Eric Lustbader - The Testament

"I'll take care of the Wassersturms, mon ami."

"Then there's no question, Jordan. As you have just confirmed, you have a company to run."

"But you're my friend-more than a friend."

"I know that and I appreciate it," Bravo said. "But send someone else. Please."

Jordan pondered his response to this request for a moment, then he nodded to the woman. "Bon, not to worry," he said into the phone, "I will send someone you know and trust."

"Thank you, Jordan," Bravo said with relief. "I won't forget this."

It was dark on the plane. Late at night, in the jumbo jet thirty-three thousand feet over the black, restless Atlantic, most of the passengers in business class were either asleep or watching the tiny glowing screens of the portable DVD players provided by the airline. But exhausted as Bravo and Jenny were, they could not find it within themselves to surrender to sleep.

Instead, theatrically spotlighted by the lights above their seats, they talked in low tones. There was an unconscious need in them both to get to know each other better. They had survived pitched battles, saved one another from almost certain death. Soldiers fighting side by side in the strange invisible war that defined the Voire Dei, they had forged a link more intimate than sex, and yet they were still strangers to one another.

"The only ones who had faith in me were my father and yours-and of course Paolo Zorzi, my instructor," Jenny was saying. "The others opposed my being allowed into the Order, let alone my becoming a Guardian." The full duskiness of her skin had returned, and in the vertical shaft of illumination it was possible to overlook the bruises and small cuts to which her skin had been lately subject. "But your father was very powerful; many in the Haute Cour were afraid of opposing him to his face."

A flight attendant came by with water, coffee, tea and juice, but they declined. Several individual lights were turned out, and it was even darker now inside the plane. By his calculation they were closer to Paris than they were to Washington.

"Was your initiation like mine?" he asked.

An ironic smile escaped her generous lips. "I'm a woman. It was nothing like yours."

"But you said my father and yours and this Paolo Zorzi believed in you."

Jenny nodded. "Yes, but there are some traditions that even they found impossible to ignore. I was given a simple black robe to dress in, then I was led to a small darkened windowless chamber. Save for four long candles in heavy brass sticks the room was bare, more like a prison cell or an executioner's chamber. It was very cold. The floor was made of ancient stone blocks. I was instructed to lie on my stomach and told to kiss the stone. A black shroud was draped over me. It was gauzy enough so that I could see the candles being placed at my head and feet. While I swore to give myself heart, mind and spirit to the Order, your father and Paolo Zorzi intoned an ancient prayer in a language I couldn't recognize."

"Do you remember any of the words?"

Jenny closed her eyes and her brow wrinkled. She spoke three words, badly, as it turned out. Nevertheless, Bravo recognized the language.

"It's Seljuk," he said, adding, "The Seljuk were the dominant tribe in Turkey in the thirteenth century, and twice successfully invaded the important trading city of Trebizond that the Greeks had founded along the south coast of the Black Sea to supply Europe with silks, spices and, perhaps most importantly, alum-the substance used to bind dyes to cloth."

Jenny asked him to repeat the words until she could speak them correctly.

"Thank you," she said.

"Anytime. Now tell me about the rest of your initiation."

Jenny let out a breath. "Zorzi dug his knuckles into the small of my back until the pain was so great that I gasped and tears came to my eyes.

" 'Thus, like your sisters,' your father chanted in Latin, 'do you come in suffering and in pain to the Order.'"

"That sounds suspiciously like part of the medieval vow for taking the veil," Bravo said.

"Bingo." Jenny nodded. "The initiation was taken directly from the one administered to Venetian women in the sixteen hundreds when they became nuns. They were, in effect, made to witness their own funeral."

"So it seems that throughout its history the Order did accept women," Bravo said.

"It would seem so, though you and I know that history records it otherwise."

He thought about the injustice of this for some time. At length, he leaned closer to her and said, "There's something bothering me." He liked her scent; it made him pleasantly woozy, and he was only too happy to surrender himself to this voluptuous feeling. "You haven't once tried to contact anyone in the Order, and when I asked you about its resources you were evasive. Why?"

She was silent for some time, but her eyes were busy, as if she was trying to work out a particularly knotty problem. At length, she turned to him and said very softly, "It was your father's contention-and my own father's as well, I believe-that there is a traitor within the Haute Cour, someone who has been on the inside for some time, someone trusted, a sleeper, if you will."

"Obviously, you believe it as well."

"I had believed our people to be absolutely safe, untouchable. A traitor is the logical explanation for why the Knights suddenly have been so successful in assassinating five members of the Haute Cour, including your father."

"So, bottom line, we're cut off from our best resources."

"That's what it comes down to." Her eyes were hooded.

"There's something else, isn't there?"

"Yes. Dexter was so certain the traitor existed that he moved the cache of secrets without telling the other members of the Haute Cour."

"That would be just like my father." Bravo put his head back against the seat, and for a moment his eyes lost their focus. "I miss him." He shook his head. "But it's a strange thing-looking back on it, we had what you might call a… difficult relationship."

"Why?"

"He demanded so much from me and I didn't understand his motivations."

But he'd hesitated a fraction too long. Was there was something more he wasn't telling her? Jenny would hardly have been surprised. There were whole sections of her own personal history that she couldn't tell him.

"I know a little of your father," Bravo said, "but what about your mother? I didn't see any sign of her in the house."

Jenny looked away for a moment, as she was wont to do when he'd posed a particularly thorny question. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly and deliberately. "My mother left some time ago. She lives in Taos now. She's a potter, she has a Navajo teacher who I think is also her lover, though she hasn't said as much. Not that she would, that wouldn't be like her at all." She paused, then, almost as an afterthought, she said, "She's learning to speak the language, so she tells me."

"She wants to speak to her lover in his own tongue."

"What a romantic you're turning out to be," Jenny said with a bleak smile. "Sadly, no. More likely it's simply because the language is exceptionally difficult to learn. My mother tends to define herself by challenges."

"Did your father take her leaving badly?"

"Yes, but to tell you the truth I'm not sure of the reason. Did he love her or simply rely on her? You know men. They can accomplish anything in business, but they're helpless as lambs in the house. My father couldn't make himself a cup of tea, and as for using the dishwasher… well, a week after she moved out I had to clean up a ton of suds when he used Dawn instead of Cascade." She shifted in her seat, settling herself more comfortably. She had her shoes off and was curled up with her knees bent and her feet beneath her. "Of course, shortly after that he found someone else, as he was bound to do. He couldn't live alone and I couldn't keep taking care of him, even he knew that much."