Jessica wanted to call out to him, tell him to hang on, but then that sounded foolish in this context, and she feared being found out. She dared not shout, wondering where Strand might be, if he were watching her from one of the deep shadows across the cavernous hall.
Jessica haltingly raised her flashlight to the dying victim left here on the cross, her fear rising to a crescendo she had never known before. Her flash shakily played now over the features of the dying man on the cross, and she realized almost instantly that the victim returned a familiar image, that of a blond Christ with a familiar face: the near dead man, his eyes gaping back at her before rolling back in his head, was Father Martin Christian Strand.
“Oh, Jesus! Luc Sante!” she moaned just before something hard and flinty struck her in the back of the head, sending her into darkness.
“So now what?” Copperwaite had asked Sharpe after the cathedral was torn apart in an effort to locate Jessica, Luc Sante, Strand, anyone, but Sharpe's first instinct had been right, the place had been deserted.
It was then that Sharpe said, “Back to the clapper bridge.”
“Clapper bridge?”
“Yes, I'll inform you along the way. Let's go!” That had been fifteen minutes earlier. The twosome now stood at the lip of the tunnel which Sharpe, Jessica, and Tatham had scoured the day before, finding nothing. By now, Sharpe had explained to Copperwaite what this place was and how they had come to find it.
“But if you've already searched it and found nothing, Richard,” moaned Copperwaite, “why the deuce are we searching it again?”
“I know no other way to go than to attempt the other corridor, the one Tatham said would only lead us away from St. Albans, and perhaps it does lead away from St. Albans as indicated on the map, but then, we found no underground debauchery in the dungeons there, so perhaps the killer's lair has no direct connection with St. Albans, at least not the place.”
“Did the RIBA guy tell you where the other tunnel led?”
'Toward Oxford Street and the tourist area.”
“Old Crown's End bazaar? Good, I have to find a gift for my nephew anyway. So let's push on through this muck,” replied Copperwaite, frowning at the horror and sludge before him. “Smells bloody awful.”
Sharpe pushed through the grate and into the pipe that led to the tunnel, the water higher today but no less filthy and stagnant for it.
Copperwaite complained as he sloshed through in his good shoes, Sharpe's mendon of three sets of 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.”