The False Door

by Brett King

  A woman with honey-blonde hair came around to face her. John Brynstone’s ex-wife. Shayna’s mom fixed her hands on her hips, pressing down on a cotton sundress. Kaylyn Brynstone’s eyes blazed with fury.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Shocked, Cori fumbled over her words. “Central Park. I was jogging. It’s just that I was thirsty—”

  “You’re watching her,” Kaylyn said. “I ignored it at first, but I’ve had enough of you watching my daughter.”

  “Honestly, I just come this way after the park.”

  “Last Tuesday, Shayna and I were headed into Norma’s for breakfast when I saw you. You followed us.”

  Cori was flustered. She didn’t like getting caught. She had followed them for a few blocks in Midtown West. The night before, she had awakened from a terrible nightmare about Shayna. She had wanted reassurance that the little girl was safe. As much as she hated to admit it, the whole thing did sound stalkerish.

  “Tell me something,” Kaylyn said, anger flickering in her voice. “You’re working with my ex-husband again, aren’t you?”

  “No. You’re totally wrong about that, Kaylyn.”

  “I’m not wrong. John is out of the country. He sends you to spy on my daughter, doesn’t he? Tell the truth, Cori.”

  “I haven’t talked to John in over four years. That’s the truth.”

  “Then why are you watching my daughter? Why are you following us?”

  Cori looked down. “Look, it’s not easy to explain.”

  “I know you’re training to be a psychologist and all that, so you should understand this. Shayna has been through enough without you stalking her.”

  “I’m not stalking your daughter, but”—she fixed the woman in her gaze—“other people are.”

  All at once, Kaylyn’s expression went blank.

  “What are you saying?”

  “There’re these guys.” Cori glanced down the sidewalk, looking for the bald man, but he was nowhere in sight. She cleared her throat. “I saw one today. Like, just a minute ago. He was watching Shayna.”

  Kaylyn rolled her eyes. “You’re impossible.”

  “You haven’t seen them?”

  “You’re the only one I’ve seen watching Shayna.”

  “I’m serious. This scary bald guy was right down there. I was going to talk to him when you stopped me.”

  “I see why you and my ex get along so well. You’re just like John.” Kaylyn narrowed her eyes. “Do me a favor, Cori. Stay away from my daughter.”

  Kaylyn marched across the street, heading back to the school.

  Cori bit her lip, fighting back frustration and resentment. Her younger brother’s words started sinking in.

  Getting ready to leave, she saw Kaylyn hug her daughter outside the school. Cori’s gaze drifted down the street. She noticed a black car parked along the curb on the opposite side of the road. The bald guy. He was back. Only now he was in a sedan, watching from behind the steering wheel. Watching Shayna again.

  Buzzing with adrenaline, Cori curled her lip and started walking down the sidewalk. She intended to cross the street and find out who he was and why he was watching the little girl. She had questions and, damn it, she was determined to get answers.

  Chapter 3

  Paris

  9:20 p.m.

  John Brynstone had no idea where he was going. He inched along a narrow ledge carved from stone that ran along the cave wall. From the edge, it made a sheer drop into blackness. He stopped to get his bearings. The cavern beneath Père Lachaise Cemetery was no place for people with claustrophobia or a fear of heights. And it was a certain hell for anyone afraid of the dark.

  Water dripped from an overhead limestone rock, leaving the narrow ledge wet. Bracing himself with palms flat against the wall, he sidestepped slowly along the ledge. Thirty feet in, he drew in a quick breath then glanced back. Véronique followed close behind. Her eyes were closed. He wondered briefly if she was afraid of heights, but didn’t bother to ask. If so, it wasn’t slowing her down.

  As they made their way through the winding cave, Brynstone reflected on his reason for being here. He had tried not to act surprised when Edgar Wurm greeted him on that snowy February day in Central Park. He still didn’t know how the man came back. Right now, he didn’t waste time trying to understand it.

  In May, Wurm had explored an archive in France. He had discovered a journal belonging to a fourteenth-century woman named Jeanneton de Paris. Numerous entries described her relationship with a Knight Hospitaller named Tyon d’Arc, his last name spelled as “Darc” during the Middle Ages. Both Joan of Arc and the corpse buried in the false-bottom coffin above were said to be descendants of the knight. Some even claimed that Jeanneton served as a namesake for Joan of Arc. The iconic French hero was also named Jeanneton, later known as Jeanne or Jehanne d’Arc. According to a 1333 entry in her journal, Jeanneton de Paris had possessed a piece of a Roman helmet. Brynstone had hoped to find it in the grave.

  He knew now it wasn’t going to be that easy.

  Her journal had mentioned a cavern, but he and Wurm hadn’t realized it was hidden beneath the grave. Was it possible the helmet piece was hidden down here?

  After another ten feet, the wall curved. As Brynstone shuffled around it, he peered down at the ledge. A word was carved into the surface between his feet.

  CAPIO

  Véronique placed her hand on his shoulder, moving beside him. “What do you see?”

  “Latin word,” he answered. “Capio. It means choose.”

  “Choose what?”

  He looked across the cavern. Two long cords dangled side by side, reaching down into darkness. On the right, a marine rope, thick and braided, lingered against the cave wall. Dull and yellow, the cord on the left was fashioned from human skeletal remains—a cluster of femur, humerus, and tibia bones wired together.

  “That’s our choice?” she asked. “We climb down a rope or climb down bones?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Took me two seconds,” she announced. “I’ve made my choice.”

  “First,” he said, “we need to get across this chasm before we can climb down the rope.”

  The twin lines dangled twenty feet from where Brynstone stood. Even with an approach run, the gap was too far to jump. He looked down at the narrow ledge.

  “At one time, it was possible to walk across this chasm. That’s my guess from the look of it. A narrow strip of rock had spanned from this side to that one, connecting it all. A natural catwalk. It’s long since crumbled and fallen away.”

  “Unhappy news for us,” Véronique sighed, looking down. “One moment, John. What is that down there? Do you see?”

  He did. Brynstone crouched for a closer inspection. He discovered a tightwire attached a few feet beneath the rock ledge.

  “Who put that there?” she asked, leaning over with hands palming her kneecaps.

  “Someone who wanted to get to the other side. After the catwalk collapsed, a tightrope offered a way for the adventurous to cross this chasm.”

  “Why not a bridge? Even an old rickety one would be far better than a tightrope.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “Too damned easy.”

  The two-inch wire spanned the cavern. The tightwire ran all the way to the twin cords, stopping between them. Make it across on that thing and he could grab one line and climb down. Only problem? He’d never been on a tightwire in his life.

  “I’ll go,” Véronique announced. “My father is a funambulist.”

  “A what?”

  “An acrobat who performs on a tightwire. He had me walking a high wire when I was three.”

  Brynstone smirked. “When it comes to parenting, your dad makes me seem downright responsible.”

  He studied the wire.

  “I’ll go first.”<
br />
  “I don’t mind,” she said.

  “Stay there.”

  Sliding his back against the wall, he dropped his butt on the ledge. He extended his right leg a few feet until it rested on the wire. He spied a guy-wire anchored to the cliff. The tension cable added stability to the tightwire. He bounced his foot on the line.

  “Seems secure,” she observed.

  “The wire has been here for decades. Maybe going back to the 1800s.”

  “Not to worry,” Véronique said. “The French are accomplished in such matters.”

  “Know all about this, huh?”

  “My great-great-great-grandfather was an assistant for Charles Blondin. In 1859, he witnessed the Great Blondin cross Niagara Falls with a man clinging to his back. Five years later, Blondin walked above the roaring falls on a pair of stilts. At the Zoological Gardens in Liverpool, he pushed a lion strapped in a wheelbarrow across a wire.”

  Brynstone knew that tightwire walking had been around since ancient Egypt. Some critics had condemned it as supernatural, at best, or demonic, at worst. Four hundred years ago, a horse had been trained to perform tricks on a tightrope. Consumed with paranoia, a Lisbon court had the animal arrested. After a high-profile trial, the horse was convicted on charges of witchcraft. The really crazy part? The court ordered the horse to be burned at the stake.

  “You’re not experienced,” Véronique said. “Remove your socks and boots. Cross on bare feet and you can grab the rope between your toes.”

  He glanced up at her. “Not my style.”

  “Follow my advice if you care to do what is best for you.”

  “If I did what was best for me, I wouldn’t be here right now.”

  “You need good balance. To do this, you must be confident.”

  “Believe me, that’s not a problem.”

  She said something more, but he didn’t hear. Brynstone was already on the wire, at least in his mind. He formed a mental picture of himself crossing the yawning cavern, focusing on the vivid image of his body from behind, seeing it in third person like he was watching a movie. He had learned about guided visualization as a child, back when illness had ravaged his body. He had been immobilized, sometimes for months at a time, in a body cast or a wheelchair. Childhood illness had forced him to develop a disciplined mind even as it sapped his body. In later years, he conditioned his body to match his mind.

  Brynstone now visualized himself reaching the end of the tightwire. When he arrived at the dark wall ahead, would he choose the braided marine rope three feet to the right of the tightwire or the skeletal cord the same distance on the left?

  “Of course, that is my opinion,” Véronique continued. “Dr. Brynstone, are you listening?”

  “Need to concentrate,” he answered.

  Brynstone pushed off with his hands, moving away from the ledge as he stepped onto the rope. His body swayed—back and forth, back and forth—as the pull of gravity flirted with the immutable outcome of success or death. Drawing in a full breath, he moved one foot in front of the other, keeping the proper biomechanics as he stretched his arms away from his body. It was better this way with the black chasm below. He couldn’t see a thing down there, allowing him to focus on the wire without visual distraction.

  He had an uncanny sense of balance, contributing to his skill as an athlete, although he had stayed away from team sports in school. Too much conformity for his taste, a way of thinking that haunted him later as an Army Ranger. He had been recruited out of the military to join the elite American intelligence agency called the United States Special Collection Service, created in 1978 as a covert joint operation between the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. As an operative there, he had finally been given freedom to handle jobs his own way.

  And the one time he didn’t?

  It had resulted in the most devastating black op of his career. Not long after, he had quit government work and returned to his first love, dedicating himself to paleopathology. Still, he couldn’t help but look for answers to questions that went back to that terrible night years ago. The night his family changed forever.

  “Your form is excellent,” Véronique called. “You appear to be a quick learner.”

  Her words came as a faint impression that dissolved the second it hit his ears. Brynstone had a peculiar ability to concentrate on a task, immersing himself in a vacuum of self-determination. It was almost surreal, losing himself in the goal, not so much overcoming the duality of self and object as much as merging them.

  Halfway across the rope, something pulled him out of his psychological immersion. Something he hadn’t imagined during his guided visualization.

  Someone had invited in the demons.

  A blast of cold air seemed to shoot up from the darkness, bringing joyless questions to a man given to confidence at the expense of introspection. So much of his life had been turned upside down when he had taken a desperate risk to save his daughter. He still loved Kaylyn, but so much bitterness had divided them and his marriage had been falling apart ever since that fateful night. For the last several years, he realized now, his life had been in a delicate balance.

  He had been a man out of time, frozen on a high wire.

  No past.

  No future.

  Other than his daughter, the pride of his life, nothing else drove him but the hunt for one man. One enemy. The world’s most elite assassin.

  “Dr. Brynstone,” Véronique called. “Are you all right?”

  He couldn’t block her words now. They came with the force of an alarm blast in his ears. The loss of self-consciousness?

  Gone.

  The steely concentration?

  Gone.

  That old fear? The one haunting him for the past four and a half years?

  It returned. With a vengeance.

  He closed his eyes. Not now.

  Fighting it off, he took a step, guiding one foot in front of the other. His body rocked in an awkward sway. The rope seemed to take on a life all its own.

  “Dr. Brynstone. Careful.”

  Too late.

  He couldn’t control the rhythm. His boot slid off the line as his body dipped the opposite direction. He overcorrected, trying to maintain his balance on the terrible motion of the tightwire. He came close—but not close enough.

  He was going down.

  The dark face of the cavern glared as John Brynstone toppled from the wire.

  Chapter 4

  Boston

  3:20 p.m.

  Viktor Nebola crushed a smoldering cigar beneath his shoe, watching the warehouse doors roll open. At fifty-three, he was agile and well dressed, his regard for Italian designers bordering on a fetish. His outsized menace seemed inconsistent with his quiet demeanor and five-foot-six frame. His ex-wife had joked that he had a Napoleon complex—a rare attempt at teasing from a woman with no sense of humor. Nebola had never figured out why she had dared to mock him, but it proved to be a critical first step in her becoming his ex-wife.

  A silver SUV cruised through the open doors toward him, coming to a halt a few feet away, then the doors rumbled to a close behind the vehicle.

  Three men climbed out.

  At gunpoint, two figures escorted a tall fair-skinned man named Abder Visser, who was cuffed, hands behind his back. He was all disciplined muscle in his tight workout shirt, the cut revealing sculpted grooves in his arms. One of Nebola’s men directed Visser into a chair. They handcuffed the guy to a cuff bar attached to the metal table.

  Milking the moment, Nebola studied the trampled cigar, then considered Visser.

  “You disappoint me. I personally recruited you out of the Korps Commandotroepen. You were one of the best special operators in the Royal Netherlands Army. Hell, you were one of the best men in the Shadow Chapter.”

  “Still am, sir.”
<
br />   “You betrayed my operation.”

  “If I may, sir, your operation betrayed me. It took fast thinking for me to rescue the Brazil project.”

  “You left a trace of our activity.” Nebola reached behind his head and brushed a ring of black hair that reached from ear to ear. “You nearly exposed the identity of your leader. Possibly also our organization. Big mistake.”

  “What will you do to me?” Visser asked.

  “Everything I can think of.”

  Nebola didn’t tolerate mistakes, in part because he had made too many in his early life. His old man had abandoned his family while Nebola had been a toddler. His mother had been a drunk. His upbringing had taught him to rely on his gut and never trust anyone. He’d committed mistakes as a teenager, an assortment of minor crimes like car theft and burglary. He had been convicted of manslaughter at age twenty for killing some stranger he had met on a cold March night. After serving fifteen years in prison, he finally got smart. He stopped making mistakes, and he didn’t permit it now in himself or in anyone else.

  “I’ve heard stories about the Boston compound,” Visser said, looking around. “I know the things you do in this place.”

  “Then you have reason to be afraid.”

  “You wouldn’t do that to your own people.”

  “You’re no longer one of my people.”

  The Dutch commando gritted his teeth. “I’m not afraid.”

  “Give yourself time.”

  Nebola’s assistant Porter Harris grimly marched across the warehouse.

  “Thought I made it clear,” Nebola growled. “No interruptions from you or anyone else.”

  In a low voice, Harris said, “Yes, sir, but I wanted to brief you. We’re ready to go with the New York operation. Do we have your authorization?”

  “Is everyone in place? We can’t afford to blow this.”

  “Affirmative, sir. We’re ready.”

  “Proceed,” Nebola answered. “Let me get started on this Dutch scum. After that, I’ll be right up to supervise the operation.”