Jonas reached up with his right hand and pushed the gloved fingers up toward his face. They moved a few inches, just enough to get an index finger next to his mouth.
Jonas bit as hard as he could.
It was like biting into a hot dog that was concealing a pencil. First leather, then flesh, then a solid and sickening crunch as his teeth approached bone.
A grunt but no scream. Jonas released and the hand was suddenly gone. The weight on him shifted, just enough for Jonas to free himself. He swung his elbow in a tight arc as he twisted his body, slamming it into his attacker’s ribs.
The weight rolled off him and Jonas sprang to his feet. The man stood in the streetlight. He wore all black, his
face only a ski mask. His clothes were tight and flexible, revealing a lean and muscular frame.
It could be anyone, but Jonas knew exactly who it was.
Sonman.
The man in black attacked with speed.
Jonas parried the first blow and sidestepped to his right. Sonman corrected and pivoted, but did not attack. Fists controlled. Balance perfect. Neither man moved, as if knowing intimately the training of the other.
Steady. No movement. Locked gazes.
Waiting.
Jonas crouched and attacked, sweeping his leg.
Sonman countered perfectly, punching the right kneecap.
Searing pain. Jonas pulled away before a second blow could land.
Jonas shifted more weight to his right leg and assessed the damage. Sore, but nothing critical.
Jonas stared at the man as he controlled his breathing. Sonman waited.
Jonas pushed off his back foot and reached with a jab at the same time.
Sonman swatted the fist away, countering with an upward thrust with the base of his palm. Jonas leaned back before contact and dipped beneath a second strike coming from Sonman’s left hand. Jonas wove, and as he came up on the other side, locked his left arm and slammed his fist into Sonman’s exposed side. Kidney punch.
Sonman staggered. Jonas couldn’t let him regain composure. He doubled on the left hook with a blow to Sonman’s head.
The impact was crushing to Jonas’s knuckles, softened only in the slightest by the thick cotton of Sonman’s ski mask.
Sonman sprawled to the ground, rolled, and then bounced to his feet almost as if nothing had happened. A quick shake of the head was the only indication to Jonas his punch even registered.
Attack, Jonas told himself. Don’t let up.
Jonas moved forward, crouching, looking for an opening.
His target would be the man’s throat or the nose. A singular crushing blow. He needed to end this.
Then Sonman reached into his waistband and pulled something out. Something black. After a flick of the wrist and push with his thumb, Jonas saw it was a knife.
Not a small one.
“I don’t mean to kill you. I just need you close to me. But dead ain’t good.”
Jonas knew it was true. If Sonman had wanted him dead, Jonas would be dead. Sonman would’ve taken him out immediately rather than risk a fistfight. But being “close” to Sonman—whatever the hell that meant—didn’t sound much better.
Jonas moved back. The situation had changed. The knife would restrict Sonman’s ability to fight, but a single connected blow could be lethal.
He continued increasing the distance between them and scanned the ground, looking for something—anything—that could serve as a weapon. Even a stray rock would work, but there was none.
Sonman advanced, knife in front, held tightly, daggerstyle. Steps small and fast, a scorpion descending upon its prey.
The distance between them was closing.
Jonas considered his options. To his left was Sonman’s car, parked alongside the curb. The waist-high brick wall was to his immediate right.
He might be able to turn and run away before Sonman reached him. But he didn’t want to.
Then he remembered the BlackBerry in his pocket. It was an older model. Older, larger, bulkier. Jonas grabbed it.
When Sonman was less than ten feet away Jonas threw the BlackBerry at him, hurling it as hard as he could, spinning it with his forefinger like he would a skipping stone.
His aim was perfect.
The BlackBerry slammed into the dead center of Sonman’s forehead, hard enough that Jonas could hear the shattering of its plastic case before the pieces scattered on the sidewalk.
Sonman grunted and dropped to one knee. He quickly got back to his feet, but Jonas could see the man’s balance was off.
Jonas pounced.
He lowered his head and charged into his attacker, slamming the top of his head into Sonman’s breastbone. Sonman flew backwards and sprawled onto the sidewalk, losing his grip on the knife.
Cold steel skimmed the concrete.
Jonas pushed backwards and lunged toward the knife. He grabbed it and turned back to Sonman, who was now back to his feet, standing motionless fifteen feet away.
Jonas advanced, his arm raised and locked in a tight L in front of him, the knife blade now a part of him. He didn’t have to remember his hand-to-hand combat training. It had never left him.
Sonman took a step back, but did not run.
Then the sirens came. Distant at first. In seconds the flashing red and blue lights were visible, bursting down the street behind Sonman, backlighting his silhouette. Jonas cursed the timing. He knew the police were responding to
Anne’s call, and when Sonman had the knife he would have been far happier to see them arrive. But this would be a confusing scene to the cops, and Jonas would soon have to drop his knife. And he didn’t think Sonman would be the type to stay put.
Sonman risked a momentary glance behind his back before leaping up the brick wall to his left. Jonas pivoted and cursed as he saw Sonman propel himself past Jonas and back down onto the sidewalk. He didn’t look back—Sonman tore down the street with a speed that amazed Jonas.
Jonas dropped the knife and started pursuit. “Stop! Metro police!”
The shout came from behind him. Jonas spun and held up his hands, not at all surprised by the sight of a cop with a nine-millimeter aimed directly at his chest.
“He’s the one you want,” Jonas said. He tried to keep his voice firm but calm. “Don’t let him get away.”
“Shut up and get on the ground. Now!”
Jonas did as he was told, except for the part about shutting up. “I work for Senator Sidams and I’m telling you right now letting that man escape will be the worst mistake of your career.”
It was only seconds before he felt a knee in his back and his arms pulled behind him. It didn’t escape Jonas he had been in almost the exact same position just a few minutes before with Sonman.
As he felt the cool steel of the handcuffs strangle his wrists, the cop breathed in his ear.
“I don’t see no one else here, buddy. Just you and a knife.”
22
THE CONCRETE feels good to Rudiger, and his feet bound off it as he sprints down the darkened street. The sprint turns into a run. No one behind him. He’s careful. Crosses the street, scales the wrought-iron fence of a small urban cemetery, and dodges tombstones as he makes his way to the other side. Cemetery lights soften the granite of the grave markers, making them look like giant teeth. Crooked smile.
Rudiger weaves through them. Climbs the fence on the far end and finds himself on a busier street. Some late night strollers. A couple far ahead, one on the other side of the street, a man with his poodle. No one pays attention to him.
Good.
His run trickles to a walk as he removes his ski mask and gloves. Buries them in a nearby trashcan.
Checks his finger. Already swollen with two bite marks just above the second knuckle. Skin is broken but he doesn’t think the bone is. Hurts though. Face hurts, too.
His forehead throbs.
Think. Don’t feel. Just think.
Won’t be going back to the car. Doesn’t matter. He can steal a car anytime. Nothing
in the car to find neither. The gun they’ll find won’t trace.
Can’t walk the streets all night. Wishes he had his gun and cash. He can get more, but not tonight. Gotta stay quiet tonight. Down the street he finds a homeless shelter. No one waiting outside. Rudiger tries the door and it swings open.
Steps inside. Rudiger sees no one. The lights are bright. He wants to shrink inside himself. A woman turns the corner of the short hallway and approaches him. Pretty young thing. Not too young to be unsure of herself. Not too old to have given up hope. She exists in that narrow slip between promise and disappointment.
“Do you need a bed tonight, sir?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Rudiger says, his voice softened by her politeness.
“You’re new here,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Are you hungry?”
Rudiger shakes his head. He doesn’t want her to look at him.
“You’re hurt.” She moves to touch his face but he pulls away. “Your face.”
“Ain’t nothin’.”
She says nothing else about the knot on his head, which must be swollen and red against the death-kissed pallor of his skin. When she turns, he reaches up for the first time and touches it. Skin feels like fire.
He follows her. They pass down the short corridor and through a set of double doors. Small gymnasium. The place maybe once was a school. Cots lined up in neat and orderly rows. Rudiger counts thirty-three of them in total. Only seventeen are occupied.
The woman points to a cot farthest from the other guests, as if she knows that would be best.
“Blanket, pillow here. There’s a toothbrush and toothpaste and some other articles in the baggie for you. Showers are down the hallway if you want, and we have a clothing bin if you want us to find you anything new to wear.”
“I’m fine,” Rudiger mumbles. “Thank you.”
“My name is Mary. What’s yours?”
“Peter,” he says, wishing it were true.
“Well, Peter. I’m glad you came in tonight. Let any of us know if you need anything.”
He nods and tracks her steps with his eyes as she walks away. They’re not so different, Mary and him. Both doing God’s work, in different ways and all.
Rudiger sits on the cot and considers how long he’ll stay. Police will keep looking for him. Maybe search here. They’ll ask Mary about him. She’ll speak of a man wearing black clothing with injuries on his face. Have to keep moving. But he’s tired and...confused. He decides to stay, leaving his fate in God’s hands. If God wants him to succeed, then the police will stay away. If they come and arrest him, then God wants him to fail.
A deep-tub sink stands in the corner of the gym. It looks out of place, an afterthought, perhaps a place to hand-wash some clothes. Rudiger walks past his row of cots toward it. He keeps his gaze firmly ahead, ignoring those who might be watching him. At the sink, he opens a bar of hotel soap—Comfort Inn, the wrapper says—and lathers up his hands. He watches the grime from his fingers swirl in a cloudy pool down the drain. He brings the water to his face and cleans himself, feeling the sting and the throbs from his injuries. The water is good, purifying. He pushes his tongue out to taste it. Soapy and warm.
He opens his eyes and notices the cross for the first time. Small, wooden. Hangs on the wall instead of a mirror. Not the traditional cross design. But Rudiger is familiar with it. Two equal lengths bisecting in the middle, like two capital letter “I’s” on top of one other. Four smaller crosses embedded in each quadrant. Sometimes called the Crusader’s Cross, but Rudiger is more familiar with its more common name.
Jerusalem Cross.
It’s a sign, and it comes at the perfect time. A time when Rudiger is close to questioning his cause. Jonas was supposed to lead him to the One, but he slipped away. Rudiger doesn’t understand why God would ask him to do something and then not let him do it.
He closes his eyes and tells himself his life is a story, though he doesn’t remember much of his childhood before the time of the Preacherman.
He remembers riding his bike after his paper route, because his momma told him it would be okay. You ken, she said. Not that dark out yet. Summer still got hold of us. He’d been coming home after delivering the three sacks of papers he was responsible for, and his momma was wrong. It was dark out. That night had been warm—soft summer night in the Appalachians—and as he rode he noticed the dirt-grey Lincoln trailing him, following like a pack of coyotes waiting to surround an old dog. Rudiger didn’t know why, but he didn’t try to ride away. Just let that car come right up alongside, just as fate intended it to. That was the first time he saw the Preacherman. Saw the gray stubble on pasty cheeks, the long face leaning out the cracked and dirty car window. The black hat with the round brim, sharp enough to cut. And later, under the haze of the single light bulb in the basement, the smeared dirt and filth on the Preacherman’s white collar.
The time between the Preacherman and the Army was supposed to be a time of healing, of new-born hope, but it wasn’t that at all. It was a time of withdrawal. Isolation. He’d never told no one but his sister what had happened in the two months he was gone. He saw his momma and daddy split up, unable to reconcile their baby boy with the thing that came limping back home, bloody, torn, and silent. It was also a time when his ability grew, the way he could see letters in a way no one else seemed to. And it was a time of the Bible, of understanding the one lesson Preacherman taught that Rudiger believed. That there would be a Judgment Day, and, glory to all, that day would be the end of all his pain.
And then there was the Mog. This part of his life Rudiger remembers well. He killed that family in the Mog, for they were unclean and impure, but, moreover, the Somali street sign told him to. Doesn’t regret the sacrifice, but he didn’t fully understand it until the next part of the story: the transformation. The transformation happened only last year. The last time he saw a Jerusalem Cross was at his transformation, when the doctors in the Israeli hospital told him he had the Syndrome. Jerusalem Syndrome.
As the surviving rivulets of water creep down the side of his face, Rudiger thinks about that day—the day he was told what to do. He wasn’t crazy, like they said.
He was the sanest one of them all.
23
JERUSALEM, ISRAEL ONE YEAR EARLIER
THE STREETS are narrow and clogged, the arteries of an old man waiting for his heart to finally stop.
Rudiger separated from his group, though he was told not to. He didn’t care. Groups are for safety and protection, neither of which he needs. Jerusalem would protect him. He carried his backpack loosely over his right shoulder as he walked through the Jaffa Gate. His guide had told him that, at the time of the Second Intifada, a non-Muslim would not dare pass through this gate to the Old City.
A man hoisting a slaughtered lamb barked in Arabic as Rudiger passed.
Red. Blue. Blazing yellow. The fabrics hanging in the stalls ghosted from the breeze of passing humans; the outside air was only a visitor down in the tangled streets of the ancient city and had no bearing or direction. Smell of spice and meat. Vendors shouted, mostly to each other. To get lost in the Old City was an expectation, but Rudiger knew where he was going. It was where he was always going. It was why he booked the trip. Why he decided to fly halfway around the world.
It was too easy to say he was looking for answers. He’d reached a point where answers didn’t matter anymore. He had a new last name. New documents. A job. A small apartment, where he kept quietly to himself. Private Rudy Sonman was killed in Somalia. Rudiger Mortisin was alive and living in Salt Lake City, earning twenty dollars an hour as an independent building contractor. He didn’t speak to many people, but to those who asked, Rudiger received the jagged scar on his ear from a job-related accident. Sometimes they asked for more details. Rudiger never gave them.
The trip to Jerusalem was his first time outside the country since the military. As in all things, he traveled alone, though he was part of a tour group for
pilgrims coming to the Holy Land. Even now, as he walked the streets of the Old City, he did not fully understand why he had come, but he had learned to trust the direction of his instincts.
For years Rudiger sought to end his pain. This pain that could only be eased by the something far greater than suicide. Ever since Rudiger learned of the Rapture under the tutelage of the Preacherman, he was convinced that only the judgment of the world would end the degree of suffering within him.
A flyer for the trip to Jerusalem had initially caught his attention. He knew he had to go. He would go to where it all began, and he would find answers.
Go find an answer. Go find salvation. Bring it all about, and end the pain. The confusion. The thoughts and the void. Pour it all into a new world, where he didn’t have to be Rudiger anymore.
Here, in the din of the merchants and the smell of animal flesh, Rudiger wound his way past throngs of tourists. He turned one corner, then another, the space above him alternating between corrugated steel rooftops and open sky. Stone street smoothed by the footprints of millions before him. Black with filth. Rudiger veered right, up a grade of steps, lost but certain. History surrounded him, buried beneath capitalist catcalls and promises of salvation.
He was closer. He looked up at the limestone building next to him, and saw the letters carved into the rock.
Via Dolorosa.
Way of Suffering.
He had memorized the maps weeks before his trip and knew he was on the west end of the eastern fraction of Via Dolorosa.
There. On the right. Barely marked on the exterior of the Polish Catholic Chapel, but unmistakable.
The third station of the cross. Where Jesus fell for the first time.
The lashes had bled Him. The cross too heavy a burden. As they watched, as they all watched, Jesus fell, the massive cross surely crushing His lungs, perhaps causing internal damage that sped His death.
Rudiger touched the wall. A man next to him snapped a picture, more interested in proving he was there than understanding what it was he documented. Rudiger stared at him, his hand still outstretched, his fingers spread wide on the cool rock. The man backed away.
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