His team. His responsibility.
To be a man, you first have to act like one.
Gray accepted his own pillow and sat down. He did not recline his seat. Despite his exhaustion, he did not expect to get much sleep. Monk toggled down the overhead lights. Darkness descended.
“Good night, Commander,” Kat said from across the cabin.
As the others settled, Gray sat in the darkness, wondering how he got here. Time stretched. The engines rumbled white noise. Still, any semblance of sleep escaped him.
In the privacy of the moment, Gray reached into the pocket of his jeans. He slipped out a rosary, gripping the crucifix at the end, hard enough to hurt his palm. It was a graduation gift from his grandfather, who had died only two months after that. Gray had been in boot camp. He hadn’t been able to attend the funeral. He leaned back. After today’s briefing, he had called his folks, lying about a last-minute business trip to cover his absence.
Running again…
Fingers traveled down the hard beads of his rosary.
He said no prayers.
10:24 P.M.
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND
CHTEAU SAUVAGE crouched in the mountain pass of the Savoy Alps like a stone giant. Its battlements were ten feet thick. Its single foursquare tower crested its walls. The only access to its gates was over a stone bridge spanning the pass. While it was not the largest castle of the Swiss canton, it was certainly one of the oldest, constructed during the twelfth century. Its roots were even older. Its battlements were built on the ruins of a Roman castra, an ancient military fortification from the first century.
It was also one of the oldest privately owned castles, belonging to the Sauvage family since the fifteenth century, when the Bernese army wrested control of Lausanne from the decadent bishops during the Reformation. Its parapets overlooked Lake Geneva far below and the handsome cliff-side city of Lausanne, once a fishing village, now a cosmopolitan town of lakeside parks, museums, resorts, clubs, and cafés.
The castle’s current master, Baron Raoul de Sauvage, ignored the lamp-lit view of the dark city and descended the stairs that led below the castle. He had been summoned. Behind him, a huge wooly dog, weighing a massive seventy kilos, followed his steps. The Bernese mountain dog’s black-and-brown shaggy coat brushed the ancient stone steps.
Raoul also had a kennel of pit-fighting dogs, massive hundred-kilo brutes from Gran Canaria, short-haired, thick-necked, tortured to a savage edge. He bred champions of the blood sport.
But right now, Raoul had matters even bloodier to settle.
He passed the dungeon level of the castle with its stone caves. The cells now housed his extensive wine collection, a perfect cellar, but one section harkened back to the old days. Four stone cells had been updated with stainless steel gates, electronic locks, and video surveillance. Near the cells, one large room still housed ancient torture devices…and a few modern ones. His family had helped several Nazi leaders escape out of Austria after World War II, families with ties to the Hapsburgs. They had been hidden down here. As payment, Raoul’s grandfather had taken his share, his “toll” as he called it, which had helped keep the castle within the family.
But now, at the age of thirty-three, Raoul would surpass his grandfather. Raoul, born a bastard to his father, had been given title to both estate and heritage at the age of sixteen, when his father died. He was the only living male offspring. And among the Sauvage family, genetic ties were given precedence over those of marriage. Even his birth had been conceived by arrangement.
Another of Grandfather’s tolls.
The Baron of Sauvage climbed down even deeper into the mountainside, hunching away from the roof, followed by his dog. A string of bare electrical lights illuminated his way.
The stone steps became natural hewn rock. Here Roman legionnaires had tread in ancient times, often leading a sacrificial bull or goat down to the cave below. The chamber had been converted into a mithraeumby the Romans, a temple to the god Mithra, a sun god imported from Iran and taken to heart by the empire’s soldiers. Mithraism predated Christianity yet bore uncanny similarities. Mithra’s birthday was celebrated on December 25. The god’s worship involved baptism and the consumption of a sacred meal of bread and wine. Mithra also had twelve disciples, held Sunday sacred, and described a heaven and a hell. Upon his death, Mithra was also buried in a tomb, only to rise again in three days.
From this, some scholars claimed Christianity had incorporated Mithraic mythology into its own ritual. It was not unlike the castle here, the new standing on the shoulders of the old, the strong surpassing the weak. Raoul saw nothing wrong with this, even respected it.
It was the natural order.
Raoul descended the last steps and entered the wide subterranean grotto. The roof of the cave was a natural stone dome, crudely carved with stars and a stylized sun. An old Mithraic altar, where young bulls had been sacrificed, stood on the far side. Beyond it ran a deep cold spring, a small river. Raoul imagined the sacrificed bodies had been dumped into it to be carried away. He had disposed of a few of his own that way, too…those not fed to his dogs.
At the entrance, Raoul shed his leather duster. Beneath the coat, he wore an old rough-spun shirt embroidered with the coiled dragon, the symbol of the Ordinis Draconis, his birthright going back generations.
“Stay, Drakko,” he ordered the dog.
The Bernese mountain dog dropped to its haunches. It knew better than to disobey.
As did the dog’s owner…
Raoul acknowledged the cave’s occupant with a half bow, then proceeded forward.
The Sovereign Grand Imperator of the Court waited for him before the altar, dressed in the black leathers of a motorcycle outfit. Though he was two decades older than Raoul, the man matched his height and breadth of shoulder. He showed no withering of age, but remained stolid and firm of muscle. He kept his helmet in place, visor down.
The leader had entered through the secret back entrance to the Grotto…along with a stranger.
It was forbidden for anyone outside the Court to view the Imperator’s face. The stranger had been blindfolded as an extra precaution.
Raoul also noted the five bodyguards at the back of the cavern, all armed with automatic weapons, the elite guard of the Imperator.
Raoul strode forward, right arm across his chest. He dropped to a knee before the Imperator. Raoul was head of the Court’s infamous adepti exempti, the military order, an honor going back to Vlad the Impaler, an ancient ancestor of the Sauvage family. But all bowed to the Imperator. A mantle Raoul hoped to one day assume for himself.