The Dark River

“What’s in this photograph?”

Startled, Sister Teresa stopped giving her prepared speech. “That’s Skellig Columba, an island on the west coast of Ireland. It has a convent run by the Poor Clares.”

“Is that your order?”

“No. We’re Benedictines.”

“But I thought everything in this crypt was either about your order or the English martyrs.”

Sister Teresa’s eyes moved downward and her lips tightened. “God doesn’t care about countries. Just souls.”

“I’m not questioning that idea, Sister. But it does seem strange to find a photograph of an Irish convent in this shrine.”

“I suppose you’re right. It doesn’t quite fit in.”

“Did someone from outside the convent leave it here?” Gabriel asked.

The nun reached into her pocket and pulled out the heavy metal ring. “I am sorry, sir. But it’s time for you to go.”

Gabriel tried to hide his excitement as he followed Sister Teresa back upstairs. A moment later he was standing on the sidewalk. The sun had fallen below the trees in Hyde Park and it was getting cold. He unlocked the Blue Monster and rode the bicycle up Bayswater Road toward the roundabout.

Glancing in the rearview mirror welded to the handlebars, he saw a motorcycle rider wearing a black leather jacket about a hundred yards behind him. The rider could have roared up the street and disappeared into the city, but he held back, staying close to the curb. The rider’s tinted helmet concealed his face. His appearance reminded Gabriel of the Tabula mercenaries who had chased after him in Los Angeles three months ago.

Gabriel made a quick turn onto Edgware Road and checked the mirror. The rider stayed behind him. The road was clogged with rush-hour traffic. Buses and cabs were only a few inches from one another as they traveled east. He turned onto Blomfield Road, bumped onto a sidewalk, and began to zigzag through the crowd that was leaving office buildings and hurrying to the underground. An older woman stopped and scolded him. “On the street-please!” But he ignored the angry looks and headed around the corner to Warwick Avenue.

A butcher’s shop. A pharmacy. A restaurant advertising Kurdish food. Gabriel skidded to a stop and tossed the Blue Monster behind some bales of discarded cardboard boxes. Moving quickly, he returned to the sidewalk and passed through the electric door of a supermarket.

A shelf stacker glanced at him as he grabbed a shopping basket and hurried down an aisle. Should he return to Vine House? No, the Tabula might be waiting for him. They would kill his new friends with the same cold efficiency they had used on the families at New Harmony.

Gabriel reached the end of the aisle, turned the corner, and saw that the motorcycle rider was waiting for him. The rider was a tough-looking man with massive shoulders and arms, a shaven head, and smoker’s lines in his face. He held the tinted helmet in his left hand and a satellite phone in his right.

“Don’t run, Monsieur Corrigan. Here. Take this.”

The rider extended his hand, offering the satellite phone. “Talk to your friend,” the man said. “But don’t forget to use soft language. No names.”

Gabriel took the phone and heard a faint crackle of static. “Who is this?” he asked.

“I’m in London with one of our friends,” Maya said. “The man who gave you the phone is my business associate.”

The motorcycle rider smiled slightly, and Gabriel realized that he had been tracked down by Linden, the French Harlequin.

“Can you hear me?” Maya said. “Are you all right?”

“I’m okay,” Gabriel said. “It’s good to hear your voice. I just found out where my father is living. We have to go find him…”

18

Hollis ate breakfast at a coffee shop, then walked down Columbus Avenue to the Upper West Side. It had been four days since Vicki and the others had left for London. During that time, Hollis had moved into a shabby single-residency hotel and found a job as a bouncer at a downtown club. When Hollis wasn’t working he had offered bits of information to surveillance programs that fed into the Vast Machine. Each clue was supposed to convince the Tabula that Gabriel was still hiding in the city. Maya had given him a Harlequin slang word for what he was doing. It was called chumming-a fisherman term for throwing bait into the water to attract sharks.

The Upper West Side was filled with restaurants, nail salons, and Starbucks coffee shops. Hollis had never been able to figure out why so many men and women spent the day at Starbucks sipping lattes as they stared at their computers. Most of them looked too old to be students and too young to be retired. Occasionally, he had glanced over someone’s shoulder to see what project took so much effort. He began to believe that everyone in Manhattan was writing the same movie screenplay about the romantic problems of the urban middle class.