Judgment Stone (9781401687359)

by Robert Liparulo

  “That’s what Ollie called it.”

  “But it’s not judging.”

  “It reflects a judgment,” Jagger said. “Whether a person has a relationship to God or not.”

  “It’s more than that. It shows His presence on earth, how active He is here.”

  Jagger waited while Owen thought about it.

  Finally Owen said, “The God Stone.” He smiled at Jagger. “The God Stone, right?”

  “I like it,” Jagger said.

  “And you said the big one, the one they took, caused something different?”

  “More powerful,” Jagger said. “I don’t know if it revealed different things, but everything was more vivid, more solid.”

  Owen placed his palms on the wide arms of the chair. He sat still like that, eyes slowly taking in the monastery, but Jagger suspected he wasn’t seeing anything other than whatever his mind was mulling over. Sitting there, broad-shouldered, stiff, contemplative, he reminded Jagger of a Star Trek captain, Picard with more hair.

  Owen stood up suddenly, slinging the satchel over his shoulder. “Come on.”

  Jagger didn’t move. “Where are we going?”

  “To get the God Stone back.”

  [ 31 ]

  “Wait, wait,” Jagger said, grabbing Owen’s wrist. “Why? So what if the Clan can see the spiritual world? Maybe it’ll scare them into giving their lives over to God. Except for the religious icon value of it, what’s it matter who has it? Look around this place.” He pointed down. “The burning bush.” Then up. “Mount Sinai.” Over at the Southwest Range Building. “There’s an entire library of artifacts and relics right there. From what I’ve seen, they don’t do anything except maybe get people thinking more about God . . . until they get back to their Sharm El Sheikh hotel, where they can lie out on the beach and order drinks with little umbrellas.”

  Owen turned to face him. He leaned against the railing, resting his hands on the top rail behind him. “You’re really comparing the top of that mountain and the burning bush to that stone? Has anyone ever had visions from touching the bush?”

  “One woman plucked a leaf off and claimed to see Moses standing next to her.”

  Owen cocked his head, narrowed his eyes.

  Jagger shrugged. “No, but—”

  “But nothing. That stone peels back the veil between us and the spiritual realm.”

  “Visually,” Jagger added.

  “In this world, that’s a lot. Granted, it’s not a doorway to heaven—as far as we know. It probably won’t make people more spiritual. But I can tell you this: if Bale wanted it, he’s planning on doing something terrible with it.”

  “But what? What can he do?”

  “Let me tell you something about the Clan. They hate God. They hate Him with a burning fury that may just frighten Satan himself. And the way they show how much they hate God is by grieving Him every chance they get. What God loves, they not only hate, they defile. They’ve murdered and raped.” He lowered his eyes, shook his head. “Women, children, nuns, priests . . . the more innocent their victims, the more pleasure they take in it. They assist the wicked, corrupt the good, drive godly men to hate God by the atrocious things they do to their loved ones. Are you hearing me?” He pointed back to the terrace where Tyler had been shot. “Nevaeh shot your son, but you know what? I bet she felt bad about that, would take it back if she could. But if that had been Bale or any of the Clan, he would have slit your throat and dragged Tyler off to do things to him that would make you tear open your chest with your fingernails and yank out your heart. If you weren’t already dead.”

  He scowled at Jagger, breathing hard, his face etched with an anger that could only have come from experience. Jagger realized that to Owen the Clan was not some distant entity; they had personally harmed him, killed someone he loved. But still Jagger was stunned.

  More quietly Owen said, “I’m sorry.” He sighed heavily. “Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, you know it?”

  Jagger shook his head.

  “Shakespeare paints Aaron the Moor as being as wicked as a person can be. In one scene Aaron recalls the evil things he’s done countless times: devised deadly enmity between two friends, burned down the barns of poor people just to see them weep . . .” Owen donned the persona of a Shakespearian actor to say with gravelly voice and sharp tones:

  “Oft have I digg’d up dead men from their graves,

  And set them upright at their dear friends’ door

  Even when their sorrow almost was forgot,

  And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,

  Have with my knife carved in Roman letters

  ‘Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.’”

  He looked at Jagger with an expression that asked, You understand?

  “That’s the Clan,” Jagger said.

  “They make Aaron look like a Boy Scout.”

  Jagger felt sick to his stomach. He felt dirty just hearing about them. Still he said, “But I don’t understand what this has to do with the God Stone.”

  “I don’t know what they’d use it for,” Owen said. “What if simply exposing it to the world bears consequences we can’t foresee: mass suicides by people who want to get to that realm faster, or people who think they’ve done things that could never be forgiven by a Higher Being they never believed in. And by mass, I mean in the hundreds of millions; wars, as different religions stake their own claims on the spiritual world.” Agitated again, he spun off the railing and sat in his chair. “Thing is, Jag, we can’t know for sure about the ultimate outcome, but we do know that in Bale’s hands nothing good can come from it.”

  His eyes bore into Jagger’s; gazing back, Jagger saw in Owen worry, anguish, desperation. “I believe you,” Jagger said.

  “Then help me get it back from them before they figure out how to use it for evil.”

  “I’m not going with you,” Jagger said, firm about it.

  “We make a good team,” Owen said, grinning now. “You know what we’re up against. You’re one of us. I’d take you over ten other men.”

  “Maybe you should find twenty other men then,” Jagger said. “We’re just starting to recover from what happened last time. Beth would say you’re crazy for asking me and I’m crazy for even listening to you. She’d say, ‘Jagger, you belong here.’”

  “You know Beth better than that,” Owen said. “I know her better than that. If she had heard everything I just told you? About the possibility that the God Stone could further the Clan’s agenda of causing heartache and chaos?”

  “I seem to recall our having this conversation before,” Jagger said. “You trying to convince me to join you on an impossible mission.”

  “Turned out to be not so impossible.”

  “If you say, ‘With God, all things are possible,’ I’m going to walk away.”

  “Why?”

  “You have a habit of quoting Scripture.”

  “I have a habit of living Scripture.” Owen leaned forward. “I talked you into combating the Tribe with me, and God saved millions through us . . . because you stepped up. I was right then, I’m right now. You know we have to get the Stone away from Bale. I don’t care if it ends up on the ocean floor or destroyed into dust, Bale just can’t have it. You don’t want to go because you don’t want to leave your family. I get that. But be honest . . . what would Beth say?”

  [ 32 ]

  “Go,” Beth said, having listened to Owen repeat what he’d told Jagger—except the part about what would have happened if it had been Bale they confronted six months ago instead of Nevaeh. Thankfully, he skipped that, though Jagger was sure he was right.

  They were standing outside the west wall near the gardens, an oasis of trees and bushes that produced figs, apricots, plums, strawberries, blackberries, and more kinds of vegetables than Tyler would sample in a lifetime. Between the wall and the trees they were shielded from the blistering sun. Tyler had run off to see how the carrots were coming along—a task Father Luc
a had assigned him.

  “Jagger,” Beth said, gripping his arms, “we’ll be okay. We’ll be safe. Gheronda said they’ve closed the monastery to visitors, and even the checkpoints on the road from Darpa to here are turning people away.”

  “What are they saying, that the mountain’s closed?”

  “That St. Catherine’s is, and they strongly advise coming back next month.”

  It would be a hearty soul who’d continue past a checkpoint against the advice of the gruff Egyptian police manning it. On a good day those guys were as unpleasant as Dobermans with hemorrhoids. They must be thinking Allah was smiling on them, getting to turn away all those rude tourists.

  “For how long?” Jagger asked.

  “At least two weeks, Gheronda said. The monks need time to get the gate repaired.” She frowned. “And mourn. He said the Egyptians were more than happy to help them keep people away.”

  “I’m sure. Did he say what the police are doing about the murders?” Jagger knew they had come to the monastery last night and this morning, but they hadn’t bothered to take a statement from him.

  “Going through the motions,” Beth said. “But it happened inside the monastery and the victims were residents there, so they’re acting like it’s a church problem.” She smiled up at him. “So, see, we’ll be fine.”

  But he saw the worry in her eyes. “I’m not going to lie to you,” he said, wanting to lie very badly. “These guys are bad. They could easily kill—”

  Beth touched her fingers to his mouth. She stroked his cheek. “If the Clan really can use the Stone to”—she looked at Owen—“how’d you put it, ‘grieve God by hurting what He loves, His children here on earth,’ then isn’t trying to stop them worth dying for?”

  Leave it to Beth: bottom line. He thought of their discussion about grief. He would grieve more if Beth or Tyler died than if everyone else in the world did. But how much would he grieve if people died and he could have stopped it but hadn’t?

  Her face got firm, and she said, “We’ll be okay, and I believe you will be too.”

  Jagger squeezed Tyler until it seemed the boy would pop. He ran his hand through his son’s hair and kissed him on his cheek, tasting Tyler’s tears.

  “You stay in the monastery and obey your mother,” Jagger said. “I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

  “But why?” Tyler said, sniffing. “Why do you have to go?”

  “I told you, we think the people who attacked the monastery are going to do even worse things, and we have to stop them.”

  “But why you?”

  He looked into his son’s eyes. They were blue like Beth’s, the first thing he’d noticed about her, because he remembered thinking they were deep blue lakes that he’d fallen into, plunging fast with no desire to save himself. He ached for the pain he was causing Tyler, and it made him all the more angry at the Clan.

  He said, “Because I can.”

  Tyler helped him pack his backpack, and they all prayed, each of them taking a turn. Owen’s was sincere and confident, without affectation. He was a guy comfortable with prayer and intimate with God, which resulted in simple words and sentences that were weighted with meaning, a casual conversation that simultaneously conveyed respect and utter awe for his Creator. Jagger remembered that from before, the way Owen prayed. He’d tried to imitate it, but either it didn’t come naturally to him or it was a quality it took longer than a few months to acquire. He suspected it was both. Tyler’s prayer was short, but—punctuated by sobs and sniffles—it impacted Jagger’s heart the most.

  More hugs and kisses and they were out the door, Tyler clinging to Jagger’s arm all the way to the side gate, Beth trailing behind. As the helicopter lifted up, Jagger waved. The copter started rotating toward the south, and Jagger saw Tyler drop his arm to hug Beth and push his face into her. Then Owen completed the turn, rising steeply out of the valley, and his family passed out of view.

  [ 33 ]

  Jagger stood shaking his head at Owen’s jet. It was a white Cessna 501, exactly the same as the one he’d crashed, right down to the gold and green stripes. He remembered thinking of it as a bullet with wings.

  He said, “Didn’t feel like trading up?”

  Owen swung open the door and looked back at him. “I’m sentimental. I did change a few things around, though.”

  Like adding the Roman numeral II after the plane’s name, Jagger saw. It was stenciled in script under the cockpit’s side window: Boanerges II. It meant Sons of Thunder, a term of endearment Jesus had called John and his brother James, a reference to their habit of letting enthusiasm trump caution. Jagger hoped Owen wasn’t doing that now.

  When he climbed inside he understood what Owen meant. Gone were the hundreds of photographs, notes, and news clippings that had lined the walls of the first Boanerges. Only one thing was now tacked to the wall, a huge map of the world marked with dots and scribbled words in a variety of highlighters. The aisle was clear—none of the old jet’s piles of books, magazines, and papers. A desk, similar to the old one, sat in the center of the cabin, left of the aisle. This time, however, there were two computer monitors bolted to it, big plasma screens. Opposite the desk was a bed, unmade, with clothes strewn over it. That was the Owen abode Jagger remembered; it made him feel more comfortable.

  “You haven’t had a chance to mess it up too much,” Jagger said.

  “I lost so much research in the crash,” Owen replied from the cockpit, “I’m trying to do everything digitally now. Backing up to a cloud server.”

  What had Judas sung to Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar? Something about if He’d come today He could have reached the whole nation, referring to the era of mass communication. Well, He did anyway, and Jagger was glad He’d done it when and how He did. The thought of Jesus having a Facebook page—two billion fans!—and His miracles getting ten million hits on YouTube just made him queasy. John uploading the book of Revelation to a cloud server from his exile on Patmos. Oh man.

  Jagger dropped his backpack on the bed and sat facing the twin screens. He tapped the keyboard’s space button and the screens lit up. One displayed a flight path from Yoshkar-Ola, Russia, to Sharm El Sheikh. The other was opened to a photo-organizing app with a grid of pictures of the Clan, a few of which Jagger had seen in Gheronda’s scrapbook.

  Owen came out of the cockpit. Seeing Jagger at the screens, he said, “I had some DVD backups in a safe deposit box in Zurich. I was able to retrieve about 10 percent of what I had on the Clan and the Tribe before the crash. I lost a lot of current stuff, like the IDs and whereabouts of some loners.”

  “Immortals?”

  “There are a few out there trying to make a go of it on their own. You were one. I’m trying to reconstruct my files from memory.” He shook his head. “No easy task. We may be immortal and have better healing abilities than normal people, but we’re still human. I can barely remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, let alone whom I was tracking four years ago.” He stopped on his walk down the aisle. “I take that back. Yesterday one of the mothers in Tabashino brought me kasha, a porridge made from oats, wheat, rice, barley, and rye flakes. Delicious. But you know what I mean.”

  Jagger considered it. He said, “I kind of thought of them, the ones whose memories didn’t get scrambled—I thought they remembered everything. All the places they’ve been, the people they’ve met, the things they’ve done.”

  “Thirty-five hundred years of memories?” Owen said, sitting down next to him. “No way. Important things, yeah. I remember every day, every minute I spent with Jesus.”

  No kidding, Jagger thought, thinking that time spend with God would be like a brand upon the brain. He said. “So, like, what . . . the year 413 is just a blur?”

  Owen made a face, looking at the ceiling. “Actually,” he said, “I spent much of that year in Hippo Regius—Annaba, Algeria, now—with Augustine and—”

  “Saint Augustine?”

  “I knew him as Augoustinos Aurelius, yes. And
Jerome—Saint Jerome now. We’d ramble all night about everything from the sufficiency of Scripture to which of us made the best tea.” He smiled at the memory.

  “Yeah, it sounds like you’ve totally forgotten everything.” Jagger wondered if Owen ever remembered himself as a member of the Tribe, before he’d met Jesus. Did he have the kind of nightmares Jagger was having? If anyone on earth truly understood the breadth and depth of God’s forgiveness, it had to be Owen. But did being forgiven mean being completely free of the ghost of past sins?

  “Trust me, there’s plenty I can’t remember . . . and plenty more I’d like to forget.” For a moment his face took on a melancholic expression. Then he seemed to shake it off, patted Jagger on the back, and stood. He stepped to the map on the wall, scanning it with his hands on his hips. “So, where to?”

  Owen was chomping at the bit to retrieve the God Stone, sure, but Jagger wondered if he’d just changed the subject because he knew what was on Jagger’s mind. Thirty-five hundred years of dealing with people had made him scary-good at reading people’s minds. He’d said the Tribe was like that: experts at human behavior, able to know what people would do before the people themselves did. They’ve seen it all before, a thousand times.

  At one time Jagger must have had that ability as well. How much of it was still in there, acting like intuition? He’d made an efficient Army Ranger, sniffing out dangers before the rest of his squad, and a top executive protector, sensing when to change itineraries and routes to keep his alphas—the people he was protecting—safe.

  So what could he read into Owen’s deflecting his question before he’d asked it? That even the Apostle John was still haunted by his past? Or that he wasn’t, which meant Jagger’s terrible memories would forever be a reminder that his name was not in God’s Book of Life?