Brent strolled with a smile, pretending to look around as the last occupants filed out. He stared up at Bolton’s oriel window—back to the grille and gate and hallowed space of the Lady Chapel beyond.
He tucked his fedora under his arm and strode confidently over the tile. His bearing and determination were something inherited from the army: Even if you don’t feel it, pretend. Make people feel as if you know every last thing you are doing.
Nooks and crevices were nestled into the hallowed space of the medieval priory. A jigsaw puzzle as complicated inside as the patches covering its interface and the chapel itself a secret to the casual attendant. The enclosed stone of the chapel evidently a sound chamber so clearly did it preserve the echo of his footsteps the moment he crossed through.
Brent recognized Fisher immediately. Surprisingly, he had a gun exposed and waiting in his right hand. It wasn’t until Brent strolled into moonlight provided by the broad arched windows that he fell back in surprise. A second man was there.
“Rick.”
Mariner looked at Brent pleadingly. “I took your advice, Somerville. I came to tell him to find his artifacts elsewhere, that I didn’t want anything to do with him.”
“I don’t know whether to be more surprised by that or seeing you in a holy place,” Brent jested while trying to get his bearings.
“But I’m not too keen on his decision,” Fisher said. “Your wife is the reason I chose this place. For meetings, to pass important documents. The other churches were an easy ruse to intercept men and lead them here. Once I had my eye on procuring oleum medicina, I got an idea. Diana once told me about a relic rumored to have been obtained by Prior Rahere during his pilgrimage to Rome.” Fisher adjusted the gun aimed at Rick while quickly sweeping his gaze over the perimeter. “Nice place. She told me she had met the love of her life in its churchyard.”
“I saw a Russian man one night,” Brent said. “Doing a rather abysmal job of winding his way through London. But near Smithfield. I believe he’s the man Diana is with now. She’ll ensure she gets whatever file he collected from you.”
Fisher didn’t say anything. He didn’t even look at Brent while explaining. “I was supposed to meet Mariner that night. At All Hallows. I confess I didn’t make you out, but I knew Diana immediately. Four years and you learn a person’s bearing.
“Oleum medicina,” Fisher continued. “It’s worth a fortune. I need a fortune. There are influential men who want it. This can get me in with them in other places. At higher levels. You found it because he left it for me.”
Fisher gestured to Mariner with his gun. “Exactly as we had planned. He would set it down just so and I would retrieve it. But he didn’t do a very good job of hiding it or shutting up about it. Another acquaintance of mine showed up just as I left, clearly saw you two and left.”
Fisher was the man Brent had sensed in shadow. And his acquaintance the one with the gun startled by a scene he wasn’t expecting to find.
“He”—Fisher indicated Rick—“has some of the connections I want. But now he was just telling me he changed his mind.” He cocked the gun. “Which is unfortunate, because he knows too many men and talks too much.”
“I thought you didn’t use guns,” Brent said. “Just piano wire.” He revealed the scar on his neck.
“You almost killed me. I figured it was about time I took precautions.”
Brent startled. The man was two moments from firing at Rick. Brent considered yelling for help, but he didn’t know what situation Diana was in. He was used to thinking quickly. He straightened his shoulders and fell on the man’s weakness: They were all just amateurs in a game fashioned by war. They were all making it up as they went along. If Brent could speak to Fisher’s incompetence . . .
“We met and followed the man you were with earlier,” Brent told Fisher. “Mariner may have said a few too many stupid things, but it isn’t like your other associates are competent. They stumble around in dark churches and tuck into trench coats like a Bogart film. It’s not exactly a top-notch organization you’re running here, is it?”
“London is a complex equation. It’s a puzzle. A maze.”
“London was toppled. It’s easier to see your way around because there’s more sky! You’re sending them randomly around based on what you heard my wife say. Great St. Bart’s?” Brent would ramble if it kept Fisher from pressing that gun any farther at Mariner or flexing his finger. “Not too far from the usual haunts of your run-of-the-mill tourist. Not a far stroll from Fleet Street if you know where to go. Or if you look to St. Paul’s as a compass. Good work on the St. Paul’s Watch, eh? You heard about them? Diana never shut up about them. Dedicated their lives so the steeple and dome survived the bombs. It boosted morale. See, you must hate Churchill and the society we’re attempting to return to, and yet you’re appropriating that society for your gain. A tenuous one, I’ll grant you.”
Fisher scoffed. “You sound like your wife.”
“How dare you pay me such a magnanimous compliment while you point a gun at my . . . friend? colleague? nemesis?” Brent chuckled weakly. “To Mariner. This is the longest the man has gone without talking. Ever.”
Brent’s eyes locked on Fisher. The man was prepped for a challenge and met him head-on. “Try me,” the flash in his brown gaze seemed to say. Brent didn’t move, didn’t flinch.
Rick cast Brent a pleading look. He was terrified. Brent knew the look from the war. Brent wore the look during the war.
Fisher surprised Brent beyond any instincts honed by war when he shot at the first word that left Mariner’s mouth in a plea.
Mariner’s limp frame sank to the stones.
Brent fell back. The Lady Chapel echoed with the sound of gunfire. He looked up at Fisher, who seemed as surprised as Brent. But he didn’t drop the gun or let it droop to the side. Instead, he straightened his back and his arm and pointed it directly at Brent.
Chapter 26
“You know what they say about the Requiem,” Fisher once said. “That it is hard to prove its ownership.” While Mozart had started it, it was finished after his death.
There was a great deal you could hide. But in the end, no matter the illusion he created, his true self would always shine through. Right now it shone through in his being as ill-prepared for his current role as Diana was for hers.
Fisher wanted her to find him. Hadn’t he implied as much the moment she ascended the steps at St. Paul’s?
Diana wandered into the chapel to the side of the altar. Candles flickered and a lone woman knelt to pray under a large wooden statue of Christ on the cross.
To her surprise, the Russian man she had followed sauntered up to her. “There is so much speculation on who contributed to the piece. To the Mozart.”
“It is just as important to acknowledge when sole ownership can direct too much attention.” She paraphrased Fisher. “To leave people wondering about where everything comes in.” He may have appropriated everything she had innocently told him to funnel a top-secret document through London, but Diana remembered everything he had told her as well.
She moved her arm behind her back in a casual stance and felt for the gun tucked in the waistband of her trousers.
“You’re pretty, I’ll give you that. He said you’d be here.”
Diana didn’t want to be pretty. She wanted to be a threat. She pointed the gun at the man. Her hand gave a little tremble. He was quite large and unnerving, but she kept the weapon pointed at him. “Give me the file.”
“I don’t have anything.” He opened one side of his jacket demonstratively.
Diana flexed her shoulder and the barrel of the gun shifted over his chest, moving right to his heart. “Your folder!”
As if oblivious to the weapon, he strolled over. “You don’t scare me.” He stretched the sentence out. “You’re a woman. Can’t even hold a gun straight.”
The gun wavered in Diana’s hand.
He twisted her arm and she dropped the gun. Diana dashed to
retrieve it, kicking at his legs, his ankles, anywhere she could thrash at him while he stayed her forearms. She strained against him but his hold was too strong, and all too soon he had her immobilized. While her brain railed at her defeat, her physical inability conceded to it.
But it didn’t matter. The man had the gun now. Whether he was armed before was a moot point as the steel flashed in the waning candlelight.
Then she heard a gunshot and had no choice but to let the man get away while she ran in the direction of the sound.
* * *
Brent straightened. Fisher stalled.
“I find it too much of a coincidence that we met twice in as many weeks,” Fisher said unevenly.
How could the man take on a casual, conversational tone? Footsteps were approaching. Fisher had shot a man in cold blood. But Brent remembered all too clearly how quickly Paul’s words had drained from him on the battlefield. You did what you had to in overwhelming moments.
“Stay back,” Fisher ordered the congregation forming at the mouth of the chapel. “Stay back or I’ll kill him.”
Brent exhaled at the sudden stillness of the onlookers. A handful too frozen to move or holler.
“I almost miss the piano wire,” Brent grumbled.
Fisher laughed too loudly. “See? You can make a joke even now. Diana said you were funny.” Fisher cocked his head to the side. “You teach, don’t you?”
Brent was surprised at how calmly his answers came considering a gun was aimed at his heart. “I’m rubbish at it now. It doesn’t feel the same.” He swallowed. “And I know what I’m teaching is important. There’s eternity in it, for heaven’s sake.” He stopped at the irony of his sentence.
“It can’t make you happy now. Your life. Your religion. What you teach.”
Brent didn’t dare move his head, but he did take in the small audience. What was the point of lying or putting on a show? “I feel that even with my graduate students, I keep sounding off as the man I was. Not the man I am now.”
Fisher didn’t lower his gun, but he did take his gaze off Brent for a moment to glance at the candlelit shadows across the Lady Chapel.
“I hadn’t ever been to Bart’s before, you know.” Fisher focused on Brent again. “Before Diana. Just to the hospital. But not this little eyesore off of Cloth Fair. I only knew of it because of a story I heard. A love story.”
“A love story.” Brent’s mouth twitched. “In a churchyard? Rather dull.”
“That’s what I told her. That she’d have a perfectly boring life. I’m a bit of a sentimentalist, you know.”
“Not too sentimental. You’re pointing a gun at the man whose love story you appropriated for your devious intentions.”
Fisher cocked the hammer on his revolver. “And you were stupid enough to come here unarmed?”
Brent nodded. “I am. However, I have a relatively sharp charcoal pencil in my pocket.”
Fisher stretched the arm holding his gun. “You can’t be sleeping well.” They might as well have been swilling whiskey at The Grapes. “Seeing all that you’ve seen. In the thick of it.”
“No. I don’t. I don’t sleep well at all. Nightmares. Constantly.”
“I might be doing you a favor. Ending your misery. They talk about the battle fatigue in the pubs. Things normal gents wouldn’t say unless they’ve had a few pints and a sad song is playing. But you have someone depending on you.”
“Yes. I do.”
“So you have someone to live for.”
Brent’s pulse quickened. The conversation was an echo of one he’d had with Ross. “Yes.”
“And I suppose you want the quaint little house and children and the whole lot of it?”
He wanted children with Diana named for the markers in Poet’s Corner. He wanted what she showed him in the Ditchfield book, finger rimming the words describing cathedrals and churches. “Must sound frightfully dull but, again, you’re talking to a man who gets kicks out of the Hebrew and Greek he teaches in New Testament theology.”
“I’ve let my life get out of hand. And part of me thinks I can backtrack, but another part doesn’t want what I had before.”
“I can’t help you there.” Brent sensed movement at the bordering gate and swerved to see a man attempting to leave.
“I’ll shoot him!” Fisher repeated, stopping the man in his tracks. “No running. No calling for help. It will be too late.”
Had any of the stunned onlookers focused in on the slice of moonlight exposing Mariner’s corpse?
“I should have listened to her,” Fisher said. “I told her I would come here and sit on a bench and wait for a pretty girl.”
Brent tried to swallow but there was a lump in his throat. “I don’t know what to say. I didn’t know you existed until recently.”
Fisher shook his head. “Of course you didn’t. Who would? I’m a mathematician who tunes pianos and fishes. No one ever noticed me until the war. Some men had everything and some nothing. Who wouldn’t throw themselves into an ideology where all had the same?”
“I . . .”
“It was a rhetorical question!” Fisher snarled.
Brent had to give the man credit. He had just killed a man and his arm didn’t waver once. Brent closed his eyes a moment. Thought of anything he might say to defuse the very near realization of his rather ironic and untimely death. “Except that you are Diana’s friend. And as her friend you most likely wouldn’t want to take me out of the equation . . .”
His senses heightened, Brent stopped at a strange feeling of something shifting, and his eyes widened. There was movement again in their small gallery of onlookers and Fisher wasn’t taking it lightly.
Brent stared the man straight in the eye and even in the shadows saw a look of determination and hurt. A cold look. The look of a man who had given away everything.
His file had been exchanged. He could see the outline of its shape in Fisher’s pocket. The man who had procured his artifact was dead.
“Don’t do this,” Brent said. “Don’t. For her. I know you are fond of her. You remembered everything she told you. Your eyes soften a little when you speak about her.”
“I envied how happy she was even in the midst of our tragic, horrible war.”
That was when Brent knew he couldn’t turn the tide except to steal a moment of acceptance. He couldn’t run. He couldn’t escape it. He couldn’t plead with the onlookers too frozen and afraid of the man with a gun in a hallowed space.
He straightened his shoulders and thought of her. If he only had moments left, he wanted to think of Diana. Not of a woman nearby procuring a dangerous folder but a girl in a green hat turning in the sunlight outside. So he would . . . and did . . .
* * *
Diana sprinted through the hallowed sanctuary, sliding on the slick stones and inset grave markers. She listened for voices through the echoing din but heard only the clack of her heels as Prior Rahere slept in stone and Prior Bolton’s window peered over her.
A small cluster of congregants lingered at the edge of the gate, but no one was speaking. Or moving.
“Let me through,” she said frantically.
She spotted Fisher first through the slightly open wrought-iron gate opening to the Lady Chapel and slowed her steps. His gun was pointed at Brent with determined aim. She narrowed her gaze on the movement of his trigger finger. Her heart somersaulted. Fisher wouldn’t blink before killing.
Brent was saying something in his even tenor voice, but Diana was too frantic to hear it. She didn’t think twice before she hurtled through a few onlookers, through the partition separating the chapel from the sanctuary, and lunged at Brent, driving him to the ground with the whole of her weight.
The blast of the shot erupted the moment she shoved him out of the way.
Chapter 27
April 1945
Italy
Holt, Tibbs, Ross, and Brent usually worked a unit, and he and Ross were always in sync, holding the same end of the canvas-and-steel re
ctangle, hoisting wounded men over uneven terrain. He could anticipate Ross’s next movements, knew from the slightest droop in his friend’s posture if they needed to slow down.
“Padre . . .” It was hard to hear Ross over the chaos of bullets and artillery. The shrieks of men and the thundering staccato of guns. One moment he had complete control, and then Brent’s end of the stretcher slipped, beginning a domino effect that had Tibbs and Holt swerving in panic to begin damage control.
Then there was nowhere to readjust. Brent hadn’t dropped a sack in the grocer’s; this was a barely breathing man. He fell back, his breath coming in galloping gasps. He hadn’t been strong enough. The mud had been too deep and the gunfire too consistent. He thought he was steady. Then why had Brent let his guard down?
Ross attempted to restore order with Tibbs and Holt, lifting the sunken stretcher and finagling it, dragging it out of the worse of the murky puddles and to surer ground.
It might have worked, but a relentless barrage of bullets resumed.
Brent held Ross down, his hands tightening on Ross’s wrists, fiercely determined to atone for his moment of weakness even as fire and mud fell around them. He felt the severity of the pressure through his arms and his back. Why hadn’t he been able to hold as tightly moments before?
“Stay down.” Brent gritted his teeth, covering him. He swiped mud from his eyes, coughing, and tried to fathom a world in which he wasn’t sinking. The artillery was falling with shrill whistles around them and a grenade had settled near the slight mud pit they fell into.
“It’s just more important for you to get home,” Ross said.
Brent shushed him, prepared to take the brunt of the explosive himself while his friend was covered by the safety of the pit below.
“That’s not how this works,” Brent ground out. Ross had been injured from a previous bullet and Brent was stronger, if only by a smidgeon. So he would hold his mate down as anyone would have done in compliance with an unwritten code. Brothers on the battlefield.
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