Sinners and Saints (The Vatican Knights Book 12)

by Rick Jones

  The cardinal reached a hand out to squeeze Bass’s shoulder, a soft touch. “God forgives those who are truly repentant for their sins,” he told him. “You have proven yourself worthy to achieve His glory. You, Frederic, after all, became the lighted spark that continues to exist today.”

  Becher smiled at this. “The Vatican Knights,” he said.

  The cardinal nodded. “The Vatican Knights.”

  Frederic glossed over a few pages and made a few mental notes regarding Kimball Hayden. “I’ve heard of him,” he said. “Kimball Hayden. Once an assassin for the United States government working on black operations committing acts of atrocity with impunity. Men, women and children died by his hands.”

  “Sound similar?”

  “I never killed children.”

  There was a moment of silence, a pregnant pause, as he continued to pour over additional sheets of information. And then: “And now he has discovered his conscience.”

  “He is a good man who remains lost. The Vatican needs you to guide him toward the Light.”

  “I can only guide him so far,” Becher said. “The rest is up to him. I’m sure Bonasero has led the way for so long, and yet Hayden continues to be lost.” He looked up from the papers and turned to the cardinal. “Why would that be?”

  “The good Bonasero Vessucci lost his life before he could finish taking Kimball Hayden to the fringe of Light.”

  “And because of Bonasero’s death…Kimball continues to live in the Gray, since he skirts the Darkness.”

  The cardinal said nothing.

  So Frederic Becher continued to read. A moment later, he said in a tired voice, “Kimball Hayden. The priest who is not a priest.” He set the records aside and sighed. “In whatever time I have left, Angelo, I will guide him to the best of my abilities.”

  “Thank you.”

  Becher held up the papers. “But from what I’ve read…he appears to be a lost cause.”

  “Nobody,” said the cardinal, “is a lost cause.”

  “We shall see.” Becher lowered the papers to his lap.

  “Please, Frederic, show him the way to the Light. Make him believe that the Light is not a mystery. But something known and reachable.”

  Becher didn’t know if this was true, as a nugget of doubt existed in his own mind—the man always wondering if God would exempt the great sins from his life such as the killings, the murders, or the blood spilled by hands that were now too frail to do much of anything. “All I can promise, my friend, is that I can try. But if a man is too far gone, if he believes that redemption is unattainable, there’s nothing I can do. Like I said, in the end it’s up to him. And the hardest thing for any man to do, Angelo, is to forgive himself. If he cannot do this—” He let his words hang, the manner of doing so answer enough.

  “I understand,” the cardinal said, standing. With the briefcase in his hand, he asked Becher one last thing: “Are there any personal belongings you wish to take along for your journey?”

  “Just a photo,” he answered.

  The cardinal nodded with a blue look that conveyed to Becher how sad he was that the sum of a man’s life was reduced to a single photograph. But the picture, at least to a man like Frederic Becher, was priceless.

  “The staff will prepare you for your journey to the Vatican,” the cardinal said to Becher, lending him a false smile. “The train leaves the day after next.”

  Becher nodded. “Thank you, my friend. And God be with you.”

  Sadly, it would be the last time they would see each other, the moment between them a disheartening one.

  Once the cardinal left the room, Frederic Becher leaned toward the nightstand and opened a drawer. Inside was a black-and-white photograph that had yellowed with age, its edges nicked and torn, but the picture itself was in relatively good shape.

  It was a time when history was at its blackest moments. He was a soldier in Auschwitz, a Nazi acolyte who had been ordered to carry out the annihilation of Jews by the scores, simply because the political culture had demanded it. In the photo he was standing alongside a Jewish girl with a rifle in his hands. The girl, however, was a Jew who wore the banded garments that hung over bones as thin as broomsticks, like drapery. Though his smile was genuine, hers was a look of contempt and defiance, a pose of unbridled strength that no form of punishment could ever erase. Not even death.

  Then he traced a bony fingertip over her image.

  A Nazi and a Jew.

  Two people in love.

  Their lives fated to fail from the very beginning.

  Frederic Becher lowered the photo to his lap and went back to reading the biographical records of the man named Kimball Hayden.

  Chapter Two

  Office of the Monsignor

  The Vatican

  The Following Day

  Monsignor Dom Giammacio sat in a wing-back chair made of fine leather smoking a cigarette. Sitting across from him was Kimball Hayden, the most elite of the Vatican Knights. When Bonasero Vessucci reigned as pope, he requested that Kimball see the monsignor to deal with issues of his self-imposed feelings that he was beyond the reach of redemption. Now that Bonasero was no longer serving as the Bishop of Rome, Kimball had never felt so hollow. When he first attended these sessions for psychological reasons, he did so after an appeal by the pontiff. Now he entered into counsel with the monsignor on a voluntary basis, trying to make sense of a life after Bonasero.

  Kimball was sitting in a chair with one leg crossed over the other. He appeared calm like he belonged, but he was far from feeling relaxed. Ever since Bonasero Vessucci had been killed by fanatical extremists, Kimball’s life seemed to have spiraled out of control. In life Bonasero had been his crutch, his beacon that validated Kimball’s right to reach the Light.

  Now he was trapped inside a void, a hollow and empty place where hope had no foothold. It was mostly dark with little light, the area he walked in always Gray.

  The monsignor snuffed out the stub of his cigarette inside an ashtray overflowing with butts, grabbed another from his pack, and lit it. As he sat there appraising Kimball with a studious look—with one eye open and the other winked shut against the ribbon of smoke curling upward from the end of his cigarette—he eventually asked, “When you returned to take your rightful place as a Vatican Knight, how did you feel since you had doubts that you belonged?”

  Kimball sighed inwardly as he searched for the proper words. Finally: “I was a danger to my team,” he answered. “I became the target of a liquidation squad. And for them to get to me, they would have had to go through the Vatican Knights. And if that happened, good people under my command would have been lost for something that became my exclusive problem for something I had done long before I became a Vatican Knight…And to me this was unacceptable.”

  “And now?”

  “And now with Bonasero gone…” Kimball’s words trailed.

  But the monsignor pressed him. “Now that Bonasero’s gone,” he said in a way to lead Kimball further.

  Kimball turned to the monsignor and narrowed his eyes, as if angry, perhaps the question itself a violation. “I’m not sure what to do,” he said. “Not completely. I came back because I made a promise that if a certain person came back from the dead, if she was allowed to live, then I would return.”

  “You’re talking about Shari Cohen.”

  Kimball nodded.

  “And who did you promise, Kimball? Who did you ask to bring her back?”

  “You know who.”

  “You need to say it, Kimball. You need to validate the truth.”

  Kimball sighed. “When I was at my weakest point…I spoke to God.”

  “Spoke to God? Have you ever done that before?”

  “No.”

  “Why now?”

  “Because Bonasero is no longer here to guide me.”

  “Is that the only reason?”

  Kimball mulled this over as hot bile rose to his throat and settled.

  “Was this the only re
ason, Kimball?” repeated the monsignor. “Because Bonasero is no longer here to offer his guiding hand to help you through moments for which you feel that you have no control over?”

  Kimball swallowed back the bile. And then: “Yes and no.”

  “Yes and no,” the monsignor said softly. “’Yes’ because Bonasero is no longer here to offer his hand in help when you need him most? Or is it ‘no’—that you only spoke to God out of desperation because you felt completely abandoned, and by praying to Him you thought that maybe He would listen?”

  “Both,” he said. “I prayed to him because I had nowhere else to turn to.”

  “Because you finally hit rock bottom. Bonasero Vessucci was gone. Your teammates were gone. Your life as a Vatican Knight was gone. And the woman you cared for lay in a coma ready to expire; the one person who meant as much to you as Bonasero Vessucci.”

  Kimball nodded.

  “And so you reached out to God in a moment of desperation, asking Him to grant you a simple moment of peace. A simple act that would acknowledge to you that He had listened and provided you with hope, something to say that He had heard you.”

  Another nod.

  “And now the woman lives. This Shari Cohen. So now you believe that He answered your pleas? And that he offered you hope as long as you both kept to your agreements.”

  Kimball closed his eyes and hesitated before speaking. “All my life everyone that I cared for had been taken away from me, everyone I loved. Mother. Father. Friends. People I grew close to and wanted to get closer to. All gone. All taken. I felt I was being punished because I wanted to be with somebody instead of being a Vatican Knight. I wanted a family. I wanted someone to go home to. I wanted a house with a white picket fence. A small yard for my kids to play in. But every time my needs came close to realization, it was swept away as if my entire life was only predestined to be nothing other than what I am: a soldier. And that what I want in life is immaterial.”

  “And you think God has predestined you to be his servant?”

  Kimball didn’t know how to answer that. On one hand he believed that life would always force him to be nothing more than a soldier, a Vatican Knight. Whether it was by God’s hand he couldn’t say, since God seemed to have abandoned him for the things he had done in his past, and that salvation and redemption was beyond his reach. But when he finally spoke to the Heavens on the day that Shari Cohen was close to death, she had recovered, and her voice, though harsh and raspy, never sounded sweeter. It had been the first time that someone in his life had come back to him, but only with an added promise that he would return to the church if she did so. Coincidence?

  The monsignor leaned forward in his chair. “If that’s the case, Kimball, by your own reasoning, then you must believe that God has heard you and responded accordingly. And if that’s the case, then He has not abandoned you. Instead, he favors you to continue His work, yes?”

  Kimball wasn’t so sure about this, either. So again: coincidence?

  The monsignor eased back into his seat. “You’re not fully convinced,” he said.

  “I’m thinking more on the lines of coincidence rather than divine intervention.”

  “Yet here you are, keeping to your promise. Why would you do that if you believe on some level that it was mere coincidence?”

  “Just in case.”

  “Just in case of what?”

  Kimball couldn’t admit that God had shown His hand, nor could he admit or say to the monsignor ‘just in case God had listened to my pleas,’ at least not yet, not when a single episode of Shari Cohen’s waking had been unequivocally confirmed as divine intervention, rather than a medical occurrence.

  Kimball was still on the fence about this.

  But a promise was made.

  And a promise was kept.

  That’s what men of honor do, they keep promises.

  Then the monsignor segued to a different topic. “You still think you’re beyond redemption for the things you have done in your past, so you continue to seek the path of the Light through the church, hoping to regain the trust of the Lord you’re not sure is listening,” he said. “But you’re not willing to believe this because you have yet to forgive yourself. And forgiving yourself, so far, has been the hardest thing for you to do, Kimball. In fact, it is something you have yet to achieve—your forgiveness.” The monsignor paused for a long moment before adding to this. “Do you think you’re unique?” he finally asked him.

  “Unique?”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “Unique.”

  “In what way?”

  “Do you believe that men such as yourself, those who have killed—and sometimes with delight—are immune to the Light no matter what they have done?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Do you believe that there are others like you who regret their pasts and spend a lifetime seeking salvation, like you?”

  “Probably.”

  The monsignor nodded as if this was some kind of breakthrough. “Believe me, Kimball, when I say this: but you’re not unique…But you are stubbornly troubled.”

  “You would be too, Padre, if you killed men, women and children to keep from compromising your military position. Do you really understand the horrors I go through every night when I lay down to go to sleep? I see the faces of those I’ve killed. I see the faces of children whose lives I’ve taken a moment before I pull the trigger. I see the faces of women and old men. Those who had nothing to do with what was going on other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “The path through Heaven for some, Kimball, often goes through Hell.”

  “So it’s said.”

  “It is. And the statement is true. In fact, Kimball, you’re going to meet a man who’s on such a journey. All his life he combatted his fears, always wondering if he had been embraced by God, despite the things he had done in his past.”

  “I’m not interested.”

  “You don’t have a choice,” said the monsignor. “This is coming directly from the pontiff. And such a meeting, he believes, may be therapeutic, if not cathartic. And I fully agree.”

  Kimball clenched his teeth, causing the muscles in the back of his jaw to work.

  “The man is aged,” said the monsignor. “And he is dying. Yet he once gripped the fear of dying because of what he was and what he did.”

  “So you want me to talk to him?”

  “More than that,” said the monsignor. “He’s in a hospice in Switzerland. You are to retrieve him and make him comfortable. But most of all…you are to listen to him.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s a very special man, Kimball. Very special. See that he is made comfortable for his final journey back to the Vatican.”

  “So now I’m a babysitter?”

  “No, Kimball. You’re a student. So listen and learn. Maybe then you’ll be able to finally forgive yourself and move on.”

  Kimball’s mind started to drift, thinking that there wasn’t anything one man could do to help him. But one thing was true: forgiving himself was a monstrous obstacle to overcome, a colossal undertaking that he had yet to achieve, even when Bonasero Vessucci lifted and carried him whenever he fell. Now he was to put his faith and trust into a stranger? A man he had never met before?

  “Who is he?” Kimball asked once again.

  “A legend,” was all the monsignor would say.

  After a momentary pause, Kimball asked, “So when do I leave for Switzerland?”

  “Tomorrow,” Monsignor Dom Giammacio told him. “You leave tomorrow.”

  Chapter Three

  Geneva, Switzerland

  8:04 A.M.

  Nann Bosshart was a homemaker who lived in a platinum-style neighborhood for the well-to-do, those areas with high-valued homes that garaged high-valued cars. She was pretty with blonde hair and striking blue eyes, late thirties, but kept herself fit with high-tech exercise equipment that had been afforded to her from her husband’s salary.

  Eve
ry morning her life was pretty much scripted and routine. She would get out of bed, prepare meals for her husband and daughter, and get them ready for the day, something she always loved to do since family was everything to her.

  After her husband left, Nann Bosshart, while wiping the granite counter to the kitchen island clean, looked at the clock. It was 8:04. “Emily,” she called out, taking the cloth to the sink to rinse it out, “it’s almost time for school. I want you ready in five minutes, you hear me?”

  Though Emily didn’t answer, Nann knew she that she had heard her. It was always a morning ritual with their daughter: always ignore your parents. But she was only nine, which seemed too early for such behavior, considered Nann.

  Turning on the faucet and ringing the rag underneath, she cried out, “You hear me, Emily? Five minutes! TV off and then—”

  There was a sudden chill along her back, that breath of cold air from an open door or window. When Nann turned she was confronted by a black mass, something dark and menacing that came at her with clawed talons, and then it eclipsed her, the mass taking the woman into darkness that was absolute.

  * * *

  Emily Bosshart was watching TV like she had done every morning—same show, repeat or not—all the way to the last moment allowed by her mother before she had to go to school.

  When she heard her mother cry out, “You hear me, Emily? Five minutes! TV off and then—” She rolled her eyes.

  Turning off the television, an ominous shape reflected off the TV screen behind her. In her eyes it was dangerous looking, a creature entirely of black with its remarkably white eyes in contrast against its blacker-than-black outline. Then it reached for her with fingers that appeared to be as long and thin as the tines of a pitchfork, the TV screen giving the image a funhouse-mirror distortion to it, until the hand wrapped around her face.

  Emily tried the scream as she slapped at the hand that covered her mouth and nose, the odor stinging as she began to slip into darkness. In time her swings stopped as the child fell limp and into a state of unconsciousness.