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And this table had not been abandoned years ago. It would, in fact, be used
tonight. With Grace.
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He forced himself away from the table. The thought of Grace ending up the same
way Wolf-
gang had that thought was too obscene to let linger. He forced himself to go
on. Across the room opposite the poteau-mitan and fire pit was a set of large
Rada drums. He walked over to look at them, more to get his back to the table
than out of real interest.
Tick took. Tick took.
Why did it always seem that no matter how much he progressed, he was still no
further ahead?
What was the point? Find Grace! She might not be here at all, but there were
still three locked doors.
Then he got an idea. He looked at the drums, pulled the black book from his
pocket and scanned it, then glanced around at the spoke hallways.
Did he have the balls to do it?
Did he have a choice?
Dr. John was broken from his dark meditation by a distracting sound. He
surfaced enough to recognize it, then slowly opened his eyes and listened.
It was the drums in the ceremonial room.
Surely, it wasn't that time yet. He frowned and broke out the message.
Summon. Hounfour. Dr. John.
He rose quickly. Why hadn't they simply come to his room if he was wanted? He
was beginning to feel alarmed.
He exited his room and crossed to the spoke hallway opposite room three. But
when he reached the ceremonial room it was empty. No one was there. The drums
were silent.
He walked out a different spoke hallway and strode around the entire outer
ring hall, checking for signs of a problem. But there was nothing amiss and no
one around. It would be another hour or so before the others began to filter
in. He checked the ceremonial room again.
Nothing.
He began to doubt his own senses. He had been meditating, perhaps it was the
gods who called him . . . He decided to go back to his room and await further
developments.
It was this last part which was the trickiest.
Gabriel heard Dr. John going into his room from his position just around the
bend in the hall. He waited for him to come out again, yelling bloody murder
because his key card was missing. But he did not come out again and Gabriel
allowed himself a moment of triumph. He might still notice it was gone, but he
hadn't looked not right away.
The reason for room one being locked was apparent as soon as the door opened.
It was a vault. Wire shelves lined the walls as they had in the storage room.
But it wasn't flour on these shelves, it was money. Stacks and stacks of
twenty-, fifty-, even one-hundred-dollar bills filled the shelves to absolute
capacity from floor to ceiling, in rows and rows. There were cash bonds
running in the thousands stacks of them.
There were even large bars of gold bullion.
Gabriel began to count and got lost in the sheer dazzle of it. Millions and
millions.
Where does drug money go when it dies?
He had an irrational image of stuffing himself full of bills and going back up
to the church to dump it out in some safe place, and returning to do it again,
and again, and again. Instead, he simply picked the highest face-value stacks
of bonds he could find three of them and stuffed them in his inside jacket
pocket. He
added a few dozen stacks of hundred-dollar bills, for good measure, as much as
he could handle without feeling incapacitated with lumpiness.
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It wasn't, he supposed, the act of a Schattenjager, but the Ritters had been
impoverished for three hundred years. Tetelo owed them something. And there
was the castle to consider. Not to mention
Mosely's VISA bill.
Room eleven was something else entirely. The door slid open by the power of
the key card, and the scent of formaldehyde immediately assailed him. Inside
were Plexiglas-faced freezer drawers built up against the wall, one on top of
the other. Inside, behind the frost on the glass, Gabriel could make out naked
corpses. The focus of the room, though, was a steel autopsy table with a
trough around its edges that emp-
tied out into a steel bucket. On the side wall was a sink and glass-faced
cabinets that con-
tained drugs and other odd bottles. In one of the cabinets was a series of
glass jars containing hearts.
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