He turned to Bennacio. “We had a little trouble, as you can see.” He nodded toward the burning wreckage. “They came on foot, apparently, and that took us by surprise. We expected an aerial assault. They used this.”
He nodded to one of the guys standing behind him. He was toting what looked like an oversized bazooka, but I figured it was probably a rocket launcher.
“Derieux?” Bennacio asked.
“He was inside the plane, Lord Bennacio.”
Bennacio closed his eyes. I saw the other two brown-robed guys staring at me and I looked away.
“Diabli!” Bennacio muttered. “Did they escape?”
Cabiri smiled grimly. He jerked his head toward the burning plane. “Come, I will show you.”
We followed him across the tarmac, past the twisted, burning husk of the plane, where the rain hissed and spat and smoke billowed upward, to the other side of the airstrip. Three men in black robes lay there faceup, staring blankly straight up into the rain. Bennacio pulled the hoods away from their faces and studied each one for a long time. He gestured toward the one lying in the middle, the biggest of the three, with a large, flattened nose and black slits for eyes.
“This is Kaczmarczyk,” he said. “The other two I do not recognize.”
Cabiri turned his head and spat. “Local fishermen, I suspect, recruited by Kaczmarczyk.”
“Perhaps.” Bennacio turned from the bodies and stared at the burning plane, and the light of the fire danced in his gray eyes.
“We cannot stay here, Bennacio,” Cabiri said. “More will come when Kaczmarczyk fails to report. Many more, I fear, than the four of us can manage.” Actually, five of us stood there, but I guess Cabiri wasn’t counting me. “Come, my house is not far from here. You may rest and we will decide our course.”
“Our pilot Derieux is dead,” Bennacio said. “Even if we can find another plane, we have no one to fly it.”
Cabiri placed one of his large hands on Bennacio’s shoulder. “Come, Lord Bennacio,” he said softly. His eyes were filled with tears, though his tone was jovial. “A hot meal, a warm bed, and things will look brighter in the morning.”
He glanced at the other two guys. “And there is someone who would very much like to see you.”
27
We left the bodies lying there. Bennacio covered the faces of the men he did not recognize, but left Kaczmarczyk’s exposed to the rain. I wasn’t sure why, but thought maybe he was getting at something symbolical.
We climbed into the Suburban. We left the Jaguar sitting on the runway and nobody said anything about it.
Bennacio, me, and the guy with the bazooka, Jules, sat in the back of the Suburban, with Cabiri and the other brown-robed guy, Milo, up front. Jules had a funny smell, like black liquorish, and a very long nose with a turned-under tip. Milo had long blond hair that he wore in a ponytail, and piercing blue eyes, like Windimar’s. Thinking of Windimar reminded me of the painful fact that I wasn’t Windimar, but Alfred Kropp, and I had no business hanging with these bazooka-wielding warriors.
We drove in silence for a few minutes, then Cabiri said, “The outsiders stormed Mogart’s keep in Játiva yesterday. Of course, they found nothing.”
“Where is Mogart?” Bennacio asked.
Cabiri shook his head. “I don’t know. We’ve heard nothing, Lord Bennacio.”
His whole attitude toward Bennacio was tender and respectful, like it was a great honor just to be around him. If he had known I was responsible for this whole mess, he probably would have directed Jules to take me out with the bazooka.
“And now there is no way to cross the Atlantic,” Bennacio went on.
“They closed the border and yet you crossed. Do not despair, Lord Bennacio. I know you loathe them, but I see no choice now. We must use what tools we have.”
Bennacio sighed. “I will consider it.”
I wondered who Bennacio loathed.
“Who are the outsiders?” I asked. “OIPEP?”
“OIPEP!” Cabiri sneered, and he made a spitting sound.
“What is OIPEP anyway?” I asked. “The best I could come up with was ‘Operatives Investigating Powerful Evil Persons.’ ”
“Ha ha!” Cabiri shouted. “You have found a witty one, Lord Bennacio!”
Nobody said anything for the rest of the drive, which lasted about thirty minutes. We ended up in this little hamlet with Cape Cod–type houses lining these narrow, twisty streets. It might have been Halifax or it might not; I didn’t know how big a town Halifax was or how far it was from the airstrip.
We went inside a house painted blue with white shutters. There was a fire snapping and popping in the fireplace and kerosene lamps set on tables, and I wondered why they didn’t have electricity. Maybe these servants of the Sword had to operate on a tight budget. But Bennacio handed that guy a blank check from Samson Industries. Maybe the knights had an expense account but the Friends didn’t. Or maybe it was a lifestyle choice, like those reenactors you see on TV.
“We are safe here, Lord Bennacio,” Cabiri said. “At least for a few hours. Jules, find Lord Bennacio something to eat.” He didn’t tell Jules to find me something to eat. “Milo, tell her Lord Bennacio has arrived.” He smiled at Bennacio. “She has been quite concerned.”
Bennacio didn’t answer. He sank into the chair closest to the fire and pressed his fingertips against his eyelids. I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I sat on a stool next to Bennacio and wished I had some dry socks; the bottoms of my feet were starting to itch. I wondered if it would be rude to take off my shoes.
Cabiri slipped off his brown robe. Underneath he wore a flannel shirt and Wrangler jeans. He had short-cropped, very curly hair, like a poodle. He looked like the guy on the Brawny paper towels.
Jules carried in a tray loaded down with smoked salmon, big chunks of cheese, bundles of fat grapes, and lumps of little black greasy-looking balls on thin crackers that I guessed was caviar. I had never tasted caviar and didn’t want to try anything new on an empty stomach, so I helped myself to some salmon and cheese. The grapes were good, with very tight skin, so when I bit into one the juice exploded in my mouth. Jules left and came back with a bottle of wine and some glasses, but I’m not a wine drinker, so I ate a lot of grapes for their juice. Maybe they’d have the cash for electricity, I thought, if they didn’t blow it on caviar and expensive French wine. Cabiri was a big guy like me with an appetite to match, and between us the tray didn’t stay full for long.
“You must call them,” Cabiri told Bennacio.
“The thought galls me,” Bennacio answered.
Just then a girl came into the room, and Cabiri got up and Jules got up and so I got up, and all the crumbs in my lap fell on the throw rug. She was tall, almost six feet, barefoot, wearing a sleeveless green dress that trailed the floor. Her auburn hair was pulled back from her face and her pale skin glowed in the firelight. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.
She went directly to Bennacio, who stood up as she came toward him, and she took his hand and kissed it, then pressed it against her cheek. “My lord,” she said softly.
He touched her cheek with his free hand and said, “Natalia, you should not be here.”
“Nor should you,” she said.
He was turned three-quarters from the firelight, so his face was in shadow and I couldn’t see his expression when he said, “I have no choice,” but he sounded sad, the same way he’d sounded when he said “Our doom is upon us” back in Knoxville.
He turned toward me and said, “This is Alfred Kropp.”
“I know who Kropp is,” Natalia said, and she didn’t look at me. Her voice had a very clear tone, like the ringing of bells in the distance, so even though she spoke softly, you could hear her across the room.
“He saved my life,” Bennacio added. I’m not sure why. Maybe to get her to like me. I could see that was going to be a hard sell.
“That you might sacrifice it,” she said to Bennacio.
&nbs
p; “That I might keep my promise.”
I looked at Cabiri, who was studying the way the light played on his wineglass, and at Milo, who was standing by the front door, like a soldier on watch. I didn’t know what had happened to Jules. Bennacio and Natalia were talking like they were the only people in the room, and I was very uncomfortable.
“Your promise!” she said. “No, not your promise, my lord, but another’s, the promise of a myth, made a thousand years ago to one whose bones have long since crumbled to dust. You trust the word of the dead above the vows of the living.”
“I trust the purity of my Order.”
“Your precious Order is no more, my lord. The knights have departed.”
“All but one.”
“And soon you too will fall and I will be alone.”
“Is this why you came?” Bennacio asked. “To torment me in this way? I cannot abandon my oath for any human being, no matter who she may be. I cannot sacrifice the world for the sake of one person.”
“The world is not worth saving, if not for the sake of one person,” she said.
He touched her cheek. “I love you before all things, and I would perish rather than see you suffer. But you do not understand what you are asking, Natalia. I cannot turn my back on heaven. I will not damn myself, even for love.”
“You’re the one who does not understand,” she shot back. Then her shoulders slumped and all the fight went out of her. She leaned against him, and he took her in his arms and held her as she cried softly into his shoulder. He murmured her name into her hair as he looked at me. Our eyes met and I looked away. I couldn’t take the look in those eyes.
28
“The hour grows late,” Cabiri said. “You must decide, Bennacio. We have lost both plane and pilot. You did not hesitate to use the outsiders to cross the border. You must call them now.”
Before Bennacio could answer, Milo said, “Someone is here.”
The window beside him exploded inward, and glass flew across the room. Something landed in the entryway and rolled toward us, bumping against Cabiri’s leg before coming to a stop.
It was Jules’s head.
“The lights!” Cabiri cried. He and Milo rushed around, blowing out the kerosene lamps. Bennacio shoved Natalia toward me, picked up a bucket that was sitting by the fireplace, and threw water onto the logs. There was an angry hiss and a plume of white smoke.
“Down the hall, Alfred,” Bennacio said. “Last door on the left. Hurry!”
I grabbed Natalia and pulled her down the hall, feeling my way along the wall with my right hand. She wasn’t making it any easier in the pitch dark by trying to pull free. She was a tall girl and strong for someone so thin. Behind us, I could hear the sounds of a pretty terrific fight going on, breaking glass, shouting, the clump of feet, and the sharp crack of furniture breaking.
I reached the end of the hall and found the door, pushing Natalia into the room and slamming the door closed behind us. What were we supposed to do now? Duck in the closet? Hide under the bed? A roaring sound moved directly overhead now, the steady thumpa-thumpa-thumpa of a helicopter, and then the pop-pop-pop of gunfire and men screaming.
I let go of her wrist. “Maybe we should—” I started to say, but she didn’t let me finish. Out of the dark a knee landed right in my crotch and I dropped straight down and curled into a ball on the floor. When you take a hit like that, there’s nothing you can do but curl up around the pain and hug it till it fades.
“That is for taking the Sword and sentencing him to death,” she hissed at me. Through my tears I saw the door open and her shape silhouetted in the lighter dark of the hallway. She held a tapered dagger in her right hand. Then she was gone and my pain and I were alone together.
I grabbed on to the edge of the bed and pulled myself up. I was swaying there by the foot of the bed, the pain keeping tempo with the beat of my heart, when the beam from a large flashlight stabbed into the room. I just rushed the guy without thinking about it, lowering my shoulder and slamming into his chest, forcing him out the doorway and into the hall. He lost the flashlight when I hit him. I started pounding his middle with both fists, till he grabbed my right wrist, twisted my hand behind my back, swung me around, and forced me to the floor, putting his knee in the small of my back and bringing my wrist up so the tips of my fingers were touching my neck. It felt like he was pulling my arm out of its socket. Then I felt something cold press behind my ear.
All of a sudden it was very quiet. The guy holding me down was breathing hard, but that and the slow whump-whump of the helicopter blades turning outside were the only things I could hear.
Then I heard Bennacio call out, “No! He is with us!”
The guy got off me and picked up the flashlight. He kicked me onto my back and shone the light right in my eyes.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“Alfred Kropp!”
“Alfred Kropp! Hey, my mistake, but you bushwhacked me, kid.”
A hand came out of the dark and pulled me to my feet. I could smell his cologne and hear him working on a piece of gum. Bennacio joined us, carrying a kerosene lamp.
The guy with the flashlight pumped my hand twice, very hard. He was wearing Dockers and a polo shirt beneath a blue Windbreaker. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five or thirty. His hair was shoulder-length and slicked back with some kind of gel.
“Mike Arnold,” he said. “How ya doin’?” He turned to Bennacio. “Close call, Benny, huh? You can thank me later. Right now we gotta get the heck outta Dodge. There’s more baddies on the way.”
He herded us down the hall into the main room. Cabiri stood near the fireplace, a couple of black-robed bodies lying at his feet. Another guy in a black robe was sprawled face-down on the kitchen floor, blood pooling under his head. Natalia stood over him, breathing heavily, the dagger glistening in her hand.
“Milo?” Bennacio asked Cabiri, who slowly shook his head and motioned toward the sofa. I didn’t want to look at Milo, but I looked anyway and then was sorry I had looked.
“We all here?” Mike Arnold asked. “All accounted for? That’s terrific. That’s just jim-dandy. Leave the mess; we’ll send somebody over to clean up.”
“How did you find us?” Bennacio asked him.
“No time for that now. Grab whatever gear you have and let’s go.” Mike strode to the front door and flung it open. There was a large black helicopter sitting on the street, whipping cold air into the house.
Cabiri stepped up to Bennacio and said softly, as if he didn’t want Mike to hear, “Come, Lord Bennacio. The choice has been made for us. Trust this turn of fortune.”
“Oh yeah, you gotta trust it when fortune turns,” Mike Arnold said, snapping his gum, and I wondered who the heck Mike Arnold was.
29
We piled into the helicopter, which was one of those big military types that sat seven with room for gunners on both sides. I sat next to Bennacio and Natalia in the seat at the back. My butt was hardly on the cushion when we were airborne, dipping hard to the left as we climbed, and I could taste soured cheese as my stomach came up toward my throat. Natalia was still barefoot and I thought her feet must be freezing in the swirling air inside the open hold. Cabiri and Mike Arnold sat across from us, and Mike was smiling at me with very large white teeth that the gum-smacking made easy to notice.
He leaned forward and shouted in my face, “So you’re Alfred Kropp, huh! Hey, what a boner, taking the Sword like that! You’re our century’s Pandora! You study Greek mythology in school? Pandora’s Box? You must be like, ‘Holy moley, what the hell was I thinking?’ ” He laughed and his gum went smack-smack-smack. He chewed gum like he was angry at it.
He looked at Natalia. “Don’t think we’ve met. Mike Arnold, how ya doin’?”
Natalia just stared at him. He didn’t let it faze him, though. He gave her a wink and turned to Bennacio.
“So anyway, you were asking how I found you. Of course, we knew when and where you crossed the bord
er. Then a couple hours ago we got the intel on the little number you guys did on Kaczmarczyk, so it wasn’t brain surgery figuring you were probably gone to ground with Cabiri.”
“Your arrival was most . . . fortuitous,” Bennacio said.
“Like the cavalry, huh?”
“Where are you taking us?” Bennacio asked.
“We’re giving you a ride across the pond, Benny. See, there’s been a development.”
“What development?”
He glanced at me, then said, “That’s classified.”
“Mogart has contacted you,” Bennacio said. It wasn’t a question.
“That’s classified, Benny. Class-i-fied.” He flashed a meaningless smile in my direction.
“You have made an offer to buy the Sword and he has accepted.”
“I’m beginning to think we have a communication problem here,” Mike shouted at him over the roar of the engine. “We’ve taken full jurisdiction over this little matter and I’m not authorized to tell you anything else!”
Cabiri turned his head and pretended to spit. I had seen him make that gesture once before, and as I stared at Mike Arnold it hit me I was looking at an agent of OIPEP.
We were in the air only about twenty minutes when the helicopter made a wide loop and started to descend. Mike looked at his watch, pulled a gun from his Windbreaker pocket, and held it loosely in his lap. He noticed me staring at it.
“A nine-millimeter Glock! Wanna hold it?” he asked me. I shook my head. He smiled, smacking on the gum. Mike Arnold clearly didn’t share Bennacio’s opinion that guns were barbaric. I got the feeling Mike Arnold liked guns—a lot.
The morning sun was just visible below the cloud cover that was pulled across the sky as we touched down. It felt cold enough to snow, and the wind was kicking up. We were at another airfield. About a hundred yards away was a military cargo plane parked on the runway, its huge back door open to a blackness like the inside of a gigantic mouth.
I followed Mike and Cabiri out of the helicopter, but Bennacio stayed inside with Natalia. It looked like they were having another argument, and Natalia’s eyes were shining with tears. Bennacio tried to get up, but she put a hand on his arm and it was pretty clear to me she was pleading with him not to go. He shook his head and kissed her cheek before joining us in the tornado beneath the helicopter’s spinning blades.