The Quest: A Novel

mountain winds.
    Vivian asked, “Why are we not seeing anyone?”
    Purcell glanced at her in the rearview mirror. They had taken the canvas top off the Jeep so they could be identified more easily as Westerners. The wind had sifted dust through Vivian’s raven black hair and deposited a fine red powder on her high cheeks. She wore a floppy bush hat to keep the sun off her stark white skin. He said to her, “They will see our dust before we see them.”
    Mercado stared absently at the winding road. His mind was elsewhere. Since his release from the Russian Gulag, he had made a career of seeking out religious experiences. In his travels as a journalist, he had spoken with Pope John XXIII, the Dalai Lama, Hindu mystics, Buddhist monks, and people who claimed they were God, or good friends of God. His life and his writing, up to the time of his arrest, had been anti-Fascist and pro-Socialist. But with the collapse of the former system and his imprisonment by a government of the latter, his life and his writings had also collapsed. Both became stale. Empty.
    People had urged him to write about his years in the Soviet Gulag, but he had no words to describe his experience. Or, he admitted, he could not find the courage to find the words.
    It was his search for God that had revived his flair for the written word and his ability to tell a good story.
    He had written a
New York Times
piece on the Dalai Lama fleeingthe Red Chinese and living in exile in India, which gained him new postwar fame as a journalist. In 1962, he had gone boldly back to Russia and done articles on religious persecution. He narrowly escaped re-imprisonment and was expelled. There had been some good pieces since, but lately the writing had become stale again.
    Mercado was as worried about his career as he was about his flagging religious fervor. The two were related. He needed something burning in his gut—like the priest’s mortal wound—to make him write well. His current assignment for UPI was to do a series of articles on how the ancient Coptic Church was faring in the civil war. He also had contacts with the Vatican newspaper,
L’Osservatore Romano
, and they bought much of his output. But there was no fire in his words anymore and his editors knew it. He had almost given up. Until now. Now his brain burned secretly with the experience of the previous night. He felt that he had been chosen by God to tell the priest’s story. There was no other explanation for the string of coincidences that had made him privy to this secret. He remained calm on the outside, but his soul was on fire with the anticipation of the quest for the Grail. But that was
his
secret.
    Purcell glanced at him in the passenger seat. “Are you all right?”
    Mercado came out of his reverie. “I’m fine.”
    Purcell thought of Henry Mercado as his danger barometer. Henry had seen it all, and if Henry was apprehensive, then a shitstorm was coming.
    Purcell, too, was no stranger to war, and both of them had probably seen more combat and death than the average infantry soldier. But Mercado was a seasoned pro, and Purcell had been impressed with the older man’s instinct for survival during the three-day ride through the chaos and violence of this war-torn country. Henry Mercado knew when to bluff and bluster, when to bribe, when to be polite and respectful, and when to run like hell.
    Purcell thought that despite their imprisonments, both he and Mercado had been mostly lucky as war correspondents, or at least smart enough to stay alive. But Mercado had stayed alive far longer than Frank Purcell. So when Henry Mercado and Vivian had approached him in the Hilton bar, armed with a safe-conduct passfrom the Provisional government, and asked him if he’d like to accompany them to the current hot spot, he’d agreed without too much hesitation.
    But now… well, what sounded good in Addis did not look good three days out. Purcell had been in worse places and much tighter situations, but after a year in a Khmer Rouge prison, facing death every day from starvation and disease, and seeing men and women executed for no apparent reason, he felt that he’d used up his quota of luck. Unfortunately, he hadn’t come to that realization until he was a day out of Addis Ababa. And now they had reached that point of no return.
Avanti.
    Purcell lit a cigarette as he kept the wheel steady with one hand. He said, “I’m hoping we hook up with the army. I’m sure they beat the hell out of