by Rick Jones
Just as Salt maneuvered into a parallel position, he launched himself and grabbed Hayden by his rucksack. Hayden, who could feel the wind buffeting him, clung to the wall like a barnacle, the man gritting with restraint.
Then like a raking talon, Salt, with the point of the piton still sticking outward from his shinbone, found it to be an effective weapon. Pushing away from Hayden to gain space, he thrust his wounded leg up and drove the point across Kimball Hayden’s dragon-scale vest to reveal exposed flesh.
“The next one,” cried Salt, “will divide your spine, believe me!”
Just as he was about to launch into his kill-strike maneuver, Kimball Hayden looked at his watch and smiled. “I don’t think so,” he whispered.
. . . 00:03 . . .
. . . 00:02 . . .
. . . 00:01 . . .
Detonation!
The precipice that was known as Deep Mountain lit up in a display like no other.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
The charges that were set within Deep Mountain by Mr. Galileo went off in unison, as expected. The precipice the facility sat upon was the first to collapse, the horn crumbling like a house of cards in the wind with stones falling and tumbling to the valley below.
The pipeline of the blast, as flames scurried through the mountainous warrens to consume oxygen with absorption, eventually reached the munitions depot. Ammo and explosives manufactured for state-of-the-art weaponry discharged, adding fuel to the flames. With the pressure so great, many were crushed in the corridors from the powerful concussive waves that swept through the hallways. Walls crumbled. Ceilings caved. And stones as large as kitchen stoves were hurled with ease as they smashed their way through exterior walls, including the south face. Others catapulted skyward as the landing erupted and opened wide, the earth heaving and pitching as projectiles went airborne.
Topside, Mr. Spartan, who was governed by the instinct of self-preservation, raised his arm as if such an action would provide the necessary protection against the coming rain of rock and stone.
* * *
Inside the mountain, Mr. Plato’s group cried out helplessly as thick dust swept into the chamber, blinding them. Walls began to tremble and shake, whereas other parts gave and crumbled to crush those nearby. Mr. Plato, with his head trapped between his hands, wondered if had done the right thing.
* * *
Against the south wall, large stones smashed through the mountain’s face like projectiles around Salt and Kimball Hayden. Just as Salt was about to use the embedded piton in his leg as a weapon against Hayden, stones were launched from the mountain’s icy face with tremendous force, along with concussive blasts that tossed Salt and Kimball Hayden about like rag dolls.
Then from these new openings in the face, licks and geysers of fire spat forward to taste the open air before retreating into these newly formed cavities.
Kimball Hayden quickly regained his maneuverability and found a hold against the wall. All around him, black smoke poured through the gaps and spiraled upward with the plumes reaching for the stars. Beside him and hanging limp against his wire was Salt, who was beginning to gain his senses after shaking off the cobwebs from his mind. Then as he turned on Hayden with eyes so pale that they appeared to have a milky glaze to them, he slowly skinned his lips upward along his teeth like a savage animal and began to make his way toward Hayden for the final kill.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
After the dust from the ceiling stopped falling and the Earth settled, Mr. Plato felt an overwhelming relief. Lowering his hands and taking inventory, he noted the soiled and dust-laden faces around him. They appeared like refugees who had followed their leader to the depths of Hell and madness, only to come out at the other end with the ‘Light’ shining upon their faces and with tears of gratitude shining like the facets of diamonds.
Mr. Plato, though he did not save everyone, saved most.
Walking through the pyramidal mounds of broken stone that seemed to be everywhere, he saw the occasional arm or leg extending from the cairn of stones that covered them, the limbs unmoving. At the opposite side of the chamber and lying beneath heavy stones, was the vociferous tech who had challenged Mr. Plato at the elevator shaft, who was now staring upward with his eyes wide with the surprise of his mortality.
His nametag read: Bjornson. The lead technician.
Waving a hand over the tech’s face to close the man’s eyes, they kept popping open as if they were trying to confirm his death, that this was nothing more than a scene to a bad dream. But on the third try they stayed shut.
Others slowly converged towards Mr. Plato waiting for the next words of hope from the mouth of their Savior. Intuiting this, Mr. Plato patted the air with the palm of his hand and said, “It’s all right . . . Help is on its way.”
There were cries of gratitude, along with cheers and explosive breaths of relief.
Mr. Plato, a member of the Consortium who was bred to save and protect and to balance the world in a way that equalizes good and evil so that evil never truly got a foothold, thought of his favorite quote from Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
Mr. Plato, in his role, did all he could as a good man.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
Salt came at Kimball Hayden as a man possessed rather than a man who was caught within agonizing pain. It was as if he had the ability to suppress the suffering and treated it as more of a nuisance rather than a hindrance, by tucking the sensation away until his obsession of regaining the Eye of Moses was completed.
As Salt skimmed and jumped his way across the face toward Hayden, Kimball launched himself directly at the approaching man, feet first, which seemed to catch the assassin with surprise, his eyes suddenly flaring to show nothing but whites.
Then Hayden caught Salt square in the jaw with the strike that snapped the assassin’s head backward with violence. Salt, with his arms and hands trying to find the wire he was secured to, though they failed to do so because his mind was seeing a starburst of internal stars, began his downward slide toward the valley floor.
It was slow at first, then he began to pick up speed, falling faster and faster until he was out of sight, out of range, the man eclipsed by the maelstrom of whirling snow beneath Kimball, and then the screaming of a falling individual, the man dropping faster and deeper until there was nothing but the sound of the howling wind.
Kimball waited along the wall.
Silence.
Salt was a wise man who knew his trade well, this much Kimball Hayden realized. What he also considered to be a possibility was that the screams which merged with the howl of the wind, could have been a ruse to draw Hayden unguarded to the bottom, where Salt would be waiting as the spider within its den.
Kimball Hayden felt for Aaron's rod and the rucksack containing the crucible, making sure they were still attached. Sighing with relief on that part, he now had to descend the final stretch wondering if Salt was expecting him from the shadows below.
Skipping and bouncing his way down along the face of the mountain, Kimball Hayden was about to get his answer.
CHAPTER EIGHTY
Mr. Spartan lay on his back upon the snow-covered landing looking at the sky. He could see the constellation like Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper until dark smoke wafted into their path to blot them out. That was when Mr. Spartan closed his eyes and prayed to his God, thanking Him.
For the most part, the topside of the mountain was gone, the remnants of what it used to be now laying in the valley below. And as he laid there, he saw the number of stones around him. The area was a moonscape with rocks everywhere. The trajectories of the explosion had propelled them upward until gravity had taken over, which then caused their long fall downward. Stones, in sizes that were both great and small, rained down and peppered the landing around him, though not a single piece of gravel had touched him. Another miracle.
Above him, the clouds
dispersed and parted. And directly overhead, as the stars twinkled like a cache of diamonds spread over black velvet, he noted that the North Star was glittering extremely bright on this night.
It reminded him of the dark particle within its crystal cocoon, twisting and turning with a life of its own, the power of absolute greatness.
And then he wondered if Providence was giving him some strange and divine signal. Were the surrounding stones so great in numbers that not one delivered a fatal or crushing blow, a message?
All Mr. Spartan could do was wonder.
Then a scudding cloud of smoke, dark and serpentine in motion, covered the ceiling of stars once again.
Feeling incredible pain in his knee, Mr. Spartan presumed that most of his team was dead, if not all, within this mayhem. And then he questioned if Providence guided Kimball Hayden the same way He had shielded him.
But with Salt having the luck of the devil on his side, Mr. Spartan could only lay there and hope, since hope was all he had left.
Wrapping himself against the biting cold, Mr. Spartan waited for the aid he knew was coming. After all, the explosion of a mountaintop often drew the curious.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE
Kimball Hayden was forty feet above the valley floor when he noted that the snowbank on Salt’s side of the line had been disrupted, as though it had taken the brunt of a fall. The impact took the shape of a snow angel, something Hayden accepted as highly peculiar for someone like Salt who often played with the devil. Perhaps the image in the snow and the man who made it was in itself an oxymoron, he considered.
As he reached the bottom with utmost caution, he wondered if Salt was lying beneath the pile or hiding in the shadows close to it, until he noticed a blood trail extend off into the distance. Salt had the ability to slow his descent upon impact, which was enough to damage but not enough to kill. The blood drops, like breadcrumbs, eventually disappeared under the brewing and swirling blizzard that was gaining strength.
Kimball Hayden, feeling the power of the universe upon his back like Atlas, would carry this great weight of responsibility directly into the hands of those who would guarantee its safety from the likes of Elias Caspari.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO
Six Days Later
In Paris, a man sits at dinner holding hands with his family praying and giving thanks unto their Lord for the ‘bounty of food.’ His hair is dyed black to hide the absolute whiteness it used to be. And he wears contact lenses, the type of brown that’s the color of newly minted pennies to give a hue to eyes that were so pale that they appeared without color. On his leg, he wears a specialized medical boot from a recent ‘accident.’
In London, Mr. Plato is on leave after his duties of surviving a mission where the cost of ‘winning’ was too great for him to completely accept. Around him are tavern chairs, which are empty because he has no brethren to fill their vacancies. He now sits in this bar alone drinking fine liqueurs.
In Germany, Mr. Spartan lies in bed debating between the darkness he continues to feel in his heart and the ‘Light’ which saved him. It is a path he knows he must walk, which happens to be the ‘Gray’ area that fills the ‘Between’ that divides Darkness from Light. Do I now work in the ‘Dark’ to serve the ‘Light’? He asks this because he knows that Salt was never found, his body never discovered.
Somewhere inside the Consortium Fortress in Cochem, Germany, a man is seated within the shadows of his Study admiring a crucible that once belonged to Nostradamus, which now sits within its glass dome under a shedding cone of light. The polished brass of the bowl shines ethereally like a halo. But Mr. da Vinci, who was elated to hold such a possession to keep its secrets safe, did not feel complete satisfaction since the cost to retrieve it was quite heavy. The lives of good men had been lost. But that was always the case in war, the risks of battle, or the gambles needed to maintain the balance between good and evil. And it would be a war that would never end as Evil will always try to gain the staff of rule, no matter the cost of lives involved in order to obtain it. Then Mr. da Vinci becomes overwhelmed with heartache, though he marches through his grief.
Inside a vault deep beneath the Basilica in Vatican City, lies a chamber that now houses the Ark of the Covenant. It is concealed behind newly pressed walls of three-foot steel, as is the ceiling and floor, with an impenetrable door. A bishop of the Holy See, with gloved hands, gingerly places Aaron’s rod inside the Ark with reverence, as the crystal cocoon glows with the life of the particle. The staff is rejoined with the two tablets of the Ten Commandments, and a bowl of manna whose contents had turned to dust long ago. And then the lid is properly secured to blacken out the light of the crystal.
Inside the Apostolic Palace where the pontiff keeps the company of his own as he stands upon the balcony that overlooks St. Peter’s Square, he pounds that stone banister repeatedly with the heal of his hand in anger. He had intentionally sent Kimball on a mission as a man without his team of Vatican Knights, hoping that this weakness would also spell his demise. But the man was among the three survivors out of many within the unit who had gone into combat. Continuing to pound at the railing until he could pound no more, Pope Clement XV returned to his office with darkness in his heart.
In Maryland, along a lakeside front cabin, Shari Cohen is delighted to learn that Kimball was making his way back to her. With a short stop in Rome and at the Vatican that lasted three days to keep company with his Vatican Knight brethren, Kimball had said his goodbyes and caught a flight to Washington, D.C. Shari, who couldn’t wait to see the man she loved, and within those three days while he was in Rome, had fulfilled one of his desires, a surprise, something she knew would please him.
It would.
EPILOGUE
Lakeside Cabin in Maryland
After spending three days in Rome to say goodbye to his team of Vatican Knights, Kimball Hayden remained undecided about his future as he walked the long and winding road that led to the lakeside cabin. But more importantly, it was a direct path to the woman he loved.
The day was beautiful due to an abnormal warm front that was coming in from the east, though there was heavy cloud cover. Pines surrounded him with their freshness of their scents pleasing. And birds of every color alit upon the branches—cardinals, robins, orioles, finches. Here was a slice of Heaven, he considered.
As he walked amongst Nature’s serene clime, he began to take stock of his life. He had always been the best he could be as a soldier, though he was not always in tune with the ways of the church. Nevertheless, he provided them with a valuable service: Protect those who could not protect themselves and do so with loyalty above all else except honor. It had become his life over the years, his motto. But in Switzerland he had been shown that Father Time remains unbeaten. Salt had showed Kimball that he was equal to the Vatican Knight’s skills set, perhaps the moment a telling one. Perhaps, he was losing his edge with the advancement of aging.
Then he wondered if things would have been different with the backing of the Vatican Knights instead of the Consortium. Good men had died, all but two within a group of many. Would he have fared better if he’d had his Vatican Knights? Would they have been able to stem the high number of kills? Though the Consortium was a guild with specialized global practices that had the numbers to keep them going, Kimball wondered what he could have done to save the lives of those within the group in Switzerland. The answer: He would never truly know.
Now with the Vatican in his rearview mirror for the moment, Kimball was looking ahead.
One who wore his cleric’s shirt and Roman Catholic collar out of conviction, today he wore a checkered flannel shirt and jacket. Inside the shirt pocket was the band of his cleric’s collar, a true treasure and reminder of where he had been and where he was going.
As he crested the gravel road and began his downward trek to the clearing of the log cabin which he could marginally see through the boughs of the pines, he began to see something that did not ap
pear proper or characteristic to the surroundings. Then as he walked into the clearing, he saw something that was ugly and hideously incongruent to the nature of the log cabin, but at the same time it was something never so beautiful, never so appropriate.
It was a white-picket fence.
During his mission in Switzerland with the Consortium Group, Shari had taken the time to deliver him a lifelong dream: a simple life. In time there would be a garden filled with the blooms of colorful flowers. There would be a grill. A dog.
And there would be children.
As he approached the cabin, Shari tossed aside the door and stood on the deck, watching and smiling for a brief moment before she launched herself forward and raced to Kimball, after he dropped his backpack and raised his arms to accept her embrace.
Before this cabin that was surrounded by a white-picket fence, they kissed. And as they did, the clouds parted enough for a biblical beam to slant downward to alight on them both, a spotlight.
The shaft was warm and all encompassing.
And in the end, when it mattered most, Kimball Hayden had finally received the Light.
THE END
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
