Wellington boots in the back of his car not easing his suffering. “I just bought these shoes. Italian leathers.”
“Best kind. They'll clean right up.”
“But they'll retain the stench.”
Sharpe agreed as he trudged ahead of his partner, saying, “Aye, that's-struth, all right.”
“Cost me a week's pay on the black market.”
“Quit your complaining, Coppers. I'll buy you a new pair, and you can resell these to the marketman.”
“I just don't want this all to be for naught. And I'm worried about Dr. Coran.”
“As am I… as am I…”
“She is the way!” declared Father Jerrard Luc Sante, pointing at the unconscious form of Jessica Coran where she lay on the cold, coal-blackened floor of the cavem. “I brought her here because I firmly believe that we must begin with another, someone not of our community, someone yet unborn and uninitiated, you see, a child whom Christ will take as his receptacle to rise from the death throes of an unborn innocent.”
“You speak of her as if she were an unborn child.”
“She is, in our ways, she is unborn.”
“When did you decide this?”
“We've talked about it, that our selections must be younger, stronger in mind and spirit and body,” he replied to his congregation's dissenters. There were always dissenters, he reminded himself now, doing his level best to remain calm and in control. He pointed at Martin Strand, saying, “I gave you my spiritual son for this purpose, convinced him of the wisdom of going before God in the ultimate sacrifice and there he stands. Wilt not you look on your Father Strand?”
Through the haze of unconsciousness, Jessica picked up bits and pieces of the conversation going on around her.
“Strand is younger than this woman.”
“In body only. In spirit and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus, Strand is the older of the two. I bring you a person who has fought evil her endre life. Who better for Christ to blow His eternal and blessed breath into, should He fail to use Martin's form?”
Jessica half-heard the voices as they bounced about the walls of the catacomb, and she heard the work of men who, like electrical pole linemen, worked to get Father Strand down from the cross. Strand was long dead now.
Someplace in her mind, her brain began to regroup and fashion some connections in its attempt to compute how Father Strand could already be dead if he had, in fact, been only steps ahead of her coming down into this hell. The timetable felt completely off. When she and Father Luc Sante had seen Strand get into a cab outside St. Albans, she realized now that what she had seen hadn't actually been Strand. She'd taken Father Luc Sante's word that it had been Strand who dropped into the cab for the bazaar. And at the bazaar, later, Luc Sante had pointed out Strand, but again, while Jessica had followed the back of a man's head and a pair of wide shoulders, she had not once gotten a good look at Strand. It followed that it had been one of Luc Sante's disciples disguising himself as Strand to lure her here in a carefully contrived plot to isolate her.
Jessica fought the dark interior of her mind where a part of her wished to remain in hiding, but someone saw her body stir and her eyes blink, and this woman screeched a loud, “She's waking up!” Jessica's single eye opened, focusing on one of the Houghton twins of Gloucester.
Jessica saw the little hole of the business end of her own Browning automatic, stripped from her ankle holster, pointed directly at her eyes. Luc Sante snatched away the gun from the Houghton sister who held it on Jessica, frightening the woman off by pointing it at her. Luc Sante also held Jessica's. 38 revolver.
“Dear Jessica,” began Luc Sante, “it will now be your pleasure to have a role in Christ's Second Coming.”
“How could you be a part to these atrocious murders, Father? You!”
“Murder? No. It was never about murder, dear. This isn't one of your sordid, filthy serial killer cases, Dr. Coran. Look there, at Strand there”-he pointed to where others prayed over the young man's corpse-”he begged me to please accept him next, and-”
“Accept him? Listen to yourself, Luc Sante. You're playing God.”
“He pleaded, begged me to take him next. As for playing God, the crucifixions always remained throughout a choice my followers willingly made, and the last time I looked, freedom of religion and freedom of choice remains legal.” He indicated his flock of dwindling followers, perhaps forty, among them a number of familiar faces: the Houghton twins; Mrs. Eeadna, the secretary; Luc Sante's patients whom she'd seen coming and going; and in shadow, there stood Tatham from the RIBA, the man she and Sharpe had trusted. She half expected to see Copperwaite and possibly Sharpe step from the shadows to complete the nightmare.
“You,” she said to Tatham whose stem glare replied in silent menace.
“Don't be so hard on Tatham. He was to be next until you came this way, Jessica.”
“Me? I'm not here of my free will.”
“Ahhh, but you are. You willingly chased what you perceived to be evil to this place, and in so doing, you have instead found benevolence and a love of mankind, a cabal bent on lifting our species to the next and greatest plane, the level of pure love, pure giving, pure religious thought- Jung's overmind.”
“Put her on the cross,” said Tatham, breaking his silence. “Else, the world finds out about us and we are all stopped in our efforts, Father.”
Luc Sante solemnly nodded and simply said, 'Take her.”
Jessica put up a struggle, bloodying Tatham's nose, tearing loose, making a run for the direction in which she'd come, but she was roughly brought down when the others tackled her and dragged her back to the altar.
“I am sorry that you are fighting this so, dear Jessica,” said Father Luc Sante. “In a manner of speaking, your whole life has led to this moment, and you should actually relish it, delight in it, for you die here for the greater glory of Jesus Christ and our Lord, and for the greater glory of all mankind, my dear.”
Her lip trembling, Jessica could only pierce the old man with her sudden hatred and contempt for him. “All you stood for, all that nonsense you spouted about creating a psychology of evil, about combadng evil at the source, and who is the greater evil than you, Luc Sante? You have become the thing you despise most.”
“Then perhaps we are two of a kind. Perhaps I will join you after, and in the afterworld, we will continue this debate. But for now…” He jerked his head to one side, indicating that the others now could take her to the cross. 'Tie her and prepare the drug and prepare her for the stakes,” he ordered.
“What about the tongue branding?” asked one of the Houghton sisters, her question sounding like a curse.
“They all had their tongues branded to send them safely over,” agreed the other sister, sounding balmy in the head.
“This one don't belong… isn't a believer!” chided Tatham. “She shouldn't be branded. We're needing to rid ourselves of her, and that's all.”
“But isn't that…”
“Murder!” shouted Jessica.
“Inject her, now!” ordered Luc Sante, tired of the bandying about, not wishing to lose control of his meager following, nearly a sixth of whom had already gone over, willingly, if he could be believed. Jessica had seen the stark evidence of how powerful the cult mentality could be on her cutting room slab, and she recalled the Hale- Bhopp comet aftermath in America some years before.
Jessica saw the slight quiver of glee going through Tatham's body as he plunged home the drug that would sedate her. She tried to pull away, to physically fight them, but there were too many hands holding her, and so she fought mentally to stay sharp. She cursed herself for having come full steam ahead, and for having held so tenaciously to her faith in Luc Sante.
The drug's effect worked on her now, making her drowsy, weak and uncaring, disinterested in her own execution, but she fought, shouting at them, shouting, “This is not a willing crucifixion! This is an execution! Murder! An execu… exe… cue… cue… don.”
And Jessica's system shut down, and somewhere deep in the recesses of her unconscious mind, she knew that she would wake up dying.
Luc Sante brought her around gently, his voice breaking through the pillow clouds of her deep slumber. A throbbing pain pulsed at the back of her head, and she felt a dampness there where blood had soaked her hair. She
