G-Mack gritted his teeth and pressed his forehead against the ground, but the pain was too much. He raised his damaged right hand and used his left to push himself up and look at his wounded foot.

“Now you can’t go far if I need to find you again,” said Louis. He raised the gun and leveled it at G-Mack’s face. “You’re a lucky man. Don’t forget that. But you better pray that I find Alice alive.”

He lowered the gun and walked back to the car.

“Hospital’s across the street,” he said, then drove away.

Apart from the fire escape, there appeared to be only one way into or out of the building, and that was a single steel door on Berry. There were no bells or buzzers, and no names of residents.

“You think he was lying?” asked Angel.

Louis had rejoined us. I didn’t ask him about G-Mack.

“No,” said Louis. “He wasn’t lying. Open it.”

Louis and I took up positions at opposite corners of the building, watching the streets while Angel worked on the lock. It took him five minutes, which was a long time for him. “Old locks are good locks,” he said, by way of explanation.

We slipped inside and pulled the door closed behind us. The first floor was an entirely open space that had once been used to house the vats, with storage space for barrels and sliding doors to admit trucks. The doors were long gone, and the entrances bricked up. To the right, beside what had once been a small office, a flight of stairs led up to the next floor. There was no elevator. The next three floors were similar to the first: largely open-plan, with no signs of habitation.

The top story was different. Someone had commenced a halfhearted division of the space into apartments, although it looked like the work had been done sometime before, then abandoned. Walls had been erected, but most had no doors added, so that it was possible to see the empty areas within. There appeared to be five or six apartments planned in total, but only one seemed to be finished. The green entrance door was unmarked and closed. I took the left side, while Angel and Louis moved to the right. I knocked twice, then drew back quickly. There was no reply. I tried again, but with the same result. We now had a couple of options, neither of which appealed to me. Either we could try to break down the door, or Angel could pick the two locks and risk getting his head blown off if someone was inside and listening.

Angel made the choice. He got down on one knee, spread his little set of tools on the floor, then handed one to Louis. Simultaneously, they worked the locks, both of them trying to shield themselves as best they could by keeping as much of their bodies as possible against the wall. It seemed to take a long time, but was probably less than a minute. Eventually, both locks turned, and they pushed the door open.

To the left was a galley-style kitchen, with the remains of some fast food on the counter. There was cream in the refrigerator, with three days remaining before it expired, and a paper bag filled with pita bread, also apparently fresh. Apart from some cans of beans and franks and a couple of containers of macaroni and cheese, this was the sum total of food in the apartment. The entrance hall then led into a lounge area, consisting only of a couch, an easy chair, and a TV and VCR. Again to the left was the smaller of the apartment’s two bedrooms, the single bed casually made, and with a pair of boots and one or two items of clothing visible on a chair by the window. With Angel covering me, I checked the closet, but it contained only cheap trousers and shirts.

We heard a low whistle, and followed it to where Louis stood in the doorway of a second bedroom to the right, his body blocking our view. He stepped to one side, and we saw what lay within.

It was a shrine, and its inspiration lay in a place far distant from this one, and in a past far stranger than any we could imagine.

III

CHAPTER EIGHT

The town of Sedlec lies some forty miles from the city of Prague. An incurious traveler, perhaps deterred by the dull suburbs, might not even deign to stop here, instead opting to press on to the nearby, and better known, town of Kutná Hora, which has now virtually absorbed Sedlec into itself. Yet it was not always thus, for this part of the old kingdom of Bohemia was one of the medieval world’s largest sources of silver. By the late thirteenth century, one third of all Europe’s silver came from this district, but silver coins were being minted here as early as the tenth century. The silver lured many to this place, making it a serious rival to the economic and political supremacy of Prague. Intriguers came, and adventurers, merchants, and craftsmen. And where there was power, so too there were the representatives of the one power that stands above all. Where there was wealth, there was the Church.

The first Cistercian monastery was founded in Sedlec by Miroslav of Cimburk in 1142. Its monks came from Valdsassen Abbey in the Upper Palatinate, attracted by the promise of silver ore, for Valdsassen was one of the Morimon line of monasteries associated with mining. (The Cistercians, to their credit, might charitably be said to have employed a pragmatic attitude toward wealth and its accumulation.) Clearly, God Himself was smiling upon their endeavors, for deposits of silver ore were found on the monastery’s lands in the late thirteenth century, and the influence of the Cistercians grew as a result. Unfortunately, God’s attentions quickly turned elsewhere, and by the end of the century the monastery suffered the first of its numerous destructions at the hands of hostile men, a process that reached its peak in the attack of 1421, which left it in smoldering ruins, the attack that marked the first coming of the Believers…

Sedlec, Bohemia

April 21, 1421

The noise of battle had ceased. It no longer shook the monastery walls, and no more were the monks troubled by fine scatterings of gray dust that descended upon their white garb, accumulating in their tonsures so that the young looked old and the old looked older still. Distant flames still rose to the south, and the bodies of the slain were accumulating inside the nearby cemetery gates, with more being added to their number every day, but the great armies were now silent and watchful. The stench was foul, but the monks were almost used to it after all these years of dealing with the dead, for bones were forever stacked like kindling around the ossuary, piled high against the walls as graves were emptied of their occupants and new remains interred in their place in a great cycle of burial, decay, and display. When the wind blew from the east, poisonous smoke from the smelting of ore was added to the mix, and those forced to work in the open coughed until their robes were dotted with blood.

The abbot of Sedlec stood at the gate of his lodge, in the shadow of the monastery’s conventual church. He was the heir of the great Abbot Heidenreich, diplomat and adviser to kings, who had died a century earlier but who had transformed the monastery into a center of influence, power, and wealth-aided by the discovery of great deposits of silver beneath the order’s lands-while never forgetting the monks’ duty toward the less fortunate of God’s children. Thus, a cathedral grew alongside a hospital, makeshift chapels were constructed among the mining settlements sanctioned by Heidenreich, and the monks buried great numbers of the dead without stricture or complaint. How ironic it was, thought the abbot, that in Heidenrich’s successes lay the very seeds that had now grown to doom the community, for it had provided a magnet of sorts for the Catholic forces and their leader, the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, pretender to the Bohemian crown. His armies were camped around Kutná Hora, and the abbot’s efforts to keep some distance between the monastery and the emperor’s forces had proved fruitless. Sedlec’s reputed wealth was a temptation to all, and he was already giving shelter to Carthusian monks from Prague whose monastery had been destroyed some years earlier during the ravages that followed the death of Wenceslas IV. Those who would loot Sedlec needed no further incentive to attack, yet Sigismund, by his presence, had now made its destruction inevitable.