Judgment Stone (9781401687359)

by Liparulo, Robert

  Owen pulled over. Jagger got out, walked a few feet to a drainage ditch through which water trickled over a bed of pebbles. He got on the ground and washed his real hand, then RoboHand. Scooped water for his arms and face. It felt good, ice cold and cleansing. He wished he could wash the images in his head away as easily. He sat back on his heels, leaned his head back, and just breathed, trying to think of nothing. Owen washed as well, and they both got back in the car.

  After a time, while they were still in the countryside, Jagger said, “What now?”

  “We try to catch them at the airport,” Owen said. “Hope they used the same airport we did, and hope we get there before they do. Maybe God will throw us a bone, and the Clan will get stopped by the cops.”

  “And if we miss them? What then?”

  Owen glanced at him, didn’t answer.

  “We can’t keep chasing them this way,” Jagger said. “Showing up at their crime scenes, the Clan long gone.”

  “Look how close we were this time,” Owen said. “We missed them by an hour.”

  “Might as well have been a year.”

  “Hey, we just got started. We left St. Cath’s only this morning, and look, we traveled over four countries and we almost got them. I say that’s pretty good.”

  “They slaughtered two groups of people. How many did you say in the nightclub, twelve? Nineteen or twenty in the barn. That’s at least thirty-one people, something like two an hour since they got their hands on the God Stone. I wouldn’t call that ‘pretty good.’”

  “Not what they’re doing—what we’re doing. It’s all we can do.”

  Jagger nodded. He saw his future and it was tragic: traveling from country to country, witnessing the aftermath of the Clan’s passing, painting his skin with the blood of children, darkening his soul with their staring faces.

  “We can’t just keep chasing them,” he said again.

  “What are you saying? Give up?”

  “Absolutely not. We have to get them, and I hope we can do more damage than simply taking away their toy. I just don’t always want to be behind.”

  “Do you have any other ideas?”

  He shook his head, and they drove in silence. Upon leaving the barn, Jagger had dropped the fragment loosely into his pocket. Now he reached in, trying to get his fingers between the cloth and fragment. He did, but he couldn’t grip the piece of Stone with the cloth; it was like trying to pick up a quarter with mittens on. He pulled the cloth out and reached across with RoboHand, pushing the hook in his pocket. He worked it around, clamping and unclamping. He exhaled a deep breath and rolled his head toward Owen, who was attempting to watch the road and Jagger’s performance at the same time.

  “I’m just going to grab the thing and put it in the cloth,” Jagger said. “Five minutes of angels isn’t so bad.” It was actually beautiful, wonderful . . . but not now. He kept thinking about that weeping angel.

  “Want me to do it?” Owen asked.

  “I don’t think so.” He reached in, got his fingers around the fragment, and closed his eyes when the flash appeared. He pulled the Stone out, tucked it into the cloth, and returned it to his pocket. With another little sigh, he looked up. The car was climbing a hill, and the membrane of undulating colors in the sky filled the windshield. Owen crested the hill, about to dip back down into a stretch of low flatland, when Jagger said, “Stop!”

  Owen hit the brakes.

  Jagger stared.

  “What is it?”

  “A blue beam.” He looked at Owen. “I feel like they should be called prayer beams, but I have a feeling they’re more than that. You said they represented a connectedness to God, and I think that’s right. They’re umbilical cords to our Creator.”

  Owen turned from Jagger to stare out the windshield. “What do you see?”

  “The biggest umbilical cord yet, the brightest and widest beam I’ve seen.”

  “Where?”

  “Far away, it seems, really far. But it’s bright and . . . stunning.”

  Owen wiggled his fingers at him. “Let me touch the fragment.”

  Jagger fished it out, pressed it to Owen’s fingers, and replaced it. Owen was nodding, smiling. “Wow.”

  “If Bale saw that, he’d go for it,” Jagger said.

  “How could he not see it?”

  “Could’ve just started. The Stone’s effect on him may have worn off before whoever’s causing that got to praying.”

  “He sees it,” Owen said. “I know it.”

  “Like . . . a feeling?” Jagger ducked to see more of the angel that was standing outside Owen’s window. “Did an angel tell you?” Yesterday those words would have been sarcastic; today they weren’t.

  “I don’t know. I just do.”

  “So where is it? How do we get to it?”

  “That’s flying distance,” Owen said, squinting out the windshield. He looked at the GPS. “Northeast. You drive.”

  “To the light?

  “The airport.”

  “I haven’t driven a car since the crash.”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  Owen walked around the hood of the car, and before settling into the passenger seat he reached behind it for the iPad. While Jagger followed the GPS toward the airport, Owen worked on the tablet. About five minutes later he spoke. “Okay, okay. Let me just cross-reference this . . .”

  “What?”

  “Hold on.” They were winding through Varna, close to the airport, when Owen said, looking at the screen, “I think I know where it’s coming from. Listen to this—from a blog called Heaven on Earth, A Quest for the Holy Among the Profane. It’s in German. It says, ‘Never in my life have I found a community so in tune with God. They pray ceaselessly’”—Owen looked up at Jagger, eyebrows raised—“‘but calling it prayer seems to diminish what it really is: communion. God is with them and they with him. Spend even the shortest time with them, and this fact becomes apparent. But they don’t walk on sandaled feet, carrying candles, chanting. They live their lives as I imagine God intended them to: They read John Grisham novels and watch Steven Spielberg movies, laugh and joke—but no teasing, they respect each other and the differences God puts into everyone too much for that. They watch and play sports. One I met collects stamps, another football cards, yet another has an incredible Lionel train set on a diorama that would make the most avid collector jealous—but then if the collector told the owner of the train set that, he might just find himself with the diorama; these people are that generous and sensitive to others’ feelings. These are humans experiencing all this temporal plane has to offer, and they do it with a constant companion, Jesus Christ.’ It goes on and on about how they’ve melded human existence with holy living.”

  “What is this community?” Jagger said. “A monastery?”

  Owen smiled. “An orphanage.”

  [ 57 ]

  “Romania?” Jagger said. They had turned in their rental and were carrying their bags—the duffel of weapons and Jagger’s backpack with medical supplies Owen had insisted on bringing—across the tarmac toward the jet.

  “Outside a town called Zărneşti, in the foothills of the Transylvanian Alps.”

  “Transylvania?”

  Owen looked at him from the corner of his eye. “Don’t get all superstitious on me, now.”

  “I’ve faced worse than Dracula.”

  Owen nodded. “We’re facing worse now. Believe me, you want monsters, you don’t have to read fiction. The real world’s full of them.”

  “How far away?”

  “Two hundred and twenty-eight miles, due northwest. Forty-three degrees west of due north.”

  “Two hundred twenty-eight miles,” Jagger repeated. “You think we saw the beam from that far away?”

  “I think if we got used to the vision, we’d be seeing beams a lot farther off than that. We can see stars billions of miles away. The curvature of the earth is the only thing keeping us from seeing the whole world’s prayers.”

&nbs
p; “That and not having our God-eyes.”

  Owen smiled at that. “Or the big Stone.”

  On one hand the conversation was perfectly ridiculous, akin to: The only thing keeping me from flying is not having wings . . . and being too heavy . . . and not being a bird . . . and gravity . . . But with their visions of the spiritual realm, they weren’t talking about the impossible, only degrees of limitation. To Jagger, it helped put the power of the Stone into perspective. Seeing prayer, seeing someone’s connectedness to God. Even forgetting about the Clan’s using it to target their victims, the ways in which that power could be abused was terrifying. He imagined some fanatical religion—or a traditional religion that became fanatical because of the Stone—sending people into exile or actually killing them because of their lack of connectedness to God as revealed by the Stone. It would end in a world war, the bright-enough believers against everyone else. A whole new kind of persecution on a global scale. Maybe this is how the apocalypse would start.

  “Jagger!”

  Owen’s voice jarred him out of his thoughts.

  Owen was pointing at a plane on the runway. “That’s it! That’s the Clan’s Bombardier!”

  It was black with silver stripes. Sleek as a bullet, like Owen’s, but three times larger. It was zipping along a runway two hundred yards away, building the velocity required to take off.

  “Don’t point,” Jagger said.

  “Turn away.”

  Glancing over their shoulders at the plane, Jagger said. “Is it too late to prevent them from taking off?”

  “What? Jump in a service vehicle, chase it down, and crash into it?” As he spoke, the jet’s nose lifted and its fuselage followed. It climbed like an eagle after catching its supper. Owen said, “Yeah, it’s too late. It was too late as soon as they started taxiing.”

  “Just thinking of every option,” Jagger said.

  “Try to keep your eye on it. See which direction it goes.”

  “Can we catch it in the air?”

  Owen shook his head. “Boanerges’s top speed is four hundred sixty-five miles per hour. Theirs is close to six hundred.” He began jogging toward his jet.

  Keeping up, Jagger calculated and said, “So it’ll take them about twenty minutes and us thirty. That’s only a ten-minute difference.” Nice that they were traveling only two hundred and thirty miles. If they were going across a continent, the faster jet could get hours ahead.

  “Add another twenty for us to get clearance and take off.”

  “Half hour behind. That’s enough time to do a lot of damage.” An orphanage . . . full of godly kids . . . He thought of the scene at the barn.

  They reached the jet and Owen opened the door. Pulling down the steps, he looked back at Jagger. “But they don’t know we’re after them.”

  “So they might dawdle at the airport, stop for a bite.”

  “The Clan? I doubt it. If they’re hungry, they’re probably eating now.” He helped Jagger up, then turned to enter the cockpit. “Shut the door,” he said, then: “Besides, it’s not food they’re hungry for.”

  Just what Jagger wanted to hear. He said, “Is there anything else we can do?”

  “Pray.”

  He retracted the steps, but before closing the door he leaned out and looked for the Bombardier. Twilight had breathed a uniform grayness into the sky, making anything up there all but invisible. But he’d tracked it up until he’d turned to enter the jet, so he knew its general vicinity. Something caught a ray of sunshine and glinted. There it was, over the Black Sea. It made an arc in the sky and headed northwest.

  [ 58 ]

  Jagger sat in the copilot’s seat with the jet’s satphone and attempted to reach the Mondragon Home for Boys and Girls. An answering machine allowed him to choose his preferred language, and a pleasant female voice informed him that the staff and students were attending services and would be available for emergency calls at nine thirty p.m. Regular office hours were between eight a.m. and five p.m. Please call back then.

  “Nine thirty’s too late,” Owen said. “The Clan will be there by then. Try the police in Zărneşti. I think it’s about twenty miles away from the orphanage.”

  Jagger found a number for a constable. He dialed, but no one answered. He disconnected after more than a dozen rings. “They must not have much crime in the area.”

  “The Clan is about to send the whole country’s violent crime stats through the roof.”

  Jagger called the monastery’s satphone. His call went to voice mail—Gheronda’s creaky voice telling him someone would return his call and God bless. He remembered Gheronda had been making plans for an evening Trisagion, an abbreviated memorial service for the fallen monks. A full-blown service, called First Panikhida—which included the washing and dressing of the bodies and the Divine Liturgy—would take place three days after their deaths, this Friday. He imagined Beth and Tyler were attending the Trisagion. He left Owen’s satphone number and requested that someone ask Beth to give him a call.

  Not sure what else to do, Jagger picked up the iPad and began reading about the home—named after Octavian Mondragon, a philanthropist railroad tycoon who converted an old royal estate into the orphanage in 1911. He’d believed that there was a unnecessary polarity between secular and Christian living, that Christians too often wore their faith like clothes instead of being their faith in everything they do. “Faith should be a part of every molecule that composes their bodies,” was the way he’d put it. He believed followers of Christ could and should permeate every aspect of society: politics, banking, medicine, geology, education, music, exploration—a glamorized profession at the time—theater, literature, religion. A footnote listed eighty-eight broad categories necessary for a civilized society.

  The key to infiltrating society with the Good Word of the gospels, according to Mondragon, was a broad education, cursory exposure to—scanning the list, Jagger decided everything pretty much covered it, from fencing to midwifery, equestrianism to fishing and not a Christian education, but a “Christ-centered upbringing.” To Mondragon, that meant showing the children how to pray and communicate with God “without ceasing.” The goal was to open a channel to God and keep it open, through triumph and tragedy, riches and poverty. It sounded to Jagger like marriage vows.

  He found a web site with the complete text of a book about Mondragon, published in 1928, the year he—oh, get this—the year he disappeared on a mission trip to the jungles of Ecuador.

  “His head’s probably the size of an apple now,” Jagger said, “glaring out of a glass case in some museum.”

  The book quoted the man: “A human being—child or adult—should communicate with his Creator as naturally and automatically as he breathes, as his heart beats in his chest. He eats, sleeps, puts on his stockings. Communication with God should come as easily, it should come as readily. Not communicating with God should be as shocking and disruptive to his system as being denied breath.”

  What seemed to set Mondragon apart from the stern Catholic boarding schools of his day—from any of the supposed Christ-centered boarding schools or orphanages throughout time—was his belief that the only way to instill such godliness was not through militaristic discipline but through sincerely understanding love. Recalcitrant children were not beaten or denied benefits; they were loved through their attitude problems, allowed to act out, as long as their behavior didn’t harm others. When it did, they were separated from others but were housed in comfortable quarters and slowly reintegrated back into the community at large as their behavior improved, which it inevitably did “once they realized their demeanor did not confer upon them special attention, but the same agape love they receive anyway.”

  Jagger looked up. He said, “Are you getting the picture of choir boys in white robes, carrying candles, quoting Scripture, and asking if they can do anything for you?”

  Owen glanced over. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “All the time?” He shook his head. “These kids don�
��t sound nauseating to you?”

  “I’m sure they’re just kids,” Owen said. “God made them to be curious and mischievous and full of energy. If he wanted robots, that’s what He would have made. And the Bible never says children are the ‘before’ picture and adults are the ‘after.’ The reverse, in fact.”

  “Yeah, but ‘every molecule’? They’re oozing faith.”

  “I repeat, what’s wrong with that?”

  “I just keep seeing these little popes in mitre hats, washing each other’s feet.”

  “Well, if they wash each other’s feet,” Owen said, smiling, “that would be cool. But why can’t they be filthy, with clothes made out of brambles like the hermit-monks? Or hacking their way through a jungle in army boots and khakis, like some of the missionaries I know?”

  Jagger nodded.

  “Or like Tyler?” Owen continued. “He’s probably not ‘oozing’ faith, but he loves God, doesn’t he?”

  “All right, all right,” Jagger said.

  “I met a street kid in old London once,” Owen said. “Shabby little girl, stole bread from the carts in West Chepe, a chicken on good days. She’d share her plunder with the other homeless kids.” He shook his head. “That kid oozed faith.”

  “But she stole.”

  Owen smiled. “We always want to put God in a box, turn His will for us into definitive rules so we don’t have to actually think about what’s right and wrong.”

  “But not stealing is a commandment.”

  “Everything in the Bible is a commandment, Jag. What about Proverbs 6:30: ‘Men do not despise a thief if he steals to satisfy his hunger when he is starving’? The point is, you have to know all of Scripture to know any of it. Otherwise, it’s like saying, ‘Jagger shoots at people. He must be a killer.’”

  “I get it.” After thinking for a moment, he said, “Knowing all of Scripture . . . really?”

  “How many believers can tell you more about Harry Potter than they can Jesus? It’s a matter of priority.” Owen stared out the window, checked his gauges, made an adjustment on a computer touch screen set in the dash.