“No need to worry,” Linden said. “He’s being protected.”
“I don’t doubt that. Just be aware that the Free Runners are still talking about him. He made us feel that there was a little bit of hope.”
Jugger left the shop and the three of them were alone together. Mother Blessing shifted her sword case and crossed the room. “He might tell his friends about this place. That means we have to move the Traveler.”
“Is that all you’re going to say?” Hollis asked. “Aren’t we going to do anything about his information?”
“What happens in Berlin is not our concern.”
“If the Shadow Program works, every government in the world is going to end up using it.”
“The technology is inevitable,” Mother Blessing said.
Hollis concentrated on the silver locket hanging from his neck and an ice-cold anger changed the tone of his voice. “You can think whatever you want-run around the world with your goddamn sword-but I’m not going to let the Tabula win.”
“I want obedience from you, Mr. Wilson. Not initiative. Blind obedience and mindless bravery.”
“Is that why you brought me to see Vicki’s body?” Hollis asked. “You wanted to turn me into a perfect little soldier?”
Mother Blessing smiled coldly. “I guess it didn’t work.”
“I want to destroy the people who killed Vicki. But I’ve got my own way of doing things.”
“You don’t know the history of the Tabula and the Harlequins. This conflict has been going on for thousands of years.”
“And look what’s happened. You Harlequins are so wrapped up in the past-all your little traditions-that you’ve lost the war.”
Linden sat down on a bench. “I don’t think we’re entirely defeated. But we are at a turning point. It’s time we did something.”
Mother Blessing spun around and faced the other Harlequin. Although her face was a rigid mask, her dark green eyes were intense and focused. “So now you’re on Mr. Wilson’s side?”
“I’m not on anyone’s side, but it’s time to face the enemy. The Tabula don’t fear us anymore, madam. We’ve been hiding for a long time.”
Mother Blessing touched her sword case as she moved around the cluttered room. Hollis felt as if she wanted to kill someone just to prove that she was alive. “Do you have a proposal?” she asked Hollis.
“I want to travel to Berlin, contact the Free Runners there, and destroy the Shadow Program.”
“And you’re going to do this alone?”
“Looks that way.”
“You’ll fail completely-unless a Harlequin is with you. Any successful plan will require my participation.”
“And what if I don’t want you to come along?” Hollis asked.
“You don’t have a choice, Mr. Wilson. What you’re telling us is that you want to be an ally, not a mercenary. All right, I’ll accept that change of status. But even allies require supervision.”
Hollis let a few seconds pass, and then he nodded his head. Mother Blessing relaxed slightly and smiled at Linden. “I can’t imagine why Mr. Wilson wouldn’t want to go to Berlin with me. I’m just a pleasant middle-aged Irishwoman…”
“Oui, madame. Une femme Irlandaise… with a very sharp sword.”
37
At random intervals, the man with the blond braids and the black man wearing the white lab coat would remove Gabriel from his cell and drag him downstairs to the school gymnasium. The long, narrow room still had bleachers on one side and a wooden floor with red stripes painted on the edge. Instead of basketball and badminton, the room was used for the torture of prisoners.
There were no new forms of torture in hell. All of the techniques used to inflict pain, fear, and humiliation had already been used in Gabriel’s world. At some earlier time, the wolves had learned about the four barriers that separated their own realm from the others; their particular system of torture corresponded to the barriers of air, fire, water, and earth.
For the interrogation inspired by air, Gabriel’s wrists were tied to a rope and his arms twisted behind his back. The rope was attached to a basketball hoop; then he was pulled upward so that he was dangling a few inches off the ground. “Are you flying?” the men asked. “Why don’t you fly a little more.” Then someone would push him, and Gabriel would swing back and forth while his arms were almost pulled from their sockets.
For fire, metal rods were heated up in a gas flare and then pressed against his skin. For water, his head was pushed deep into a tub of water and released only when he had sucked water into his lungs.
The “earth” interrogation was particularly frightening. One day, he was blindfolded and dragged out of his cell to a patch of dirt behind the school. Someone had placed a straight-backed chair at the bottom of a deep pit in the ground. Gabriel was strapped to the chair and then-slowly-his interrogators began to bury him alive.
The cold dirt surrounded his feet first, and then moved up past his legs, waist, and chest. Occasionally, the two wolves stopped and asked the same questions: Where is the passageway? How do we find it? Who knows a way out of this place? Finally the dirt reached Gabriel’s face. He was completely covered, each breath drawing dirt into his nostrils, before the two men dug him out.
During each of these ordeals, Gabriel wondered if his father had also been captured. Maybe another group on the Island was holding him prisoner or maybe Matthew had finally found the passageway home. Gabriel tried to figure out what lesson his father had learned from this place. It wasn’t surprising to discover that hatred and anger had a persistent power, but compassion still survived within his heart.
Gabriel refused to eat the scraps of food brought to his cell, and the hungry guards gobbled down anything left in the bowl. Gradually, he became frail and weak, but his memories of Maya remained. He could see the intense grace of her body as they practiced together in the loft back in New York. He could remember the sadness in her eyes and the way her skin felt against his when they made love in the chapel. These moments were gone-lost forever-but sometimes they seemed more real than anything around him.
THE BLOND MAN called himself Mr. Dewitt, and the black man was Mr. Lewis. They were enormously proud of their names, as if having a name suggested both an elaborate past and a possible future. Perhaps because of the lab coat, Lewis had a quiet, serious manner. Dewitt was like a big boy in a schoolyard. Sometimes, when the two men were dragging their prisoner through the hallways, Dewitt would tell a joke and laugh. Both wolves were terrified of the commissioner of patrols, who held the power of life and death in this section of the city.
Time passed and, once again, he was brought back down to the gymnasium, where the tub of water was waiting for him. The men tied Gabriel’s wrists in front of him with a length of rope, and he suddenly glanced up at them.
“Do you think it’s right to do this?”
Both men looked surprised-as if they had never heard this question before. They glanced at each other, and then Lewis shook his head. “There’s no right or wrong on this island.”
“What did your parents teach you when you were children?”
“Nobody grew up here,” Dewitt growled.
“Were there any books in the school library? A philosophy book or a religious book-like the Bible?”
Both men glanced at each other as if they shared a secret; then Lewis reached into the outside pocket of the lab coat and pulled out a loose-leaf school notebook filled with stained sheets of paper.
“This is what we call a Bible,” he explained. “After the fighting started, certain people realized that they were going to be killed. Before they died, they wrote books describing where weapons were stored and how to destroy their enemies.”