Clement shook his head with the fervor of his words. “We cannot be in league with the devil, Augustus! It is an abomination. Listen to me! Repent from this! Find your old way! Perhaps there is still hope for you. Perhaps your sins are not mortal. Destroy this book and forget – yes, forget and let us pray together, now, tonight, as we prayed together when you were only a child and I was your confessor, and God may yet receive you. Because if you do not, then you will be serving the Abomination. In your foolishness you will strengthen his Empire. You may even hasten his dominion over what he has no right to claim! So listen to me! The book must be destroyed! Even as I should have destroyed it years ago, after it was resurrected by Simon. But I was sinful and cowardly and resisted what I knew was right. Now, though, I will not fail. I will not let you have it. The manuscript must be destroyed.”
Augustus seemed unfazed. “I am not convinced that you could make war against me, Clement. My powers are great, and protected. It would take many years for you to affect my empire at all.”
For a long silent moment, Clement stood, breathless from his petition. His eyes searched the determined face before him. Then he nodded, weary, with pain in his voice, his face. “So be it,” he whispered. “Then I shall take years.”
Calm, Augustus’s steady gaze centered on the old man.
“Better to be a living dog, Clement,” he said slowly, “than a dead lion.”
“And better yet,” Clement replied, “to be a living lion.”
Augustus’s face was grim. “I tell you again, Clement, the book is not evil!”
“Look at your hands!” roared Clement, ignited suddenly to step forward in a startling display of immense and volcanic anger. “You are destroying yourself, Augustus! There is blood on your hands! Listen!” He flung out a robed arm. “Simon’s blood calls to you from the Earth! I can hear it! You search for truth, but your search has caused you to destroy the lives of the innocent! Is that not evil? Is it not evil to grind down the lives of the weak? Look at what you have become, Augustus! A murderer! A medieval warlord, like Genghis Khan or Hitler with a mercenary army! Your words are noble but your actions reveal what you truly are!”
“Desperate times require desperate measures, Clement.” Augustus stepped back. His ice-blue eyes revealed the first, faintest lessening of composure, of doubt that flashed across the visage like lightning, and was gone. Hesitantly, he continued, “I ... had no other option. You would not surrender the book.”
“As I said, Augustus. It was not yours to possess.”
Augustus stiffened. “And was it yours, Clement? Was it yours? Was it Simon’s? Whose?”
Clement said nothing.
Recovering, Augustus gathered himself. “I will have the manuscript!”
For a long moment, the old man was silent, seeming to debate and resist some impulse within himself.
“So be it,” he said, finally. “But if you claim the manuscript you will worship at the feet of the Beast. So I cannot allow you to possess it, even if only for your own sake. I will resist you until I die.”
Fully composed, though his face hardened, Augustus sighed tiredly. “Enough, Clement,” he said with a hint of pain. “I see there can be no peace between us.”
Clement agreed. “No, not peace. Not between us. Not as long as you murder and oppress to claim what is not yours.”
A long silence held, intensified, and lingered between them. Clement’s gaze was stone, implacable and unyielding. And Augustus in quick degrees solidified a rigid control, becoming equally as implacable, and unyielding.
Cold wind passed between them, and clouds hung between the earth and sky, casting a gray night-shadow.
“Remember this,” said Clement. “The law shall always stand against the lawless. The peaceful shall always stand against the violent. The righteous shall always stand against the wicked. It is the way of all things. So there will be no ultimate victory for you, Augustus. The Beast will conquer and make war, but he shall not rule. The Christ, whom you worshipped as a child, will not allow it. And, despite your fantasies and your madness, you have no eternal dominion that will shift the power to your side. So there will be conflict, even as there is conflict in the sea rising against the shore. The sea will never overcome, nor will the shore yield.”
Augustus nodded, thoughtful. “And what will you do?” he asked.
“What I must do.”
“That is no answer.”
Clement frowned. “No. But it is truth. And truth is enough. It is more than you have offered.”
Augustus retreated cautiously a step as the wind silently lifted his black cloak, caressing the darkness behind him. Warily, with distance, he eyed the old man before him.
A bellowing wave crashed upon the strand.
Roaring.
*
FIFTY
Gage taped a fresh bandage on Kertzman's forearm. Kertzman had trashed the other during their long run through the sewer system in Rome.
As Gage finished, Kertzman looked around at the safe house: a deserted, square, yellow two-tier building on the distant outskirts of Rome. He had no doubt that he would never see his hotel again.
Gage had rented the place from some farmer. It smelled like it might have once been used as a slaughterhouse; no heat, no electricity, no running water. It was old and dilapidated, had no phone, no windows and probably not even an address.
Kertzman shifted in the old wooden chair.
Escaping from the subway station was far simpler than Kertzman had anticipated.
First, a long but uncomplicated run down the maintenance tunnel to the rail system itself, then over the rails and into another tunnel that ended at a large underground drainage pipe, a sewer. Then down the pipe to a manhole cover that exited onto a street somewhere downtown.
Gage had already acquisitioned a car and, after sanitation procedures to lose any possible surveillance, they drove back to this place, arriving in the dark of early morning.
Tired, Kertzman sighed. It had been a long night – a long couple of days.
His arm itched, and, frowning down, he resisted the impulse to scratch his bandage. His forearm and a portion of his hand were still numb. The Japanese had sliced him deep, severing muscle, tendons, and a major nerve.
Two nights ago, on the night of the shooting, physicians at Monticello Medical Center had told Kertzman he would probably regain partial use of his hand, but little of the feeling. The nerve wouldn't heal, they said, but would "fuse" in time, so there was no way to predict how his hand would eventually function.
Concealing his disappointment, Kertzman grunted indifferently at the diagnosis. But he had taken it hard and felt it hard. Steel had sliced again through him. Another wound from the Japanese.
Gage finished changing the forearm bandage with an expert, methodical familiarity. Bandage and gauze, strips of tape moving over a butterfly tie that helped the sutures hold the wound closed. Experienced with wounds, his hands moved swiftly, gingerly, without the roughness expected from a professional soldier. He softly applied the final strips of tape, smoothed it down.
"That should do it, Kertzman." He rose to turn tiredly away. "That's good enough to hold you." He waited a second. "Do you still want to go through with this? You're hurt worse than I thought you were. You're only going to have one arm."
"Yeah," Kertzman grunted. "I want to go through with it. I want to finish it."
Gage watched him. Kertzman saw the wheels turning.
Gage began, "You're—"
"Going with you to finish this," Kertzman said gruffly. "Okay, I'm hurt worse than you thought. So?" He paused. "Look, I need your testimony but I ain't gonna force you. You been through enough, and I don't think you'll live long if they take you into custody. This thing is even dirtier than I thought. There's still too many spooks running around who can save their hides by having you pushed into the street. No, I'm here to get Sarah Halder, take her back. So we might as well work together. We could both use the backup." He looked at
Gage steadily. "After that, you can do what you want. I'll cover you as long as I can. They're offering immunity, but that's up to you. There's a fall guy set up, but I don't know who really ran Black Light, and neither do you. Frankly, I don't think we ever will."
Reaching out with his left hand, his good hand, Kertzman lifted a steaming cup of coffee that Gage had heated on a small stove. He took a sip, held the cup in his hand. "Who do you figure that guy was who came through the turnstile after us?"
Gage almost smiled. "No way to know." He leaned back and seemed to search an image inside his mind. "He was on somebody's squad, but there were at least two different teams and they weren't working together. I saw at least twelve people on surveillance. There might have been as many as twenty." He waited, shook his head. "It was weird. You're a popular person."
Kertzman pondered it. "Probably British. They want Stern. He's a runaway."
"MI6 is hunting Stern?"
Kertzman nodded. "They wanted me to help them kill him. They want him pretty bad. A loose cannon sort 'a thing."
Gage shook his head. "I'm not going to trust anybody else at this stage, Kertzman. Too much can go wrong. We'll take Stern down ourselves."
Kertzman took another sip of coffee. "Well, you sure lost all of 'em pretty easy."
"It's easy to lose surveillance when you go underground." Gage loosened his shoulder, as if stretching sore muscles. "But we never would have lost them on the street. Never. We would have had to kill one of them. And I don't want to hurt anybody. I just want those guys to stay out of my way. Anyway, there's no way to know who they were, for sure. Not without bringing one of them with us for some questions. It definitely wasn't an Italian team, but it might have been KGB. CIA. Rome's resident FBI guys. More of Stern's crew. An NSA team. All of them together stepping over each other's feet. This stuff gets so complicated, you wouldn't believe it. But you can assume that everybody is in bed with everybody else. So the general rule is not to trust anybody. Assume everyone is a threat and lose them."
With a pained expression on his face, Gage reached over and lifted a small pill bottle. He took out three capsules, swallowing them with a long drink of water. He leaned his head back against the wall, eyes closed.
Kertzman watched him. "You don't look so good, boy. What happened?"
Gage smiled wryly, opened his eyes. "I could look a lot worse, Kertzman. I had a little dance with them over who was going to walk off with the book. Now I've got to keep the pain down or I won't be able to concentrate or move." He blinked tiredly. "I guess I've got maybe seventy-two hours before I can't go on anymore. I'm hurt pretty bad. And I'll probably get hurt a lot worse before this thing is finished. By then the pain will be too much to overcome even with drugs." He massaged his shoulder.
Kertzman's eyes widened. "Did you get any of them?"
"One."
"The Japanese?"
Gage shook his head. "No. He got away. But I got the German. We went into a glacier together." He rolled his left shoulder. "He didn't come out."
Kertzman absorbed that for a moment. "That leaves two of them."
"Plus Radford and D'Oncetta," Gage added. "Unless they recruit some new talent."
"They won't get any new talent," growled Kertzman. "It'd be too much of an insult. They're supposed to be perfect. Like gods.”
Gage stared at him. His eyes were solid, steady, and he smiled slightly. "There's only one God, Kertzman," he said quietly.
Kertzman nodded. "Yeah, that's what I think, too."
Suddenly Kertzman became aware of the old and yellowed manuscript lying on the table between them.
In form it appeared similar to a scroll – exceedingly, frighteningly ancient. It disturbed him to look at it lying there, echoing unknown, apocryphal voices from blood-soaked halls of a dark history. Kertzman stared at it warily. Like a man who has stumbled over a dead rattlesnake. He gestured vaguely with his injured hand.
"Can you read it?"
"No," answered Gage quickly, not looking at it. "It's written in Latin. Sarah could read it. Or Malachi. Or Barto."
Kertzman stared at the manuscript for a long time. Then he spoke hesitantly. "Do you think that it's, you know, real? I mean, do you think all that legend stuff is true? About it containing the name of the Beast and all that?"
Exhaustion seemed to battle with anger in Gage. His eyes were flat dead on Kertzman. "Yeah, Kertzman. I think it's real."
Kertzman nodded, looked away. He turned his mind from the manuscript, instantly feeling a lightness in his soul. "The old priest, Father Simon, he was your friend?"
Gage held his gaze. "More than a friend. He was the only father I ever knew."
Silent, Kertzman waited.
"He helped me," Gage continued. "Without him I couldn't have changed my life. He taught me things. Taught me how to live in peace. He was ... the best man I ever knew. He was just a genuinely holy person who loved God with all his heart and loved his fellow man, too. He was a simple man, but he wasn't simpleminded. He knew more about philosophy and science and theology than most people ever dream of. But he knew about just plain everyday living, too. He was wise about life. He understood everyday problems and he knew how to find a way through them. And he was so peaceful, so balanced. It was amazing, just knowing him. And these thugs killed him because of ... this." He shook his head, angry. "Such a waste. And that's all they are, Kertzman. Thugs. Rich or poor doesn't make any difference."
Kertzman nodded, somber. "I'm sorry about the old man." He stared at Gage. "You think we can put ‘em down for the count?"
"I don't know." Gage shook his head. "They're committed. And they've got a lot on their side."
"But they want to trade for this thing, right? Sarah for the book?"
"Yeah."
"Tonight?"
"Yeah."
Kertzman scanned the room. His eyes strayed over the Hi-Power on the moldy table, the knife, the backpack and assorted rounds.
"Is that all you got? The nine? That ain't much to back up a scene like this. I got this four-inch Smith from the British. But that ain't much, either. I mean, we're gonna pull a doublecross on 'em. So it's probably going to get mean." He blew out a hard breath. "Real mean."
"Well, I've got a little more," said Gage. "But it's in a safety deposit box downtown. With some money. It's a safety drop I took out about five years ago. But it's Saturday so the bank is closed. I can't get to it until Monday." He hesitated. "We'll just have to go with what we've got."
Kertzman's curiosity was touched. "I thought all you big-time spies kept your money in Swiss bank accounts."
Gage laughed. "No, Kertzman. All that stuff is too complicated. And it can be traced. No, the best way to hide money is with safety deposit boxes. Distribute a sizeable amount in banks and dozen safety deposit boxes that are listed under a dozen names. Keep a few weapons in them. I did that in Europe, did the same thing in the States. It's easy. It's simple and there's not much that can go wrong. Pay the boxes up ten years in advance and if you need them, they're there. I’ve got millions stashed in a million places that I can reach in a day’s journey anywhere on this planet."
Kertzman took another sip of coffee, nodded. "Simple," he repeated, his lips carefully forming the word, as if he'd never heard it before. "Keep it simple."
Gage's eyes were locked on him. He smiled faintly. "You're in deep, Kertzman. Helping me. How are you ever going to get out of this?"
Kertzman's brutish face was unexpressive. "I got a job to do, kid. That's all there is."
"But now you're saying that I don't have to go back, right?"
Voice flat and honest, Kertzman grunted, "Not if you don't want."
Gage's eyes narrowed, almost laughing. "Don't worry, Kertzman. I'll go back and give testimony. But I'll have to take immunity because I'll need to stay free."
"Why's that?"
"I'll have to be free in order to make my plan work."
"So that's how you're going to do it," he mumbled, deadpan. "K
eep them watching their backs for the rest of their lives?"
"No other way, Kertzman. At first I thought I could rig up some kind of dead man's switch with the manuscript, threaten them with it. But now I think they'd just kidnap somebody else, do another exchange. Now, I think that the only way clear of this is to get both Sarah and the manuscript. Then destroy the manuscript and get myself clear. Then, if any actions are taken in the future ..." He paused, looked hard at Kertzman, "… and I'll know if actions are taken, then I'll execute ten times as much against the other side. And they'll know it beforehand."
Stone-faced, Kertzman nodded. "Sort of like a doomsday weapon."
"They don't fear laws. They don't fear governments. They don't even fear God. But they fear for their own necks. They won't do anything again as long as they know I'm out there, somewhere, and that I'll retaliate. They provoked me at the beginning of this, when they killed Simon. But they didn't really know me as well as they do now. Now they know I can ... visit them. It doesn't matter what kind of security they get. I can get into anything, get past anything. Anyway, the manuscript will be gone so they won't have anything to gain by vengeance. It will only cause them a lot of trouble, and I don't think they want any more trouble than they've had. This has been expensive for them, in people and in money. So they'll lay low and they'll look for me, try to eliminate me first. But they won't find me." He looked down, shook his head. "Nobody will ever find me."
Reckoning Page 47