He wept in the darkness, waiting for whatever would come.
CHAPTER 13
The first thing Lisa noticed when she opened her eyes was the kitchen clock. There was something odd about it, but it took her a moment to realize that the oddness wasn’t in the clock itself but in the angle at which she was viewing it. She was on the floor, leaning back against the dishwasher, her legs stretched out in front of her. There were loops of cut duct tape clinging to her ankles and wrists. She noted this odd fact but didn’t think to question it. It seemed to be taking place in a fuzzy zone of reality midway between dreaming and waking, where such things were unexceptionable. The time, she noted, was nearly eight. The house was dead silent. Her head was pounding dully, and her mouth was dry, with an unpleasant chemical taste haunting the back of her throat. The air smelled of pizza. For a second, she thought she was going to vomit. Then the feeling passed. She stirred weakly, tried to get her feet under her. Big mistake. The sick feeling came rushing back, and she was barely able to turn her head to one side before she was violently ill all over the linoleum floor.
After the spasms had ebbed into weak shudders, she lay back gasping, feeling as if her stomach were a sponge that had been wrung out between two merciless hands. She raised a trembling hand to wipe the spittle and bile from her lips and felt something hard and crusty on her cheek. She rubbed it off. It looked like dried pizza topping.
At that, the memory hit her. Her head snapped back, clunking painfully against the door of the dishwasher as she recalled opening the pizza box and hearing the telltale hiss of compressed gas being released. Whatever it was, she had inhaled it. And it had obviously knocked her out.
Which could only mean one thing.
The Congregation had found them.
Her fear for Ethan took over, pushing Lisa to her feet. She wobbled, one hand gripping the edge of the sink to hold herself upright, her vision swimming. She tore the duct tape from one wrist, then the other. Then she staggered away, heading down the hall to the front door. With each step, her balance grew steadier, her wits sharper. But she felt as weak as a kitten.
She saw the blood first. A thin rivulet running from somewhere near the stairs, still wet and glistening in the overhead light of the foyer. It widened into a red pool. Face down in the center of it was Gordon. A low moan trickled past her lips. Despite all her training, Lisa had never seen a dead body before. And this body in particular she had never thought to see that way. But she knew in an instant, through some sure instinct that was a piece of all human heritage, that her husband was no longer among the living. Even without the blood, the arrangement of his limbs, like the twisted appendages of a rag doll flung down by a petulant child, proclaimed it. The knowledge stabbed through her heart, and it was all she could do not to collapse beside him, straighten his poor arms and legs, and take his broken body into her arms. But there was nothing she could do anymore for Gordon. Only mourn him, and that would come later.
But now there was no time for mourning.
She had to find Ethan.
Her training kicked in, overriding her grief. She fumbled in her pocket for her cell phone and hit the speed dial for the emergency number that would summon a swarm of Conversatio agents. She could only assume that Gordon hadn’t had a chance to do so himself, or else the agents would be here already. Then she bent down carefully, black dots dancing in front of her eyes, and laid two fingers on her husband’s neck. As she had expected, there was no pulse. But it had been important to check. Then she carefully pried the pistol from his fingers; her own gun was upstairs, no use to her now. The gun came away easily; rigor mortis hadn’t set in. He hadn’t been dead long enough. But Lisa didn’t want to think about that. Didn’t want to think about how she had lain unconscious in the kitchen while Gordon fought for his life. How, when he’d needed her most, she hadn’t been there for him.
Or Ethan.
The front door was closed, but there were a pair of bullet holes in the wood. She saw two more in the wall to the left of the door. How had the fight gone down? Who had fired first? Did the closed door mean that her husband’s killer was still in the house?
Heart hammering, Lisa lurched toward the stairs, careful to avoid the blood. She paused in annoyance to rip the tape from her ankles, then continued on. There was more blood on the beige carpet of the stairs, a trail of drops and spatters that went about halfway up and then simply vanished. Had a wounded Gordon tried to climb the stairs, only to fall back? Or did this blood belong to someone else? The Congregation agent . . . or Ethan?
Please, God, don’t let me be too late!
If Ethan was dead too, she didn’t think she could bear it. How could she go on, knowing that she had failed them both?
She forced herself up the stairs, holding the pistol out before her in a trembling hand. It seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. She would be lucky if she could pull the trigger, much less aim the damn thing. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, but Lisa made no move to brush them away. She didn’t even seem aware of them.
The door to Ethan’s room was open. Cautiously, she slipped inside. His room was empty, but the door to the bathroom was open a crack. Flickering candlelight was visible from inside. Lisa knew how the Congregation disposed of high potentials, all of whom it treated as Antichrists. She knew the steps of the ritual, less an execution than a blood sacrifice: the prayers recited in Latin, the splashing of holy water, the knife drawn across the throat. There was no room for the doctrine of the second son in their crabbed and paranoid theology. They had no use for mercy, no concept of innocence. In a way, she pitied them.
Or had, until this moment.
Now she hated. She didn’t care if it was a sin. She wanted revenge. She wanted to kill.
The time for subtlety was over.
Lisa took a deep breath. Then, summoning up her last reserves of strength, reserves she hadn’t even been sure she possessed to call upon, she sidled across the room like a panther and kicked the bathroom door open, the pistol up and steady in her hand, her finger already tightening on the trigger as the door flew wide.
Ethan—bound, gagged, and blindfolded—cringed against the far side of the tub, which was filled with rocking water. He was shivering violently. Candles burned low on the sink and toilet.
There was no one else in the room.
“It’s me, honey,” she whispered.
He made a whimpering sound behind his gag.
Lisa’s heart, which she had thought broken forever, soared. But it was a strange soaring, on wings of grief as well as joy, and the combination of these contradictory emotions, fused under the intensity of the moment into something that partook of both yet was more than either, was almost too much to bear. She felt as if a new emotion, one she lacked a name for, lacked even the proper capacity to contain, was nevertheless forcing its way inside her, carving out a space for itself, and changing her in the process. For good or ill, she didn’t know. She only knew that it hurt like childbirth must hurt.
At that instant, though she didn’t realize it until later, Lisa ceased to be a Conversatio agent and became instead what she had pretended to be for the last nine years.
A Conversatio agent would not have put down her gun and lifted Ethan from the freezing water of the tub as Lisa did.
A Conversatio agent would not have carried him dripping and shivering out of the bathroom to the bed, laying him down with tender devotion on the rumpled bedspread.
A Conversatio agent would not have removed his blindfold, and then his gag, and then his bonds, murmuring to him all the while in a wordless croon of love and reassurance.
A Conversatio agent would not have checked his body for wounds or injuries and then pulled the blanket up around them both and huddled close, warming him with her body, stilling his shivers with her steadfast presence and mingling her tears with his while she waited for help to arrive.
A Conversatio agent wouldn’t have done any of these things. Not with a Congregation killer unaccounte
d for, perhaps still in the house, preparing to strike.
But a mother?
A mother could do nothing else.
The Conversatio team showed up within moments, though it seemed like hours to Lisa. Hearing movement downstairs, she came fully awake with a start, wondering if the killer had come back to finish the job. Only then did she realize that she’d left Gordon’s gun in the bathroom. Cursing herself for a fool, she quickly rose and retrieved it, then returned to the bed and faced the door.
Ethan didn’t so much as stir. He was asleep in the blanket’s cocoon, his skin hot and sweaty. His damp forehead burned beneath her lips as they bestowed a hasty kiss. But even then he didn’t wake.
Footsteps on the stairs.
Lisa said a prayer and aimed the gun at the open door. Although she’d trained for moments like this, she couldn’t for the life of her remember the proper procedure, how to identify herself without giving her position away in case those footsteps weren’t announcing friendlies. What was it? A Latin phrase? A palindrome of some kind? “Able was I ere I saw Elba . . .” Gordon was always better at this kind of cloak-and-dagger spy stuff. She felt almost giddy, as if fate were playing an elaborate joke on her, and she was just about to experience the punch line . . . a punch line already on the tip of her tongue.
In the blink of an eye, two men with automatic rifles ducked through the doorway. She didn’t recognize either of them.
They held their fire, training their guns on her.
She returned the favor, aiming her pistol at the nearest of the two.
That man said, calmly, “Put down your weapon, Agent Brown.”
She didn’t trust her voice, so she just shook her head.
“We’re Conversatio,” the other man said. “Like you.”
“Then you put down your weapons,” she managed to get out more or less intelligibly.
The men glanced at each other. Then slowly lowered their weapons.
“You see,” said the one who had spoken first, “it really is us.”
“About damn time,” she said and burst into tears.
Ethan didn’t wake up even when one of the men gave him a cursory examination. He looked so fragile there on the bed, his body limp and unresisting as the agent worked through his physical assessment, that Lisa almost started crying again.
“Is he okay?” she asked.
“He’s running a fever, but it doesn’t look like he was injured,” the man said in a businesslike tone of voice, then added: “We’re going to evacuate you both.”
Lisa nodded; it was standard procedure. She didn’t bother to ask where they were going. She knew the man wouldn’t tell her. And she would find out soon enough in any case. Instead, she said, “The Congregation agent . . . it’s as if he vanished into thin air. I don’t understand why he didn’t finish the job.”
“We’re looking for him, don’t worry,” said the second man, who was hovering impatiently at her side. “We have to go. Can you walk?”
“Of course,” she said. But when she stood up, her legs wouldn’t support her, and she would have fallen if the man hadn’t slid an arm around her waist. “Sorry.” She gave him an apologetic smile, ashamed of her weakness.
“You’ve been through a lot,” the man said as he gently lowered her back onto the bed. “Try to relax. We’ll take it from here.”
She didn’t even try to resist. “My—my husband . . .” The realization was spreading through her like a cancer. Gordon was dead. She would never feel his touch again, never hear his voice, never— “Leave everything to us,” the man said soothingly.
As he spoke, she felt a sudden jab in her arm; she whipped her head around, and the man who had been tending to Ethan held up a syringe. “Sorry, Agent,” he said. “But it’s best if you sleep now.”
She didn’t try to resist that either.
Christ, what a colossal screw up, thought Papa Jim in disgust as he gazed through the one-way mirror at the motionless form of the female agent, Lisa Brown. At least, that had been her name, her alias, before everything had gone to shit. But now Lisa Brown was dead. Ethan Brown too. Perhaps not in the same sense as Gordon Brown, but gone as if they had never existed. The woman and the boy who would walk out of this hospital, a private facility outside Phoenix, Arizona, staffed by Conversatio personnel and paid for by Papa Jim’s millions, would have different names, different histories.
Papa Jim hated incompetence. He hated waste. And this situation was up to its eyeballs in both. He honored the sacrifice the male agent had made. Gordon Brown had been damn impressive, really, taking out one Congregation agent and then, gravely wounded, in fact already as good as dead according to the autopsy report, going toe-to-toe with another. Papa Jim respected that. But it was the man’s own complacency that had let the whole situation spin so badly out of control in the first place. Papa Jim had been worried about Gordon, about his level of commitment to the cause. Over the years, his weekly reports had grown a little too relaxed. As if he were just filling in the blanks. Doing his job by the numbers but no more than that. Not because he didn’t care, but because he cared too much. He had gone native, so to speak. Started to think of himself as the boy’s real father. Or such, anyway, had been Papa Jim’s concern. Yet he hadn’t said anything. Which meant that this fiasco was partly his fault too.
Papa Jim hated that more than anything.
Now, even with the Conversatio clean-up crew’s usual expert work, spiriting away Gordon’s body in the dead of night, and Lisa and Ethan too, and then erasing not only every trace of violence from the house but every trace of its inhabitants, so that by the morning after the attack it was as if the Browns had inexplicably vanished off the face of the Earth, abducted by aliens, perhaps, leaving behind a fully furnished house in which nevertheless there was not to be found a single fingerprint or speck of DNA and, needless to add, no forwarding address—even with that undeniably impressive achievement, there would still be rumors that would spread among the neighbors, and even if that weren’t the case, the Congregation had been alerted to Ethan’s existence now, and Grand Inquisitor would be searching tirelessly for him, searching in ways that no human mind could comprehend and thus could not defend against, not forever. Sooner or later, no matter what was done to hide Ethan, a mistake would be made, insignificant as it might seem or even be, but it would proclaim his whereabouts to Grand Inquisitor as clearly as if he’d walked into the Vatican and surrendered.
Still, they’d been lucky. After all, Ethan hadn’t been harmed.
At least, not physically. Or so the doctors said.
“Then why isn’t he waking up?” he’d asked.
The expensive eggheads with entire alphabets after their names didn’t have an answer for that. They only shrugged and shook their heads and offered more of their fancy doubletalk that, when you stripped away the jargon, boiled down to the fact that they didn’t have any more of a clue than he did about why his great-grandson was still asleep three days after the attack. At first, they’d blamed his high fever, but that had broken by the next morning, by which time his bruises, too, had faded. Now it was “post-traumatic stress.” Papa Jim knew bullshit when he heard it.
The woman, Lisa, was a different matter. The gas she’d breathed had damaged her lungs. For a while, the doctors hadn’t been sure she would live. Now the consensus seemed to be that she would make it, although there would be significant scarring. She would never fully recover. Clearly, she would be in no condition to continue as Ethan’s guardian. Papa Jim hadn’t broken that piece of news to her yet. Actually, he’d only spoken to her once, briefly, since she and the boy had been flown in; the doctors had kept her sedated after that as they’d worked around the clock to save her life and her lungs.
But now the doctors were bringing her around. And once she was conscious, he meant to have a nice chat with her. Well, he would do the chatting; speech was going to be beyond her for a while, apparently. But the doctors thought she would be able to write down answers to
his questions, as long as he kept them simple and didn’t say anything too upsetting. They couldn’t in good conscience allow him any more than that. And even then they glared at him as though he were some kind of monster, not giving her time to grieve or to heal. But there were things he had to know. Things he had to hear that only she could tell him.
Unanswered questions . . . and Papa Jim hated unanswered questions.
For instance, what had happened to the Congregation agent? Lisa’s preliminary report, necessarily confused and incomplete, recorded after her arrival at the hospital, just before she was wheeled into surgery, had stated that the man had been gone when she’d regained consciousness. And the Conversatio agents at the scene had confirmed that there was no sign of him; all the evidence indicated he’d left the house at least twenty minutes prior to the time that Lisa had come to. But Papa Jim thought, or rather hoped, that Lisa might remember something more now than she had then. Something that would help him understand why the man had not completed his task. Why, with the sole impediment to its success removed, and his intended victim waiting helplessly upstairs, a victim the man’s religious beliefs did not even admit to be human but rather some avatar of the Antichrist, why, given all that, did the agent—seriously wounded himself—turn around, get back in his vehicle, and drive off? And for the love of God, why had he, an ordained priest for Christ’s sake, ditched that same vehicle ten miles away, at the entrance to a public park, staggered into the midst of a densely wooded area, and hung himself by the neck from a convenient tree branch until he was stone-cold dead?
Why, Papa Jim asked himself, would a priest commit the one sin that could not be forgiven? The sin of Judas—for if Judas had begged God’s forgiveness, God would have forgiven him, would have been bound to, at least according to the words of His beloved son, whom Judas had just betrayed. If Christ was who He claimed to be, and if His words were true, then even Judas could have tasted the forgiveness of God . . . but he hadn’t even asked. Instead, he’d compounded his sin by committing a worse one, worse in the sense that there was no aftermath to it in which you could repent and pray to be forgiven. When you killed yourself, you threw away that last chance, that lifeline to God and to Heaven. You went straight to hell, to everlasting torment, to the one place where God’s forgiveness didn’t reach. Judas, clearly, had meant to go there. He had understood that the gravity of his sin merited no other fate, and surely not the forgiveness of a compassionate God. He had chosen damnation as an act of free will, his final act of free will, because he knew that he deserved it. Papa Jim didn’t have any idea of what the theologians had to say about Judas, nor did he have any interest in knowing. His own understanding of it was good enough for him. And in his opinion, Judas had been a fool, throwing away his chance at Heaven just to make a point. But what of the priest? Had he, like Judas, suddenly come to the realization that his sins merited no other fate but eternal damnation, a damnation that God would spare him despite everything if he only asked sincerely, with a heart full of repentance? And if so, what had sparked that revelation?
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