The Omega Factor(8)
His quarry turned another corner and he kept racing ahead, the gap between them closing. They passed through a piazza with an eager, active night crowd. The woman stayed to its edges and disappeared down a side street. He could not lose her. With some polite phrases he eased his way through and followed. Another corner turned and they were now riverside, paralleling a waist-high stone wall. He had the impression she wasn’t just running away. She was headed to a specific place. Luckily, few people were around here to either get in the way or be placed in danger. Was she aware he was following? Hard to know.
Sirens suddenly pierced the air.
Three cars, blue and red lights flashing, emerged from one of the side streets. They turned and headed for a small cobbled square that spread out from the quay wall, their headlights cutting huge swaths of light in the darkness. It was like they’d sensed her, the black-clad figure now being boxed in with nowhere to go.
The locals worked fast.
He stopped about a hundred feet away, shifting his weight forward, ready to sprint or weave, depending on what was about to happen. His breath expelled in sharp whooshes, drying his mouth. The woman backed to the stone wall and glanced over the side, as if assessing the situation. The headlights angled toward her and, in the instant before she was fully illuminated, she tossed the laptop over the side. Into the river?
The cars screeched to a stop.
Doors opened.
Men with guns emerged, shouting. In Flemish. The woman whirled around and faced the police, one hand down, behind her back.
More shouts.
The concealed arm appeared from behind her.
A shot rang out.
From the police.
More rounds were fired.
Which seared the woman’s chest and sent her lean body spinning like a dancer. The sight sickened him. Sure, he’d seen his share of violence, but was this necessary?
Neither hand held a weapon.
She slid along in a marionette’s dance, then fell forward unable to protect her face, which smacked hard into the pavement near a stone fountain.
He did not move.
Luckily, he was not near enough to draw attention and the police were focused on the body, advancing ahead with guns pointed. He glanced over the wall. Long fingers of shadow clutched the water in a tight grip. He caught a blur of movement in the darkness and the outline of a boat drifting away from a concrete walk that edged the river.
Nothing would be learned here.
So he hopped over the wall, hung by his fingertips, then dropped to the concrete below.
Chapter 4
Bernat left Carcassonne with Andre, driving nearly an hour east to Béziers. The town occupied a bluff above the river Orb a mere ten kilometers west from the Mediterranean coast. One of the oldest settlements in France. Neoliths, Celts, Gauls, Romans, and Visigoths all had occupied it at some point or another. Bullfighting was its current claim to fame. A million people came every August to witness the spectacle. But on July 29, 1209, the feast day of St. Mary Magdalene, something happened here that changed the world forever.
The army was camped outside the city, a vast expanse of tents and bivouacs, a solid mass of men, horses, and carts encircling the fortified walls. It had arrived yesterday after a march from Lyon intent on capturing 222 heretics, about 10 percent of Béziers’ population, that the residents were known to be harboring. The warriors had come in response to a call to arms made by Pope Innocent III. The West was accustomed to papal crusades, as it had been waging those since 1095. But all of that venom had been directed at Muslims and the bloodshed occurred far away in the Holy Land. This was to be the first crusade directed against fellow Christians conducted entirely in the heart of Europe. More precisely in a region known as the Languedoc, a proud and independent arc of mountainous terrain stretching from the Pyrénées in the south to Provence in the north. The land of wind, olives, grapes, and sea. Troubadours and traders. Sharing a culture and language with Aragon and Barcelona. A bastion of independent thinkers and capitalistic burghers. Where Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived and worked together in harmony.
Here also flourished a new religion. A pacifist brand of Christianity stressing that salvation could be obtained through a detachment from natural goods. One whose origins were wholly unknown, but one that proclaimed itself the true faith, more ancient than Catholicism, tolerance and poverty its keystones.
It had migrated from the East, after gaining footholds in Italy and the Rhineland. Its central doctrine proclaimed that the world was the creation of a dark evil force. Rex Mundi. King of the World. Encompassing all that was corporeal, chaotic, and powerful. Matter was corrupt. Anything that existed in the world was corrupt. Civil authority was a fraud. And if that authority was based somehow on a divine sanction? Like the Holy Roman Church?
That was even worse.
Followers believed the soul was trapped in the body, an imperfect creation within the domain of evil. The object of life was to escape this hell on earth and seek the God of Light who ruled the eternal spiritual domain, unsullied by the taint of matter. Each believer had to choose to renounce the material world. If not, after death, they kept returning, over and over, occupying new bodies, experiencing new lives, until they were finally ready to reject all that was physical. Once done, they were elevated from a mere believer to a Perfectus, capable then, at their next death, of ascending to a blissful, forever state ruled by the God of Light.