“Do you think someone out there took a shot at him? Was he shot?”
Gracie looked at him with sudden horror, then bent back down to Finch’s side. Dalton bent down with her. She hesitated; then, with trembling fingers, she straightened Finch’s arms and legs and, slowly, turned him over. She scanned his front, but couldn’t see any bullet wound.
“It doesn’t look like it,” she said. “I didn’t hear a shot, did you?”
“No.” Dalton looked mystified. He turned his gaze back up at the top of the keep. “The lip of that wall up there, it’s so low. Maybe he was leaning over to tell us he found it and just . . .” His voice trailed off.
Gracie scanned the ground around them. The satphone glinted at her from a few feet away, half-buried in the sand. She scanned wider. Spotted it. A small black box, lying by the base of the keep’s wall. Finch’s BlackBerry. She got up, retrieved the satphone, then padded over to the wall. She picked up the BlackBerry and just stared at it, brushing the sand off it with her fingers, imagining Finch’s last moments in her mind’s eye as he found it on the roof and crossed over to the edge for—what, one last look? a wave? She wished there was some way to go back and stop him from climbing up there and having his life grind to a halt in one cruel and sudden moment. But there was no going back. She knew that. She’d seen enough deaths in her years and had learned, long ago, to accept their finality.
“What are we going to do?” she asked. Her eyes, still teary, drifted past Dalton, to Father Jerome, the abbot, and Brother Ameen, who were behind him, and the macabre contingent of monks slightly farther back.
“We’ve got to go,” Dalton told her, his voice hollow.
“What about Finch? We can’t leave him here like this.”
“We can’t take him with us,” he replied softly. “We just can’t.”
After a brief moment, she nodded, still reluctantly but with a hint of clarity seeping back into her. “You’re right,” she said. She looked over at the abbot. “Can you . . . ?”
Sparing her the need to say it, the abbot nodded solemnly. “Of course,” he told her. “We’ll take care of him until we can send him home . . . properly.” He paused, as if to make sure she was all right with that, then glanced over at the Previa and the men huddled around it. She followed his gaze. The faint drone of the radio was still there, threatening like a malevolent siren.
“You should go now,” he added, “as planned.”
AS THEY GATHERED THEIR GEAR, Gracie and Dalton watched as a few monks, aided by the driver, lifted Finch’s body onto a makeshift stretcher—an old door that they’d lifted off its hinges—and carried him inside the main chapel. Four other monks picked up the rest of the news crew’s gear, and the small troupe followed the abbot out of the sun-soaked courtyard and into the cool darkness of the monastery.
They trudged past the entrance of the Church of the Holy Virgin and the refectory, until they reached an ancient, unlit stairwell.
“You’ll need the lamps from here on,” the abbot instructed. The monks lit up a succession of small, camping gas lanterns, casting a cool white pallor across the stone passage. Slowly, they descended a narrow staircase, kicking up a fine mist of pungent dust, and landed in another passage that led them past a couple of olive-oil cellars, where some of the world’s earliest dated books—brought to the monastery by monks fleeing religious persecution in Syria and Baghdad in the eighth century—had been discovered in the mid-1800s, and on to the entrance of Saint Bishoi’s cave.
The abbot pushed the crumbling timber door open and led them in. The cave was dark and narrow, no bigger than a small bedroom. Gracie held her lantern up for a closer look. The cave’s floor was begrimed with dirt, its ceiling vaulted with rough-hewn stone. She saw nothing to support the legend she’d read about during the downtime on their journey over—the legend that Bishoi’s devotion to his faith was so powerful that he used to tie his hair to a chain that dangled from the roof of the cave, to make sure he didn’t fall asleep for days on end while awaiting the vision of Christ that he was praying for.