Текст книги "The Chosen"

Автор книги: Алекс Арчер

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Chapter 16

Albuquerque

"Please don't take this the wrong way, Annja," Byron Mondragón said, squeezing a teabag into his cup by holding it in his spoon and wrapping its string around it. "But you look as if the world is weighing you down."

She showed him a wan smile. "That's the nicest way anybody's ever told me I look like hell, Byron. Thank you."

She took a tentative bite of her chile relleno.It was a whole roasted green chili pod, stuffed with cheese and batter-fried. It was very good.

"So tell me something, Byron," she said when she finished a mouthful. "How is it possible for the infant Jesus to be wandering the Southwest helping out Japanese tourists? Even if it is his ghost, he was a full-grown man when he died."

"You have to consider the notion of timelessness.It holds that spiritual elements, just like God Himself, are timeless. So Jesus is at one and the same time everything he was – an infant, a child, a man crucified, a man-god resurrected. He's just as much an eight-year-old Jewish kid as he is sitting at the side of God the Father. I admit, I do have to wonder about Jesus appearing in costume from twelve hundred years after he died," he said.

"Still – " He gave a little laugh. "You really have to figure that if Jesus is what they say he is, he can appear any way he likes."

"True." She stirred her refried beans meditatively with her fork. There was something in the notion of refried beans that struck her as somehow just wrong. It didn't mean they didn't taste good, though.

"Of course," he added, "that doesn't mean the Santo Niño everybody's seeing is actually Jesus. I'm just pointing out that in Catholic belief Jesus exists outside of time. So it could be him, sure. I'm not saying that it is."

"Who or what do you think the Holy Child is, then?"

He only smiled.

"Are you a Catholic?" she asked, to mask her frustration.

"I was raised that way. It doesn't mean I'm one now. Or that I'm not." He grinned mischievously. It struck her that if she was going to paint a faun, he'd be her model.

"But your paintings are mostly on religious themes," she said.

"That's an idiom I know. If anything, it's a sign of laziness, not anything profound."

"Why the Santo Niño in particular?"

"He seems handy for me to use to say some things about mankind, his relationship to the universe, the infinite. That kind of thing," he said. "Not that what I'm doing has any direct connection to what's going on in the state right now. Or anybody else's concept of the Holy Child, really. He's my current favorite subject, not necessarily what the paintings are about."

"What are they about?" Annja asked.

He shrugged. "Sorry. I don't feel comfortable talking about it any more than that. I feel like, if my paintings don't speak for themselves, I'm not doing my job. I'm not that good with words, anyway."

He's so innocent, she thought.

Outside the window a guy in a worn olive-drab army jacket, with a brown weed-patch of hair, stood with his back to one of the big windows and slowly raised hands in fingerless gloves out to his sides. He looked as if he were either supplicating Heaven or mimicking crucifixion. Neither the cars zooming past on Central nor the students eating at the tables on the other side of the big window paid him any heed. For some reason it gave Annja an eerie feeling.

Things just have me susceptible, she thought. She still had no idea who was after her. Besides Father Godin, she thought. And maybe Garin Braden. And perhaps even Roux. She shook her head. She had other mysteries to solve at the moment.

"How about these other sightings?" she asked him. "All these bizarre creatures. Do you have any insight on them?"

He turned sideways in the booth seat and crossed his legs. The question seemed to agitate him. "Why would you think I would?" he asked.

She shrugged. "I don't necessarily think you do," she said. "I'm just grasping at straws here. I wanted to get your, you know, your unique perception."

"I don't really know much about it. I don't really pay much attention to the news. I know from listening to my friends that people are seeing some scary things. And that poor kid got killed in the mountains north of Santa Fe, and now there seems to be some kind of media blackout about it."

That was, Annja thought, perhaps putting it mildly.

After getting back to her motel room not too long before midnight the previous night, she had collapsed straightaway into bed and slept almost around the clock. When she woke she couldn't tell from the media that anything resembling Doug's phone account to her of the evening before had ever happened at all. The local TV news program Annja put on talked about the death of the snowboarder as an accident.

When she logged on to her computer, after a shower and a restorative cup of coffee brewed in the little machine by the sink in the bathroom, she found a site linked to by Google News that spoke in terms of the state police investigating what they called "possible foul play." Yet when she clicked back to it several minutes later to recheck some details she found a new story claiming an accident.

Interesting.

Only by turning to alternative new sources was she able to find any mention at all of the killer-ape theory. It seemed a party of four – three young men and a woman – had been about to call an end to a day's snowboarding in the vicinity of an eleven-thousand-foot Sangre de Cristo peak called the Dome when something set upon them and killed one of them. Though none of the others was within a hundred yards of the victim when the attack occurred, at sunset with windblown snow screening the scene, all apparently agreed the attacker was an eight-foot-tall being, black, shaggy and vaguely humanoid. Despite the distance all three of the survivors spoke of seeing its horrible red eyes as it looked at them. Two of them recounted hearing its cry, which one described as sounding like screams and another like a baby crying.

The three survivors apparently fled several miles on foot before finding a signal to call 911 on their cell phones. Santa Fe County sheriff's officers who responded said the snowboarders were pale, hyperventilating and almost unable to speak from terror. The initial investigation was complicated by the fact that the attack seemed to have taken place just across the county line. After some back and forth between the neighboring sheriff's departments, the New Mexico State Police were called in.

The afternoon was actually warm as Annja walked back to her car. The only free parking space when she'd arrived to meet the artist had been a block and a half south of Central on Cornell Drive. The street was lined with little shops and apartments in somewhat shabby Southwestern stucco. And parked cars.

She found the image of Father Godin's grinning face coming back to mind. Why?she demanded of herself. She just kept thinking about him – his easy charm. His equally easy competence. The fact that he'd treated her with respect, not as if she were a little girl in a man's world, despite being totally an old-school European.

He knows my secret,she reminded herself forcibly. Not to mention the fact that he tried to kill me.

She had done some Internet research on him. It turned out he was quite notorious. He had a fascinating history. None of it was exactly confidence inspiring. Some was actively scary.

Still, Godin's smiling, homely yet charismatic face was far preferable to the image that hovered around the edge of her awareness, always looking to push inside, like a horrific specter at a banquet in a yarn by Poe or Lovecraft. The sight of that poor man burning in his own taxicab. Even if he was already dead.

Her phone rang. With a sigh of relief she flipped it open to her ear. "Annja."

"Ms. Creed? This is your doctor friend."

"Doctor?" she echoed, momentarily blank. Her first response was that this was a call from some fan of the show who had cadged her number somewhere. Maybe he offered Doug twenty bucks, she thought unkindly. She almost broke the connection then.

Almost. But the voice sounded familiar. Where earlier it had been jovial, now it was gruff.

She stopped walking. "Dr. Co – "

"Yes. Please. No more names. No questions. It is imperative that you listen. Will you?" Cogswell's voice sounded strained.

"Yes, of course."

"I have not been altogether open with you, I'm afraid. There is no more time for subterfuge. There may be no more time at all. Forces beyond your expectation are on the move. They may pose a danger to all humanity. They pose a highly specific danger to you. Do you understand?"

Her first response was to laugh. Cogswell was probably just a sad old monster crank, lonely and looking for a little drama to liven the aimless winding down of his life. Except – she clearly wasthe object of a conspiracy, of entirely deadly intent.

"Yes," she said.

"The sightings – you must study the sightings. Carefully, Annja. You have a scholar's mind. Treat them as puzzle pieces. Find how they fit – wait. Damn."

From the rush of wind into the phone it sounded as if he had turned his head momentarily away. He must be calling from a pay phone, she realized.

"Time's up," he said. "Seek the center, Annja Creed. Seek the – no! Damn your eyes, take your hands off – "

The connection died.

She stood there staring at the razor-thin flip phone in her hand. "A hoax," she said aloud. "Just theater."

But however much her mind wanted to believe that, her heart knew it lied.

Chapter 17

What Annja gathered was a premature heavy snowfall had laid a thick blanket of white over the low mountains surrounding Chimayó. Through breaks in thick cloud, the stars shone brightly enough to make the snow seem to glow.

She was still a good mile from the sanctuary when she started to see cars parked along the sides of the road. She had already come well off the beaten path here. Chimayó was solidly up into the lower reaches of the Sangre de Christos and not, from all indications, anybody's idea of a metropolis.

She parked the rented Honda on a shoulder of the road that was relatively flat and seemed to have a fair amount of bunch grass beneath the snow. The temperature was well above freezing and not likely to drop much, given the low ceiling of cloud. She had no desire to have her car bog down in mud – especially if she had to make a speedy getaway. She'd found herself having to do that with distressing frequency these days. The roots of the tough grass would tend to bind the soil and keep it from swallowing the car whole if the snow started to melt.

She got out. The air was surprisingly cold, especially after the mellow autumn afternoon she had left behind in Albuquerque. Her breath puffed out in clouds.

She made a face at the pine trees standing around with snow gleaming on their boughs. She had not brought a proper winter coat to New Mexico with her. Just days before the dig ended she had been working in shorts and halter top, and it was still flat-out hot. Even with a T-shirt and a long-sleeved flannel shirt on over it, her jacket was not likely to be terrifically warm. I'd better get moving, she thought.

Cars were rolling past her steadily if not very fast. A fair number were coming back the other way, cruising slowly, evidently in search of places to park. She chose to walk on the pavement, preferring to check behind herself frequently and moving off the road when vehicles approached rather than trying to slog along the snow-covered shoulder. Especially since that picture-postcard snow could hide all kinds of nasty pitfalls and snags to trip her or twist her ankle.

Striding briskly, she came around a forested ridge to see a double line of red taillights in front of her, with some flashlights waving a few hundred yards down the nearly static line. State police or sheriff's deputies were turning cars back. Apparently the sanctuary grounds were full enough already.

Other people made their way on foot around her.

Byron had filled her in on some curious details about the sanctuary. Aside from the chapel devoted to the Holy Child, where the faithful came to offer baby shoes and slippers, there was a pit dug behind the church. The blessed dirt was alleged to have healing properties. It had the miraculous character of never running low no matter how much was dug out. Annja suspected that was the sort of thing Dr. Lauren Perovich had been talking about when she enumerated reasons she loved living in New Mexico.

Byron had also told her of friends of his who came from the hills up here, who had served as altar boys. They'd been told to go and fill the hole with fresh sand when nobody was around. It appeared to be a semiopen secret. Yet each Easter attracted thousands of pilgrims to the sanctuary. Some walked from Albuquerque or farther away, others from Santa Fe – on their knees.

Approaching the police checkpoint, she felt a shiver run through her body that didn't have anything to do with the cold. Byron had told her that pilgrims were gathering for a memorial for the unfortunate snowboarder. They were also gathering out of fear from all the strange sightings.

As Annja got closer she could see the church was a conventional enough looking building in the Spanish Colonial style. It had a pitched roof flanked by two little square towers with belfries. A four-foot adobe wall surrounded it. An adobe-arched gate led into the courtyard. Its simplicity reflected the relative poverty and isolation of the area during the church's construction in the early 1800s. Yet, made of the local soil itself, with timber from local trees for its bones, it gave the appearance of strength, of enduring as the tiny community it served itself endured in the face of time and neglect and endemic poverty. As well as the encroachments of the modern world.

The light of candles danced above and among the gathered throng like fireflies. The effect would, under most circumstances, have put Annja in mind of a rock concert. But something about the mood of the crowd, the way everyone spoke in low, hushed tones as if in a church instead of outside it, gave it a far different feel.

No cars had been permitted to park within several hundred feet of the church. No new ones arrived, and no headlights shone. A few news crews stood off to the sides in isolated pools of glare, but otherwise very little artificial illumination was visible except a few lights from the village nearby. Annja saw a number of law-enforcement officers bundled in black fake-fur hats and dark bulky jackets with big reflective initials on the back.

The occasion itself enforced the mood. Even a group of mildly punked-out Anglo kids who had walked near Annja for the past few hundred yards, scoffing among themselves, paused to buy candles from a little card-table vendor set discreetly on the outskirts of the church grounds. Now they walked softly without speaking, their young faces showing mostly a sort of awed expectation in the lights of the fat little yellow or white votive candles they carried in gloved and mittened hands.

Annja approached the church through a grove of cruelly topped cottonwood trees, with thin shoots rising unnaturally vertically from the lopped-off stumps of once mighty limbs. Many leaves still clung to shoots and limbs, probably still colorful to judge by what she had seen of the rest of the river valley and its flanking mountains, where great stands of aspen had caught flame in autumn yellows and reds. The snow muted any color the dry leaves held, made them sodden and dull. On the outskirts of the little grove several ambulances and emergency vehicles were parked. The EMTs stood around or sat in open doors, chatting and smoking.

Annja's boots crunched in the new snow. Despite the solemnity of the setting and affair, and the overhanging sense of dread, Annja felt a certain schoolgirl's delight at walking through snow. It was still a relative novelty for her. Growing up in New Orleans she could remember seeing snow only twice, once during a freak dusting of the city, a second time during a field trip some of the girls unaccountably were taken on to Cleveland, Ohio around Thanksgiving.

"And how is our warrior maid this evening?" a voice called softly in French.

Annja turned quickly around to see the trim, erect form of Father Robert Godin standing beneath a tree with utterly bare limbs, his hands in the pockets of his scuffed leather jacket. She felt an urge to move away quickly, and another urge to walk right up and slap him.

What she did was sigh and walk toward him. She kept a hand discreetly ready to move for the butt of the compact .40-caliber Glock 23 she carried in a holster clipped at the small of her back. She was not going to be caught off guard again. It gave her range the sword lacked. Also, if she did have to defend herself its effects would be a lot easier to explain.

"I'm cold," she said. "I didn't pack for this weather. I wasn't really thinking of this as a skiing trip."

He laughed softly with that seamed hound's face of his. "Let us hope you don't find things too warm soon."

She recoiled slightly. He frowned and shook his head. "Ah. Forgive me. A careless choice of words, was it not? I intended no reference to your illustrious predecessor. But rather to the possibility of vigorous action. Please forgive a young, gauche Antwerp wharf rat grown into an old, gauche Antwerp wharf rat, if you will."

She laughed and shook her head.

She came and stood by him, all the while wondering why. Just seeking the comfort of familiar companionship, on such a strange and fraught occasion, she thought. Although the more cynical part of her wondered why she might take comfort from the presence of someone who'd recently tried, determinedly and skillfully, to disable or kill her. She was beginning to understand the complex connection between Roux and Garin a little better.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, still speaking French. It seemed a useful security measure. Many of the people she had overheard spoke Spanish, and most of the rest spoke English.

"The same as you," he said. He didn't look at her, but instead scanned the scene ceaselessly from behind his round lenses. "Something will happen here tonight."

He glanced at her then, with a hint of a smile. "Or do you pretend to yourself not to sense it?"

She shook her head, frowning. "I don't even know what the hell I'm doing here talking to you. Aside from the fact you tried to shootme – "

"A misunderstanding, shall we say?"

"I did a little online research on you. You have quite the résumé. Belgian paratrooper. Congo mercenary. French Foreign Legionnaire. Ph.D.s in history and psychology."

"Please don't leave out civil engineering," he said. "That was the hardest, by far."

"Globally renowned antiterrorism expert. And if I paid attention to conspiracy sites, what you've done the past twenty years has been a lot spookier than what you did in your mercenary days, and not a lot less bloody."

His smile was abstracted. He was scanning the scene again. His weight was rotated forward on the balls of his athletic shoes. He seemed tense as a hunting dog who's caught the first whiff of prey and is straining at the leash.

"You're well advised to ignore them. Their purported facts are absurdly mistaken. If not necessarily their take on the natureof what I am about."

She stared at him with mingled disbelief and horror. "You admit it? You're actually a hit man for the Vatican?"

Several Latino couples passing nearby, middle-aged and dressed in their Sunday best, looked sternly over at her outburst. Fortunately, they gave no sign of understanding what Annja had said.

"My niece apologizes," Godin told them in Spanish. "She finds herself somewhat overwrought by the occasion. She is an impressionable child."

The matronly scowls softened into smiles and nods. The men smiled, too, trying not to look too closely, much less too approvingly, at the leggy young gringa.

The youngest of the women noticed Godin's collar. "Your blessing, Father?" she asked shyly.

"To be sure," he said warmly. He blessed them. They crossed themselves and murmured thanks.

A shadow passed over Godin's face. He set his mouth, coughed behind his lips. To Annja's look of concern he gave a quick shake of his head.

"Sometimes I don't know whether to hug you or punch you," she continued in French.

"If you don't answer my question I'm walking away," she said. "Are you really a secret enforcer from the Vatican?"

He stuck a thumb inside his collar and fished out a round silver medallion hung from a fine silver chain. She squinted to look at it in the uncertain light. Then her eyes widened in shocked surprise. It looked like a crudely struck coin. It prominently showed a cross, not of squared timbers, but logs knobbly with the stubs of hacked-off limbs. To the left the cross was flanked by a small bush, possibly laurel. To the right was an upright straight-bladed sword, not so very different from the one that answered Annja's call. Around it were inscribed tiny words.

" Exurge domine et judica causam tuam," she said, half-breathlessly.

He nodded. "'Arise, O Lord, and judge thy cause,'" he translated, though certain she knew it. "Your eyes are very fine."

"I don't have to read it. That's the insignia of the Inquisition!" she exclaimed.

"Quite."

"I didn't think the holy office existed anymore."

"They have gone through some changes. And my functions are not – how shall we say? – openly acknowledged."

She took a step away from him. He laughed.

"You need have no fear of me. I have not the slightest interest in burning heretics or witches. But even as my somewhat questionable predecessors thought they were doing, I am engaged in protecting the body and soul of the church. And of humanity itself, communicant or otherwise."

"How?" she asked.

"You are familiar with the concept of spiritual warfare?" Godin asked.

"You wage spiritual warfare for the Vatican?"

He smiled. "Not exactly, my dear. When it ceases to be a metaphor – and moves beyond the purely spiritual, as it were – that is when my real work begins."

"You fight demons?" Annja asked.

"Demonic influences. When they break into our world and begin to cause actual destruction and pain. It happens far more frequently than you would feel comfortable believing. You will come to know the unsettling truth soon enough."

"Are you serious?"

"Only when absolutely necessary. On that subject you might consider lightening up somewhat. You're still young. There's time to head off certain tendencies toward humorlessness before they become set in the stone of habit. That frown, for example. Do you want that lovely face stuck that way?"

She laughed. Then quickly stifled herself and looked around, feeling guilty. She didn't want to incur any more matronly wrath. Nor did she wish to show disrespect for the event or the participants.

But she had little call to worry about being overheard. They stood apart from the crowd. The doors to the church itself had opened. The pilgrims had begun to file inside. Some sang hymns.

"Truce?" Godin asked.

She glared at him. "Why should I trust you?"

"Because we may face a common enemy," he said, "quite soon."

"But what about your determination to repossess your precious relic?"

"Let us say that the jury is still out about your suitability to carry it."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"The sword does seem to have chosen you. In spite of your almost defiant refusal to believe. Yet you acquit yourself as a true warrior ought."

"Are you trying to flatter me into letting down my guard?" Annja asked.

"I would if I thought it would do any good," he said artlessly. "What do you feel are my intentions? Think deeply, if expeditiously. If you are worthy of the relic must your judgment not be of the utmost reliability?"

She thought a moment, drawing in a deep breath. The sense of responsibility his words evoked washed over her like a wave that threatened momentarily to swamp her.

No, she thought. I must not doubt myself now.

"You're right," she said. "I believe you're sincere. So far as the words you just spoke. So yes, I agree to a truce. But if you play me false, may your God have mercy on your soul. Because I won't hesitate to send it to him!"

He laughed and offered a black-gloved hand. She shook it firmly.

"Do you note the disparity of persons?" he asked quietly, turning away to nod at the throng entering the church. The sea of folk outside seemed scarcely diminished.

She did. The seekers gathered, at least a thousand strong, she guessed, were your proverbial all-walksof-life assortment.

"What do you feel," Godin asked as they walked toward the church, "from the people?"

"Fear,"she said without he sitation. "These people are genuinely afraid. They've come here looking for – "

She broke off, shaking her head.

Godin was not merciful. "Spiritual shelter? A sense of solace and reassurance that ruthless materialism cannot offer them?"

"I don't see how giving in to – superstition – can be a meaningful response to the problems of the world," she said.

"Why do you dismiss anything spiritual as superstition? Is that not itself a superstition from the days of the Age of Enlightenment, when men and women were defensive because professing reasoncarried genuine risks? Perhaps it's time to realize that there is no necessary conflict between science and spirituality?"

She still furrowed her brow and shook her head. "It's just hard for me to reconcile reason with faith, with either witch-hunting righteousness or New Age goofiness."

"Which do you sense here, Annja Creed?"

"Neither," she said after a reluctant interval.

A sound trilled through the night nearby, from among the pilgrims now all around, their bodies dark or illuminated in front with the flickering orange of candlelight. Annja's face compressed in bewilderment.

"Is that the theme from The Simpsons?" she asked.

"I believe so," Godin said, even as the jaunty little tune cut off. To her right Annja heard classical music peal out, then a rap tune she was unfamiliar with, bars of a current chart-topper from some English band she could never bear to listen to, the epic fanfare of the Star Warstheme, a Kanye West song, electronic chirps and warbles in half a dozen keys. Each was soon cut off by a muted voice saying, "Hello?"

A middle-aged woman spoke into a cell phone held to her ear not fifteen feet from where Annja and Godin stood. With a start Annja recognized her as the woman she had seen in the Shed restaurant what seemed a lifetime or two ago, complaining about the furtive but frightening black creature that haunted the backyard of her expensive home on Lamy ridge.

"Saw him?" she said. "You saw the Holy Child?" She turned to her companion, presumably her husband. "Harry, Margaret says she and Louis just parked their car and who do you think they saw? The Holy Child! He appeared right in front of them!"

"He told you what?" a man said in hasty Spanish, passing from Annja's right. Everywhere around them people were holding their hands to their ears and talking into them. More and more ringtones sounded, like a chorus of dissimilar crickets, filling the night with tinny dissonance.

"He told you to stay away from the church?" a young woman with a pierced eyebrow and lower lip said.

" – stay away – "

" – from the sanctuary?"

" – there's danger here?"

Annja looked from side to side and then at Godin's face. But his air of confident, slightly humorous detachment was gone. He was frowning.

From the church door, screams echoed.

The crowd went stiff as one. It was as if the bodies around Annja and Godin instantly changed state, like some sudden shift in crystalline structure.

A figure staggered from the open doors that led into the sanctuary. It was a priest, a stocky, middle-aged Latino. His glasses were askew on his face. He clutched the front of his surplice as if carrying some heavy load. The pristine white was splashed with some dark taint, gleaming wetly in the candlelight and the glow from thickening clouds overhead.

He fell to his knees. More screams rang from behind him, shrill as bat cries and edged with hysteria.

His arms sagged. Dark loops of entrails moistly glistening slopped out over them upon the stoop of the church.