The Seventh Stone (21 page)

“
Torrino,” he barked into the phone. “You’re at the University Medical Center, right?”

A hesitation, then, “Yeah, I’m here.”

The bug turned right on Dickinson, away from the medical center. She wasn’t headed there. Two choices, work the case from the outside or from the inside. “Just stay put, Torrino,” he said. “I’ll be there in five minutes.” He pressed end before Torrino could answer.

He floored the accelerator; inciting an angry horn blare from the car he nearly sideswiped rounding the next corner. The Volkswagen continued straight. He slid into the drop-off only spot on the curb.

The emergency room was buzzing. Patients moaned and rocked, doubling over their stomachs. The nurses’ worried chatter centered on food poisoning, but it seemed to be affecting a surprising number of people and an odd range of ages. Down the hall, a woman argued with her husband, her cheeks red, as if he had slapped her. Torrino sat in the waiting room, a
Sports Illustrated
that he wasn’t looking at clutched in his beefy hands. A splint was taped to his left pinky finger.

Braydon scanned the room. Although the crowd, two dozen or so, of sick people and their companions packed into the small clinic was alarming, he saw nobody from the Contreras entourage besides Torrino. Braydon nodded at him. Torrino put down the magazine, then stood and brushed by Braydon, heading for the men’s room down the hall. Braydon waited a beat and followed. In the men’s room, an acne-faced teenager in torn jeans washed his hands at the sink.

Torrino shot him one glance. The kid left without bothering to dry off. Torrino turned to Braydon. “The Prophet will kill me if he sees me talking to you,” he said. “Kill you, too.”

“
He’ll do worse if we don’t stop him.”

“
You don’t know how crazy he is.” He held up his injured hand. “Broke my finger for screwing up at Hunter’s house. Twisted it with a nutcracker. Enjoyed it.”

“
So you screwed up the kidnapping.”

“
Not the kidnapping, I’d never do that, not for nobody. The Hunter kids were in school. Contreras sent me to get Gabriella Hunter’s journal.”

“
A journal? What for?”

“
You think the mastermind lets minions like me in on his plans?”

Contreras was after his chief botanist’s journal. This could connect to some new miracle drug after all. “What about the artifact Christa Devlin found in Arizona, the armillary sphere?”

“
Armillary what? That’s what was in Devlin’s pack?” He thrust his splinted finger at Braydon. “This is what I got for holding back with that Devlin girl and not grabbing that pack this morning. I figured she had the Turquoise, one of these
sacred
stones the Prophet says is going to change the world or something. You don’t know how crazy he is.”

“
I do know how crazy he is,” Braydon said. The Turquoise, Gabriella Hunter’s journal, the Abraxas stones, the Lux et Veritas sword, he couldn’t see the link, but couldn’t shake the feeling that it was something utterly dangerous, potentially catastrophic. And the immediate threat was to a little girl’s life. “That’s why you’ve got to go back.”

“
I’m done.”

“
Lucia Hunter is just a year older than your little girl,” he said. He didn’t need to add that Torrino’s daughter would never have been born if Braydon hadn’t taken that bullet for him and killed the bad guys before they shot his pregnant wife, who was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then Braydon gave him a chance to come clean. Torrino was a good man at heart, deeply damaged by a very bad upbringing.

“
If I went back, I couldn’t just stand by and let him hurt her,” said Torrino. “I wouldn’t care much about blowing my cover.”

“
Exactly why she needs you.”

Torrino’s phone buzzed in his sport coat pocket. He pawed it out and studied its small screen. “Text from The Prophet,” he said. “He expects me back in ten minutes.” He shoved the phone back into his pocket, leaned his hands on the edge of the counter. He assessed himself in the mirror, looking deep, frowning. “I’ll probably get myself killed.”

“
You can’t,” Braydon said, allowing himself a sardonic smile. “It might get Lucia killed, too.”

CHAPTER
26

Daniel Dubler hated the heat, humidity and putrid fecundity of Gabriella’s greenhouse. It made him nauseous, the same queasiness he felt when he was forced to attend the football match-up between Princeton and Harvard in the suffocating student section. He considered congesting spores and contact sports freaks of nature whose goal was to overtake and strangle civilization.

His cell phone chimed Beethoven’s Fifth from his tweed jacket pocket. The screen read Private Caller. Those two words identified no one more acutely than Baltasar Contreras. Fine. He was ready, in a sense.

“
We are out of time, Dubler,” Contreras said.

“
I’ll find Gabriella’s journal for you,” he said. “Then I insist on telling Christa the truth.” That sounded lame, as his students at Washington Prep would say. Besides, he shouldn’t have to get approval to talk to the woman he loved.

“
The truth,” Contreras spit it out, as if the word repulsed him, “will reveal that you are a liar. You became friends with her sister because of a lie. You became close to her because of a lie. You’ve been building towards this endgame for six months. One stupid move now and you’ll lose your queen.”

Contreras treated the Princeton community as his fiefdom. The only reason that Gabriella’s greenhouse was on the Princeton campus was because Contreras, and his generous donations to the university, waved a hand and made it so, staking out a prime if diminutive piece of property within a stone’s throw of the Merick Rehabilitation Center. The greenhouse was tucked away in a sunny, quiet corner in the back, seldom visited and often overlooked. Nobody would guess that it could change history.

Daniel, too, had been seldom visited and often overlooked, and he was primed to change history. The Breastplate would be the find of the millennium. More than that, it was a direct conduit to God. He believed that. Yes, he believed that. Those fools at the seminary. They had no idea what he was capable of, given the opportunity. “This isn’t a game,” he said. “Not since she told me about her father’s obsession with finding the Breastplate of Aaron. It took a lot for her to open up to me about that.”

“
That was the moment you should have thrust forward. That was the moment to lay bare her soul. To learn what she knows. Two weeks have passed since you told me this revelation. And you have done nothing with it.”

“
You mean I haven’t continued to lie to her.” He couldn’t. He couldn’t even talk to her. He pretended to have never heard of the Breastplate. Him, with his dual degrees in theology and history. Lame. She had to have seen right through it. He stopped calling and sending emails.

“
Deception molds a relationship, not truth,” said Contreras. “She didn’t tell you about the Breastplate. You manipulated it out of her. Bravo, by the way. But doesn’t it make you wonder, Daniel, what other truth she is hiding from you?”

For a man who only understood human nature through books, not actual experience, Contreras was a master. “Christa is afraid to trust anyone. With good reason, obviously.” Daniel yanked at the right-hand desk drawer. Locked.

“
Or is it because she fears that someone else will find the Breastplate and wield its power? Daniel, I did not choose you by random chance to join Hunter’s Colombian expedition last summer as the historian. You are an integral part of the Lord’s divine plan. You must embrace that, not fear it.”

Daniel hadn’t been with anyone this crazy since his days at the soup kitchen, putting in service hours as stepping stones on his path to priesthood. People had looked to him to calm down the drunks and druggies, but he was much better at theology than psychology. Now, he found a new calling. Christa Devlin. He grabbed a trowel from the shelf next to the desk and wedged it into the drawer to force the lock open. “I got in tight with Gabriella over these last months, just like you wanted.”

“
And you got in tight with Christa Devlin,” Contreras said, “just like you wanted.”

Contreras was either mocking or manipulating him. The locked drawer wouldn’t budge. “I’m doing this for Christa, not me.”

“
Touching,” he said.

“
She needs a man in her life.” She was so alone, like him.

“
And if you are the one who is instrumental in finding the Breastplate, in bringing her father home,” he said, “you won’t be just a man. You will be her hero.”

“
All she wants is a family,” he said. “I told you how her mother had been murdered.” Maybe Gabriella kept the key to the drawer nearby. He hoisted the terra cotta pot holding a thorny, putrid smelling vine. Nothing but dirt beneath it. “You wouldn’t understand.” Love was as foreign an emotion to Contreras as the sun was to a worm.

“
Understand this,” Contreras said, his tone so sharp it nearly made Daniel jump. “Secrets beget secrets, revelations beget revelations. Sound familiar?”

Impossible. Nobody knew what Daniel had done. Contreras was dangling a hook. “It was tragic,” Daniel said, “those very words, spray painted across the beautiful granite altar in my seminary’s chapel.”

“
You were angry,” Contreras said, his tone condescending. “So close to earning your doctorate in theology, only to be spurned by your advisor for your oral presentation. What was it he said in his review,
Not in keeping with your foundation of research
.”

“
More like not in keeping with my advisor’s idea of God,” he countered. “Even without the doctorate, the seminary was desperate to ordain me as a priest.”

“
The Vatican won’t even defrock child rapists,” said Contreras, “as long as they are male and single.”

“
It’s not why I left. I wasn’t about to kowtow to their cultish hierarchy promoting religion by repression.” Truth was, they suspected him of the vandalism, and he knew it. “The police arrested two local hoodlums for desecrating that altar.”

“
The rector at the seminary treated you like a triviality,” said Contreras, “just as your father did. And it was, what, just two days after you were denied your PhD that your father passed from this life. Think of it. He spent his last hours knowing that his son had failed miserably, again.”

Daniel dashed the potted plant to the slate floor. “Leave my father out of this.”

“
You not only defiled the altar with graffiti, you tore the seminary’s precious collection of historic texts to shreds. I’m afraid an historian like Christa would find that unforgiveable. And, given their value, it is a federal offense.”

Secrets. He could lose everything because of them. “She suspects I’m hiding something.”

“
Only the depth of your ignorance,” said Contreras. “We are closer than ever, Daniel. Together, we will know the power of the divine artifact. The power to save souls.”

To save Christa’s soul. With Christa by his side, he’d find the strength to become the man he was born to be. No more demeaning himself teaching history to snotty boys. “Listen, I’ll get you the journal, even though I can’t imagine why you think this journal is so important. Christa is our best shot at finding that Breastplate.” Contreras couldn’t always be right. He had to stick to his guns, tell Christa the truth, or at least part of the truth.

“
That is only proof of your lack of imagination,” said Contreras. “Christa now knows that I, too, seek the Breastplate of Aaron. And she is on her way to you.”

He scanned the street. “Christa is coming here, to the greenhouse?” He combed his fingers through his mop of blond hair, straightened his trademark bow tie. Dirt had streaked onto his jeans. It lent him a man of action mystique. No, this was ridiculous. Contreras thought he could control everyone, but not a woman like Christa. Never Christa.

“
Play this as I directed you,” Contreras said, “and you will win her.”

A car skidded to a stop at the end of the greenhouse walkway, a purple Volkswagen beetle with a dent in the front fender. Brief elation at seeing her collapsed into sheer dread. “She’s here,” he said.

“
As I told you,” said Contreras. “Help me find the Breastplate. I will deliver to you Christa’s soul. Now, go to work.”

CHAPTER
27