by Rick Jones
“Not likely,” said Kimball, then he put the man out of his misery by driving the point of his Ka-Bar through the man’s temple, killing him before the giant had time to register the moment of his death. Then the behemoth slid down against the bar and to a sitting position, where his chin ended up resting against his chest.
Pivoting quickly on his feet, Kimball went to assist his brothers in battle.
* * *
Shari Cohen finally broke through the bottleneck traffic from the accident and headed straight to The Senate House faster than the posted speed. Torrential rain was coming down in sheets, her wipers at full speed. Then when she turned the corner toward the tavern she saw a short woman sprinting from the side entrance with pages of a newspaper over her head as a makeshift hat, getting into a vehicle, she sped out of the parking lot with the SUV fishtailing a moment before it finally caught the pavement.
Shari drove to the double doors of the entryway, got out of her sedan, and ran through the rain and to the threshold with the point of her Glock facing the floorboards. Carefully, she reached for the knob. It wouldn’t turn. She tried the other. Both doors were locked. Then she eased her weight against the left side of the French doors and found it secured. And then the right, realizing that a series of swift kicks from a powerful leg might part the doors in the middle. She fell back and looked upward and then to the building’s left, and then to the right, searching for an opening.
Nothing.
So she tried the side entrance by the parking lot where the woman had come from.
The knob turned easily in her hand.
The door opened.
All she saw was a staircase that dropped down into a veil of shadows. With her Glock leading the way, Shari Cohen descended into darkness.
* * *
Isaiah was surrounded by three men who stood in stances he recognized to be the style of Taekwondo. With a knife in each hand, the Vatican Knight began to swing them in figure eights with the action a means to draw attention to the motion. But when eyes refused to gravitate away from Isaiah’s, it told him how seasoned these people were as warriors.
Then the circle around him grew tighter as the enemy closed in from all points, all sides, their hands and legs lethal weapons. Isaiah’s head remained still as his eyes rolled inside their sockets first to his left, then to his right, the Vatican Knight surveying as much as he could while waiting for the strike he knew was coming.
And then the unit converged as a collective and attacked Isaiah as one from all sides, converging. Isaiah threw his hands out in diagonal sweeps, then in arcs, the movements quick and fluid. The knives scored the flesh of all three within a second, the blinding maneuvers surprising all three attackers as they fell back to check their wounds, with the slices appearing like magic to them. They had never seen the blades coming.
Isaiah stood as still as a Roman statue with one knife held high and the other low, waiting. But he didn’t have to wait long. His attackers converged once again with hands and feet lashing out, their actions just as quick as Isaiah’s as they matched his maneuvers. Isaiah’s knives sliced through the air, missing, which caused the soldiers to back away and then push forward from all sides, and quickly, the maneuvers of closing in eventually eclipsing him.
When one of his attackers wrapped a bloody forearm around Isaiah’s throat, Isaiah, seeing an attacker come at him from the front, threw his leg up and with the heel of his foot connected to the point of the man’s chin, and drove the rear points of his jawbone through the skin underneath the man’s ears, the protrusions nothing but polished bone as the attacker fell hard to the floor behind him, the onetime special-op soldier fully deactivated.
The man from behind tightened his grip around Isaiah’s throat with the grip of a python, squeezing until the Vatican Knight’s eyesight began to fade to black. The second attacker came at Isaiah with a roundhouse kick to Isaiah’s wrist that knocked the knife free, leaving Isaiah with a single weapon. As the knife landed on the floor, the attacker ran to retrieve it. Now with the knife firmly in his grip and with Isaiah in a choke hold, he moved against the Vatican Knight with the intent to punch the Ka-Bar through the man’s chest.
But Isaiah brought his second knife up to score the man’s arm repeatedly with deep cuts, until the attacker surrendered his python grip and fell back with his teeth clenched against the white-hot pain. As the armed hostile closed the gap between them within a split moment, Isaiah pivoted on his feet and raised his Ka-Bar in time to deflect the jab, the attacking knife knocked to the side. Then Isaiah drove a series of straight knuckle jabs to the man’s throat with his free hand, each blow smashing the windpipe, the esophagus, the attacker now robbed of his airway as he eventually fell to his knees, dropped the knife, then brought his hands to his throat. There was a gurgling noise, wet, the man drowning in his own fluids as blood bubbles escaped the corners of his lips and popped. Then the man’s eyes flared with alarm as a hand reached skyward begging God for intervention. But none came as he fell forward with both hands grasping his throat, and quickly died with his face planted directly against the floorboards.
Isaiah turned. The last attacker wavered in his stance as blood dripped copiously from his wounds. The sleeve of his left arm was completely crimson, red against white. And then the attacker went to his knees and raised his good arm towards Isaiah, the man surrendering.
Isaiah went to his attacker, who was looking at the floor before Isaiah’s feet in submission, the man refusing any eye contact because the battle he waged had been lost.
“I don’t want to die,” he told the Vatican Knight. “Please don’t kill me.”
“I won’t.” Then Isaiah came down with the pommel of the knife and struck a blow to the man’s crown, knocking him unconscious.
With his three down, Isaiah concentrated on the two men standing sentinel by the door. One was Cecil Cooper, the man Isaiah took down by the archdiocese.
And Cooper, the brute with the muscle roll along the back of his neck, beckoned Isaiah with his hand. It appeared that he wanted to settle a score with Isaiah, which the Vatican Knight obliged as he closed the gap between them.
* * *
Shari Cohen took the steps cautiously, the darkness revealing even darker shapes along the walls, like discarded furniture. Up ahead she could hear voices and conversations, the tones marked with urgency.
She took the bends, the turns.
The voices became louder, clearer.
And then she came to a dimly lit room. There was a huge table with a single lamp in its center casting a feeble glow, which was not strong enough to shed enough light to those who milled about the area as darkened shapes. Against the far wall stood a bank of monitors, the images crisp and clear. The Vatican Knights were at war with the Nocturnal Saints, the screens showing the battle from the four corners of the room.
Shari drew closer, her eyes locked onto the monitors, watching.
She saw Kimball, the man working with his weapons of choice.
And she saw Isaiah, Jeremiah and Elijah—the woman riveted all the way to the moment that a hand came down across her wrist and chopped the Glock from her grasp. In a maneuver that was just as quick, the man in the shadows kicked the firearm so that it skated out of their reach.
Grabbing her by the throat with one hand, which surprised her, he flung her against the edge of the table. Just as she was about to maneuver into a more defensible position, the shape was upon her with his weight holding her down against the tabletop and both hands around her throat, pressing and squeezing.
The dark figure could feel her life force slipping away by the inches within the grasp of his choking grip. “I gave you false information to drive you off!” he told her. “I even kept you close to see how far along you were in the case! To see how much longer I had to keep looking over my shoulder! But you just kept coming! You had to keep digging along with the Vatican Knights, didn’t you? I even tried to get answers from you when we had dinner, but you were evasive!
Now look at what you’re making me do!”
In the cast of weak lighting, she could see Darce Earl above her as he attempted to crush her windpipe, the man almost salivating from the action as if killing her was something orgasmic, her death the climax.
“I told you that your life line was cut short,” he told her. “And I’m very good at reading palms.”
Darce Earl continued to squeeze the life from Shari Cohen.
* * *
Kimball joined Jeremiah; the combat now two against three. The Vatican Knights against the Nocturnal Saints.
Kimball and Jeremiah stood with their backs to each other, the team having a 360-degree view of their opponents. The three-man unit of the Nocturnal Saints drew closer, though their facial features told Kimball that their confidence had abandoned them.
When the first attacker drove at Jeremiah with hands and feet swinging with choreographed design, as his body moved poetically and with balance, Jeremiah interrupted these signature movements by stepping within this man’s space, deflecting his kicks with sweeps of his hands, and with the knife in his left hand he slashed the attacker’s thigh, a crippling blow. Then with his right hand he drove the knife across the muscle where the forearm met with the bicep, the counter move taking the attacker entirely out of the equation in less than two seconds.
The other two attackers backed away, then retreated as their comrade lay on the floor crying out in agony.
That left Elijah with his three and Isaiah with his two.
The battle waged on.
* * *
Three men converged on Elijah at once, the gaps closing between them within the blink of an eye. As hands were about to touch down on the Vatican Knight, Elijah jumped up and swung his leg around in a 180-degree arc, the blinding horizontal sweep of his leg catching two of his attackers in the face as he came around, the strike hard enough to knock them off their feet and to the ground. The third attacker, however, was able to grab Elijah as he landed and took him to the ground, the men fighting over the rights of the Ka-Bars.
With the attacker having a powerful grip on Elijah’s wrists while his weight pressed Elijah to the floor, they wrestled with the knives in order to position themselves against one another. The Nocturnal Saint had the upper hand with his positioning weight on top of Elijah. Using his weight against the Vatican Knight, the Nocturnal Saint was beginning to overpower Elijah by forcing the sharp edge of the blade close to Elijah’s throat, the gap between metal and flesh less than an inch apart, and closing until the blade now touched the skin, caressing it as a bloody line now formed across his throat as the attacker pressed his weight against the knife, the blade now beginning to drive a groove along the flesh as blood began to escape the wound.
Elijah fought against his attacker by pushing the edge of the knife away, his strength waxing, the gap between knife and skin now growing. Then the Nocturnal Saint countered with strength of his own, the knife now going the other way, the actions between the men seesawing, the edge of the blade rising then lowering, rising then lowering, until the knife once again rested against Elijah’s throat, this time cutting deeper.
Suddenly the attacker’s eyes flared. For a moment they locked onto Elijah, the pinning stare a vacant one as his eyes finally rolled into slivers of white, and then he fell to the side.
When Elijah sat up with his hand rubbing at his throat, he saw Kimball and Jeremiah standing over him. Not only had they taken out the two others, they also took out Elijah’s assailant as well.
That left Isaiah to deal with those standing by the door.
* * *
The man with Cecil Cooper came at Isaiah throwing jabs in the open air like a boxer practicing punches before the big fight, with a series of jabs and uppercuts. As soon as he stepped into Isaiah’s strike zone, the Vatican Knight threw a sequence of punches to the attacker’s face and midsection, causing the attacker to fall unconscious to the floor as a boneless heap. Isaiah never lost stride as he approached the much larger man, Cecil Cooper, who continued to beckon Isaiah with a fat finger.
“You may have caught me by surprise before,” Cooper told him. “But not this time.”
Cooper closed in with his massive arms in the ready position to grapple and crush. If he got Isaiah in a clinch, the Vatican Knight knew he would be in trouble against the much larger man. But Isaiah counted on his speed and agility, like before, when confronting Cooper.
As they approached one another with Cooper trash-talking, the Vatican Knight stepped into Cooper’s vicinity and with a bladed-chop of his right hand to Cooper’s throat, he connected. Then he came forward with straight-fisted jabs and pummels. His hands moved with lightning-fast strokes as they pounded and smashed the big man’s ribcage, with some of the ribs snapping, then breaking, his ribcage beneath the skin becoming a warped rack of broken bones. When the man fell to a knee and started to rise from sheer will, Isaiah pivoted around on the ball of his foot, brought a boot up, and connected with Cooper’s cheek. The man’s shaved head snapped viciously to one side while a blood gout erupted from his lips, the bloody trail arcing through space as Cooper started to tilt toward the floor, leaning further still, and then falling unconscious.
When Isaiah turned to note the number of bodies of the enemy lying the floor, he immediately took a head count of the Vatican Knights and noticed one thing: Kimball Hayden was missing.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
The life from Shari Cohen’s eyes was beginning to fade, the pupils contracting to pinprick points to shut out the light, even if that light was feeble. Darkness was becoming absolute as Darce Earl’s hands continued to steal away her breath, her very existence, with a face that could be described as nothing more than a mask of raw madness.
His eyes appeared to be emblazoned in red, perhaps a trick of light, something Shari thought was a weird consideration at such a moment. Then suddenly he floated away from her with his mouth a perfect O of not understanding what was happening to him, and slipped quietly into the shadows with his arms extended in her direction. When Shari sat up gasping for breath, she spotted two shapes in the shadows dancing in a drunken tango. The larger of the two lashed out with hammer-like blows to the face of the smaller man, the impacts coming one right after the other without mercy or forgiveness, even as the smaller of the two hung with a ragdoll limpness within the grasp of the larger man.
After the hulking mass that was blacker than black dropped the man to the floor, it crossed the floor and fell into the fringe of weak lighting. Shari immediately recognized Kimball’s face and was bedazzled by his cerulean-blue eyes.
“Are you all right?” he asked, holding her steady.
Realizing that she was seconds away from losing her life, she broke as she fell into Kimball’s arms, which was a place of comfort and a place where he embraced her like never before.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
When Kimball Hayden dragged Darce Earl off Shari Cohen and pulled him into the shadows, the others inside the room scattered like roaches and disappeared, leaving behind boxes filled with files, and computers loaded with banks of data. As D.C. Metro maintained a perimeter around the building with cruisers and yellow tape, and as detectives investigated the barroom area while the feds commandeered the files and hard drives below, Kimball was downstairs with Shari, Special Agent Trycord, and a few others who were combing the room for whatever intel they could appropriate for processing and analysis at the forensics lab. “When I grabbed Earl there were others here; more of the analytical types than combatants. And when Earl and I went at it they took off, leaving this.” Kimball swept his hand to emphasize the number of cardboard boxes filled with manila folders and accordion files along the floor.
Shari, who spoke with a raspy voice, said, “We’re collecting data from the computers. From what we can tell so far from the master file, it contains the encrypted records of all Nocturnal Saints dating back to the 1500’s.”
“And what will happen to those upstairs?” he asked her.
“Three dead. The others injured; some severely. Unless there’s something in these files that can implicate them in the murders of the priests, Kimball, we might not have much. And for those on their way to the hospital, such as Darce Earl, you know as well as I do that they were once special-ops soldiers. And they don’t turn on each other. So in the end, we might not have much to go on because you know how well the Nocturnal Saints cover their tracks.”
Kimball did, since they always sanitized their presence with precision. But this time with the files, both computer and hardcopy, he believed that enough light would be shed on the cabal to counter future efforts. What the Vatican Knights discovered inside The Senate House was most likely a cell, one of many across the globe. But if the main file held the identities of every Nocturnal Saint dating as far back as to their inception, then organizations like Interpol and the CIA would most likely undertake the assignments to bring the establishment down. What the Vatican Knights did today was to provide that first chink in the armor, that small opening that would fester until it became a massive wound to the operations of the Nocturnal Saints over time.
And then from Kimball: “This isn’t the end, you know. But perhaps the beginning of the end.”
