Vatican Knights

by Jones, Rick

  “Past history is usually a great indicator of future behavior,” she continued. “If the group is rogue, we don’t have a lot of past accounts, so we’ll have to come up with a format based on their individual dossiers. Psychology, in this case, will become paramount. And that’s where I’ll come in.”

  Shari peeled off another page, but never referred to it.

  “We’ll play this based on our data and according to the situation. If the situation seems to be heading in the wrong direction, then we’ll have to shift course. That’s why we’ll need to develop a series of schematics to deal with whatever scenario may arise.”

  Shari gave each face a quick examination. “Questions?”

  There were none, the team apparently resolved and ready for duty.

  “Then let’s get to it,” she said. Her briefing was quick and to the point.

  During the next hour Shari moved the staff to a workroom filled with personal computers, terminals, and phones, then divided the assembled experts into groups of three and designated each group a specific task according to their skills and strengths.

  In essence, Shari Cohen was flexing her muscles.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Somewhere Over the Atlantic Ocean

  September 23, Evening

  Kimball Hayden sat alone in the front of a Gulfstream jet cruising along at twenty-nine thousand feet. The four members of his team were situated throughout the cabin, sitting quietly, their moods matched by the depressive gray of the Atlantic sky.

  After drawing a deep breath and releasing it in an equally long sigh, Kimball closed his eyes, trying to attain a moment of peace. But when he closed his eyes, the images always returned: snippets of his life, from his days as a teenager, trying to become an appreciative glimmer in his father’s eye, to the moment of his epiphany in Iraq as a member of the Force Elite.

  His father, Daryl Hayden, was a man of minimal presence. As a widowed father, having no social standing of his own, he relied on his son’s achievements to confirm his own importance. By the time Kimball was seventeen, he was a foot taller than and twice as broad as his father. But Daryl didn’t credit his son for being strong, handsome, or charismatic. The way he saw it, these were accidents of nature, not achievements. In fact, Kimball felt his father resented rather than valued these attributes. He spent his entire youth wondering why it was so easy to please others—his classmates, his teachers—but so impossible to please his own father.

  He remembered in vivid detail the night he first saw the glow of appreciation in his father’s eyes. He was playing linebacker for his high school football team. It was Friday night. The stands were full. And in front of thousands of people, he was being knocked off his assignment by a center that was smaller than him. Repeatedly, Kimball was sent sprawling as the running back ran to daylight through the gaping hole Kimball was supposed to fill. Catcalls erupted; the coach was on the brink of benching him.

  When the tailback scored a second touchdown, running through the seam that Kimball was supposed to fill, it all proved too much for his father. So when Kimball went to the sidelines, his father grabbed his facemask and twisted it, the man looking like a child before his behemoth son. Spittle flew from his mouth in rage as he openly chastised his boy, telling him he was an embarrassment to the Hayden name.

  More wrenching of the facemask followed, the violent tugging almost causing the coach to intervene. It appeared Kimball’s father had lost his way in disciplining his son; the incident appeared to border on abuse.

  “Do not embarrass me!” he screamed. “I want you to go out there and make something of yourself! You hear me? Push yourself to the limit, Kimball! And when you think you reached that limit, then push yourself some more! You got me?”

  Kimball nodded.

  “You look like a pansy out there! I will not have a pansy for a son! You got me? Not one more time on your backside!”

  Another nod.

  “Then get out there and act like you belong!”

  When he released Kimball’s facemask, Kimball returned to the sidelines ready to prove himself.

  When the next defensive series began, Kimball became an animal. This time when the center approached him, Kimball hunkered down to a low center of gravity and launched himself forward, hitting the center so hard that the player fell backward and knocked the running back off his route, causing other players to swarm in for a tackle of a loss. As the pile cleared, it was apparent that the center was severely injured. Blood foamed at the edges of his mouth from an internal injury, and he had to be carted off the field. When Kimball looked up into the stands, he saw his father standing there bearing a smile of approval and pride. It was the turning point in Kimball’s life, the pivotal moment in which he finally shone bright in his father’s eyes. Kimball had finally discovered the key to his father’s approbation.

  He was courted by numerous college football programs; coaches around the country loved his aggressive tenacity on the field. However, Kimball shunned the scholarships and decided to join the Army Rangers instead. It was here that he caught the eye of the military hierarchy. They noticed his determination and his remarkable strength and agility. They also noticed that he seemed to thrive on pressure. The more challenging the task, the more committed he was to completing it.

  Soon, Kimball found himself under a new command in the Force Elite, a governmental Black Ops unit known only by the president and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the Force Elite, Kimball assailed insurgents with incredible efficiency, earning a reputation as an unstoppable warrior.

  Since targeted assassinations were banned by the Ford administration in ‘76, Kimball had become the first of a new breed. Secret meetings were the norm in the Situation Room, where the ban went unnoticed by future presidents and the JCS. At these meetings, Kimball was often the focal point, spotlighted for his ability to carry out even the most difficult missions with stoic precision.

  In 1990 he was assigned to kill three key members of Saddam Hussein’s Cabinet responsible for brokering deals with Russian dissidents for high-grade plutonium. Not only was the plutonium never delivered, but the Iraqi brokers were found shot to death in Chelyabinsk, Russia by a Rav-.22LRHA, which happens to be Mossad’s weapon of choice for assassinations. This weapon was the red herring that made Israel the scapegoat for the killings.

  From that moment on Iraq never attempted to develop a nuclear arsenal in earnest.

  In December of that same year, Kimball was asked to commit another assassination. This time the target was Saddam Hussein.

  When Iraq ventured onto Kuwaiti soil to pillage the country in August, the United States and the UN coalition ordered Hussein to withdraw from the country immediately. However, several months of wasted negotiation evolved before the commencement of the counterattack by U.S. and coalition forces. It was during this period that President Bush and the Joint Chiefs of Staff called upon Kimball to take out Hussein before the allied assault began. They believed war could be averted if the rank and file of the Republican Guard fell into disarray without Saddam Hussein’s leadership.

  Kimball asked no questions. He only needed to know what he had to do, not why he had to do it. It was this icy-cold fortitude that led his employers to consider Kimball practically inhuman. He seemed to possess no conscience, no remorse, no care. He was a perfect killing machine that seemed to take pride in that image. His commanders saw him as larger than life, the same way his father saw him that night on the football field. The feeling was indescribable.

  As the window of opportunity lay open and the negotiations continued, Kimball breached Iraqi territory.

  Just then the Gulf Stream hit an air pocket, causing the plane to dip sharply. When it leveled off Kimball recalled the moments of his pride, a deadly sin in the eyes of God. And his fall had come to him quickly.

  He had been in Iraq for seven days and was making his way toward Baghdad when he happened upon a flock of goats herded by two boys, the older no more than fourteen, the young
er perhaps ten, each carrying a gnarled staff of olive wood.

  Kimball remained out of sight, with his back pressed against the sandy wall of a gully, listening to the goats bleating only a few feet away. And then a shadow cast over him from the younger boy, who had spied Kimball from above. The child’s small body was silhouetted against the pure white sun, a diffusion of light shining from him like a halo. And then the boy was gone, shouting, the sun assaulting Kimball’s eyes with a sudden and terrible brightness.

  Kimball stood, immediately engaged his weapon, drew a bead and pulled the trigger, the bullet’s momentum driving the boy hard to the ground. The older boy stood unmoving with his mouth open in mute protest, his eyes moving to the body of his brother, to Kimball, then back to his brother. When he took flight Kimball took a single shot, the bullet killing the boy before he hit the surface.

  Another bump of turbulence, this time stronger, jarred Kimball from the memory. But when the plane settled back into a smooth flight pattern, he closed his eyes once again and remembered what he had for so long tried to forget.

  He had buried the boys and their staffs in the trench. Wordlessly, Kimball Hayden covered their bodies with sand and scattered the goats. Once done, he sat beside the two small rises in the earth and considered that maybe the White House brass was right after all. Maybe he was inhuman.

  And suddenly it was no longer a game. The memory of his father’s approval on that Friday night when Kimball openly maimed another player, the smile on his father’s face, and the subsequent pats on the back no longer seemed to matter. He could not go on living life as a game in which those around him were merely targets—especially innocent children.

  At that moment Kimball was greatly tormented by what he had done. His cold fortitude was gone. He had reached his limit. And though he could hear his father rage on about pushing further, he could not. Every man has his limits.

  If his father had been alive on that fateful day rather than buried in a nondescript grave in an obscure township, he most likely would have turned his back on his son, but Kimball didn’t care anymore. His father was dead. Why was he still living for his approval? Why had he ever fought so hard to please a sadistic man who required him to deny his humanity? Kimball didn’t want to be emotionless anymore. He deserved to feel pain, to feel guilt. He wanted to suffer.

  Kimball remained by the makeshift graves all that day. Even with the sun blistering his lips, he refused to take cover. He recalled the moments when day turned to night. He laid between the two mounds with a clawed hand on each rise of soft earth and prayed for forgiveness—not from God, but from the boys.

  His only answer was the soft whisper of wind through the desert sand.

  As he lay there watching the moon make its trajectory across a sky filled with countless stars, Kimball Hayden made a fateful decision.

  On the following morning he headed back for the Syrian border with President Bush and the JCS never to hear from him again. The White House believed that Kimball Hayden had been killed in the commission of his duty. Less than two months later, the man who was considered to be without conscience was posthumously honored by the Pentagon brass, though the true nature of his contributions was never made public.

  Two weeks after his defection, however, while Kimball sat in a bar in Venice drinking an expensive liqueur, the United States and the Coalition Forces attacked Iraq.

  He had been drinking and doing little else since his defection, but he was becoming restless, anxious. It was not in his nature to be idle, but he didn’t have the first idea what to do next. A few days later at this same bar, a man wearing a Roman collar and a cherubic smile took the seat opposite him without permission.

  “I really want to be alone, Father,” he told him. “It’s too late for me, anyway.”

  Nevertheless the priest continued to smile. “We’ve been watching you.”

  Kimball could only imagine the look he gave the priest. “I‘m sorry . . . you‘ve been what?”

  “Kimball Hayden,” the priest said, offering his hand. “My name is Bonasero Vessucci . . . Cardinal Bonasero Vessucci.”

  And a new alliance was born.

  Kimball drew another deep breath and let it go. The Gulf Stream was flying at an incredible speed.

  The time was 1834 hours, Eastern Standard Time.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Boston, Massachusetts

  September 23, Early Evening

  Steve O’Brien was second in command of Alpha Team and used the moniker of Kodiak, for the giant bears of Alaska. Prior to his induction into the squad, O’Brien had been an Army Ranger, an elite soldier in terms of combat, courage and duty. Now he was a mercenary, recruited for the tools he had to offer.

  He stood six-four and two-hundred-seventy pounds. His body was pure rippling muscle, his biceps larger than most men’s thighs. And to keep with his military heritage he wore his flattop to specs, closely cropped and ruler straight. Running from the edge of his right eye to the corner of his lip, forever drawing his mouth into a sneer, was a puckered scar from a wound laid open by an al-Qaeda rebel hiding in the hills along the Afghan border. The rebel’s victory, however, was short lived once Kodiak took the knife away and used it against him. He ended up hanging the rebel’s head on a pike for several days.

  The other members of the Alpha Team had taken the tags of Boa, Diamondback, King Snake and Sidewinder, monikers assigned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff indicating stealth, poise, and deadly precision. But Kodiak saw the tags as degrading, since snakes make it a lifelong journey to crawl along their bellies, something he saw as lowly and undignified.

  Like him, Boa and King Snake were former Army Rangers, while Diamondback and Sidewinder were Green Berets.

  But to this group, Team Leader remained a mystery.

  Nobody knew who he was or where he came from, but he exuded such raw power nobody dared to consider challenging him.

  Kodiak glanced at his team lying on the floor around him, sleeping. This was a moment of luxury. He closed his eyes, then rested his head against the wall. Finding comfort in the fact that he was surrounded by the deadliest men on the planet, he fell into a much needed sleep.

  #

  He was having a wonderful dream—the happiest, perhaps the best he had ever had—and then it went away when an alien sound brought him back to a baffling awareness. Pope Pius XIII finally opened his eyes, his lids fluttering—the world, the ceiling, still clouded from a drug-induced haze. And then he realized that he was no longer in a wonderful dreamscape, but awake in a large room choked with dust and darkness. The internal walls were gutted, revealing bare studs underneath, and the floor was trashed with broken plaster, litter and waste. Here was abandonment.

  When he turned over on the mattress he could feel the weight of the chains that shackled him to the brick wall. On the other side of the mattress lay a coffee can to accept his bodily wastes during his confinement.

  The pope propped himself up on his elbows and tested the strength of the chain by tugging at the mooring. The links rattled like a pocketful of coins, but the chain held firm.

  “I’m afraid it’s no use. The plates are anchored firmly to the brick.”

  Pope Pius XIII narrowed his eyes in an attempt to pierce the darkness. What his sight finally settled on was the vague outline of a man, standing against the opposite wall. If the man had chosen not to speak, the pope would never have known he was there.

  The figure stepped into a shaft of wan light, with his hands clasped behind his back. He wore a black tactical jumpsuit, a black ski mask, and combat boots. “How are you feeling?” the man asked, speaking in a clipped accent.

  Pope Pius XIII raised his bony hand, the chained hand, the movement itself imploring and fragile. “Please,” he said. “Why are you doing this?”

  The shape took a step closer, the toes of his boots nearly touching the edge of the pope’s mattress. “I do this,” he answered, “to end the madness once and for all.”

  The pope
gave him an inquisitive look.

  “Whereas your Christ was the King of Kings who readily embraced the world, Pope Pius XIII shall become the Martyr of Martyrs who will divide it.” The shape took a step back and was again swallowed in darkness. “You will be the catalyst for the beginning of the end.”

  The pope was unable to grasp the meaning of what was being said, the words cryptic, the voice hollow and growing distant. The shape spoke in riddles, while his mind was still numb from the ketamine in his system.

  “I don’t understand.”

  The shape illuminated one thing further. “Tomorrow you will begin to usher in a new age,” he said.

  And like a wispy comma of smoke in a blowing wind, the shape was gone.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Team Leader made it a point to separate the pope from the bishops of the Holy See and the governor. He wished to evaluate each man on his own mettle, without any support, encouragement, or comfort from the pope.

  He wanted to see if the bishops truly believed in a paradisiacal afterlife, if they would readily accept death as a graduation rather than the end. He would watch them with studious appraisal to see if their eyes reflected hypocrisy or genuine belief in the moments before he pulled the trigger. In this fashion Team Leader was an observer, a scientist, a searcher for truth. Does an afterlife of absolute peace and tranquility exist? And is blind faith the wings that carry humankind to such a place? If he could discover the truth, he would gladly surrender to it.

  But Team Leader had grown tired; his searching always ended in disappointment. He had seen nothing more than cowardice in the faces of all the men he had killed. Still, he searched for a spark of hope that a better life than this existed. Everybody wants to go to heaven, he considered, but nobody wants to pay the price of admission.

  Shaking his head in disappointment, Team Leader walked into the dank and hollow corridor. In the slivers of fading light that penetrated the edges of the boarded-up windows, he walked to the room where his team had anchored the governor and the bishops of the Holy See to a wall with lengths of chain. The stench of their filth hung on their garments and in the air, constant and unyielding.