The Sixth Station(70)

“But that would be consistent with everything here—where nothing was as it appeared. I shut tight the second set of purple velvet blackout curtains.

“I then lit several other candles—still a strange sight in a room buzzing with the quiet white noise of high-tech medical equipment, three hungry laptops—created way before the time that such a thing was even possible to consumers—constantly being fed with information from the portable satellite dish, and, of course, the sleeping Girl and the newborn Infant.

“Sister Grethe went over to the Girl’s bedside just as the priest—almost on cue—walked back inside and picked up the Infant with the expertise of a man who’d fathered legions of them. Which of course he had.

“As he held the Baby, the nun slipped on surgical gloves and then gently manipulated the Girl’s engorged nipples until the first drops of breast milk—colostrum—the yellowy, thick, sticky first milk—appeared.”

Needless to say, unsettling for me to read these words about a little girl from a grown man to whom she had been “betrothed.”

“The Baby began sucking immediately, while the Girl continued to sleep, seemingly unaware that she was nursing the most extraordinary Child in nearly two thousand years.

“As calm settled over the house, and as Sister Grethe and Father Paulo were finally ready to get a few hours of sleep themselves, the alarm in my headset went off.

“We had been breached.”





23





I stopped reading and looked up at the priest. “My God! This reads like a sci-fi thriller!”

“I can assure you, Miss Russo, it involved a lot of science, but it is not fiction.”

Just then our plane touched down so smoothly I hardly felt a thing. Or maybe it was because I had been so completely thrown back in time that my head was in a whole other place.

We deplaned at a small private airport and hurried across the tarmac and into a waiting car. The priest informed me that the car we were in was armored. “Secure against bullets and hopefully anything else they can throw at us.”

“Who is ‘they,’ may I ask? And where the heck are we?”

“Need to know, Miss Russo, need to know…”

“I need to know. If I’m going to be shot at, trust me, I need to know.”

“I can only say there are forces—black forces—who put Demiel into this position and who, frankly, need to take you out of the equation.”

“Me? Why me?” I looked out the window and decided to come clean.

“And, ah, this is weird, okay? But I think I blew up a car and, along with it, the, ah, one of the ‘black forces.’ At a rest stop in upstate New York.”

He laughed. “Do you think one explosion would eliminate an entire group thousands of years old?” He laughed again.

“Pardon? Sorry, but the joke escapes me right now.”

“Shall I continue the readings?”

Not sure he’d not edit as he went along—taking out any unflattering references to himself—I picked up the book and continued, as he anxiously shifted in his seat, trying to read over my shoulder.

“The inside of the house was instantly thrown into darkness. In seconds, the automatic lockdown gates slammed into place, and then the infrared emergency lights came on, casting a glow to the ancient walls of clay bricks and stones. It was all working perfectly.

“We three assumed our positions as smoothly as if we’d been choreographed by Balanchine. Grethe remained at the bedside; I moved toward the chapel room; and Paulo headed toward the cache of weapons.

“Theotokos stirred in her sleep, so Grethe kept Demiel steady at her breast.”

I looked at the priest at that point. Damn! He was talking about the little New York City girl who’d been abducted in 1982. Somehow I kept reading without gagging. Monsters!

“I retrieved my thermo-controlled binoculars and Browning M2 .50.

“I carefully made my way into the other room—the chapel—and knelt at the small brick-arched window, slipped the binoculars between the panels of the velvet drapes, and pressed a code to release a tiny opening into the two-foot-thick stone wall and a corresponding hole in the outer metal lockdown gates. It was the modern equivalent of an ancient arrow slit.

“Sixteen satellite TVs built into the floor and flush with it had also already automatically flipped open and were lit up, feeding information into the laptops.

“‘We’ve been breached! Hold your positions, and don’t move. Die in your spots if you have to,’ I ordered.

“I surveyed the mountainside from the window and from the monitors, looking closely and magnifying every inch of the area, around the Fountain of Health, the Fountain of Wealth, and the Fountain of Happiness. Nothing moved. My headset blared a warning signal into my ears again.