Blood Oath Part 24

They stared at each other.

"We made love," he said. "I don't regret it. But it doesn't change a thing. It only complicates. My wife is dead, and I won't turn my back on what she meant to me. I'm going to find the man who killed her."

"And find your father. And my own."

"And save him. Save ourselves. We can't keep running."

She shrugged and smiled. "The answer I expected. Go." Her voice was bleak.

"Before I try to stop you."

Houston kissed her. He stepped back from her and braced himself, then turned to face the cliff. The castle seemed distorted down there, far away yet close. Its lights were misted, and its towers had a ghostly haze. He felt as if he watched it from a former century.

He turned again and studied Simone's face for what was possibly the final time, memorizing it. His throat ached. With the doubled rope between his legs, he reached behind him, brought the rope around his right leg, looped it around his chest, and let it hang down his left shoulder. With his left hand clutching the part of the rope ahead of him, he dropped his right hand backward, gripping the portion of the rope that dangled down the cliff. The rope, thus wound around him, was supported by his right leg and his back. He said a prayer. He leaned down from the cliff top. Blood roared in his head. He felt the rope pinch where his leg and back supported it.

And slowly he started walking backward, downward.

Chapter 43.

Everything was off its center. Now the stars were not above him. Rather, they were straight ahead of him. The castle wasn't down from him; it was behind him.

The illusion was that he walked backward on a horizontal surface. But the biting pressure of the rope against his leg and back, in tandem with the pressure in his stomach, contradicted that illusion. These sensations emphasized that he was moving on a vertical, instead of horizontal, plane. The different signals he was getting, incompatible with one another, made him nauseated. Ahead and yet above, Simone peered toward him from the cliffs edge. But her worried face got smaller as he played the rope out. Then she disappeared in darkness, and he saw only the murky rocks before him, then the speckled sky beyond.

He had to keep his knees straight while he bent his body forward from the hips.

Otherwise his legs would rise above his head, and he would fall.

His motions were considered: slow and steady. He'd seen movies in which climbers swooped down cliffs, rebounding off the rocks and dropping twenty feet at once.

But drops of twenty feet put too much strain on the rope and on its mooring.

There was little chance of compensating for mistakes. And even if he had been tempted to be more aggressive he would not have tried it in the darkness; he could not see what was underneath him. Slow and steady, Houston told himself.

Take care to do this right.

Despite his heavy gloves, he felt the friction of the rope. Heat soaked toward his hands. He inched the rope up, and the pressure burned his shoulder, chest, and leg. His stomach fluttered. He breathed quickly, gasping to stay calm.

His right hand touched the knot that held the two ends of the doubled rope. It warned him that he'd have to stop, to find a ledge, a place to stand. If he kept sliding downward, he'd run out of rope and fall.

His right hand pinched the rope against his side to stop him from descending any farther. He pressed waffle soles against the rock face, searching the craggy surface for a foothold. When he didn't find what he was groping for, he almost panicked. He had dreaded this. He'd been determined not to think about the hazards. If he didn't find a place to rest, he wouldn't have a chance to pull the rope down, anchor it once more, and then continue his descent. He'd be forced to climb back up or be stranded.

Houston dangled. The rope cut fiercely at his leg and chest, his shoulder and his back. His boots scrabbled at the cliff face; his heart thundered in his chest. He reached his boots down, testing. He leaned to the right, and then the left.

And Houston found it a slight outcrop, wide enough for him to stand on. He swung himself toward it, reached with his left hand, gripped a jagged piece of rock, and pulled himself upright. He rested on the outcrop, gulping, sweat burning his eyes. He wiped his sleeve across his forehead; then he realized his arms were shaking. And his legs.

Don't think about it, Houston told himself. Don't think about the drop below you. Just be thankful you can't see it in the dark.

He clutched the rope with one hand while he slipped his knapsack from his shoulders. He took out a piton and a hammer, felt along the rock face, and found a solid crack. He wedged the piton in the crack, spreading a cloth across it to m.u.f.fle sound. He hammered at it, wincing from the metallic noise the piton made despite the cloth. A dog barked from below him, near the castle.

He stiffened. The dog stopped barking. All the same, Houston waited, glancing through the darkness toward the castle. But he saw no guards, no sign of an alarm. The wind dried his forehead. He relaxed. He tested the piton, satisfied it would hold.

He put the hammer and the cloth inside the knapsack, pulled out a metal clip, snapped it through the hole inside the piton, and at last took off his gloves.

With his fingers bare, he struggled with the knot that held the two ends of the doubled rope. His fingers shook. The knot refused to budge. He tried again, and as his breath burned in his throat, he felt the knot pull loose. The ends were free.

He was balanced on the outcrop, unsupported. He pulled on one side of the rope and watched the other side snake upward, imagining how the rope slid past Simone, then through the clip attached to the sling around the tree. Abruptly the rope had no weight; it slipped from the clip up there and streamed down the cliff. He clutched the end he held with all his might, felt the rope hiss past him. Then it jerked him forward, and he nearly lost his balance. Scrambling, he leaned back to compensate, bracing his boots against the outcrop. He pulled the rope up, tied its ends again, and hooked it through the clip inside the piton. All he had to do was put his gloves on, drop the rope, and he was ready to continue.

He pushed off, complacent; he didn't think to keep his knees straight. His legs jerked up, and he was upside down, dangling breathless from the rope that now constricted him. Dark turned to red, blood rus.h.i.+ng to his brain. The pressure was like being under water. Houston's eyes began to bulge. His swollen cheeks sagged downward toward his forehead. Blood roared in his skull. The wind was stronger, sc.r.a.ping Houston's back against the cliff. His head cracked on a rock, and his hands went weak. He nearly dropped the rope. No! If he lost more balance, if his feet flipped outward, he'd be so entangled in the rope that he might hang himself. He twisted, scratching the side of the cliff with his boot soles, straining at the rope to pull his chest up even with his feet. He fought to bring his boots down as he raised himself, but now the pressure of the blood inside his brain had nearly rendered him unconscious. Houston gasped for air as if he were drowning. His arms were numb, their circulation cut off by the rope.

Adrenaline insisted, burning. Fear created strength. He strained and heaved and sc.r.a.ped and pulled, and all at once the pressure in his brain diminished. He could breathe again. His cheeks no longer pressed down toward his eyes. His knees were straight, his body horizontal to the cliff. He leaned up and was safe again.

But he kept shaking, couldn't stop the spasms in his arms, his legs.

Chapter 44.

Thirty minutes later, exhausted, Houston finally touched bottom and collapsed inside the compound. Inside! He glanced behind him toward the fir trees. They were sighing in the wind. The air was colder. He pulled off his shredded gloves.

His hands were blistered, b.l.o.o.d.y. With his swollen fingers he released the knot, tugged on the rope, and stumbled back. The rope hissed down, flopping heavily beside him. He took off his knapsack, packed the gloves and rope, withdrew the revolver, and slumped wearily against the stump of a tree. The revolver gave him confidence. Its smooth hard weight a.s.sured him. He caressed it.

He realized that he trembled more from fear than from exertion; he knew he had to move. It was almost midnight. There was too much to be done. He couldn't waste time resting, couldn't give himself a chance to reconsider.

He stood painfully and crammed his knapsack in a hole beneath the stump, covering it with rocks and fallen fir-tree needles. He rubbed dirt across his face to help his skin blend with the shadows. Nervously he started through the forest, boot soles silent on the spongy earth. He squinted forward through the spreading branches and saw the outline of the castle, saw the light-filled cas.e.m.e.nt windows.

Fear was chilling. He had not thought beyond his plan to reach the castle. He would have to watch for guards and dogs, but if he reached the walls, then he could scale the ropelike vines that grew upon them. At the top, he could maneuver through the complex intersecting walkways to scout any portion of the castle. Errol Flynn, he thought. Sure, Douglas Fairbanks. What the h.e.l.l is wrong with you? These people want to kill you.

He stood at the forest's edge, confronted by the lawn that he would have to cross to reach the inner wall of the castle. A spotlight glared down from the tower at each corner, but no sentries manned them, and the beam of one light did not extend to meet the other's beam. There was a shadowed section in the middle.

Houston weighed the risk. He watched for dogs. He saw none saw no guards.

He bolted toward a waist-high hedge that formed a square within which outdoor furniture had been arranged on landscape stones. He scurried past the hedge, then paused to catch his breath, to scan the grounds, before he hurried forward once again. His chest was pounding; he hunched beside the steps of a gazebo, peering through its trellis toward the shadow on the lawn between the searchlight beams. Despite the wind, the night was silent. He heard the shrill breath from his mouth. From this vantage, at the castle's rear, he saw the stables to his left, a seven-door garage, the bleak stone of the guardhouse.

Before he realized what he was doing, he had started running.

Now or never! No guard here to see him. No dog close to scent him. In a minute, everything could change. For all he knew, the guards would soon emerge around a corner, checking this side, then continuing toward all the others in a constant, thorough pattern. Throat tight, Houston forced himself forward. His eyes misted from his effort. Searchlights threatened him on either side; he skirted their illumination. Frenzied, he rushed to the wall, and even as he glanced both ways to guarantee he'd not been seen, he shoved the revolver in his belt, then grabbed the thick vines on the wall. Their bark was dry, but their roots were solid, so enmeshed that they held firm. He wedged a boot among them, clawed up, wedged another boot, and was climbing. Half a minute later he was almost to the top.

Sounds below made him stop: gruff muttered voices and the click of metal. Panic made him hang there, frozen. Peering down, he saw two guards at the base of the wall. One lit a cigarette, and in a lighter's glow, Pete saw the other man unsling a rifle. Then he saw the German shepherd, and his breathing stopped.

Although the guards were underneath him, they were obviously not aware of him.

The dog, though. That d.a.m.n dog was sniffing at the gra.s.s, the wall, the vines.

It tensed, whining, turning toward the open lawn and the intrusive scent of a stranger. No! Houston thought, and stared up at the short s.p.a.ce he had yet to climb. He heard the men below him talking.

The vines he clutched were separating from the wall. He had to move, or else in seconds he would slip. He'd land on the guards. The dog would slash his throat.

He raised a hand and found a better grip. The vines groaned. Now the dog was barking. Good. Its sounds obscured his own. He feared it was barking up at him but didn't dare to look down for confirmation. He just kept climbing one hand, then the other tensing for the bullet that would burst through his back and rupture his chest.

His trembling hand touched open air. The top! He'd reached the top! He slung his arm across the edge and squirmed down on a parapet.

He listened to the dog. A guard spoke sharply, and the barking stopped. He waited. Cautiously he raised his head to peer back down. The guards were walking, led by the dog. They crossed the shadowed s.p.a.ce between the searchlights toward the steps of the gazebo. There the two men hesitated, frowned at the dog, and yanked its leash.

The dog resisted. They yanked harder and continued their patrol.

Houston licked his cracked, cold lips. Relief that he had not been seen was followed by depression, the fatiguing aftermath of fear. Adrenaline stopped pulsing. He felt weak, lethargic.

High on the walkway, he crouched in darkness. Here, in ancient times, the s.h.i.+elded archers of the castle had faced outward toward the open ground below him, aiming crossbows toward intruders. There were notches in the parapet through which the soldiers would have shot their arrows.

Wind whistled past the black shape of the tower to his right. No guard stepped from its solid shadows to confront him. Nonetheless he drew the revolver from his belt, smelling the gun oil as he flicked off the safety catch. He gazed down at the courtyard in the middle of the castle walls. Deserted, it was bright from spotlights. Straight across from Houston, far below, a ma.s.sive wooden barrier sealed off the entrance to the courtyard.

He crept to the walkway's edge and peered below him toward another walkway jutting out and, then below it, yet another walkway jutting farther out until like monstrous steps they reached the bottom. They were wide enough for Houston to a.s.sume that, in addition to providing access to the parapet, they were also the roofs of different levels in the castle.

But despite their semblance of order, Houston had the sense of labyrinths and mazes. Inside, he could wander aimlessly, he knew, losing direction until finally he was discovered.

No, don't think like that. Get moving.

Houston scurried soundlessly to the tower and found chiseled stairs. He scanned the corniced skyline of the castle, looking warily at what from this new angle was an overwhelming grandeur. Blocks of stone were taller than himself. Through canopied windows he saw rooms three times normal height. Most rooms were dark.

The few that blazed with light from chandeliers and fireplaces drew his interest, made him study them.

These rooms were on the bottom level to his right, from where he crept along a lower walkway. Suddenly he stopped. Within the far right wall, beyond a huge, arched window one of few without stained gla.s.s he saw a man gesturing angrily, evidently berating someone unseen. Close to sixty, in a navy jacket, light-blue turt- leneck, and dark-gray slacks, the man had short, neat sandy hair, a stern-eyed handsome face. But Houston couldn't see who else was in the room. He changed position, sprawling flat on stone, and now he saw much farther into the room.

He saw two other men, but not their faces. One wore a brown suit and a vest, the other slacks and a white s.h.i.+rt, its three top b.u.t.tons open, revealing chest hair and a medallion dangling from a glinting chain.

These men were stiff, intense. With forceful movements, one man answered what the first man had been saying. Houston wished that he could hear. He crawled a little closer. And reflex-ively inhaled. Because from this new angle, seeing other portions of the room, he had a clear view of Monsard. The image sickened him.

The old man cowered in a deeply cus.h.i.+oned high-backed chair. He looked pathetic, shrunken, frightened older than when Houston had last seen him. There were bruises on his face. His clothes were rumpled, b.l.o.o.d.y.

They had beaten him. That's something else they'll pay for! Houston thought. His anger seethed within him. He clutched the revolver harder, squeezing it with fury. I'll !

He suddenly was rigid. In the room, two guards appeared; they flanked Monsard and jerked him to his feet. Monsard protested, face contorted by his fear.

From Houston's vantage on the walkway, he felt helpless. Rage was useless. He saw the guards drag Monsard backward, saw them leave the room.

He had to get inside to save Monsard, to take him to Simone . . . and learn some answers, make the old man tell him what the h.e.l.l was going on!

He trembled with the need for action. Even as he chose an entrance at the far end of the walkway, he imagined the stairs down which he'd hurry to subdue the guards. He didn't know how he would manage. All he knew was that he had to.

He was stopped before he entered. Below him, to his right, a door banged open.

He heard m.u.f.fled angry orders, heavy boot-steps, and a dragging, sc.r.a.ping sound, a whimpering.

He peered below the walkway's edge. The spotlights glared. He saw the two guards drag Monsard across the courtyard. They were huge, the old man frail between them, terrified, resisting.

Houston strained to see which door they'd use. He'd follow. He would Blinding, blazing light shot out from all directions. Countless searchbeams intersected onto him. The night was day. The walkway was a stage, and he was the attraction. He felt totally exposed, completely naked in the piercing brilliance. He couldn't see. He raised his hands to s.h.i.+eld his eyes. His body stiffened. Sphincter muscles gripped. On either side of him, guards scurried forward, rifles aimed, their faces grim. Above him, other guards appeared.

As Houston crouched defenseless, paralyzed in the sudden glare, a smooth, deep, resonant man's voice boomed from the speakers in the towers all around him.

"Welcome, Mr. Houston. We expected you."

PART 5.

He dove.

He didn't plan to die or take time to calculate his chances or decide that any risk was worth the price of being captured. As the spotlights blazed on him, as his burning eyes strained through the brilliance toward the rifles pointed at him, he reacted with pure reflex.

He'd been facing toward his right. He pivoted toward the walkway's edge in desperation plunged. The wind rushed past his cheeks. His stomach s.h.i.+fted. The cobbled courtyard zoomed to meet him; Houston aimed for one of the canopies he'd seen.

He struck the dark brown canvas with his shoulder, landing with bone-jarring suddenness. His breath exploded from him. He rebounded, struck the canopy again, and tumbled down its slope, his hands grotesquely clawing for a grip. His feet slid off the edge. He clutched the canvas border, hampered by the revolver in his hand. His legs kicked at air, and he lost his hold. He landed with a stunning wallop on the cobblestones.

He felt such pain his vision failed him. Clumsily, he forced his arms and legs to work. With sluggish, uncoordinated movements, he crawled to his knees. As he swayed in stupefaction to the rhythm of the dizziness inside his head, his vision cleared enough for him to see two guards in the courtyard. They let go of Monsard and charged toward him, faces pale above the barrels of their handguns.

In his stupor, Houston thought their bootsteps sounded like thunder.

Though his body swayed, his arms refused to budge. His revolver seemed enormous.

He lifted it with all his strength, and slowly it responded, as if by tomorrow he would raise it all the way. He tried to sight it, then remembered he hadn't c.o.c.ked it.

He groaned. The first guard reached him. Houston watched, completely helpless, as the guard's boot kicked at him with eye-blink speed, the steel toe battering his wrist. But Houston was already in so much pain that he barely felt the blow.

He only felt his arm s.h.i.+ft and his fingers loosen. Then he watched, perversely fascinated, as the revolver left his fingers, swerving through the air, cracking on the cobblestones.

As he clutched his wrist, he heard the scurry of more guards. They scrambled down the steps to reach him. Men shouted, breathing hoa.r.s.ely, slings on rifles rattling. As they rushed at him, Houston felt the air constrict around him from the pressure of their bodies. Then he heard the latch snap on a huge door beneath the canopy directly facing him. The door swung open, banging against a wall inside.

His vision wavered; he didn't have strength to raise his eyes. He squinted toward the cobblestones at the bottom of the door and saw the gleaming black of patent leather, of expensive evening shoes step toward him. Then the shoes stopped, so near that, if he had wanted to, he could have touched them.

Houston slowly raised his eyes. Black formal trousers, a black dinner jacket, a black dinner tie. The man was almost sixty tall and trim and handsome, full-lipped, with dark blazing eyes, strong cheeks, dark hair combed straight black from his sculptured forehead, skin so tanned that it was bronze. Pete blinked in awe.

"A foolish gesture, Mr. Houston," the man said.

"What would you have done?" Houston's angry words were m.u.f.fled, as if spoken through cotton batting.

A moment's thought. A shrugging compliment, the eyes amused. "The same."