Nelson Demille - The Quest

“Yes, in Rome.”

“Well… I’m not sure who it was. An English lady.”

“How did you meet her?”

“In her hotel bar.”

“Did you go to her hotel, or yours?”

They were actually the same place, but he could imagine that Vivian would not like to think they’d all used the same bed. He replied, “Hers.” He also said, “I thought you had left for good.”

“You should have known better. But I understand, and I forgive you.”

“Thank you.”

“And when we get back to Rome, if I go off shopping, I hope you don’t think I’ve left you for good, and go off and fuck another lady you’ve met in the elevator or somewhere.”

“Right. That won’t happen.” He glanced up at the sky. “It’s getting dark.”

She took his arm and led him around the statue of the two-faced Janus. She said, “For security reasons, we must keep our clothes on, but I suggest you drop your pants.”

He liked that suggestion and pulled his pants and underwear down as she knelt in front of him. Vivian said, “We will learn a new Italian word today. Fellatio.” She put his now erect penis in her mouth and showed him the meaning of the word.

On the way back to the spa hotel, she said, “There is a romance in classical ruins-something hauntingly beautiful about a great edifice returning to nature.”

“Right.” He said to her, “We need to find some privacy tomorrow night.”

“I don’t think that will happen again out in the bush.”

“Well… let’s see.”

“I’m embarrassed as it is that Henry and Colonel Gann know what we’ve been up to.”

“I don’t think they do.”

“I don’t think they could have missed hearing your moaning echoing through the colonnade.”

“Really?”

They got back to the lobby, which was very dark now. At the far end of the big room lay the bones of the slaughtered men, where Father Armano had also lain dying.

Vivian said to him, “Tomorrow we go to where Father Armano was going. Do not be cynical-he will show us the way.”

“I’m counting on it.”

“Do you know what that statue was?”

“The two-faced guy?”

“That was Janus, the Roman god of the New Year-he faces back and forward.”

“I get it.”

“This is January.”

“Right.”

“Which reminded me of something. When I was in boarding school, which was English-run, I read a very beautiful passage-something that George VI said in his Christmas message to the English people, in the darkest year of the war. He said to them, ‘I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown. And he replied, Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.’ ”

“That is very beautiful.”

“Put your hand into the hand of God, Frank.”

“I’ll try.”

“You will.”

They rejoined the others.

They rose before dawn and had some bread and boiled eggs as they waited for better light.

The night had been long and uncomfortable, and the jungle sounds had kept them awake. Purcell began to wonder if anything short of the Holy Grail was worth getting eaten by mosquitoes and listening for Gallas.

Vivian seemed cheerful, and that annoyed him.

Gann, too, seemed ready to get moving, but Henry didn’t look well, and Purcell was a bit concerned about him. But if Henry complained, Purcell would remind him whose idea this was. Or was this his own idea?

The dawn came and they left the relative comfort of the spa hotel and walked down the steps. They moved quickly across the field and through the brush, then looked up and down the road. Gann said in a whisper, “I will cross first, then one at a time.”

Gann crossed the narrow road and knelt in the brush on the far side. Mercado followed, and then Vivian and Purcell brought up the rear.

They beat the bush on the side of the road, looking for an obvious trail-a trail that Father Armano might have taken to his imprisonment forty years ago, and which he may have been looking for again before he died in the spa. Dov’è la strada ? But even Gann couldn’t find an opening in the wall of tangled vegetation that lined the road.

Gann said, “We will walk on the road, though I’d rather not.” He instructed them, “The drainage ditch here is partially filled with dirt, as you see, and choked with brush. But we will dive into it if we hear a vehicle, or the sound of hoofbeats.”

Especially hoofbeats, Purcell thought.

“We will continue until we’ve found a trail that will take us into the interior of this rain forest.” He said, “I suggest we try south, toward Shoan.”

They began their walk south on the old Italian road that Purcell, Mercado, and Vivian had driven from Addis what seemed so long ago. The road, as Purcell recalled, was hard-packed, and he could now see evidence of the tar and gravel that the Italian Army had laid forty years before. But when Father Armano had walked the road-if he had walked it-the Italian engineers had not yet gotten this far. More important, any trails intersecting this road may have been more obvious forty years ago, before this area had become less traveled and less populated.

Gann stepped off the road now and then and smacked the brush with the side of his machete. After half an hour, Purcell said, “We’re going to wind up in Shoan soon.”

“That will be another two hours, Mr. Purcell.”

Up ahead was a huge gnarled tree, and Purcell picked up his pace. He got to the tree and said to his companions, “I am going to do some aerial recon.” He took the binoculars from Mercado, dropped his backpack, and shimmied up the wide trunk, then got hold of a branch and pulled himself up.

Gann said, “Watch for snakes, old boy.”

Purcell continued to climb the twisted branches and got about forty feet off the ground.

He sat on a bare branch and scanned the area around him with the binoculars. The trees near the road were not tightly spaced, though there was very dense brush between them. As he looked west, he could see the beginning of a great triple-canopy rain forest.

He turned his attention to the road and looked north, toward Tana and Gondar, but he saw no one approaching. The road was probably better traveled before the revolution and civil war, he thought, but now only armed men roamed the countryside, and he didn’t want to meet any of them-unless they were friends of Colonel Gann.

Purcell scanned the road to the south, and it was also deserted, though he saw some sort of catlike animals crossing a hundred yards up the road. He watched them go into the bush, then he focused closely on the area where they’d disappeared.

Gann called up softly, “See anything?”

“Maybe.” He made sure he knew where the cats had disappeared, then climbed down and jumped onto the road.

Gann asked, “How was your view?”

“Lots of trees out there.”

“What type of trees, old boy?”

Purcell described the terrain and suggested to Gann, “You can climb the next tree.” He told everyone, “The good news is I saw some sort of… medium-sized cats going into the bush. So maybe there’s a game trail.”

“Excellent.” Gann guessed, “Some sort of lynx, I would think.”

Mercado asked, “Are they dangerous?”

Gann replied, “Only if they have something better than my nine-millimeter Uzi.”

Purcell led them up the road, and over the drainage ditch, to the ten-foot-high wall of tropical vegetation. He said, “Right about here.”

Gann got on all fours, like a cat, and said, “Here is the trailhead.” They all crawled through the tangled brush onto a shoulder-wide trail, overhung with branches that formed a natural ceiling above their heads.