Judgment Stone (9781401687359)

by Robert Liparulo

  Jagger noticed Owen’s frown. “What is it?” he said.

  Owen shook his head. “It’s just . . . what we were talking about . . . What does a godly person look like?”

  “I heard you,” Jagger said. “Who knows, right? It’s like—who said it, ‘People look at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart’?”

  “God said it to Samuel. Tell me, who are the people you know who are the most in touch with God?”

  “The monks,” Jagger said, thinking of their hours spent in prayer and worship. “Pastors, missionaries, theologians . . .”

  “Because they’re wearing their faith on their sleeves,” Owen said. “Not a bad thing, but do you think they have the strongest relationships with God, the best communication with Him?”

  Jagger said, “I’ll bet Beth could give them a run for their money. So to speak.”

  “Exactly. Think about it.”

  Jagger waited for Owen to continue, then realized he wanted him to really think about it. He said, “You’re saying there’s no way of knowing. Could be the plumber come to clean the hair out of your pipes.” He thought. “The grocery store clerk. The little girl stealing food from a baker’s cart.”

  Owen nodded. “It’s the ‘no way of knowing’ part that’s got me worried.”

  “Why would that worry—” Jagger remembered the beggar in Varna. The blue light coming out of his head, the angel. “The God Stone,” he said. “That’s how you’d know. That’s how Bale would know.” He needed a Tums, a whole bottle of them. “He wants to grieve God.”

  Owen looked at him. “What better way than to go after the people closest to Him? Not the ones who seem closest, but those who truly have a heart for God.”

  “Bale’s using the Stone to target his victims,” Jagger said. “He’s using it to put crosshairs on the most godly people on earth.”

  [ 59 ]

  “That’s how he found the barn full of worshipers in the middle of Nowhere, Bulgaria,” Jagger said.

  “And why he slaughtered them,” Owen said. “He’s not going to keep hitting mass targets like the barn or the orphanage. They’re too high profile. It’s the very thing he’s avoided all these years to keep from getting caught.”

  “So why now,” Jagger said, “other than he can see these godly people?”

  “He’s like a kid who just got himself a huge bag of candy. He’s indulging.” Owen paused a moment. “He’s still figuring it out, how to use the Stone. It won’t be long before we start hearing about the puzzling deaths of a shoemaker in Paris, a housewife in Bristol, a Boy Scout in Des Moines. Maybe he’ll be more ambitious: a dozen in Spain, fifty in the US, a hundred scattered across Brazil . . . whatever he thinks he can get away with.” He looked at Jagger. “If we don’t get it back.”

  “Wish he were just a kid with a big bag of candy.”

  Owen gave him a wry smile. “Think of him that way. It’ll be easier.”

  “Except this kid’s got a ream of ruthless killers around him, and machine guns and swords and crossbows.”

  “And he would do anything not to lose his candy,” Owen added.

  “I think I’d rather try to get a bone away from a pack of wolves.”

  “Don’t dwell on it.”

  Jagger returned his attention to the screen, forcing himself to think of something else. He suspected raising kids in a group environment but with individual care and an emphasis on love was a lot more work and more expensive than it appeared in writing.

  Bale’s going to use the Stone to find them.

  It would require a large staff of well-trained and vetted personnel who themselves were treated well by Mondragon and his organization.

  Kill them.

  But it was a philosophy and program that apparently worked. A good number of “Mondragon children,” as they were called throughout their lives, went on to graduate from the country’s finest universities—as well as Oxford, Cambridge, the Ivy Leagues, University of Edinburgh, École Normale Supérieure de Paris. They became leaders in politics, the military, medicine, education, the arts . . . nearly every field Mondragon had listed. They’d advised presidents, prime ministers, kings, and popes. They ran conglomerates, powerful trading firms, nonprofit foundations—Why couldn’t the Sinai dig have been funded by one of their conglomerates, instead of Ice Temple?

  Through it all, each one had a reputation for high moral values, and when asked attributed his or her success—indeed, everything—to Jesus Christ, apparently doing it without coming off as holier-than-thou.

  Wolves.

  He cursed under his breath and squinted hard at the screen.

  Jagger gleaned most of the information about the Mondragon Home from articles and online annual corporate reports. The alumni section of the orphanage’s web site contained about a hundred mini-articles and interviews with former residents, dating back to its founding. None of them covered the most elite, powerful members, but blacksmiths, accountants, nurses, construction workers . . . ordinary people leading ordinary lives. It seemed the Mondragon orphanage was just as proud of these people, as they had a right to be, of the ones who went into more prestigious circumstances.

  Owen listened to Jagger describe the work of the orphanage and said, “It’s no coincidence that the home works with children, has had extraordinary success to instill love for God, and that they’re doing it in this location. God has redeemed a tragedy and thrown it back in Bale’s face.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I have experience with Bale in this region,” Owen said. “In 1212, he showed up in the village of Hamelin, claiming to be recruiting for the German shepherd Nicholas. Nicholas was gathering children to go preach the gospel to Muslims in the Holy Land.”

  “The Children’s Crusade,” Jagger said.

  “That’s what it was eventually called. But Bale wasn’t recruiting for Nicholas, at least not in Hamelin. He took the village’s children, one hundred and thirty-four of them, and disappeared. When I heard of this, I came to help. I tracked him to a cave just north of Miclosoara, not far from here.” He fell silent.

  “And?”

  “And he’d murdered them all,” Owen said. “Left them in the cave.”

  “He killed them? Why?”

  “Besides to hurt God?” Owen said. “I believe he wanted to cast Nicholas in the worst light possible. Nicholas had claimed to receive his marching orders directly from God. He was charismatic, and people believed him. Now here’s an entire village’s children murdered in his name. Hamelin grieved for centuries. The town’s earliest written records go back to 1385 and start with the line, ‘It is a hundred years since our children left.’ One hundred and seventy-two years, actually, but I think the chronicler used ‘a hundred years’ to mean a long time. Point is, after nearly two centuries, the tragedy was still on the townspeople’s minds.”

  “Wait a minute,” Jagger said. “Hamelin . . . that rings a bell.”

  “It’s the story of the pied piper.”

  “Bale was the pied piper?”

  Owen nodded. “In the story, he lures away the village’s rats using a magic musical pipe, and then does the same with the children when the village reneges on paying him. That’s not what happened. It had nothing to do with rats, and he lured them away by telling them it was God’s will. The villagers were so ashamed to have allowed a stranger to take their children and kill them, they made up the story of his having a magic pipe.”

  Jagger was dazed. “And the ‘pied’ part?”

  “Means ‘multicolored.’ Bale was into flamboyant fashions back then. They told me he was dressed like a count, in scarlet, purple, and gold.”

  Jagger stared out at the darkness. Every time he learned something about Bale, the same thought crossed his mind: how could anyone be so evil?

  “I chased him for eighteen years,” Owen said, “trying to convince myself it was to prevent him from killing more innocents.” He glanced at Jagger. “But it wasn’t true, not com
pletely. My heart had turned dark. I wanted to avenge those children’s deaths. I’d seen their bodies.” He closed his eyes, anguish cutting into his features, seeing them again after all this time. He continued: “Finally, I heard what God had been telling me all along. I was chasing Bale with the wrong motive. I’d become a vigilante, no better than the Tribe. I stopped the hunt and returned to my purpose: helping people.”

  “Wouldn’t stopping Bale be helping people?”

  “It would, but as you said, man looks on the outside, God looks in your heart. When it comes to Bale, my heart is conflicted.”

  “Then what are we doing chasing him now?”

  “I keep telling you, we have to take back the God Stone.”

  “Well,” Jagger said, “I want to kill him.”

  “If you remembered your time with the Tribe, as a member, you’d reconsider.”

  Jagger shook his head, thinking about the people in the barn, the children. “No, I wouldn’t. I can’t believe it would be a sin to kill someone like Bale.”

  Owen looked at him and tapped his finger against his chest, over his heart.

  Jagger looked away.

  “We’re here,” Owen said.

  [ 60 ]

  Jagger lifted his rump off the copilot chair to look down through the windshield. Lights sparkled in a sea of blackness. It could have been a cruise ship in the middle of the Atlantic. His eyes adjusted, and he saw the moon catching the tips of trees—a vast forest of what looked like pines, the tips pointed and swaying, appearing wavelike, which reinforced Jagger’s first impression.

  “Those lights down there?” Owen said. “That’s the manor, the orphanage.”

  “Are you sure?” The night didn’t afford him a comprehensive view, but lights from the structures’ own windows showed a massive compound centered around a building with towers and spires. The front was dominated by a square tower similar to the clock towers that he’d seen at large railroad terminals. Walls, walks, and bridges connected this main structure to outbuildings the size of mansions. “It looks more like a castle,” Jagger said.

  “Why don’t you confirm we’re in the right spot?”

  “How—” He caught the look on Owen’s face. “The fragment?”

  “We need to see what Bale sees, but I’m sure he’s already locked in on the place and researched it the way you did. Even if they’ve stopped praying—which, from what you found out about these kids, they haven’t—but if they have, Bale’s still coming. The blood’s already in the water.”

  “They haven’t stopped praying,” Jagger said, the tips of his fingers touching the fragment in his pocket. Ropes of blue light rose from the manor’s roof, spiraling into a single beam, blindingly bright and thick as the manor itself. Golden light pulsed through it, like the flashes of paparazzi covering a red carpet event. The blue glow itself waxed and waned, seeming alive. He thought he caught glimpses of the angels’ embers sparking out of the beam here and there.

  Owen’s blue thread was back. Praying while he talked, planned, flew the jet. Jagger’s heart skipped a beat when he saw an angel looking in at him from the window beside Owen. Embers swirled into the cockpit through the wall, swirled back out. The sight gave him hope, but he didn’t know why, not after the barn.

  He said, “Where’s the airport?”

  “Almost an hour’s drive away, in Sibiu.”

  Jagger’s heart sank. “The Clan must have landed a half hour ago. If it takes thirty minutes to secure their jet, go through customs, find a vehicle—which we’ll have to do too—they’ve probably just left the airport.”

  “Most likely.”

  “They’re an hour ahead of us. We’ll never catch them.”

  Owen banked sharply—Jagger gripping the seat’s arms to keep from tumbling out—and when the jet straightened, the orphanage appeared in their windshield again.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Beating the Clan. See that road down there?”

  Jagger strained. “I think so. To the left of the lights?” It could have been a gray pencil line on black paper.

  “That’s it,” Owen said. “It’s curvy in both directions, but straightens out as it passes the orphanage. Take a look. Does it look at least a half mile long, the straight part?”

  “There’s nothing to compare it to. I guess so.”

  “That’s what I thought. The Clan’s Bombardier may be faster and more comfortable, but it’s bigger, almost twice the wingspan of this one.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It could never land on that road.”

  “You’re going to land there?”

  “Gonna try.”

  “Try? Have you ever done anything like this before?”

  “Once.”

  “What happened?”

  Owen frowned at him, shook his head. “It wasn’t pretty.” He made another sharp bank. “I’ll circle back around, give it go.”

  Jagger snapped into the seat’s shoulder harness. “What if a car comes along?”

  “This is pretty isolated territory,” Owen said. “But if one does drive up, it’ll have to get out of the way, because we won’t be able to.” As he came out of the turn, he pushed in the control wheel and flicked toggles. Jagger watched the “basic T” instruments—named for their standardized arrangement on the instrument panel—showing attitude, airspeed, altitude, and heading. Every one changing dramatically. Below Jagger’s feet something vibrated, clunked, and hummed. The landing gear, he guessed. They were dropping, heading for a spot where the narrow road below and ahead of them came out of a bend and cut through the trees in a somewhat straight line. Okay, it did look a bit like a runway—one designed by a drunk or a preschooler.

  “Lights would be nice,” he said.

  “The landing lights will pick it up when I get close.”

  “Is it wide enough for the wings?” The trees on either side looked like a Super Mario challenge, drawing closer and closer together as they approached.

  “It’ll be close,” Owen said.

  “Don’t feel you have to be honest,” Jagger said. “A lie will make me feel a lot better about now.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Owen said and flashed him a big grin.

  Jagger gripped the armrests. His legs stiffened, pushing him hard into the seat back.

  The jet edged over the road and dropped suddenly. The wheels bounced, then gripped the road. Jagger’s head jerked forward . . . again . . . then the plane roared like a weightlifter pushing more than he could handle. Trees zipped by on either side, branches slapping at the wings. As promised, lights on the jet’s nose and wings illuminated the road, branches of trees encroaching into their path. They sped past the gates to the orphanage, indicating that they’d eaten up half the “runway.”

  Jagger’s eyelids and mouth sprang open. An angel was holding the nose of the jet, head down and tilted in apparent effort. Its embers had formed wings, which beat behind him. Jagger looked out his side window. Another angel there, in front of the wing, holding the edge. This one appeared to be getting pulled back under the jet’s wing, but the angel’s ember-wings were out front, over his head, flapping, flapping.

  “We’re going to make it,” Owen said. But the far bend in the road, where trees rose up like a wall, was approaching fast. The entire plane roared and shuddered under the effort to reverse its forward momentum. Slowing, slowing . . . the trees ahead loomed, growing brighter in the landing lights. The nose of the jet pushed the angel into a branch. The angel fluttered up, his embers turning into a whirlwind around him. In a flash he zipped away, sparks trailing after him.

  “Told you,” Owen said. He fiddled with the controls, and an image of a road, lighted by a single bulb, appeared on the GPS screen. Owen backed the jet up.

  “You going to back us up all the way to the orphanage’s gate?”

  “I’m going to get this rig around the bend here,” Owen said. “The Clan will reach the orphanage from the other way. I don’t want them seeing Boanerges.
I just pray some car doesn’t crash into it.” As he said it, his blue thread thickened and grew brighter. Guess he really meant it.

  Owen unsnapped his seat harness, spun out of the chair, and left the cockpit. “Let’s go,” he said.

  Jagger let out a deep breath and looked out at the wing. The angel wasn’t there. When he entered the cockpit, Owen was loading the duffel bag with weapons.

  [ 61 ]

  Beth had passed out. Curled on the storeroom floor, a mop bucket pressing into the back of her head, her broken left arm cradled in the right one against her chest. She felt the throbbing in her arm, the pain still shooting into her shoulder, before she opened her eyes. She groaned and started to rise. Her arm protested, sending a lightning bolt to her brain. She touched it delicately with her fingertips, which had apparently turned into white-hot soldering irons for all the pain they caused. Her forearm was swollen, huge, and something hard pushed the skin up. Had to be the bone.

  “Tyler,” she whispered. He must be frightened out of his mind.

  Comfort him, Lord. Let him feel Your peace, which transcends all understanding. Let him be okay.

  She rose to her knees, felt around. Boxes, bundled rags, gallon jugs of some kind of cleaning chemical. She had no idea how long she’d been out—ten, fifteen minutes. She found the handle and cracked the door open an inch. She blinked, not understanding. It was night. She walked on her knees and stuck her head out. Deep purple smeared the sky over the mountain, fighting as it did every evening with a starry blackness. An hour and a half at least—could she really have been unconscious so long?

  She had to find Tyler.

  She pulled the door shut, found a bundle of rags, and began tearing them with her teeth. She tied three around her arm, cinching them as tightly as she could bear. Her molars grated against each other, and tears streamed down her face. She wondered if she could make it to her apartment, where she could do this right, find some kind of splint, a butter knife, maybe; tape; aspirin, lots of aspirin. She thought of other reasons to get to the apartment. Number one on the list: Tyler. It was where he would go, was taught to go if anything bad went down in the monastery. Number two: the gun might still be there, and Phin most likely tossed the box of bullets aside after depriving her of them.