I rolled Maureen off of me, and grabbed the Veil literally a second before it too caught fire.
I could feel myself splattered in her blood, which was all mixed up with the plaster, bone fragments, and pieces of burned wood, and without thinking about what had just happened, I tried to get back up.
That’s when I saw Pantera standing in the light that was pouring through the stained-glass window. He was in the open doorway, long, lean, and as calm as he had been that night in the Restaurant Costes. In one hand he held his gun, and in the other, he held out an envelope.
I reached out for him as more and more of the room caught fire. “Pantera!” He handed me the envelope, and then two more shots rang out, sending him flying backward against a pillar.
He’d been clipped in the right leg and shoulder; blood was pouring from the wounds. He yelled out, “Watch it! Watch it.”
I spun around. Maureen. The old snake was still alive, though paralyzed from the waist down. She turned the gun on me. I leaped across the space between us and kicked her hard in the head with the toe of my still-burning-hot boot in a blind fury. I kicked her Glock out of her hand, picked it up, loomed over her, and pointed it directly at her face. She locked me in her gaze. I pulled the trigger and shot her clean between the eyes.
“Trust no one, you fucking bitch.”
42
The draperies had by this time caught fire, and the stained-glass windows began blowing out all over the room. The pillars supporting the room and others supporting the building shook, and I turned back to Pantera, who was sprawled against one of them. I had to get to him before it gave way. I shoved the envelope into my jacket pocket and turned back to him. We were about seven feet apart.
The crack of the breaking pillar was louder than the gunshots had been. The one Pantera had been propped against gave way and crashed to the ground, followed by the ceiling above him. The whole room was shaking, and the dust was so thick that I couldn’t see anything and began coughing and choking. The rubble had sealed off that portion of the room where Pantera lay.
“Pantera! Talk to me,” I called, trying to claw my way through the ten-foot-high pile of plaster and dust. “Pantera! Pantera! Can you hear me?”
Finally, I heard a faint voice on the other side. “Go. Save yourself. Save the Veil. Get out!”
“Not without you. Pantera!”
Silence. The pillars supporting my side of the room started to crack and shake, and the blazing draperies were threatening to engulf the entire space.
I grabbed the Veil, whose edges had started to singe, and shoved it into my other pocket.
“Get out. Now!”
“I can’t.”
Nothing. “Pantera. Pantera!” Nothing.
The room was collapsing around me, and I had to get out. “Pantera!” I yelled. Again, nothing.
The fire was rushing toward me, so I turned away and crawled on my hands and knees as best as I could in the smoke and rubble to the window. Dodging the flames that were licking at me, I climbed to the blown-out window frame. I looked back one last time and could see Grethe’s body being consumed by the flames, just as the Cathars’ bodies had been in 1244. And for the same reason: to keep alive the blood of Christ.
Like my distant ancestor, I knew for certain that I was the one who had been assigned this time to save the Cathar treasure—the Veil holding the DNA of Jesus—the treasure that was now stuffed into the pocket of my old leather jacket.
And yes, I too had been assisted along the way by a rogue Crusader.
Did Alazais Roussel fall for her rogue Templar, like I fell for mine?
The acrid, terrible smell of burning flesh assaulted me once again. But this time it wasn’t the stuff of nightmares. This time it was very real.
43
When I had fully shimmied out of the window and my feet touched the tiles of a roof, I realized that I was on the second floor of the swaying building. The church began to collapse, and I crawled along the edge until I reached the front of the church and jumped onto a ledge below and from there onto the ground.
As suddenly as it started, the earthquake stopped, although the morning sky was dark as night. The town was deserted—many bodies lay scattered around the parking lot in front of the church. Some had been crushed by boulders that had flown off the mountainside, while others, I could see, had been shot dead.
It was a scene out of Armageddon, and I still had no idea of what really had happened outside of this earthquake-ravaged town. A massive downpour began, complete with lightning and deafening thunder rolling off the mountain, which literally looked as if it were cracking apart.
I took out Sadowski’s phone just for the light and began climbing up toward Grethe’s house, using the phone as a flashlight. I still don’t know why I went up. The rain, the brambles, the fallen rocks, and the mudslides made climbing nearly impossible, but somehow I was forced onward.