by Rick Jones
Kimball moved quickly, knowing every second of the hostages lives lay in the balance since the cell had been compromised.
They’re preparing for my welcome, he considered.
I can feel it.
Kimball moved around back. There was a door whose only security was the glass pane that had been imbedded with chicken wire, locked by a dual pair of high-end locks. But Kimball didn’t see it as a problem at all, since he had the key. He removed a sidearm from his shoulder holster, took aim, and took out the locks. Removing them and turning the knob, the door swung wide. He stood there in quick examination, scanning and seeing the multiple points of rifles directed at him.
I was right, Kimball thought, they had prepared a welcome.
Now it was time for Kimball Hayden to greet them.
* * *
The Devil’s Magician was a large man with intense eyes that flashed like blue ice and cold indifference. He swung the door wide, the man nothing but a darkened shape who stood silhouetted within the door’s framework, a massive black mass whose remarkable blue eyes scanned the area with remarkable quickness a moment before he seemed to evaporate within a haze of their gunfire. Continuous rounds from AK-47s smashed into the wall surrounding the door, taking out chunks of concrete. Smoke and haze from the gunfire thickened the air and created a black-gray veil before them, the cloud blotting out their target. When the assault weapons started to go off in a series of dry clicks and before the terrorists could eject their magazines to reseat another, two metal orbs bounced and carried across the floor.
Phosphorous grenades.
While two men managed to ram their magazines home and then lift their weapons, two others turned to run. But the grenades went off, the explosions rocking the entire level as the chemicals attached themselves to the skins of the assailants, the elements burning their flesh down to the bone. Their eyes dissolved like wax, the terrorists becoming so blind that not even the Light of Allah was granted them.
Others writhed on the floor in agony, the phosphorous burning through their flesh and muscle until the rims of their cheeks showed as polished bone, before succumbing.
Behind the veil of smoke a man stood in the doorway watching, a black mass who eventually stepped inside the facility and crossed the floor with a suppressed weapon in his hand, then firing off two shots to end the miserable agony of those who had yet to die from their injuries.
More will come, Kimball thought.
The blasts will see to that.
Securing his firearm inside his holster, Kimball removed his Ka-Bar combat knives and slid within the shadows.
They will come, he told himself, gripping the knives until he was white- knuckled. Kimball Hayden continued to walk the Dark to serve the Light, looking for his next kill.
CHAPTER FIFTY
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Hassan was down below when he felt the concussive blast shake the entire sub- level. There were four doors. Two, however, were secured by locks. Other than the two guards who escorted Hassan to the chambers below, an armed man whose sparsely bearded growth was that of a teenager, stood post in the center of the aisle with an AK-47.
“What was that?” asked the young man, who looked ceilingwards as dust cascaded downward.
But Hassan knew exactly what it was, who it was.
They heard the subsequent melee of gunfire and the cries that followed there- after.
And then the silence—the all-consuming silence.
Hassan quickly waved his hand for the team to go topside to engage the threat.
But after intuiting the fearful looks on their faces, Hassan added, “He’s just a man. Remember that. Now go! I’ll manage things from here.”
As the team took the steps to the topside level, Hassan admitted to himself that he was afraid of this man as well, even though he was capable of bleeding like all other men. But this man was different, he considered. It was as if he was shielded from whatever Allah could throw at him.
Undoing the lock to one cell, Hassan swung the door aside and entered the room.
The Vatican Knight, who looked broken from mistreatment, gave Hassan a half smile. “Sounds like you’ve got company,” he told him as he continued to hang from his metal bracelets that were tethered to the ceiling ring. “The man who comes does not do so to give,” he told Hassan, “but to take away.”
Hassan gave the Vatican Knight a hard stare before he removed Abdullah’s cellphone from his pocket, clicked on the video portion, and directed it until he had full cooperation of the phone’s recording system. “Unfortunately for you, Vatican Knight, like the one you called Ecclesiastes, you’re to be made an example of.” The Vatican Knight’s smile flourished, somewhat of a lazy upturn at the corner of his lip. “I’ve been ready to embrace God from the day I accepted my role as a Vatican Knight. He will embrace me.”
“Unfortunately for you,” said Hassan, raising the point of his weapon, “your God is a false one.” Hassan pulled the trigger with the phone catching every morbid detail of the Vatican Knight’s death.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
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Gunfire.
The report was loud and unmistakable. But also distant, muted and coming from the level below him.
Kimball Hayden moved silently through the hallways and rooms, searching. The facility was huge and vast with floor space, the one-time office building still having the remnants of dust-laden desks, chairs and cheap wall-hangings that gave the rooms’ marginal character. But Kimball found nothing of value other than recently discarded bags of food and drink.
Then he heard a rush of voices in Arabic, the words coming fast and with a hint of urgency to them, as myriad footfalls stamped through hallways and down corridors.
Kimball peeked around the corner of a doorjamb. Down the hallway a unit of four had their backs to him as they moved in the opposite direction with Russian AK-47s.
Kimball gripped his Ka-Bar, which felt like an extension of himself that was nothing but flesh and bone and black matte steel, all of it feeling like connected tissue. Slowly, he moved through the dimly lit corridors.
Then a floorboard groaned behind him like the creak of an ancient ship.
Kimball turned with his knife cutting a horizontal arc through the air, the blade catching the point of an AK-47 assault rifle just as a burst went off, deflecting the weapon in time for the rounds to stitch along the wall where they punched fist- sized gouges into the cement.
Kimball’s attacker was a heavily bearded behemoth of a man with no visible neck and tree-trunk limbs. He was taller than Kimball by two or three inches and moved with all the swiftness and agility of a monkey.
When the attacker tried to bring his weapon around for a final volley, Kimball showed his attacker that he, too, was exceedingly quick. The former Vatican Knight slapped the weapon aside with the back of his hand and came across with his knife to slash the man’s face, the skin paring back and parting like a second horrible mouth. The large man cried out in pain and anger while bringing a hand instinctively to the wound. In this moment Kimball Hayden kicked the gun free from his attacker’s hand. As the weapon seemed to flip end over end through space with the slowness of a bad dream, the large Syrian thrust the flat of his palm, which didn’t move slowly at all, and struck Kimball in the chest, the powerful blow lifting Kim- ball off his feet and through a door, the wood splintering into shards as he hit the floor and slid a foot or two, while trying to shake the cobwebs from view. The massively built man stood within the doorway, which appeared dwarfed by the man’s sheer size, and roared with bestial savagery and rage as he charged Kimball, grabbed the former Vatican Knight by the throat with one hand, and lifted him easily off the floor until Kimball was dancing on the tips of his toes. Kimball began to see internal stars form in his vision of sight, and then darkness began to close in around the edges, the purple turning to black, with the black closing inward to a pinprick hole of light. When Kimball raised his knife, the colos
sally-sized Syrian grabbed his wrist and squeezed it so hard that Kimball could feel pins-and-needles racing through the region as if the nerves were falling asleep. The grip had so weakened Kimball’s hold on the weapon, he dropped the Ka-Bar. That was when the Syrian clamped his second hand around Kimball’s throat and lifted him completely off the floor, his hands tightening, choking, strangling. Kimball could hear additional voices of those racing down the hallway, the behemoth’s team coming closer.
As the hands tightened around Kimball’s neck, Kimball’s sight grew darker as the edges closed in and the stars began to fade. Extending his arms to the side in an image that appeared like mock crucifixion, Kimball swung and clapped his hands against the large man’s ears once, twice, three times in quick succession, the blows from cupped hands shattering the Syrian’s eardrums, causing both ears to bleed liberally. The large man dropped Kimball and fell back, screaming not in rage but in absolute pain. As the light in Kimball’s eyes began to push back the darkness, he grabbed his knife, got to his feet, and drove the blade across the man’s abdomen, gutting him. As the Syrian’s entrails began to spill from the wound, Kimball came across and drove the point through the man’s temple, the thinnest part of the skull, killing him. When the behemoth finally fell, his great weight appeared to shake the floor upon impact.
The voices of the backup team were nearing, the burst of gunfire from the Syrian’s weapon an obvious alarm.
With skillful precision, Kimball returned his knives into their sheaths like a gunfighter who quickly holsters his six-shooters, pared back the folds of his coat, gripped the strapped Uzis until he had one in each hand, and entered the hallway with both barrels directed forward.
When the pack of four saw Kimball come out of the room and step into the hallway, they summarily raised their weapons and set off a few rounds. Bullets traversed the distance in between, as Kimball set off his own volley with the rounds from both parties passing each other in flight.
The walls and floor around Kimball kicked up chucks of wood and cement. Dust rose all around him, creating clouds and swirling eddies. Yet Kimball kept coming, kept firing, the man listening to the waspy hums as the bullets passed his ears by inches, could feel the tug of his coat as rounds tore into the unzipped folds which flagged beside him as he moved down the corridor, the man unstoppable. The terrorists, however, did not appear to have the same angel sitting on their shoulders as rounds penetrated center mass or indented foreheads. Now with the corridor filled with smoke, Kimball Hayden pushed through the veil and kept walking.
Of the nine lives he had taken thus far, Hassan Maloof was not among them.
And most likely, neither was the man who resided in the shadows.
* * *
Abdullah Kattan had heard the blast of the grenades and the subsequent cries of his men. A moment later there was a second firefight, which was followed by silence rather than the victory cries of his teammates. Another red flag. When Kimball Hayden called Hassan, Kattan considered that Kimball Hayden’s intel team must have triangulated every past call from Sargon’s phone, which would explain why Kimball Hayden was so close to the area when his call to Has- san came in. It was that final call that had configured the precise location for Hayden to close in on.
“He was on top of us all the time,” Kattan whispered to himself. In fact, we never had a chance to relocate.
Abdullah Kattan looked ceilingwards. Up there, he thought, the Devil’s Magician walks.
Then he rose from his seat and walked from the room, thinking that he had a few tricks of his own.
* * *
It was a cell of fourteen combatants which included Hassan and one other, the man who sits in the shadows. Nine were dead, leaving three more foot soldiers besides Hassan and the Shadowman.
Kimball moved like an animal through the hallways, the man hunting with the whites of his eyes flared to a point where his irises appeared dime-sized instead of nickel-sized, with laces of red stitching running like roadmaps throughout the whites with these threads having been forged from rage and anger. The children, he thought, moving from corridor to corridor, had died without reason. Innocent people who had no concept of the world or the madness it brought with it. Then he thought about the similarities between Carmela Conti and Shari Cohen, how they both lost their husband and two daughters to the hands of mad- men. As Shari became hollowed by her loss, he knew the cardinal’s sister would be hollowed out by hers.
Then he heard the whispers of men in hiding, cowards who knew of what it was that walked among them, but were afraid to stand up to the challenge, even with the arms they carried. Perhaps I am the Devil’s Magician, he considered. Perhaps I walk and dance in the devil’s shadow with tombstone courage because my hate is greater than my fear.
Kimball bent his knees and pressed forward with a knife in each hand.
The whispers grew louder. Then someone shushed the voices quiet.
Kimball, however, had already pinpointed their location. Behind a wall of crates three men huddled together as a single mass. And Kimball, quietly scaling the crates, walked along their tops until he was above them.
They sat there with their weapons directed in front of them, young men who romanced the idea and pleasures of killing others who could not protect themselves. Then like an eagle who spread its wings wide, Kimball leapt from the crate and took flight. Heads and eyes turned upward, could see the shadow of a man eclipse them before they could turn their weapons. Cries of terror and pain quickly followed as the Devil’s Magician slaughtered them without conscience, swinging his knife to deeply score the flesh as blood-splatter painted his features and his beard, the whites of his eyes now bearing a great starkness against the blood-red of his face that gave Kimball the look of something wild and primitive.
When he was done and the level cleared, Kimball went off to find Leviticus, Isaiah and Cardinal Alnasseri.
And let people like Hassan and the Shadowman be damned should he cross their path.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
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Hassan was watching and preparing the video of the Vatican Knights execution to go viral on Kattan’s cellphone when he felt a strange heaviness in the air. It was thick and syrupy, and somehow had the feel of menace to it.
In the lower level that was surrounded by shadows and with little light that filtered in through casement windows, Hassan felt a presence.
He looked into the shadows. “Abdullah?”
Nothing.
Hassan lifted the cellphone so that its screen faced the shadows. “It’s done,” he said with a slight tremor. “The Vatican Knight is dead, as you requested. His execution is about to go viral.”
Nothing.
“Abdullah?”
In the shadows something moved, something indescribably black and taller and wider than Abdullah Kattan. A man came forward with his face a mask of red, the adornment made from the blood of men.
“Where is the other?” asked the demon. “The one who sits in the shadows?”
As Hassan’s mouth moved in mute protest, he dropped the phone and backpedaled away from the man who wore this mask of red death while trying to raise the point of his AK-47, but fumbled his way through the process.
“Where is he?”
Just as Hassan began to control his weapon, Kimball let his Ka-Bar fly, the knife spinning in perfect revolutions with the blade covering the space between them in blinding speed until the wicked point of the knife embedded deep into Hassan’s throat. Hassan went to his knees while grabbing the knife’s hilt and attempting to pull it free. The knife started to pull slowly from the slot in his throat, the blade slick with blood. But when Kimball approached him with unspeakable fury in his eyes, Hassan knew that this man had no mercy for what he was about to do.
Kimball closed in quickly, raised his foot, then kicked the end of the knife and drove it through Hassan’s throat until the point punched through the rear of his neck. Hassan immediately went limp as Kimball smas
hed the life out of his body with a forward thrust of his leg.
Grabbing the phone, Kimball located the video catalogue and played the last download.
Kimball’s eyes teared and welled. Then he asked God ‘why?’
WHY?
And though he was visibly shaken, Kimball got to his feet and took a snapshot of Hassan lying upon the floor with the knife deeply embedded in his throat. After removing the knife and tucking the phone into his pocket, Kimball went through the rooms of the lower level until he came upon what he was looking for. With the door wide, Kimball entered the room on severely weakened legs. Tears coursed down his face, the wet tracks through the war paint of blood creating strange patterns. With his body swinging lifelessly in lazy circles, Kimball swept Leviticus into his arms and held him tight. Pressing Leviticus’s face close to his shoulder with a hand cradling that back of the Vatican Knight’s head, Kimball sobbed openly as a sour lump wedged deep inside his throat.
“My brother,” he managed to say, his sobbing growing louder. “My brother.” Leviticus continued to hang limp against Kimball, showing no response of affection that life would have afforded him if he was able to do so.
Removing his suppressed firearm, Kimball took aim and set off a shot that divided the chain that handcuffed Leviticus to the ceiling. As Leviticus fell limp into Kimball’s arms, Kimball laid him against the floor and placed him a position of gentle repose—with legs together and hands crossed over his chest.
Leaning over, Kimball kissed Leviticus on the forehead, then he went looking for Isaiah hoping above all else that he wouldn’t discover him the way he discovered Leviticus.