He simply did not have the time to let the fight continue. He shoved away his opponent and readied himself for a killing blow. The enemy raised his right arm and strode toward Targeno.
Seizing the moment, Targeno spun into the man with a neck-level reverse-kick. The flat of his foot struck the man’s larynx squarely, crushing the cartilage and collapsing the target’s throat. Despite the great size of his bull neck, the man’s head flopped forward as his eyes bulged out like a frog’s. He gasped for air with a sound like gas leaking from a balloon. He fell to his knees, thick-fingered hands clawing at his throat, as though to rip away the occluding flesh. His huge chest heaved like a bellows.
It was not a pretty way to die. But then, few are…
Stepping over him, Targeno clambered up to the satellite dish. No time to check for the U-sonic chip. This had to be the right dish. With a power-driver, he unscrewed the plate at the base of the dish. As it fell away, it revealed all the confirmation he needed—instead of the videocipher motherboard, he saw the glass-boxed amplifier of a high-intensity military laser. In his long career, he’d sabotaged many a similar device. Grabbing a pair of needle-nose snips, he cut the jumpers that connected the amp to the digital temperature gradient regulator. When the laser was triggered it would either melt down or blow up. In either case, it would not be able to focus its light into a lethal beam.
Leaning back against the metal railing behind him, Targeno drew in what seemed like his full first breath in a long time. His limbs tingled from the sudden drop in adrenaline levels; a wave of dizziness rippled through him.
But there was no time to rest. He forced himself to his feet and climbed down to the maintenance concourse, then dragged the dead man’s body as far under the platform as possible. Unless someone was looking for him, he would not be discovered for some time.
Now, thought Targeno, it was time to go down for a closer view of the proceedings.
Bevins
What the hell was taking so long?
The dais rotated with agonizing slowness like a carousel in a dream. The more he tried to detect its movement, the more frustrated and crazy he was getting.
The goddamned weapon should have fired by now.
Looking up at Carenza, Bevins had no doubt his prey was in the right position for a kill. He even chanced looking around to check on the disguised laser. Yeah, it looked good. No problem there.
So what was going on?
He wondered if the microtransmitter in Carenza’s badge had failed. No—what was the chance of that? More likely, Billy Clemmons had fucked up. Gotten the badges mixed up? Had some other poor bastard gotten the death-badge?
Questions rattled off his mind like hailstones on a tin roof. He wished now that he had enlisted a couple of accomplices. Every good security operation always had proper backup systems in place. In this case, Fred Bevins was primary and backup. He was it.
Well, he would do what needed doing. For what Cooper was paying him, he could retire for the rest of his life and not give a shit about any of these religious phonies…
Detecting movement out of the corner of his eye, he turned to the VIP section, where Billy had jumped up from his seat.
What the fuck—?
Clemmons
If he kept listening to Peter’s impassioned presentation, he risked being swept away by the sheer power of the words and the almost mesmeric cadence of the delivery. A part of his mind kept fighting to stay alert. The sensation that something was about to happen…it just wouldn’t leave him.
He glanced at Marion. The sun, high above the Palladium’s rim, diffused its light through the auburn nimbus of her hair. Her green eyes were so bright they seemed electrified; her milky complexion seemed to glow. He’d never bothered to imagine what a saint like Teresa or even Mary herself might have looked like, but seeing Marion at that instant, he knew. She seemed charged with a special energy.
Was she the one in danger, not Peter?
Confused, Billy scanned the crowd. Behind the rows of seats, he saw Bevins, the guy who’d made a big deal about Peter wearing his security badge. Bevins stood out from the crowd like he was wearing neon. He had a completely weird look on his face and kept looking at his watch and then turning to look at something up near the rim of the stadium. Then the watch, the rim, then Peter, then back again.
Bevin’s face seemed to change, then, as if he’d made a decision. He took a step forward; Billy watched as the man reached into his jacket where a shoulder holster bulged under his arm like a growing tumor.
Got to do something…!
Billy heard his own voice, breaking the solemn silence of the crowd, cutting into the spaces between Peter’s words. He jumped to his feet and the radioactive gaze of half a million people seared him.
“Peter! Stop! Stop! Get away!” His voice sounded far away, distant, threatened to be absorbed by the monstrous hush of the crowd.
Billy struggled toward the dais, toward the man he had served faithfully for so long. It felt like he was moving through the gelatinous haze of a dream. He moved, but he did not move.
Bevins reacted immediately, moving forward and loosing a dark, ugly handgun from its case, but keeping it concealed. Anger and frustration flickered over his face as he looked from Peter to Billy and back again. Billy watched him break into a jog as he shouldered past confused people in the crowd.
“They’re going to kill you!” Billy screamed as hands reached out for him. “For Christ’s sake, Peter! Move!”
Other VIP’s were already clearing out, making a path for the sudden madman, and ducking for cover. The Pope, however, sat rigid in his seat, watching events as though he had expected them. Security types of every flavor began converging on the dais. Billy knew he had very little time—he headed straight for Bevins.
Cooper
Holy Christ-a-mighty, what was that bastard doin’?
Peter Carenza had fallen silent at the first sign of disturbance, though he still stood at the podium. Stunned, Cooper watched plainclothes and uniform cops materialize all around the dais as some of the religious leaders began to stir. There was a sudden swirl of movement and color and noise. It was hard to see what was happening.
One thing for sure. Freemason knew his plan was shot to hell.
Clemmons
“Bevins! He’s the one!”
Billy leaped over the railing around the box seats, hurling himself at the stocky man. Bevins turned clumsily to face him, swinging the portable cannon out like a tank rotating its turret.
A brilliant muzzle-flash was followed instantly by a hot sledgehammer just below Billy’s rib cage. He was flipped sideways into the air from the force of the slug, landing at the base of the dais. Shock waves of recognition and panic rang outward through the crowd as he got to his feet and stumbled along the edge of the cinder track.
People were swarming all over him as hands reached down for him. He heard a feminine voice call out his name. Laureen? No, it couldn’t be. Marion, of course. She sounded crazy, panicked. He felt lightheaded; his pain seemed to skip away like a ping pong ball across a tiled floor. He could almost see Time itself stretched out before him like an enormous length of taffy. Everything was slowing down except the downhill schuss of his thoughts. All around him boiled the noises of fear and outrage—shouts, screams. Terror. Confusion. Then an explosion—far off, but full of crackling energy. Billy heard it all as though from down the length of a great tunnel. The bright sky was turning strangely dark. Was there a storm coming? He wondered idly how that could be. Laureen…
He saw Peter moving toward him.
“Billy…hold on,” said the voice. A deep, resonant, soothing voice. He wanted to feel Peter’s hands touching his wounded belly. He knew, somehow, that they would be impossibly cool, that they would reach right into him…He wanted to just close his eyes and rest for a while. It would be best. So easy…
“I’ll get you, Billy,” said the familiar voice.
Why was it getting so dark?
> Targeno
He was halfway through the lower level, wading through the labyrinth of box seats and VIP sections, when the disturbance began. Billy lurched up out of his seat like some puppet with half its strings cut; Bevins blew him away, and all the VIPs scrambled for cover. Then the laser dish kicked in and blew itself into tiny pieces of junk. As hot chunks of metal rained down on the people in the upper deck, they began to stampede.
The crowd surged all around him like whitecaps in a choppy sea. If he didn’t move instantly, he was going to be caught up in the current of the mob and held helpless. Leaping over the railings and sluicing down the aisles, pushing errant bodies aside, Targeno reached the cinder track in the midst of ascendant chaos.
He watched security people swarm about, watched Carenza leap down to help his fallen friend. Bevins wheeled about, backhanding with his handgun a uniform who tried to disarm him. The air grew clotted with screams and orders. Clearly no one knew what anyone else was doing.
In that moment of total chaos, when no single track of events had yet assumed control, in that solitary instant—Targeno could act.
Bevins
His whole hand and forearm vibrated from the vicious contact with the rent-a-cop. The mob-panic was rising like a rainy creek. Fuck it, he thought. Got to finish. He’d already decided to use Clemmons as the fall guy. He would say he thought the kid was a secret assassin, and when he tried to take him out an errant slug caught Father Peter as well. It was a hastily cut plan, but just crazy enough to work.
Climbing up to the dais, where he could get a clear shot, Bevins aimed into the center of the circle of bodies which had converged around Billy and Carenza. Billy was still staggering forward, reaching out. Bevins extended his arms, holding the 9mm automatic with both hands.
Carenza suddenly looked up at him as though alerted by some strange sixth sense. There was something about the cold, utter emptiness in the man’s eyes that stunned Freddie, kept him from squeezing the trigger.
Carenza turned away from Clemmons, defiantly facing Bevins.
The crazy bastard!
The volley of slugs from the machine pistol ripped through him with such surgical efficiency, Freddie was taken instantly from the realm of thought. Bone-shivering impacts danced up the length of his torso. The last seconds of his life were hastily-sketched sheets of awareness. Pain from the first explosive shell ripping out his crotch in a bloody fireball of soft tissue. Even more exquisite pain as the wet center of his bowels and stomach exploded like a ruptured water balloon. Then dull, black shock as the last two bullets shattered his rib cage and shredded his neck and lower jaw into a fine pink mist. He spun downward into dead dark calm of infinity.
Carenza
He hadn’t wanted it like this. His ascendance should not spring from panic, from chaos. But he had been propelled into a reality far beyond the petty concerns of human emotion and rational thought. If he did not take control now, he would lose the reins of the crowd’s energy and enormous will.
Dispassionately, he watched the already-lifeless corpse of Freddie Bevins dance and shudder from the hail of bullets. Turning, Peter faced the assassin’s killer. Long blond hair, and wide-eyed. Dressed all in white, weapon still braced for firing, he looked like an avenging archangel.
Suddenly everyone was pulling out weapons, pointing them at each other. The man in white lowered his gun, and for the first time stared into Peter’s eyes…
Targeno
There was no sound as the half-million held its collective breath. No sound but the caress of the steel being slipped from shoulder holsters.
Had to be careful now, he thought as he slowly lowered his weapon. Best to ignore everybody but Carenza. He was the focus of everything. He exhaled and looked, as though for the first time, into Carenza’s eyes.
Utter coldness filled him in that instant, reaming him, obscenely probing the deepest parts of him. Targeno wanted to vomit. His mind was flooded with the smell of death, the taste of blood, the essence of fear. His thoughts hissed with recognition of abomination like water splashed upon hot coals. Carenza’s eyes were endlessly dark. For an instant they reflected no light at all, as though they were two perfect black holes in Carenza’s skull—holes into the obsidian reaches of infinity, which drew in all things. A soul-gravity so powerful that even the light of hope could never escape.
Evil in all its myriad forms was no stranger to Targeno. Indeed, he’d courted it, wallowed in it, and had even, at times, enjoyed its seductive influence. But as he stared at Peter Carenza, he knew he had just met something that transcended mere evil.
The image of a black rose, unfolding like a dark galaxy, appeared inexplicably in his mind’s eye as he stared into the face of the rough beast which slouched toward all the new Bethlehems.
He knew now what had been bothering the Pope.
And even as the nerve-impulse left his brain to move his arm, to raise and fire his weapon, he knew he would fail.
Targeno had long wondered what it would be like to die. He had pondered over this in the abstract for many years. Now he felt himself withering under the foul breath of its reality, come round at last.
Windsor
Stunned, she tried to hold up Billy’s head. As soon as Peter had turned away from him, Billy’s eyes had rolled toward the top of his head. So much blood everywhere. So much.
Marion tried to stop the bleeding but kept her gaze locked on Peter. He stood staring calmly at the stranger in white who’d saved his life. The atmosphere danced with pent-up emotion. She could feel a sense of expectancy, of brittle, glass-edged anticipation holding the crowd in its slick grip.
The stranger stared directly into Peter’s eyes for an instant, and then, assuming a classic dueler’s pose, the man in white began to raise his gun—the gun which had literally shredded Freddie Bevins into something unrecognizable.
Peter raised one hand, as though in warning or denial, but Marion was not fooled. Light burst from his palm like a miniature sun, and the collective voice of the Palladium gasped and screamed like a sudden storm. A tongue of blue-white fire arced from Peter’s hand to touch the stranger. Time seemed to slow. Marion could see the lash of force reach across the space between the two men. The flash burned the image into her retinas. The gunman erupted into the purest, whitest flame she’d ever seen. So bright, so hard and clean, she could not look into its core.
And then it was gone.
Like the man in white. In his place tottered an obscene column of charcoal. Greasy smoke wafted upward as it fell, shattering into shining crystals of anthracite.
Not one person in the giant arena spoke or moved. Marion knew they were waiting for a sign from Peter. His power was full-grown now. She could feel it emanating from him in thick, hot waves. She was repelled by its overwhelming aura, and yet irresistibly attracted at the same time. The crowd could feel it too—the same way.
Looking down at Billy, she was surprised to see his lips trembling.
“I need help. I could almost see back there…” he said, his voice cracking like a dry twig.
“Billy, please, don’t talk now. It’s going to be all right,” she lied. She wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore. Nothing seemed to matter.
His left eye remained fixed on her while the right orb rolled back whitely. He coughed up a wad of blood and his chest spasmed, then froze and went still.
In the confusion which boiled around them, no one noticed that the light that Billy had been was now out.
Marion felt nothing. Nothing at all. This numbness should have bothered her, but she felt so spent, so totally used up, she could feel nothing. She just sat there, with her dead friend’s head in her lap, her soul full of emptiness.
The silence in the Palladium became oppressive, choking with foulness. Still no one uttered a sound. No one moved.
Until…
On the dais, where knots of stunned security personnel surrounded amazed dignitaries and religious world
leaders, one man stirred to his feet.
Resplendent in his ceremonial robes, sparking with a kind of pure, brilliant whiteness, the Pope glared at Peter and stepped forward.
“Io ti conosco,” he said. I know you…
Peter looked at the old man in the tall, mitred hat and grinned lopsidedly. Marion had never seen such an expression on his face, but she knew instantly she didn’t like it.
The Pope jerked to a halt in mid-stride. As he grabbed his left arm with his right hand, Marion could see his jeweled ring sparkle in the midday sunlight. The old man pressed both liver-spotted hands to his chest as his eyes widened and his round little mouth popped open. He collapsed into the arms of his onrushing entourage, but Marion knew he was dying.
She’d seen another man stagger and fall under the cold stare of Peter Carenza. The first time, she hadn’t comprehended what was really happening.
But this time, as the Holy Father’s body bucked in its final, fatal contractions, she knew who, or what, had dealt the death blow.
The signal had been given. The sign had been proffered, and the crowd sprang to life. A huge roaring rose up from the assembly. The great hive of people attuned itself to the over-mind of its new ruler.
A figure loomed over Marion.
Looking up at the dark silhouette framed by bright light, she saw Peter extending his hand to her.
“It is time to go,” he said.
She did not want to be with him any longer, to go anywhere with him. But she knew she’d given up the right to choose months ago.
“Come,” he said.
“Where are we going?” She touched his hand and shivered.
He grinned again. The lopsided smile she didn’t like.
“To Rome, of course.”
EPILOGUE
Vatican City—Lareggia
* * *
December 25, 1999
Turning away from the large television monitor, he dared look at his colleagues. Like pieces of rough stone, Francesco and Victorianna still stared at the screen, as though unable to comprehend what they had witnessed. In all the years he had known the rogue priest, Paolo Cardinal Lareggia had never seen fear in Francesco’s face.
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