The Blood of the Lamb

by Thomas F Monteleone

  “Good.” A while back, Laureen had decided that Father Peter should be there when the baby came, but when she’d asked Billy, he’d tried to talk her out of it. But she’d kept at him and pouted, and like always, it worked. He’d finally given in and called Peter. Well, why not? she thought between bursts of pain. Billy was his right-hand man now. And he and Laureen were going to name the baby after Peter if it turned out to be a boy.

  A spike of pain shot through her. Her skin felt like it couldn’t stretch another inch. She was gonna bust open like a piece of rotten fruit. Suddenly her bed was moving. Ceiling lights flicked by overhead as they wheeled her gurney down a long hall and into a brightly-lit blue-tiled room crowded with people wearing pale green scrubs. Billy was gliding alongside her, still holding her hand.

  “Okay, babe, it’s gonna be fine now. Pretty soon we’ll have our baby.”

  The gurney stopped. Laureen turned away from Billy to look straight up at the ceiling and saw, bending over her, a doctor with thick eyeglasses. Several sets of hands touched her on each side and lifted her gently onto another bed, one with stirrups.

  “Okay, Laureen,” the doctor muttered through his mask, “let’s have this baby, all right?”

  “I’m tryin’!” she screamed and then, as though on cue, another series of contractions wrung through her body. “Oh God, I don’t care what you do—just get it the hell outta me!”

  “You’ve got to help us, honey,” said a nurse. “You’ve got to start pushing again.”

  “Don’t forget to breathe, babe.” Billy’s voice sounded so far away.

  “It hurts too much! I can’t push no more or I’m gonna die!”

  “Yes you can,” said the doctor. “You know you can do this. I know it’s hard, but the baby’s almost here and you just have to do a little more work.”

  “Where’s Father Peter!” Laureen heard herself screaming, but it sounded distant, not really her.

  “Here I am, Laureen,” said a deep, familiar voice. In an instant she felt a warm glow spreading through her. He was there.

  “Oh, Father!” she said between gasps for air. “Please! Help me! Take away the pain! Oh God, take it away!”

  Something huge was coming through her bottom, gouging her out as if she was an apple being cored. She could feel herself being ripped apart.

  “I can try,” said Father Peter. She felt the heat of his hand as he laid it on her belly. His touch was like a sponge; she could feel it soaking up the hurt and the pain like dirty water.

  “One more push, Laureen,” said the doctor.

  Oh God, she couldn’t believe it! As fast as Father Peter could absorb her pain, a new torture rushed in to take its place! Push?! How could she push when it already felt like something was pulling her whole skeleton out through her bottom?!

  “Is that the head?” asked one of the nurses.

  “Yeah, here we go,” said the doctor. “Okay, Laureen, another push. Let’s go.”

  Oh God, something was yanking at her insides. She was going to get turned inside out. She’d never let another man near her! Oh God, no!

  “Okay, here it comes…That’s it.” The doctor’s voice was so calm. “A little more and—”

  It was like passing a bowling ball with spikes.

  She heard a woman screaming nearby. For an instant she wondered how she could be screaming when she couldn’t breathe…then she realized they were not her screams…Her vision was glazed, foggy, but she could see vague shapes all around her. Staggering back, slack-jawed, the doctor had put his hand back against his masked mouth. The nurses were still screaming.

  Something exploded from between her legs. She could hear a heavy plopping sound as it landed on the cold tile. She felt a great gush of hot liquid and the release of pressure but the pain didn’t go away.

  The lights above Laureen’s head began to spin and everything started to turn gray. People were moving around her quickly and talking in hushed, mumbled tones that sounded frantic. One of the nurses was whimpering, gagging.

  But she didn’t hear a baby crying…

  “Billy! Billy! What’s the matter?! Where’s my baby!?”

  “Hang on, babe, you’re gonna be okay!” Billy’s voice came to her weakly. He sounded strained, upset. “Oh God…”

  “Father Peter! Where’s my baby! I want my baby!”

  “I’m here, Laureen,” said Father Peter. She felt the firmness of his grip on her hand.

  “Father, what happened?” Someone was mopping up between her legs, applying compresses. She didn’t care; she just wanted her baby.

  Father Peter leaned forward so she could see him more clearly. He had a weird expression on his face—like he might suddenly burst into either tears or laughter.

  “Laureen, the baby’s…dead.”

  Somehow she’d known what he was going to say. The words did not sting as much as confirm. The pain of her delivery was suddenly a distant memory, it was as though it had never happened. Knowing that her baby was dead became a blackness at the center of her soul, a cancerous knot that would eat her away.

  Someone was holding her hand, squeezing. She looked over to see Billy’s tear-streaked face. “It’s better this way, hon…It couldn’t have lived anyway…”

  “Was it a boy or a girl, Billy? I’ve gotta know…Can’t I at least see my baby?”

  “Laureen…” Father Peter’s voice wavered, cracked with pain.

  “I wouldn’t advise it,” said the doctor.

  “Why can’t I see the baby? Billy, was it a boy or a girl?”

  Billy started crying, shaking his head. “We don’t know, Laureen.”

  She’d started crying too. Wracked with sobs, she tried to sit up. Hands tried to contain her as she strained to see what was going on in the room.

  “I wanta see my baby!” she screamed over and over. A motion caught her eye: a green-gowned nurse covered something on a gurney as she wheeled it quickly from the room.

  Laureen saw what lay on that gurney for an instant, but the single eyeblink-framed image burned into her memory. Small and glistening red. A bulbous, misshapen head too large for its body. The thing’s limbs lay twisted up like the branches of a diseased tree. It wore its organs on the outside of its body as though it had been turned inside-out.

  The sheet fell into place and it was wheeled away forever—to be bottled and pickled in a lab jar, or maybe dissected and gawked at by medical students, or perhaps just tossed into a plastic bag and crated off to the crematorium. It didn’t matter, she thought as the shadows of unconsciousness closed in.

  Even if it was a monster, they hadn’t stopped her from seeing her baby…

  FIFTY-TWO

  United Airlines Flight 1104—Bevins

  * * *

  December 15, 1999

  The takeoff out of Birmingham had been as rough as Freddie could ever remember. A rare snowstorm had rolled down from the northeast and socked the shit out of the top-end of the state. High winds had rocketed across the tarmac, jerking the jetliner around while it taxied to the beginning of the runway. Freddie hated to fly even when the sun was shining, but on a night like this he was always ready to bet his left nut the plane was going down like an over-the-hill heavyweight.

  As the “unusual turbulence” (the pilot’s words) buffeted the plane’s western approach to Lambert Field in St. Louis, Freddie watched the left wing light through his cabin window. The blizzard swirled and danced in the rhythmic flashes of the red beacon; the effect was almost hypnotic. One good thing about the damn storm, though…it kept him from thinking too much about his latest assignment.

  Christ, he’d pulled some real pranks for Cooper, but never anything like this…

  What the fuck was he thinking about when he said yes?

  The money, of course.

  When you get offered enough jing to guarantee you never have to work for the rest of your life, you don’t turn down the job—no matter what it is.

  No matter what.

  The pr
oblem, though, was whether or not he could pull it off. Not that he couldn’t figure out a way to make it happen. We’re talking about some logistics and timing problems, which were always solvable. No, something more basic was bugging him, burrowing up into his gut to have a meal.

  The big question here, Freddie-boy, was if you plain-and-simple have the stones to pull it off. Yourself. Alone. Naked and alone under the hard-edged gaze of whatever was Out There watching all of us. Despite all the kowtowing to Cooper and “the Reverend”-this and “the Reverend”-that, Freddie wasn’t sure what he believed about God and the hereafter, and good and evil, and all that shit.

  To put it bluntly, he never really wanted to be bothered by questions which might be labelled “ethical” or “moral.” Freddie was the kind of guy who figured he wasn’t really doing anything worse or better than the next simp. Most people grafted a little if they got the chance; cheated, noodged the numbers in their favor; lied when they could get away with it; bullshitted when it seemed to be needed. Most people, yeah.

  But most people never agreed to—

  “Can I get you anything to drink, sir?” The female voice entered his thoughts like a ballet dancer—smooth, effortless.

  Looking up, Freddie only half noticed the forty-ish attendant’s plastered-on smile. Either the rough flight really had her worried, or she was just burned out on acting nice to a bunch of assholes who rode planes.

  “Uh, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. You have any Wild Turkey?”

  “No sir, but I have Old Grandad.”

  “That’ll be fine,” said Freddie. “Give me a double. Neat. And a little Coke and ice on the side.”

  The flight attendant continued to smile as she mixed his order at the drink cart. The pitching and yawing of the plane made her splash everything around and by the time she had his Grandad poured, it was closer to a triple. Which was just fine with Freddie.

  Freddie grinned sardonically. Cooper might sound like a good ol’ boy, but he was nobody’s fool. Though his latest idea—well, it just seemed crazy.

  Freddie slurp-sipped his whiskey, followed it with a little sweetness from the Coke. The first few gulps were already leaching some of the flight-tension out of him. He wondered what it would be like to be falling out of the sky and be so drunk you didn’t care, didn’t even know the plane was going down.

  Yeah, he thought, calmly, taking another gulp, and raising his hand to get another drink: maybe if he was completely wasted by the time they reached St. Louis, he wouldn’t worry about catching Father Peter in the crosshairs of the weapon of his choice.

  FIFTY-THREE

  Los Angeles, California—Targeno

  * * *

  December 25, 1999

  Sunrise.

  Christmas morning was warm and sunny with a breeze more than subtle, less than brisk. Californians knew this as sweater weather. Golfers loved it; so did surfers, as long as they had a wetsuit. People from other parts of the country could never get used to bright sunshine and warm temperatures at Christmastime, and even if they didn’t like blizzards, many seemed to require some gray sides or nasty winds to get into the mood of the season.

  But this particular Christmas morning in Los Angeles was special. Hundreds of thousands of people had migrated to New Gomorrah; pilgrims from across the continent and a hundred other countries gathered at the city’s newest architectural shrine, the Los Angeles Palladium.

  The Palladium: big enough to hold six Houston Astrodomes, it could easily accommodate more than a quarter million people. Sky-boxes, suites, restaurants, bars, and even nightclubs accented the gigantic, concrete torus like gems in a tiara. At night, seen from Mulholland Drive, it looked like the mothership from Spielberg’s Close Encounters, ready for lift-off. The envy of every other city in America, the Palladium had become the Mount Olympus of urban coliseums. The mayors of most of America’s major cities were jealous. They knew that their constituents couldn’t see the effects of better public education, or programs to help the aged or the homeless, but they could undoubtedly see a stadium as big as Rhode Island, lit up like a Georgian’s birthday cake.

  Rock concerts, ballgames, the NFL, and the Goodwill games had already called their worshipers to the Palladium’s altars, but the International Convocation of Prayer was the first truly “religious” event to take place there. Radio and television crews from more than 140 countries had wired up the place until it looked like the world’s biggest bowl of spaghetti. Satellite uplinks sprouted along the stadium’s rim like mushrooms after a night of hard rain. The Convocation would be witnessed simultaneously by billions of people. Technicians swarmed about like worker bees readying the hive for their queen’s coming-out party.

  If Francesco had seen his agent at that moment, it was doubtful the old wolf would recognize him. Long, blond hair had replaced his close-cut black; his dashing mustache had been sacrificed to absolute deep cover. Wearing the white coveralls of the Church of the Holy Satellite Tabernacle technical crew, he scrambled around the upper levels of the Palladium and pretended to be part of the army of drones making the final connections for the big broadcast. There were dozens of crews from scores of networks, individual stations, syndicates, and satellites around the world; many different languages were being spoken. Targeno was surprised no one had yet been electrocuted. Confusion ruled the hour and he had the freedom to go anywhere he pleased.

  Later, he imagined, the various security agencies would give the screws a few good turns and start setting up procedures for the event. But now, there were virtually no security goons about. Targeno stood still for a moment in the early morning shadows of the light towers which soared up and over the rim of the giant doughnut like great curving horns. Like strands of endless webbing, catwalks and ladders interleaved the superstructure. The beauty and the terror of such a design were that everything was either camouflaged or hidden by architectural trickery. The Palladium offered plenty of places for an assassin to hide.

  Targeno smiled as sunlight tickled the back of his neck. Finding such a place was, in fact, his first priority. He planned to locate several sites, so any contingency might be covered. As he strode briskly through the mass of coveralled technicians, each displaying the colors and logos of myriad countries and broadcast systems, Targeno carried a clipboard and pretended to be speaking into a remote headset. To the average observer, he was probably just another foreman or shop steward trying to honcho an assignment to completion.

  Up on the rim, he had a clear view of the dais far below. Located in the exact center of the Palladium, mounted on a complicated set of gears and electric motors, the huge, circular platform had been designed to perform one rotation per hour. Used often for concerts and other performances, the revolving stage had proved a big hit with the audiences, and made the arena’s publicity hype—“Not a Bad Seat in the House!”—true.

  The clockwork movement would also afford any possible assassins an ever-changing panorama of potential targets. And the rotation was slow enough to have no serious effect on a killer’s aim. Targeno shook his head as he surveyed a crew connecting their KU band uplink dish to a small platform out on the rim. There were literally hundreds of these mounting platforms encircling the arena, a mark of the foresight of the architect, who had anticipated worldwide coverage of Palladium events. He had fairly well ruled out the mounting platforms and the dishes themselves as possible hiding places—too open, and too vulnerable to infrared scanners, which might pick up the body heat of a lone figure in an unexpected location.

  No, he thought, he’d have to find a site that was accessible, and perfectly camouflaged. Perhaps a less obvious spot…

  To anyone using a sniper-scope, the rim of the arena would be no obstacle to a clean kill. At this distance, Targeno could use one of his own weapons to delicately snick a fly off the Pope’s nose. And Targeno was not an exceptional shot; there were plenty of men who could shoot as well or better than he. But being a good marksman was not the only requirement for a great as
sassin. There was also the matter of perfect timing, that knack of selecting the precisely correct moment when no one was looking, when your prey was most vulnerable, when your avenue of escape lay the widest, and of course when your kill quotient was the highest.

  Targeno was constantly aware of this rough-edged equation. The closer one could get to the rotating dais, the higher the odds that even a botched job would be successful. And so he would have to be thorough; he would have to slowly work his way down through the labyrinth of seats, checking everything.

  It also meant he would have to consider alternative methods—the most obvious being a bomb. Time-honored methods of searching for an explosive device would take weeks in the Palladium. Impossible. Pointless. But thanks to the microelectronics of the very late twentieth century, Targeno had some very reliable help in snooping out the distinctive electrochemical atmospheric signatures of portable bombs. Other weapons or devices, such as equipment using laser or microwave technology, were more difficult to detect, but there were ways of coping with that sort of thing too. No one had a better bag of tricks than Targeno. If there was anything out there, he would know about it.

  He looked at his watch and noted the time—just after six AM. The Convocation’s opening ceremony would begin at noon.

  He smiled as he pretended to make a note on his clipboard.

  Six hours.

  He’d been left with a lot less on many occasions.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Los Angeles, California—Windsor

  * * *

  December 25, 1999

  Peter had flown out the day before, disguised and alone. Marion was no longer personally offended by his aloofness, but that didn’t keep her from worrying about it, about him. As her jetliner taxied to a stop at LAX, she tried to stop thinking about the way he’d changed, and still seemed to be changing. He was no longer—