by Victor Koman
The Jehovah Contract
Victor Koman
The Jehovah Contract
A theological suspense novel
by Victor Koman
To my parents,
Igor Petrovich and Alexandra Pavlovna
who showed me the possibilities
light, life, liberty, and love could bring.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Assassin
Chapter 2: Silver Angel
Chapter 3: The Contract
Chapter 4: The Bautista Connection
Chapter 5: Pre Mortem
Chapter 6: Unbelievers
Chapter 7: Witches
Chapter 8: Red Mass
Chapter 9: Isadora
Chapter 10: The Damned
Chapter 11: Priest
Chapter 12: St. Judas
Chapter 13: Mortis Operandi
Chapter 14: Eyecatcher
Chapter 15: Promotion
Chapter 16: Poker
Chapter 17: Starfinder
Chapter 18: Magick
Chapter 19: Crone
Chapter 20: Conversation
Chapter 21: Yuletide
Chapter 22: Blastoff
Chapter 23: The Spell
Chapter 24: Contact
Chapter 25: Wheels Without Wheels
Chapter 26: The Endworld War
Chapter 27: Revelation
Chapter 28: Terra Cognita
Chapter 29: Queen of the Angels
Acknowledgments
1 Assassin
I've seen it all and I've done half of it. Frankly, I was ready to cash it in. So the word from the doctor didn't hit me too hard. I was halfway through the
Times
when Evangeline, his nurse, poked her gorgeous head into the waiting room and glanced toward me. Her fawn eyes misted as though she had just said good-bye to a beloved teddy bear.
"Mr. Ammo? Dr. La Vecque will see you now."
I switched off the newspaper plaque and slipped it into my breast pocket. Passing by her, I reached to pat the small of her back just about where her avalanche of platinum hair ended in a cloud of curls. She didn't smile this time the way she used to. That clinched it.
"Learn to take it colder, Evvie. See?" I grinned at her.
She looked me in the eye, her tension unwinding. I gave her another pat and made my way to the examination room.
Dr. La Vecque treated most of the aging bums that hung around Fiqueroa and Fourth. I included myself in the clientele mostly because his office was just a few floors below mine.
The office reflected the social status of his patients-all the needles and drugs were kept under lock and key, same for even the most inexpensive equipment. His office and mine were located in the worst section of Old Downtown-the Arco Tower. The one that's still standing, so to speak.
After about twenty minutes of moist palms, I heard La Vecque rummaging for my file in the little tray outside the door. He entered with less of a greeting than a mortician gives a stiff.
"Sit down." He eased his birdlike frame into a ripped swivel chair next to the examination table.
I sat on the butcher paper that covered the table and stared at him.
He was bald, beak-nosed, and looked as if he didn't take much of his own medical advice, or maybe he took too much of it. He gave the impression of being a practiced, controlled drug user. He tossed the folder he carried onto the counter, rubbed the bridge of his raw nose, and sighed.
After a moment he said, "Do you want me to ease into this, Dell?"
"No."
"You've got about three to six months. It's a form of cancer called osteogenic sarcoma and it's metastatic. All through your bones."
"Sounds painful."
"It will be. More and more as time goes by. I can give you something to help ease it-"
"Forget it, Doc. I won't end my life as a junkie."
He looked hurt for a moment, then let it slide. Shaking his head, he leaned back to stare at me with a technician's impartial gaze. "The State Institute for Cancer Research has a center for osteogenic sarcoma. They could treat you for free. You probably wouldn't get treatment with something as expensive as monoclonal antibodies, but I'm sure-"
"Yeah," I said. "I'd wind up wearing a plastic skeleton impregnated with cobalt sixty. No thanks. I'll go when I go."
He raised what eyebrows he had. "You're a religious man, are you?"
"I'm a man. I believe in staying that way till I die." I scooted off the table.
He looked up at me as though I'd robbed him of some petty cash. That expression reminded me of why he chose to conduct his practice in the middle of Skid Row.
"It's this building, Dell. They never did get rid of all the radiation."
"Yeah," I said, "but the rent is sure reasonable." I headed out. "Thanks for the prognosis anyway, Doc. Now I can plan my retirement."
I waved to Evangeline on my way out. She blinked as she waved back. I could tell she wasn't cut out to be a nurse. I figured I knew why La Vecque kept her around.
I climbed up eight floors to my office, wondering how long it would be before the pain and effort became unbearable. How long until I'd be forced to depend upon the jury-rigged elevator. How long it would ride me up and down before I died or it dropped and killed me. Falling twenty stories in a stainless steel box seemed cleaner than lying awake at night feeling my bones rot.
I was getting depressed. In my opinion, drunk was better than depressed any day. I opened the door to the stately office of Solutions, Inc.-Dell Ammo, sole proprietor. My shoes scuffed at the holes in the rug. The place smelled of the years it had served as both an office and a dwelling.
I flopped down in the cracked remains of a black vinyl executive chair and pulled a bag of whiskey from my desk drawer. I proceeded to get drunk as per request.
It was always then-during that buzzing, whirling spin of intoxication-that I wondered why I bothered. With ten million Panamerican dollars in cash waiting for me, I was living like a maggot. I squirmed around in a dying corpse with all the other maggots, trying not to be as maggotlike as they.
Ten million saved up under dozens of names as false as my current one. And I couldn't touch it until A.D. 2000.
A.D. 2000 was roughly two months away.
I felt like a marathon runner who drops dead right before hitting the ribbon.
I'm in a business that pays very well if you're unobtrusive and keep your mouth shut. Excessive spending is generally a bad idea. Sudden, unexplained increases in wealth will sometimes get noticed. Sometimes a nosey fed or a rival with a contract will start poking around. If he's on the wrong side of the fence from you and finds out enough...
People in my profession usually don't go to trial. They wind up with blades in their backs in a crummy dive-their fingerprints etched away, their retinas seared, their faces practiced upon by amateur plastic surgeons.
Don't ever believe that an assassin's life is exciting and glamorous. It's a marginal risk at best.
Memories flowed with a couple more swigs of Professor Daniel's. I'd been an assassin for thirty-seven years, earning my living exclusively in the field. At fifteen, I had been setting off firecrackers behind the grassy knoll in Dallas. It was a glorious job, and my first. Sure, the Secret Service boys gave me the firecrackers and told me that it was all part of a salute to the President.
I learned right there to keep my mouth shut and disappear after the job-they had their own ideas on how to repay me for my efforts. From then on, it was strictly cash-up front.
The sixties were a fabulous time to be young and building a career in political murder. The one nuisance in my business is that all the publicity hounds stole my thunder. I didn't dare go public, but that suited
me just fine.
The closest I ever came to fame was when they had cameras in the Ambassador Hotel in `68. You can almost see me duck behind that football player to slap one of the guns into Sirhan's hand right after I'd finished with it. I was also the one who gave Bobby the rosary. He would have wanted it that way.
A lot of people thought that one was political. I know different. It was a whole big flap over that actress and what he'd done to her.
That job got me a clientele, and I moved on to bigger and more lucrative jobs. Johnson, Mao, Moscone, Sadat, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Yeltsin (it was like a revolving door there), that Gandhi dame, Duarte, Gore, Doc Rock-I can't even list them all.
Sometimes an assassination doesn't even require any killing on my part. Putting the right person in the right bed with the right blabbermouth is all that's needed. A well-placed scandal can usually result in an assassin from the other side of the fence receiving a contract to clear up the embarrassment with bullets or poison or a nasty case of cancer.
La Vecque had implied that my cancer was caused by the radiation in Old Downtown. Cancer is also the preferred weapon of some of the more patient people in my trade. It's usually employed by those who can lure their victims into a medical room or prison. Government assassins use it a lot. I think it's unsporting. And it takes too long.
Could someone have gotten to me? Bone cancer wasn't the trademark of anyone I knew.
Did it matter? I was done for, no matter how it had come about. So what if someone saw me living it up here and there? A garroting cord around the neck in a stinking LA alley would only save me the trouble of having to cash it in myself when the pain became too great.
I'd made up my mind.
The next morning I woke up with a thousand overweight pixies tap-dancing on my skull. Dragging my head off the desk, I stumbled through a personal kaleidoscope of light and pain toward the hall bathroom.
Bennie the Dipso lay sprawled there, one elbow in the urinal, snoring merrily. I moved him to a more dignified position and used the convenience for its intended purpose. L.A. smog drifted in through the vent shafts. I was glad I hadn't developed any lung diseases.
I finished up and returned to my office for a breakfast glass of dog hair. I needed a shave and a bath. Or just a quick swim through carbolic acid. Instead, I tucked the .45 Colt Lightweight Commander into my waistband holster and headed for the stairs.
I could feel it this time. Maybe I was anticipating it. A sort of dull agony spread all through me by the time I got to the lobby. I sat down for a moment. It made no difference. At least I finally knew what all those little aches and pains over the past few months had been. I almost felt relieved. It wasn't as if I was getting
old
-I was merely dying.
I surveyed the ground floor. The lobby served as a repository for all the old, degenerating losers in the Arco slum area. They sat or lay or piled themselves in dirty heaps of gin and old clothing, waiting for that ultimate assassin to fire his fatal round. Men and women left behind by the spirit of uncaring time.
And I was one of them.
I felt like an old sick dog and knew it. I adjusted my foulard-the hottest design ten years ago, as was most of my ensemble-and pulled myself up to my full five-ten to step over the other derelicts.
I beelined to my nearest bank, over on Seventh. This one contained about five hundred thousand Panamerican dollars from a job I did on a senator who'd opposed private ownership of solar power satellites. He'd been one of those quirks you sometimes run across in politics. He wouldn't stay bought.
I'd decided to be poetic on that guy. He was driving up to his cabin in Vermont one summer day. Secluded country road. Lovely.
I was waiting along the way with a dazzlingly polished parabolic reflector. At a sharp bend in the road.
Easy money. Getting it out of the account turned out to be a lot tougher.
The line at the bank stretched almost the length of the building. The tellers had been shut off-a bad sign. Human substitutes had taken their place at tables set up at the far end of the floor. Guards with neural interruptors and backup revolvers formed a threatening line between the customers and their savings.
Even with a staggering hangover, I figured something was slightly amiss. Pulling my newsplaque with yesterday's
Times
from my pocket, I punched up page one, column one. Since I usually started at the comics, then went to the obituaries, followed by sports and finally the news, this minor item had escaped my attention.
There'd been another devaluation.
The lady with the wheelbarrow full of cash should have tipped me off.I sighed and pulled out my passcard-a slip of plastic with the bank's logo on it. I'd been through this before. The feds always called it a "revaluation." That's a fancy term meaning "the shaft" for anyone on a fixed income.
My foggy brain couldn't remember the date of the last deposit. `94? `95? I ignored the babble of impatient customers and the jostle of spectators while waiting my turn.
"Next," the man behind the table said. Someone leaned too far over the counter, causing him to shout, "Come on, everyone! Calm down. We're converting all currency. There's no shortage."
"That's the problem," someone whispered. "Too damned
much
of the stuff!"
I dropped my card onto the table. A gangly youngster in a red jumpsuit took it and popped it into the aluminum box beside his elbow. Yawning, he pulled the card out to hand back to me.
"Any deposit or withdrawal?" he asked.
"All of it," I said as cordially as possible. "Now."
"Cash or debit card?"
"Cash."
He looked at me as if I'd asked for beads and bearskins. From a drawer under the table he pulled out a packet of orange scrap paper with pretty swirls engraved on it surrounding a drawing of some stranger in clothes more out of date than mine. He counted out ten of them.
"Four hundred, four-fifty, five hundred." He reached into a sack by his other elbow to pull out some clear plastic poker chips with squiggly colored strands sealed inside them. They fell into my hand with a dull, sad clack. "And fifty-eight cents."
I stared at the Monopoly money in my hand, then eyed the weasel behind the table.
"I had half a million Panamerican dollars in there!"
"Which you deposited in April of `92 There's been seven revaluations since then. You now have five hundred Panpacific dollars and fifty-eight Panpacific cents. Next." His gaze darted to one of the guards.
A sudden feeling of porcine enclosure coursed through me. I nudged past the tightening circle of federal bank police and didn't look back.
Great. That deposit had been one of my more recent ones. A quick mental calculation gave me a revised estimate of my total worth.
Between seven and ten thousand Panpacific scraps of paper.
Sic transit pecunia.
The rest of my savings had already been wiped out in the Great Gold Seizure of `93.
Oh well, die and learn.
The walk back seemed longer and hurt more. Overhead thundered the sonic clap of a Phoenix spacecraft returning to Earth. The sound of it lifted my gaze up from the trash-clogged sidewalks. Arco Plaza commanded my attention.
I remembered when both towers stood tall and black like a pair of stone idols against the blue. Now the sky was slightly brown
all
the time. And only one tower stood, if you could call it
standing
.
A few years back, the Red Twelfth of November Revolutionary People's Brigade for the Liberation of the Third through Sixth Worlds had detonated a small fizzle fission explosion in the women's restroom on the twenty-sixth floor of the South Tower.
The whole southern structure had collapsed, taking with it a good portion of the North Tower and blowing out most of the facing windows for a few blocks around with secondary projectiles.
Instant property depreciation. The ultimate in block
busting.
None of the survivors cared to risk living or working near the radioactive mess, so-in spite of superior decontamination efforts-Old Downtown became an instant slum. It promptly filled up with the ignored scum of life. It made a perfect hiding place.
Solutions, Inc. served as my legit front. I even did some minor detective work-recovering stolen property, finding lost daughters, and the like. No divorce work, though. It made a good cover. A cover I no longer cared much about blowing.
I found a phone booth and slammed a callcard into the slot. When it verified, I punched up the number of a fellow tradesman. The line buzzed three times.
"Yeah?" demanded a bullhorn voice.
"Pete-check your stash. The lobby scheme's inoperative. Pass it on." I rang off.
Several people in the same line of work as mine were saving up some of their money to push for a statute granting a blanket amnesty for all political crimes committed in the twentieth century. We'd even gotten to the point of killing the major legislators standing in our way. We'd hired a hotshot lawyer to figure out the tricky wording and were all set with the bribes. Only now, most of us were out of money.
The amnesty idea vanished from my thoughts to be replaced by a desire to forget everything and live out my last months as pleasantly as I could.
There was an area near Old Downtown where the law was most conspicuously absent. Under a tenement slum that even rats ignored lay a labyrinth honeycombing all of Bunker Hill. Inside it, every illegal substance, act, or commodity was available for a price. But this place was different from every other rathole of vice throughout history.
A blind man could stroll through with a fistful of gold and not be bothered. A mother could send her daughter to the ice cream store on the first level and see her return with her ice cream, change, and virginity all intact. The people who devised Auberge had a pleasant philosophy-if something's illegal, there must be a market for it. If it's marketable, they'd attract a much better clientele with a hotel or shopping mall atmosphere.
The armed guards in tuxedos served as the crime deterrent. The managements were eager to retain their wealthy customers from Malibu, the Valley Rim, and Disney County.
