Sidney Sheldon’s Chasing Tomorrow (Tracy Whitney)
Chasing Tomorrow: Part 3 – Chapter 23

JEFF WAS IN THE house in Eaton Square. He was naked in bed, with Tracy lying next to him. Only, when he leaned over to kiss her, it wasn’t Tracy. It was another woman, a stranger.

Tracy was standing in the doorway shouting at him.

“How could you?”

Jeff felt sick. He ran to the door, but when he got there Tracy had gone. Now it was Jeff’s mother, Linda, who was talking. She used the same words Tracy had: How could you? But she was in another house, in another time, and she was shouting at Jeff’s father. Linda Stevens had caught her husband out in another affair.

All her inheritance money was gone, squandered on Dave Stevens’s latest get-­rich-­quick scheme.

“Get off me, you bitch!”

Cowering outside their bedroom, Jeff heard the crack of bone on bone as his father’s fist smashed into his mother’s cheek.

Linda screamed, “Stop it, Dave! Please!”

But the beating went on: thwack, thwack, thwack.

THWACK, THWACK, THWACK.

Something hard and cold slammed again and again into Jeff’s back.

He was lying on the floor, a metal floor, being thrown around like a potato in a sack.

I’m moving. Where am I?

He heard a sound like roaring engines and felt the shaking intensify.

A plane? A cargo plane?

Then he slammed down hard on the floor. The blackness returned.

THE BED WAS WARM and soft but Jeff had to get out of it. His stepmother wouldn’t leave him alone.

“Hold me, Jeffie! Your dad won’t be back for hours.”

Her breasts were like pillows, soft and enormous, suffocating him. Rolls of smooth, feminine flesh pressed down on him like dough. He couldn’t move! Panic rose up within him.

Jeff ran to the window and jumped out, naked, into the snow.

He started to shiver. It was so cold. So deathly cold.

Some instinct told him, Don’t fall asleep. If you sleep you’ll die.

Wake up, Jeff. Wake up!

“WAKE UP!”

The voice was real. The cold too. Jeff wasn’t moving anymore, but he was still on his back. The stone beneath him was like a block of ice.

“I said ‘wake up!’ ” A sharp kick to the ribs made Jeff scream and writhe in agony.

The voice was distinctive, masculine yet oddly high-­pitched, and with a distinct note of hysteria. Jeff recognized it at once, and a flood of memories came back to him.

Seville.

The church.

Going to meet Daniel Cooper.

Cooper was quoting from the Bible. He sounded utterly deranged.

“ ‘Are you still sleeping?’ said the Lord. ‘The hour has come. I am to be delivered into the hands of sinners. Wake up!’ ”

Jeff groaned. “I’m awake.”

His ribs hurt from Cooper’s jackboot, but that was nothing compared to the pain in his head, a constant throb, as if his brain had swollen to such catastrophic proportions that it was about to shatter his skull from within. Instinctively he moved to touch the wound, then realized that his hands were bound.

Hands, arms, legs, feet.

He was dressed, but not in his own clothes. What he had on was flimsy and insubstantial, like a hospital gown. A blindfold of something thicker and coarser had been tied around his head. Could it be a bandage?

“I need a doctor,” Jeff croaked. “Where are we?”

Another kick, this time to the collarbone. The pain was excruciating. Jeff couldn’t understand why he hadn’t passed out.

“I ask the questions,” Cooper squealed. He sounded like a stuck pig, or an angry child who’d just inhaled the helium out of a party balloon. “The Lord will heal your pain. Only the Lord can help you now.”

Unless “the Lord” had a flair for emergency cranial surgery, and/or an ability to convince deranged psychopaths to release their hapless prisoners and walk into the nearest mental hospital, Jeff couldn’t bring himself to share Cooper’s confidence in His present usefulness.

He remembered another quote from the Bible, something Uncle Willie used to say: “The Lord helps those who help themselves.” Jeff’s survival instincts began to kick in.

Step one was to figure out where he was. From the echoing quality of Cooper’s voice, he could tell they were in a very large building of some sort, something high-­ceilinged and drafty. A church? No. All churches had a certain smell to them that this place lacked. A barn? That seemed more likely. When Cooper wasn’t spouting off about the Lord or kicking him like a dog, the silence was total. There was no sound of traffic, no ambient noise, no birdsong even. Just an enveloping blanket of soundless peace.

We’re in a barn, somewhere remote.

The cool temperatures suggested that it was nighttime. Also that they were probably no longer in the south of Spain. The plane ride came back to him . . . if it was a plane ride. And something else. A car?

He wondered how long he’d been unconscious. Hours? Days?

They could be anywhere by now.

Jeff tried to work back logically. What was the last thing he could remember? The pain in his head and body made it hard to focus for more than a few seconds. Thoughts and images came back to him piecemeal. He remembered the church in Seville. The smell of incense, the beautiful altar.

Then what?

The plane. The cold metal. Tracy. His mother.

It was so hard to untangle what was real from what was imagined.

Jeff’s mother had been dead for twenty-­five years, but her voice, her screams, had felt so real. He felt himself on the brink of tears.

“Do you know why you’re here, Stevens?”

Cooper’s voice stung like a cattle prod.

“No.” Talking seemed to require an inordinate amount of strength. Each word was exhausting. “Why?”

“Because you are the lamb. The third and final covenant.”

Great. Well, thanks for clearing that up.

A weak smile played at the corners of Jeff’s bruised lips.

“Do you think this is funny?” Cooper seethed.

Jeff braced himself for another blow, but none came. What’s he waiting for?

He tried to put himself in Cooper’s shoes, to get inside his mind-­set—­not easy given that the man was clearly a card-­carrying fruit loop.

He’s talking to you. That means he wants to engage in a dialogue.

He could easily have killed you by now, but he hasn’t.

Why not?

What does he want?

What does he need that you have?

Jeff’s mind was a blank. But he knew he had to do something, say something. He had to keep Cooper engaged. On instinct he said, “I’ll tell you what I think. I think this has nothing to do with the Lord, and everything to do with Tracy.”

Cooper erupted. “DON’T SAY HER NAME!”

Jeff thought, Jackpot.

“Why shouldn’t I say her name? She is my wife, after all.”

Cooper made an awful, howling noise like a dying animal.

“No. No no no. She is not your wife!”

“Sure she is. We never actually divorced.”

“It doesn’t matter. You defiled her. You took what was mine. You took something beautiful, something perfect, and you made it filthy. Like YOU.”

Jeff heard the little man scrabbling around on the floor. Then he felt himself being rolled over onto his stomach and the thin garment he was wearing being ripped off his back.

“You will atone.” Cooper let out a wild shriek, then struck Jeff hard on the back with some sort of crude whip. It felt as if it were made from electrical wire, with sharp metal tips that ripped into Jeff’s flesh like razors.

Jeff screamed

“You WILL atone.”

The whip came down again.

And again.

And again.

The pain was beyond words, beyond anything Jeff had ever experienced.

He was still screaming, but the sound seemed to be coming from outside him now. Inside, he had shut down, waiting for oblivion, knowing that it must surely come soon.

The last thing Jeff remembered was the sound of Daniel Cooper’s labored breathing, the little man gasping with exertion as the blows kept raining down. Then, like a lover, the silence rushed up to greet him.

“DO YOU PLAY CHESS?”

Jeff opened his eyes. He could see nothing but blackness. For a second he panicked. I’m blind! The bastard’s blinded me!

But then he remembered the cloth bandage over his eyes and took a breath. He waited for the pain to shoot through his rib cage as air entered his lungs. Or for his headache to return or his raw, flayed back to start screaming. But all the agony he’d felt before was gone. It was miraculous. Wonderful.

It wasn’t long before the obvious thought struck him:

Cooper must have drugged me.

But he didn’t care. Jeff’s whole body felt warm, as if a glow of contentment and well-­being were heating him from within. He had no idea how much time had passed since he was last awake—­since the beating—­but whatever Cooper had given him felt great. The strange thing was that Jeff felt none of the mental fog usually associated with morphine or other opiate-­based painkillers. His body might have been lulled into a false sense of security, but his mind was clear. Perhaps, he wondered, adrenaline was keeping him focused? Very obviously he was still in danger. Other than his hunch about Tracy, Jeff still had no idea why he was here or what Daniel Cooper wanted with him.

“Chess?” Cooper repeated. “Do you play? Oh, never mind, it’s a rhetorical question. I know you do.” His earlier anger seemed to have dissipated to the point where he sounded positively cheerful. “Let’s play. I’m white, so I’ll go first.”

Jeff heard the sounds of a board being set up, of wooden pieces being set down gently in their respective battle lines. He barely knew how to play chess, hadn’t played since his teens, in fact. But he sensed this would be a bad time to admit as much. Something told him Cooper wasn’t likely to go for a hand of poker instead, or to whip out the Monopoly board.

“Haven’t you forgotten something?” Jeff asked.

“Of course not,” said Cooper. “I never forget things.”

Jeff said, “I can’t see. Or move my hands. How am I supposed to play chess if I can’t see the board or touch the pieces?”

Cooper seemed amused by the question. “With your mind, Mr. Stevens. I’ll tell you my moves and you tell me yours. Then I’ll move your pieces for you. It’ll be just like on the QE2. The game you rigged between Melnikov and Negulesco. Remember?”

Jeff would never forget it. It was the first scam he and Tracy had pulled off together and it had worked like a charm. The two grand masters had sat in separate rooms and unwittingly copied each other’s moves. Jeff had run a book on the match for fellow passengers and cleaned up. The question was, how did Daniel Cooper know about it?

“How much did you make on that fraud, out of interest?”

Jeff’s voice was hoarse. “Around a hundred thousand dollars, I believe.”

“Between you?”

“Each.”

“Your idea or Tracy’s?”

“Mine. But I couldn’t have done it without her. She was magnificent. Tracy was always magnificent.”

Cooper said nothing, but Jeff could feel his jealousy in the air between them like a living, malevolent thing, a hovering falcon poised to strike. On the one hand, it seemed crazy to keep provoking a man who was obviously totally crazy and who already wished him dead. On the other, Tracy was Cooper’s one weakness. If Jeff could get him to reveal more about himself and his obsession with Tracy, maybe he could use that information to figure out a way out of here . . .

It was worth a shot.

“C4 to C5.” Cooper scraped his piece across the board. “Your move.”

Jeff hesitated. How did it work again? The horizontal rows had numbers and the vertical ones had letters? Or was it the other way around.

“I said YOUR MOVE!” Cooper shouted.

“Okay, okay. I wanna move my knight. That’s N, isn’t it? . . . er . . . Nd5.”

“Hmm.” Cooper seemed unimpressed. “Predictable.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” said Jeff.

“Don’t be sorry. Be better. This might be your last game. You want to leave a good impression, don’t you?”

Jeff ignored the threat. Instead he focused on keeping his captor engaged.

“I guess no one could accuse you of being predictable, could they, Daniel?”

“Don’t call me by my first name.”

“Why not?”

“Because I said so, that’s why not.”

“You don’t like your name?”

Cooper muttered under his breath. “He used to call me that. Zimmer.”

Jeff registered the loathing in his voice.

“Zimmer?”

“Fred Zimmer. He was disgusting. A lech, like you. Bxd5. Say good-­bye to your knight.”

More clattering on the chessboard. Jeff tried to picture the pieces but it was so hard to focus.

“G5 to E5.” He tried to draw Cooper back into the conversation. “How did you know him?”

“He was our neighbor,” said Cooper. “He used to come over to our house and defile my mother.”

Defile. He likes that word.

“Fred Zimmer and your mother were lovers?”

“It was disgusting. Afterward he would pass me in the hall as if nothing had happened. ‘Hey, Daniel, how are you?’ ‘You wanna go to a game, Daniel?’ Zimmer turned my mother into a whore. But I brought down the Lord’s vengeance on him. On both of them.”

“What did you do?”

“I did the Lord’s will. I spilled the blood of the lamb. That was the first covenant. Ra5.”

“You killed Fred Zimmer? How?”

“Are you deaf? I said ‘the lamb.’ The lamb! Zimmer wasn’t the lamb. He was a wolf. Your move.”

Jeff tried to wade through Cooper’s deranged logic. It was like trying to swim through molasses with your arms tied behind your back. If the neighbor was the wolf . . .

“Your mother. She was the lamb?”

“I loved her so much.” Cooper started to cry. “But just as Abraham had to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac, so I too was called by God to bring the lamb to the altar.”

“God had nothing to do with it,” Jeff said bluntly. “You murdered your own mother, Daniel. No wonder you’re so screwed up.”

“DON’T CALL ME DANIEL! I told you already.”

“You were jealous of her boyfriend, so you killed her, and then, what? Got got rid of him too, I suppose?”

Cooper was crying softly to himself.

“Jesus,” Jeff exhaled. He didn’t know what he’d expected exactly, but certainly not this. Not only was Daniel Cooper insane, but he’d been insane for a very, very long time.

“I am the instrument of the Lord.”

“Like hell you are. You’re a psychopath.”

“I am a vessel!” Cooper was growing hysterical. “The blood of the lamb will be shed for you, and for all men, so that sins may be forgiven. That’s what the Lord said. So that sins may be forgiven. ‘Do this in memory of me.’ ”

“Do what? Murder your own mother?”

“You don’t understand! My mother had to atone. To sacrifice. Just as I have had to sacrifice, to earn Tracy’s love. If Tracy had come to me in the beginning, like she should have, all of this could have been avoided.”

“Oh, so now you’re blaming Tracy? That’s not very gallant of you, Daniel.”

The chess game was apparently over. But Jeff had a strong feeling he was playing for his life. Provoking Cooper was a risky strategy, but right now it was all he had.

“Just now you said it was your mother and Zimmer who turned you into a killer. So which is it? Who’s to blame?”

“NO! STOP TALKING! My mother was perfect!”

“I thought you said she was a whore?”

“Tracy’s the whore,” Cooper muttered darkly. “Tracy tempted me, like Eve in the garden. Because of her sins, and mine, many lambs have been sacrificed. But now the price has been paid. Well, almost paid. It’s time for the new covenant. One last sacrifice . . .”

Many lambs? Did that mean many murders? If Cooper really had killed his mother—­if it wasn’t one of his sick, fantasy projections—­what else could he be capable of?

He continued rambling.

“I did the Lord’s will. I obeyed, but it was awful. Awful. So much blood! Just like with my mother. You don’t know what I went through. But then, you see, there was so much sin with these women.”

“What women?” Jeff asked quietly

Cooper didn’t seem to hear the question.

“So much sin. So much recompense to be made. I thought it would go on forever. But the Lord in His mercy had other plans. He brought Tracy back to me, you see.” He paused then, and after a few seconds seemed to regain his composure. When he spoke again, he sounded totally calm. “That’s why we’re here, Mr. Stevens, you and me. Playing our last game. The time has come. The Lord has demanded a new covenant. A new lamb must suffer death, death on a cross. Only then can Eden be restored.”

A new lamb? A new covenant? Death on a cross? For a moment there Jeff had felt as if he had Cooper on the ropes, emotionally. But now he was losing him.

“Once the new covenant has been made, Tracy and I can at last be married. Our sins will be forgiven. We will walk hand in hand, pure and clean in the light of the Lord.”

“You want to marry Tracy?”

“Naturally. After the sacrifice.”

The sacrifice.

Death on a cross . . .

Jeff held his breath. Slowly, very slowly, the shoe was beginning to drop.

“After the sacrifice, Tracy will come to the tomb, like Mary Magdalen.” Cooper sounded positively cheerful now. “But like Mary, she will replace it empty, but for a shroud. She will press the new shroud to her face and she will weep. Then, at last, she will believe. She will see her Messiah face-­to-­face and she will understand.” Jeff felt the hairs on his arms stand up and the bile rise in his throat.

The new shroud . . .

Daniel Cooper had never been planning to steal the Shroud of Turin.

He was planning to make a new shroud all his own.

He came to Seville to learn how to do it.

What had he said a few minutes ago?

“Do you know why you’re here, Stevens?

“Because you are the lamb.”

Jeff had shrugged off the words as lunatic ramblings. But now he knew what they meant. Panic gripped him like a frozen fist clenched around his heart.

“Your move.”

Jeff couldn’t breathe.

Jesus Christ.

Daniel Cooper’s going to crucify me!