by J. F. Penn
The men exited the vehicle and walked towards the hut, guns in outstretched hands before them. They covered each other with sweeping movements, scanning the forest around them. One had a submachine gun slung across his shoulder and as they reached the hut, he lowered his pistol and holstered it. His meaty hands gripped the stock of the submachine gun and without warning, he peppered the hut with bullets.
Strips of wood flew off the structure. The metallic sound echoed through the clearing, smoke dissipating on the breeze. The other man walked towards the hut, his own pistol at the ready. Just as he stepped forward to open the door, his head rocked sideways and he dropped to the ground, blood flowing from a wound on the side of his neck. He clutched at it, writhing in pain. The other man sprinted for cover behind the hut, on the opposite side from where the attack had come. Another shot rang out and he went down too, hand clutching at his chest. He turned towards the woods and shot off the remaining bullets into the green before collapsing.
The remaining man in the vehicle scooted across into the driver's seat, scrambling for the keys, trying to get away. Morgan pushed her gun against the side of his head, leaning forward from the backseat, which she had slipped into as the gunshots rang out.
"Put the keys down," she said, her voice molten steel.
The man raised his hands, his eyes wide in the mirror. His face was heavily tattooed, marking him out as one of Kadmon's men. As his gaze met hers, she saw something else in him, a flash of fear, not of her, but of what would happen to him because of this. She knew an instant before he took action, that he would not give up so easily.
Sure enough, he thrust open the door and threw himself out, scrambling to his feet and running towards the woods. Morgan jumped from the backseat, sighting on the man as he ran. She aimed and fired once. He dropped to the ground, clutching his leg, then pulled himself up again, dragging his injured limb, trying to get into the forest.
Mikael and Jake emerged from the woods behind and to the side of the hut. As Jake checked the bodies of the other two, Mikael joined Morgan as she walked after the injured man.
"I'm not going to kill you," she said. "I just need to talk."
He turned, his expression desperate as he shouted at her, a stream of Spanish she could just understand.
"They'll kill me anyway. Please, finish it."
The man fell to the ground, his hands clutching the bloody wound. Morgan kept her gun trained on him and approached cautiously.
"Where is Kadmon's base?"
The man moaned, his eyes watching Morgan, but she knew the fear was not of her, or of dying here. There was no time for hesitation, and she saw Adam Kadmon's face as she shot into the man's other leg and he howled in agony.
"Where are you going next?" Morgan moved closer, her aim now clearly between his legs. Her eyes were fixed on the wounded man's face, her face a sculpted portrayal of fury.
Mikael raised an eyebrow. "Remind me not to piss you off," he said.
This time the man wouldn't shut up, a torrent of words spilling from him, his breath ragged as he clutched at both legs, blood oozing out onto the pine needles.
"What did he say?" Mikael asked.
"Kadmon wants the Key, and when they find it, they will take the girl to the Gates. He doesn't know where the Gates are exactly, but it's a castle, and not here or in Spain. Sofia is with them, and they call her a daughter of the Remnant." Morgan felt a kinship with the young woman, hunted for what her grandfather had started, and what Morgan's own father had protected.
Jake came over and stood next to Morgan, wiping blood from his hands.
"Those other two had no identity papers, nothing to trace them. But clearly others from the group will be coming through the forest to find them. We need to make a move." He gently touched Morgan's arm. "There are too many of them to try and get Sofia back now. We have to trust that he's keeping her alive for a reason."
Morgan nodded.
"Alright, we'll retreat for now but we're not leaving Israel until we know where to find the Key. And I know just the person to help us."
Chapter 17
Pushing the blue door open, Adam Kadmon stepped into the modest home that had once been Leon Sierra's haven. He had never met the man, but he had paid the bomber who had blown the bus up that day, promising extravagant reward for the martyr's family. In a land scarred by such killings, it was a less noticeable method of ridding the world of another member of the Remnant.
There were a couple of boxes on the floor. The contents of one lay strewn across the carpet, a man's handwriting on the pages of jumbled notes. Adam bent to pick up a couple of the pages, scanning the stream of consciousness. He frowned. Were these just the ravings of a man deep in a spiritual trance, or was there a truth hidden in Leon's papers? Those who had been here before the attack must have taken anything of real worth, but who were they and why did they also seek the Key?
Adam walked into the area where Leon Sierra had studied. The air felt rarefied and Adam was aware of a tingling sensation, as if something shimmered just outside his vision. A rush of doubt flooded through him. He had assumed that the Remnant were corrupt, inflated with a sense of their own importance, unwilling to commit to the grander goal. But had he actually destroyed the man who could have led him to the Key?
Sweat broke out on his brow, prickled under his arms as a sense of anger and frustration rose within. Adam began to systematically search the room, emptying drawers, lifting papers, looking for clues to where he should go next. He strode into the kitchen, pulling open drawers and cupboards.
A radio crackled from outside. The door creaked open and Carlos, his tattooed bodyguard, put his great head around the corner. His expression was downcast, his eyes not meeting Adam's.
"They've escaped, sir. One of the vehicles was disabled in the scrublands and when the men got inside the nearby forest, they found three of our men dead and the targets missing." He fell silent, waiting for the explosion to come.
Adam slammed his fist down on the kitchen countertop, the sound reverberating through the apartment.
"Bastards," he said, his face contorted with anger. "Get access to the satellite surveillance. I want to know where they're going next." His gaze dropped to the counter and he noticed a small photo lying there. A woman looked out at him, dark curls around a striking face, her eyes a brilliant blue with a violet slash through the right.
Adam picked it up, looking more closely at the image. She would be older now, but this was definitely Leon Sierra's daughter. He had not intended revenge on the children for the sins of their fathers, but if this Morgan was intent on beating him to the Key, he would have to deal with her as he would with Sofia. The daughters of the Remnant would be a sacrifice to the dark power that drove him onwards.
Chapter 18
Father Ben Costanza found his breath a little short as he walked up the stone steps to his office on the first floor. He stood at the window as his pulse calmed, watching the students lazing on the grass below in the quad of Blackfriars Hall in the heart of Oxford. He smiled a little. They were so young, these students, their faces lit with hope and the possibility of a bright future ahead. He still taught some tutorials in theology, but his mind was often elsewhere these days.
Ben knew the students saw him as another creature, utterly removed and invisible to their worldview, his wrinkled, shrunken old flesh anathema to their young lives. Had he once looked at his own tutors that same way? A flash of memory and Ben remembered that one amazing summer when he had fallen in love. As a Catholic priest who had taken his vows, he could only ever dream of her, and Marianne Sierra had belonged to another anyway. At least he could honor her memory and watch over her twin girls as their lives progressed.
Pulling his smart phone from the folds of his black Dominican cloak, Ben checked the text again. It had been a while since he had heard from Morgan, and yet here was a message from her halfway across the world asking to speak with him. He worried about her involvement with ARKANE, but equal
ly, he recognized a spirit of adventure in her, a wild creature who could not be tamed. That kind of spirit must be allowed to roam, and he would be here as long as possible to help her.
Would he want to be young again now, in this crazy fast-paced world? Ben looked out the window once more. It seemed as if the rate of change kept increasing. He had just come from a meeting to discuss how they would turn the precious library area on the ground floor into a more usable space. Right now, it was filled with shelves containing oversize physical books, some beautifully illustrated, many of them containing precious wisdom from the history of the Church. The young librarian had told the gathered monks that the students had petitioned for more desks with super-fast Wifi connection, and proposed removing the old shelving, retaining just a few of the old books for display and decoration purposes. Ben shook his head. Times had changed indeed, but he supposed that even Oxford must move with those times.
He sighed and turned to put his little kettle on: his daily cups of blended chai were at least one way to stay in control of his world. He turned on the computer and poured his tea, sitting down carefully, the chair creaking under the weight of his old bones. He signed into Skype and called Morgan.
Ben smiled as he saw her lovely face on the screen, the dark brown curls hanging loose about her face, her blue eyes vibrant and the slash of violet almost glowing on the screen. Ben saw the fire in her and knew she must be on a mission again. He had seen that look on her face before, when he had helped her track down the Ark of the Covenant. It had almost ended them both in smoke and flames, but here they were once again.
"Hi, Ben," Morgan said. "You look well. Are you OK?"
Ben smiled. "As well as can be, although the autumn turns and my old bones start to protest at the rigors of the Order."
Morgan laughed. "I've never envied you those crack of dawn masses, but I know you love it really."
"When are you coming home again?" Ben asked.
Morgan's Oxford house was only a few streets away from Blackfriars, but she was rarely there these days. Ben sometimes popped in for a cup of tea with her neighbor to visit Morgan's sometime cat, Shmi.
A shadow crossed her face and Ben noticed the strain in the muscles around her eyes. "I can't say exactly, but once again I need your help with something. Do you have time?"
"For you, anything, my dear. You know that."
Morgan pulled out a sheaf of paper and held it up to the camera. "Can you see this?"
It was blurry at first, and then the focus shifted. The drawing showed a kind of key, with a skeleton on top pleading with Heaven. It was haunting, as if the bones communicated a desperate need for salvation. It was surrounded by symbols and Hebrew words, written in a shaky hand. As Ben stared at it, the sun went behind the clouds outside and a cold wind blew through the old window frame in front of the desk. He shivered and pulled his cloak more closely around him.
"What is it?" Ben asked. "Is that what you're looking for?"
Morgan pulled the image away again, but the picture was seared into Ben's mind, the bony limbs imprinted on his consciousness. He knew that he would see the Key when he closed his eyes tonight.
"We think it's meant to be the Key to the Gates of Hell," Morgan said, raising her eyebrows and giving a wry smile. "I know it sounds a little crazy, and we don't actually know whether it's real or what it's supposed to do, but my father was trying to protect its location before he died." Ben heard the pain in her voice, and although he had no love lost for Leon Sierra, his heart ached for Morgan.
"And you want to find it now," Ben finished for her.
"There's more." Morgan paused, her eyes flashing with anger and Ben knew he would never want to stand against this fierce woman. "Someone else is looking for it, as well. Someone who is capable of great violence, someone who wants to open these Gates and let whatever is in there out into the world." She shook her head. "It sounds crazy but what I've seen with ARKANE makes me wonder … What do you think, Ben? I'm at a loss as to where to go next. We need to find the Key, but I don't know where to start. The clues have stopped in Safed."
"Email me a copy of the image," Ben said, "and I'll have a look in the archives here. There are still a few favors I can call in with the theologians of Oxford if necessary. I suppose it's urgent as ever?"
Morgan smiled, her eyes lighting up at his acquiescence. "Of course, but I know you love the chase. I'll bring you back some chai spice when I come for tea next time, I promise."
"Make that soon." Ben turned serious. "You be careful now, Morgan. Your family wants you home again, as do I."
Morgan looked wistful, her voice tinged with guilt. "Have you seen Faye and Gemma?"
"They came to a fundraising event the college put on last week. Gemma was such a sweetheart, until she ate too much ice cream and ran around like a little hellion." Ben laughed, his eyes crinkling in pleasure at the memory. "It's so good to have the laughter of children around the college. We old men take ourselves far too seriously otherwise."
"I wish I could have been there with you all, Ben." A frown deepened in Morgan's forehead. "I want to be home more, but this is something that I have to see through, something about my father's death. I don't want to tell Faye until it's all over so please don't mention I called, but I miss you all."
Ben nodded. "Give me a few hours to work on this Key and I'll get back to you. Get some rest, you look tired."
Morgan smiled and signed off, her face disappearing with the connection. Ben's office was quiet and lonely once more as the warmth of her voice faded. The computer dinged a moment later as an email arrived and Ben steeled himself to look again at the image of the Key. Something about it made his skin itch, as if tiny creatures burrowed into him with jagged teeth.
He opened the file, noting the fine detail of the skeleton, the intricacy of the edges of the Key. He forced his gaze away from the image and looked at the words and symbols etched around the edge, translating from the Hebrew, allowing the mesh of his mind to start making connections.
Ben sat back in his chair, staring out into the quad. The sounds of Oxford faded away as his mind roamed the stores of memory, years of theology and philosophy swirling about him as he tried to sift through the patterns. Sometimes the truth was not one specific thing but an amalgam of many. He had learned with age that the truths of his own Church were built upon the beliefs of other faiths, even the superstitions of pagans, whose gods had been assimilated into the Christian faith over millennia. For Ben, this layering was like a rich silt where new shoots could grow and the compost of ancient faith allowed new life to rise. It was into these layers that his mind now wandered, for even though Ben was surrounded by books and papers, his computer tapped into the vast storehouse of the Bodleian Library, the trick was knowing where to start looking.
After a moment, Ben refocused. He took a sip of his chai, the spicy tea now cool in the ceramic mug. He pulled himself up from the chair and went to his bookshelf, which took up the length of his study, encompassing the entire back wall. Even if they digitized the whole of Blackfriars Library, he thought, I will keep my physical books here until they cart me out in a box. His joints creaked as he stooped a little. That may be sooner than I would wish, he mused.
Ben reached for his King James Bible, one of several versions he kept for study along with the scriptures in Hebrew and ancient Greek. The only way to truly fathom the words was to read in the original, but for this, the King James Version would suffice. He lifted the heavy tome and rested it on the back of a chair, his fingers skipping through the thin pages, familiar verses leaping out at him as he thumbed his way to the back. Here it was, Revelation 1:18: I am he that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death. But this was Jesus speaking in a New Testament text, not a Jewish scripture. Why would the Kabbalists refer to something Christian?
He flicked back through the Bible to Isaiah, a book sacred to both Jews and Christians, and after a few moments, found wh
at he sought. I said in the cutting off of my days, I shall go to the gates of the grave: I am deprived of the residue of my years. The pages rustled as a draft blew in from the windows and Ben shivered a little, feeling the cold deep in his bones. He prayed that it would not be Morgan who was cut off and deprived of years. Take my old bones, Lord, he prayed. But not hers.
The Hebrew version used Sheol for the grave, an abode for the dead, a dark place cut off from God where shades dwelled. Sheol was a neutral place, whereas the term Gehenna was truly the destination of the wicked, the biblical Valley of Hinnom where pagans had sacrificed their children to Moloch. Was this Key to a dark underworld or a true Hell, Ben wondered? The pleading skeletal Key flashed through his mind. It was surely from a place of torment, a place of the dead.
Ben sighed, and reveled in his breath. At this stage in his life, each moment was a blessing, each inhalation a miracle. He turned back to the bookshelf and pulled an oversize tome on biblical art history down, the exertion making him wheeze a little. He laid the book on his desk and opened it to the sculptures of Rodin, flicking over until he saw what he was looking for.
The Gates of Hell were fifteenth-century bronze doors depicting scenes from the Bible, influenced by Dante's Inferno and the inspiration for Rodin's more famous works. The original figure of The Thinker sat at the top of the doors, looking down at the suffering below. The couple from The Kiss had been portrayed in the panel originally, but were removed as they didn't fit the scene of suffering. The effect was chaotic and movement seemed to shudder from the images on the page, the detail of the sculpture depicting sinners writhing in torment, trying to escape the cloying embrace of the bronze sea. Ben stared into the picture, the juxtaposition of so much history of speculation about what Hell could be. But again, it was the Christian Hell, a place of active suffering.
