The Way of Sorrows

by Jon Steele

  “Statum!” Krinkle yelled.

  Swiss Guard tacticals and a gang of medics broke into the stairwell from up and down. They joined the brawl, throwing Harper to the floor. Krinkle pulled the hypodermic from his overalls. Harper saw it coming.

  “Get off me!”

  He pushed harder, knocked away the priest. He tried to roll from Krinkle’s grip. Two guards fell on Harper, flipped him on his face, and pinned him to the floor.

  “Bloody—”

  Krinkle hit Harper with the hypodermic, pressed the release button, and the needle jabbed deep into Harper’s neck. Numbness rushed through Harper’s form. He seized up, unable to breathe. Krinkle leaned down to Harper, whispered in his ear. “Sorry, brother. No choice. The job is yours.”

  Nowtimes began to break up into alternating patterns of hash and flashes of blue light with only shreds of dizzying time to comprehend. Krinkle pulls the needle from Harper’s neck. Hash, blue lights, then black. Lifted from the floor, carried to the second floor; door opens, Inspector Gobet is waiting . . . “Mr. Harper, what is the meaning of this?” Hash, blue lights, then black. In a hallway now, moving fast. Mutt and Jeff drag him through crowds of little men in white coats. Inspector Gobet leads the parade, barks on about being “shocked indeed” to learn Harper had been secretly abusing his radiance allotment by mixing it with synthetic dihydromorphinone. He was ordering Harper into the tank for a three-week dry-out. Hash, blue lights, then black. Mutt and Jeff and a squad of Swiss Guards strip Harper of his swell new clothes down to his boxers, toss him in the tank, slam closed the lid. Hash, blue lights, then black. The lid opens and two men in white coats change the bioskin gloves on Harper’s hands. Harper can swear one of them was the light mechanic/artificial-intel geek from EPFL. They slam the door closed. Hash, blue lights, then black.

  ii

  Beep, beep, beep . . .

  “Recovery in forty seconds.”

  Nothingness.

  Beep, beep, beep.

  “Recovery in thirty seconds.”

  Nothingness.

  Beep, beep, beep.

  “Recovery in twenty seconds.”

  This time Harper held on to the voice in the pitch dark. It was a pleasant voice; a woman with a bit of an Irish lilt. And the beeps were dead ringers for Auntie Beeb’s just before the top of the hour on the World Service.

  Beep, beep, beep.

  “Recovery in ten, nine, eight . . .”

  In the tank.

  Time’s up.

  Lid about to open.

  “. . . three, two, one.”

  Harper covered his eyes with his hands. He smelled the new bioskin on his palms. Air pressure seals released: sishhhhhhhhhhhhh, thunk.

  “Open bloody sesame,” he said.

  The lid was lifted.

  A blast of cleansing air hit him in the face and fresh oxygen filled his lungs.

  “You can lower your hands, brother. The lights are made safe.”

  Harper did. The place was lit like a photographer’s darkroom; everything was red. Including the roadie holding open the tank.

  “How are the ribs?”

  The pain was gone at Harper’s side. “Fine. What day is this?”

  “Same day it was when you went in. Sixteen hours, fifty-five minutes later, to be exact. That makes it almost midnight.”

  It would take Harper a full ten minutes to fully reconnect with his timeline. For now all he could see was Inspector Gobet marching him down the hall. Three weeks in the tank, the cop said to the passing crowd.

  “Same day? Midnight? I don’t get it.”

  “You will.”

  Harper saw the roadie turn to someone.

  “Give me a hand, would you?”

  A Swiss Guard in tactical gear came into Harper’s red world.

  “Let’s get him out of this thing,” the roadie said.

  They reached in the tank, grabbed Harper under his shoulders, and lifted. Harper came up and out. They stood him on his feet and let him stand. He wobbled a bit, but he was okay.

  “Read the letters on the wall,” Krinkle said.

  Harper looked ahead. Five meters away was an eye chart bathed in red. But there were no letters, just patterns of interlocking triangles and circles and squares. They were moving.

  “What letters? It looks like a geometry student threw up.”

  “He’s all right,” the Swiss Guard said.

  The voice was familiar; Harper looked at him. More flashes of time reconnected in Harper’s eyes. The guard was Inspector Gobet’s chauffeur/special-ops sniper. The one who pulled Harper from the cavern during the Paris job, the one who told Harper it looked like he was trying to raise the dead after Harper sliced open his palms and let the blood fall onto the eyes of the dead man.

  “Sergeant Gauer. What brings you here?”

  “I’m delivering a pizza. What’s it look like?”

  Harper looked around the tank room, all aglow in red. There wasn’t a pizza in sight. He looked at Krinkle.

  “I’m confused.”

  “It’s the potion I hit you with before you went into the tank,” the roadie said.

  “What was in it?”

  “Fuck if I know. Something to help you better understand the nature of your mission.”

  “It’s not working.”

  “Have faith. You could have just drunk it in a really nice mint tea while you were getting your bioskins changed, that was the plan. But you had one of your episodes and we had to do it the hard way.”

  Hard to argue that an episode of some sort had occurred, Harper thought.

  “What mission?” he said.

  “You need to go to the Holy Land, sweep Qumran, then get to Jerusalem and get into the Israel Museum. You need to get your hands on the new Dead Sea scrolls and find out if this is the real deal.”

  Harper let the words sink in. “What?”

  Krinkle nodded toward the Swiss Guard. “Gauer is just back from a recon. Go ahead, Sergeant, tell him.”

  “The Holy Land has been a no-go zone for your kind and the partisans for the last thousand years. The bad guys consider the one square mile of earth the world calls Jerusalem to be under their sphere of influence.”

  “Considering the innocent blood spilled there in the name of the gods, not a surprising development,” the roadie interjected.

  “We went in on a probing mission and they smelled us coming,” Gauer said. “I lost five men getting the hell out. It wasn’t pretty.”

  “There is a silver lining,” the roadie added.

  Sergeant Gauer continued. “I think I found a way to get you in under their radar. It means hoping a few locals on the inside help us. Problem is, as a rule, those same locals don’t trust us as far as they can throw us.”

  “But we’ve got to get you there within the next twenty-four hours,” Krinkle said.

  Keeping up with the back-and-forth in a world of red light made Harper queasy as hell. Then one more shred of time dropped in his eyes. It was murky at first; a little like watching a photograph slowly coming clear in a developing tray. It was a portrait of the man of signs and wonders, crucified and buried in Jerusalem; a man who would return to Qumran nearly two thousand years later. His name was Yeshua ben Yosef.

  Harper thought about it.

  “I’m still confused.”

  “You go ahead and be confused all you want, brother. In the meantime, get dressed.”

  NINETEEN

  i

  Katherine got up from the chair and pulled aside the curtains and saw the moonrise above the Alps. Fields of high snow looked like clouds in the night. Far below were the lights of cities and towns gathered around Lac Léman. Over there, where the lake began to bend and narrow till it met the marshlands of the Rhone estuary, was Montreux. No doubt about it; she was back in Switzerland. And if that was Montreux, then this was Vevey, she thought. In the clinic, Corporal Mai had told her when she bolted awake, “You’re safe, Madame Taylor. All is well. You were having a nightmar
e.”

  Katherine looked at the buildings beneath her window. The neighborhood looked familiar. There was another window with the curtains drawn on the next wall. She walked to it while pulling the IV stand along on its wheels. The wheels squeaked and her bedroom slippers made flip-flop noises. She opened the curtains, saw the neo-Gothic building rising above the rest.

  “Huh.”

  It was the Hôtel des Trois Couronnes, one of the grandes dames of the Swiss Riviera. A lifetime ago—not really, but it felt like it—Katherine had spent the night in the hotel’s Tchaikovsky Suite, overlooking the lake. She was turning a trick with a taipan from Hong Kong. Actually the trick was with his executive assistant. Her name was Michelle. She was British. She had auburn-colored hair, porcelain skin, and the most astounding hashish. The taipan watched the women play with each other while he rubbed himself raw. He had a round face, an effeminate giggle, a wicked smile. Katherine tried to remember his name but came up blank.

  What she did remember, staring at the hotel just now, was the client was a member of the Two Hundred Club, the private escort agency out of Geneva that booked Katherine Taylor’s jobs. That meant if the cop’s sermon on the jet was on the level, then the taipan was one of them, one of the bad guys who bred evil into paradise. They had watched her the day she was born, the cop told her. They groomed her, paved her road to Lausanne with gold. They passed her from member of the club to member of the club, making her ready to be raped by the one whose name she now remembered: Komarovsky.

  She remembered that name because he had come to her in her last round of dreams. She was locked in the bunker. Max was in her arms, crying. The steel door began to buckle and crack open. Black mist leaked into the bunker and a form began to take shape before her eyes. She put the barrel of her gun next to Max’s head; she slipped her finger inside the trigger guard. “Big, brave Max,” she said. Then the transmigrating form began to reveal itself. She saw a tall, elegant-looking man with long silver hair tied at the back of his head. She saw his flawless face and the dark glasses over his eyes. He was as stunning a creature as he’d been when she’d seen him the first time, years ago in Lausanne. And in the dream he was reaching for her son.

  “The child is ours,” he said.

  Katherine pulled the Glock from her son’s head, aimed at Komarovsky, and fired. The bullet passed through him as if passing through dust. That’s when Katherine bolted awake in a cold sweat. “Jesus!”

  Corporal Mai rushed from her post and held her. Told her she was safe, told her all was well, told her she was in the Vevey Clinic.

  “Vevey?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the corporal said. “You were asleep when we landed in Geneva. We transferred you here by ambulance.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Half past midnight, ma’am. You were having a nightmare.”

  “No. It wasn’t a nightmare. It was like it was happening, like I was back there.”

  Katherine looked at Corporal Mai. There was the most blank expression on the young woman’s face.

  “But you already know that, don’t you?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “You probably listened to me babble while I was sleeping, huh? Reported it in already, have you?”

  Corporal Mai did not answer.

  “That’s what I thought,” Katherine said.

  “Let me get you a cup of tea, Madame Taylor.”

  Corporal Mai got up from Katherine’s bed and walked to the door. Katherine looked at the IV attached to her arm. The bag on the stand was pumping her with another potion, pale blue this time. She pulled the sheets and blanket off her body.

  “Could you help me over to the chair first? Over there by the window. I don’t want to sleep anymore.”

  “Of course, ma’am.”

  Corporal Mai helped Katherine onto her feet and dressed her in a silk robe and slippers.

  “Okay, let’s see if we can do this without breaking anything,” Katherine said.

  Corporal Mai took Katherine’s right arm, and Katherine held on to the IV stand. They moved slowly over the white-tiled floor. Katherine looked around the room. She saw Marc Rochat’s lamp on a table in the corner; the delicate flame inside swayed atop the candle. Katherine stopped walking, looked back at the bed. Something was missing.

  “Where is Monsieur Booty?”

  “They took him into the OR for a checkup.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Nothing, ma’am. The medics just want to check him over.”

  “Looking for phantom images in the axons of Monsieur Booty’s optic nerves?”

  “Yes.”

  Katherine laughed. “I was joking.”

  “Well, that is what they are doing.”

  “Why?”

  “The cat is a sentient creature. The medics want to make sure it isn’t haunted by the things it saw.”

  “What?”

  “The cat was pacing the room and mewing as you slept. It took me a few minutes to realize it was crying, like it was afraid of something it was seeing. I sent for the medics, and they took it. They said they will have it back by morning.”

  Katherine laughed a little. “Broken-down angels, ex-hookers, and cats who see things that go bump in the night. This really is a one-stop shop of the weird, isn’t it?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “They’ll take anybody here.”

  Corporal Mai smiled. “Even half-kinds.”

  Katherine remembered more of Inspector Gobet’s sermon on the jet. Telling her about the half-kinds like Corporal Mai and Marc Rochat; telling her about the hundreds of half-kind children around the world who had been slaughtered as a diversion to kidnap her son.

  “I didn’t mean ‘weird’ in a bad way, Corporal.”

  “I know, ma’am. It sounded funny, not bad.”

  “The cop, your boss, told me what happened to the half-kinds. I’m so sorry.”

  “The wheel is turning, ma’am, that’s all. I’m very sure the light will come to us again.

  Katherine studied the young Asian woman with the emerald, almond-shaped eyes. The eyes reminded Katherine of Marc Rochat, sure, but so did the almost blank expression on her face. And the cadence of the girl’s speech just then, and the innocent words coming out of her mouth. For one wild moment, Katherine thought it was him standing there. She looked at the lantern, watched the flame sway atop the candle, then looked back to the girl.

  “Did you know Marc at Mon Repos?”

  Corporal Mai nodded. “I was two years under him.”

  “He was something, wasn’t he?”

  “Oui. He always said the funniest things. We were friends. Sometimes I went to visit him in the belfry. We liked to climb in the timbers and talk to the bells. Once, he let me call the hour.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  They continued their slow walk to the chair.

  “The cop said there were only three of you left in the world. You, the new girl in the belfry of Lausanne Cathedral, and . . . He didn’t say who the third one was, actually.”

  “Goose,” Corporal Mai said.

  “Huh?”

  “That’s the name of the third one. His real name is George Muret.”

  “Was he a friend of Marc’s, too?” Katherine said.

  “Goose never came to our school. He wasn’t part of the experiment like the rest of us.”

  Katherine remembered the sermon on the jet again. Telling her of the one half-kind born apart from the experiment to replenish the ranks of the good guys. The one child conceived in an act of love, the cop said.

  “Where is he? Goose, I mean? What happened to him?”

  “He’s here, ma’am.”

  “In Switzerland?”

  “In the clinic.”

  They reached the chair by the window.

  “Hurrah. Made it,” Katherine said. She rolled the IV stand into place and sat down. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “Ma’am?”
<
br />   “Goose.”

  “He was attacked by a pack of dogs. But they weren’t real dogs. They were bad shadows.”

  “Jesus. When?”

  “It was a few days before the orphanages were attacked, before the enemy kidnapped your son. Goose was with his father. They were trying to escape across Heaven’s Gate. It’s a mountain pass through the Pyrenees.”

  “Escaping from whom?”

  “The bad shadows, and us.”

  “I don’t understand. If Goose is a half-kind, then his father is like Harper. Why was he running from his own kind?”

  “The father was not well, ma’am. He thought his kind were as evil as the enemy. He didn’t even accept Goose as his son. He imagined Goose to be someone else, not his own son. That way he could turn the world back to year zero. He wanted to reset the clock of creation.”

  “Who did he imagine his son to be?”

  “The child of the prophecy, ma’am, the one born of light into this world to guide the creation through the next stage of evolution.”

  Katherine hesitated. “Like Max?”

  “Like your son.”

  “And you believe that?”

  “With all my heart.”

  Katherine shook her head and looked away. No, he’s just my little boy. That’s all he is. She focused on the pale blue potion running into her vein. Whatever it was, it was allowing her to imagine her son’s face. Not crying; he was laughing. And he wasn’t in the bunker, he was in his high chair in the kitchen of the house. He was wearing a bib over his Shaun the Sheep pajamas. Katherine was trying to feed him some of Molly’s applesauce, but the goofy kid had other ideas. He had his little blue hammer in his hand and decided at that moment to attack the no-see-ums on the tray. Boo! Boo! Boo! Applesauce flew everywhere and splattered Katherine’s face. She was laughing with him now. Yeah, you get ’em Max. It’s the ones you can’t see that’ll bite you in the ass! Katherine held the image of his laughing face in her mind and she was filled with hope. No, not hope; it was the comfort of knowing she would hold him in her arms again and, yes, all would be well. She looked at Corporal Mai.

  “Are you supposed to be telling me any of this stuff, Corporal?”

  “I was ordered to answer your questions to the best of my ability, ma’am.”