The Thieves of Heaven

by Richard Doetsch

  Yet, here he sat. In church. Running from something, from someone, he couldn’t explain. He reached up and fingered Mary’s gold cross. He felt nothing spiritual in it, but he did feel her. The little gold trinket was Mary’s and she had asked him to wear it, had begged him never to take it off. And he wouldn’t: not because he believed in what the cross stood for, but for what the necklace meant. It was Mary’s. And maybe it would protect him, not because of any divine meaning, but because it would remind him why he was sitting here in Germany, hiding here in this church: for love. Here, not because what he believed, but for what Mary believed.

  Noon. A few of the daily faithful had come in throughout the morning, lighting candles, kneeling in silent thought and prayer. Michael worked his way behind the altar and found the red neon exit sign eerily out of place in the two-hundred-year-old sanctuary. He slowly eased the door open. No one around. He headed down the stairs.

  There was a vendor on the corner selling pretzels and soda; it had been ten hours since his last bag of airplane peanuts. He was hungry, thirsty, and tired. Sleep could wait but his stomach couldn’t. A little one-block detour wouldn’t be of any consequence.

  He never even made it across the street. A dozen police cars screeched to a halt in front of him, disgorging trigger-happy policemen—Polizei—of all shapes and sizes. They encircled him screaming in German, waving their nine-millimeter custom-SIG-Sauers. Michael didn’t need a translation. It was pretty clear in his mind what they wanted. He raised his hands in surrender.

  Hotel Friedenberg overlooked Tiergarten Platz. Sixty years old, she’d fallen into utter disrepair in 1961. When the Berlin Wall went up, she went down. The Omega Group had purchased her in ’90, spent close to ten million in refurbishments. Not real fancy but nice: spacious rooms, big swimming pool, health club, and room service. The minibars were stocked with liquor, nuts, and those little five-dollar Cokes that you end up cracking open at three in the morning, and which you completely regret when you get the bill.

  The business-class suite was broken into separate sleeping and working areas. Two king-sized beds were set toward the back of the room, while near the door was a small conference table, desk, and seating area. The room was tastefully decorated for a hotel room, but you wouldn’t remember the muted maroon, brown, and yellow leaf pattern four minutes after you checked out.

  “Michael?” Simon called out as he heaved five large duffel bags on the bed; the double-tip would never compensate the bellboy for his ruined back.

  Simon opened the blinds, stealing a moment to soak up the sun as it poured in on his face. He checked the phone: no blinking light, no messages. He grabbed his briefcase off the bed, sat at the table, and pulled out the hand-drawn plans of Finster’s house that Michael had labored on during their flight. Simon could barely focus. He was beyond exhausted, it had been at least twenty-four hours since he’d slept. He had so much work ahead of him; if he couldn’t stay sharp he would fail. It would be his first failure but in what he did, you failed only once. And a failure now would not only reap consequences for himself.

  He debated. Study the plans? Unpack? Sleep? He would do it all but not necessarily in that order.

  After buying all the crosses in the tiny religious shop, Simon had found Stingline’s right where the nice shopkeeper had said it would be. He had frequented the place several years back when in need of “certain” equipment. Today, he was in need again. Stingline’s was a gun shop but it was also a Gun Shop. The kind that you went to when the other gun shops wouldn’t or couldn’t sell you something. The display cases were filled with hunting rifles, bows and arrows, and, for the military wannabes, fatigues. The real stuff, however, was kept out of sight. Herr Stingline was ex-Red Army, Baader-Meinhof, or IRA, depending on who you spoke to. Word was he was fifty-two. Simon knew for a fact that he was sixty-eight; he always put together a thorough dossier before dealing with unknowns. And whether Stingline was fifty-two, sixty-eight, or eighty-five, the man could still kick the lungs out of you before you even had a chance to breathe. The German was soft-spoken and oddly hairless. The fever took his hair when he was eight and the taunting he’d received had been enough to make him tough as a junkyard dog by the age of nine. He had operated since ’86, which meant that he had to have some kind of quid pro quo with the former East German government and their enforcers, the Stasi. The Stasi were the secret police, the East German form of the KGB, poking their noses in everyone’s lives. Privacy was not a factor in the former Republic; it simply didn’t exist…anywhere. Meaning that Stingline’s op was known and probably even supplied by the government. But as long as Simon had known him, since just after the fall of the Wall, the old man was never a snitch.

  He didn’t ask how, but Stingline had pulled together Simon’s shopping list in less than fifteen minutes: four hands-free radios, four nine-millimeter Glocks with custom silencers; fifty boxes of ammo; two Heckler and Koch PDWs that fired eighteen rounds per second; two Israeli Galil sniper rifles; four head-mounted nightscopes, four bowie knives, six stung grenades, and a box of Power Bars. Simon always bought in fours and twos and he always paid in euros—the least traceable currency at the moment. He’d left Stingline’s with everything he wanted and without a question asked or answered.

  The knock at the door pulled him back to the moment. “Yeah?” He quickly headed for the bags on the bed.

  “Room service.”

  Simon pulled out one of the Glocks and a box of ammo, no time to check the weapon; he just loaded a couple of rounds and prayed. He hugged the wall, working his way carefully to the door. He didn’t bother with the peephole: no sense in turning his eye into a bull’s-eye. He swung open the door to slowly reveal…

  A busboy with a cart of food. The kid couldn’t have been more than nineteen, the cover-up Clearasil barely hiding his acne. “It is our custom to present each new guest vith a complimentary food and beverage cart,” the kid said in a thick accent. He fidgeted with the silver cart, his sweaty palms leaving fingerprints.

  Simon stared at him while slipping his gun into his back waistband. He motioned him inside, leaving the door open. “Sorry. I’m a little tired. This really isn’t necessary.”

  “Sample vines and cheeses for your pleasure, sir.” The busboy rolled the cart into the room, uncovering a selection of soft and hard cheeses, some smoked sausage, fruit, and two bottles of red wine, which on closer inspection Simon found to be of decent vintage. Maybe a glass wouldn’t be a bad idea after unpacking; it might at least help him sleep.

  “May I open the vine for you?” The boy smiled, pleased that his English was being understood.

  “That’s OK, I’ve got some work to do first, I can manage.” Simon slipped the kid a couple euros and led him toward the open door.

  And that’s when it happened. The door slammed shut. The shutters smashed closed. The blinds came crashing down. The room was instantly drenched in blackness. As Simon looked around, he cursed his eyes, trying to force them to adjust to the absence of light. He crouched low and rolled away from the last spot he’d seen the busboy. Unsure if anyone else had entered, he held his breath, reaching out with his mind, trying to feel. How many were there? He strained his hearing; there was no further movement. Slowly his pupils grew, shadowed images started to appear, the conference table, the couch…Across the room, near the desk, a crack of light squeezed through the shutters. Obscured in shadow, the busboy stood gaping at him as if the room was lit with two-hundred-watt bulbs. The kid knew exactly where Simon was, but made no move.

  Seconds, long as hours, ticked by. Neither said a word. Simon could now make out more than shapes, he could see enough to move freely, enough to see the young boy’s face. And suddenly as if the shadows and light were playing tricks, it was the face of Finster.

  Reflex took over. Simon fired both rounds, emptying the gun, hitting Finster square in the left eye.

  Simon stepped up and back from his crouch. Finster was bleeding, of this Simon was sure. Blood and g
ore poured down his face like buckets of scarlet tears. Yet the German didn’t fall. He didn’t move at all.

  And in a casual motion Finster reached up…and reached into his eye. His forefinger and thumb plucked first one then the second bullet from his mutilated socket. Where once an eye stared out at Simon, there was now nothing more than torn flesh and splintered bone, a crevice awash with blood. An opaque fluid separated itself from the redness, the pupil within still reacting to the light. The bullet should have passed clear through his brain but he was still standing.

  Simon watched as the wounded man placed the two nine-millimeter slugs on the conference table and pushed them toward Simon.

  “Please,” Finster said, politely. “Keep them.”

  A sound softly rumbled. It was a sickly, moist sound, a flesh-on-flesh rubbing and tearing sound from somewhere deep inside Finster. It was his eye—it was reforming and Finster acted as if this were a nonevent, like hair growing back on a shaved head, a severed limb rejuvenating on a newt.

  And suddenly it was whole. His two eyes again fixed on Simon, never blinking, never moving, always terrifying.

  “How are those secrets, Simon?”

  The emptied gun flew out of Simon’s hand, ripped away by some unseen force. The power was everywhere, filling the room, Simon could feel it, growing, overwhelming him like an electrical charge at maximum voltage. He looked around desperately for his duffel bag, the big blue one, the one filled with the crosses. He should have unpacked first….

  “That’s right. You should have unpacked first,” Finster said, as if reading his mind, “instead of nodding off, losing focus.”

  “You will not have my—”

  “Soul?” Finster cut in with a laugh. “But I already do, Simon. You forfeited your soul long ago. Those hunched-over, Bible-thumping men in white collars couldn’t come close to offering someone like you absolution.” He raised a finger, as if sharing something precious. “Little hint here, Simon, my friend, kind of a trade secret: you must be sorry for your sins to receive forgiveness….

  “But I digress, that is not why I’m here. Your soul is not the prize I seek. My realm is nearly filled with the pitiful souls of this world. I’m returning to whence I came. I am going home.”

  With that, Simon charged Finster, slamming into him, unleashing blow after blow to his body, to his face. Finster turned his head away and when he turned back, he was an old man, his clothes in shreds, his wrists bleeding from some kind of constraints. Grotesque white scars covered his face, some barely healed. Abruptly, Simon stopped his barrage of fists. He recoiled from the old man in fear. He gasped as if struck by a mighty fist.

  “I begged your forgiveness, Simon. I knew not what I had become, my mind was gone when I had attacked your mother. She forgave me, why can’t you? Why can’t a son forgive a father?”

  Simon drew back his fists and rained down blow after blow on the old man. “You raped my mother; you stole the life out of her. You left me alone.” He continued the assault as the old man began to collapse. “You are nothing more than a bad dream, just a terrible nightmare.”

  And suddenly, without warning, the old man under his battering fists vanished. Where he once stood, there was a dark-haired lady in a sheer black dress, her alabaster skin shining through, the scars plain as day upon her. She recoiled away from Simon, stumbling backward, falling helplessly beneath his blows.

  “Son, please…” she pleaded.

  An icy shiver ran through Simon as he realized he had struck his mother, thrown her crippled form brutally to the floor.

  “Your heart is cold, Simon. Join us, unite us as a family again.” She picked up Simon’s gun, holding it out. “I am just an instant away, my son. Join me.” In her left palm lay a gleaming single bullet.

  Simon crumpled to his knees, staring at his mother, the pistol in her hand. He could feel his mind slipping. His mother, who had taught him to be strong, was telling him it was time to stop, to give up, to follow in her footsteps and take his own life. He was a mess. But then he looked up, looked her right in the eye, and as he did so, he swiped the gun out of her pale hand. His tear-filled eyes overflowed with hatred. “Everything you say is a lie. You will be stopped.”

  And the figure before him started to flicker, the image alternated between his tortured mother and his monstrous father, like a picture struggling to take focus. But the eyes never changed: they remained lifeless, cold—evil.

  “You couldn’t stop me before. What makes you think you could stop me now?” came the hissing words from the lips of his father.

  And with that, Simon slammed back against the wall. The old man was gone and Finster stood once more in his place. Simon dangled eighteen inches above the floor, his face twisted with pain. Deep below his skin, eruptions started to form like tiny bubbles in a pot of water hovering just below boiling. His flesh started to heave, to twist about. And the small bubbles grew, rising just below the skin, contorting his face. Simon screamed in his head but refused to give Finster the satisfaction of crying out aloud.

  Finster picked up the gun, examined it, then walked over to Simon. “Do you think it will be hard to find your mother’s soul?” He fingered the rising bubbles under Simon’s flesh, seemingly fascinated with his handiwork. He peered closely at the gun, examining it, feeling its weight, the deadly power of it. “I love toys.” He raised the Glock, pointing it at Simon…but then thought better of it. Walking close, he leaned into Simon’s ear, whispered in a soft, fatherly tone: “I will return to Heaven from which I was banished. Why merely conquer the world, when I can rule eternity?”

  Simon bolted upright from the desk, heart pounding, sweat beading his brow. The shades were open, night had fallen. He looked about. His bags were still on the bed, unopened. His face was unblemished.

  “Michael?” he called out. Glancing at his watch: half past eight. He couldn’t remember falling asleep. His neck ached from his facedown position over the floor plans. He stood; his body protested from his awkward sleep and the long plane ride. He yanked open the minibar. Only about six of those two-ounce bottles of whiskey, not enough to trash a rat. He grabbed the phone.

  “Room service,” the voice answered. “How can we help you?”

  “I need a bottle of whiskey: Jack Daniel’s. And some ice.”

  “Right away, sir,” the master of efficiency replied. “Was the cheese platter to your liking, sir?”

  Simon caught a glimpse of the room service cart. Not a scrap of food was touched, the wine was unopened. “Yeah, it was fine.”

  He hung up, still staring at the cart. He ran his hands about his face, nary a bump or blemish. Yeah, the dreams were getting worse. But then he turned his head and his heart leaped. He tore open his duffel bag and pulled out the boxes of ammo: all sealed. It had been nothing but a bad dream, a frightening nightmare. But then how did he explain the items on the table? There, on the table’s edge, lay two crumpled nine-millimeter slugs.

  Chapter 23

  Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, there existed a building where many went in and few came out. Dunkel Gefangnis was a six-story stone structure out of the Dark Ages. Its enormous iron-plate doors—all three metric tons—swung on twelve-foot hinges. These had well-earned their acquired name: the gates of perpetual torment. The building was surrounded by a two-story-high iron fence, capped in rusted concertina wire. And while the structure was terrifying in appearance, it was her lower level, all seven sub-stories, that contained the true horrors.

  During the height of their reign, the Stasi—the vampiric East German security force—were known by all, but their dealings behind this building’s great stone facade, which they ruled with an unrelenting bony fist, were only rumored. So, when tales of torture, of maimings, and of slow death circulated, people shuddered in fear, as they were meant to. Dunkel Gefangnis became a useful control on the public, a symbol to terrify them into submission. And it was better for them that they never learned the truth, for the truth of what happened with
in its walls was far worse then the rumored horrors.

  Dunkel Gefangnis was converted in 1996 to the Berlin United Police Headquarters and Jail System. And while trees were planted, lights added, and the imposing iron fence removed, she was still Dunkel Gefangnis, the sinister jail, her hallways perpetually haunted by death.

  The prison levels were belowground and it was evident that the refurbishment money was meant only for those levels where the sun shined. The stench of urine permeated the cold moist air of sublevel five, block six. Michael tried to protect his senses from the onslaught, but to no avail. He lay on the granite slab in the gray jumpsuit provided when they’d taken his clothes. The cell was eight-by-eight, three solid granite walls and an iron-bar front; more like an animal cage than a jail cell. A chill pierced the place and the only source of heat he’d found was intense exercise that left him exhausted. He had lost all sense of time since his arrival and they had yet to ask him a single question. The neighboring cells were empty but somewhere off the main hall he could make out the murmur of foreign tongues. Sing Sing, his prior prison home, had been a palace compared to this.

  Michael debated asking to call the American Embassy, but in the end he realized the embassy would check stateside and all too soon find him to be a fugitive. Besides, who was to say the local police hadn’t contacted them already or, for that matter, that he’d been picked up at the request of the U.S.? No, he wouldn’t call. And anyway, they hadn’t even offered a phone.

  The outer cell-block door crashed open. Down the hallway came the same harsh-looking guard who had silently strip-searched him and thrown him his jumpsuit. But this time, the guard wasn’t alone. Michael heard two sets of footfalls. And when the surly guard came into view, Michael’s senses were confirmed; behind him stood a man who remained back in the shadows.