Текст книги "The Chosen"

Автор книги: Алекс Арчер

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Annja shrugged. "I do wonder if we have enough information to form an opinion."

Perovich nodded. "True enough!"

She slapped a jean-clad thigh. "Well. Just be glad we're not having an outbreak of sightings of one of our reallyscary apparitions."

Annja felt invisible mice with cold feet run down the nape of her neck and right down her spine. "Such as what?" she asked, not sure she wanted to hear the professor's answer.

"La Llorona. The Weeping Lady. Brr." Perovich shook herself theatrically. "Those stories always give me the willies."

"The Weeping Lady," Annja repeated in a small voice. "What does she do?"

"Wanders rural areas weeping for her lost children. She murdered them herself. In some versions of the legend she was burned at the stake for it. She's also supposed to lure lone travelers – usually young men, for obvious reasons – to their doom. She keeps turning up even today, although modern encounters are sadly short on actual doom. I have collected some pretty unnerving reports that seem quite credible. I've interviewed several percipients myself, off the record. Most people who run into something really strange seem very reticent to talk about it."

That would be me, Annja thought. Unfortunately, it would not be whoever spilled the beans about our sighting last night. It was an eagle, anyway, she told herself again..

"One odd thing I've noticed," Perovich said. "Sightings of the weeping lady are usually associated with the sound of a woman screaming – big surprise, huh? But sounds like that have also been cropping up in the monster-sighting reports that have started to cross my desk of late. You know – shadowy cats, anomalous dogs, bigfoot kind of things, but black and foul smelling. Peculiar, isn't it?"

Once again Annja thought she could hear the chilling noise that had accompanied the black form as it glided off out of sight – piercing screams like a woman in distress.

"Very strange," she said.

Outside, twilight was well advanced. Over and through the old trees across University Boulevard she could see the dying embers of another gaudy black-velvet-painting sunset silhouetting an old church steeple. The narrow parking lot between the Maxwell Anthropology Center buildings and the street was empty but for her rented Honda and a battered minivan parked twenty or thirty yards away. She gave the van a glance and put it from her mind. It looked like the sort of third-hand vehicle a college student might own.

"'Scuse me, lady." A voice broke the silence from her left.

She snapped her head up and around. She had parked with the car facing away from the street. A raggedly dressed man – early thirties, she guessed – was walking none too steadily toward her across the strip of grass separating the inner and outer sections of the parking lot. He was gaunt. His face was half-covered by patchy dark beard.

"Sorry to bother you, ma'am," he said, speaking a little too crisply, as the mildly intoxicated tend to do when they want to decisively show they aren't drunk. "My car ran out of gas about a quarter mile back up University here." He gestured vaguely to the north. "I need to go pick up my old lady at work. She's pregnant and gets tired real easy, and I need to ask if you could please help me out with a couple of bucks for gas."

Annja frowned. She hated these situations. She'd heard such sob stories before – not infrequently repeated word for word on consecutive days, by the same "distressed" motorist. He obviously does need money, she thought. But do I really help him if I give it to him? Or only encourage him to persist in self-destructive behaviors?

"Really, lady," he said. He sounded weary and desperate. "I'm not bullshitting you. I really need it."

She almost reached in her pocket for some money. Almost. But he had entered the customary cultural limits of her personal space and kept coming. Warnings shrilling in her mind, she turned to face him squarely.

Her arms were suddenly seized from behind by powerful hands.

Chapter 6

The Vatican

Grunting, the man slowly pushed the weight-laden iron bar upward from his chest. The body lying supine on the bench was well into middle age, and had expanded and softened considerably around the middle. But he prided himself that he had lost but little of the bull-like strength that had characterized him in his youth. This despite the sedentary and indeed intellectual profession where he had spent his entire adult life since leaving the seminary.

Straining, eyes tightly shut, he fought to straighten his arms against the massive weight. Finally, with a last exertion of his will – an organ exercised perhaps more regularly and rigorously than his body – he forced his arms to lock.

Instantly they began to tremble. He felt strength flee. In a heartbeat they would buckle and drop the weight to crush his chest. In half panic he opened his eyes, although he knew his spotter stood waiting, attentive to just such situations.

Yet the spotter did not seize the bar. The man on the bench began to perspire profusely as the bar started oscillating in the air above him. He squeezed his eyes shut again, as if by not seeing his doom he could forestall it.

He felt the bar move, then, tardily, steady as it was grasped. But still the awful weight pressed down on his arms, turning them into jelly.

" Deus meu!" he gasped. "My life is in your hands."

"Yes," a deep voice said.

He opened his eyes.

The hands guiding the heavy bar as if it were featherlight were not the pale, relatively soft hands of Franz, the Swiss attendant at the modern gymnasium below the Vatican. They were as hard and sun-browned as a common laborer's, and covered with expensive rings of ruby and sapphire, gold and silver.

"You," he gasped as Garin Braden, clad in his customary Fleet Street suit, lowered the bar into the waiting rack. After his initial start the cardinal felt little surprise at seeing Braden, although access was most carefully restricted. Garin Braden seemed to appear anywhere he willed within the confines of the Vatican.

"Thank you," the cardinal said when he caught his breath.

"It is nothing, Eminence," the newcomer said in the prelate's native Portuguese.

He knelt, took the still-shaking white hand proffered and kissed the ring of office. Braden was a big man, with dark hair, a neat black beard and mustache and piercing black eyes. He rose smoothly to his feet.

Cardinal Adalberto de Souza sat up. He gratefully accepted the towel and bottle of water the wealthy industrialist handed him. He mopped his high, sweat-sheened brow and drank.

Then he looked around. They were alone in the small but brightly lit, clean and wonderfully appointed weight room, one of many dotted throughout the sprawling Vatican City complex. The modern church had begun to pressure its shepherds to tend to the condition of their bodies, rather than regarding such as vanity and indeed the sin of pride, as in years past. Cardinal de Souza was still one of relatively few among princes of the church to avail himself of the weight rooms, although many of the younger priests were quite passionate about fitness.

He shook his head. He had seen many changes come to the church. Not all were for the better.

He looked up at his guest. "Good morning, Mr. Braden. It is an unexpected pleasure to see you."

"The pleasure is mine, Eminence," the shaven-headed man said in his exquisitely modulated baritone.

He reached a manicured hand inside the coat of his dark suit and brought forth a manila envelope. This he handed to the prelate.

"The negatives," he said.

Vanitas Vanitatum, omnia vanitas, Garin Braden thought. He had seen it all before.

Braden and Sons was one of Europe's most established and respected industrial concerns. The company was second only to arms maker Fabbrica d'Armi Pietro Beretta in age. It had long outlasted such one-time peers as the Fugger and Medici banking empires. One thing had mystified the cognoscenti for centuries. It seemed each Braden son looked unnervingly like the last, and all the others before him.

Garin Braden knew a secret. He knew many. He had grown rich trafficking in secrets long before it became a cliché that knowledge itself constituted wealth.

One of the deepest secrets he knew was that there wereno Braden sons. He and his one peer – his deadly rival, former mentor and sometime best friend Roux – had no heirs. Garin Braden remained eternal in many guises.

"With my compliments, Your Eminence," he said.

The cardinal snatched the envelope as greedily as a small boy with a Christmas present. "They're all here?" he asked.

Braden smiled. "Have I given Your Eminence cause to doubt my diligence?"

"No, no. Forgive me, my son. I know you to be most scrupulous."

It might have been hard not to laugh at that, had Garin not had so many years of practice.

Garin had betrayed Jeanne Darc – whom moderns had until recently miscalled d'Arc – to the English. He had been motivated by simple jealousy, born of insecurity. He'd felt his master was devoting too much time and attention to his female protégée, and too little to him. It was intolerable that a brilliant, apt pupil and apprentice should be pushed aside for a teenage schizophrenic with a sanguinary cast of mind.

He had repented it long since, of course. It had been petty. Worse, it had been out of control.

Garin Braden was all about control.

He had forgiven himself. It was mere youthful folly. And he had accepted – even embraced – the consequences.

"And the blackmailer?" de Souza asked.

"He will trouble you no further, Eminence."

The flesh merchant had proved unwilling to see reason. Consequently he had suffered a fatal accident two days before, when his vehicle had overturned on a treacherous back road, breaking his fat, greasy neck. Or at least, so read the official finding.

It would do no good to Cardinal de Souza for his enemies to come into possession of evidence of distasteful acts. Powerful men – and Cardinal de Souza was powerful indeed – had many enemies.

Garin knew all about that, too.

The cardinal clutched the envelope protectively against his undershirt, which was sweat soaked and glued to his matted, graying chest hairs. "I thank you, my son," he said. "You have performed a great service. Not just to me, but to the church."

"My pleasure to serve," Garin said.

He thought it a great pity his old master, Roux, was so sunken in self-righteousness and hence self-pity. Roux hadn't changed much over the years. He was still in the grasp of the same vices as five centuries ago – wine, women, gambling, a tendency toward sloth.

Garin, meanwhile, had explored without compunction the furthest extremes of human behavior, vice and virtue. He had jaded himself with excess – and spent decades in self-denial so total it had excited both envy and suspicion among the Christian Trappists, Sufi dervishes and Tibetan Buddhists in whose monasteries, and more, he had studied and meditated. Garin had seen, and done, it all.

"And the sword, Eminence?" Garin asked.

The balding head nodded gravely. "You served us well in that, too, my son. It was a grave matter you called to our attention."

Garin thought about his youthful betrayal of Roux's protégée. For half a millennium Roux had attempted to make amends. Whereas Roux liked to steep himself in drink and self-pity and rail against the modern world, Braden embraced it with both arms.

But suddenly there was a terrible threat. The loss and breaking of Joan's holy sword had frozen them in time. The rediscovery and reforging of the blade threatened the status quo.

Indeed, Braden had initially feared he would simply age all at once, like the head vampire at the end of a horror film – drying to dust and blowing away. That had not happened. But he woke each morning alert to every pang, and each time he looked in the mirror, scrutinized beard, eyebrows, head for the telltale appearance of a gray hair. The existence of the sword was a threat to his existence. If Roux could not understand that – or worse, was fool enough to welcome the prospect of oblivion as a rest from his endless bouts of guilt and self-recrimination – then so much the worse for him. Garin would do what needed to be done.

He would do whatever was right for Garin Braden.

Just as he had always done.

Cardinal de Souza looked up with a bushy gray eyebrow raised. "If your information is correct?"

"I am likewise scrupulous about my information," Garin said smoothly. "And Your Eminence knows my resources are vast. Would I have troubled your Eminence with a mere fairy story?"

"No. No, of course not. Forgive me." De Souza shook his head and mopped his brow again. His breathing had mostly returned to normal. "It's just that what you told us was so...difficult to credit."

"In this modern world of ours, with its vaunted science and reason," Garin said, "I can see how that would be so."

"Nonetheless it is as well to have certain...spiritual realities recalled to us. Even to princes of the church."

"So you have done me the honor of taking my warning seriously, Eminence."

"Just so. I myself spoke to God's Hound before he left on this mission of his. He goes, you see, to investigate whether something demonic lies behind these apparitions in New Mexico." He shook his head. "His superior, Secretary Cangelosi, insists he actually finds such infernal influences. And dispatches them in a most efficient way."

"God's Hound?" Garin asked.

"It's what we call this Walloon Jesuit. He looks like a hound. He is tenacious as a rabid dog. And can be as ruthless. Domini Cane."

Garin laughed. "He might take umbrage. The term was once used to refer to the bitter rivals of his order, the Dominicans."

"Really? I had no idea. Well, I personally took Father Godin aside and charged him to recover this relic. To think – the sword of St. Joan restored! You are certainly correct. It must be returned at once to the bosom of the church!"

Garin bowed to hide his smile. He found Roux's new project, Annja Creed, to be a thoroughly delightful young woman. She was beautiful, vibrant, resourceful, indomitable. But if she stood between him and his continuing ageless immortality – well, was it not the way of mortals to wither and fall from the vine?

He knew about Father Godin. The former Belgian paratrooper, Congo mercenary, French Foreign Legionnaire had a list of doctorates as long as his arm. He was one of the world's most esteemed counterterrorism experts. Indeed, certain of Garin's companies had at various times hired him to consult on security, although Garin had never met the man. But his great passion and his life's work were to serve as the special secret operative of the church, answering only to the Pope's confidential secretary.

Despite advancing age he was deadly as a krait. And for all his genius-level intellect he had the single-minded tenacity of what Cardinal de Souza blithely named him, and what he resembled – God's Hound.

If any mere mortal could separate Annja Creed from her cursed blade, it was Godin. Garin was counting on that.

"We live in an age of miracles as well as dangers, Eminence."

"Just so, my son, just so."

The cardinal rose and made the sign of benediction over the industrialist, who piously crossed himself in turn.

"May God bless you, Garin Braden."

"He has, Your Eminence," Garin said with a wholly genuine smile. "Many times."

Chapter 7

Two men pinioned Annja's arms from behind. She had never sensed them coming. She looked back over her shoulder. The man on her right had a head like a Muppet, all blond shag and gap-toothed grin. He wore an oversize Army jacket and smelled sour.

The scruffy man who had originally approached her had shifted to place himself between Annja and the street to screen what was happening from cars passing in the twilight. He smiled at her.

"Don't scream or struggle, honey," he said. "Or we'll have to hurt you."

The man who held her left arm rammed a fist into her kidney. She gasped as pain shocked her system. Her knees buckled.

The men hustled her toward the minivan. They moved around to flank her, making themselves look more like helpers and less like abductors while keeping pressure on her shoulder and elbow joints.

They've done this before,Annja thought. Adrenaline coursed through her veins. The aftershocks of pain made her blink. She forced herself to breathe deeply and focus.

The first man moved around her to open the van's back doors. The rear row of seats had been discarded, leaving an extralarge cargo space. Her two handlers, grunting from the exertion, hoisted her into the van.

"Damn," the man on her left said with a Latino accent. "Bitch is heavy."

"Muscular," the gap-toothed guy said. "Watch her. She might get ideas."

"No way," the first man said, climbing in after them and shutting the doors.

The sunset gloom was replaced by darkness that seemed complete. Annja felt panic fluttering around inside her belly and rib cage like a bird trying to break free. She drew in a deeper abdominal breath.

"She knows she'd better be a good girl. And if you are a good girl, we'll make you feel real good."

Rapists? she wondered. It was the most obvious explanation for this attack. But from the very outset she doubted it was the motive.

The first man was pleasant-looking, if you overlooked the patchy three-day beard and an overlay of grime that she strongly suspected had been applied by hand rather than hard living. He had his hand inside his jacket. When it came out Annja saw a glitter as her eyes adjusted to the last rays of daylight filtering in the front windows of the van.

The grubby hand held a hypodermic syringe. There could be no mistake.

Annja sagged. "There, sweetie," the man said. "This'll sting at first. Then you'll feel fine."

The fear she felt on seeing the needle turned her stomach. It was time to stop pretending to be a victim.

She ripped both arms forward. The two men holding her were caught off guard in spite of their previous discussion. She clapped her hands together on the sides of the bearded man's head as if clashing the cymbals.

He bellowed in surprise and dropped the syringe, reeling back. Annja slammed both her elbows straight back. She felt her left one glance off the Latino's forehead. The shaggy man caught it right in the mouth. She felt teeth break and gouge her elbow through her windbreaker.

She was pretty sure the gap in his teeth had been blacked out. He'd have a gap for real now. He fell back from her, howling.

"Jesus Christ!" the Latino guy shouted. Holding her biceps with his left hand, he let go to do something urgent with his right.

Suspecting what it was, she pulled her knee to her chest. The man who'd held the syringe crouched before her. His eyes were glazed but starting to refocus with purpose – and rage.

Annja kicked him in the sternum with all her strength. The force blasted him backward. He had not fully engaged the door latch. The van doors blew open and he flew out to land hard on the pavement.

Annja was already twisting clockwise. The Latino was bringing a handgun to bear. It was a serious handgun – a Heckler & Koch USP of some kind, big and black. It was expensive hardware for a penniless, panhandling derelict.

Annja recognized the standard equipment for a professional killer.

She caught his right wrist in her left hand, pushed the barrel upward. It went off with a bang that seemed to bulge the thin-gauge metal van walls outward and Annja's eardrums inward. With her eyes stinging from the muzzle-blast Annja squeezed. Hard.

The Latino's dark eyes went wide. His mouth worked. No sound came out.

His wrist bones broke with a crunching sound, like rocks breaking beneath the tires of a heavy truck.

He screamed. With a twist, to make sure raw, splintered ends and loose parts ground against nerves and shocked him into incapacity, Annja flung him bodily against the shaggy man, who now had a bloody beard to go with an authentically vacant black gape of mouth.

She leaped from the van. The man who had first accosted her had struggled to his feet. He had his hands down in his pants. As she sprinted the few steps toward him, Annja did not reckon he was playing with himself.

The hand popped out of his waistband clutching some kind of black autopistol. It was blocky: maybe a Glock, she thought. She crescent-kicked with her right foot, up, across. The inner side of her boot slapped the handgun spinning from his hand. She used the kick's momentum to plant her right foot, pirouette on that leg and deliver a spinning reverse kick to his jaw with the heel of her left foot.

Bone broke with a loud snap. The man's head whipped to the side, trailing blood and saliva. Whether it was his neck that gave or his jaw she didn't much care as she spun through her kick, then took off running for her rented Honda.

She had crested the adrenaline rush and now rode it like a surfer on a wave. Without any fumbling she got her keys from her pocket and into the door. Forcing herself to move deliberately, she unlocked the door, removed the keys, opened the door, slid inside.

Annja was no stranger to danger. She was experienced enough to know that in immediate lethal peril the main predictor of survival is not strength or fitness or even skill at fighting. It's whether or not you keep your head.

Keeping her head had kept Annja alive before.

She looked back. The man who had first braced her lay sprawled face-first on the ground. He didn't seem to be moving.

The Honda kicked to life at the first twist of the key. She had parked at the north end of the ribbon lot. The van was parked to the south, cutting her off from the only exit. Directly behind her was a landscaped strip, dry and sparse as autumn had settled, and then another row of parking places paralleling the street beyond. She could easily back into that row and head to the exit that way. But if the van had anybody in shape to drive, it could just as easily block her exit like a cork in a jar.

She put the Honda in Reverse and backed out, turning to face south. At the same moment the van backed out into the middle of the drive to face her. She rolled her window down quickly and hit the gas.

Engine whining, the Honda shot forward. She couldn't see who drove the van. Whoever it was probably wasn't acting or reacting at top speed. The bigger vehicle made no further motion to block her.

She stuck her left hand out the window, fingers curling as if to grasp, and reached with her mind to a different place. As she veered right to whip past the van through the space it had just vacated, a fantastic broadsword appeared in her left hand. She slashed it forward and down, felt impact. The van's front left tire exploded. Drawing the sword rapidly back, she thrust out again as she passed the rear tire. The weapon bit deep, yanking her arm brutally as the rubber closed around the double-edged blade.

The sword came free. She was past the van. She made the sword return to that pocket universe, or whatever it was, where it dwelt until she summoned it. With both hands on the steering wheel she spun around the end of the divider toward the exit.

The van tried to follow. Its driver had trouble controlling it with two flats on his left side. The van was lurching up the drive when Annja burst out onto University, turned right and raced into the darkness.

She watched her rearview mirror for suspicious headlights as she squealed through another right turn on Lomas, the next major street north. But she saw no sign of pursuit.

"Mind if I join you?"

Annja looked up from her plate of blue corn enchiladas. A man stood by her table, smelling strongly of the piñon smoke outside. He looked to be about her height and trim, so far as she could tell given that he wore a loose brown leather jacket. He had hair buzzed to a pale plush, round wire-rim glasses whose reflection masked his eyes and a well-creased oblong face wrapped around a boyish grin.

It was standing policy of the Shed restaurant, tucked into a little courtyard off the Plaza in Santa Fe, that during crowded times new diners could be seated in unoccupied chairs at otherwise occupied tables. The smiling young female hostess had explained it to Annja when she'd arrived around eleven o'clock, finding her breakfast burned up by a leisurely morning spent visiting museums and window shopping.

The lunch rush had hit about the time she'd placed her order. The place was packed to the vigas,the heavy dark wood beams exposed from the ceiling. She saw no other place nearby the man might sit.

Something about him immediately intrigued her. She wasn't long on company these days. Or any day.

"Certainly," she said, smiling.

"Thank you," the man said. "You are most kind." He had an accent that fascinated Annja. It sounded partly French, but with a certain guttural undertone she could only think of as Germanic.

I could do worse for a mandatory lunch partner, she thought. Though once he settled himself and began unzipping his jacket she saw that his hair wasn't blond but silvery-gray; he was older than he looked at first glance. Still, he was obviously in excellent shape and politely well-spoken. And I'm as big a sucker for a man with an accent as the next girl, she thought.

"I'm Annja," she said.

"Robert Godin," he said.

Smiling, he reached across the table. As he did his jacket fell open. Beneath it he wore a black shirt with a white clerical collar. Annja tried not to stare. It had been years since she had seen a dog collar worn outside a church.

"Father Robert Godin, Society of Jesus. I'm a Jesuit."

Feeling a marked drop in internal temperature, Annja took his hand and shook it. His grip was cool, dry, and hinted at a strength that could crack walnuts without mechanical aid.

"I'm pleased to meet you, Father," she said.

He laughed, turned sideways in his chair as he reclaimed his hand. "I assure you, Annja, we Jesuits don't bite."

"I – I'm sorry. I know you don't. I didn't realize I was that transparent," she said, embarrassed by her childish reaction.

"I have perhaps an advantage in experience and training over most people. Your secret is safe with me, my dear. If my presence or profession make you uncomfortable, I shall be happy to wait for a seat at another table."

"No, no. I really am sorry. It's just that I was raised in an orphanage. In New Orleans. A Catholic orphanage. I – I'm afraid I still have a little bit of a problem with authority."

He laughed. Not loudly but richly. "I do, too. For much the same reason." He held up the heavy crystal water glass a server had deposited unobtrusively at the table. "I propose a truce. You will rein in your natural fear of priests – I will refrain from putting a poison tack on your chair."

It was her turn to laugh.

He leaned forward slightly. Behind his lenses she could now see the color of his eyes. They were extremely pale green. They danced.

"I take it you recognize the reference," he said.

"Sure. It's from a supposed argument in the late sixteenth century by a noted Jesuit scholar – I don't remember who – who claimed that while it wasn't permissible to poison someone's food, because a man must eat to live, it was permitted to place a poisoned tack on his chair, because man doesn't haveto sit."

"Close enough. We've gotten more inhibited since then. Or at least more circumspect."

He ordered pork medallions marinated in red chili and they settled into a pleasant conversation. Annja told him about her work on the dig. He asked her about Southwest archaeology. She found herself falling readily into conversation with him. He asked questions like a well-informed amateur who was genuinely interested in knowing more.

He told her he was a Walloon – a French-speaking, Catholic Belgian, accounting for his curious part-Germanic accent. He regaled her with stories about growing up wild on the docks in Antwerp. Though the stories were pretty sordid and sad, if looked at carefully, he somehow made them seem lighthearted and nostalgic.

Annja realized how good it was to have somebody to talk to. She led a pretty solitary life. She was around other people a fair amount; any New Yorker was. But she so seldom got to talkto them.

She finished her meal and found she'd ordered coffee just to sit and talk a little longer. Even if he was twice her age and a Jesuit, her companion was entirely charming, as well as knowledgeable and witty. He had a gift of putting her at ease.

Or a skill,she cautioned herself as the coffee was delivered.

The crowd was beginning to thin out. A pair of expensively dressed and very fit women in middle age passed close by their table. They stood beside a pillar bedecked with artificial flowers, one aisle away from a window that looked out onto a courtyard alive with late-season blooms.

"You really should report it," the woman with hennaed hair cut in a bob said. "There are reports coming in from all over the area."

The other woman, taller, with frosted blond hair, shook her whole body in a shiver of negation. "It scares me even to think about it," she said. "Besides, who's really going to believe me?"

"Well, there have been a lot of sightings of strange animals. It's even in the paper."

"I just remember seeing that shape crouching on the slope right over my garden wall. All I could see was a shadow the size of a Shetland pony. It looked at me with those eyes – those red-glowing eyes! I'll be having nightmares forever. And that strange sound it made, like a baby crying. Or was it a woman screaming – ?"

They passed beyond earshot to the cash register up front. Annja felt a strange sort of shuddering emptiness within.

She was aware of Godin – Robert, he'd insisted she call him – watching her intently. Those pale jade eyes missed very, very little, she was sure. As she was sure there was a very great deal he wasn't telling her about his life.

"'And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth,'" the priest quoted softly.

Annja glanced sharply at him. "Revelation 6:8," she said. "The fourth seal, if I recall correctly."