Vampire a Go-Go(14)

Kelley’s foot caught on something underwater, and he pitched forward. His hands flew out to break his fall, and he landed with a cold splash, the torch hissing out and plunging him into total darkness.

Muttering every curse he could think of, he sat up in the middle of the stream and blinked. That’s a lot of dark.

He thought about feeling his way back up the stream, finding the ladder. If he was extremely careful, he could probably make his way back without falling in the river and drowning himself.

He was wet. He was cold. He was still hungover. This had been a terrible idea.

Kelley grunted, stood, and rubbed his backside where he’d landed on some rocks. Slowly his eyes adjusted. The darkness was not complete after all. Dimly he perceived the dull yellow flickering of torches at the far end of the cavern. There was light far ahead, around a corner.

He went forward, forcing himself to move slowly. This was no time for a sprained ankle. He stumbled a few times but managed to right himself without going into the water again, and soon he was at the bend in the cavern where it made a right turn. There was more light here, and Kelley picked up the pace. Soon the cavern turned again, and he saw a lot more flickering light.

He stood at the corner, peeked around the edge.

A handful of men milled around a construction site. One stood at a small wooden table, looking at an unrolled parchment. The large chamber was well lit by a number of torches and a large brazier. The echoes of a few men working with various tools mixed with the sound of rushing water coming from behind him. There wasn’t much mud here, although the stream still ran through the center of the chamber and left again through a hole on the far side.

A giant waterwheel had been assembled, but they hadn’t yet placed it in position. Kelley imagined the dam had been built to hold back the water for the construction and placement of the waterwheels. Presumably the water-or at least some of it-would be let loose again when the wheels were in place. But why? It was a hell of a place to grind flour.

The man standing over the parchment looked familiar. Yes, Kelley remembered him from the audience with Rudolph. Hans Vredeman de Vries. Rudolph had said something about the man’s working with drainage.

Kelley couldn’t stand it now. He had to find out what was going on. The curiosity burned a hole in his imagination. He waited until most of the workers were in another part of the chamber and the rest had their backs turned. He scooted fast around the edge of the cave, clinging to the shadows, and hunkered down behind a barrel and a pile of thick, coiled rope. He noticed a few narrow openings behind him, more natural tunnels.

There wasn’t much to see from this vantage point, so Kelley moved stealthily toward a pile of lumber. He never made it.

Strong hands grabbed him from behind, one thick hand clapping over his mouth. He was dragged into a tunnel, backward into the long dark beneath the earth.





FIFTEEN




This isn’t where I die.

I don’t want to mislead you, so I thought it best to assure you now isn’t when I meet my untimely demise. I mean, I’m a ghost, right? So something bad must have happened to put me in this circumstance. Yeah.

But not yet.

In the meantime, you’re probably wondering what happened to Allen.





THE JESUIT SQUAD





SIXTEEN




After ten minutes, Father Paul began to wonder if Allen was coming back. When twenty minutes had passed, he knew something was wrong.

Father Paul touched the throat microphone hidden under his priest’s collar. “Are you monitoring, Finnegan?”

“Right here, Boss,” came the voice in his earpiece.

“I think I’ve lost Cabbot.”

“Did he rabbit?”

“I don’t think so. I think something happened.”

The priest twiddled his thumbs a moment, smoked the remainder of his cigarette down to the butt. “Finnegan, how many can you round up without jeopardizing our surveillance?”

“Let me see.” Ten seconds crawled by. “Five.”

Father Paul thought about it quickly. Five was enough. “Where’s the van?”

“Two blocks north of you.”

“I’ll see you in five minutes.”

The priest pushed away from the table, made his way through the Globe’s crowd and checked the restrooms. He circled the café once on the off chance that Allen had been caught in a conversation with some girl, but as suspected, Allen was nowhere to be found.

Father Paul went outside and turned north.

He stuck another cigarette in his mouth and considered. Somebody had gotten their hooks into the Cabbot boy. Father Paul thought he’d arrived early enough to preempt any sort of action by the opposition, and it irked him that he’d figured wrong. He’d planned to make Allen Cabbot his link to Evergreen. Father Paul could deal with Evergreen without the boy, but he didn’t want to have to try. A lot of careful thought had gone into the plan.

The black van came into view, and Father Paul broke into a trot. It was a large, nondescript van, parked in an alley. The priest reached it and knocked on the back door. It opened, and he entered, pulling the door closed behind him.

The interior of the van hummed with electronic equipment. Father Flynn Finnegan was a giant pale Irish block of meat with a headset perched on his fat noggin. It looked like some children’s toy headset. His black frock bulged with thick muscles. His red hair was growing gray at the temples. He nodded at Father Paul as he entered the van.

“Blake and Santana are on the way,” Finnegan said. “What’s the target?”

“Give me a quick rundown.”

The big Irishman swiveled in his chair and tapped at a laptop. Pictures of buildings and houses flickered on various monitors. “Target zones alpha and beta are quiet,” Finnegan reported. “But our people watching the house in Zizkov say a sedan pulled into the driveway six minutes ago. The lights are on, and there’s activity.”

“That’s the one,” Father Paul said. “Start the van.”

“Right.” Finnegan took off the headset, went to the front of the van, and squeezed into the driver’s seat, cranking the engine.

Father Paul opened the weapons locker under one of the bench seats and withdrew a flak jacket. All the Battle Jesuit flak jackets had a small emblem over the heart-a golden cross, the bottom of the cross in the shape of a sword blade. He shrugged into it, looked at the other two young priests in the back of the van. They looked of the same mold: young, athletic, a steely-eyed appearance that seemed to indicate a cool, calculated readiness for action. He’d seen their files but had yet to speak with them in person.

He nodded at the tall black man sitting across from him. “Father Starkes?”

William Starkes shrugged into his own flak jacket. “Yes, sir.”

“Good to meet you.” According to Starkes’s file, the man had served a hitch as an Army Ranger before earning a degree in religion from Princeton and then joining the seminary. Father Paul’s outfit had only recruited and trained him three months ago. He was a good man on paper, but he looked nervous.

The priests strapped on nylon shoulder holsters, checked the magazines of their 9 mm Glocks. Finnegan punched in the security code on the gun locker’s keypad and handed each priest a fully automatic H & K 9 mm submachine gun with laser sight and collapsible stock.

Father Paul shifted his attention to the short man sitting next to Starkes. Emile DeGaul had joined the French Foreign Legion at age seventeen and had already served eight years when his older brother-a priest-had been killed in an automobile accident. DeGaul had made some private deal with God that Father Paul didn’t completely understand, and DeGaul had answered the calling a month later.

“Are you ready for this, DeGaul?”

“Absolutely!” His French accent was thick, but his English was good.

Father Paul saw that Finnegan was strapping on a flak jacket also. “Where do you think you’re going, Monsignor?”

“You don’t think you’re going to keep an old warhorse like me out of this, do you, Father?”

“Didn’t you just celebrate your fiftieth birthday, Finnegan?”

Finnegan flexed, and muscles rippled beneath his frock. A grin spread across his ruddy face. “Would you like to arm wrestle?”

A smile tugged at the corner of Father Paul’s mouth. “No, I don’t think I would. Call off Blake and Santana. I don’t want to wait for them. Finnegan, take us to Zizkov.”

“Right.” The Irishman crammed himself into the driver’s seat and drove toward the target house.

The three priests in the back of the van checked one another’s equipment and made sure their gear was properly secured. They checked and rechecked their weapons. Father Paul handed out headsets. They put them on, plugged them into the compact radios on the shoulders of their flak jackets.

“Remember, this is an extraction,” Father Paul said. “I want Cabbot secured and out of there as fast as possible. Let’s try to keep casualties down. But never forget these are dangerous people. You see a threat, shoot to kill.”

Grim faces nodded back at him.

“Shall we say a quick prayer?” DeGaul asked.

“Lord, aid us in Your work and help us to triumph over evil in Your name. Amen.”

They all crossed themselves.

“How about grenades?” suggested DeGaul.