Judgment Stone (9781401687359)

by Robert Liparulo

  The angel smiled and turned his face away.

  [ 14 ]

  Standing in the archway between narthex and nave, as if between two worlds, Jagger felt himself pulled back into his own reality. Awareness of his surroundings returned to him, though he hadn’t realized it had ever left, like waking after a brief catnap in a chair on a sun-warmed porch. He blinked, became aware of the floor beneath his feet, gravity holding him to it, the coolness of the air on his skin. He smelled incense, flowery, herbal.

  The angels were still there—even more ethereal than when he’d entered—and the threads of light: dimmer, as though they were hot wires cooling off. Jagger ached at their passing, at their leaving his world or his leaving theirs.

  Someone touched his arm, said again, “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

  He rotated his head toward a man standing near him, out of focus. Jagger ran two fingers over his eyelids, surprised to find tears there. He squeegeed them away.

  Father Augustus watched him with concern. One hand rested on Jagger’s forearm, the other held a shotgun.

  “We heard gunfire, lots of it,” a man said from the other side of him. Father Stephan, sitting in a chair just inside the nave on the right. It occurred to Jagger that these men had been positioned just inside the basilica’s door to protect the praying monks.

  From behind him Mattieu described the carnage outside, the loss of their brothers.

  Stephan’s mouth dropped open. Augustus clasped a cross hanging over his chest and fell to his knees on the spot. He bowed his head, and Jagger reeled back when the blue light appeared, too fast to tell if it had come up out of the man or down into him. Then something like golden smoke streaked down from the ceiling, spiraling rapidly around the thread of light. In a flash it flowed over Augustus’s head, spilled to the floor, and piled up beside him. Before Jagger could comprehend it happening, the smoke-like substance had become an angel, kneeling with one knee on the ground, a hand on Augustus’s head. Embers broke free from him, as if flaking off of his skin, forming the wings he had seen on the other angels.

  He knew humans throughout history had seen angels, both in human form and as they really were—or at least in an angelic form made compatible to the human eye and mind. It was no wonder so many people thought angels had wings, even though very few in Scripture did. The embers apparently could be formed into any shape, and when they came together around back, they did appear wing-like.

  He stepped back into Mattieu, who moved to his side and wrapped an arm around him. As he watched, the angel beside Stephan faded, faded, and disappeared, along with the blue light. He took in the nave: all of the angels and threads of light were gone, at least to Jagger’s eyes. He wondered if they were still there, if they’d left . . . or if they’d ever been there at all. The monks remained, praying, and Jagger saw Gheronda, St. Catherine’s abbot, at the lectern, chanting softly in Greek. Without the glow of the blue lights, the church was dark, the candles doing little more than pushing the shadows away from the nave’s central aisle.

  Jagger passed his hand over Augustus’s head, then through the spot where the angel had knelt, thinking he’d feel something, a chill or a warmth, a tinge of emotion, happiness or peace, but there was nothing.

  After leaving the basilica together, Jagger and Father Mattieu split off in the courtyard at the base of the apartment stairs. Leo went off to find Father Antoine and the man who’d screamed; Jagger bounded up the stairs, thinking now only of Beth and Tyler. Relief washed over him when he found their apartment door locked and nothing disturbed inside.

  He knocked on the panic room’s door, said, “It’s me.”

  “Dad!” Tyler said. The first bolt thunked open, and Tyler called out: “What’s the password?”

  “What?”

  “The password.” Another bolt disengaged.

  “Spaghetti,” Jagger said. As anxious as he was to squeeze the living daylights out of his wife and son, he couldn’t help but mess with the kid.

  “No!” The third lock clicked.

  “Uh . . . macaroni?”

  The last bolt slid away and the door burst open. Tyler rushed into his arms, all teeth and sparkling eyes and flying hair. “Ravioli!” he said.

  “Oh yeah.” He hugged his son, then reached past him to help Beth stand and pull her into the embrace.

  Beth leaned her head into his chest, now turning her face up for a kiss.

  “What happened?” Tyler asked. “We heard shooting and a helicopter and explosions!”

  Jagger let his lips linger on Beth’s before answering. “You sure it wasn’t just television?” he teased.

  “We don’t have TV here.” Thankfully, the boy didn’t launch into the topic of how deprived he was, which he did on a weekly basis, just said, “Are you okay? Was it scary? What happened?”

  “I’m fine.” He kissed Beth’s forehead and brushed the hair off Tyler’s. He took their hands and led them into the living room/dining room/kitchenette—with this room, two bedrooms, and a bathroom, it was the largest apartment in the complex, which wasn’t saying much. Beth had commandeered the tiny eating table for her writing project, an anthology of vignettes about pilgrims to the monastery and what they’d discovered here. A manual typewriter—she felt it helped her get into the mood of the book’s old-time stories—and stacks of paper and notes forced the family to use the living room area to eat, read, relax, and just about everything else. Jagger sat them down on the sofa and knelt in front of them. “Some men broke in. They were heavily armed. I think they took something, but I don’t know what yet. The monks, some of them, are trained for this sort of thing. They . . . fought well . . .”

  He looked from Tyler to Beth, who read him perfectly. She covered her mouth, said, “Jagger . . . what happened?”

  “Three of them were killed.”

  Beth gasped. Her eyes moistened.

  “Father Bardas and Father Luca and Father Corban.”

  Beth dropped her face into her hands and began sobbing.

  After a moment of shock, Tyler pushed himself forward on the cushion, enough to get both arms around Jagger’s shoulders, and buried his face in the crook of his neck. He began not only to cry but to wail, loud wrenching sobs. He knew all the monks in the monastery, and every one of them—except Father Kostya, a seventy-something block of Russian ice and the monastery’s token curmudgeon—treated Tyler like family. Especially Luca, who had let Tyler help him tend to the gardens and regaled him with stories of his childhood spent manning his family’s fishing boat off the small Greek village of Gerolimenas—stories that had made Jagger ponder the distinction between exaggeration and lying. Jagger suspected that friendship contributed only a little to Tyler’s grief; the boy had a tender spirit and most likely would be crying just as hard if “Kostya the Cold” had been the attackers’ sole victim.

  “I know,” he said, feeling like he should fall back on the old standards—they’re with God now; they’re in a better place—but Beth and Tyler knew that as much as he did. And as true as the statements may be, God put in everyone a strong instinct to survive, to appreciate the breath of life and the world He built for them. Even if you were at peace with your own mortality, utterly comfortable with letting God choose the time and place, being murdered was no way to go. Saying They’re in a better place was just a way of trying to feel a little less terrible about something that was a big pile of stink any way you cut it, same as getting excited about a sliver of sunlight in the distance after a hurricane had already picked you up and whipped you around while deciding how far to throw you.

  Beth reached out and ran her fingers over the back of his head. In her eyes he saw more sorrow. The attack, the deaths brought back the anguish she’d felt when Tyler had been shot, coupled with that shaky, light-headed terror of realizing how bad it could have been: Jagger had been out there; it could have been him lying dead on the stone ground right now.

  If she knew how truly close he’d come, she’d probably have
an anxiety attack.

  No, he thought. Not Beth. She’d be out in the compound picking up a shotgun, planning to track down Jagger’s killer if she had to cross the desert on foot to do it.

  Tyler leaned back. “Bet you tried to save them,” he said with a trembling smile.

  “You know it, Ty. But it all happened really fast, not a lot I could do.”

  “You gonna get them, the people who killed them? Make them pay?”

  “There are people whose job it is to find them and bring them to justice. It’s not mine.”

  “But—” Tyler stopped, and Jagger turned his head to listen: someone was stomping up the stairs outside, in a hurry. He felt his son’s muscles tighten and he told him, “The bad guys are gone, don’t worry.”

  The footsteps stopped outside their door and someone pounded.

  “Come in,” Jagger called.

  The door opened, and Leo leaned in with it. “Ollie’s hurt,” he said.

  “Shot?”

  “With an arrow.” He touched his chest, indicating the wound’s location.

  Jagger looked at Beth, gave her thigh a squeeze, and stood.

  Tyler rose and grabbed him. “I want to come, please!”

  Of everyone they knew in Egypt, outside his own family Tyler was most fond of Oliver Hoffmann, the lead archeologist and director of the excavation outside the compound’s east wall. Because of him, Tyler said he wanted to be an archeologist, and Ollie had taken it upon himself to nurture that interest.

  “Not now, son,” Jagger said. “I’ll let you know how he is.” He turned and followed Leo down the stairs.

  [ 15 ]

  Jagger had gotten ahead of Leo on the stairs, anxious to see Ollie. He pulled a flashlight off his belt and entered the tunnel formed on one side by the apartment building’s bottom floor. He paused at the first door, an empty guest room. The door was canted on one hinge and the jamb was splintered where the latch belonged. Someone—Steampunk, of course—had smashed it open. He went to the next door, broken open as well. The room had been converted into a storage area for the excavation’s artifacts, organized on metal shelves by dig unit—Ollie had named the two holes Annabelle and Bertha—and by date of the find. A lighted bulb in the ceiling showed that many of the finds for Bertha during the last week had been swept to the floor, mostly pottery shards and what looked to Jagger like dirt clods.

  Leo brushed past him, said, “He’s in his apartment.”

  Jagger hurried to the next room. A lamp was glowing on a table beside a couch—cluttered with books, journals, and papers, except for one empty spot by the arm where Ollie would sit when he was reading.

  Father Pietr stood in the entrance to the bedroom, his back to Jagger. He turned when he heard Jagger’s footsteps and moved out of the way.

  Ollie lay wheezing on his bed, head propped on a pillow, blankets pulled up to his chest, where an arrow jutted up from the left side. His work shirt had been torn away from the wound, which to Jagger looked devastating. Thin cuts in Ollie’s flesh fanned out from the arrow’s shaft, where the broadhead’s plus-sign razors went in. His left hand was clenched into a fist, resting on the blanket over his stomach. His eyes were half lidded, and he was stretching his lips over those horrendous teeth of his that Jagger had always thought were somehow endearing, humanizing.

  Gheronda knelt near the foot of the bed, praying. Father Jeffrey crouched close to Ollie’s head, patting it with a cloth.

  Behind him Antoine leaned against Jagger’s arm. He whispered, “He was on the floor when I found him.” He pointed at the safe in which Ollie kept important documents relating to the excavation. Its door was open, and papers were lying on the floor in front of it. Some of them partially covered a handgun, only its grip and hammer visible. “They were looking for something.”

  The rock, Jagger thought. Or was there something else?

  “Brother Ramón went for the first-aid kit and to call for a medevac,” Antoine said. “I didn’t want to try to remove it.”

  “No, that’s right,” Jagger said over his shoulder. “Let the doctors take it out.” Common sense that wasn’t so common. He’d read of a hunter who’d pierced his thigh with a broad-headed arrow while climbing over a fence. In a panic, he’d yanked it out and bled to death from a lacerated femoral artery. The article said the man probably would have lived if he hadn’t removed the arrow, which was effectively sealing the wound.

  But Jagger understood the impulse: looking at the arrow in Ollie’s chest, wavering like a tachometer needle with each breath, he wanted it gone, out of his friend.

  Ollie’s eyes opened wider, and his scowl turned into a grin. He raised his hand, as if reaching for something, and said, “They’re beautiful! The sparks!”

  Jagger felt as though he’d been slapped. “What?” he said. “What’d he say?”

  Ollie lifted his head from the pillow. “Jagger?” he said.

  “You said sparks—”

  “They’re beautiful,” Ollie said. “All around, so bright. They’re smiling at me.”

  Jagger knelt beside the bed. “What do you see, Ollie? Are they angels?”

  “Angels! So . . . lovely . . . strong and glowing. The sparks, like stars all around them!”

  Jagger realized Ollie was gazing beyond him and turned to look. Leo was walking toward the bed.

  “You—” Ollie said. “So beautiful.”

  Leo grinned. “Thank you,” he said, and bent to whisper in Jagger’s ear. “He’s delirious.”

  Jagger eyed him. “Obviously.”

  “But . . . but . . . but . . . ,” Ollie said, reaching out to Leo, who took the cloth from Jeffrey and pressed it against the spot where the arrow entered his chest. Ollie groaned, closed his eyes, and tilted his head back on the pillow.

  Leo dabbed at the spot, then handed the bloody cloth back to Jeffrey. Jagger saw that the wound wasn’t as bad as it had first looked. The broadhead slices were gone, trickles of blood, not lacerations.

  Leo stood, patted Jagger on the shoulder, and left the room.

  Jagger leaned in. “Ollie,” he said. “Tell me about the sparkles. How—”

  Someone gripped his shoulder. Gheronda leaned close, said, “Come with me, Jagger. We need to talk.”

  “But . . . wait a minute. Ollie—”

  Gheronda gave his shoulder a shake. “Now,” he said firmly. “Please.”

  Jagger rose and backed away from Ollie’s bed. Gheronda grabbed his arm and led him out of the room, pushing past Pietr and Antoine, still in the doorway.

  Ollie called, “Do you see them, Jag? Aren’t they beautiful?”

  Gheronda released Jagger and went back to the bedroom door. “Brother Pietr,” he said, “please go find out what’s taking Brother Ramón so long. Brother Antoine, Oliver needs your prayers.” When the monks departed, Gheronda turned to Jagger. He said, “I’ve seen it before, people on their deathbeds seeing angels.”

  “I don’t think that’s what’s happening,” Jagger said. “What he’s saying, what he sees . . . I . . .” He didn’t finish. He wasn’t ready to talk about his vision, not yet. But if Ollie was having the same vision, that changed everything. He just wasn’t sure how. “It doesn’t look like he’s ready to die. I mean, he doesn’t look that close to death. He’s so animated . . . and the air ambulance is coming.”

  The old man nodded. “I’m praying God will let Oliver live to dig another day. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.” He stepped closer. “Father Leo tells me you saw who did this terrible thing.”

  “He was wearing a mask,” Jagger said. “A tight-fitting leather thing with stitches and zippers and black goggles.”

  “The other attackers, you saw them?”

  “One of them had dark hair, good-looking, snappy dresser. The others—” He shook his head. “They looked like a group of trick-or-treaters, all dressed up differently. A muscle man with black makeup streaked over his eyes, a guy who looked like a jungle commando, a punk rock girl. A
nd the one with the mask. If it weren’t for their firepower—and homicidal tendencies—I’d almost laugh.”

  The bushy whiskers of Gheronda’s beard bristled as the muscles in his jaw tightened. His brow scrunched in the center. He said, “If they’re who I think they are, there’s nothing to laugh about.”

  “Well, no, they killed three monks.” But Jagger knew what the man meant.

  “Come,” Gheronda said. He strode out through the open apartment door.

  “Who do you think they are?” Jagger called, starting after him.

  “Come and see!”

  [ 16 ]

  Jagger caught up with him as Gheronda was unlocking the door to the library on the second floor of the Southwest Range Building. Jagger turned to look across the rooftops and walkways to his apartment. A light was still glowing in the window. He hoped Tyler wasn’t waiting up, but Jagger knew he was.

  “Shut the door behind you, please,” Gheronda called from inside.

  They walked down the long central aisle of the library, and as they reached each square, white-painted column positioned at the border of the aisle and the shelves of books, Gheronda flipped a switch. Florescent lights two stories overhead sputtered on, illuminating their path to the next column.

  The air smelled grassy and musty. It wasn’t a bad smell—it was soothing, actually—but it seemed at odds with Jagger’s emotions, which at the moment might have given off the odors of gun oil and blood.

  At the far end of the hall, Gheronda made a ninety-degree turn into a shorter corridor and stopped at a wooden desk set in the middle of it. He crouched, keys rattling in his hand, then the abbot rose with a set of white cotton gloves, into which he worked his hands. From a drawer he withdrew a book the size of a briefcase, which he thunked down on the desktop.

  The book looked to Jagger like an antique scrapbook, no real spine, just pages sandwiched between leather-covered boards and stitched on one side with a long strip of leather.