Experience a heart-pumping and thrilling tale of suspense!
Originally published in THRILLER (2006),
edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author James Patterson.
In this exciting Thriller Short, New York Times bestselling writer David Morrell revisits Saul, a character from his wildly popular thriller Brotherhood of the Rose.
An unexplained attack on Saul’s village motivates him to reenter the fray. It’s also what motivated Morrell to revisit a character he’d thought long gone.
But what would a Brotherhood story be without the Abelard sanction?
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The Abelard Sanction
David Morrell
CONTENTS
The Abelard Sanction
DAVID MORRELL
The Brotherhood of the Rose is a special book for David Morrell. It was his first New York Times bestseller. Later, it was the basis for an NBC miniseries. The “rose” in the title refers to the ancient symbol of secrecy as depicted in Greek mythology. Clandestine councils used to meet with a rose dangling above them and vowed not to divulge what was said sub rosa, under the rose. The “brotherhood” refers to two young men, Saul and Chris, who were raised in an orphanage and eventually recruited into the CIA by a man who acted as their foster father. Having spent time in an orphanage himself, Morrell readily identified with the main characters.
When Brotherhood was completed, Morrell so missed its world that he wrote a similarly titled thriller, The Fraternity of the Stone, in which he introduced a comparable character, Drew MacLane. Still hooked on the theme of orphans and foster fathers (Morrell thinks of this as self-psychoanalysis), he wrote The League of Night and Fog in which Saul from the first thriller meets Drew from the second. Night and Fog is thus a double sequel that is also the end of a trilogy. Morrell intended to write a further thriller in the series and left a deliberately dangling plot thread that was supposed to propel him into a fourth book. But his fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, died from complications of a rare form of bone cancer known as Ewing’s sarcoma. Suddenly, the theme of orphans searching for foster fathers no longer spoke to his psyche. Morrell was now a father trying to fill the void left by a son, a theme later explored in several non-Brotherhood novels, especially Desperate Measures and Long Lost.
These many years later, Morrell still receives a couple of requests a week, wanting to know how the plot thread would have been secured and asking him to write more about Saul. When this anthology was planned, Morrell was specifically asked about a new Brotherhood story. He resisted, not wanting to go back to those dark days. But Saul and his wife, Erika, returned to his imagination and refused to leave. The plot thread—an unexplained attack on Saul’s village—has been tied. Perhaps both Morrell and his readers will now find closure. There wasn’t room to include Drew and his friend, Arlene, but fans will sense them, unnamed, in the background.
One other element is included, too—for what would a Brotherhood story be without the Abelard sanction?
THE ABELARD SANCTION
At the start, Abelard safe houses existed in only a half-dozen cities: Potsdam, Oslo, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Alexandria and Montreal. That was in 1938, when representatives of the world’s major intelligence communities met in Berlin and agreed to strive for a modicum of order in the inevitable upcoming war by establishing the principle of the Abelard sanction. The reference was to Peter Abelard, the poet and theologian of the Dark Ages, who seduced his beautiful student Heloise and was subsequently castrated in family retaliation. Afraid for his life, Abelard took refuge in a church near Paris and eventually established a sanctuary called The Paraclete, in reference to the Holy Spirit’s role as advocate and intercessor. Anyone who came for help was guaranteed protection.
The modern framers of the Abelard sanction reasoned that the chaos of another world war would place unusual stress on the intelligence operatives within their agencies. While each agency had conventional safe houses, those sanctuaries designated “Abelard” would embody a major extension of the safe house concept. There, in extreme situations, any member of any agency would be guaranteed immunity from harm. These protected areas would have the added benefit of functioning as neutral meeting grounds in which alliances between agencies could be safely negotiated and intrigues formulated. The sanctuaries would provide a chance for any operative, no matter his or her allegiance, to rest, to heal and to consider the wisdom of tactics and choices. Anyone speaking frankly in one of these refuges need not fear that his or her words would be used as weapons outside the protected walls.
The penalty for violating the Abelard sanction was ultimate. If any operative harmed any other operative in an Abelard safe house, the violator was immediately declared a rogue. All members of all agencies would hunt the outcast and kill him or her at the first opportunity, regardless if the transgressor belonged to one’s own organization. Because Abelard’s original sanctuary was in a church, the framers of the Abelard sanction decided to continue that tradition. They felt that, in a time of weakening moral values, the religious connection would reinforce the gravity of the compact. Of course, the representative from the NKVD was skeptical in this regard, religion having been outlawed in the USSR, but he saw no harm in allowing the English and the Americans to believe in the opiate of the masses.
During the Second World War and the escalating tensions of the subsequent cold war, Abelard sanctuaries proved so useful that new ones were established in Bangkok, Singapore, Florence, Melbourne, Ferlach, Austria and Santa Fe, New Mexico. The latter was of special note because the United States representative to the 1938 Abelard meeting doubted that the sanction could be maintained. He insisted that none of these politically sensitive, potentially violent sites would be on American soil. But he turned out to be wrong. In an ever more dangerous world, the need for a temporary refuge became greater. In a cynical profession, the honor and strength of the sanction remained inviolate.
* * *
Santa Fe means Holy Faith. Abelard would approve, Saul Grisman thought as he guided a nondescript rented car along a dusk-shadowed road made darker by a sudden rainstorm. Although outsiders imagined that Santa Fe was a sun-blistered, lowland, desert city similar to Phoenix, the truth was that it had four seasons and was situated at an altitud
e of seven thousand feet in the foothills of a range of the Rocky Mountains known as Sangre de Cristo (so-called because Spanish explorers had compared the glow of sunset on them to what they imagined was the blood of Christ). Saul’s destination was toward a ridge northeast of this artistic community of fifty thousand people. Occasional lightning flashes silhouetted the mountains. Directions and a map lay next to him, but he had studied them thoroughly during his urgent flight to New Mexico and needed to stop only once to refresh his memory of landmarks that he’d encountered on a mission in Santa Fe years earlier. His headlights revealed a sign shrouded by rain: Camino de la Cruz, the street of the cross. Fingers tense, he steered to the right along the isolated road.
There were many reasons for an Abelard safe house to have been established near Santa Fe. Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was invented, was perched on a mountain across the valley to the west. Sandia National Laboratories, a similar research facility important to U.S. security, occupied the core of a mountain an hour’s drive south near Albuquerque. Double agent Edward Lee Howard eluded FBI agents at a sharp curve on Corrales Street here and escaped to the Soviet Union. Espionage was as much a part of the territory as the countless art galleries on Canyon Road. Many of the intelligence operatives stationed in the area fell in love with the Land of Enchantment, as the locals called it, and remained in Santa Fe after they retired.
The shadows of piñon trees and junipers lined the potholed road. After a quarter mile, Saul reached a dead end of hills. Through flapping windshield wipers, he squinted from the glare of lightning that illuminated a church steeple. Thunder shook the car as he studied the long, low building next to the church. Like most structures in Santa Fe, its roof was flat. Its corners were rounded, its thick, earth-colored walls made from stuccoed adobe. A sign said, Monastery of the Sun and the Moon. Saul, who was Jewish, gathered that the name had relevance to the nearby mountains called Sun and Moon. He also assumed that in keeping with Santa Fe’s reputation as a New Age, crystal-and-feng-shui community, the name indicated this was not a traditional Catholic institution.
Only one car, as dark and nondescript as Saul’s, was in the parking lot. He stopped next to it, shut off his engine and headlights, and took a deep breath, holding it for a count of three, exhaling for a count of three. Then he grabbed his over-the-shoulder travel bag, got out, locked the car and hurried through the cold downpour toward the monastery’s entrance.
Sheltered beneath an overhang, he tried both heavy-looking wooden doors but neither budged. He pressed a button and looked up at a security camera. A buzzer freed the lock. When he opened the door on the right, he faced a well-lit lobby with a brick floor. As he shut the door, a strong breeze shoved past him, rousing flames in a fireplace to the left. The hearth was a foot above the floor, its opening oval in a style known as kiva, the crackling wood leaning upright against the back of the firebox. The aromatic scent of piñon wood reminded Saul of incense.
He turned toward a counter on the right, behind which a young man in a priest’s robe studied him. The man had ascetic, sunken features. His scalp was shaved bare. “How may I help you?”
“I need a place to stay.” Saul felt water trickle from his wet hair onto his neck.
“Perhaps you were misinformed. This isn’t a hotel.”
“I was told to ask for Mr. Abelard.”
The priest’s eyes changed focus slightly, becoming more intense. “I’ll summon the housekeeper.” His accent sounded European but was otherwise hard to identify. He pressed a button. “Are you armed?”
“Yes.”
The priest frowned toward monitors that showed various green-tinted night-vision images of the rain-swept area outside the building: the two cars in the parking lot, the lonely road, the juniper-studded hills in back. “Are you here because you’re threatened?”
“No one’s pursuing me,” Saul answered.
“You’ve stayed with us before?”
“In Melbourne.”
“Then you know the rules. I must see your pistol.”
Saul reached under his leather jacket and carefully withdrew a Heckler & Koch 9mm handgun. He set it on the counter, the barrel toward a wall, and waited while the priest made a note of the pistol’s model number (P2000) and serial number.
The priest considered the ambidextrous magazine and slide release mechanisms, then set the gun in a metal box. “Any other weapons?”
“A HideAway knife.” Modeled after a Bengal tiger’s claw, the HideAway was only four inches long. Saul raised the left side of his jacket. The blade’s small black grip was almost invisible in a black sheath parallel to his black belt. He set it on the counter.
The priest made another note and set the knife in the box. “Anything else?”
“No.” Saul knew that a scanner built into the counter would tell the priest if he was lying.
“My name is Father Chen,” a voice said from across the lobby.
As thunder rumbled, Saul turned toward another man in a priest’s robe. But this man was in his forties, Chinese, with an ample stomach, a round face and a shaved scalp that made him resemble Buddha. His accent, though, seemed to have been nurtured at a New England Ivy League university.
“I’m the Abelard housekeeper here.” The priest motioned for Saul to accompany him. “Your name?”
“Saul Grisman.”
“I meant your code name.”
“Romulus.”
Father Chen considered him a moment. In the corridor, they entered an office on the right, where the priest took a seat behind a desk and typed on a computer keyboard. He read the screen for a minute, then again looked at Saul, appearing to see him differently. “Romulus was one of the twins who founded Rome. Do you have a twin?”
Saul knew he was being tested. “Had. Not a twin. A brother of sorts. His name was…” Emotion made Saul hesitate. “Chris.”
“Christopher Kilmoonie. Irish.” Father Chen gestured toward the computer screen. “Code name Remus. Both of you were raised in an orphanage in Philadelphia. The Benjamin Franklin School for Boys. A military school.”
Saul knew he was expected to elaborate. “We wore uniforms. We marched with toy rifles. All our classes—history, trigonometry, literature, et cetera—were related to the military. All the movies we saw and the games we played were about war.”
“What is the motto of that school?”
“‘Teach them politics and war so their sons may study medicine and mathematics in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music and architecture.’”
“But that quotation is not from Benjamin Franklin.”
“No. It’s from John Adams.”
“You were trained by Edward Franciscus Eliot,” Father Chen said.
Again, Saul concealed his emotions. Eliot had been the CIA’s director for counterespionage, but Saul hadn’t known that until years later. “When we were five, he came to the school and befriended us. Over the years, he became…I guess you’d call him our foster father, just as Chris and I were foster brothers. Eliot got permission to take us from the school on weekends—to baseball games, to barbecues at his house in Falls Church, Virginia, to dojos where we learned martial arts. Basically, he recruited us to be his personal operatives. We wanted to serve our father.”
“And you killed him.”
Saul didn’t answer for a moment. “That’s right. It turned out the son of a bitch had other orphans who were his personal operatives, who loved him like a father and would do anything for him. But in the end he used all of us, and Chris died because of him, and I got an Uzi and emptied a magazine into the bastard’s black heart.”
Father Chen’s eyes narrowed. Saul knew where this was going. “In the process, you violated the Abelard sanction.”
“Not true. Eliot was off the grounds. I didn’t kill him in a sanctuary.”
Father Chen continued staring.
“It’s all in my file,” Saul explained. “Yes, I raised hell in a refuge. Eventually Eliot an
d I were ordered to leave. They let him have a twenty-four-hour head start. But I caught up to him.”
Father Chen tapped thick fingers on his desk. “The arbiters of the sanction decided that the rules had been bent but not broken. In exchange for information about how Eliot was himself a mole, you were given unofficial immunity as long as you went into exile. You’ve been helping to build a settlement in Israel. Why didn’t you stay there? For God’s sake, given your destructive history, how can you expect me to welcome you to an Abelard safe house?”
“I’m looking for a woman.”
Father Chen’s cheeks flared with indignation. “Now you take for granted I’ll supply you with a prostitute?”
“You don’t understand. The woman I’m searching for is my wife.”
Father Chen scowled toward an item on the computer screen. “Erika Bernstein. A former operative for Mossad.”
“The car in the parking lot. Is it hers?”
“No. You said you’re searching for her?”
“I haven’t seen her in three weeks. Does the car belong to Yusuf Habib?”
As thunder again rumbled, Father Chen nodded. “He is a guest.”
“Then I expect Erika to arrive very soon, and I’m not here to cause trouble. I’m trying to stop it.”
A buzzer sounded. Frowning, Father Chen pressed a button. The image on the monitor changed to a view of the lobby. Saul felt blood rush to his heart as a camera showed Erika stepping from the rain into the lobby. Even in black and white, she was gorgeous, her long dark hair tied back in a ponytail, her cheekbones strong but elegant. Like him, she wore running shoes and jeans, but in place of his leather coat, she had a rain slicker, water dripping from it.
Saul was out of the office before Father Chen could rise from his chair. In the brightly lit lobby, Erika heard Saul’s urgently approaching footsteps on the brick floor and swung protectively, hardly relaxing when she saw who it was.
She pointed angrily. “I told you not to come after me.”