Comes a Horseman

by Robert Liparulo

  Ambrosi gave Brady’s hand another tight squeeze. “Expect anything, absolutely anything,” he said. “Remember: volatile, violent, unpredictable.”

  “I’ll remember,” Brady said. He opened the rear door and helped Alicia in. He climbed in after her, slid the door shut, and gave Ambrosi a somber nod. The cab pulled away, bound for Leonardo da Vinci Airport.

  BACK IN his apartment, Cardinal Ambrosi paused before an ornately framed mirror, supposedly crafted in 1841 by Justus von Liebig himself, the inventor of the contemporary silver-backed mirror, and presented to Pope Gregory XVI to commemorate the pontiff’s tour of the papal states. He scowled at his reflection and shook his head sadly. He ambled to a white telephone on a wall in the kitchen. He picked up the handset and held it to his ear. Elsewhere in the Vatican, a switchboard light glowed red.

  When the operator answered, he said in Italian, “Send my car, please.”

  He listened and said, “The airport.”

  Another question from the operator.

  “No, no,” he said. “Ciampino Airport.”

  He hung up and went for the carry-on of clothes and toiletries he kept ready in the front closet.

  67

  Luco Scaramuzzi was at his desk in the Italian Embassy when his private cell phone began emitting the opening drumbeat of Basil Poledouris’s score for Conan the Barbarian. He continued to scan his computer monitor. It displayed a list of non-Council Watchers scheduled to attend tonight’s Gathering in Jerusalem. More than two hundred, and he hoped to have a word with each one. Nothing built goodwill like a big smile and a well-timed wink or slap on the back.

  He picked up on the fourth bar.

  “Yes?”

  “Pippino Farago is alive.”

  The words were filtered through an electronic voice changer. Luco leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs.

  “Really?” he said.

  “He has contacted the Americans.”

  “Americans?”

  “The two FBI agents. He has arranged to give them the file.”

  Luco’s heart began to pick up pace.

  “When?”

  “Today.”

  “Where?”

  “That was to be arranged later.”

  “Here, in Israel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why are you telling me?”

  “You have many friends. I am but one.”

  “And how did you come by this information, friend?”

  Silence.

  “Hello?”

  Nothing.

  He clicked off, picked up his desk phone, and punched a button. Arjan answered on the second ring.

  Luco said, “Find out where the FBI agents are. Now. ”

  He hung up. This was an intriguing turn of events. He tried to think of a reason one of his enemies would have placed the call and could not. Very few people knew that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had agents looking for him. And only he and Pip knew about the Raddusa case file, or so he had thought. He suspected Pip had found help in getting away from Arjan the other day. Perhaps the caller was one of those who had come to Pip’s aid. But why betray him now?

  Because he did not know until later the person Pip was running from, he thought. And I am not someone people want to align themselves against.

  Luco did have friends. Many whom he was not even aware of. He was certain of it.

  The caller’s use of a voice changer concerned him. It meant that either he was someone whose voice Luco would recognize or he was an overcautious stranger. Luco laughed. If the roles were reversed and he wanted to convey a message about a powerful secret to Antichrist, he’d be overcautious too.

  Ah, he was thinking about it too much. The call had been a gift. He should act on it accordingly.

  An idea occurred to him. For all he knew, the caller was Father Satan. He had been wondering when and how Old Nick would appear to him—as prophecy said he would. The more he considered it, the more it made sense. The caller knew things he should not have, and he had offered the solution to Luco’s most desperate concern. Friend . . . ?

  “Father,” he whispered.

  Maybe this was a test. Yes, a test. If it were, Luco would not fail it.

  68

  From her seat next to a porthole window, Alicia watched Rome drop away. Short and sweet, she thought.

  She regretted not finding Father Randall, but Cardinal Ambrosi’s assistance had been a boon to their pursuit. In retrospect, his church-sanctioned mission to monitor global Antichrist activity was not surprising. Antichrist, after all, belonged to the realm of religion. As Ambrosi had explained, Antichrist’s primary function was as Satan’s emissary. His hatred for Jews and Christians, as well as his hunger for power and wealth, would eventually combust into the last great battle on earth. Believing that such a person might someday exist was a matter of faith. Whether by cultural influence or some innate understanding or who knew what, she believed it. Maybe it boiled down to cynicism: the world deserved an Antichrist.

  Even if she did not buy into the Antichrist mythology, Scaramuzzi and his backers obviously did. And they were acting on their beliefs, which meant people were dying. And according to Ambrosi, Scaramuzzi’s bloodletting was just getting started.

  Brady leaned close to her.

  “A hundred and twenty seats,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  “I counted them. A commuter plane. Strange, don’t you think, seeing that Israel is esteemed by the world’s top three religions?”

  “Brady, the Jews and the Palestinians are fighting. People are dying. It’s not the best time to visit.”

  “That’s the West Bank and Gaza.”

  “Hamas goes where the people they want to hurt are. That’s Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. When I booked the flight online, a window popped up saying that the State Department had issued a travel warning asking U.S. citizens to defer travel to Israel. There was a link to the complete warning.”

  “Did you read it?”

  She smirked. “What if there were no commercial flights to Israel at all?”

  “I’d have chartered a jet,” Brady said firmly.

  “Of course I didn’t read the warning.”

  She tried to imagine what it would be like living in a place as unstable as Israel. Knowing that any outing could be your last. Sitting in a café, sipping tea, hearing first the rumble of an explosion, then the scream of tearing metal, the shattering of glass, the rending of brick and concrete. Turning slightly to catch all of it tumbling through space toward you. Your brain refusing to acknowledge the sight or what comes next and thinking something ordinary and incongruous (“We’ll need some bread for dinner tonight”). At the very last moment, you open your mouth to scream but never do. Just imagine the dread mothers must feel every time their children go out, she thought. The clamp of fear whenever the phone rings. Never knowing when or where or if terror will peel itself away from the shadows to engulf you.

  She thought the feeling must be very similar to her own for the past three days.

  A tone sounded, and the seat belt light over their heads went dark. Immediately, two men in separate sections of the plane stood up in the aisle. They were dressed identically, in black slacks, white shirts, and black jackets. They both wore yarmulkes. They raised their hands, palms out, and began rambling at high speed in an alien tongue. Slowly, they turned in circles, as if intent on exposing every inch of the interior and its passengers with an invisible substance radiating from their palms. Alicia saw that their eyes were closed. They were praying.

  “Oh, that’s comforting,” she whispered facetiously. “What do they know about the plane that we don’t?”

  “That it’s in God’s hands?” Brady suggested.

  She lowered the seat-back tray and positioned her laptop on it. After it booted, she called up the file she had started last night to store Ambrosi’s information about Scaramuzzi and Antichrist. She and Brady had reviewed them at the airport as they waited for thei
r flight. From this, they had developed a plan of action. It didn’t amount to much, she knew. Still, she was all right with it.

  When she had been working investigations, before the R&D stuff, she had a partner who’d been with the Bureau something like thirty years. Fatherly guy, tough as a railroad spike, smart as Alex Trebek. Jerome Moyers was his name, and he loved to turn his advice into proverbs. One of his favorites was, “Conducting an investigation is like panning for gold. You might scoop up a fist-sized nugget, but most likely you’ll build up flakes until it amounts to something you can take to the bank.” When Alicia complained about the legwork and phone calls and interviews that seemed to add up to squat, he’d say, “You’re panning, girl. Just keep panning.” And sure enough, almost without her realizing it, her team would have accumulated enough bits of evidence to take to the bank, which in their line of work meant a U.S. attorney.

  Just as a survey of the clues and the options available had sent them to Rome, it was now sending them to Israel. They had believed Father Randall was in Rome. Instead, they’d found Cardinal Ambrosi, whose information gave them a new target: Luco Scaramuzzi. She’d still like to pin down Father Randall, but Ambrosi was convinced Randall would lead to Scaramuzzi anyway. If they were lucky, they’d run into both in Israel.

  She and Brady had agreed to treat Ambrosi’s suspicions about Scaramuzzi and the Watchers as fact. At least until they learned otherwise. On the surface, everything Ambrosi had said lined up with what they had already known: the person behind the murders and attacks possessed power and contacts, enough to track relatively anonymous FBI agents and arrange for their executions. The Antichrist story was flat-out weird, no doubt about it. But so were the grisly beheadings of so-called endears, to use Father McAfee’s term; a killer who pretended to be—or really was—a Viking and used war dogs; a would-be assassin who tormented priests and freaked out about Satan and child sacrifices; and an FBI division chief who was afraid of a shadow organization that monitored the bizarre from an ivory tower in the nation’s capital. Flat-out weird. All of it.

  The first step in their POA was to gather intel about Scaramuzzi’s current operations from ancillary players, working from the least likely to have information—area shopkeepers and the community at large—inward, toward the center of the knowledge circle, which was Scaramuzzi himself.

  They would pattern their investigation on those conducted by the Bureau’s organized crime task force: use surveillance to gather a list of players, then try to ascertain each one’s role and level of authority, as well as his or her potential as a source of information and as a possible ally.

  The POA would be in a constant state of refinement. With each new piece of information, with each new lead, the plan would shift and flex, sometimes dramatically. That was the nature of the beast they were riding. The only rule: Don’t fall off.

  Their objective was to gather enough evidence against Scaramuzzi to force Israel or Italy or the United States into taking action against him for one crime or another. If that didn’t happen, they hoped to discredit him in the eyes of the Watchers. Ambrosi said a Watcher vote of no confidence always resulted in the disappearance of the Antichrist candidate. Brady had told Alicia he would accept either scenario. However, he had made it clear that should the investigation stall or should it become apparent that Scaramuzzi would likely get them before they got him, Brady would make a serious attempt to “put a slug in that scumbag’s brainpan.”

  Go, Brady, she remembered thinking.

  Their plan was weak, tissue-paper thin. Holes big enough to fall through. Full of ambiguities and what-ifs and enough optimism to get the whole planet off anti-depression meds forever. But it was all they had—that or rolling over and letting Scaramuzzi kill them and anyone else he wanted to.

  Alicia bit her lip and looked out the porthole window. Blue sky. Wisps of cloud.

  What are we doing? she thought.

  What we have to, came her answer. What we have been thrust into doing.

  In the faint reflection of the plastic window, she saw herself smile.

  Bring it on. Bring . . . it . . . on.

  BEN-GURION WAS much smaller than da Vinci, less concerned with first impressions. No soaring ceilings, no modern art, no sunlight glinting off expensive stone and metals. It reminded her of the countless small airports she’d seen with her travel-obsessed mother. A place of embarking and disembarking, a few stores and eateries—nothing more, nothing less. There was a charm to its no-nonsense, no-frills practicality, not unlike a neighborhood bakery.

  At customs, Alicia remembered that an Israeli passport stamp could prevent a traveler from entering certain Arab countries, and sometimes worse. It was what made the PLO hijackers of the cruise liner Achille Lauro target and murder American Jew Leon Klinghoffer in 1985. Ink in a passport. Israeli customs often accommodated fretful tourists by stamping a sticky-note that later could be thrown away.

  She immediately became Alicia-the-filmmaker and initiated the inspection of the CSD helmet-cum-camera; they skated through without a hitch. Outside customs, she checked her watch against a wall clock, as she had done yesterday in Rome.

  “Up an hour,” she informed Brady. “2:23.”

  He fiddled with his watch and said, “Breakfast time in the States. I want to call Zach.” He scanned for a pay phone.

  “All right,” she said. “I need to find a restroom. I’ll meet you at the Hertz counter.”

  She shot off toward a corridor that looked promising. She’d walked a hundred yards and was about to backtrack when she saw a pictogram of a woman above a doorless portal. She strode in.

  The room was vacant. She chose the second stall from the last. On the toilet, she slipped off her blazer and inspected her arm, touching the bandages gingerly. Her prodding yielded dull points of pain that fanned out like ripples in a pond. A few pokes produced bolts of electric agony that shot up into her shoulder and neck. Even her lower back ached with a kind of aftershock. Still, she prodded some more, as if daring the wound to torment her again.

  Footsteps clicked on the tile. The person paused, then went into the first stall and latched the door.

  Alicia collected her things and went to the sink. She splashed water on her face, wiped it off with rough paper towels. She kept looking at her arm in the mirror. The blood was soaking through more quickly now. She would have to change the dressing in the car. Maybe put a strip of duct tape over it to prevent the blood from leaking through to her blazer.

  She sighed heavily and appraised herself in the mirror. Overall, not too shabby, considering. The cardinal’s comfortable guest bed, the morning’s long, hot shower and healthy breakfast, the clean clothes had all helped, aesthetically and emotionally. Now, if only they knew what they were doing and she didn’t have a gimp arm.

  She put the blazer back on, picked up her purse and satchel from the counter, and headed out. She rounded a wall, turned out the door, and ran directly into a man who apparently had been standing just outside the threshold. She took a step back.

  “Excuse—,” she started, then stopped. The man was grinning at her. He was movie-star handsome. Square jaw. Large dark eyes. Strong brow and nose. Olive skin that could pass for a deep tan. Where his facial hair would grow if it were not shaved, his skin was a shade darker. Very masculine, with boyish qualities in his eyes and smile.

  “Alicia, Alicia, it’s nice to meet cha,” he said with a singsong lilt. His voice was seductive.

  For a moment, she tried to place him. She could not imagine forgetting this man, but nothing came.

  “I’m sorry, do I know—”

  Someone stepped up behind her from inside the restroom. She felt a hand pull at the satchel. She started to turn, caught a glimpse of a man. Bald. Severe looking. She drew in a sharp breath, ready to yell an obscene accompaniment to the blow she was preparing to strike with her elbow. A hand came around from the other side. It pressed a cloth over her mouth. Her lungs filled with a sweet, pleasant tang.

/>   An anesthetic!

  She tried to jerk away. The hand held her head firmly against the chest of the man behind her. She moved her arms, flailing and striking and causing great damage. But a second later she realized her arms were not obeying. They hung limply. Her eyes rolled up, down—from the ceiling to the handsome man’s face. His smile broke as he moved his lips to speak.

  What . . . can’t hear . . . gotta warn Brady . . . gotta . . .

  Everything went dark.

  69

  After examining the pay phone, Brady used cash to buy a calling card from an exchange counter. He inserted it and dialed, prefixing the Oakleys’ number with the 011 country code. The phone on the other end rang. He smiled, almost giddy with the prospect of talking to his son. On the third ring a woman answered.

  “Kari?”

  “Brady? Brady, how are you? Where are you?”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Oh, yeah. The kids are getting along wonderfully, as usual. The first day, Zach kind of picked at his food, you know? You could tell he was down. Taylor and Tommy kept trying to cheer him up. Yesterday was better. He started laughing with the others. Ate all his dinner. ’Cept his broccoli. He doesn’t like broccoli?”

  “No. Can you put him on?”

  “Oh. They gobbled down their breakfast and took off. Down to the creek, I think. Something about building a fort.” Pause. “I can go get him . . .”

  Brady knew the creek was a good twenty-minute walk over some rugged terrain.

  “No, that’s okay. Are you expecting them for lunch?”

  “You bet. Twelve thirty.”

  “I’ll try back then. Don’t let him take off till I call, ’kay?”

  “I’ll tie him to the chair,” she said, laughing.

  “Thanks, Kari. Talk to you then.”

  He hung up, but his hand would not release the receiver. He was glad for Zach’s having kids to play with and a project to take his mind off things, but he craved speaking to his son. He closed his eyes and recalled holding him on the couch thirty minutes before they were attacked. He had been squeezing the boy so tight, he could feel his heart beat.