The corpse felt heavy beyond its apparent weight as he dragged it to the far side of the bed. Trying to breathe only through his mouth, he stooped and tugged loose the rope at the guard's waist and pulled the robe over the still head.
Even through the thickness of the door, Lang could hear voices tinged with surprise at finding the sentry gone. He tried to move faster.
Dipping into resources of strength he didn't know he had, Lang managed to dump the limp body onto the bed and throw a sheet over it. The door was opening as he lifted the robe over his own head and let it settle over him like a large white bird coming to roost. There was only time to pull up the hood and hide the rifle under his habit before Silver Hair and another man were in the room.
Silver Hair asked something in a language Lang couldn't understand, again Slavic-sounding. Guessing at his meaning, Lang pointed to the body under the sheet and mumbled. The Templar asked again, this time with an edge to his tone. Again Lang nodded, moving around the bed toward the door.
As soon as he was between the two men and the exit, Lang whirled and lunged into the hall, slamming the door behind him. As he had hoped, the key was still in the lock. He felt, rather than heard, two bodies slam into the heavy wood on the other side as the lock's bolt clicked into place. Lang took deliberate care in putting the key in the robe's pocket.
In the hall was a small cart, the sort of thing an auto mechanic might use to carry around a car battery. That was what was on it: the battery with wires and alligator clips. The sight brought Lang's mind back to the pain he still felt and he fought the urge to go back into the room and fry someone else's balls.
Instead, he made sure the hall was empty before taking the rifle out from under the robe and checking the clip.
Full with all thirty-six rounds. Too bad the guard. hadn't had an extra magazine. Ammunition, Lang mused, was like cash on a vacation: no matter how much you brought, it was never enough.
He risked taking off the cassock long enough to sling the AK-47 muzzle down under his right arm so that, if need be, he could bring it up, firing through the cloth. He wasn't going to get any points for marksmanship that way, but the Russian-designed weapon was intended more for rapid fire at relatively close range than for competition shooting.
Keeping close to the wall, Lang sauntered down the hall as though he knew where he was going. At the intersection, both directions looked the same: dimly lit, with curving.walls and regularly spaced doors that, absent the outside latch, were identical to the one he had just locked.
Right or left?
Lang chose left so the rifle was on the outside. If he had to use it, he preferred not to have to fire across his body. Shortly, he came to an arch framing a staircase beneath an arched window, the glass black with night. The steps only went down. Lang was on the top floor.
The stairs were marble. Like the tower of Blanchefort, there was a depression worn in the middle where centuries of feet had passed that way. Also like the old castle, the risers were short, made for short legs. The steps radiated from a center column in a spiral tight enough to make him slow his descent to ease a faint sense of vertigo.
There were landings on each of the two floors he passed, each similar to the others, each with a window. He saw the color of night and an occasional streak of light shimmering through the waves of the hand-blown glass.
A sound floated up the tight circular stairway, so faint Lang was surprised that he had been unconsciously listening for some time. The further down he went, the more distinct it became until he recognized it as a Gregorian chant, Latin sung without tune, but still pleasingly melodic.
Still too distant to make out the words, Lang came to yet another landing. The stairs continued down, but through the window he could see trees, their branches limned against a streetlight. He thought he could make out a wall, too. He stopped. This place-this weird, round building probably had at least one basement, no doubt complete with dungeons. If Lang was seeing what he thought he saw outside the window, this must be the ground floor.
He stepped into another circular hallway, this one with a ceiling vaulted twenty feet. The cold gray of stone walls was abated by tapestries, their figures life size and mostly gory. In silent agony, martyrs bristled with arrows, sizzled over fires and were devoured by lions. Between the gruesome pictures, suits of chain mail held swords, empty helmet slits squinting into the dim light.
The main floor. Like the men in the lifeboat in the lawyer joke, he knew where he was but not where that was.
Steps echoed from the stone floor. Lang grasped the rifle under the robe with one hand and tugged the hood down further over his face with the other. There was no need. Like a ghost in his white habit, a figure floated past on the other side of the hallway. His hands clutched rosary beads and he was mumbling what Lang supposed was a prayer.
Once the Templar was out of sight, Lang felt like saying one of his own.
The chanting grew louder until Lang was at its source. To the right, a huge circular room was filled with men in white robes or chain mail armor. In the center of the circle, another man in robes stood before a carved marble altar faced by the standing congregation.
Just as Pietro had described the chapel at Blanchefort.
Past the chapel was what Lang guessed was the door to the outside. To call it massive hardly did it justice. Reaching almost to the ceiling, two single panels were held closed by an iron bar as thick as Lang's thighs. The hinges, shiny brass, were three or four feet in height.
Lang considered making a dash for it but quickly discarded the idea. Two men, one on each side of the door, stood guard, their AK-47's anachronisms against the white surcoats with the red crosses.
They did not appear to be purely decorative.
Both watched with little interest as Lang approached.
Their reply to his motioning for them to open the door was a question in the same Slavic tongue he had heard before. Lang gave an exaggerated shrug to say that he didn't understand. With the international character of Pegasus, surely not everyone spoke the same language, at least not this language.
The man on the left pantomimed reading something and held out his hand, a clear signal that he expected a document or writing of some sort. Apparently the good brothers had to get a hall pass to leave.
The man on the right was staring at Lang's feet. The Mephistos. After throwing the one, Lang had put the pair back on. Everyone here wore the armored solleret or Jesus shoes.
The Templar guard was quick to unsling his rifle but not nearly as quick as Lang in raising the one under the robe. The sound of the shot inside stone walls was deafening. A neat red hole was centered on the cross on the Templar's robe, blood smudging the sterile white.
The remaining guard was as eager as his brothers to die for the cause, scrambling to bring his weapon to bear. Lang again squeezed off a single shot from the hip, aware that he had been forced to kill yet again.
Even before the sound waves reverberating from the domed ceiling stopped echoing in Lang's ears, the chanting stopped. He let the rifle's sling slip from his shoulder to use both hands on the huge latch on the door. He pushed from his mind the possibility this led into another part of the building or a closed courtyard.
Worse than up that well-known creek.
The latch weighed nearly a hundred pounds and Lang had to lift it a good three feet or so to clear the hasp. The exertion sent daggers across the shoulder that had been twisted as well as a lightning bolt to his scrotum that burned away any remorse he might have felt at leaving two more dead Templars. In fact, the pain was so great that he had an instant fantasy of sticking around to kill every one of them.