The testament, p.17
The Testament, page 17
Camille pulled over, Bravo helped Jenny out. Camille grabbed a raincoat and, holding it over Jenny, insisted on going with her. Jenny did not have the strength to argue, and together the two women hurried into the low, squat building. Bravo went around to the driver's side of the Citroe"n, the better to keep an eye on the traffic. The light rain was cool, and he enjoyed the feel of it on his face as he pulled out his cell phone and dialed an overseas number.
It would already be night in New York, the blaze of man-made lights dimming the stars, the great energy of the city flowing unabated through the streets while the tops of high-rises disappeared into the clouds.
Emma answered on the first ring, as if she had been waiting for his call.
"Bravo, where are you?"
"In France," he said. "On my way to Brittany."
"What are you doing there?"
"I'm on an errand for Dad. He spoke to me about it just before the… just before the end." There was an uncomfortable silence for a moment. "How are you, Emma?"
"I'm fine. I'm singing again, my voice coach was just here."
"That's wonderful-and your eyes? Any change?"
"Not yet. Never mind, it's you I'm worried about."
"Me?"
"I can hear it in your voice," she said.
"Hear what?"
"Trouble. Whatever Dad wanted you to do, it's trouble, isn't it?"
"Why would you say-"
"Because I'm not an idiot, Bravo, and I resent you treating me like one. The president of the engineering firm I hired read the report to me. The gas line wasn't faulty; it was tampered with."
He looked around to see if the women had returned from the bathroom, but they weren't in view. "You seem to have taken the news in stride."
"Dad was in a dangerous business, Bravo. D'you think I hadn't guessed? And once I had, he confided in me."
"What?"
"In fact, from time to time I helped him. He knew-and so did I-that there was a high degree of risk in his business with the Gnostic Observatines."
There was a short pause, during which Bravo could hear her take a sip-of tea, perhaps. He was trying hard to adjust to this new reality.
"Now that you're launched on this mission," Emma continued, "I want you to know that I can be of use to you."
"Emma-"
"I suppose you think it's different now that I'm blind, but you're wrong. I'm quite capable of taking care of myself-and I can take care of you. I always have."
"I don't think I understand."
"Who d'you think kept tabs on you and reported back to Dad when you and he weren't talking? The estrangement certainly wasn't his idea."
"You mean you spied on me?"
"Come off it, Bravo. I did what was best for all of us-you included. Do you think even now that Dad had any evil designs on you? He was worried, and frankly I don't blame him. You acted like an adolescent, as if he were the enemy, when all he was trying to do-"
Bravo took the phone from his ear and severed the connection. He sat down heavily on the driver's seat. His mind seemed numb, the traffic on the All a distant buzz. A car pulled in and a couple of tourists with skittish teenagers tumbled out, loped through the drizzle into the low building. A large truck rumbled away from the gas station back onto the slick highway. His eyes registered these small comings and goings without comment from his mind, as if he were in a theater, watching a film.
His cell phone buzzed.
"Don't you dare treat me the way you treated Dad." Emma's voice sounded sharp in his ear. "And don't hang up on me again."
"Okay, okay, sorry." Bravo felt sheepish and a bit as if he were hung over. "But you rattled the hell out of me. I mean, here I was wondering how you were getting from room to room, and you tell me that you can provide me with help the way you did Dad."
"I suppose that was a lot to dump on you at once, but really, Bravo, sometimes you're so clueless. If you knew me at all you'd have realized that I've been struggling all my life to live up to you and Dad's expectations. I dealt with that, so I sure as hell can deal with this."
Bravo thought about how poorly Jenny had been treated by the Order. But when he considered this it didn't seem much different from how women were treated in corporate life or most anywhere else for that matter. "Listen, Emma, I… well, you know, when you told me, I thought, there it is again-everybody knew about Dad except me."
"There was a good reason for that, Bravo. You must know what it is by now. Dad was grooming you to take over for him. That's why he trained you, why he was always so hard on you. He wanted you prepared when the time came, but until that day he didn't want you involved in the Gnostic Observatines. It was vital that his enemies believed that you had nothing to do with the Order, that your life had been set on another path entirely. If the Knights of St. Clement had suspected for a moment what he had in mind for you, you would've been in terrible danger."
"There's a woman with me-Jenny-"
"Right, the Guardian. Dad was very high on her."
"I know. He sent me to her. She says Dad believed there's a traitor inside the Haute Cour. Do you have any idea who it might be?"
"No. I think in the final days Dad had narrowed it down to a couple of suspects, but he never got a chance to tell me who they were."
"Right." Bravo turned, saw Jenny and Camille exiting the building. "Maybe you could do some digging."
"Sure, no problem." The tension had drained out of her voice. "I'd love to get back to work."
"How will you… ?"
She laughed. "Oh, Bravo, before there was e-mail, there was the telephone. I have a facility with voices: if I hear a tape I can be whoever I want to be. Don't worry, I did this all the time for Dad. It worked quite well-people nowadays are paranoid about e-mails and electronic files."
Jenny had on the raincoat, and Camille was gripping her with one arm around her shoulders.
"Listen, Emma, about what happened before-"
"Forget it. Now that we understand one another-"
He never heard the end of her comment because at that moment he saw a black four-door Mercedes sedan with German plates heading for the two women. As it closed on them, Jenny pulled Camille out of the way. The Mercedes swerved to come between them and the building. At the last instant, it slowed. A blacked-out window slid down, the offside rear door opened, and he saw the dark glint of metal as a hand gripping a gun appeared.
Before Bravo could make a move, Jenny planted her left foot and with her right kicked the door closed. Then she lunged forward with her upper body, chopped down on the hand, wrested the gun away and fired three bullets into the interior of the Mercedes.
The car shuddered on its heavy shocks as if it had been shot, and it lurched forward. Jenny was whipped off her feet. Bravo could see that the hem of her raincoat had been caught in the closed door.
Emma was screaming through his cell phone as he threw it onto the seat, turned the ignition and put the Citroe"n in gear. He shouted to Camille, who was running after the Mercedes as it dragged Jenny along the rest area. The car was heading directly toward the gas pumps; it didn't seem as if anyone was driving it.
As Bravo momentarily tamped the Citroe"n's brakes, Camille, who was on his side of the car, pulled open the rear door. Even as she jumped into the Citroe"n's backseat he took off, the car slewing alarmingly on the wet blacktop.
"We'll never make it," she said breathlessly. "She's going to go up in a fireball with the assassins."
Bravo could see that Jenny was twisted up in the raincoat and, though she struggled to get free, couldn't extricate herself. Then the Mercedes ran over something and the bump swung Jenny around, slamming her head against the blacktop. Her eyes rolled up in her head and her body went limp, twisting grotesquely.
"The door's the only answer," Bravo said.
"You're insane! To get me close enough you'll risk running her over."
"She'll be dead if I don't try," he answered grimly. "Roll down your window and get ready."
Narrowly missing another car on his right, Bravo took up position just off the Mercedes's right flank. Now for the hard part. Focused solely on Jenny, he depressed the accelerator, creeping up on the other car. Fortunately, he had physics on his side; the force of the Mercedes's passage was pulling Jenny's body in toward its undercarriage, giving him slightly more room to maneuver. On the other hand, he was forced to push the Citroe"n to an unsafe speed; the gas pumps were only several hundred yards away. He forced himself not to think of the beating Jenny was taking. Instead, he concentrated on the outline of her body as if she were part of a puzzle he needed to solve. And yet he hesitated to bring the Citroe"n closer to her. "You'll risk running her over," Camille had said, and she was right. But he had very little time; he needed to act now. Desperately, he maneuvered the Citroe"n so that it was parallel, then matched the Mercedes's speed and trajectory. It was still heading straight for the pumps, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He risked glancing sideways, glimpsed the driver slumped over the wheel.
"Come on!" he yelled at Camille. "I can't get any closer!" Jenny could be under his wheels in a heartbeat.
Already kneeling on the seat, Camille now stretched her torso out the window. Balancing her hips on the bottom of the window frame, she reached out and grabbed hold of the Mercedes's door handle. Jenny was directly below her, cocooned so thoroughly in the raincoat she couldn't see her face. She pulled the handle once, cursed mightily, tugged again.
"Now!" Bravo cried.
Camille jiggled the chrome handle and the door unlatched partway, but the same law of physics that kept Jenny's body close to the Mercedes was making it difficult to open the door.
"Camille! For the love of God!"
With a tremendous effort, she wrenched the door open. Abruptly released, Jenny's body rolled across the rain-streaked blacktop. Her face was bone white, and Bravo couldn't tell whether or not she was breathing.
He stood on the brakes so that the Citroe"n screeched to a halt. Camille threw the door open, gathered Jenny up. Even before Camille swung the door shut, Bravo had accelerated.
All at once, they were upon the gas pumps. Bravo turned the wheel hard to the left, and the Citroe"n's tires squealed in protest as it fishtailed. People were screaming and running in every direction. Bravo turned into the skid, then accelerated sharply. The car leapt forward like a racehorse at the opening gun. Just behind them, the grille of the Mercedes slammed into the nearest pump, taking it right off its foundation. Gas spewed upward, and with a great sucking whoosh and a fierce burst of heat, the car and the station went up in a nightmare fireball full of twisted metal shards and greasy black smoke.
A great fist rocked the Citroe"n so severely it threatened to roll over. Then a piece of metal, black and twisted, struck the sedan as it was about to reenter the A11, and Bravo was forced to steer in a white-knuckle stagger, barely missing two cars as he entered the traffic stream, until he had the car under full control again.
"How is she?" he asked anxiously as he made his way through the maze of traffic.
"She's unconscious, that much is certain." Camille was using her hands to feel for a pulse. "She's alive. Her heartbeat is strong."
"Thank God," Bravo breathed. The police hadn't arrived yet so far as he could see, but it wouldn't be long, he knew, until they did. In the rearview mirror the greasy fireball was finally subsiding, but now the flames could be seen licking upward into the rain-laden sky.
"Hand me my phone. It's there right beside you," Bravo said, a bit out of breath as he drove. "I have a call to finish."
"My love, how are you?" Camille asked.
When he took the cell phone from her, his hand was trembling visibly.
Chapter 11
Several miles on, Camille made him pull over, and they switched positions. Bravo walked on stiff legs around the back of the Citroe"n. He bent down, extracted part of the Mercedes from the Citroe"n and with a muffled cry hurled it away. He climbed into the back seat, settling Jenny's limp form beside him, her head cradled in his lap. He gently drew wisps of hair off her cheek. In the process, his fingertips caressed the soft flesh behind her ear.
In the rearview mirror, Camille noted how his hand lingered on Jenny, how his gaze had a faraway look. At length, she said softly, "My love, please close the door. We must move on."
In a half daze, Bravo complied. His gaze returned to Jenny, his thoughts as dim and nebulous as the fog that had crept in on the heels of the rain.
"Bravo," Camille said in that quiet voice that never failed to command attention, "the Mercedes had a German license plate."
"I saw," he said automatically.
"We must now consider the possibility that we are wrong and Jordan is right."
She drove quickly and efficiently to a hotel that lay on the landward side of the causeway that stretched out to Mont St. Michel like an entreating hand. It was here that, over the centuries, pilgrims came from all over to worship at the monastery of the Archangel St. Michael, whose statue rose from the pinnacle of the medieval stone abbey at the top of the rocky islet, five hundred feet above the English Channel.
Bravo felt the way those ancient seekers must have felt when they arrived here-exhausted, sick at heart, in need of a miracle. He held Jenny closer to him as Camille got out and went into the hotel. They'd need a miracle, he thought, to get rooms here at the height of summer.
He watched her returning, walking purposefully toward him, a small smile on her face.
"Come, my love," she said as she opened his door. "Our rooms are waiting for us."
The room was clean and neat. It was modern and anonymous, but owing to its position on the third floor its picture window overlooked the channel and the magnificent sight of the Marvel, as Mont St. Michel was sometimes called by the French, now nothing more than a ghostly shadow in the dense and swirling fog. There was a sling-back sofa and matching chair upholstered in a dark tweedy fabric beside the window, with a low wooden table between them. In the middle of the rear wall was the door to the bathroom, and to their right was the bed, flanked by a pair of night tables and lamps. The floor was polished wood, the walls the color of sand. The light streaming in was pallid and watery, entirely without definition, so that no shadow was cast anywhere in the room.
Bravo sat on the bed, holding Jenny in his arms, while Camille used hot water and a washcloth to bathe the back of her head and her hands where they were abraded. He hoped that the raincoat that had trapped her had also protected her from more serious damage while she had been dragged by the Mercedes because right now they were afraid to subject her to the handling required to take it off.
Camille applied one of the antiseptic creams she had bought, and Bravo gently laid Jenny on the bed, pulled a light blanket up around her.
"Camille, we have to find a doctor. Surely the longer she's unconscious the greater the danger."
Camille sat down beside him on the bed and, leaning over, carefully lifted Jenny's lids. "Her pupils aren't dilated-she appears to be sleeping, nothing more."
"But-"
"Come away now, my love." She rose and took his arm. "What she needs most now is rest-as do we all."
"I don't want to leave her."
"And you won't." Bravo was too distracted to notice the small pause. "You must take some time now to look after yourself. Go wash up. Don't look so concerned, I'll watch over her."
Bravo nodded. As soon as he was in the bathroom, Camille carefully and methodically searched the room. She knew exactly what she was looking for, and when she found Jenny's possessions she picked through them with the expert eye of a pawnbroker. At first glance, nothing out of the norm presented itself. This was to be expected; Jenny Logan was a Guardian. But because she was, Camille knew she could not be totally unarmed. She had to have a weapon on her-one that she could take through airport security. And so Camille came at last to a compact, which was slightly oversized and a good deal heavier than any compact had a right to be. Opening it, she found not foundation powder and a pad but a small folding knife. She wasn't fooled by either its size or the mother-of-pearl scales. Activating the switchblade mechanism, she was rewarded with the lightninglike appearance of a wicked-looking stainless-steel blade. With the digital camera in her cell phone, she shot photos of the knife open and closed, dialed a Paris number and sent the photos off. Wiping down the knife carefully, she returned it to the compact moments before Bravo reappeared.
"How is she?" His hair was still dripping wet.
"No change." She gestured to the sofa near the window. "Why don't we sit here where we can easily keep an eye on her."
Outside, the fog had settled like a blanket of snow. The centuries-old image of St. Michael slaying the dragon curled at his feet was visible, but of the massive fortress-isle below it nothing could be seen, so that the fierce and avenging archangel appeared as if borne through the air on vaporous wings.
Camille allowed Bravo to sit in silence for some time, then she began to speak: "Tired as we both are, we must make some decisions. Was this the form of attack you escaped from in America?"
"More or less, yes." Bravo was sitting forward, flexed elbows on drawn-up knees. He seemed hollow-eyed, his face empty.
"Then Jordan was right. The Germans-"
"The Wassersturms have nothing to do with this!" he exploded. Rising, he returned to the bedside, stood staring down at Jenny's pale face. Her freckles had all but disappeared; a faint spiderweb of blue veins was visible at her temple.
Camille gave him some time with her, but not too much. She rose and went quickly to his side.
"Bravo, I'm terribly confused," she said softly. "Isn't it time you told me what's happening?"
When he didn't respond, she turned him around to face her. "Why won't you confide in me?"
"I want you to leave right now."
