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“THEY HAVE BEEN CONTAINED.” Inspector Carrola stepped into the cool room and closed the door behind him.
“There has been no harm done to them, I trust?” The question came from the weak old man lying face down on the bed. He struggled to raise his head from the pillow and face the inspector. “Come closer. I cannot see you.”
Inspector Carrola stepped around the intravenous stand and the beeping machinery full of lines and tubing running to and from the man, and came alongside of the bed. “We expected the Jesuit to prevent them from leaving, but the Key is resourceful.”
“They will not stop until he is dead.” The patient coughed. “It has taken us many years, my friend, to build the trust of the few, and now we are nearly able to expose the truth.”
“If God be willing.”
“And the church.”
“We have friends.” Inspector Carrola placed his hand on the old man’s arm.
“We are old and weak.”
“But we have God. He is on our side.”
“That is what the other side thinks too.” The old man coughed several times. He placed his face into the pillow. When the coughing stopped, he continued, “Do we know after these sixty years whose side God is on? I am nearly defeated and yet the Jesuit appears strong. If it is he who is strongest, who will win? Then where is our God?” He coughed again, arching in pain.
“Cardinal, you must rest,” Inspector Carrola said, while pushing a small button on the tip of a long cord, silently summoning the nurse.
The door to the hospital room opened even before Inspector Carrola had released his finger from the button. “Inspector? Cardinal Celent?” The stout nurse asked as she glanced at the beeping machinery and the zigzagging lines on the monitors.
“I will be leaving now.” He looked to Cardinal Celent then back to the nurse. “Someone must be with him always.”
“I will be here, Inspector,” the nurse said nodding.
“Good,” he said a little too sharply, then added. “And thank you, nurse.”
“Cardinal, are you in pain?” The nurse adjusted a dial on the heart monitor and watched the lines spike up and down. “Maybe some medicine to ease that?”
“There is no medicine that can ease the pain of my deceit,” Cardinal Celent said.
“It was necessary. Dominic will understand when this is done,” Inspector Carrola said from the doorway.
“You are right, of course.”
“If we had not told him that you had died, he would have remained here looking for answers.”
“The answers were buried sixty years ago.”
“And he will succeed in finding them.”
Cardinal Celent raised his head from the pillow. “Go. I will be fine,” he said, as the pain medication took control and he drifted into sleep and the memories of long ago.
Bill Celent hit the ground hard. He rolled, fell two feet down an embankment, landed on top of a rock the size of a basketball, slid off of the rock, scraped a knee, and finally came to a stop on his back. He gasped as the air was forced out of his lungs and into the atmosphere. He sucked in as much air as he could, but his diaphragm and lungs would not cooperate and he could not catch his breath. His arm, scratched by the dry, sunbaked desert crust, bled from his shoulder to his elbow. His head throbbed and his ribs ached. He touched his side, applying the slightest amount of pressure, and a searing pain shot through him. He closed his eyes, allowing the haze in his mind to disappear and waited out the pain. Slowly the pain in his side faded, as his lungs began to fill and an even rhythm to his breathing returned. Cautiously he sucked in oxygen with quick shallow breaths, allowing his lungs to fill. Then exhaled slowly. He repeated the processes of quick breaths and long exhales until his body relaxed and his muscles responded. Then he opened his eyes.
A sky, slightly darkened and overcast with scattered clouds, filled the panorama of his sight. He blinked away the slight dizziness behind his eyes and fought back the nausea gnawing at his stomach. Bill slowly raised an arm up to his head, running a hand through his hair and lightly massaged his scalp. He brought his hand to his face. No blood. Then he moved his arm back down to his side, anticipating the pain at his rib cage to return. It didn’t. Good. Bruised, a little bloodied, but not broken, he thought.
He pushed off of the small rocks and stones that covered the ground he had landed on and raised up slightly. “Oow!” he spoke out loud. “That hurt.” He brushed the dirt and small embedded pebbles from his skin and clothes, and took in his surroundings. The desert, just like it should be, Bill thought.
He stood, pushing up on shaky knees and dusted off the fabric of the thin gray jump suit meant to protect him from possible radiation exposure and heat. The suit may very well have done a great job on the heat and radiation, but it was terrible at stopping rocks. The legs of the jump-suit were torn, allowing bare bloody skin to show through.
A flap of the gray shiny material at his chest was nearly gone. He finished brushing away the dust and picked at the desert thorn brush that had become attached to the torn and frayed fabric. He stretched, and feeling only a slight ache in his side, started off toward a high outcropping of gray brown stone.
The loose stone and gravel slipped under his weight, creating small avalanches that tumbled down the side of the embankment as he scrambled up. Bill fell to one knee, and slid down several feet. He cursed the pain in his side that had been growing, aggravated by the climb, and regained his footing. A few well-placed steps and he reached the top.
Bill stood looking north. The land in the distance was arid desert, covered with brown, shrub brushes, low growing trees with snarled snake like branches, and dry washes, that would fill during a storm and flow like a river for several hours after a downpour. They were now empty of water, filled only with desert debris. A hot breeze kicked up, scented with the slight briny smell of salt.
Odd, he thought.
He turned around slowly, carefully, taking in the vast open land. His foot loosened a stone and it tumbled down the hill, hitting others on the way, scaring up a large-eared fox from its den. The fox darted down the hill into a nearby ravine. Bill watched as the fox, with its large oversized ears, disappeared from sight. Then a moment later, popped its head up from behind a brush and stared back at Bill. When he seemed secure that Bill was no threat, the fox darted back to his den.
Bill steadied himself on his precarious perch, checked his footing, and continued to turn around. “Oh my God,” he said out loud knowing that it would be only himself and to the heavens that would hear. And then there were no words. He stood dumbfounded, opened mouthed. What he saw before him could not be. He closed his eyes for a moment, thinking that he may have hit his head harder than he had thought. When he opened his eyes again, the vision remained. He believed that he had returned to the desert just as he was meant to. That the experiment had gone as planned. But now he realized that it did not. He was not where he was supposed to be. What lie before him could not be. And yet it was.
Not fifty yards in the distance, a mass of people chanting, screaming, crying out, mixed into others that were laughing and dancing gleefully, all flowing from an arched gate in a large stone wall. They surrounded a group of soldiers surging around and in between them. Scuffles broke out among the crowd as some of the soldiers pushed at them, shoving some to the ground, chasing and hauling others away, as they cleared a path for the object of their furor and ridicule. In the center of rock strewn, dirt roadway, a small thin man carrying his burden walked slowly and deliberately on the path in the space created for him by the soldiers. His body bent forward under the weight of the heavy timber upon his shoulder. He stumbled, losing his balance briefly, paused, then regained his footing and continued on, only to fall to his knee two steps later. The crowd of onlookers spat at the man when he stumbled, pelting him with stones and whipping him with palm fronds as he struggled to rise again. A dark-skinned man standing along the side of the roadway where the road met a steep cliff, stepped forward to aid the fallen man with his burden. Before the dark-skinned man could reach him, other angry men in the crowd rushed forward and shoved him back away from the man who remained on his knees, pushing and shoving until the dark-skinned man was at the edge of the road and too near the steep sides, to fight back. The dark-skinned man brushed his hand over his torn clothing and looked back to the pained figure lying upon the roadway. The fallen man regained his strength and took to his feet pulling himself up and hosting the wooden beam back upon his shoulders. The masses, that had only moments ago jeered and spat upon the man, kicking at him and throwing stones at him, now cheered and urged that same man forward.
Bill studied the path, taking in the entire route from the large arched gate in the stone wall to the crowd and the place where the man had stumbled, risen and was now walking. He looked beyond the man and the onlookers, following the well-worn road to a small hill that rose up from the roadway and leveled off to a plateau. An outcropping of rock on the side of the hill jutted out becoming rounded along the top of the hill and came together at odd angles toward the bottom before falling off to a valley below. The sun, now hanging above the horizon, but not yet near its pinnacle, cast light and shadows upon the rock. It highlighted the ridges and deepened the pockets and the shadows where the sun’s light could not reach. Bill gasped as his eyes and mind transformed the light and shadows, the ridges and the pockets, into that of a face upon the rock. Then with sudden realization, Bill saw that the wind and water carved face was not a face at all. It was a skull.
He quickly turned his gaze back to the crowd. He took in the soldiers and the man with the heavy wooden beam hoisted upon his shoulder, now struggling to make his way up the path to the top of the hill and the plateau above the skull-faced rock.
And then he saw them. Not slim trees as he had first thought them to be. But stakes. Three stakes standing tall, firmly planted into the ground above the skull rock, two were complete.
And the third stood empty.
Waiting.