At least this part of her tale was true.
The two women disappeared through the front door of the chapel.
His pulse quickened. He clenched his fists and softly beat them against the tree trunk. He prayed for guidance.
But he did nothing.
Elizabeth felt she was in a dream the moment she entered the chapel and began her descent underground. Years later, looking back, her mind would never allow her to retain the details of what she was about to see, and as an old lady she would sit alone by the fire and try to decide whether any of it had been real.
The chapel itself was an empty space with a blue-stone floor. There were low stone walls but the structure was mainly timber-framed with a steeply pitched shingled roof. The only interior decoration was a gilded wooden crucifix affixed to the wall above an oaken door at the rear.
Sister Sabeline pulled her through the door and led her down the steep stairway that bored into the earth.
At the threshold to the Hall of the Writers, Elizabeth squinted into the dim cavern and tried to make sense of what she saw. Wide-eyed, she stared at Sabeline, but the woman’s icy rebuke was, “Hold your tongue, girl.”
None of the writers seemed to take notice as Sabeline dragged her in front of them one by one, row by row, until one man raised his ginger head from a page and looked at the girl. He was perhaps eighteen or nineteen. Elizabeth noticed that three spindly fingers on his right hand were stained black with ink. She thought she heard a low grunt come out of his puny chest.
Sabeline yanked the horrified girl away. At the end of the row, Sabeline pulled her toward an archway into a black void. Elizabeth thought it must surely be the gate to Hell. As she passed through it, she turned her head and saw the grunting young man rise from his table.
The void was the entrance to the catacombs. If the first room smelled like misery, the second room smelled like death. Elizabeth choked and gagged at the stench. There were yellow skeletons with bits of adherent flesh piled like firewood in the recesses of the walls. Sabeline held out a candle, and everywhere the light splashed Elizabeth saw grotesque skulls with jaws agape. She prayed she would fall into unconsciousness, but woefully remained sensate.
They were not alone. Someone was beside her. She whirled around to see the dumb blank face and green eyes of the young man blocking the passageway. Sabeline withdrew, her sleeve brushing the leg bones of a corpse, its dry bones clattering together musically. Then, holding the candle high, the nun and watched from a short distance.
Elizabeth was panting like an animal. She could have fled, deeper into the catacombs, but was too afraid. The ginger-haired man stood inches away, his arms limp by his sides. Seconds passed. Sabeline called to him in frustration, “I have brought this girl for you!”
Nothing happened.
More time passed and the nun demanded, “Touch her!”
Elizabeth braced herself for the touch of what seemed a living skeleton and closed her eyes. She felt a hand on her shoulder, but strangely, it did not repulse her. It was reassuring. She heard Sister Sabeline shrieking, “What are you doing here! What are you doing!”
She opened her eyes and, magically, the face she saw was Luke’s. The pale, ginger-haired youth was on the ground, picking himself up from the spot where Luke had roughly shoved him.
“Brother Luke, leave us!” Sabeline screamed. “You have violated a sacred place!”
“I will not leave without this girl,” Luke said defiantly. “How can this be sacred? All I see is evil.”
“You do not understand!” the nun roared.
From the hall, they heard a sudden pandemonium.
Heavy thuds.
Crashes.
Flopping. Thrashing.
The ginger-haired youth turned away and walked toward the noise.
“What is happening?” Luke asked.
Sabeline did not answer. She took her candle and rushed toward the hall, leaving them alone in the pitch-dark.
“Are you hurt?” Luke asked Elizabeth tenderly. He was still touching her shoulder, and she realized he had never let go.
“You came for me,” she whispered.
He helped her find her way from the darkness into the light, into the hall.
It was no longer the Hall of the Writers.
It was the Hall of the Dead.
The only living soul was Sabeline, whose shoes were soaked with blood. She aimlessly walked among a sea of bodies, draped on the tables and cots, crumpled in piles on the ground, a mass of lifelessness and quivering involuntary twitching. She had a sick, glassy expression and could only mutter, “My God, my God, my God, my God,” over and over, in the cadence of a chant.
The floor and tables and chairs of the chamber were slowly being coated with the blood spurting from the quill-pierced eyes of almost 150 ginger-haired men and boys.
Luke led Elizabeth by her hand through the carnage. He had the presence of mind to glance at the parchments that lay on the writing tables, some of them blotting up puddles of blood. What curiosity or survival instinct prompted him to snatch up one of the sheets as he fled? That would be something he would contemplate for years to come.
They ran up the precarious stairs, through the chapel, and out into the mist and rain. They kept running until they were a mile from the abbey gate. Only then did they stop to soothe their burning lungs and listen to the cathedral bells pealing in alarm.
AUGUST 1, 2009
T he navy operated a single G-V, the C-37A, a luxury, high-performance business jet favored by the Secretary of the Navy for his personal travel. The twin Rolls-Royce turbofans put out neck-snapping thrust on its steep-angle takeoff, and out its windows, in seconds, the endless incandescence of the Los Angeles night disappeared behind sheets of low clouds.
Harris Lester was running on caffeine after a stressful, time-zone-stretched day that had begun before dawn in his Fairfax, Virginia, home and included stops at the Pentagon, Andrews Air Force Base, and LAX. After a brief layover in L.A., it was wheels up again for the return flight to Washington. His facial tone was slack and unhealthy and his breath was stale. The only things about him that were crisp and fresh were his dress shirt and pressed tie, and they looked like they had just been unwrapped from Brooks Brothers tissue paper.
There were only three people in the passenger cabin, a paneled interior configured in club style, with pairs of plush dark-blue leather seats facing each other over smooth teak-wood tables. Lester and Malcolm Frazier, whose chiseled block of a face was contorted into an immutable grimace, were staring at the man seated across from Lester, who clutched his armrest with one hand and a cut-crystal glass of scotch with the other.
Will was bone-weary but the most relaxed person on board. He had played his cards, and it appeared he had the winning hand.
Hours earlier he had been scooped off the street in Hollywood by Frazier and a team of watchers who were jetted in from Groom Lake to make the pickup. They bundled him into a black Tahoe and sped off to a private aviation terminal at the airport, where they kept him on ice, uninterrogated, in a conference room until Lester arrived. Will had the distinct impression that Frazier would have preferred to kill him outright, or at least inflict a punishing dose of pain; he supposed if someone had shot up one of his FBI teams, he’d have wanted to do the same. But he could also tell that Frazier was a soldier, and good soldiers obeyed orders.
Now, Frazier opened Shackleton’s laptop and after a few keystrokes he spat out, “What’s his password?”
“Pythagoras,” Will answered.
Frazier sighed. “Fucking egghead. P-I?”
“P-Y,” Will said sadly.
Then, in seconds, “It’s here as advertised, Mr. Secretary.”
“How can we be sure you made a copy, Agent Piper?” Lester asked.