The Sixth Station (47 page)

As I was turning the phone this way and that, I noticed all the monks rise and head toward me.

“Ecce electus! Ecce electus!”
(“Behold the Chosen One!”) they chanted, coming closer.
“Pater noster qui es in caelis, tuum; adveniat regnum tuum…”
It was the same chant I’d heard those monks in Turkey sing as they entered the House of the Virgin.

Oh, shit. Who the hell are these people? Time to get outta Dodge, baby. But how?

I moved back toward the door, but in a flash the monks and Grethe completely surrounded me, chanting.

“What do you want from me? Who are you?” I shouted, still trying to back out, but clearly without a shot—at least of getting out alive.

Then it hit me:
They
were Headquarters.

This is like a scene out of
Rosemary’s Baby
! Again.

I backed up once more and could feel the arms of someone in back of me grab me around the waist.

I got up my best New York tough act and spat out, “I’m going to move back, and I am going to leave. You all should leave, too. There’s a war raging.…”

“No, no, no! You must not leave.” It was Grethe. “You can never leave us now. No, never. Your destiny is fulfilled.”

I moved back an inch and while someone else kept the grip around my middle, she grabbed my arms and shoved and held them behind my back with the strength of a twenty-year-old wrestler. “Tell her,
Fratello Antonio.
”

It was the man I’d seen behind the window who had turned the gun sight on me yesterday. “You have nowhere to go,” the friar reasoned.

You’re trying to reason? You are all insane. I have to get out!

The circle tightened and the robed monks surrounded me, suffocating me with their breath and their chants. Louder and louder. The more I struggled the tighter the circle became.

“Ecce electa! Ecce electa! Ecce electa! Ecce electa! Ecce electa! Ecce electa!”
The sound was piercing my brain.

“Stop! Stop!” I shouted above the din, but the chanting was growing more frantic. Others made the double sign of the cross as they sang.

Antonio, who was standing outside the circle, lifted the frame and held the Volto Santo aloft. “Behold the Chosen One!”

I struggled to break free, but was helpless against their combined strength.

“Help!”

Help me somebody.

A shot rang out, blasting the monks out of their reverie. They jumped back in horror as Brother Antonio dropped to the ground in the middle of them, blood gushing from a giant hole in his chest. I spun around to duck, but before I or the monks could take cover, the robed brothers began falling around me like bloody dominoes with each new, precisely aimed gunshot.

Who the hell is shooting?
I was too tired to run for it, but I stopped dead.
That can’t be the shooter!

Standing at the back of the room was Maureen, two hands around a Glock in the shooter position. The only other person left standing was Grethe, who, shocked, turned to look at Maureen, recognition and disgust registering on her face at once.

“Daemonium, Antitheus, Diabulus,”
Grethe cried out rapid-fire. She reached into the pocket of her habit—it looked like she was reaching for a gun—but as she did so, Maureen turned her pistol on Grethe and fired. The old nun fell wounded but not fatally, bleeding from her shoulder, a bloodstain spreading down the right side of her habit.

“They were going to sacrifice you,” Maureen cried out to me. “A pagan ritual! I saw a pyre already prepared down on the hill; they would burn you to get rid of the last of the Cathars.”

“But I thought they were the last of the Cathars…”

Grethe, weakened and gasping, managed to croak out, “We
are. You
are!” She pulled herself up by holding on to the altar, and she and Maureen faced one another.

“Once before but never again,” Maureen said, shoving the barrel right between the old nun’s eyes tauntingly. Grethe didn’t back down.

“Murderer! Paid assassin. Whore of Babylon!” Grethe spat back before
literally
spitting in Maureen’s face. Maureen wiped the sputum off her face with her sleeve as gracefully as she could. Her gun never wavered a centimeter from its spot between Grethe’s eyes.

“You can kill me, but you can’t kill the spirit of ben Yusef, Son of the Son!” Grethe taunted.

At that, the light from the old chandelier flickered and died, and except for the candles, the room was thrown into semidarkness.

I felt as though I’d suddenly gotten vertigo and could no longer keep my balance. But it wasn’t me—it was the earth beneath our feet that had started to shake. I could hear buildings collapsing and the roar of what sounded like the earth literally being torn asunder.

Despite this, Maureen never moved her gun from between Grethe’s eyes. “We have to get under a doorway—it’s the only place that’s safe in an earthquake,” I yelled out, like some demented Girl Scout.

The two women were seemingly oblivious to the danger, locked as they were in their deadly hatred of one another.

“You think you’ve won?” Grethe shouted at Maureen. “You will never win!”

Maureen just kept steady.

What the hell?

“Please, we’ve got to get out of here before it’s too late,” I begged.

Instead, Grethe started keening. “It’s done! They’ve killed the Son of the Son!”

The room was shaking more and more violently, and I ducked and held on tightly under a doorway, as relics flew off the walls. Relic bones and a blond braid of some long-dead person flew at me like missiles.

“Mortuus!”
Grethe cried out amid the noise and chaos. “
Mortuus
! The Son of the Son will rise again!” As the women stood in that deadly standoff, the giant chandelier broke free and knocked Grethe to the ground, missing Maureen by inches. As she lay in a heap at Maureen’s feet, Grethe mouthed the words to me, “She is Black Robe.”

Then Maureen, calmly and as though the world literally weren’t falling around our heads, said, “You are insane,” and put a bullet clean between Grethe’s eyes.

To this day, I swear—even though the crumbling room was too filled with plaster dust to see clearly—that Maureen then spat on Grethe’s corpse.

41

Maureen squatted down to Grethe’s body and fished around in the pocket of the dead nun’s habit. “What the hell are you doing?” I called out over the din.

She came back up with Grethe’s ring of keys. As I stood in the doorway, Maureen crawled through the rubble of the shaking room and picked up the frame holding the Volto Santo.

She fumbled with the keys and found a small gold one and inserted it into the crown at the top of the frame. The glass easily slid out—and she removed the image of Christ after it had for untold decades been encased in an airless environment. I briefly thought about the damage that the fresh air would cause and then realized that I had more important concerns at the moment—like somehow getting out of this collapsing church alive.

“What the
hell
are you doing?” I called out again, leaving the alleged safety of the doorway to climb over rubble and dead bodies to get to Maureen’s side.

“At least we can save the image if not the man,” Maureen yelled over the din, and pointed to a stained-glass window, from which we might be able crawl out. She ordered me to climb up and push it open, which I did, and immediately the darkened sky shed at least some light into the room.

“Go! Go!” Maureen yelled behind me as I began to shimmy out of the small space of the open window. I was halfway out when I smelled smoke behind me. I called for Maureen, but when she didn’t answer I shimmied back in to help her.

She’s caught in a blaze!

But in fact, she didn’t need help, and what I saw her doing instead turned my blood cold. Maureen was holding a large blazing wooden cross above the altar, where she’d laid out the Volto Santo, the Sixth Station of the Cross—the very cloth that had been laid over Jesus’s face before he rose from the tomb. It was the last and only vestige left of Jesus on this earth.

“Maureen! Stop! Stop! What are you doing?” I screeched and lunged for her.

“I am destroying the evil thing! The evil dies only when that Face of their god is destroyed! Now he can
never
come back!”

She easily sidestepped my lunge, and as she did so, my head hit the marble of the altar and I fell backward. Nonetheless, I got back up and lunged for the tattered Veil, but Maureen grabbed it up as the earth continued to split. The small rug under the altar caught fire when sparks from the flaming cross blew onto it.

I stomped on the flames with the soles of my boots. When I looked up, Maureen, who was still holding the flaming wooden cross, turned the Glock on me without so much as a change of expression.

“What are you doing?” I asked, not sure what to make of what was happening.

“The Son died and now
you,
you who think you are the savior of the Savior, you proud, stupid, foolish woman.”

“Why? I thought—”

“You thought wrong. You and those despicable heretic Cathar ancestors of yours. They preserved your line, like you could save their treasure
again,
” she said, lifting the Veil with the fingers of the hand that was still holding the gun. She took the Veil and rested it on the end of the gun barrel.

“I can shoot you through the Veil. Perfect justice. You can die with His DNA all over you. Would you like that?”

She squeezed the trigger and a shot crackled through the air. I felt nothing. Where was the blood? I hadn’t been hit!

Is she toying with me?

Maureen looked down at her chest. A large red stain spread over the front of her habit. “Son of a bitch” is what she said as she fell on top of me, knocking us both to the floor. The blazing cross and the Veil dropped in front of the cloth-draped altar, and the altar cloth went up immediately.

I rolled Maureen off of me, and grabbed the Veil literally a second before it too caught fire.

I could feel myself splattered in her blood, which was all mixed up with the plaster, bone fragments, and pieces of burned wood, and without thinking about what had just happened, I tried to get back up.

That’s when I saw Pantera standing in the light that was pouring through the stained-glass window. He was in the open doorway, long, lean, and as calm as he had been that night in the Restaurant Costes. In one hand he held his gun, and in the other, he held out an envelope.

I reached out for him as more and more of the room caught fire. “Pantera!” He handed me the envelope, and then two more shots rang out, sending him flying backward against a pillar.

He’d been clipped in the right leg and shoulder; blood was pouring from the wounds. He yelled out, “Watch it! Watch it.”

I spun around. Maureen. The old snake was still alive, though paralyzed from the waist down. She turned the gun on me. I leaped across the space between us and kicked her hard in the head with the toe of my still-burning-hot boot in a blind fury. I kicked her Glock out of her hand, picked it up, loomed over her, and pointed it directly at her face. She locked me in her gaze. I pulled the trigger and shot
her
clean between the eyes.

“Trust no one, you fucking bitch.”

42

The draperies had by this time caught fire, and the stained-glass windows began blowing out all over the room. The pillars supporting the room and others supporting the building shook, and I turned back to Pantera, who was sprawled against one of them. I had to get to him before it gave way. I shoved the envelope into my jacket pocket and turned back to him. We were about seven feet apart.

The crack of the breaking pillar was louder than the gunshots had been. The one Pantera had been propped against gave way and crashed to the ground, followed by the ceiling above him. The whole room was shaking, and the dust was so thick that I couldn’t see anything and began coughing and choking. The rubble had sealed off that portion of the room where Pantera lay.

“Pantera! Talk to me,” I called, trying to claw my way through the ten-foot-high pile of plaster and dust. “Pantera! Pantera! Can you hear me?”

Finally, I heard a faint voice on the other side. “Go. Save yourself. Save the Veil. Get out!”

“Not without you. Pantera!”

Silence. The pillars supporting my side of the room started to crack and shake, and the blazing draperies were threatening to engulf the entire space.

I grabbed the Veil, whose edges had started to singe, and shoved it into my other pocket.

“Get out. Now!”

“I can’t.”

Nothing. “Pantera. Pantera!” Nothing.

The room was collapsing around me, and I had to get out. “Pantera!” I yelled. Again, nothing.

The fire was rushing toward me, so I turned away and crawled on my hands and knees as best as I could in the smoke and rubble to the window. Dodging the flames that were licking at me, I climbed to the blown-out window frame. I looked back one last time and could see Grethe’s body being consumed by the flames, just as the Cathars’ bodies had been in 1244. And for the same reason: to keep alive the blood of Christ.

Like my distant ancestor, I knew for certain that I was the one who had been assigned this time to save the Cathar treasure—the Veil holding the DNA of Jesus—the treasure that was now stuffed into the pocket of my old leather jacket.

And yes, I too had been assisted along the way by a rogue Crusader.

Did Alazais Roussel fall for her rogue Templar, like I fell for mine?

The acrid, terrible smell of burning flesh assaulted me once again. But this time it wasn’t the stuff of nightmares. This time it was very real.

43

When I had fully shimmied out of the window and my feet touched the tiles of a roof, I realized that I was on the second floor of the swaying building. The church began to collapse, and I crawled along the edge until I reached the front of the church and jumped onto a ledge below and from there onto the ground.