House of Acerbi

locked in on the target. Within seconds, he had tone and was squeezing down on the trigger. A split second later he released his grip and stood back.

“What are you doing?” Lev shouted.

“Look.”

Above and behind them, the chopper had drifted sideways in an attempt to match the slow speed of the barge, giving Alon a clear view of the lighted French tri-color painted on the chopper’s dark blue tail. It was a French police helicopter.

The chopper suddenly backed away before making a violent turn over the trees along the bank.

“I believe they just caught a glimpse of the Stinger,” Lev said.

“They’re probably on the radio with the military as we speak, which means that anyone monitoring their communications will also hear about a well-armed barge headed down the river toward the coast. It won’t take Acerbi’s people long to figure out we’re on this boat.”

“Run her up on the bank.”

“What?”

Lev pointed to a slight bend in the river ahead. “Run the bow up on the bank. We’re only a few miles from the coast now. We should be able to make it overland to the beach from there. Aim for that spot under those trees leaning out over the water. That should give us some cover.”

“I’ll let the families know we’re going ashore,” Leo shouted from the stairwell.

“Start getting them all up on deck!” Lev shouted. “I don’t want anyone below the waterline if we punch a hole in the hull when we hit.”

Within minutes of the command to run the barge aground, everyone below had been herded up on deck. They were all bracing for a collision when the huge barge slid gently up against the bank and came to an anticlimactic stop in the soft mud.

Alon leapt down into the shallow water at the stern of the barge and waded ashore. With Stinger in hand, he settled in under a clump of trees and began to scan the skies for any new threats. Moving quickly, the men on deck began helping people off the bow onto the bank, and as soon as the last person was safely on shore, the entire group took off through the countryside. Moving almost at a run, they were trying to put as much distance between themselves and the barge as possible, for everyone knew that it was now a target.

With Alon covering their retreat from the river, John and Ariella followed along behind the main group with Dr. Diaz. A lifelong battle with asthma was forcing the overweight scientist to stop along the way to catch his breath as his body was wracked with fits of wheezing.

“Are you ok to go on, Dr. Diaz?” Ariella asked. “Do you have some medicine or something with you?”

“Yes … in my bag.” He dropped to one knee while Ariella dug through his bag and found a red plastic inhaler. Reaching out, Diaz grabbed it and shoved it in his mouth. In quick succession, he inhaled two metered puffs, and within seconds, his wheezing seemed to lessen as the color returned to his face.

“I’ll be alright now. Thank you, but we need to get going. The people chasing us will stop at nothing until we are all dead.”

John and Ariella exchanged glances.

“You know who they are?” John asked.

“I’m certain they are Acerbi’s people.”

“You know him?”

“Let’s just say we’ve crossed paths in the past. Come on you two, let’s go.”

Diaz rose to his feet and stumbled forward as a puzzled John and Ariella followed behind. They had all assumed that Acerbi was somehow behind the attack on the castle, but Diaz seemed sure of it.

Leo and Lev needed to know about this as soon as possible … especially if Diaz had been withholding information he should have shared with them sooner.

Unlike the hilly terrain that surrounded the castle, the land they were now passing through was flat. In the bright moonlight, their silhouettes where highlighted as they moved silently through musty-scented olive groves on their way to the coast. By now, they could smell the sea, and the humidity of the offshore breeze bathed them in its welcoming embrace as they crept past darkened gated villas. The very act of walking, of being in motion on foot, seemed to re-energize the group in their struggle against an unknown enemy that seemed intent on their destruction for some reason.

Passing thorough one of the ever-present vineyards, their moving figures blended in among the twisted and gnarled grapevines, until finally, Moshe pointed out the rising shapes of sand dunes glowing under the moonlight in the distance. The group continued along a trail that led between two tall dunes, finally emerging onto a wide sandy beach that bordered the area where the Aude River emptied into the Mediterranean Sea. There, to their relief, they spotted two of the Carmela’s speedboats bobbing in the luminescent surf surrounded by crewmembers dressed in black.

A figure in the dunes stood up and called out to the group. “Is that you, Professor?”

“Yes,” Lev shouted back.

The figure slid down the side of the dune and jogged up to Lev. It was the crew member Alex had posted in the dunes as a lookout.

“Where’s the Carmela?”

“She’s blacked out, sir. We anchored her just beyond the third sand bar. The captain had us make a few practice runs in the boats. Our transit time from the beach to the yacht is down to five minutes, and that includes pushing the boats off the beach.”

“Good. We need to start loading right away. We think the people who attacked the castle know we’re out here somewhere … and they have helicopters.”

The crewman flashed his light three times, and soon a human chain stretched from the boats to the water’s edge. In all, a total of over thirty men, women, and children began wading through the waist-high surf to the waiting boats for the first run out to the yacht. When the two boats were full, the drivers shoved the throttles all the way forward, and soon, the roar from their engines faded, replaced instead with the rhythmic sound of the rolling surf.

The families with children had been the first to depart for the yacht, leaving all the members of the Bible Code Team, along with several men and women from the compound, temporarily stranded on the beach. Grouped together, they huddled between the dunes to prevent their outlines from casting moving shadows against the stark white sand in the bright moonlight.

In the hyper-alert state of waiting, each new sound made them jump. Was that the thump- thump of a helicopter in the distance? Was that the sound of an animal stepping on a twig, or was it the click of a round being chambered in a weapon pointed directly at them from behind the next sand dune?

The questions pummeled their thoughts, like the obsessive-compulsive checklists of the mind that torture those who fear they’ve forgotten something after they’ve left home. Did I close the garage door? Did I turn off the oven? The list of potential threats was endless.

Suddenly, like ghosts in the night, the Carmela’s white speedboats reappeared over the crests of the waves and inched their way toward the misty shore. Looking back over their shoulders, the group in the dunes bolted for the water. Without waiting for the boats to slide up onto the sand, the evacuees thrust themselves into the surf and pushed the slim speedboats around before climbing onboard. Within seconds, they were charging back out to sea, leaving resident sea birds and crabs in their wake, the sole inhabitants of a beach that appeared deserted.

It was good to be home, for that was what the Carmela had become to the Bible Code Team-a place of refuge away from a world seemingly gone mad. Hadar immediately set to work in the yacht’s galley preparing food for everyone, while Ariella and Nava began organizing the crew to assist the families in finding places where they could sleep. Every inch of the yacht’s interior space had been given over to sleeping bags and makeshift beds, and soon they were all settling down with bowls of quickly prepared seafood stew as the Carmela disappeared into a thick fog that had suddenly settled over the Mediterranean along the French coast.

Up in the yacht’s communications center, Lev was talking to some of the crewmembers manning their stations. They were all marveling at the sudden appearance of the fog-a fog that had not been in the forecast. It was as if God had finally embraced them in his arms, protecting them from the airborne assault they had all feared was eminent.