“Yes,” Kate said flatly. “If Joshua's life and liberty depend on it.” Or yours, she added silently, looking at his eyes.
O'Rourke finished his bread and drank some wine. For a giddy moment Kate wondered how many times this man . . this lover of hers . . . had said Mass, had prepared the Eucharist for Communion. She shook her head.
“I won't kill anyone,” he said softly. “Not even to save the person most dear to me in the world. Not even if your life depended on it, Kate.”
Kate saw the sadness in him. “But“
“I've killed people, Kate. Even in Vietnam, where none of the usual reasons made sense anymore, there was always a good reason to kill. To stay alive. To keep your buddies alive. Because you were attacked. Because you were scared . . .” He looked down at his hands. “None of the reasons are good enough, Kate. Not anymore. Not for me.”
For the first time since she had met the priest . . . expriest . . . she did not know what to say.
He tried to smile. “You've gone on this mission with the worst choice for a partner that you could have made, Kate. At least if killing people is going to be called for.” He took a breath. “And I think it is.”
Kate's gaze was very steady. “Are you sure these . . . these strigoi are people?”
His head moved almost imperceptibly back and forth. “No. But I wasn't sure that the shadows in Vietnam were human either. They were gooks.”
“But that was different.”
“Maybe,” said O'Rourke and began cleaning up their modest picnic site. “But even if the strigoi have become so alien from human emotions that they're another species . . . which I won't believe until I see more evidence . . . it's not enough. Not for me.”
Kate stood and brushed off her skirt. She pulled a jacket on over her sweater. The wind was colder now, the sky grayer. The brief return to autumn was over and winter was blowing down from the Carpathians.
“But you'll help me find Joshua,” she said.
“Oh, yes.”
“And you'll help me get him out of this . . . country.”
“Yes,” he said. He did not have to remind her of the police, the military, the border guards, the informants, the air force, the Securitate . . . all obeying the orders of those who took orders from the strigoi.
“That's all I ask,” Kate said honestly. She touched his arm. “We'd better get moving if we have another hundred miles or so before we get to Sighisoara.”
“The main highway is faster,” said O'Rourke. He hesitated. “Did you want to continue driving for a while?”
Kate paused for only a second. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I do.”
The road down from the pass was a series of hairraising switchbacks, but Kate had got the hang of handling the bike now, and used the compression of the lower gears to keep the brakes from overheating. O'Rourke had doublechecked the gas tank and thought they would have enough to get to Brasov, but the uncertainty made Kate nervous.
There was no traffic at all on this steep stretch of the highway and Kate saw only a handful of cottages set far back in the pine trees. Then they were in the outskirts of Sinaia and the homes grew more frequent and larger, obviously country houses for the privileged Nomenclaturethose party apparatchiks and smiledupon bureaucrats who earned extra perks from the state. Sinaia itself looked like a typical Eastern European resort townlarge old hotels and estates which had been fine places a century earlier and which had received little maintenance since, signs to winter sports facilities where a “ski lift” would involve ropes and the occasional Tbar, and a newer, larger section of town featuring Stalinist apartments and heavy industry pouring pollution into the mountain valley.
But the scenery above the town could not be compromised by socialist ugliness. On either side of Sinaia and the busy Highway 1 that ran through it, the Bucegi Mountains rose in almost absurd relief, leaping skyward to bare peaks whose summits reached 7,000 feet. Kate's homeher exhome in the foothills above Boulder had been at 7,000 feet, and the peaks of the Rockies to the west had risen to almost 14,000 feet, but these Bucegi Mountains were much more dramatic, rising vertically as they did from the. Prahova River Valley that was not far above sea level. The result, Kate thought, glancing up at the scenery while winding the motorcycle through truck traffic exiting from what looked like a steel mill, was a mountain scene that looked the way the nineteenthcentury painter Bierstadt only wanted the Rockies to look: vertical, craggy, the summits lost in clouds and mist.
Kate had been to the Swiss Alps before, and the scenery here rivaled anything she had seen there. It was just the gray people shuffling along the highway, the empty shops, the decaying estates, the disintegrating apartment buildings, and the filthy industry pouring black smoke at the mountains that reminded her she was in an environment that no self-respecting Swiss would tolerate for an hour.
There was no gas station in Sinaia, and Kate pressed on toward Brasov thirty miles to the north. The road continued to follow the river, with cliffs and breathtaking views on either side. Kate was not looking at the view. When the truck traffic thinned out, she throttled back so that she could be heard. “O'Rourke,” she shouted. When he looked up from whatever thoughts he was lost in, she went on. “Why don't you trust Lucian?”
He leaned closer as they rumbled past a closeddown Byzantine Orthodox church and followed the highway around a long bend in the river. “At first it was just instinct. Something . . . something not right.”
“And then?” said Kate. Clouds continued to pour between the mountains to the west, but occasional shafts of sunlight would illuminate the valley and the narrow river.
“And then I checked on something when I went back to the U.S. Before I went to Colorado and . . . before I saw you in the hospital there. Do you remember telling me that Lucian said he'd learned his idiomatic English during a couple of visits to the States? When he'd gone with his parents?”
Kate nodded and maneuvered to miss a Gypsy wagon and a small herd of sheep. She swerved back to the right lane just as a logging truck roared by in the opposite direction. It was half a mile before they escaped its blue exhaust fumes. “So?” she said.
“So I called my friend's office in Washington . . . Senator Harlen from Illinois? . . . and Jim promised to check on it for me. Just look at the visa records and so forth. But he didn't get back to me before you and I left for Romania.”
Kate didn't understand. “So you didn't learn anything?”
“I told him to contact the embassy in Bucharest when he did get the records and have them leave word with the Franciscan headquarters there,” O'Rourke shouted over the engine. “They'd gotten the message when I spoke to Father Stoicescu the other morning. The morning after Lucian showed us the bodies of his parents and the thing in the tank at the medical school. “
Kate glanced at him but said nothing. The valley was widening ahead.
“Visa records show that Lucian visited the United States four times in the last fifteen years. The first time he was only ten. The last time was in late autumn of 1989, just two years ago.” O'Rourke paused a minute. “He didn't go with his parents any of those times. Each time he came alone and was sponsored by the World Market and Development Research Foundation.”
Kate shook her head. The vibration and engine roar were giving her a headache. “I never heard of it.”
“I have,” said O'Rourke. “They called my superior in the Chicago archdiocese almost two years ago and asked if the Church would suggest someone to go on a factfinding trip to Romania that the foundation was sponsoring. The archbishop chose me. “ He leaned up out of the sidecar so that Kate could hear better. “The foundation was started by the billionaire Vernor Deacon Trent. Lucian went to the States four times at the invitation of Trent's group . . . or perhaps at the old man's personal invitation.”