by Brandt Legg
Gale nodded; she’d been too caught up in everything else to even consider the much bigger nightmares that lay ahead, if the final four Divinations came to pass. “You’d better get him out of there alive. The Eysen is almost useless without Rip.”
Chapter 53
Pisano had read the report on the flight to Albuquerque. Clastier’s early days preaching were spent at a church in San Cristobal, but as it turned out, there had not been a church there until a century later. Vatican archivists had uncovered long-hidden details about his life. That first church had actually been a small one-room farmhouse that had been utilized as a storage building by neighbors after the owner had died. Eventually, it came to be used as a school and meeting hall for the scattered settlements north of Taos, including nearby Arroyo Hondo. At some point, Clastier came to preach there.
In the beginning of his career, he spoke of strict Catholic doctrine. He was a magnetic speaker and influenced most matters in the community. He also rose in importance within the region, as word of his sermons and kindness spread. Once he moved on to El Santuario de Chimayó, his first official congregation, he never lost touch with his friends and followers from San Cristobal, Arroyo Hondo, and the surrounding areas.
When the Church made its final push to put Clastier to death and remove all traces of his existence from any official records, representatives were sent to San Cristobal. The old one-room farmhouse was leveled, homes were searched, property seized, and many false stories were spread. Still, loyalties remained, and the last time Clastier was ever seen, he was riding on horseback heading toward Arroyo Hondo.
Pisano was glad the rain had stopped, but was annoyed that he had to travel the back roads of one of the most primitive parts of the country to seek clues that had been missed by the people who had held his job a hundred and sixty years earlier.
Pisano was a man of faith. The cardinal had done a good job conveying how much was at stake for the Church and the world. However, Pisano was most worried about his position within the Church. If he succeeded in this impossible mission, he would gain the trust of the inner circle and be rewarded with immeasurable power that, once granted, would not be relinquished. Should he fail, he was going to pay with his life. It hardly seemed fair, for one lapse in judgment, in an otherwise solid career. He trusted it was all in God’s hands.
He had squads of people in Mexico, but Nanski had believed the only hope of beating the NSA to the Eysen was in Taos. So Pisano intended to find Nanski and, barring that, unravel the mystery himself. “Divine Guidance is a powerful thing,” he said to himself as his phone rang.
“Nanski is dead,” the cardinal said. “His car was forced off the road and burned to the frame at the bottom of a ravine. His body had been thrown clear before the fire, or he might never have been identified.” The cardinal went on to explain that a man walking his dog had spotted the wreckage. He also gave him an address in San Cristobal that he’d given to Nanski the day before. “Nanski had asked us to research any churches related to Clastier. This was the only one he had not yet been to because it has long been destroyed. It is up to you to finish his work,” the cardinal said, before ending the call.
Barbeau sat in front, next to the driver, with two additional DIRT agents in the back seat. They turned onto the small road that led to the D.H. Lawrence ranch, but instead veered off toward San Cristobal. He expected Gale either to have been there, to be on her way, or if things were finally going right, to still be wandering the streets of the tiny village.
His satphone rang with the news of Nanski’s death. Barbeau considered for a minute whether they should head over to the crash site. “It’s likely that Gale Asher is the one who ran him off the road; proves she was heading this way. Let the state police secure the site and get some regular FBI over there ASAP,” Barbeau told the agent on the other end. They parked at the tiny post office and waited for something to happen. Barbeau felt foolish staking out a whole town, albeit a small one, but he didn’t know what else to do. He figured he was due for a break.
Gale felt the clock ticking. Seeing Rip nearly die had brought the urgency to another level. “I can’t stand the waiting and not knowing,” Gale said.
“Use this time to call Monroe again.”
“No, I know him too well. He needs to stew a while longer.”
“There is nothing new on Rip,” Booker told her again.
“I need to go to San Cristobal,” Gale said. “That’s where I was heading, when I ran into the Vatican agent.”
“Taos is full of NSA, FBI, and Vatican agents; plus at least one assassin. You aren’t going anywhere.”
“Am I a prisoner now?”
“No, but Gale, we’re talking about your life. What could possibly be so important to risk that?”
“Clastier and the answers.”
He stared at her for a long moment, unable to get past the burning blueness of her eyes.
“I need a car,” she said.
“Only if Kruse and Harmer ride with you.”
“If they’re ready to go now, and you make sure they know that I’m in charge.”
Gale said goodbye to Grinley. As a precaution, he was being moved to a place Booker owned in Cuba. He’d be gone before she returned. “I’ll see you again,” she promised him.
“I’m counting on it. Saving you and Rip might have been the nicest thing I’ve ever done. I used up all the kindness I saved, by being mean all those years. Sure hate to think I wasted it.”
“I don’t think you have a mean bone in your body,” she said, kissing his cheek.
Booker gave her an update on the other man who had saved her life. Father Jak was improving. Although he had regained consciousness, his condition was still guarded, but his doctors were optimistic. As Harmer drove through Taos, Gale sat in the backseat contemplating reasons why a Catholic priest had so easily thrown himself into a hail of bullets to save her. While at Booker’s, she had journaled all that she remembered from Clastier’s letters to Padre Romero, and it was there that she found the answer.
Chapter 54
They’d driven only a few miles when Elpate stopped at a cracker-box house, with almost all of its chalky blue aluminum siding missing.
“Why are we stopping?” Rip asked.
“I know this guy. He’ll help us.”
Rip looked back at the road they’d just left; then up in the air. So far, no one was following. Elpate embraced the man who answered the door and a machinegun-fast conversation in Spanish ensued.
The man started walking across the street. “Come on,” Elpate said. Rip looked reluctant. “How long do you think it’ll take them to find the farmer, and learn we took the pickup?”
“Where are we going?”
“America.”
“How?”
“Same way the drugs get in.” They climbed in an old Datsun B210 and raced away. The driver was on the phone the whole time. Rip only caught a few words. Elpate told him someone was going to drive the red pickup around for a while and then return it to the farmer at the end of the day.
Within ten minutes, they were weaving through an industrial section of town, then stopped in front of a large dingy building which was some kind of assembly plant. Rip followed the man and Elpate, as they hurried around the side and entered a smaller building. Inside, a warehouse the size of a school gymnasium was filled with rows of shelves from floor to ceiling of neatly labeled boxes. Two armed men nodded to the driver, but eyed Rip suspiciously.
The driver pulled open a large cardboard box on the bottom shelf; the inside was framed in wood. There was just enough room to crawl inside and grab the top rung of a wooden ladder leading down into the floor. “I’ll go first,” Elpate said.
“Go where?”
“It’s a tunnel that goes under the border,” Elpate said, as if it were obvious. “Don’t worry, there are lights.”
Rip remembered the last time he went into a tunnel and wasn’t sure. “Is it safe? Can we trust this guy?”
Elpate said a bunch of stuff in Spanish and the guy calmed down a little, but still looked angrily at Rip.
“You insulted my friend, who is only helping us.”
“I’m sorry,” Rip said to the man. “I’m running scared.”
The man walked away.
Elpate called after him, but he didn’t return.
“Sorry,” Rip repeated to Elpate, and mimed offering money to the man from Grinley’s dwindling stash.
“He’ll get over it. Come on.”
Rip didn’t see any other choice. Going underground was probably the safest place to be. He went in after Elpate, careful not to step on his head. Someone shut the box above them. Rip could see the promised light dimly lit below. The ladder descended about twenty feet. As he reached the bottom, Rip realized this was a sophisticated operation and it had probably been a great risk to allow him in to see it.
The narrow tunnel, about thirty inches wide and almost five feet high, stretched far ahead. Ventilation ducting ran along the ceiling, next to a strand of electrical wiring with a bulb about every ten feet. Four-by-six timbers framed the ceiling and walls every five feet, and a narrow rail system ran along the smooth dirt floor.
“Wow,” Rip said. “Who built this thing?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s here, let’s go,” Elpate seemed agitated by his question.
Rip knew it was a drug tunnel, and was also likely used to smuggle illegal immigrants into the U.S. as well. Once again, criminals had saved him. He realized for the first time that he might spend the rest of his life as an outlaw, although that life might not be much longer than the tunnel. They were heading back into the country that wanted him dead.
Even with the vents above, the air was heavy and dusty. They didn’t talk much along the way, but Elpate told him that someone should be meeting them on the other side as long as his friend had gotten over being offended by Rip. Elpate kept a good fast pace, but occasionally slowed to cough or to catch his breath.
The tunnel went much farther than he’d imagined. It was impossible to know the actual length and he didn’t want to ask Elpate, but as they came to the ladder on the other end, he estimated they might have traveled nine hundred feet. “What now?” Rip asked, sweaty and breathless.
“Up,” Elpate said, going first.
The climb down had been hard on Rip’s arm; going up was even more painful. He’d been expecting to emerge in another building; instead he emerged behind a group of low rocks, in the middle of the hot desert.
After they were through, Rip helped Elpate push the dirt back to conceal the hatch. Then he gazed to the horizon and asked, “Where’s our ride?”
“Don’t know,” Elpate said.
Rip scanned the desert; a hundred miles in every direction, and there wasn’t a trace of a vehicle.
Chapter 55
Gale called Monroe again, during the drive. Booker had given her an untraceable scrambled phone, but just to be safe he told her to limit the call to no more than ten minutes.
“Honey, I’m so glad you called back, I’m sorry I was a little cranky earlier. You know when you tell someone they are going to be killed . . . well, there’s really no good way to do that.”
“I’m trying to help.”
“I know you are, and I called some friends at the Vatican, who checked into Clastier’s- what did you call them? His Divinations. It seems the records are incomplete. Maybe you could get me a copy of what you have.”
“I don’t think that will be possible,” Gale said. “But you need to believe me. You and I have a lot of history and I’m trying to save your life.”
“I do appreciate that, sweetheart, but I’m trying to save yours.”
“It’s more than that. There are other prophecies, and if we can change yours, then maybe we change the others.”
“And what are those other prophecies?”
“Let’s just say they are apocalyptic in nature.”
Monroe was silent. He did know Gale well, and he believed she was telling the truth. And according to the Vatican, and the preparations they were making for Ater Dies, Clastier was also to be believed. “What do you need me to do?” he asked.
“Call off the NSA and the Vatican.”
“You overestimate my power.”
She didn’t think he’d go for that, but she had to try. “Then make sure that no matter what happens; you do not personally take possession of the Eysen.”
“Is it that simple?”
“I wish I knew.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem, especially since we don’t even have the damned thing yet.”
“Good. I have to go. I’ll call again.”
Sitting in the parking lot of the San Crisobal Post Office, Barbeau received a vital piece of information from an FBI agent at the scene of the Nanski crash. He smiled when he got off the phone. “They found an address in Nanski’s pocket,” he told the DIRT agents. “And guess what? It’s in San Cristobal, not far from here.” In less than five minutes Barbeau was standing in a field of sunflowers. There was no building at the address, only an empty lot. However, there were old adobe homes on either side. He chose one, hopped the fence, and knocked on the front door. A heavyset, middle-aged Spanish woman answered. After he flashed his credentials, she made a face and spoke only Spanish. Jaeger called over a DIRT agent, who easily conversed with her. She claimed to know nothing about the field next door.
They thanked her and tried the house on the other side. Their knock was answered by an old man holding a beer. He didn’t know anything either, but suggested they talk to the man in the house up on the hill. Barbeau hadn’t noticed, but at the end of the lot, mature cottonwoods and oak trees took over the field before the terrain turned steep, and a little adobe house sat atop the hill. “Been there since the days of old,” the man said.
The morning rains had left everything muddy, making the hill especially treacherous; Barbeau slipped twice on the climb. What the hell was he doing here? He asked himself, as another agent helped him up and said, “Look, Barbeau, that’s not how you become a DIRT agent.” Barbeau didn’t like jokes, especially at his expense.
A friendly man in his seventies answered the door. His thick white hair, bright smile, and infectious laugh after almost every sentence made even Barbeau like the guy. He invited them in and happily talked about the history of the area; said he’d met President Reagan when he came through Albuquerque one time. Barbeau had to work to keep the conversation on the empty field, and eventually the man told him what he knew.
“An old school house was there, but it was completely destroyed by some officials from Spain, or Mexico, I don’t know which. Said something about crimes against God. I don’t know what it was about, but my grandmother had some books from her grandmother that she said they came out of the schoolhouse. This house has been here almost two hundred years. Looks it too, I’m afraid.”
“Do you have them?” Barbeau asked hopefully. “The school books?”
“I took them to an antique shop down in Santa Fe maybe twenty, thirty years ago, to see what they’d give me for them. Turns out they were next to worthless. I sold a few chairs and an old fiddle, but he didn’t want the books. They’re still in a box, around here somewhere. I always meant to donate them to that historical society down in Taos, but never got around to it.”
For ten minutes, the man rummaged through a cramped attic without enough room to stand, accessible only from a rickety ladder; while Barbeau and the other agents waited. “Found my old army uniform,” the man yelled down triumphantly at one point.
Barbeau had no idea what the books might hold, but he was more hopeful than he’d been since Hall had been killed.
“Hey, here they are. Can you give me a hand?” He lowered the box.
Barbeau flipped through the titles: Arithmetic, World Geography, readers, a couple of hymnals. Then he found one that seemed out of place, a thin l
eather bound book with no markings on the spine. He opened it and discovered it had been written in fine script. After scanning a few pages, he found the name Clastier.
All the other books were just antique textbooks. He asked the man if he could borrow the Clastier book, for a federal investigation. It seemed to please the man a great deal to be part of something so important, especially when one of the agents wrote him a receipt and Barbeau gave him his card. Finally, Barbeau had beaten the Vatican agents. He didn’t know exactly what he had, but believed it was extremely important.
Gale gave Harmer a description of the place she had read about in Clastier’s letters to Flora. There was also another mention of “his sanctuary” in one of the letters to Padre Romero. Gale had a feeling that if they could find the place where Clastier began; there might be a way to unlock the Cosega Sequence and change the final Divinations.
Pisano had a similar idea and was less than a mile away, heading to the same place; only he had an actual address.
Chapter 56
After twenty minutes of isolated despair, a cloud of dust that eventually became a Toyota Four-Runner speeding toward them, interrupted the horizon. “You might want to tip this guy and try not to insult him,” Elpate said, finishing a joint he’d been smoking.
The driver looked fourteen. Rip hoped he was at least sixteen. The young Mexican-American spoke English and smiled when Rip handed him three hundred dollars. Twenty minutes later, he deposited them at a convenience store, and Rip gave him another two hundred.
“Decision time, dude,” Elpate said. “I’m out of moves.”
Rip looked to the sky, waiting for black helicopters to burst through the clouds. He had only a few thousand of Grinley’s money left. There were three payphones hanging on the front wall of the store and luckily, one still worked. He told the operator it was a collect-call. Once someone answered on the other end, without identifying himself, he quickly gave his location.
