The testament, p.51
The Testament, page 51
"No, Jordan. I'm your mother, you will obey me."
"My time of servitude to you has ended. And do you know why? I'm no longer willing to be bound by your secret."
A look of horror marred Camille's beautiful face. "Jordan, no! You can't!"
"But I can, Mother, and I will." He turned to Bravo. "Here it is in a nutshell, my friend-my very good and faithful friend-the short story of the lie your entire life has been. My mother was your father's mistress. That's right, he was shacking up with her for years, while you and your siblings were growing up and, in one case, dying. Your mother never suspected and you were too young. In any event, he was so good at keeping secrets, wasn't he? And then, when you were just past your fifth birthday, she became pregnant with his child."
"Wait," Bravo said.
Jordan laughed harshly. "Oh, look at his expression, Mother, isn't that the look you've dreaded? Yes, yes, I think so! I, too, am your father's son, so that makes us, what, brothers, yes? Well, half-brothers, if you need to be technical. Not to worry, it's all relative under the skin." He laughed again.
"Wait," Bravo repeated. His head was pounding so hard, he felt as if his brain would explode at any minute. He turned to Camille, "Is this true?"
Jordan continued, relentless. "He betrayed your mother, he would have betrayed you, too, so Camille believes. She says he had agreed to leave you-leave his family-to live with her, with us. But then your brother Junior died, and he couldn't bring himself to make the break."
Bravo stared into Camille's face and for the first time saw naked emotion. It was so raw, so devastating that he had the urge to turn away, as if from a terrible injury. And so the truth burst in on him with the force of a grenade blast.
Jordan shrugged. "If it makes you feel any better, I don't believe that fairy tale. Your father never would have left his family. He didn't want my mother, he didn't want me, either. He proved that over and over when I tried to contact him."
Camille's head swung around, her eyes open wide. "You did what? I expressly forbade you to contact him."
"Did you really think I'd listen to you? Jesus Christ, he was my father. Of course I tried. But he wouldn't see me, wouldn't even talk to me. You see, Mother, if he never wanted anything to do with me, why would he leave his family for you?" He laughed. "Dexter Shaw played you just as you were playing him."
"You're insane. Dexter never knew a thing."
"You're right, Mother, I have no proof, except what was once in my heart, and now I can never reach it again. C'est la guerre." He shrugged. "It's of no matter now, is it? We planned Dexter Shaw's death and now he's dead. End of story." He pointed. "What matters is that we've succeeded. After we tortured Molko to no avail we knew Dexter wouldn't talk, no matter what we did to him, so we had to find another way to the cache. And that way was you, Bravo. We knew from our man inside the Order that Dexter had trained you to be his successor. We realized what we needed to do was take Dexter out. Difficult, almost impossible, but in the end we did it. We banked on you leading us to the cache; we knew we could control you, we'd had so much experience at it.
"And we were right. You solved every cipher your father threw at you. Because he had trained you, you knew him better than anyone. You had the knowledge he'd given you, locked away inside you. You see, Bravo, you've never stopped working for me. Don't you find that ironic?"
Bravo wanted to curl up and die, he wanted to lash out. An inchoate shrieking filled his mind so that he could not speak, could not think clearly. He could only listen to the horror that came pouring out of their mouths: the lie of his own abominable existence.
Jordan moved slightly, a twitch of long-held expectation. "Now, finally, the time has come to open the cache; everything inside will be mine."
"Alors, that was always what you longed for, wasn't it?" Camille fairly spat out the words. Her mind was still reeling at the possibility that Dexter had seen through her lies. No one else ever had, how could he? "You didn't care about my revenge, about the destruction of the Order. You wanted their secrets for yourself."
"Oh, yes. Especially the Quintessence. With it, I can rule the world."
"No." Jenny moved into one of the circles of sunlight, the Albanian's gun aimed at them. "You'll never get the chance now." All at once, chaos. Everything happened simultaneously, in the blink of an eye. Camille turned, aiming the Witness at Jenny, Jordan grabbed Bravo who had managed to get to his knees. Jenny squeezed off two shots, both of which struck Camille in the chest, taking her off her feet.
She slid across the floor, fetching up against the far rock wall. Not that she felt the impact; she was already dead. But by the time Jenny swung the Albanian's gun back to Jordan, he was standing behind Bravo, Lorenzo Fornarini's dagger poised across Bravo's throat.
"You have his life in your hands, Guardian," Jordan said. "What will you do, I wonder?"
Bravo called to her, but she had already thrown the gun aside.
"There's a good girl." Jordan tossed the key at her. "Pick it up." When she did, he pointed to the altar where Bravo had begun to dig. "There. Go on. You know what to do."
Jenny began to cross to the altar.
"Not so close," Jordan ordered. "I'm not about to give you that chance."
Obediently, she altered her course. As her position changed, Jordan swiveled, keeping Bravo's body between himself and Jenny. She knelt and began to dig with her hands. Within ten minutes she had come to a hard surface. She brushed away the dirt, revealing the top of a box.
"Go on," Jordan said as he pushed closer, Bravo in front of him. "Faster."
The box, as Jenny uncovered it, was perhaps forty-five centimeters in length by about half that in width and depth.
"Now lift it out."
"But I-"
"Do it!" Jordan shouted.
Gritting her teeth against the pain, Jenny reached into the hole she had dug and with a grunt lifted it out. The effort cost her a great deal both in energy and in blood. She knew she was nearing the end of her rope, that she would have to get to a doctor sooner rather than later or the wound might turn fatal. At the very least, she was in danger of passing out from loss of blood.
"Now use the key," Jordan said, his voice as avid as his eyes. "Open the cache!"
Jenny did as she was told, sliding the key into the old-fashioned lock. She turned it to the left, heard the tumblers click. All at once, a wave of black despair inundated her. This can't be happening, she thought. I was supposed to help protect the cache, not help the Knights steal it.
With numb hands, she opened the lid. She peered inside, aware of Jordan bending over to get his first look at what he'd lusted after almost all his life.
But there was nothing inside, nothing at all.
Jenny began to laugh, Jordan cried out in rage and dismay, and that was when Bravo twisted his torso, viciously slammed his elbow into Jordan's kidney. While Jordan was still off-balance, Bravo threw him forcibly into the rock wall. Jordan slashed out blindly with the dagger and Bravo chopped down with the edge of his hand. Jordan's hand went numb and he dropped the weapon.
He struck out with his other hand, then rushed at Bravo. They hit the wall again, then, as they grappled, fell backward into an opening. Bravo punched Jordan, but it was without his full force. He kept trying to understand his new reality: Jordan was his brother. Jordan, however, was holding nothing back. He pounded Bravo, as Bravo retreated back along the passage toward a shaft of sunlight.
Jordan was on top of him, connecting repeatedly with punishing blows to his head and torso.
Bravo pushed back and they crouched, staring at each other, panting, abruptly motionless. "Why are you doing this?" Bravo gasped. "Because my father rejected you, is this what it's all about? You should have come to me."
Jordan bared his teeth, an animal scenting the kill. "And then what? You would have hated me, just like your father did. You would have taken his side."
"His side?"
"I was his little mistake, an indelible stain on his stellar reputation. I was the reminder of what he had done, of his betrayal. Why else do you think he wanted nothing to do with me?"
"I don't know," Bravo said truthfully. "But if you'd come to me, if you'd told me the truth, we could have worked it out. We were friends; we're brothers, after all."
"I'm not your friend, I'm not your brother," Jordan said. "I'm your enemy."
"It doesn't have to be that way."
"But it does. There's no other path for us than to be at each other's throats."
"Why? You said it yourself: the Knights have been reborn. The old enmity between them and the Order can be a thing of the past. Think of what we could do if we joined forces, the good we could achieve."
"Oh, yes, of course-why wouldn't I love to be your right-hand man?"
"Christ, Jordan, that isn't what I meant at all."
"Oh, but it is. You're just like your father: arrogant, judgmental, you think you're smarter, better than anyone else. No, thank you, I have my power base, I've spent years sacrificing, compromising, kowtowing to my gorgon of a mother, all in the service of consolidating it. Fuck you, I'm not going to share it with you or anyone else."
Bravo tried not to think about how he'd been just that way with Jenny-felt he knew more, condemned her, and had been proven wrong. Had he done the same with Jordan? "Listen," he said with mounting desperation, "you're making a mistake-"
Jordan smirked. "It's so like you to think that, isn't it? You see how right I am about you?"
Bravo tried to ignore what Jordan was saying, ignored the accusations that had sunk their barbed tips deep into his psyche. It would be easy to dismiss Jordan as a deluded monomaniac, but the truth was he knew Bravo too well, knew his failings just as Bravo now knew Jordan's. Still, some font of goodness inside him impelled him on what he now knew was a fruitless course. "Despite what you think, we still have a chance, if you only-"
"Listen to you? I'd rather slit my wrists."
"I'm offering you a family, Jordan. Why can't you see that?"
"Why can't you see that you're trying to lord it over me again? Not again, Bravo, never again, this I promise you. You're the one with a past, a history, a family. Offering me a family? No, you'll come to pity me, if you don't already. In fact, the process has already begun. It's pity that has motivated you to make your offer. 'Poor Jordan,' you think. 'I can help him.' But you can't help me, Bravo, you'll only want to take over, to make decisions for me, to tell me what's right and wrong. You always felt you knew the difference between good and evil, but it turned out that you knew nothing.
"You have what I want, what I never will have. Can you give me that? Would you, if you had the chance? You fucking-"
He leapt at Bravo, struck out blindly, with a rage-filled heart, with the full intent to maim, to destroy what he hated most. Bravo defended himself as best he could, but all too rapidly he was being plowed under by the ferocity of Jordan's rage. He kept retreating down the passage, further and further toward the shaft of sunlight, until at length, Jordan knocked him partway into the chimney and, with one leg hanging in space, he saw that it not only went up, but down as well.
Blocking Jordan's next blow, he tried to twist himself back from the brink, but Jordan blocked him with his body, forcing him back against the rim on the rock floor. He could feel the shaft of air at his back. His foot slipped over the edge. How far down did the chimney plummet?
Taking advantage of Bravo's momentary loss of concentration, Jordan got inside his perimeter of defense, landing a blow to his ribs. Bravo went down onto his knees. Jordan struck out with his foot, but Bravo caught it before it could land, took Jordan off his feet. Bravo fought his way on top of Jordan, swinging his balled right fist into Jordan's face. In so doing, they both moved further over the edge.
Bravo struck again, but this time Jordan was ready, blocking the blow as Bravo had blocked his kick. Twisting Bravo's arm, he reversed their positions. Now it was Jordan who was on top. Very quickly, Bravo realized his intention. Jordan was pushing and shoving, trying to tip Bravo over the edge, to push him into the rock chimney, to be rid of him forever.
Bravo's head and shoulders were already into the chimney. In a moment, he'd be too far over the edge to be able to save himself. It was now or never. He knew he had to put aside his feelings of wanting to save Jordan from himself, of forging by his will alone a new expanded family that would, somehow, expunge the bitter taste of his father's betrayal. As Jordan had said, it was pure arrogance. He couldn't do it: he would fail, and if he persisted, he would certainly die trying.
He looked up into the face of his enemy, absorbed his vicious blow, saw a vulnerable spot and, as Jordan drew his fist back to repeat the blow, used the points of his stiffened fingers to jab Jordan in the spot between his sternum and diaphragm. Bravo struck hard and true, disrupting the important nerve bundle.
Jordan reared back and Bravo rose up, shoving him hard so that his head struck the rock wall. He toppled off Bravo, fell forward, pitching over Bravo's head, down into the chimney.
Bravo flipped over, reflexively reached out in an effort to catch him, but there was no chance, there was never any chance. Jordan was gone.
Jenny grabbed him as he crawled out of the rock passage.
"Jordan?" she asked.
He shook his head. He felt light-headed, his hands cold and bloodless. He reached for her, as a drowning man reaches a line thrown overboard. She winced, bit her lip so as not to cry out, and through his own pain and misery, he realized that she, too, was hurt.
"Jenny, what happened?" Then he saw the tourniquet she'd tied around her abdomen. "You're hurt."
"A flesh wound, that's all. Nothing to worry about."
But her blood-soaked shirt told him otherwise. "We've got to get you to a hospital, or at the very least a doctor."
She nodded. "But first, there's something I have to show you." Leading him over to where Camille lay, she lowered herself gingerly until she was squatting, then she went through Camille's clothes until she found what she was looking for, which she displayed in her palm.
Bravo knelt beside her. "Your knife."
"Not quite." Jenny drew out her own small switchblade.
"They're identical." He looked at her. "She had a duplicate made. That means-"
"She found my knife."
"At the hotel in Mont St. Michel, while you were unconscious. I went to the bathroom, left her alone with you. I didn't want to leave you, but she assured me it was okay."
"Of course it was, she was poring through my things."
He looked down at Camille's face, pale, porcelain-beautiful even in death. "She slit Father Mosto's throat, not Cornadoro. She jumped me in the corridor outside his office."
"I wonder how much she enjoyed it," Jenny said bitterly.
"Jenny-"
"She must have enjoyed tearing us apart."
Bravo nodded sadly. "That was her plan all along, I can see it now."
With a soft groan, Jenny rose. "What a supreme bitch."
A gorgon, Jordan had called her. In this, too, he wasn't wrong, Bravo mused. But she had been even more than that. He rose at last to stand with his arm around Jenny, looking down into the face of the devil seen and recognized by Father Damaskinos.
Chapter 33
Sunset shrouded them in its cool embrace. The sky was on fire, layered with tiers of pink clouds. It was a relief to be free of the cavern, of the horrors that had awaited them there.
"The cache," Jenny said. "What happened, Bravo? Did your father lead you astray?"
"On the contrary," he said. "I never read you or Camille his last cipher, because he warned me against it."
"What do you mean?" In the soft swirl of shadows in the small meadow, she turned. "Wait, he knew you wouldn't be alone, didn't he?"
"Well, it was a supposition, one that makes good sense when you think about it," Bravo said. "You see, the moment the Knight attack began, he'd taken the precaution of moving the contents of the cache out of its original container. But he was adamant that if I was with anyone-anyone at all-I go to the original burial site. This way, I could draw out whoever was against me. Over the centuries, the power of the Quintessence has had the ability of corrupting even those who thought themselves steadfast. My father was told that it was the origin of all the traitors within the Order."
Jenny looked at him with the sun in her eyes. "He was told? By whom?"
"Fra Leoni."
An early evening wind had sprung up. All around them, the wildflowers bobbed, bent their heads as if in obeisance.
"He's still alive." Jenny's voice was an awed whisper.
"Against all logic, it would seem so."
"Logic has nothing to do with it," Jenny said. "It's all about faith."
He nodded. "I understand that now."
"It's here," he said, kneeling by the Cauldron, the sacred spring of the Orthodox Greeks. From the reddish earth in front of him rose the cracked plinth of an ancient pillar. Jenny leaned on his shoulder as she lowered herself beside him. Bravo cleared away a layer of pine needles and leaf mold. Beetles and centipedes scuttled for safety. The smell of decay that fed new life rose up to them like the aroma of a cool morning.
"Are you all right?" Bravo asked. "You can do this?"
She smiled, and all the pain was erased from her face. "I can do this, I have to do this."
Together, they dug down, lifting handfuls of earth, piling it higher and higher until there appeared beneath the worked stone plinth a small wooden chest. Painted with primary-colored boats, fish and birds, it was wholly unlike the original container she had unearthed in the cavern.
Bravo sat back on his haunches and laughed. "It's the toy chest I had as a kid."
"Oh, Bravo." Jenny put a hand on his shoulder.
Silently, reverently, they went back to work, brushing the last of the earth off the top of the chest, digging out the sides. At last, it was revealed, and they lifted it out.
