The Sixth Station (35 page)

“Okay, fine. Let me show you something else.…”

“No more slippery slopes. Promise?”

“No,” he said, and immediately walked me around to the most slippery slope of the unforgiving northeastern side of the pog, and I looked down. Straight down. It was indeed impenetrable. “Is this where—”

I heard a crack and at the same instant felt something whiz by my head so close that it literally spun me around. Pantera grabbed me, and we ran back around that steep outer edge and jumped into the courtyard of the castle remains maybe six feet below.

We squeezed into a five-by-three-foot opening cut out of the stone wall, which was hollow all the way around—a double-walled edifice with both an inner and an outer wall. The “doorways” opened into a passageway that went completely around the perimeter.
Must have been for defense,
I thought. We could hide inside, although we wouldn’t be able to get out if they found us.

Following Pantera’s lead, we crept around and positioned ourselves behind a slit cut into the outer wall. “For arrows,” he whispered.

It was clear that that’s how the inhabitants would have fought off invaders during the Middle Ages.

Pantera handed me a pistol. “Know how to use one of these things?”

“Maybe.”

“Just point and shoot.”

Three men armed with machine guns came stalking around the outer perimeter, heads low. Pantera stuck his Glock through the arrow slit and fired. Once. I heard the sound of impact and the sound of someone going down.

The two others, I could see from my tiny vantage point, flattened themselves against the outer wall and fired into the turrets near us, clearly not able to fire inside the tiny arrow slits.

One moved out and was heading toward the courtyard. Pantera maneuvered out of the wall and threw a rock up to the turret and then slid back in.

He handed me a cylinder. “Flash grenade. If it comes to that, go to the doorway, pull this, and throw.”

The man who had remained on the outer wall came into view and fired into the turret above us, as Pantera picked him off.

The third must still have been moving around toward the courtyard and the southern slope. Pantera held me back.

“Use it if you need to,” he said, referring to the grenade. “It will cause temporary blindness and deafness in the enemy and give you time to get away.”

He then slipped out of the walls through the opening. When he reached the courtyard, I could hear him heft himself up to the courtyard wall with his arms. Then silence.

I took up his former position behind the arrow slit. The armed man started back; I could see his shadow. He looked up and pointed his gun. Did he see Pantera? I didn’t wait to find out. I put my pistol into the arrow slit and squeezed the trigger. I saw him go down. But he wasn’t dead. He was writhing and bleeding from his chest. I could hear him moaning like a wounded dog. He rolled over, got a bead on where the shot had come from, and aimed into the arrow slit.

The shots hit the rock wall millimeters from the slit. From on top, automatic fire blasted the stone wall, and then nothing.

Was he up? I couldn’t look out, or he’d shoot me. I picked up the grenade and slowly crept back to the opening. If he made it into the courtyard somehow, I’d hurl it and then shoot.

Oh, God.

As I was feeling my way against the stone wall, a shot rang out from above. I heard a scream of agony, then silence. Someone had died.

Is it Pantera? Is it the shooter? What do I do?

Just then, Pantera called out as calmly as if he were calling Kmart shoppers to attention: “There were three. All dead.”

“You sure they’re dead? How do you know?”

He moaned back, “Do I tell you how to type?”

“Asshole!”

I could hear him walking and heard him jump back down into the courtyard. He called to me to come back out. Right. Nothing would make me willingly move out from the safety of the inner wall, and, in fact, I scrambled farther in and crouched.

“It’s me, for God’s sake. I told you they’re dead. I’m coming in—it’s fine,” Pantera said. “We’ve got to go.”

I made my way to the opening, gun pointed, and saw Pantera entering. “Who was that? Why did they shoot at us? It was my fault for turning on the phone!”

“Not unless they could climb a mountain in a single bound—they were here—although the signal probably gave them our exact location.”

“I’m so sorry. But I may have killed someone.”

“Don’t get crazy.”

“Who were they?”

“Sent by the same people who also convinced Hussein, Bar-Cohen, and Pawar to lie in 1982.”

“What does that mean?”

“Like the wise man said, ‘All the powers in the world.’”

It hit me then: Three astronomers showed up at the house when they saw a star and found an unwed mother and her baby. And that birth would threaten all the powers in the world. History repeating? This was too much.

“The rest of them—and probably the French authorities—will be up here soon,” he said, taking binoculars from his backpack and surveying the area below. “Let’s move. They’re already here.”

“What do you see?”

I grabbed the binoculars from him and could see dozens of police cars arriving at the bottom of the mountain.

“It will still take them forty-five minutes to get up here. But the choppers will be surveilling. They’ll drop troopers.”

I could hear them already approaching in the distance.

“What do we do? We’re trapped. They’ll get us on the way down!”

At that, Yusef unhooked the webbing harnesses and instructed me to put one on and lock it, which I did. He did the same. He went back inside the wall and came back out rolling a wooden wheel of rope.

“We’ve been preparing for this.…”

“Thanks for inviting me along. We killed three people.”

“Will you cut it out? Next time you should let them kill you. Or I will.”

He motioned for me to move, and I helped him maneuver the wheel up and over the courtyard wall and heft it back out onto the outer rim.

We pushed the wheel to the impenetrable, sheer cliff side, and he unraveled it—hundreds of feet of rope—and then cut it in half, looped each around a turret, secured them with knots, and attached them to our rappel devices on the harnesses. He anchored various other things, while I stood in shock, looking straight down into a four-thousand-foot drop.

He tested both the ropes and the devices, unclipped the daisy chain from the anchors, and said, “Get in position.”

“What position? I can’t!”

He took me by the shoulders, pushed me to the edge, and turned me around so I was facing the castle and standing with my back to the drop.

“Now, place your left hand around the rope.… Okay, good; move it down six inches above the rappel device. Move your left hand between the clip and the anchors.”

I did as I was told, shaking every step of the way.

“Okay, good. Now grab the rope that hangs down out of the rappel device with your right hand—that’s your break hand—and slide your hand on the rope back to your right hip and wrap the rope slightly around your right hip.”

I was getting better at taking orders, and was doing fine following the next few directions—until he said, “Now step back off the edge.”

“What? No!”

He locked himself in next to me on the next turret and came alongside of me. “Step off!”

I didn’t budge. “Goddammit—step off, Alazais! You’ve done it before.”

“I haven’t done it ever before, so fuck you!”

Yes, you have. Just not in this life. The dream … the dream.

I rechecked the harness and then took the biggest step of my life. I turned my back to the mountain and fell backward—and put my future once again into the hands of the assassin.

Holding on for dear life and letting myself down slowly, I began to rappel downward. Or creep downward, is more like it.

“Let some of the rope in your right hand slide up through the rappel device,” he ordered as he hung next to me. As I did this I felt myself sliding more easily down the rope.

When we got partway down, and we ran out of rope, he swung into me, grabbed me around the waist, and together we swung over to an overhang and stepped onto it, grabbing onto branches.

“Now what?” I said, shaking.

“Now we unhook ourselves and make our way down. We’ve gone through the worst of it.”

He tied one end of a piece of the rope he’d taken from the welding shed to me and the other end to himself, and we began creeping, crawling on ledges that were no more than six inches wide at some points, until we finally got to level ground some one thousand feet up. The choppers were above us, but even I knew nobody in them would be looking on this side, and even if they were, they wouldn’t see us in all the tangles of brambles and the jutting rocks.

“Toss your gun.”

“No.”

“Yes, leave the gun.”

“And take the cannoli?”

With that he grabbed my gun and tossed it along with his into the brambles.

“Why did you
do
that?”

No answer.

It took an hour more of descending on hands and knees before we could see the valley clearly. In another half hour, we touched ground. Happy to be alive but in pain from the gashes on my knees, which had opened wide, I still kissed the ground.

He untied us and said, “Now let’s go see what’s going on.”

“What?”

He took the water and disinfectant towelettes out of his backpack, redressed my knees and hands, cleaned my face and his, dusted us off, reached into his bag, and pulled out a terrible hat, which he pulled over my terrible hair, saying, “A bonnie boonie.”

Jeez. Loony is more like it.

He grabbed my hand and began walking me, or more accurately pulling me, around the perimeter. I could see dozens of flashing cherry lights atop cop cars, ambulances, armored vehicles, and even a tank assembled in the Valley of the Burned, where they’d set up a command center, as the cops prepared for all-out battle. With
us.

Instead of sneaking back around the backside of the mountain, Pantera tightened his hand around mine in that death grip and, almost at a run, began dragging me toward them in the valley.

Like the Cathars walking into the flames!

“We’re heading right back to the—” I tried saying, but he wasn’t listening. I attempted to break free of his grasp, but it was useless. At a run now, dragging me with him, he began waving to the cops. In less than ten seconds I’d be in their hands—the hands of the authorities I’d been ducking for days, who were out for blood.

“You lying traitor,” I screeched, as he rushed us into the fray, still holding my hand.

32

“
Ta gueule!
Seriously. Trust me.” He actually said this as he was dragging me against my will into the hands of the authorities.

Trust no one.

He loosened his grip on my hand and then squeezed it—as opposed to crushing it—and put his other arm around my shoulder, draping it like a boyfriend would, as he forcibly “strolled” me quickly to the first cop we came up to.

Like a big buffoon, he said way too loud in the cop’s face—or this is what I thought he said, but my French is worse than, well, anything:

“Qu’est qui se passe? Pouvez-vous nous prendre en photo moi et ma femme? C’est comme dans un film!”

The cop was having none of whatever it was, and threatened (or it sounded like a threat anyway):
“Mais c’est ridicule
!
Reculez! N’approchez pas. C’est une scène de crime, vous devez quitter immédiatement les lieux sinon nous allons ce faire arreter.”

“Juste une photo, s’il vous plait. Nous avons traversé tout le village dès que nous avons entendu les sirènes.”

“Sortez ces civils d’ici immédiatement.”

At that, two cops came over and forcibly escorted us out of the Valley of the Burned and then out of the area entirely.

If you ever trust anyone, maybe this should be the guy.

As we headed back down the paved part of the mountain road to the bottom, I turned to him.

“Damn! You are good.”

“You have no idea.”

“No, seriously. Really good.”

“And seriously, I know that. Let’s move,” he urged, pushing me beyond my physical capacities right then. Or so I thought. I didn’t realize I hadn’t even been tested yet.

We hurried back to the boarding house at a jogging pace. I packed up my nearly nonexistent belongings, changed into my only other pair of jeans, and met him back downstairs.

“We’ll take two cars. I don’t want you to follow me, but I highlighted the route for you in yellow. We’re going to Carcassonne. It’s a fairly straight route, so don’t get lost. We can’t communicate by cell. Strictly off the grid, old-school.

“When you get to the city, there is parking at the foot of the village outside the walls.”

“Walls?”

“It’s a walled city. But tell them you are staying at Hôtel de la Cité, and you will be directed to a private area immediately outside the wall and they’ll send a car or van to get you. I’ll meet you there.”

“What name should I use to check in, and should I use Sadowski’s ATM card?”

“It’s all taken care of. Just tell them you are Madame Roussel and that you would like your room key.”

With that he got in his red Citroën and slowly pulled out of sight. I assumed by now everyone in the village of roughly one hundred citizens knew everything we’d done, hadn’t done, and were about to do. Or maybe the French weren’t like small-town folk everywhere else on the planet.

There wasn’t a soul in sight, and I assumed that whoever was there had by now gone up to the mountain to see what all the excitement was about.

At the end of the village there was, as I should have expected, a police- manned roadblock. I showed my false passport, and they checked the car thoroughly. I told them in English, and then tried in Italian, that I had come to see the mountain, and then I made a big deal about trying to find out why all those cop cars and ambulances were there. Maybe it was the old-lady rocker hair that did it, but they just got annoyed and let me pass.