Seduced by the Operative

by Merline Lovelace

  “We have to hustle,” she warned, skimming a glance down his length. Hard to believe what the man could do to jeans and an open-neck white shirt with the cuffs rolled up! “Major Talbot said we need to take off by two p.m., or she’d have to request a crew waiver.”

  “We’ll make it. But first…”

  Before Claire understood his intent, he retrieved the plastic shopping bag he’d left out on the terrace overnight. The ripe odor had subsided somewhat, but still carried a punch.

  “Luis! You don’t seriously intend to bring that stuff with us?”

  “It does us no good here.”

  She started to protest that his aromatic home remedies were based on pure superstition. The silver chain and small, oval St. Benedict medal she’d slipped on while dressing blunted that argument.

  Saints and angels. Devils and demons. People had believed in both for centuries. Still believed, Claire admitted with a shiver as Luis dropped the plastic sack in a large container with a press-down lid.

  “I had room service deliver this. They swear it is airtight. It will contain the smell.”

  “It better, or we’ll get some very strange looks when we arrive at Sedlec.”

  “Let me see the directions again.”

  Side by side, they studied the handwritten instructions and accompanying map.

  “Sedlec is a suburb of Kutná Hora.” Claire tapped the X denoting their destination. “It looks like a fair-size town. We should be able to follow the signs and go right to it.”

  Should, being the operative word, she was forced to admit almost two hours later.

  By mutual agreement, Luis drove while Claire navigated. They’d spent the first portion of the trip in the discussion they’d postponed earlier. She brightened Luis’s day considerably by telling him she didn’t want a big, splashy wedding. She’d gone that route once and would always hold the memory in her heart. This time around, she didn’t need a lot of pomp and show—only the presence of their friends at a small ceremony, followed by a reception dinner at their favorite restaurant.

  “My staff will take care of everything,” he promised.

  Living arrangements were next on the list of topics. That negotiation carried them through Prague’s suburbs. Luis agreed they should make Claire’s condo their primary residence and use his ambassadorial quarters for official functions.

  Also high on the list of topics was how they’d manage their separate careers once he completed his stint as Cartoza’s ambassador to the United States. That particular discussion lasted until they exited the main road and hit the Central Bohemian countryside.

  Any other time, Claire would have admired the rich, rolling farmlands and picturesque villages. If not for the omnipresent satellite dishes, the stone houses with their slate roofs and chickens pecking in the front yards might have come right out of the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, few of the signposts leading to these villages matched the spelling on Father Milosec’s instructions. Two or three turns, and they were hopelessly lost.

  At that point, Claire was forced to do battle with the rental car’s dubiously named Never-Lost system. Obviously, its computer had been programmed for Prague’s immediate environs. When she tried to key in some of the towns from Father Milosec’s instructions, the system didn’t recognize them. She tried five or six different spellings of Kutná Hora before the computer finally translated one to the Czech name, Hory Kutné.

  Even when they finally reached the city itself, they weren’t home free. As Luis had indicated, it was a large city. A sign on the outskirts indicated its town center had been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Claire caught only a few lines of the English inscribed on the sign.

  “It says Kutná Hora owes its origin to the silver mines in this area,” she read, twisting around in her seat to read the rest. “King Wenceslas II issued some kind of decree in thirteen hundred to govern the mines’ operations and ordered the construction of the Cathedral of St. Barbara in thanks for their riches.”

  A truck rattled by, obscuring the rest of the sign, and Claire settled back in her seat. She could see the magnificent Gothic cathedral rising above the city directly ahead. Its multiple spires speared into an achingly blue sky. Their lacy stonework formed a tribute to both the glory of God and the immense wealth of the region.

  Too bad the spires proved totally worthless as navigational beacons. Within moments of entering Kutná Hora’s narrow, twisting streets, Claire and Luis were lost. The construction barriers erected at almost every turn in the town’s historic center didn’t help matters. Luis pulled over twice so Claire could ask directions, but neither of the people they stopped could speak English.

  After driving down several blind alleys, Luis finally pulled up at a small tobacco shop/convenience store. The interior was dark and smoky, and the three locals hunched around a dime-size table eyed the newcomers curiously. Claire smiled a greeting, or started to. Her smile slipped when she noted their boots, baggy trousers and loose-fitting shirts.

  These men looked eerily like the farmers in her and Stacy Andrews’s nightmare!

  Her breath caught. Her heart started to pound. Shaken, she glanced around. She half expected to spot a wooden pitchfork or scythe leaning up against a wall. To her immense relief, her gaze took in only racks of magazines, an array of tobacco products, shelves crammed with canned goods and several strings of sausages hanging above the counter where Luis had spread their map.

  “Sedlec?”

  The burly shopkeeper eyed the spot he pointed to and nodded vigorously. “Ano, Sedlec.”

  “Where? What direction?”

  “Ano, ano.” The man thumbed the countertop several times. “Sedlec.”

  Luis turned to Claire. “I think he means we’re here.”

  “I think so,” she agreed, still tingling from the odd sensation of a moment ago. “Church of All Saints?” she tried. “Ossuary?”

  “Ahhh!” Enlightenment dawned. Coming out from behind the counter, the shopkeeper gestured for them to follow him to the door. Once out on the stoop, he pointed to a slender spire just visible over the slate rooftops.

  “Kostnice. Ossuary.”

  “Thank you!”

  They reached the church a few moments later and parked behind several other vehicles with rental car plates. As difficult as it was to find, the site obviously drew its share of tourists.

  Claire climbed out and slung the strap of her purse over her shoulder. While Luis keyed the car lock, she studied the baroque facade of the church. It didn’t compare to the cathedrals of Prague and Kutná Hora in either size or magnificence. This was a parish church, designed and built to serve the needs of a small community.

  As was the cemetery adjoining the church. Enclosed by the stone wall, it held at most forty or fifty graves. Some of the headstones marking those graves were new, shiny marble freshly inscribed with names and dates. Time had weathered others so badly their lettering was indecipherable. Hard to believe this tree-shaded patch of ground had served as the burial place for thousands over the centuries.

  Claire didn’t appreciate how many thousands until they followed the path that led to the entrance to the underground bone repository. The sign posted outside the entrance contained information in Czech, English and German. As Father Milosec had indicated, the present church had been built on the site of an eleventh-century Cistercian monastery. The ossuary came later, after the cemetery gained fame as a holy place.

  “Good Lord!” Claire gasped. “It says here that somewhere between forty to seventy thousand people were buried here over the centuries.”

  The rest of the information was almost as startling. The present two-story church had been constructed in the early 1400s, with a vaulted upper level, and a chapel on the lower level to store skeletons dug up to make room for new burials. For centuries, bones had stacked up in the lower chamber. Then, in 1870, the duke who ruled this region commissioned a wood-carver to put the bones in order.

  “‘His efforts are as
artistic as they are startling,’” Claire read aloud.

  Goose bumps rose on her arms. She didn’t have a good feeling about this. Her unease grew as they approached the entrance. Two steps later, she stopped dead.

  A ticket taker sat in a dusty glass booth just inside the entrance. The arch above the ticket booth was studded with skulls and crossed femurs.

  That alone was enough to send a shiver down Claire’s spine, but it was the massive arrangement on the opposite wall that held her astonished gaze. More skulls, femurs and scapulars had been fashioned into the universal symbol of the Catholic Church—the letters IHE—topped by a bone cross, and what was obviously intended as rays emanating outward. Claire swallowed hard, staring in unwilling fascination at the macabre arrangement, while Luis purchased entry tickets.

  “Two, please.”

  The cheerful, red-cheeked attendant took the bill he slid toward her and returned his change, along with a thin brochure.

  “You want in English, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  She glanced from Luis to Claire and back again. “You come from America?”

  “My friend does.”

  “I haf visited my cousin Magda in a place called Oklahoma. Her city is called Prague, like our own city. You know this place?”

  “Sorry, I don’t.”

  “It is very small, this Prague, but many Czechs live there.” Smiling, she gestured to a leather-bound book. “Please to sign our guest register.”

  Luis complied, and the woman slid two tissue-thin tickets through the window.

  “Please to enjoy our ossuary.”

  Enjoy was not the verb Claire would use in association with the feelings that crawled over her as she and Luis descended the shallow steps. Before entering the chapel itself, they came face-to-face with a windowed niche containing hundreds of skulls piled in neat rows, one on top of the other. A flickering candle illuminated the coins left in a tray in front of the window.

  “Offerings to the dead,” Luis murmured, adding a handful of change to the pile.

  Claire had no desire to contribute to the offerings. Her throat felt tight. A fine film of sweat had dampened her palms. Wrenching her gaze from the rows of empty, sightless sockets, she stepped down into the chapel itself and immediately wished she hadn’t.

  Bones and skulls decorated almost every square inch of the sanctuary. On the walls, on the staves of the vaulted ceiling, on every door and window frame. Even the seven-foot-tall candelabra beside the altar was topped by angelic cherubs who didn’t appear the least bit disturbed at being entwined for all eternity with human remains.

  Dominating all, however, was the massive chandelier hanging in the center of the chapel. Her palms clammy, Claire had to fight the urge to back away from the bones that dangled from its lower branches like the tinkling crystal drops on a Waterford chandelier. She sure as hell wasn’t about to have her picture taken directly under the thing, like the young woman toting a heavy backpack, who struck a pose for her equally encumbered friend.

  “The brochure says the chandelier contains at least one of every bone in the human body,” Luis read quietly.

  Claire tried to tell herself this was a unique form of art. That the woodcutter who arranged these skeletal remains had intended to inspire awe and reverence for the dead. But none of the arguments she struggled to marshal could combat the icy sensations rippling down her spine.

  She felt as though she was living her nightmare. They crowded her, all these skulls and skeletal remains. Smothered her. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.

  “Look at the royal insignia,” Luis said, completely absorbed by the monstrous coat of arms depicted in human remains. “Is that a raven pecking at the eye socket of that skull?”

  She gave a strangled gasp. “I need some air. Now!”

  Smothering an oath, he grasped her elbow and steered her to the short flight of steps. She lurched up the steps, barely able to breathe. Their precipitous exit drew a startled glance from the ticket seller.

  “Madam?” She jumped up and grabbed one of the bottles of water for sale in the booth.

  Claire didn’t stop for the bottle the woman thrust through the ticket window. She had to get out in the sunshine, had to banish the images that pecked at the edges of her sanity like the raven Luis had pointed to.

  She made it as far as the low stone wall before her legs collapsed. She sank onto the ledge and dragged in air. Bit by bit, the dark images receded and were replaced by Luis’s handsome, worried face.

  “Forgive me, my darling. I was so mesmerized by that place, I did not see how it affected you. Are you all right?”

  “Now.”

  “Here, madam.” The ticket seller hurried over to them with the plastic bottle clutched in her hand. “Drink. The water is from the stream behind the church. It is blessed and will banish the ghosts.”

  Claire wasn’t about to gulp down water from a stream that filtered through a cemetery.

  “Thank you, but I’m fine now. I just needed some air.”

  “Our ossuary does this to some,” the woman admitted apologetically. “Even big men, strong men, grow faint.”

  Still trying to steady her breathing, Claire merely nodded. The woman’s next comment snared her full attention, however.

  “One of your countrymen was similarly taken just weeks ago. His face was ashen, but he asks many questions, makes many notes. He wants, too, to see our parish records from many years ago. I think he looks for his ancestors, but he shakes his head when I ask this.”

  Luis’s glance locked with Claire’s. She guessed instantly what he was thinking. Another coincidence?

  “Did this man sign the guest register?” he wanted to know.

  “He does not, but the one with him does.”

  “May I see the entry?”

  “Ano. Come, I will show you.”

  “Don’t move,” he instructed Claire. “I’ll be right back.”

  Feeling more revived by the moment, Claire let the strap of her shoulder bag slip down her arm and rested her palms on the stone ledge. Bit by bit, the quiet tranquility soothed her jagged nerves. Sunlight dappled through the trees shading the cemetery. Honeysuckle spilled over one corner of the wall and filled the air with its perfumed scent.

  Her gaze strayed to a rusted iron cross tilting against the wall, mere inches from the bright yellow blossoms.

  Was there something in this tranquil setting that might help Stacy Andrews? Or something Claire had missed inside the ossuary? Those cherubs topping the gruesome candelabra? The creepy chandelier? They could be interpreted as shedding light after death.

  She was still trying to put a positive spin on the artwork inside the ossuary when a shadow of movement near its entrance caught her eye.

  Her pulse skipped a beat. Angels’ wings? Again?

  Not this time.

  This time it was Luis who emerged from the shadows. Claire watched him stride toward her, so tall, so confident, so damned handsome, and a sense of absolute rightness settled around her heart.

  Chapter 10

  Claire called into OMEGA’s control center during the drive back to Prague. It was still early in the States, not yet 4:00 a.m., but her controller was at the desk.

  No surprise there. When Joe Devlin acted as controller for an agent in the field, he pulled round-the-clock duty. Claire would do the same for any operative she controlled.

  “Yo, Cyrene.” Rigger’s lazy Oklahoma drawl came through the earpiece. “You and El Colonél on your way home?”

  “Almost.”

  “How was the visit to Sedlec?”

  “Creepy, but productive. We may have something.”

  Or nothing. So two American men had rooted around in parish records some weeks ago? Claire had no proof they’d been looking for information about Stacy Andrews’s great-grandfather. Or that they were in any way connected to falling statues or presently deceased muggers.

  “I need you to check someone out, Rigger.”

/>   “Can do easy.”

  She heard the sound of a thump. The back legs of his chair hitting the floor, she guessed.

  “Shoot.”

  “His name is Alex Dawson. He signed the guest register at the Sedlec ossuary on April twentieth and gave his home as Richmond, Virginia.”

  “Alex Dawson. Richmond. Got it.”

  “See if you can make any link between this guy Dawson and the man who attacked us outside my condo.”

  “Edward Porter? Will do.”

  “Also…”

  “Yeah?”

  “You might also run a screen of White House personnel. See if Dawson pops up in anyone’s list of contacts.”

  It was a long shot, but Claire was fast running out of options. She’d hoped the bone ossuary would yield concrete clues to the root cause of Stacy Andrews’s nightmares. All she’d come away with was a much keener appreciation of how deeply spectral remains were imbued in Bohemian history and culture.

  “If there’s a connection,” Rigger predicted confidently, “I’ll find it.”

  Claire signed off and tucked her phone back in its special pocket in her shoulder bag.

  “Rigger’s going to work it,” she confirmed to Luis. “I hope he finds something. I hate going back to the president and Stacy Andrews empty-handed.”

  He gave her a quick glance from behind his mirrored sunglasses. They’d left the windows open to the warm spring air. The rush of wind ruffled his glossy black hair and tugged at the open neck of his shirt.

  “We are hardly going back empty-handed, querida. We’ve learned much during this trip.”

  “All we’ve learned is that Stacy’s great-grandfather did in fact emigrate from Bohemia.”

  “And that he was born in a village one might describe as the bone capital of Europe.”

  “So the ossuary got to you, too?”

  “How could it not?” His silky black mustache twitched. “I don’t believe I have ever seen skulls so artfully arranged.”

  Claire smiled, but had to repress an involuntary shudder. She suspected it would take some time for the memory of those disturbing candelabra and altar decorations to fade.