David Morrell - The Covenant Of The Flame

'Why the hell did you come to Spain? How did you enter the country? You don't have any passports.'

'My mother was recently murdered,' Tess continued to repeat what she'd answered so often. 'Alan Gerrard is – was – a longtime, close, family friend. He invited my fiance and me to accompany him on Air Force Two to Spain in the hopes that the trip would take my mind off my sorrow. His invitation was sudden. We didn't have time to get our passports, and I was too stunned by grief to think clearly, to refuse a request not just from a friend but from the vice president of the United States. Would you have turned him down?'

'But what were you doing in – how did you get to – northern Spain?'

'Before Alan began his official duties, he wanted to visit José Fulano at his estate near Pamplona. The two were friends. But I suspect that they might also have had some business to discuss. At any rate, we were taken along. Alan was quite enthusiastic, still trying to distract me from my grief. He claimed that he'd never forgive himself if we didn't have a chance to see that dramatically beautiful area of the country.'

'A cave? At midnight?'

'Because of the feast of Saint John. Both Alan and José insisted on showing us the bonfires in the valleys. Then they ordered the helicopter to land so they could also show us the cave. It was special, they said, because it had Ice-age paintings that very few people had ever seen.'

'Ice-age paintings?'

'Yes. They were beautiful.'

'And that's when the terrorists struck?'

'The attack was sudden. I don't know how the assassins knew we were in the cave, but all at once there was gunfire. Explosions. I saw Alan and José shot several times. My fiance and I raced down a tunnel. The explosions weakened the cavern's ceiling. It collapsed but not before we managed to find that stream and escape.'

'Seems awfully damned convenient.'

'We were lucky. What would you prefer – that we'd been killed as well? There'd be no one to tell you what happened.'

'The assassins. Who were they?'

'I have no idea. They wore masks. I could barely see them in the dim light in the cave.'

And on and on. Although the interrogators tried to find inconsistencies, Tess and Craig stuck to their story. Much of it was true, and the vice president's aides along with the Secret Service agents he'd left in Madrid verified those parts. What couldn't be verified and what the investigators had to take on faith was that Tess and Craig weren't able to provide information that could help identify the assassins.

Meanwhile efforts to retrieve the bodies proved useless. The interior of the mountain had completely collapsed. Leveling the mountain was out of the question. The corpses would have to stay entombed there forever with the massive peak as their gravestone.

Unidentified assassins. No hint of anything except the Ice-age paintings in the cave. Those two pieces of disinformation – a term she'd learned from her father – were the key to Tess's plan to protect her and Craig, and that disinformation was what she read in a newspaper as she and Craig were flown in Air Force Two back to America. The interrogation would continue in Washington, she'd been told, but she had no doubt that the investigators would soon release them, that she and Craig would be dismissed (presumably with lingering suspicions about them) as two innocent bystanders.

The newspaper she read on the flight to America was the international edition of USA Today , and in the economic section, she noticed an article that roused her spirits. Public outrage against the slaughter of elephants for their tusks had resulted in an international trade ban on ivory, with the consequence that the price of ivory had plummeted from $200 per kilogram to less than $5. Poachers no longer considered elephants valuable enough to massacre them. The species had a chance to be saved. At the same time, the article noted, other species were disappearing at the alarming speed of 150,000 per year.

Nonetheless the salvation of the elephants gave Tess hope, just as the brilliant sky, unusually free of smog, also gave her hope as she now wiped her tears at her mother's graveside.

She turned to Craig, her voice deep with mourning. 'There's something I never told you. The night we sat at the fire in the valley?'

Craig put his arms around her.

She leaned her head against his chest and managed the strength to continue. 'I began to understand why the followers of Mithras worship flames. The blaze rises from things that are dead. Old branches. Dry leaves. Like the phoenix.'

Craig nodded. 'Out of death comes life.'

She raised her head. The trouble is, the flames aren't immortal anymore than the branches and leaves were. Eventually the blaze has to die as well, turning into, becoming…' With a sob, she stared again at her mother's grave. 'Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.'

Craig didn't respond for a moment. 'Sprinkle ashes on a garden, though, and the earth becomes more fertile. The cycle of death turning into life continues.'

Her voice sounded choked. 'The miracle of nature. Except that my mother's gone forever.'

'But you're still here. And you're the life she created.'

'I'll try to do what I hope would have made her proud of me,' Tess said. 'So many years, I avoided her, and now I wish so much that she and I could spend time together.'

'Do you think she'd have minded being buried here instead of next to your father in Arlington National Cemetery?'

'No.' Tess had trouble speaking. 'My mother was a diplomat's wife. She knew the bitter rules. My father's career came first. She always had to stay in the background. But she didn't object. Because she loved him.'

Craig kissed her tear-swollen eyes. 'And I love you. And I promise you'll always be first, the most important part of my life.'

Holding each other, they walked from the grave.

'I wanted revenge so bad,' Tess said. 'But when I killed Gerrard and Fulano, I didn't do it to get even. I didn't enjoy it. It didn't give me satisfaction. I hated it. I only did it to save us. That makes me feel clean somehow, or at least as clean as I'm able to feel under the circumstances. All the men I shot. All the blood. The ugliness. I keep having nightmares.'

'I'll be there to share them with you.'

They passed other graves, approaching their rented car.

'At least no one knows who really killed Gerrard and Fulano,' Tess said. The Inquisitors think they did. The heretics will think so, too. We won't be blamed.'

'But you still believe they won't come after us?' Craig asked.

'It's a calculated risk, but yes, that's what I believe. When we were questioned, we never mentioned Father Baldwin and the Inquisition. We never talked about the heretics. We never revealed that there was a chapel in that cave. Both sides must have informants who know what we told the investigators. I'm hoping they realize that our silence about them is an act of good faith.'

'You want to leave it at that?' Craig asked. 'You don't want to try to stop them?'

'We'd never be able to. I'm not sure which is worse, the heretics using terrorism to try to save the planet, or the Inquisitors using vigilante tactics to stop what they think is theological evil. Let the bastards fight it out. With luck, maybe they'll destroy each other, and people will get smart enough to save the world the right way, with love.'

They passed the final row of graves and reached their car. As they drove from the cemetery, Craig turned on the radio, and a news announcement made Craig stop abruptly at the curb.

Two days ago, when Tess's mother had been buried, there'd been a state funeral for Alan Gerrard. Earlier, as the constitution dictated, the president had nominated a new vice president, subject to approval by both Houses of Congress. Despite the nation's turmoil, President Garth had decided that he didn't dare postpone his trip to Peru to attend a major drug-control conference. After all, as he said with deep tones of bravery in a nationally televised speech, he couldn't allow the drug lords to think that the vice president's assassination made him afraid of possibly being assassinated himself. So he'd flown to Peru, and now the news announcer reported with barely subdued shock that Air Force One had been blown apart by portable ground-to-air missiles as the plane came in for a landing at Lima 's airport.