“No. I won’t go back. I can’t.”
“Can’t?”
He couldn’t bring himself to explain. He’d promised they’d talk when this was over. But he couldn’t subdue his apprehension that this wasn’t over. Explain? Ruin what might be their last peaceful moments together? Instead, he walked over, embracing her.
Without a word, they went upstairs to her bedroom.
And at last made love.
He felt no guilt. What Arlene had once said was true: His vow was really one of celibacy, not chastity. Given the Church’s attitude toward communal property, a member of a religious order wasn’t so much forbidden to have sex as not to marry. The restriction was legal, not moral, to prevent a wife from wanting to share what her husband worked for, the Church’s assets.
Otherwise, the restriction was only one of self-denial. And at the moment, weary, heartsick, Drew didn’t care about self-denial. It occurred to him that two human beings who chose to give comfort to each other, to ease each other’s pain, couldn’t possibly be committing wrong.
Naked, his body against hers, feeling her warmth, her lean, lithe, muscular response to his thrusts, her body returning his thrusts, hard yet soft, demanding yet giving, he felt a completeness in himself.
The feeling was sensual, yes. Erotic, yes. But it was more. For beyond the physical pleasure, this sharing of each other cast away his loneliness, his anguish, his sense of imminent doom. In this long eternal instant, he no longer felt damned.
But eternity was shattered. The present cruelly insisted as Drew heard the phone ring.
He pivoted from Arlene’s body, staring toward the phone on the bedside table.
No, not yet! I had things I wanted to say! I wanted to—!
The phone rang again. He felt Arlene’s body stiffen next to him.
But I’m not ready! Couldn’t they have given us a few more hours together?
The phone rang a third time. Its jangle seemed extra harsh in the gathering silence.
“I’d better answer it,” she said. “Maybe a neighbor saw the lights and decided to make sure I’m back. We don’t want the cops to show up looking for a burglar.”
He nodded in agony.
She picked up the phone. “Hello?” Her eyes darkened. “Who? I’m sorry. I don’t know anyone with that name … oh, yes, I see. I understand. Since you put it that way.” She pressed a hand across the mouthpiece.
Drew didn’t need to ask who it was.
“A man wants to speak to you. I don’t understand how he knew you were here. He says he offers you a choice. The easy way, or—”
“I get the point.” Straining to quell his apprehension, Drew took the phone. “Hello?”
“Brother MacLane—” the voice was deep but smooth; Drew imagined it intoning a mass “—we’d like to know what happened to Father Stanislaw. He didn’t check in with us as scheduled. We know he went to recruit you. We want you to tell us what you did with him. And with his ring.”
The room seemed to tilt. “I can’t discuss this over the phone.”
“Of course. Shall we meet in fifteen minutes? At the arch in Washington Square? It’s just a few blocks away.”
“I’ll be there.”
“We know you will. We’re sure you’re as anxious as we are to settle any misunderstanding.”
“That’s what it is. A misunderstanding.” Swallowing, Drew hung up.
He reached for his clothes.
“Who was that?” Arlene asked.
He put on his shirt and pants.
“Who?”
“The fraternity.”
She shivered.
“They want to know what happened to Father Stanislaw. They want me to meet them. In Washington Square.”
“But you can’t take the risk!”
“I know.” He hugged her, long and hard, feeling her naked body against him. “If I let them get their hands on me, no matter how I resist, I’ll be forced to tell them who killed Father Stanislaw. Jake, not me. And after they’ve finished with me, they’ll come after Jake, maybe even after you. I can’t let that happen. Christ, I love you.”
She held him so tightly his injured shoulder throbbed. “But where will you go?”
“I don’t dare answer. In case they use drugs to question you.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“And prove you’re involved?” Drew shook his head. “They’d kill you.”
“I don’t care!”
“But I do!”
“I’d go anywhere for you.”
“To Hell? I’m giving you your life. Next to your soul, that’s the greatest gift. Please take it.”
She kissed him, sobbing. “But when will…”
Drew understood. “We see each other again? One day during Lent.”
“What year?”
He didn’t know. As a drowning man clutches his savior, he clung to her.
Then released his grip.
And was gone.
EXILE
Egypt. South of Cairo, west of the Nile.
He wandered into the Nitrian Desert, where in A.D. 381 the first Christian hermits, fleeing Rome, had begun monasticism. It hadn’t been easy for him to reach this wilderness. Without money or a passport, pursued by the fraternity, he’d needed every trick and wile, every ounce of strength and scrap of determination. His torturous journey had lasted six months, and now as he walked across the sun-parched sand, squinting toward the rocky bluff in the distance where he meant to establish his cell, he felt a great relief, a burden falling away from him. Safe now, away from people, the horrors of civilization, he no longer had to fear for Arlene’s safety. All he had to fear for was his soul.
Finding a cave among the rocks, a tiny waterhole nearby, a village a day’s walk away where he could buy provisions, he reestablished his routine from the monastery, silently reciting the vespers prayers, recalling the matins service, providing responses to an imaginary celebrant of mass. He meditated.
Rarely he saw another person passing by in the distance. He always hid. But every six weeks—he waited as long as possible—he had to encounter the world when he went to the village for more provisions. On those traumatic occasions, he spoke only as much as was necessary to conduct his business, and the tradesmen, normally fond of haggling, didn’t invite conversation. This tall, lean, sunburned man with haunted eyes, his hair grown past his shoulders, his beard hanging down his chest, his robe in rags, was obviously a holy one. They gave him distance and respect.
His days were filled with solitude. But not with peace. As hard as he meditated, he still was often struck by thoughts of Arlene. One day in Lent, he’d vowed, I’ll go back to her.
He thought about Jake. And Uncle Ray. And Father Stanislaw. The fraternity. Would they ever stop hunting him? Or was that part of his penance, constantly to be hunted?
Sometimes he remembered his parents. Their deaths. Their graves. Beginnings and ends.
He gazed to the west toward Libya, the madman who ruled it, the terrorists being trained there.
He gazed to the east toward Iraq and Iran, toward Israel and its enemies, toward the Holy Land and the birthplace of assassins and terrorism.
His heart filled with gall.
He had much to think about.
If you liked THE FRATERNITY OF THE STONE, then you might want to check out the other books in the trilogy, THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE ROSE and THE LEAGUE OF NIGHT AND FOG.
THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE ROSE, the first installment of the trilogy, begins with Chris and Saul, orphans, raised in a Philadelphia school for boys, bonded by friendship, and devoted to a mysterious man called Eliot. He visited them and brought them candy. He treated them like sons. He trained them to be assassins. Now he is trying desperately to have them killed.
To buy THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE ROSE click here!
The exciting final installment in THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE ROSE trilogy is THE LEAGUE OF NIGHT AND FOG. Two brilliant operatives known as Saul and Drew are drawn together to s
olve a baffling mystery: Why have ten elderly men from around the world been kidnapped? As the agents investigate, they are pulled into a violent cycle of revenge that stretches back to World War II—and is now forcing sons to pay for their fathers’ darkest sins. David Morrell’s international thrillers have no equal. From the Vatican to the Swiss Alps, from Australia to the heart of America, The League of Night and Fog brings together two generations bound by one chilling legacy.
To buy THE LEAGUE OF NIGHT AND FOG click here!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Morrell is the award-winning author of First Blood, the novel in which Rambo was created. He was born in 1943 in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. In 1960, at the age of seventeen, he became a fan of the classic television series Route 66, about two young men in a Corvette convertible traveling the United States in search of America and themselves. The scripts by Stirling Silliphant so impressed Morrell that he decided to become a writer.
In 1966, the work of another writer (Hemingway scholar Philip Young) prompted Morrell to move to the United States, where he studied with Young at the Pennsylvania State University and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in American literature. There, he also met the esteemed science-fiction writer William Tenn (real name Philip Klass), who taught Morrell the basics of fiction writing. The result was First Blood, a groundbreaking novel about a returned Vietnam veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder who comes into conflict with a small-town police chief and fights his own version of the Vietnam War.
That “father” of modern action novels was published in 1972 while Morrell was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. He taught there from 1970 to 1986, simultaneously writing other novels, many of them international bestsellers, including the classic spy trilogy The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for a top-rated NBC miniseries broadcast after the Super Bowl), The Fraternity of the Stone, and The League of Night and Fog.
Eventually wearying of two professions, Morrell gave up his academic tenure in order to write full time. Shortly afterward, his fifteen-year-old son Matthew was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer and died in 1987, a loss that haunts not only Morrell’s life but his work, as in his memoir about Matthew, Fireflies, and his novel Desperate Measures, whose main character lost a son.
“The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions,” as one reviewer called him, Morrell is the author of thirty-two books, including such high-action thrillers as Creepers, Scavenger, and The Spy Who Came for Christmas (set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives). Always interested in different ways to tell a story, he wrote the six-part comic-book series Captain America: The Chosen. His writing book, The Successful Novelist, analyzes what he has learned during his almost four decades as an author.
Morrell is a co-founder of the International Thriller Writers organization. Noted for his research, he is a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School for wilderness survival as well as the G. Gordon Liddy Academy of Corporate Security. He is also an honorary lifetime member of the Special Operations Association and the Association of Intelligence Officers. He has been trained in firearms, hostage negotiation, assuming identities, executive protection, and defensive/offensive driving, among numerous other action skills that he describes in his novels. To research the aerial sequences in The Shimmer, he became a private pilot.
Morrell is a three-time recipient of the distinguished Bram Stoker Award, the latest for his novel Creepers. The International Thriller Writers organization gave him its prestigious Thriller Master Award. With eighteen million copies of his work in print, his work has been translated into twenty-six languages.
To send him an email, please go to the CONTACT page at his website, www.davidmorrell.net.
David Morrell, The Fraternity of the Stone
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