Son of the Morning Read online

  That couldn’t be allowed to happen. One way or another, he would get those papers.

  Grace couldn’t sleep. She was exhausted, but every time she closed her eyes she saw Ford, the sudden, horrible blankness of his eyes as the bullet snuffed out his life, saw him toppling over on the bed.

  It was still raining. She sat huddled in a metal storage building, hidden behind a lawn mower that was missing a wheel, a greasy tool box, some rusting cans of paint, and several moldy cardboard boxes marked “Xmas Decorations.” The eight-by-ten building hadn’t been locked, but then there wasn’t anything in it worth stealing, except for a few wrenches and screwdrivers.

  She wasn’t certain exactly where she was. She had simply walked north until she was too tired to walk any farther, then taken refuge in the storage building behind a ’fifties-style ranch house. The neighborhood was showing signs of raggedness as its lower-middle-class respectability slowly deteriorated. No cars were parked in the carport, so she had taken the chance that no one was there. If any neighbors were at home, the rain had kept them indoors, and no one shouted at her as she walked slowly across the backyard and opened the flimsy metal door.

  She had scrambled over the clutter until she reached a back corner, then settled down on the dirty cement. She had sat in a stupor, staring at nothing. Time passed, but she had no grasp of it. After a while she heard a car drive up, and several car doors slammed. Kids yelled and argued, and a woman’s voice irritably told them to shut up. There was the squeak of a storm door opening, then the slam of another door, and the human clatter was silenced behind walls that held warmth and normalcy.

  Grace leaned her head on her knees. She was so tired, and so hungry. She didn’t know what to do next.

  Ford and Bryant would be buried, and she wouldn’t be there to see them one last time, to touch them, to put flowers on their graves.

  Her throat worked, closing tight on the surge of grief that made her rock back and forth. She felt herself flying apart, felt her control shredding, and she hugged her arms tightly as if she could hold everything together that way.

  She had never even taken Ford’s name, Wessner, as her own. She had kept her maiden name, St. John. The reasons had been so practical, so modern; her degree had been awarded to Grace St. John, and there was her driver’s license, her social security, so much paperwork to be changed if she changed her name. And, of course, Minneapolis was in the vanguard of political correctness; it would have been considered hopelessly gauche by the academic crowd if she had taken Ford’s name.

  The pain was almost unbearable. Ford had been willing to die for her, but she hadn’t been willing to use his surname as her own. He’d never asked, never even mentioned it; knowing Ford, it hadn’t been important to him. He’d been so grounded; their marriage had mattered to him, not what name she used. But suddenly, to her, it mattered. She yearned for that link to him, a link she would never have now, any more than she would ever have his children.

  They had planned to have two. They had talked about it, but put parenthood off while they both built their careers. After this past Christmas, they had decided to wait another year, and Grace had continued taking her birth control pills.

  Now Ford was dead, and the useless pills had been left behind in a house to which she would never return.

  Oh, God, Ford!

  She couldn’t bear this. The pain was too great. She had to do something or she would lose her mind, run screaming from this filthy little metal building and stand in the middle of the street until she was either arrested or killed.

  Jerkily she pulled the computer case from the plastic bag. The light in the building was a dim, muted green, too poor to do any translation work off the copies themselves, but she had already had some of them transferred to disk and she could work on the computer. She was too tired to get much accomplished, but she desperately needed a few minutes of distraction. She had always been able to lose herself in her work; maybe this time it would save her sanity.

  She didn’t have much room, crammed in the corner the way she was. She repositioned the boxes of Christmas decorations, sliding one in front of her to use as a desk; she knew from experience that the laptop generated too much heat to rest it on her legs. She slapped down the mouse pad, then opened the top of the computer and pushed the switch on the side. The screen lit and the machine made its musical electronic noises as it went through the booting process. When the menu appeared on the screen, she moved the cursor down to the program she wanted and clicked the mouse. She already knew which disk she wanted, and had it ready to slide into the A drive.

  The disk contained the section she had been working on before, when curiosity had led her to do more research on the Knights Templar. The language was Old French, something she was so familiar with that she should be able to work even with her mind so numb.

  She accessed the file, and the words filled the screen. The letters were indistinct with age, strangely formed, and medieval people had been very creative spellers. There hadn’t been any standardized spellings back then, so people had used whatever sounded right to them.

  Grace stared at the screen, slowly scrolling as she read and reestablished herself in the work. Despite everything, she could feel her concentration gathering, her focus narrowing as the documents pulled her into their power. The name popped out at her again, “Niall of Scotland,” and she took a deep breath. She eased down into a cross-legged position on the concrete, moving closer to the computer as she automatically fished out a pen and the pad that was always in the computer case for taking notes.

  Whoever this Niall of Scotland had been before joining the Order, he had quickly become renowned as its greatest warrior. She skimmed over the cramped lines on the screen, jotting down notes on sections she couldn’t quite make out, or on words that were unfamiliar to her. She didn’t notice her heartbeat speeding, or feel the increased oxygen boosting her concentration. Instead she felt as if she were being sucked into the screen, into the epic account of a monk who had lived and died almost seven hundred years before.

  Niall had been “of great size, three elnes and five more.” Since this document was in French, Grace decided the measurement would more likely have been a Flemish ell, twenty-seven inches, rather than an English one of thirty-seven inches. And though Niall had been Scots, the Scots ell was something like forty-five inches, which meant that by Scots measurement three ells and five inches would have placed him close to twelve feet tall. The Flemish ell was more reasonable, making the man stand about six feet four, tall for his time but not freakishly so. Medieval people had been of varying sizes, depending on their nutrition during childhood. Some knights had been ridiculously small, their suits of armor looking as if they had been made for children, while others had been big even by modern standards.

  According to this paean, Niall had been unsurpassed in swordsmanship and the other arts of war. There was account after account of battles he had fought, Saracens he had killed, fellow Knights he had saved. Grace felt as if she were reading a tale of a mythical hero along the lines of Hercules, rather than a Middle Ages record of an actual Templar. Granted, the Templars had been superb soldiers, the best of their time and the equivalent of modern-day special forces. But if the Templars had been such good soldiers, why had Niall of Scotland been singled out for excessive praise? She assumed she was reading actual records of the Knights Templar, and while outsiders would understandably be impressed by the great Knights, the Knights themselves would take such exploits for granted. It seemed unlikely they would aggrandize the accomplishments of one.

  She scrolled down, and there was a break in the narrative. The text picked up on what seemed to be a letter, signed by someone named Valcour. He expressed concerns about the safety of “the Treasure,” and the importance of protecting this, which had worth “greater than gold.”

  Treasure. Grace stretched her back, rotating her shoulders to ease the kinks. She didn’t know how long she had been staring at the computer, but her feet w