“Waiting outside.”
Martin nodded hesitantly.
“You’ll like him. Almost everyone does, but those who don’t hate him.” Taglieri pressed a large toggle on the intercom with an arthritic finger. “We’re ready for him.”
The door opened and the visitor who stepped in was tall and well-built, with the confident gait of a boxer or wrestler, an aquiline profile made up of strong features including a patrician nose and piercing gray-green eyes. His hair was longer than the style. He smiled widely and extended his hand.
He said, “Jonathan Mark.”
Martin looked back and forth between Mark and Taglieri, who nodded slightly.
They shook hands and Martin noted how Mark’s eyes seemed to pierce his very soul, how the grip seemed capable of crushing his hand but showed restraint, and how he felt immediately attracted to the man Taglieri insisted was Judas Iscariot himself.
I must be dreaming.
“My pleasure, Father,” said Jonathan Mark, releasing the hand. They’d been friends ever since.
Jonathan Mark used many more aliases in the next thirty-two years, and now he was Simon Pound and the name suited him well. Father Martin chuckled to himself. One of the gifts the suicidal, dying Judas had been given that day in the bloody field was what he himself referred to as a way with people. It was more than that, really, allowing him to make most people see him as he wanted to be seen. And giving him the ability to push people to agreement.
It came in handy with women, too. If Simon Pound had one weakness besides good food and drink, it was women. Martin shook his head. After all these years, he still couldn’t believe how easily the assassin attracted women, and how they were somehow still smitten with him even after he had lost interest.
Father Martin let out a long sigh. A light blinked on his computer screen and he knew his visitors had arrived. First it was time to review the facts of this case, and then once again to aim the weapon that was Simon Pound.
He only hoped it wasn’t too late.
The scar is almost invisible now, but I can still feel how the skin parted like a zipper and my intestines burst forth onto the desolate field in which I had chosen to die. Even after time slowed and the Deal was offered—and I accepted it, desperate to live after all—the voice in my head scolded me for what I had done. The pain was unbearable, but the terrible wound healed itself almost as soon as inflicted.
The scar reminds me now, though mostly only I can see it. Occasionally one of my lady friends traces the discolored line with the tip of a finger and asks me about it. I shudder a little and offer a lie, then take the hand and finger and place them where I prefer them to be.
Unconsciously, I touch the simple bracelet that currently holds my flake of silver struck off the coins given me on that day, for that one act of betrayal. A tangible reminder of my blood money fee, and I must keep it on my person, next to my skin at all times lest the aging process begin anew. It, also, is part of the Deal. For a few centuries, I wore it inside a pendant. Styles change…When the right technology came along, I tried to have the silver flake implanted, but the heat of magical activity nearly burned me alive from the inside and I couldn’t slice it out of my flesh fast enough. Now the inconspicuous leather bracelet does the job without calling attention to itself and keeps my life-prolonging silver flake right where it needs to be.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t worry about the nature of my secret weakness.
I’ve gotten used to this near-immortality thing, and I won’t let go of it easily.
In fact, I’ve killed to protect it.
Chapter 9
Milwaukee Public Museum
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Reggie Wasilevich was sixty-one, overweight, and tired. But the security guard was the only ex-cop on the museum’s security force and he was duty-bound to finish his last rounds of the night.
The route was long and his arthritis had kicked up about halfway through. Grimacing, he tagged each recording station, then in each large hall or display room he made sure the night lighting was on and the overhead lighting was dim.
He paused at the front of the large hall which led into the newer Aztec display. A top of the pyramid temple recreation complete with human sacrifice acted out by realistic mannequins was the hall’s central attraction, and he had just seen a bobbing light behind the faux blocks of the pyramid’s peak.
What was back there? Oh, yeah, a line of glass display cases.
They held new artifacts dug up from the museum’s storage rooms. Many had never been seen since the museum had acquired them decades before.
Looks like a small flashlight moving around.
Somebody messing with the exhibits? Thief looking to steal some of the gold idols and statuettes kept under glass?
Reggie reached for his weapon, but all he had now was a large flashlight and pepper spray. He unholstered the flashlight and hefted it. It would do.
“Hey, who’s there?” Reggie called.
The bobbing light flickered and went out.
“Come on out, this is security!” He pulled the phone out of his pocket, planning to alert the security office.
Light footsteps approached from the darkness. One person. Then another, and maybe a third.
What the hell was this, a gang initiation? Fraternity hazing?
“Hold it right there!” His flashlight beam stabbed through the darkness. He didn’t follow through with the phone.
The shadows moved rapidly around. He swiveled the light, but a crash on the left side of his head caused a blinding explosion in front of his eyes. His knees buckled and warm wetness gushed over his ear. He groaned. Another crash: this time the pain spiked and before he could utter a single word, his body crumpled to the marble floor.
The three shadows converged over Reggie. One took a hammer and spikes from a shoulder bag. The other drew a curved katana. They had already found what they were searching for, in the display case: a solid gold statuette of the feathered serpent-god, Quetzalcoatl, apparently defiling a rough Christ-figurine from behind. The vile statuette was now safe in a shock-proof carrying case.
Reggie’s right leg moved as if he were trying to stand. The left side of his cranium was crushed and bloody, but duty ran deep in his veins.
The three intruders watched him. Had he seen them, or the statuette?
It didn’t matter, their instructions were clear.
With grim determination, they set to work.
Soon Reggie’s screams echoed in the empty halls of the museum. Then they didn’t.
Chapter 10
Edificio Nuovo, Comitato per Interventi
Vatican City, Rome
The meeting with Father Martin, head of the VSS, began as soon as he entered the conference room. The three men and one woman already seated at the walnut table were the directors of the various bureaus of the Secret Service, which was—unlike so many others—actually secret. Martin joked privately that only the Mossad had more success at keeping secrets. This agency had been built around an unbelievable premise—that an immortal agent would terminate enemies of the Church—making secrecy all the more paramount. Most nations knew the Vatican dabbled in spy craft, but no one would have believed how much.
Father Martin had believed now for thirty-two years, having been given little choice when old Taglieri had introduced him to Judas Iscariot himself.
The bureau heads believed, for they knew the greatest secret of the agency. Other agents employed by the VSS, however, merely considered Simon Pound the senior, most experienced agent.
Martin gave each face a small nod of greeting. They met much less formally numerous times a month to conduct the more mundane business of the agency, but this meeting had been labeled Segretissimo. The bureau heads had all arrived via the old tunnels, dug next to and in some cases through the catacombs, starting from several innocuous addresses in the Vatican City. One had arrived through the tunnel from the se
cret bowels of the Archives, the portion of the Biblioteca Vecchia which housed the most vile of texts and artifacts collected over the centuries by agents of the Church and, in numerous cases, by Simon Pound himself.
Tension was obvious in the air and on their features.
“There’s no point in pleasantries today. Let’s get started.” Father Martin clicked his remote. An image appeared on the whiteboard screen. Several of his guests hissed in shock.
The phallus crucifix, as they had once dubbed the vile figurine, loomed large and ominous over their heads.
“It has reappeared,” Martin said by way of introduction. “As you know, we had held it for a couple hundred years, safe from prying eyes, but about a hundred years ago it was somehow stolen from the Archives.”
“Before my time,” muttered Bellucci, who had been in charge of the Archives for the past twenty years. He was a Jesuit, but never dressed like one, preferring a black turtleneck and tweed blazer to go with his ruddy complexion.
“Just so.” Martin frowned at the interruption. “As I was saying, it has reappeared—and immediately everyone who saw it was executed. First the man whose hands pulled it from the dirt, and then anyone else who might have been around. They didn’t discriminate.”
“Where?” It was Moltisanti, nominally a Franciscan monk but also a man happy to share a surname with the most hot-headed Mafioso on The Sopranos, which they all had secretly enjoyed despite the negative stereotyping. And the sex and violence, of course.
“Queens, New York,” Martin said. He let this sink in. The only woman in the room, Monica Valessio, was rubbing her eyes, having set her wire-rimmed glasses on the table. “Are we next for having seen it?”
Martin shook his head. “I don’t believe the statue itself has any powers. The followers would execute us for seeing the damned thing itself, but only for their own secrecy. And perhaps as a power ritual.”
“There is that,” said Annunzio, a monk but no one could remember from which order.
“Just because they may have built a ritual around it does not indicate that it fulfills any of their desires. But…” Father Martin paused. “But we know what it can do when united with the other four.”
“We only know from what’s been written—” started Moltisanti, but Martin cut him off.
“And that’s enough, believe me. These occultists have taken the name New Golden Dawn, but they are a new breed, unrelated to the old order of intellectuals and amateur mages. I prefer to call them the followers, because they are nothing but acolytes.”
Martin clicked the remote. “This is another one of the five.” He clicked again and again. “Here they all are.”
The shocked faces of his bureau heads said everything.
“The problem we have is that we don’t know for sure whether this one is the first they have found, or the second. Or, God help us, the last of the five.”
Chapter 11
Gulfstream G550
Over the Atlantic Ocean
The jet was cruising at thirty-seven thousand feet through light clouds that occasionally obscured the black ocean below. Simon Pound reclined on one of the creamy leather captain’s chairs mounted in two single rows between the front and rear of the plane, swiveling back and forth.
He glanced at the MacBook Air on the nearby table, but he was bored.
“Would you care for a drink?”
He swiveled and smiled at the flight attendant, a pretty brunette in a conservative uniform of sky blue skirt and blazer. There were gold crosses on her collar.
“I think so,” he said. He explained his requirements and she went to the galley to prepare it.
He watched her from behind. One would have thought the flight attendant on a Vatican plane would be a dowdy nun from some obscure order, but instead she was more like an idealized vision of a stewardess from the early Seventies “coffee-tea-or-me” phase of air travel. He appreciated her presence—she added a much needed attractiveness to the almost severe tan and violet furnishings. When she brought his special Manhattan to him, placing it on a Holy See coaster, he chuckled.
The plane shuttled plenty of highly-placed Jesuits around, which explained the well-stocked bar. In his experience, Jesuits drank like fish.
She waited as he sipped and nodded his approval, and she went away with a pleased smile.
He assumed there were cameras aboard, so he contented himself with the drink and a wink at the laptop screen.
“Happier now, Simon?” The face on the screen was that of Caterina Galassi, and she had been in the middle of a standard briefing when Simon’s attention had wandered. She was used to his variable attention span, and so she had waited patiently as he checked out his surroundings and ordered his drink. He’d left New York barely an hour ago, and already he felt as if he were back in Rome.
“It’s all relative, isn’t it, Cat?”
She sighed. “What is?”
“Happiness.”
“I suppose so. Can we get back to business now, Simon? Marty wants you up to speed before you get here.”
Now he sighed. He tilted the glass and drained half the Manhattan. “All right, fire away.”
“We’ve just heard that another of the statuettes has fallen into their hands, but I don’t have the details yet. Looks like it was stolen from a museum in Milwaukee, of all places.”
“What the hell was one of these crazy things doing there? Plus I thought they were all buried or locked away.”
She perused a screen off to her side. “Hm, it was in a vault, but apparently a new curator decided to open up some old acquisitions and a few of those secured artifacts made their way into a public display…”
“Damned fools,” he muttered. “You’d think your boss would have made sure.”
“Simon, these items were secured decades ago. Marty’s been busy working on the links between our enemies and terrorism.”
“That’s a no brainer, isn’t it?” he said.
“Simon—”
“Tell me more about this New Golden Dawn nonsense.” He changed the subject. Bored again.
“I sent some material to your phone…”
“Sure, but then I don’t get to see your smiling face.”
She blushed. “Okay, the boss is hosting a meeting right now, but the fact that this so-called Golden Dawn incarnation knows about the five statuettes and the ritual is suspicious. And what we don’t know is whether these are now the first two of the five to be found, or the last two…”
“What do they look like?”
“You saw the first one already, the phallus Christ. We’ve given them names…”
“Go on,” Simon said, rolling his hand to move her along. He finished his Manhattan and tried to wave at the pretty attendant, but she had her back turned.
Cat continued, “Looks like the second is an early Mesoamerican figurine, probably cast sometime after Spanish conquest. I believe it’s a feathered serpent, huh, taking a priest or Christ figure from behind.”
“That’s novel,” Simon said. “A little bestiality never hurt anyone. Photo?”
She flipped through screens. “No—wait, here’s a sketch.” She angled an ancient-looking ink drawing up to the camera.
The plane dipped suddenly and started to rock violently.
The attendant screamed as she was thrust stomach-first into the galley counter, dropping some glassware and a tray she had been stowing.
“What’s happening?” Cat said from the laptop screen.
Simon was about to respond when he realized his bracelet was searing his skin.
It was a dead giveaway, and it meant there was nothing wrong with the plane, not really. But they were under attack nonetheless.
The plane’s nose dipped and they were plunging at a severe angle toward the dark surface of the ocean.
Chapter 12
Edificio Nuovo, Comitato per Interventi
Vatican City, Rome
“Are we all aware of the consequences if these fanatics m
anage to locate and collect the five statuettes?” Father Martin clicked the remote again. An indistinct photograph of a group of robed and cowled people clustered over a red pentagram appeared. His visitors looked puzzled. A couple shook their heads.
“They look like nut-cases,” he said, “but somehow they have managed to locate and translate a text we believe went missing from the Archives possibly decades ago.”
“Also before my time,” called out Bellucci, who was intent on not being blamed for anything.
“Indeed, it was most likely under your predecessor, a time when various items and texts seemed to vanish—or walk out. Security was much too lax. They may have cracked the meaning of the text, and if so they will have learned of the Demonia Satani ritual, one of a set of rituals included in the original black mass manuscripts. Not the popular but useless Anton LaVey stuff, you understand. But the real thing, the stuff that would turn people’s hair white if they knew it wasn’t just fiction.”
Martin didn’t elaborate, but LaVey had been a Vatican plant, a ringer, an obviously fake Satanist intended to draw attention away from the real thing by being so obviously a charlatan that the public would be forced to scoff. LaVey had been handsomely paid for the charade, the money helping to fuel his carnival-barker celebrity status and, therefore, to further discredit his own movement.
It had been a devious ploy, and it had worked. LaVey’s popular version of Satanism was dismissed as shock theater, reducing the power wielded by true agents of Satan. Much of their power was based on belief, so once they were publicly ridiculed the real movement lost momentum.
Martin continued: “Now we are dealing with actual fanatics who are aware of the line between fact and fiction when it comes to the spawn of hell. We believe the text describes a blood ritual which will release a monster into the world. Once released, this monster will swallow human sin and greed and hate and the world will be his. The text makes clear the intent of the freeing ritual, and the way to perform it is to place each of the statuettes at one of the pentagram’s five points.”
THE JUDAS HIT Page 3