1307.

“More directly in answer to your question, Poussin did the painting because he was commanded to do so, a slight variation upon his work that now hangs in the Louvre. He never knew its significance. We had copies made, one for each of our chapters. Last year we moved the London house, sold a number of its goods rather than move them. The movers mistakenly bundled up the picture with the items we had sold.

“Now, I’ve given you your answer. I want to know where that letter went.”

Lang yawned, not entirely an affectation, and moved his aching arm in a slow circle. “Like I said before, so you can kill somebody else? I don’t think so.”

There was an audible sigh. “Very well, Mr. Reilly. We will leave you for a while to meditate on your situation. When
we return . . . well, I fear it will be most unpleasant. We no longer use the rack, the thumbscrew. But we can do amazing things with alligator clips and automobile batteries, simple electrical cooking appliances and human skin. I warn you, though, we have limited time.”

So much for Lang’s theory on the demise of torture as an interrogation tool.

There was the scrape of the unseen chair as Silver Hair got up. Lang was already relaxing, slumping back onto the bed, when hands reached out from the dark, pinioning Lang’s arms behind him. His wrists were quickly handcuffed to the bed as his pants were removed. His shoulder was on fire.

“Now look,” Lang said. “Surely we . . .”

Somebody literally had him by the balls. The scrotum’s skin was stretched and he felt cold metal. Before he could say anything else, his breath evaporated in a bolt of pain that seared from his testicles throughout his body. His blood was on fire and he could see nothing but a wall of red that was one with his agony.

Lang didn’t hear his own scream. Burning, searing pain had replaced the other four senses, cramping, demobilizing, anguish.

It stopped as suddenly as it started. The clamps were removed and Lang’s arms released. The fire in his crotch made him forget his shoulder.

“A few volts, a low charge,” the voice from the darkness said. “We will leave you to consider the effects of a larger charge, perhaps applied to a metal rod inserted in the anus up to the prostate.”

They left Lang with the thought. That and pain worse than any he’d ever gotten from a dirty shot in any sport he’d ever played. Gingerly, he moved onto his side. That was when he noticed the shock had made him wet himself.

Location unknown
Time unknown

Lang no longer needed to count floor pegs to occupy his mind. He had to find a way out of here before the guy jump-started his balls again.

Every move set a new fire in his crotch, underlining the urgency of escape. Gritting his teeth against the constant pain, Lang tried the window. The shutters were immobile, probably secured by a bolt outside too heavy to move even if he could reach it. Besides, unless he was on the first floor, jumping out of a window might not be such a hot idea.

Trying the same tactic as with the Templar in his condo in Atlanta was a possibility he quickly discarded. They would be alert to the chance he might try to spring on them when they entered the room, and if there were more than one of them, there would be no chance at all. Lang needed to think of something else. He began another slow circuit of the room.

If there had been a chair for Silver Hair, he had taken it with him. The door was hand-hewn wood, the marks of the chisel on it and the matching frame visible even in the dim light, as were the details of the brass lock plate. Lang knelt to inspect the lock, the posture squeezing testicles already ablaze. He groaned as he peeked into the keyhole again. There was no spring latch like a modern knob would have. Like most old doors, this one would have been kept shut by a simple latch on the inside, a device that empty screw holes indicated had been removed. The keyhole was still blocked but Lang thought he could see the thinnest glimmer of light between the door and jamb. He moved his head up and down. The space extended from top to bottom,
blocked only where the lock’s bolt fit into the bolt plate.

Careful to jar his crotch as little as possible, he sat on the floor. Removing a shoe, he used the dirt and grime on the sole of the Mephisto to make a nearly invisible mark on the frame just even with the bolt.

The he returned to the bed, this time looking at the bottom of it. Instead of springs, it had old time slats to support the stuffed cotton ticking. For once, Lang was happy to have been uncomfortable. Those slats . . .

It was tempting to stretch out for a few minutes, to give into the pain, but there was no time. Working the end of one slat loose from the bed’s frame, he levered the other end up and down until he heard it crack. Slipping the whole board out of place, he picked a splinter from the damaged end and returned the slat to its place.

Lang had done what he could. Now he had to depend on the fickle favors of luck.

Although it felt like he was passing fire, he urinated a slim stream of blood into the chamber pot. Then he beat on the door.

They must have had a guard outside because the click of the lock was immediate.

The doorway was filled with a large man in a white cassock, complete with a hood and a rope belt, something Pietro might have worn seven hundred years before. The light was behind him, preventing Lang from seeing the features of his face although it was adequate to make a halo of his close-cropped blond hair. And to reflect from the automatic rifle slung over a shoulder.

“The pot needs emptying,” Lang said, indicating.

Even in the dim light, Lang could see the sneer, nostrils dilating in disgust as he smelled the dry urine on Lang’s clothes. “When you fill it, you will empty it, heathen . . . if you live that long.”

The accent was Slavic, Russian or something like it. The rifle was one of the AK-47’s, Russian or Chinese-made, that the collapse of the Soviets had left all over Eastern Europe. The thirty-seven–round banana clip hung in front of the trigger guard.

The man’s distaste was apparent even in his back as he spun and strode from the room.

The door slammed and Lang dropped to his knees. The key was rattling as he picked up the splinter from beside the door and slipped it between door and jamb. He could feel the heavy bolt hit it and prayed the slender bit of wood would hold.

It did.

Lang leaned against the oak, making sure the door had no give should the man outside test it. Careful the unbolted door did not move, he turned his back against it and slid into a sitting position, hand over his shoulder to hold the splinter in place.

How long to wait? At some point Silver Hair was coming back with the man from Autolite. He glanced at his bare wrist before remembering they had taken his watch. He began slow counts to sixty, trying to keep score of the passing minutes.

Ten.

Twenty.

Thirty.

Carefully, he pushed the door slightly ajar, trying to remember if the hinges squeaked. The first thing visible in the tiny crack between door and frame was a pair of feet propped in a chair. The guard was taking it easy, maybe too easy if the deep, even breathing was any indication. Encouraged, Lang pushed the door a little wider. He wasn’t as lucky as he had hoped. His keeper was tilted back in a chair, his legs stretching to a second chair, engrossed in a magazine. The rifle was across his lap.

Beyond him, a dimly lit hall stretched for maybe twenty feet, intersecting what Lang guessed was yet another hallway like a large hotel. The only thing missing were numbers on the line of doors.

Lang eased the door shut. He needed to move but couldn’t chance the door swinging open. Untying a shoe, he jammed the rubber sole between floor and door. Careful to keep the splinter in place, he returned to the bed. The sheets were old linen, bordered with fine lace. Regretting the necessity of destroying something so beautiful, he ripped a couple of long strips loose before returning to the door. He wadded one strip and made a loop of the other.

The guard was still intent on his magazine. Lang opened the door a little wider. If the guard looked up, Lang was finished. With as little motion as possible, Lang lobbed a Mephisto over his keeper’s head. It landed with a gratifying thunk.