THE JUDAS HIT

by W. D. Gagliani

  “Oh, Simon…” Cat started to scoop his hands in hers, but he waved her to silence with a grim frown.

  “In a moment, my dear.”

  A long moment, but eventually it passed. His hands no longer bled or hurt, his brain already beginning to forget.

  “I’m fine,” he said and she nodded, relieved.

  They caught their breath, surveying the bodies and sliced-off limbs of the attackers. Then they quickly checked the other rooms in his loft.

  “Do you know any of them?” Cat asked, her arms akimbo and her chest still slightly heaving.

  She’s magnificent, Simon thought appreciatively. Now that he could think again.

  He allowed this moment to stretch out too, admiring her long, lithe curves and her flushed complexion. Her eyes were just softening after the blaze of battle and her concern for him. He wondered how much this skirmish had taken out of her, so soon after her other exertions.

  He said, “Let’s find out.” Together they removed the masks from two corpses, and slid the mask off the one severed head.

  “I really shouldn’t have gotten carried away,” he said, pulling the bloody rubber covering off the grimacing face just above the severed neck gore. “On the other hand, they’ve had no problem going for my head. Or my bracelet.”

  In the dim glow from the skylights none of them looked familiar. He held up the severed head and stared at it, but shrugged and let it wobble over and roll to a stop sideways, as if the assassin were keeping an ear to the ground.

  “They ruined my rug, and it really tied the room together.”

  “I’m taking pictures,” said Cat, ignoring his movie quote humor and swiping her phone. “We’ll try facial recognition.”

  “I’m betting no. They’re low-level cannon-fodder types, same as those who almost got me at the airport.”

  “Why send only three this time?”

  “Maybe there are more out there waiting to jump us. Or maybe these were better trained and therefore should have had better results. Should have been our heads messing up the floor. Either way, we’d better get out of here.” His entry was trashed, a couple low tables splintered and a mirror shattered.

  “But Simon, this is where you live!”

  He chuckled. He had other safehouses, but perhaps she didn’t know about them.

  Hmmm.

  He got on his phone, making the coded call request for a clean-up crew. The blood would be a bitch to remove, but they were magicians—he smirked—and they’d leave behind not a trace. He was on hold, mindlessly tapping his foot to an Abba piece he’d rather have forgotten. Really? Hold music? Do the corporate pirates have their fingers in everything?

  To Cat, “We can’t stay here anyway, it’s too exposed—obviously the Opposition knows more than I thought. Don’t worry, though, we don’t quite have to leave.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He held up a finger and spoke into the slim phone. “I need commercial cleaning at my location, no delay.” The operator would check his identity with a voiceprint match.

  He muted the phone. “Tell you in a second,” he whispered. “They’ll call when it’s done.” Cat stepped away to scan titles on a bookcase that had miraculously survived.

  He finished the call. “I’ll show you what I mean, Cat.”

  Simon stepped behind the short bar in the main room’s corner. There were shelves lined with his favorite liquors and a mirror set in the wall. He pressed a hidden switch and the mirrored section slid sideways into an invisible recess. Left exposed was a red velvet board full of weaponry: an array of knives, pistols, several submachine guns and rifles all clipped to the wall.

  “I may be damned near immortal, but I don’t have any other superpowers,” he explained. “Well, except that other one.”

  Cat cluck-clucked. “I hate guns.”

  “Me too, but they come in handy when you do my job.” He selected a second compact SIG Sauer pistol and gave it to Cat. She took a full magazine, slammed it home and racked the slide expertly. He stuffed more magazines in his pockets, and made a set of Gil Hibben knives disappear.

  “Anything else?”

  She perused the choices. “Well, considering how hard they’re trying to get you, an anti-tank missile might come in handy.”

  “Sorry, not here. But my place in Texas…”

  She slapped him playfully on the arm.

  “No, seriously,” he said.

  He looked longingly at an MP5 submachine gun with laser sight, but decided against it. Too much trouble if they were stopped by terrorist-hunters—getting them out of it could prove difficult since his pushing talent worked best one on one. And there was Vandenberg—he couldn’t be held off forever.

  He slid the panel closed, then led her to the staircase and up to the loft’s sleeping quarters. At the rear of the large space was a small guest bedroom with an en-suite. In the bedroom’s walk-in closet, another secret panel disguised as a dressing station slid open, revealing the top of a narrow staircase. Small bulbs in sconces immediately flicked on.

  “Really?” She raised a pretty eyebrow.

  “I bought this place when it first went co-op in the Seventies. I had some improvements made by very good contractors, all of whom have sadly passed on by now. Not my work, by the way.”

  He led the way down, past a landing she assumed was the loft’s main floor, and kept going. The passage was carpeted and well-paneled in oak, but narrow—they had to step down in single file. When they reached bottom, another floor down, he thumbed a switch and another panel slid open to reveal the back of a well-filled walk-in closet. Outside it they found themselves in a master bedroom.

  Cat peered around. “Is this the loft right below yours?”

  “Indeed. I bought them both and had them updated to my specifications. I really liked this fine old building, and I could see the potential uses of a second bachelor pad below mine. This loft’s tenant has a different name and background, and travels a lot. A fancy maid service keeps it spotless for me…er, him.”

  He led her into the sleeping quarters—another king-size bed, she noted—and then down into the great room, which was decorated in a completely different style.

  “Here we are, a new temporary base of operations.”

  “Impressive, Simon. Very impressive.”

  “We near-immortals aim to please.”

  “Now what?”

  “Now,” he said, “we get more ambitious about finding out who wants me dead. Who is the head of this poisonous snake? Then we cut it off.”

  “We have a whole department of analysts and intelligence gatherers trying to figure it out, Simon, but other than knowing their silly name, we haven’t yet found where their money comes from.”

  There was a nice wood and glass bar. He mixed two of his Manhattans, handed her one.

  “Do we have time?”

  “I don’t see why not.” He waved her to a maroon leather sofa, and they clinked glasses. Then he related specifics about Vandenberg’s witness and how he was murdered with a bomb earlier, and Simon’s surviving attacker slitting his own throat.

  “Thanks for sending the photos,” she said. “Our people are working on it. We have the latest software…”

  “But my point is that as long as they are all willing to die rather than be captured, we’re not going to find their leader. He—or she, I suppose—is too well insulated and it’s hard to imagine any of them will give him up. Or her.”

  Cat laughed infectiously. “It’s all right, Simon, you don’t have to be so politically correct. Anyway, most megalomaniacs and sociopathic psychopaths are men anyway.”

  “Touché.”

  She sipped her drink. “It’s good.” Then: “How do you do it?”

  “First I dribble two dashes of bitters over the rocks, then I measure the exact amount of Vermouth, then I drop in the Kalamata olive—”

  “Silly, I mean how do you take all this so nonchalantly. All these assassins hunting you? Your immortality? Y
our allegiance…?”

  He set down his glass and looked intensely into her eyes. She’d never been so disarmed in his company. He wanted to reach out and take her lovely cheeks in his hands and guide her to him.

  But he sensed she wasn’t ready. She was conflicted. He chose not to complicate matters. Yet.

  “You didn’t come all this way just to baby-sit me, did you, Moneypenny?”

  For a moment a sudden flash of fury blazed in her eyes and he thought she would slap him again, but instead she softened her curled lip into a chuckle.

  “I convinced Martin I should come to use my—unofficial—abilities to do just what you mentioned. Find the leader of the New Golden Dawn. Martin is doing all he can with his normal resources, but…”

  “But you represent the abnormal?”

  She shrugged. “I’m just the newest cog in an ancient and complex machine, Simon.”

  “I’ll drink to cogs,” he said, and they touched glasses.

  Chapter 40

  Tomb KV 34, The Valley of the Kings

  Egypt

  Dr. Akil Kazem stared uncomprehendingly at the gun Jill Harris held steadily on him. She looked magnificent, like out of a classic desert B-movie. But she frightened him terribly. He tapped his pocket harder, still searching.

  The pills.

  He needed a pill.

  “Jill,” he said, but his voice was hoarse and he tried to clear his throat. “Jill, I thought we were in love.”

  He knew how silly that sounded now that he faced the muzzle of her gun, but it was all he could think to say. He flashed on memories of her face near his groin with his hands in her hair, that wonderful body beneath and above his, straddling him and leaning far back until he thought he could reach her very soul through her sex, her eyes closing as she screamed out her pleasure. These memories were at odds with the Jill he saw now.

  She noticed his confusion.

  She chuckled coldly.

  He cleared his throat again. Pain was starting to cross his torso. The pleasantly warm memories faded, replaced by mounting fear.

  Jill Harris said in a rush, “Whatever is wrong with you, open the compartment first. Open it now, and we’ll get you to a doctor.”

  Kazem felt a stab of pain that would not diminish. His hand scrabbled at his pants pocket. “Pills,” he muttered weakly.

  “What?” she said, smiling. The smile did not reach her limpid eyes. “What did you say?”

  “I—I need pills. Heart…”

  “Get them,” Jill ordered Yusef, who crossed the space between them and roughly felt the archaeologist’s pockets as if he were a pack mule wearing saddlebags. After rummaging, eventually Yusef found the bottle, dug it just as roughly out of the pocket, and held it out to Jill.

  “Not to me, you idi—just give them to him!”

  Kazem took the bottle, struggled with it and managed to pop open the cap. Child-proof? What had he been reduced to, after all the dreams? He was ready to cry.

  He swallowed a pill and waited for the pain to subside. It did, but not altogether much.

  “Now open the compartment.” She gestured with the gun.

  “Wh-what about a doctor?” Almost afraid to speak, as if it would break him. “You said—”

  “After the compartment. Open it.”

  Kazem staggered toward the pillar. Quickly he located the right line of hieroglyphs, and let his finger trace the fading symbols across the pillar’s width until he reached the seventeenth mention of Osiris, the symbol of which was a stylized eye. Not quite the eye of Horus, but the two symbols were similar. He pressed the pupil once, took his finger off, counted slowly to five, and pressed it again.

  They heard a faint rumble, then a tortured scraping of stone on stone, as a relatively small counterweight hidden inside the pillar moved for only the second time in countless centuries. On the opposite face, a rectangular doorway—the edges of which were disguised in a groove surrounding various panels of glyphs—opened with jerky motions.

  It was only about a foot square, but when it opened Kazem wanted to shout for joy all over again.

  There it was...He’d panicked, thinking someone had removed it—but no, it was in the secret compartment. A treasure unlike any he had expected. A treasure that had given him nightmares, visions of asps slithering into and nesting in his hollowed-out skull.

  The eight-inch statuette was fashioned mostly of solid gold—hence the weight—with lapis lazuli highlights and some other metal inlays. Silver, perhaps?

  But the statuette’s most crucial feature was the subject it depicted.

  Apparently it was an early example of Egyptian anti-Christian sentiment created perhaps a century or two after Cleopatra’s time, when she was still revered by some religious cults, for it seemed to be a portrait of her likeness with snakes—asps, as in his nightmare—and a graphic depiction of the fate with which the famous female Pharaoh might have threatened either a Christian figure or Christ himself, though it was hard to tell because the faces had been left—most likely—intentionally primitive. It was an abomination born of hatred and disgust, and it was beautiful.

  “Jill—”

  “Shut up. Yusef, take the statue.”

  “Jill, I think—why can’t we…must we?”

  “I said, shut up. You think all those times we fucked I enjoyed it? You think I didn’t take three showers afterwards? You think I didn’t stick my head in the toilet and vomit out your taste, your smell, your touch? It’s called acting, you self-important piece of shit.”

  Kazem was thunderstruck. The violence of Jill’s words, the venom she spewed. He opened his mouth to protest, to defend himself, to try one last time to convince her that what he’d felt was real. He hadn’t mentioned it, but he’d begun to consider reneging on the deal to keep the find private. Sure, there was a lot of money on the table, but he’d suddenly remembered his boyhood dreams of fame and fortune made in his field, not from some private bribe. No, he could have all the same things, but also the respect he had always sought. His reputation would rise sky-high, just the obscene quality of it would make him famous, and he’d take a much better job and his book would sell, and they’d make a movie, and…

  The jolt lanced through his upper torso like a lightning bolt, and his limbs seemed to go numb all at the same time. His breath caught in his throat. His eyes widened.

  The pill…

  The pill should have saved him.

  He wanted to check the bottle, to look at the pills, but he knew it was no use.

  Jill Harris stood over Akil Kazem as he groaned and buckled on his side. She watched as the massive heart attack shut down his functions one by one. Then she crouched before him while he shuddered, watching the light fade from his eyes. Melodramatically, his face seemed to register both fear and puzzlement. And that was the expression in which his features froze.

  Dead in a famous tomb of the dead, but not nearly as famous as the other tenants.

  Jill Harris chuckled again. He’d saved her the use of a messy bullet, but she’d made certain it could end this way. Replacing his pills had been simple—sex always knocked him out. She shuddered. Glad that’s over.

  “Looks like the esteemed doctor had that final coronary he feared. Follow me with that thing, Yusef. Don’t drop it. It’s worth a few dollars.”

  She closed the compartment. No one would ever find it again. The mystery of Kazem’s after-hours death in the tomb would endure.

  Checked her watch. The Kessler jet was waiting, the right palms greased. The crate was in the truck. Now to get the statue out of the country and into Kessler’s eager hands. Her share would be tremendous wealth and immortality. What else was there to desire?

  She resisted the urge to spit on the corpse of Dr. Akil Kazem.

  Chapter 41

  The Pinnacle (Kessler Building)

  Pinnacle Industries International Headquarters

  Manhattan, New York

  Pieter Curtis was relieved when he could report good n
ews. The boss did not take bad news well. He had no doubt his own skin was on the line more often than he imagined.

  They were in the round room, where Kessler had been staring at his new playthings. There were two, and Curtis knew his people could not rest until the other three were obtained.

  Kessler looked like a kid drooling over ice cream.

  Curtis was wary, worried Kessler could detect his line of thinking. He was never quite sure how much power Kessler possessed, power of the magickal sort, but he’d seen enough small impossibilities to give even a bastard of an old mercenary like him second thoughts when dealing with the boss.

  Or the boss’s lady.

  The Russian babe was lying sideways on a settee across the room, watching with amusement as Curtis bowed and scraped.

  He hated her.

  He hated her for her icy beauty. He hated her for her sizzling sexuality. And he hated her for the power she wielded within Kessler’s empire.

  Which meant that Curtis hated her magickal power the most, because it was with such power that had bought her influence.

  He hated that whatever power Kessler expected to receive from the ritual he would share first with this ice queen—who always looked at Curtis the way a pedestrian looks at shit she’s just stepped in.

  “News for me, Curtis?” Kessler’s eyes never left the figurines, the gross crucifix with the Christ sporting a hard-on and the statue from that tiny midwestern museum, in which the serpent figure was giving it to a rough-looking Christ in the rear.

  Nice stuff.

  Wouldn’t win any art prizes, that was sure.

  But it would gain all of them power, and he would benefit too. Part of him wondered if all the other artifacts were made of gold, and how much they would be worth if the ritual thing didn’t pan out. Pieter Curtis was a fan of the Plan B concept.

  He said, “Yes, sir. News from Cairo. Harris is taking possession of a statue any time now.”

  “That is excellent news.” Kessler smiled coldly. “No problems this time?”