The Way of Sorrows

by Jon Steele

  The inspector raised the beam to her left eye, panned it to the right. He was close to her, but his presence did not have a scent of any kind.

  “Looking for something?” she said.

  “Phantom images in the axons of your optic nerves.”

  “Which are what?”

  “I’d have to cite a lot of medical mumbo jumbo. Suffice to say any remaining hidden images could cause a relapse of your condition, preventing you from understanding the dream that awakened you just now, and how that dream relates to your son.”

  She stretched her fingers, touched the silk of his tie . . . He’d never see it coming. She sighed instead and let the warmth rush through her blood.

  “I think you’d better step back now. That urge to strangle you is becoming more and more appealing.”

  “Of course.”

  The inspector turned off the beam and returned the penlight to his suit coat. He retook his place at the foot of the bed.

  “So your evil twins aren’t the only ones who like to get inside a girl’s head and fuck with her dreams,” Katherine said.

  “That’s not what I was doing, Madame Taylor.”

  “Then how did you know about my dream?”

  The inspector shrugged. “You were talking in your sleep. Corporal Mai heard you and reported it to me.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “That you were reciting the opening of the devotional prayer known as the Angelus.”

  Rapid-fire images flashed through Katherine’s eyes.

  The twelve-year-old girl she once was, on her knees in the chapel . . . and she conceived of the Holy Spirit. Then the hooker on the run in Lausanne and Marc Rochat taking her into the cathedral to hide . . . Why are you helping me? Because you’re lost. Then the bum on the altar walking her into the light, rising into a flood of brilliant colors . . . to protect the life within you . . . Then the laughing eyes of her son; then the moment the killers tore him from her arms . . . “Maman!” And now the flashing message in the control room and the screaming tone drilling into her brain . . . ANGELUS, ANGELUS, ANGELUS. Then Harper in the bunker . . . a child conceived of light, born into the world to guide the creation through the next stage of evolution. Then a sharp jolt and she was looking at Inspector Gobet’s mug. His familiar-looking emerald-green eyes watching her, observing her, knowing everything she just experienced in less than a second.

  “Fuck you and the moonbeam you rode in on,” Katherine said.

  “Madame Taylor, I am only trying to help you understand what is happening to you.”

  “Yeah, sure. I got the same understanding treatment from Saint Harper in the bunker when he got into my eyes. It feels like rape.”

  “Indeed not.”

  “Hey! Do yourself a favor, do not tell a woman what is and what is not rape. You get inside a woman’s head and use her to your advantage, it’s rape. I thought that Angelus message on the screen was some kind of code from Anne’s troops to you, a fucking distress call. But I get it now, there was more to it. The word, the screaming tone—it was for me. You were rewiring my brain to hook up with a little girl’s memory.”

  The inspector nodded. “It was designed to connect you to the facts of the case in the event you emerged from the bunker and—”

  “What fucking facts?”

  “That you are who you are, Madame Taylor, and that your son is who he is.”

  She stared at him.

  “Now hear this, Inspector: I didn’t believe in that Angelus stuff when I was a little girl. I sure as hell didn’t believe in it when I was turning tricks in Lausanne. Honestly, I could give a flying fuck if it’s true or not. You want to think my son is the savior of your fucked-up world, you go right ahead. But get this through your head: Max is my child and that’s all he is. And I swear on his soul, I will kill anyone who tries to keep him from me. Do you fucking hear me? Am I getting through to your superior fucking intelligence?”

  That perfect mix of empathy and compassion was reloaded onto Inspector Gobet’s face. “I am receiving you loud and clear, madame. I apologize for disturbing you. I’ll leave you to rest now.”

  He turned and walked to the door. He set the palm of his hand on the wall.

  Swish.

  A curious thought dropped in Katherine’s head.

  “Hold it.”

  Inspector Gobet stopped in his tracks but did not look back.

  “Not that I give a shit,” Katherine said, “but what I just said about killing anyone who keeps Max from me—that’s what you wanted me to say, wasn’t it?”

  The inspector looked back at her. “Yes, as a matter of fact. Corporal Mai will be returning to keep the watch.”

  “Just in case I talk in my sleep again.”

  “Something like that.”

  He was a piece of shit in a snappy suit when he walked in; he’s a piece of shit on the way out, Katherine thought. But if turning a metaphysical trick or two meant getting Max back . . .

  “Whatever it takes, Inspector Gobet.”

  He smiled. “I’m so pleased to hear it. Try to rest. We will be landing in a few hours.”

  He left and the door closed.

  The room was quiet.

  She picked up the controller and pressed the button to lower the shades. The room became a place of shadows once more. She slid down into the bed, rolled to her side. Monsieur Booty tumbled in the duvet, righting himself to a sitting position. Monsieur Booty looked at her. What?

  “Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

  The beast obeyed, and Katherine stroked its head.

  She stared at the flame in the lantern.

  She imagined the mothers of the half-kind children, watching their own flesh and blood slaughtered before their eyes. She sighed.

  “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”

  FIFTEEN

  i

  So what am I supposed to focus on in the article? The name or the location in the byline?” Harper said.

  Krinkle was still at the desk, sifting through computer files like he was panning for gold. “Give me a minute.”

  Harper gave him five.

  “Son of a bitch,” the roadie said.

  “Find something interesting?”

  “It’s what I can’t find. Sorry, what did you ask me, before you just asked what you did?”

  “Lines of causality. Intersections. Julian Magnolly or Jerusalem? Or is it that they both begin with j?”

  Krinkle jumped up from the chair and helped himself to a Vivalto Lungo from Arctic X’s Nespresso machine. He added two packs of sugar to the cup and walked back to the desk. He sat and drank the brew in one gulp. He wiped dribbles from his beard.

  “He’s a partisan working undercover at 24 Heures. HQ never talks to him directly, and he never talks to HQ except through a one-off edition of the newspaper at LP’s Bar.”

  “The bar is his drop site.”

  The roadie nodded. “The one-off gets left at LP’s every day, by whom we don’t know, and we don’t ask. Every day, another partisan reads through it looking for anything by Magnolly. The one-off is checked against the print run for any added words. Added words are reported to another partisan, who reports them to HQ as flash traffic level one.”

  “Old tricks being what they are. His intel is solid?”

  “He’s the guy who planted the story about the Russian tourist they found in the car on the Gstaad road before the cathedral job went down. You read about it in LP’s Bar, even though you almost didn’t.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Long story. Someone got hold of it and took it and there was a whole thing about getting it back in time. Anyway, it’s what got you on track to cracking the case wide open.”

  Harper checked his timeline. “I can’t see it.”

  “There’s a reason for that.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Fuck if I know. That’s what Gobet told me to tell you. And it doesn’t matter. That was then, this is nowtimes.�
�� The roadie pointed to the newspaper. “You’re holding yesterday’s one-off in your hands. Gobet planned to give it to you to read before he left with Madame Taylor, but you told him to get stuffed and down you went.”

  “That one I see. Sort of. So what words would he have told me to look for, had I not told him to get stuffed?”

  “Third paragraph from the bottom. The last four words of the first sentence have been added to the one-off edition. They were for our eyes only.”

  Harper found it: The scrolls are written in first-century Hebrew, and they are genuine.

  “Define ‘and they are genuine.’”

  “Magnolly is telling us what’s in these new scrolls contains critical intel regarding our kind and the prophecy. And before you ask me to define ‘critical,’ I’ll tell you. The new scrolls may be bigger news than the Book of Enoch.”

  Harper stared at the roadie. “You must be bloody joking me.”

  “Nope.”

  “Who wrote the new scrolls? When?”

  “The last scribe of Qumran. When is the unknown. Sometime after anno Domini 73.”

  Harper flashed through episodes of the History Channel. He landed on The Destruction of the House of God. Headline: Rome lays waste to Jerusalem, destroys the Second Temple, and scatters the Jewish people to the wind in AD 70. But something didn’t fit. According to the History Channel, Rome had already been on a rampage of destruction across Israel for three years before Jerusalem was leveled. The empire was striking back hard to obliterate the Jewish revolt. Jericho went down in AD 67; so did all the surrounding settlements and towns, including Qumran. And the Romans weren’t big on taking prisoners.

  “Hang on. How could the scrolls be written in—”

  “I know where you’re going. The Romans didn’t know Qumran even existed until they marched along the Dead Sea to wipe out the Zealots at Masada in AD 73. That’s when Qumran bought it. And get this: The Romans may have had some help. It seems they had bad guys in their ranks. In the fifth cohort of the Tenth Legion, to be exact.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it’s in the new scrolls, and the new scrolls are genuine. Remember?”

  “Sorry. I’m still looping a little.”

  “Her?”

  Harper nodded.

  “It’ll pass,” the roadie said.

  “So a voice in my head keeps telling me. What else is in the scrolls?”

  “That’s all we got for now. And it’s all we’re going to get. The intel went cold in a bad way twelve hours ago. Magnolly had a contact with access to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. That’s where these newly discovered scrolls are now. They scheduled a meet at a café in West Jerusalem.The two of them ended up ripped to shreds courtesy of a suicide bomb. A huge friggin’ Claymore strapped to a bomber’s chest. Thirty-seven collateral deaths. Hamas, Fatah, all the usual suspects denied responsibility. Gobet’s partisans got into the morgue to check what was left of the bomber. Pure goon. Same strain as the killers in the Paris job.”

  Harper scanned the byline again. The story was getting weirder by the minute.

  “That would mean Magnolly filed this story from beyond the grave, no?”

  “The real world doesn’t know he’s dead yet. He was basing himself out of an Arab hotel in East Jerusalem and working under an alias. If he didn’t get back to his laptop by a certain time, the story was trip-wired to go. On-the-ground intel says the laptop’s hard drive nuked itself. A mirror disc image of what was left was sent to the SX geeks in Bern. They got traces of another story he was working on.”

  “Any clues on what it’s about?”

  “Fearful sights and great signs.”

  Harper thought about it. “Luke 21:11.”

  “Amen.”

  Harper scanned the story on the scrolls once more. He felt dizzy and dropped the newspaper. He took a slow breath, rubbed the back of his neck. Shit.

  “Sorry, could you tell me what any of this has to do with why we’re in Alaska?”

  “Lines of causality can run rings around the world at the speed of light for thousands of years before they intersect. Each intersection points us to a different direction in space-time.”

  “And lines may have intersected here?”

  “Judging from what I cannot find in this friggin’ computer, I’d say that’s a big ten-four,” the roadie said.

  Harper looked at his own watch, happily ticking along in the real world. And the roadie was right. If Harper were in Lausanne at the moment, he’d be in Café du Grütli, sipping an espresso with a wine chaser. The Swiss would have already marched back to work, and if there were no bad guys to hunt down and kill, Harper could waste the afternoon watching the world go by outside the café windows; then, soon enough, it would be happy hour. A line dropped in his head. From the Book of Psalms: Teach us to count well our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. He let lines of causality run in his eyes, tried to count them like the days. The lines raced by at the speed of light; trying to keep up made him feel like he was taking another ride on the cosmic merry-go-round. But this time the centripetal force pinned his eternal being against the wall and the weight of his form crushed down.

  “Oh, bollocks.” He reached for his smokes.

  “Ah, hold it,” Krinkle said.

  The roadie reached in the pouch of his overalls. He pulled out a small metal and glass tube and threw it at Harper. Harper caught it, looked at it. Four inches long, thin, mouthpiece attached to a clear chamber containing a silver-colored liquid, black metal housing at the tip. Small button and a smaller LED in the housing.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “A present from Gobet. It’s an electronic smoker with a new blend to get you straight after the Taylor job. Just press the little button, a little blue light comes on, and inhale like your life depends on it.” The roadie pulled out his own metal tube. He switched it on, inhaled, and released a cloud of vapor. ”I was issued one, too. It takes some serious getting used to.”

  Harper gave it a go. Press here, little blue light there, inhale. Took a few hits for Harper to feel the radiance ease the weight. When the weight disappeared, so did the last trace of Katherine Taylor’s face from his timeline. He looked at Krinkle.

  “You with me now, brother?” the roadie said.

  “I’m with you.”

  Krinkle sat back and rested the heels of his steel-toed work boots on the posh desk.

  “Okay. Unknown to anyone on the ground at Grover’s Mill, Katherine Taylor’s child had a GPS microchip embedded in his thigh. It was a biotech gadget, powered by a hundred watts of energy drawn from the child’s own body and programmed to ping once a minute.”

  “So if it pings, he’s alive. No ping, he’s dead.”

  Krinkle nodded. “One of Gobet’s satellites picked up a single ping five hours, fifty-eight minutes after the enemy hit Grover’s Mill. The ping emanated from just outside this friggin’ hangar. Subtract an hour for battle time on the ground and snatching the child from the bunker, forty minutes for a chopper to make the nearest airport at Portland, three hours and twenty-three minutes from Portland to Anchorage on a private jet . . .”

  “Welcome to Arctic X Air Services.”

  Krinkle nodded again. “Thing is, the microchip requires line-of-sight to a satellite. It’ll transmit through most substances, except certain heavy metals. My guess is the child was unconscious and being smuggled through here in a container, something that had been turned into a Faraday cage to block the microchip’s signal.”

  “The container was opened,” Harper said.

  “Most likely. Gobet dressed a few of his Swiss Guards up as Swiss bankers, put them on a business jet, and sent them through here this morning to see if the place was legit. They arranged to have a bit of engine trouble so they could sit around all day and watch who comes and goes and how they do it.”

  “And?”

  “If slippery shits had an airport, this would be it. Still, in and out of the States,
everyone gets processed through a mobile Immigration and Customs unit. And get this: All cargo listed on the flight manifest is verified before exiting the States.”

  Harper nodded toward the computer screen on the desk. “Except the flight that came through here five hours and fifty-eight minutes after Grover’s Mill was attacked. That’s what you were looking for.”

  “Dude, I’ve just hacked through Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs, not to mention the company’s own files. I got squat. There is no record of any flight coming through here in the time frame we’re looking at.”

  Harper thought about it. “We’re being played by the bad guys.”

  “Check.”

  “What’s the name of the game?”

  “As in did they remove the microchip from the child, send it this way and him another?”

  “Makes sense,” Harper said.

  Krinkle shook his head. “Too sensible for revenge.”

  The roadie’s last four words tripped an imagination in Harper’s mind.

  “Inspector Gobet knows who was behind the slaughter of the innocents. He knows who snatched the child.”

  Krinkle smoked, releasing a cloud of vapor that half hid his glassy eyes. “Damn,” the roadie mused.

  “Feel free to share.”

  “When Gobet gave me the newspaper and the brief on the microchip and told me to tell you what he told me, he said you’d say exactly what you just said. Which I thought pretty funny until you said it. The man might be in a different form than I’m used to, but he’s the same old Boz. I wonder if he still blows a blues harp? That would be wild.”

  The roadie stared with a wide grin on his face. Harper had no idea what the roadie was talking about. More radiance required. Press here, little blue light there, inhale.

  “Does your mind ever travel in a straight line?” Harper said.

  “Not since London ’72 on the Dead’s European gig. During the load-in my form found a few tabs of Owsley hidden inside a speaker cabinet. We’re talking grade-A, premium LSD made by the one and only himself. One tab, you’re flying. Two tabs, you see the face of God. I took all three tabs. By the time the Dead led into ‘Morning Dew,’ I was floating above the crowd and I knew I was an angel come to free all souls from the chains of evil.”