The Covenant Of The Flame

At the bottom of the slope, Tess noticed shadowy figures and realized that they were villagers huddled around a fire, holding their crosses woven from flowers and stalks of wheat. The villagers frowned at Tess and Craig, suspicious. But she raised her right hand, still wet from the stream, and touched it to her forehead, her chest, her left and right shoulder. The villagers nodded and motioned for Tess and Craig to sit.

The fire quickly warmed them, drying their clothes. Tess and Craig continued to hold each other lovingly and remained there throughout the night, sometimes dozing, only to waken and stare again, as if hypnotized, toward the power and magic of the flames.

FOURTEEN

Alexandria, Virginia.

With Craig's comforting presence beside her, Tess stood in a cemetery near the city's outskirts and stared at her mother's grave. Tears misted her vision. The funeral had been yesterday, six days after she and Craig had escaped from the caverns and two days after they'd returned from Spain.

Much had happened. Following the night at the bonfire, their Spanish companions had escorted them across the valley to the nearest village. There, with great difficulty because of her unfamiliarity with the language, Tess had managed to use a phone and eventually contact the American embassy in Madrid. Her report had caused a half-dozen helicopters to arrive by mid-afternoon, American and Spanish officials accompanied by armed guards hurrying out. From then on, she and Craig had been questioned repeatedly. They'd shown the investigators the obliterated, former entrance to the caverns. They'd taken the investigators to the waterfall that had saved them.

Soon other helicopters had arrived, bringing more investigators and guards. The interrogation had continued well into the night. After a few hours' sleep and a meager breakfast, Tess and Craig had wearily answered further questions, continuing to repeat the story that they'd agreed on before Tess had phoned Madrid.

The story was the core of Tess's plan to protect themselves from both the Inquisitors and the heretics. More than anything, she wanted to tell it to reporters, to make sure it was publicized, but when reporters did arrive, she and Craig were taken under guard via helicopter to Bilbao and then to Madrid, where the questioning continued at the headquarters of Spain's intelligence service, distraught American CIA officials joining in.

Reporters managed to learn enough from u

The terrorists remained unidentified.

What the accounts did not include, of course, was the increasing frustration with which the grim investigators questioned Tess and Craig.

'Why the hell did you come to Spain? How did you enter the country? You don't have any passports.'

'My mother was recently murdered,' Tess continued to repeat what she'd answered so often. 'Alan Gerrard is – was – a longtime, close, family friend. He invited my fiance and me to accompany him on Air Force Two to Spain in the hopes that the trip would take my mind off my sorrow. His invitation was sudden. We didn't have time to get our passports, and I was too stu

'But what were you doing in – how did you get to – northern Spain?'

'Before Alan began his official duties, he wanted to visit José Fulano at his estate near Pamplona. The two were friends. But I suspect that they might also have had some business to discuss. At any rate, we were taken along. Alan was quite enthusiastic, still trying to distract me from my grief. He claimed that he'd never forgive himself if we didn't have a chance to see that dramatically beautiful area of the country.'

'A cave? At midnight?'

'Because of the feast of Saint John. Both Alan and José insisted on showing us the bonfires in the valleys. Then they ordered the helicopter to land so they could also show us the cave. It was special, they said, because it had Ice-age paintings that very few people had ever seen.'

'Ice-age paintings?'

'Yes. They were beautiful.'

'And that's when the terrorists struck?'

'The attack was sudden. I don't know how the assassins knew we were in the cave, but all at once there was gunfire. Explosions. I saw Alan and José shot several times. My fiance and I raced down a tu

'Seems awfully damned convenient.'

'We were lucky. What would you prefer – that we'd been killed as well? There'd be no one to tell you what happened.'

'The assassins. Who were they?'

'I have no idea. They wore masks. I could barely see them in the dim light in the cave.'

And on and on. Although the interrogators tried to find inconsistencies, Tess and Craig stuck to their story. Much of it was true, and the vice president's aides along with the Secret Service agents he'd left in Madrid verified those parts. What couldn't be verified and what the investigators had to take on faith was that Tess and Craig weren't able to provide information that could help identify the assassins.

Meanwhile efforts to retrieve the bodies proved useless. The interior of the mountain had completely collapsed. Leveling the mountain was out of the question. The corpses would have to stay entombed there forever with the massive peak as their gravestone.

Unidentified assassins. No hint of anything except the Ice-age paintings in the cave. Those two pieces of disinformation – a term she'd learned from her father – were the key to Tess's plan to protect her and Craig, and that disinformation was what she read in a newspaper as she and Craig were flown in Air Force Two back to America. The interrogation would continue in Washington, she'd been told, but she had no doubt that the investigators would soon release them, that she and Craig would be dismissed (presumably with lingering suspicions about them) as two i

The newspaper she read on the flight to America was the international edition of USA Today, and in the economic section, she noticed an article that roused her spirits. Public outrage against the slaughter of elephants for their tusks had resulted in an international trade ban on ivory, with the consequence that the price of ivory had plummeted from $200 per kilogram to less than $5. Poachers no longer considered elephants valuable enough to massacre them. The species had a chance to be saved. At the same time, the article noted, other species were disappearing at the alarming speed of 150,000 per year.

Nonetheless the salvation of the elephants gave Tess hope, just as the brilliant sky, unusually free of smog, also gave her hope as she now wiped her tears at her mother's graveside.

She turned to Craig, her voice deep with mourning. 'There's something I never told you. The night we sat at the fire in the valley?'

Craig put his arms around her.

She leaned her head against his chest and managed the strength to continue. 'I began to understand why the followers of Mithras worship flames. The blaze rises from things that are dead. Old branches. Dry leaves. Like the phoenix.'

Craig nodded. 'Out of death comes life.'

She raised her head. The trouble is, the flames aren't immortal anymore than the branches and leaves were. Eventually the blaze has to die as well, turning into, becoming…' With a sob, she stared again at her mother's grave. 'Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.'