The Brotherhood of the Rose (49 page)

The mystery deepened when firefighters clearing the wreckage discovered a locked steel vault beneath the greenhouse. CIA personnel, in cooperation with the FBI, sealed off the area. "We worked all night to open it," a spokesman said. "The heat from the thermite bomb fused the locks. We finally had to cut it open. The vault had been used to store documents, that much we know. But what the documents contained is impossible to determine. The heat soaked through the walls of the vault. The documents were seared into dust."

REDEMPTION

Enjoying the heft of the shovel in his hand, Saul threw dirt along the bank of the ditch. He'd been working for several hours, enjoying the strain on his muscles, the trickle of honest sweat. For a time, Erika had dug beside him, helping to extend @@%,the the ditch, but then the baby had started to cry in the house, and she'd gone inside to nurse him. Afterward, she'd braid and bake the challah dough for their Sabbath bread. Watching 'her walk to the house, made from concrete blocks painted white, the same as the other dwellings in this settlement, he'd smiled in admiration of her strength and dignity and grace.

The sky was turquoise, the sun molten white. He wiped his brow and got back to work. When his network of irrigation trenches was completed, he'd put in vegetable seeds and grapevines. Then he'd wait to see if God would do His own part and send the rain.

He and Erika had come to this settlement- north of Beersheba and the desert region-six months ago, just before the baby was due. They'd wanted to help extend the nation's frontier, but disillusioned with international rivalry, they'd stayed away from land contested by the Arabs, preferring to develop the nation inward rather than out. But borders were never far. An unexpected attack was always possible, so he took care to have a weapon with him everywhere. A high-powered rifle lay near the ditch.

As far as the sanction was concerned, he thought he'd protected himself. In theory, the intelligence community had still been after him, so after punishing Eliot he'd contacted his network along with representatives from MI-6 and the KGB. His revelation of the conspiracy involving descendants of the original Abelard group had gone a long way to put him back in their good graces. They'd felt bitter pleasure in knowing that their suspicions about internal sabotage of their operations had been justified. Taking steps to undo the damage Eliot and his group had caused by interfering, they let'global tensions assume their natural course.

Saul's own network required a further gesture of good faith before they'd absolve him of blame, however. The documents, Saul had said. Eliot's collection of scandals. The blackmail that had kept him in power. "But no one knows where those documents are," the agency had said. "No, I do," Saul had said. He'd been thinking about those documents since Hardy had first explained about them. Where would Eliot have hidden them? Pretend you're him. In Eliot's place, where would I have hidden them? A man obsessed by verbal games. Whose life had been based on sub rosa. Under the rose? The old man couldn't have chosen any other hiding place. Refusing to hand over the documents lest someone else take advantage of them, Saul had suggested a compromise, blown up the greenhouse, and destroyed them. The president, despite his public praise of Eliot in death, had felt immensely relieved.

But the rules of the sanction were supposed to be absolute. Saul received only unofficial immunity. "What we're agreeing to do is look the other way," a senior intelligence officer told him. "If you hide well enough and don't raise your head, we promise not to come looking for you."

And that was good enough for Saul. Like Candide in his garden, he retreated from the world, enjoying the pleasant exhaustion of manual labor, digging his irrigation ditch. He reflected on the grave Chris had dug in Panama. Now life instead of death would come from turning the ground. Old habits fade hard, however, and when not engaged in establishing a home for Erika, their son, and himself, he taught the youth of the village how to defend themselves if the settlement was ever attacked. He was foremost a warrior, after all, and though he'd disowned the profession, his talents could be put to constructive use. It struck him as ironic that many of the boys he trained had been adopted by the village: orphans. This time around, the process seemed justified. But as he tossed more dirt from the ditch, he remembered that Eliot too had felt justified.

He'd expected revenge to be satisfying. Instead it filled him with misgivings, haunting him. A lifetime of love, no matter how misguided, couldn't be dismissed, any more than his love for chris could be dismissed. Or his love for Erika. If things had somehow been different. In somber moments, Saul debated with himself. Perhaps what he'd really wanted was the tension of the,rest home to last forever. Punishment prolonged. Eliot and himself eternally trapped there. Bound by hate.

And love. But then Saul's mood would lighten. Glancing at the broad warm sky, smelling the hint of rain in the air, he'd listen to Erika talking to their baby in their house, their home. He'd swell with affection, wholesome, unlike the perverted affection Eliot had created in him, and realize that his father had been wrong. "No matter how hard you try, you'll never be normal": one of the last things his father had said to him. You bastard, you were wrong. And Saul, who in a special sense had always been an orphan, delighted in the thought of being a father to his son.

He set down his shovel, thirsty, retreating from the highest heat of the sun, picking up his rifle, walking toward his home. Entering its shadows, he sniffed the fragrance of tomorrow's challah, walked to Erika, and kissed her. She smelled wonderfully of sugar, flour, salt, and yeast. Her strong arms, capable of killing in an instant, held him tight. His throat ached.

Drinking water from a cool clay pot, he wiped his mouth and crossed the room to peer down at his son in a blanket in his cradle. Friends from the settlement had remarked at first about his name. "What's wrong with it?" Saul had asked. "I think it's a good name."

"Christopher Eliot Bernstein-Grisman?"

"So?"

"Half Christian, half Jewish?" "Chris was a friend of mine. In fact, you could say he was my brother."

"Sure. Chris Grisman. They'll love it when he goes to school. And what about Eliot?"

"I used to think he was my father. Now I'm not sure what he was. No matter. I'm-what he made me."

The friends didn't understand. But sick in his heart, Saul didn't either.

Even more than the name for the boy, the friends from the settlement drew attention to something unique outside the Bernstein-Grisman home. It seemed a miracle, they said.

A sign from God that the settlement had been given a blessing. How else could it be explained?

A man (with a past, it was rumored in the settlement, and not without respect) who'd never grown anything in his life? And in such brittle ground?

A large black rose. About the Author David Morrell is the author of FIRST BLOOD, the basis for the movie starring Sylvester Stallone, and of four other novels, including BLOOD OATH. He is a professor of American literature at the University of Iowa, where he lives with his wife and two children.

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