The Testament, page 20
"In a sense," Uncle Tony said. "Except that the Knights don't yet know the location of the cache. Only your father knew it."
"That's why I was being tailed all the way from New York to Washington," Bravo said. He thought of Rossi making sure they wouldn't be shot when they fled Jenny's house, the rubber bullet with which Jenny had been shot at the cemetery. Now he had confirmation of his theory that the Knights hadn't been sent to kill them; they needed to find out the location of the cache. "But Jenny and I took care of that before we came here."
"What you need to understand," Rule said, "is that the Knights of St. Clement are like a hydra-lop off two heads and four more take their place."
"They can't have a bug on Bravo," Jenny said. "He's got nothing on him he had in Washington, not even his clothes."
Bravo leaned forward, his forearms across the back of the driver's seat. "Except for the few things my father left me, and no one except me had any knowledge of where they were or their significance."
Jenny nodded. "They must be using another method to track you."
"What do I do, then?" Bravo said.
"Keep to the plan. Trust your father. That's all you can do," Uncle Tony said. "Meanwhile, Jenny here has your back."
He accelerated past two cars stuck behind a laboring truck. "Sorry about your dad. He was one of a kind-a great man and the best friend I ever had."
"Thanks," Bravo said, "that means a lot to me."
"I know you were Dexter Shaw's oldest friend inside the Order," Jenny said. "Is that why you're here?"
"And you thought it was to check up on you," Rule said with a not unkind snort. He was a tall, rangy man, with the rough and ruddy skin of an outdoorsman. His hair was going gray at the temples and was brushed forward in the style of a Roman senator. "Well, I don't blame you. Kavanaugh took it into his head to light out after you." A livid scar, slightly raised and ropy, ran down the left side of his jaw like an exclamation mark. "I'd say 'poor Kavanaugh,' if only the bastard had deserved it."
Jenny looked at him for a moment, then turned away to stare out the window.
Rule pursed his lips as if he had just tasted something rotten.
"Kavanaugh made a mistake, let's leave it at that," Bravo said. He had grown increasingly uncomfortable with their occasional verbal slaps, and he meant to put a stop to it. "Right now, what we need most is a lift to Paris. We've got a flight out of Charles de Gaulle at nine p.m. for Venice."
Anthony Rule nodded. "Only too happy to be of service." Though he was in his late fifties, time had been kind to him. He had lost none of the casual good looks that had naturally attracted women all his life. "Bravo, to be honest, Dex's death was a shock to me, but it was hardly a surprise. I think by now you must know what I mean. Dex knew he was marked for death, knew his murder was possible, perhaps even inevitable. That's the brutal nature of our war against the powers of evil and corruption. I wish it could be otherwise, but until the Knights of St. Clement are annihilated, it can't. It's as simple as that."
"It seems to me that an enmity that has survived for centuries would be anything but simple," Bravo said.
"Listen to the expert." Rule shook his head. "Instead of waxing philosophical, you should be concentrating that brilliant mind of yours on how the Knights have been able to keep tabs on you."
"My father-and Jenny's-both believed there was a traitor inside the Haute Cour," Bravo said. "Do you?"
Rule shot a quick glance at Jenny in the rearview mirror. "I see you've been doing your job in other ways as well, kiddo."
Bravo noticed that Jenny had returned from her sullen contemplation of the road. At last, Uncle Tony had her full attention.
"Do you have any idea who the traitor is?" Jenny said.
"That was Dex's obsession," Rule said darkly. "As for me, my attentions are elsewhere. I have no opinion."
They were on the motorway now, heading back to Charles de Gaulle Airport. Rule exited the motorway and, slowing considerably, joined the traffic on the secondary road. He took one of his periodic reads of the cars in the side mirror and made two quick turns. "Okay, we're clean."
They were now on a long, relatively straight stretch of road that was perfect for keeping an eye out for tails.
"They want our secrets, Bravo," Rule continued. "But they especially want one secret-the one your father was guarding with his life."
"But I don't even know what that secret is."
"Of course you don't. Jenny doesn't know what it is, and neither does the majority of the Order. But I do." The entrance to the motorway came up fast on his left. Rule was already in the left lane, but there was a broken-down car blocking the entrance and he zoomed past without being able to get on.
Jenny had already turned her torso half around so that she could look through the rear window.
"What's going on?" Bravo said.
Rule sat a little forward, his body tense. "We've got a problem."
"Picked up another tail." Jenny moved slightly closer to Bravo on the backseat to improve her view. "White Mercedes coupe three cars back."
Rule nodded. "That's the one, but my concern is that it might not be the only one."
"What makes you say that?" Bravo asked.
"The broken-down car that was blocking the motorway entrance," Jenny said.
"It kept us on this road," Rule said. He turned the wheel hard, and the X5 skidded slightly. He pressed the accelerator to the floor, and they were thrown backward into their seats.
"Now we'll really see what this can do," Rule said. "I have a twelve-cylinder engine in here that should let us do everything but take off."
Up ahead, Bravo saw a red Audi move over to the left and accelerate to match their speed.
"It's a box, all right," Jenny called out.
Rule nodded again. "They've got us front and rear. Better fasten your seat belts, children."
He wove in and out of the traffic, cutting his lane-changing within a hairsbreadth of disaster. He was deliberately going faster than the traffic flow, and now it was easy to see the two Knight vehicles-the Audi in front, the Mercedes behind.
All at once, the Audi slowed. Rule stepped on the brakes, skidding slightly, and he shifted down to compensate. An instant later, they were slammed by the Mercedes, and he accelerated directly at the Audi. The Audi, smaller and lighter by far than either the BMW or the Mercedes, skittered to life, staying in front of them.
"This isn't good," Rule said. "I have to assume they want us on this road for a reason."
No sooner had he said this than he saw the semi idling up ahead. Its rear doors gaped open, a steel ramp extending down from it.
"That's why they put us in a box," Rule said. "They want to herd us into the semi."
To their left loomed the off-ramp to the motorway. Rule waited until the last possible instant, then he swerved for it. A gray Renault was lumbering along the exit ramp when the driver saw the BMW X5 on a collision course. The Renault's horn blared furiously even as it slewed out of the way. Rule accelerated up the off-ramp and onto the motorway.
They had lost both the Audi and the Mercedes, but now the BMW was heading the wrong way. Horns sounded and brakes screeched as disbelieving drivers struggled to get out of the way without slamming their vehicles into other cars or the guard rails. Mercifully, there was a breakdown area that Rule used to make a screeching U-turn, pulling out into the disjointed traffic flow before his passengers had a chance to catch their breath.
They were by this time northwest of Chartres, and at the exit for the town of Dreux, Rule cut across the entire motorway to take the off-ramp. As he slowed the X5, he pulled out a cell phone and made a brief call, his voice so low that neither Bravo nor Jenny could hear what he said.
Within six minutes they were in Dreux. It was a small industrial town filled with hulking foundries, refineries, sprawling factories where televisions, boilers and chemicals were manufactured. Not surprisingly, it was an ugly and vaguely depressing place, despite its trees and flower beds. The stern and forbidding Gothic St. Pierre's Church was one of the few surviving medieval buildings to remind those with a sense of history that Dreux had once belonged to the counts of Vexin and the dukes of Normandy.
"All the counts of Vexin were members of the Order in their time," Rule said. "In this way, Dreux still belongs to us. These are my people, I can vouch for every one of them."
They were met outside St. Pierre's by a slim young man in jeans and a T-shirt, whose eyes were completely hidden by a pair of glasses with reflective lenses. Ignoring Bravo and Jenny completely, he exchanged keys with Rule. He went straight to the BMW and drove off.
The interior of St. Pierre's was cool and dim. The air was faintly tinged with incense and massed voices raised in hypnotic liturgical chant. Rule led them to a particularly gloomy side chapel dominated by the emaciated figure of Christ, body bent backward, eyes raised heavenward.
They stood close together, listening for hurried footsteps or stealthy movement in the shadows. Bravo felt the Voire Dei close around them, as if they had sunk beneath the Bay of St. Malo. From time to time, he saw small groups of tourists, or a priest striding past on some unknown business, and he was struck by how removed he felt from them. It was as if they existed in an old, dim print he was being shown. And he thought Jenny was right, he could never go back to their reality.
At length, Rule took off his sunglasses and said very softly to Bravo, "You must listen to me closely because I suspect that there may be no other time for me to tell you what your father entrusted me to say. The secret the Order has guarded for centuries, the secret Rome has wanted above all others is this: we have a fragment of the Testament."
"Testament?" Bravo said. "What testament?"
Rule's eyes flashed with a kind of fervor Bravo had never before seen. "The Testament of Jesus Christ."
Bravo's heart seemed to give a painful lurch against his rib cage. "Are you serious?"
"Never more so," Rule said.
A priest walked by, saw them and nodded with a smile. All three fell silent until he had disappeared from view.
When Rule spoke again, his voice was both lower and more urgent. "Tell me, Bravo, in your studies have you come across the Secret Gospel According to Mark?"
"Of course," Bravo nodded. "In 1958, a scholar discovered it in the library of the Mar Saba monastery near Jerusalem. He found a handwritten text on the endpapers of a 1646 edition of Isaac Voss's 'Epistolae genuinae S. Ignatii Martyris.'"
Rule grinned. "Full marks, as usual."
"And they came into Bethany," Bravo recited from the Secret Gospel. "And a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and said to him, 'Son of David, have mercy on me.' But the disciples rebuked her. And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightaway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him…"
Rule laughed. "Of course, your eidetic memory."
"Basically, the Secret Gospel has been derided by Bible scholars because it depicts Jesus as a miracle worker, which runs counter to formal Church doctrine. It describes in detail how Jesus resurrected not only Lazarus, as is told in the eleventh chapter of Clement, but this boy and others as well."
"That's correct," Rule said. "And so dangerous was the Secret Gospel deemed that it was secretly suppressed by the Church in the fourth century, and then destroyed. Or so they thought."
"This is one of the secrets in the cache my father was guarding?"
"That's right," Rule said.
"Are you saying that you think it's true?"
"I know it is," Rule said, "because the fragment of the Testament of Jesus Christ confirms it. This is why it is vital that it and the other documents so closely guarded for centuries not fall into the hands of the Knights of St. Clement, for they will surely destroy all trace of them as if they had never existed."
"If what you're saying is true," Bravo said, "then why are you holding on to this secret? It's not only a religious artifact-it's an archeological miracle, a part of history. Why not reveal it to the world?"
"Bringing the Testament to light would violate our basic tenets, and this we will not do."
"I don't understand."
"It's not only the Testament that we possess," Rule said. "We also have the Quintessence."
"What?" Bravo had started, as if pricked by a needle.
Rule nodded. "You heard me."
"The fabled fifth element," Bravo breathed. "Medieval philosophers were convinced that the celestial regions were composed of earth, air, fire, water and the Quintessence-the essence of life itself. I always assumed that the Quintessence was a myth, like alchemy and turning water into wine."
"It's quite real, I assure you," Rule said.
"But what exactly is it? Can you see it, feel it, taste it, or is it beyond man's ability to observe and to quantify?"
"In His Testament, Jesus describes it as an 'oil,' but that term may or may not bear a resemblance to what we think of as oil." Rule leaned in, lowered his voice. "What makes the fragment of the Testament so explosive, so potentially dangerous to the Church, is that in it Jesus writes that it is by means of the Quintessence that he resurrected Lazarus and the others."
"But that goes against Church doctrine. The scriptures say that Jesus resurrected Lazarus by His divine power."
"Indeed, that has been the accepted interpretation since time immemorial," Rule said. "But the Testament of Jesus Christ clearly states that it is the Quintessence that brings Lazarus back to life. Christ makes no mention of a divine power."
Bravo was stunned. "Wait a minute-"
"Yes, yes, you see the mind-boggling implications. If it was the Quintessence that resurrected Lazarus and not Jesus's divine power, then the stories of him being a healer, the stories that the Church has systematically repressed, are true. And it might also be true that when he died his disciples resurrected him using the Quintessence."
Bravo's mind was reeling. At last he understood. "The entire structure of the Catholic faith would crumble because it would call into question whether Jesus was, in fact, the son of God."
"This is why over the centuries kings have been assassinated, regimes have been toppled, countless lives have been lost, blood has been spilled." Periodically, Rule tried to decode the shadows beyond the columns. "Your father told me he read the Testament, authenticated it. There is no doubt it's a fragment of the Testament of Jesus Christ, none at all."
Bravo stood absolutely immobile. To someone with his training, the idea of finding even a fragment of the Testament of Christ was akin to suddenly unearthing the Holy Grail. And, on top of that, to have the Quintessence, as well! The very possibility that Uncle Tony was right took his breath away.
"If the Order has had the Quintessence for all this time, if it actually exists," Bravo said, "then why didn't you use it to heal the sick and infirm?"
"That precise point was the subject of much heated debate in the twelve hundreds between Fra Leoni, the Keeper, and Fra Prospero, the Order's Magister Regens." Rule kept shifting his gaze to areas of the interior. "Two reasons for keeping the Quintessence secret prevailed over all the others: One, man was not meant to be immortal, or even to have his lifetime unnaturally extended. Two, news of the Quintessence would bring out the worst in people. What do you suppose would happen? A stampede, a panic in the general populace. But it would never get that far, because the rich and the powerful would contrive to steal it, to keep the secret for their own benefit, to extend their own lives. By applying the Quintessence at intervals they would live virtually forever."
Bravo's mind was moving at lightning speed. This was why the Knights were in a sudden lather to find the cache-the Vatican was pushing them to find the Quintessence. The pope was gravely ill. Was he ready to die? If so, the Quintessence was his only hope. The closer the pope came to death, the more pressure the Vatican would put on the Knights, the more of their power would be wielded. He'd have to remember that. Even in this day and age, the Vatican's power was a net flung far and wide across the globe wherever Christ had been introduced.
"And so power, already concentrated, would become ever more so," Rule continued. "And then there would be governments, rogue individuals, terrorists who would wish to use the Quintessence for their own ends, rather than for the betterment of mankind. Unmitigated disaster." He shook his head sadly. "No, the Quintessence is too powerful for mankind-it only seems like a gift, but that's the nature of all corrupting influences."
"If you feel that way, then why not destroy it?"
"It's not up to me, is it? But any archeologist will tell you-I'm sure you know this and are testing me-it would be criminal to willfully destroy such a miraculous artifact from the time of Christ. Jesus himself held the Quintessence in his-"
Some movement Rule had been looking for must have occurred because he said, "Come now, quickly, quickly!" and with his arms he guided them deeper into the shadows of the chapel. Groping along the plaster of the rear wall, he found a small glass knob and, pulling on it, opened a small door.
Pushing them into the dark doorway, he said, "This passageway will take you to a side entrance. There are a number of turns, but the door to the outside will be at the far end, not along either wall."
"Who did you see?" Jenny said.
"It doesn't matter," Bravo said. "Come on, Uncle Tony."
"I'm not going with you." Rule put the set of keys the young man had given him into Jenny's hand.
"Oh, no you don't," Jenny said. "I'm not going to let you-"
"You'll do your job," Rule said shortly, "which is to protect Bravo with your life. Leave these people to me. Besides, you have a plane to catch, and if I don't provide a diversion you're never going to make it."
"I won't leave you," Bravo said. "You taught me never to run from a fight, and I sure as hell am not going to start now."
Rule put his hands on Bravo's shoulders. "I appreciate the sentiment, Bravo, really I do, but sentiment has no place in the Voire Dei."
"I don't believe that."
"You'll learn soon enough that I'm right." He gripped Bravo all the harder. "In any case, we all have our roles to play in this war, and yours is safeguarding the Testament and the Quintessence. You're the Keeper: at all costs, you must remember that."
