Godsent

by Richard Burton

  Finally, despite her determination, Kate realized that her trip to the toilet could be postponed no longer. She swung her legs over the side of the bunk and placed her feet cautiously on the metal floor, half expecting that she would receive an electric shock for her trouble. But the only thing that transmitted itself from the floor through the thin paper soles of her slippers was an intense cold that made her toes curl and her jaw clench. God, what she wouldn’t have given at that moment for a thick sweater and a pair of woolen socks!

  Not until reaching the toilet did she consider the logistical difficulties presented by the orange jumpsuit. A zipper ran from the neckline to the waist; there was no choice but to unzip it and let the whole garment fall to her ankles, leaving her in bra and panties. The plain white panties were her own; the bra, absurdly, was as orange as the jumpsuit. A wave of embarrassment and anger swept through her at this forced exposure, which could have no other purpose than humiliation, and she felt her face burning as she quickly peeled the panties down to her knees and sat on the bowl.

  A sharp gasp escaped her, almost a cry, and she nearly jumped back to her feet.

  It was like sitting on a block of ice.

  Kate fought back tears as she peed, her stream ringing tinnily against the insides of the bowl. Her body trembled with fear and rage. She felt so damn helpless. But she wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of seeing her cry. They had seen too much already. She imagined them watching now, whoever they were, laughing at her discomfort, her fear, making jokes about her body, the body of a forty-something-year-old woman who had borne a child and hadn’t exactly been a regular visitor to the gym.

  Only when she was finished did she notice that there was no toilet paper. The pettiness of it seemed so childish, so unnecessary. After all that had happened, did they really think she cared? Toilet paper wasn’t exactly at the top of her list right now. Standing, Kate jerked up her panties and the jumpsuit as the toilet automatically flushed behind her. The nearby sink had no faucet; when she approached, water began to flow from the tap. It was like dipping her hands in snowmelt. The temperature in the cell seemed to drop ten degrees. She dried her hands on the sides of her jumpsuit and returned to the bunk.

  The lights went on buzzing.

  The air went on hissing.

  The temperature continued to drop, as if the drain in the center of the floor was drawing all the heat out of the cell, sucking it up like a black hole.

  Whatever had been holding her fear at a manageable distance, drugs or shock, was disappearing along with it. Kate hugged herself tight but couldn’t stop trembling. She could feel her bones vibrating, hear the chattering of her teeth.

  Don’t panic, she admonished herself. If they wanted you dead, they could have killed you already.

  No, her kidnappers wanted her alive. She tried again to think of who they could be. The Congregation was at the top of the list, but it was a long list. There was no way to decide who had done this or why, not until they showed themselves. Until then, the important thing to remember was that Ethan would find her. He would save her.

  Or would he?

  He hadn’t saved Maggie, had he? Or Lisa. Why would he make an exception for her?

  Have faith, Kate admonished herself. Trust in Ethan.

  Trust in God.

  In any case, she thought, Papa Jim was certainly looking for her with all the considerable resources at his disposal. They’d had their differences over the years, and lately more than ever, but she knew all too well that if there was one thing Jim Osbourne cared about in this world—besides power, that is—it was family. Despite everything, Kate knew her grandfather wouldn’t rest until she was safe. Her kidnappers, whoever they were, had thrown down a gauntlet by snatching her right out from under the cybernetic nose of his precious AEGIS system. That was an insult he couldn’t ignore, a challenge to his reputation and authority, his very manhood. Her kidnappers were good, obviously professionals, but they would be no match for Papa Jim. She almost felt sorry for them.

  Almost.

  So much for turning the other cheek, she thought. But she couldn’t help wanting them to suffer for what they’d done to her. For what they were going to do . . .

  No, don’t think about that!

  The waiting was torture, as it was no doubt intended to be. There was nothing she could do but pray. The words came to her unbidden, as they had once, so long ago.

  Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven . . .

  CHAPTER 23

  Father O’Malley lay huddled on the bare steel bunk, trying to stir as little as possible. But though he could refrain from any purely voluntary movements, he couldn’t stop shivering with the cold, and the jittery vibrations sent needles of raw pain jabbing into his nerves and deep into his bones. Even the shallow breaths he drew were painful, causing him to whimper softly as he sipped at the air through chattering teeth that were the instruments of still more pain along the swollen length of his jaw. That he should still feel such pain, despite the drugs he had been given, seemed like a very bad sign.

  As he’d been dragged roughly away from the corpse of Grand Inquisitor by men whose faces were hidden behind black ski masks, yet who also wore the garb of priests, giving them a singularly chilling aspect, O’Malley had tried to prepare himself for what was sure to come. He didn’t know how long he could hold out against the persuasive methods of the Congregation; their techniques of pain delivery were the results of centuries of experience. To be honest, he’d always felt scornful of his order’s embrace of physical brutality, as if his work, by its cerebral nature, had conferred a kind of moral superiority upon him. As if he weren’t implicated in the murders and tortures carried out by Congregation agents acting on information his work had helped to provide. He’d never taken much of an interest in that side of things. Consequently, he had no idea of what to expect now. Thumbscrews? The rack? Surely torture, like other disciplines, had advanced over the years, reached new levels of refined cruelty. But though O’Malley was already trembling at the mere anticipation of what would be done to him, he was determined to keep back Cardinal Ehrlich’s name as long as he could. Not just for Ehrlich’s sake, but for the sake of any other undercover Conversatio agents who might still have time to get safely away. O’Malley had only one name that he could betray. Ehrlich no doubt had many more. So as the faceless priests hustled him down corridors he had never had occasion to visit before, and in fact had tried never to think about at all, O’Malley prayed silently for the strength to withstand the interrogation he was about to face.

  But there hadn’t been any interrogation. It was as if nobody cared about anything he might have to say. He was shoved into a gleaming silver-blue metal box of a room, in which there was a chair, sink, and toilet, and a grate in the center of the floor, all of that same shiny metal. No windows; not even the faint outlines of the door he’d come through were visible. He’d stood there under the bright, cool lights, gazing with curiosity and fear at the four men who had followed him into the room, or cell rather, each of them masked, so that they looked identical as robots stamped from the same mold. He wondered if beneath those masks lurked faces that he would recognize. Nobody said a word. He licked his lips nervously, eyes shifting from one mask to another.

  Help me, O Lord, he prayed. Let me be brave for once. Let me go to my death with half the courage of Grand Inquisitor . . .

  He didn’t see the fist coming. All at once, it seemed, he was stretched out on the cold floor, his vision blurry, his ears ringing, a distant throbbing in his jaw. It took him a second to realize that he’d been punched in the face. He could scarcely believe it. There was something absurd, even ludicrous, about it. Priests hitting another priest. He felt so ashamed that he tried to mumble an apology past his bloody, already swollen lips; for what and to whom, exactly, he could not have said. But no one seemed to hear in any case. Two of the anonymous priests hauled him back onto h
is feet.

  Then the real beating began.

  Father O’Malley was no stranger to beatings. As an overweight boy with his head perpetually lost in the rarefied clouds of music and mathematics, he’d been a kind of bully magnet. All the way through elementary, junior high, and high school, O’Malley had become well accustomed to the periodic feel of fists and feet pounding against his body, to the sound that a good punch made as it smacked into his face or sank into his gut, to the sight of his own blood flowing freely. And while he hadn’t experienced any of these things for many years now, a thorough beating, like riding a bicycle, was something you never really forgot.

  But O’Malley realized early on, through a red haze of pain, that he had never received a beating like this one. These were not schoolyard bullies pounding on him. These were professionals. Every blow was calculated, precise. They weren’t necessarily even hard. Just painful. That was the main thing. Everything they did to him hurt worse than the last thing they had done, which is hard to accomplish if you are trying to keep someone conscious, relatively undamaged, and alive. That appeared to be the case here, as far as O’Malley could judge . . . which admittedly wasn’t very far. Or very long. After the first few moments of sustained battery, his will was broken, even if his bones were not—not yet—and he was drowning in a sea of agony. If his torturers had just stopped long enough to ask him who had sent him to kill GI, he would have given Ehrlich up in an instant. But they didn’t stop. Didn’t even give him enough time to volunteer it on his own. This wasn’t about eliciting information. It wasn’t about getting him to confess. This was about punishment. About revenge. O’Malley sensed raw and seething hatred behind the implacable mask of the men’s terrifying professionalism. To them, he was a traitor. And worse, a heretic. An apostate. They took turns on him, passing him back and forth, working him over in teams. Occasionally they lowered him into the chair for a time, not to give him rest but rather to give themselves a chance to focus on areas of his anatomy less reachable while he was standing. The only sounds were the thuds and cracks of punches landing, animal-like whimperings and moans from the red ruin of O’Malley’s mouth, and soft grunts of exertion and satisfaction from the laboring men.

  This went on for some time before shifting to another level of punishment at which it no longer seemed important to the men that O’Malley remain undamaged or conscious. He began to pass out at intervals, and he was dimly aware that the blows he was suffering had an object beyond just causing him severe pain. He felt things breaking inside him, though the sensations were curiously distant, as if he were standing outside the house of a stranger and listening with concern as hooligans trashed the interior. The line between consciousness and unconsciousness became too subtle for easy distinguishing, and O’Malley drifted back and forth across it without paying much attention to which side he was on. It didn’t really seem to matter.

  After a while, he became aware of a presence floating alongside him. It was nothing he could see, but he felt it quite distinctly. It spoke to him in a voice he knew, a voice full of hope and comfort.

  Fear not, Father O’Malley. I will stay with you until the end, as you stayed with me.

  It was the voice of Grand Inquisitor. But how? He had watched the great computer die.

  There is life beyond death for those with faith. Courage, Father O’Malley. Soon you will see the Son of man.

  At last, without quite knowing how he had gotten there, O’Malley found himself lying facedown on the cold metal floor as ice-cold water showered over him from above. He tried to push himself up, but there was something terribly wrong with his fingers; it felt like he was clutching hand-fuls of broken glass. At which he screamed . . . or would have screamed, but his jaw wasn’t working right either. Panic rose in him then like a drowning man gasping for air, but he felt once more the soothing presence of Grand Inquisitor settle over him, taking away the fear, the pain.

  The next time he opened his eyes, he was lying upon this cold steel bunk in a room very much like the other. He was no longer wearing priestly garb but the orange jumpsuit of a captured terrorist or other prisoner. The air was freezing; in fact, it was the cold, and his fitful shivering, which woke him—that and the pain his shivering inflicted on his shattered body. A certain dullness of mind and numbness of affect told him that he had been drugged. But through the haze of its deadening effects he understood very clearly how badly he had been hurt and how unlikely it was that he would recover from his injuries. Indeed, it seemed likely to him that there would be worse tortures yet to come.

  But he felt that he could endure them now. He could endure anything. Not just because Grand Inquisitor had given him solace and hope, though it had given him these things. But it had given him something even more precious. Something he hadn’t even realized he had been lacking.

  It had given him faith.

  Father O’Malley clung to that newfound faith as he lay shivering upon the bunk, waiting for whatever would come next. When he heard the sound of footsteps outside the door of his cell, he knew another beating was at hand.

  But when the door to the cell opened, more of the masked priests did not enter. Instead, a man was thrown roughly into the room. He appeared to have been beaten, though not nearly as badly as Father O’Malley. Badly enough, though. The man stumbled and fell to the floor. He laid there for a moment, catching his breath. Then he raised his head and saw O’Malley for the first time.

  A look of shock came across the bruised and bloody face of Cardinal Ehrlich.

  “Where is Ethan?”

  Papa Jim shrugged. “He’ll be here. You’ve just got to be patient.”

  “You would lecture me on the subject of patience?” Pope Peter II turned from the window in his private quarters overlooking the Vatican square named for his predecessor. “You forget who you are speaking to, Mr. Osbourne. I am the head of a church that has endured for more than two thousand years. There is nothing you could possibly teach me about patience.”

  “And you forget who you’re talking to, Your Holiness,” rejoined Papa Jim testily. “I’m one of the richest, most powerful men in the world. I was the United States Secretary of Homeland Security. My company earns more in a year than the gross national product of most countries, including this one, and has a larger military to boot. And I am, or was, the head of an organization nearly as old as the church itself. So don’t patronize me.”

  The pope waved a pudgy hand as though swatting at a pesky fly. “Conversatio? That heretic rabble? We would have crushed them soon enough even without your help.”

  “Is that so? Funny how quick you were to accept my offer, then.”

  “Yes, your offer. You promised to deliver your great-grandson to us, if I recall. But again I ask you, Mr. Osbourne: Where is Ethan?”

  Papa Jim sighed in exasperation. “How the hell should I know? Why don’t you ask Grand Inquisitor?”

  Now it was the pope’s turn to bristle. His flabby-cheeked face flushed crimson. “There are questions even Grand Inquisitor can’t answer. It’s not infallible. Nor are you, Mr. Osbourne. Only God may claim that distinction.” He gave an unctuous smile. “And, in matters of church doctrine, me.”

  “It’s only been two days, Your Holiness. So far, I’ve held up my end of the bargain, haven’t I? I gave you Ehrlich, the traitor in your midst. I delivered my granddaughter as agreed. There’s no call to talk like this. We’re partners. We have to trust each other.”

  “Fine words coming from a man who betrayed his own flesh and blood,” sniffed the pope, gazing at Papa Jim with distaste. “How can such a man be trusted?”

  “My loyalty is to God, Your Holiness.”

  “The devil himself couldn’t have put it any better. No, your loyalty is to yourself, Mr. Osbourne. Of that I have no doubt. But that makes you predictable, which is better than trustworthy.”

  “I don’t have to listen to this.”

  “I’m afraid you do,” said the pope. “Out in the world beyond these walls, yo
u may be a powerful man. An important man. A man used to getting his way. But you are in my country now, Mr. Osbourne. And here in the Vatican, my word is law.”

  Papa Jim burst into laughter. “You don’t intimidate me, Your Holiness. Am I supposed to be afraid of those tin soldiers of yours? My munchies would make mincemeat out of ’em. And they have orders to do just that if I don’t check in regularly. So let’s not try to bullshit each other anymore, okay? Since you’ve been blunt with me, I’ll return the favor.” Warming to the subject, he pulled a cigar from his jacket pocket and lit up, ignoring the look of shock on the pope’s face. “I’ve dealt with guys like you as long as I’ve been in business and politics. Big fish, small pond. If you need to pretend you’re better than me in order to do business, fine. As long as it doesn’t get in the way, I don’t give a shit. What I care about is results, not insults. Now, Your Holiness, with all due respect, you’ve been running a crap operation. Look at all the money you’ve got, all the resources. You’ve got Grand Inquisitor, for Christ’s sake! All that, and you haven’t been able to shut down a two-bit outfit like Conversatio, let alone track down my great-grandson. Your whole organization was riddled with spies, all the way up to your right-hand man, Cardinal Ehrlich, and you never even suspected it.” He blew out a cloud of smoke and shook his head sadly. “Pathetic, that’s what it is. But now, thanks to me, Ehrlich is history, and Conversatio is on the ropes. Seems to me that I’ve proved my worth, Your Holiness. Seems to me that if it comes down to a question of trust, I’ve done my part. You’re the one with something to prove.”

  “How dare you speak to me this way!”

  “It’s about time somebody did,” Papa Jim said. “I mean, what were you thinking, killing the Richardson girl?”

  “That was suicide,” said the pope. “A tragedy.”