by Jones, Rick
THE ISCARIOT AGENDA
Book Three of the Vatican Knights Series
Rick Jones
© 2012 Rick Jones. All rights reserved. Smashwords Edition
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For more information e-mail all inquiries to: [email protected]
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Epilogue
CHAPTER ONE
Twenty-three years ago
Senator Joseph Cartwright, an ambitious man whose weighted arrogance was so often exhibited at the podium on the Senate floor, knew he was about to die at the hands of the very monster he created.
Inside the study of his residence, the senator closed the blinds against the inconstant flares from the evening’s lightning storm and moved as quickly as possible to his desk to bundle together some very special dossiers.
There were eight in all, the documented pieces of the creature he helped assemble into a single, unstoppable mass that was forever at the beck and call of the man holding the highest political seat in the land.
In haste the senator bound the manila folders together with rubber bands, his arthritically challenged hands moving with surprising deft while hoping that his death would serve as the beginning of the end of something that had gone horribly wrong.
Closing his eyes and clenching his teeth as he leaned over the files, Senator Cartwright couldn’t help the pang of regret that tormented him for believing that he was untouchable, which allowed his conceit to carry him too far by pushing certain dignitaries too hard, too fast, or without giving any measurable thought of the terrifying powers they wielded.
Now with his senatorial tenure about to come to a quick and deadly finish, the man struggled in hindsight and wished he kept himself from challenging those whose scepters were loftier.
Beyond the louvered windows of his estate, a staircase of lightning struck close by. The lights in the study winked, died, the house then succumbing to darkness as deep and vacuous as a celestial hole.
Feeling his heart misfire to an unsteady beat, the senator realized that the Pieces of Eight were coming for him.
At best he had a minute, maybe two.
Hunkering next to his desk with the dossiers held within his twisted hands, the senator pressed a shoulder against the desk’s side panel and gave a nudge. The panel slid inward, then upward, giving approach to a small compartment the size of a breadbox. It was an area where he had kept the untold secrets of others and often used the information against them as an aid of blackmail to reshape, retool or destroy the political lives of those who affronted his views.
Now he would use it one last time, hoping that someone would discover the dossiers and use them to destroy the Pieces of Eight, and the man who drove their reins.
After the files were placed inside, the senator pulled down on the interior panel and secured it, the seams of the wood matching so closely that the divide of the partition was barely perceptible.
Laboring to his feet with pain beginning to cinch across his chest to the point of crushing breath from his lungs, the senator placed his knuckled hands against the desktop and steadied himself.
Where are you?
Beyond the blinds another stroke of lightning ignited: a quick and dazzling flash of pure, unadulterated light that poured in through the edges of the closed blinds and bled hotly across the area, the quick strokes catching movement across the room.
The senator stood and waited, expecting the punch of a bullet to end his life.
Instead he received a comparable blow equal to a bullet’s impact; it was the voice of a preadolescent child crying out to him. “Grandpapa?”
Oh, no!
In the mix of his own fears he had forgotten about his grandson, the only living tie to his bloodline and the only family left. If the child was discovered by the Pieces of Eight, they would kill him without mercy as predicated by the same protocols he created.
The senator got to a bended knee and beckoned his grandson to rush into his outstretched arms. Pulling his grandson close, his gnarled hands caressing the child, the senator kept repeating ‘I’m so sorry,’ and wept into the wild tangle of the boy’s hair.
“Grandpapa, are you afraid of the lightning, too?”
The child sounded so innocent that the impending nature of what was going to happen to them crushed the senator’s blighted soul.
“I’m so sorry,” the senator whispered as he buried his face against the crown of the boy’s head. “I’m . . . so . . . sorry.”
In that moment he noted the shared features of his daughter within the boy as he appraised him, the child possessing the eyes and lips of his mother, beautiful and petulantly full. “You look so much like your mother,” he told him. Oh, how I wish she was here to see how much you’ve grown.
Two years ago his daughter was driving along a causeway when a drunk driver caromed off a barrier and struck her vehicle head on, killing her the moment her body made its trajectory through the windshield. In the tragic aftermath the coroner painstakingly pieced her together. But it was not enough for the aesthetic appeal needed for an open-coffin viewing.
It was also the first time in the senator’s life where he’d been rendered completely powerless to reshape the outcome of an event. Even with all his command, the senator quickly realized that he was limited in capacity with resurrection regrettably not one of his strengths; therefore, this painful lesson drove him back to the status of a mortal with perceived weaknesses.
But as a man of steadfast conviction, he tempered the loss of his daughter by burying his remorse deep and regained momentum, his power going unchecked as his sense of invincibility rose once again to the surface with the senator becoming a political demigod who ruled over others without the impression of impunit
y or consequence.
Until now.
The old man closed his eyes and rubbed a hand adoringly along his grandson’s back.
Then taking on a more sobering appearance, the senator grabbed the child firmly by his triceps to let him know that anything less than undivided attention was unacceptable. “Markie, I need you to listen to me and I need you to listen good and hard. Do you understand me?”
The boy nodded.
“I want you to find a hiding place,” he told him. “I want you to hide from the lightning, and from the thunder. And no matter what, no matter what you see or hear, you are not to come out from your hiding place. Is that clear?”
“Grandpa—”
“Is that clear, Markie?”
“Yes.” The boy was obviously frightened, his chin shaking with a gelatinous quiver that prompted the senator to pull him into a hug.
“I love you, Markie. Never forget that. I love you more than life itself.” And then he drew back and held his grandson in regarded appraisal for the last time, wondering what kind of man he might have become if granted the time to live.
From the area of the entryway came a sound, the tiny snicker of the bolt being drawn back, and then the subsequent following of the study’s doorknob turning slowly in the darkness.
The senator directed the child with a mild goading toward the darkest area of the room. “Quick, Markie. Hide. And don’t come out.”
As the child ran towards the darkest shadows of the study, the senator labored to his feet with the stiff joints of his knees popping off in protest, and waited with a warrior’s stoicism, his chin held brazenly outward in defiance.
The moment the door swung slowly inward on its own accord a silver-mercury flash of lightning exploded throughout the entire estate, divulging an empty doorway before the flashes died off.
The senator swallowed; his throat as dry as old parchment.
Then, in a warbled tone that sounded unlike the voice of a poised senator, he said, “Show yourselves.”
Upon the utterance of his final word a stroke of lightning flashed on cue, igniting the world in a white-hot flare that revealed the Pieces of Eight.
Each master soldier stood as still as a Grecian statue before him.
In their own unique design they were eight elite commandos with each one possessing a very particular skill. Collectively, they were a deadly ensemble of skilled assassins better known to the Joint Chiefs of Staff as the Force Elite.
They were spread across the room, one soldier a facsimile of the other with waxy faces and stone-cold deadness in their eyes.
No one moved.
No one spoke.
Their military issue was black adornment with unpolished boots and a black beret bearing the team’s insignia of two crossing tantos serving as crossbones beneath a grinning skull wearing the same assigned beret.
My children . . .
Once the lightning died off, the Pieces of Eight became one with the darkness.
“How can you do this to me?” The senator took a step back as an act of self-preservation. “I created you! I created all of you!”
Outside, a loud report of thunder sounded off, which soon melted away to an awkward silence that seemed to last countless moments.
And then with the bravado of an all-powerful senator, Cartwright said, “I demand you answer me!”
The louvered blinds did little to block out the light as lightning once again lit up the study with a spectacular burst that was ethereal in its effects. In that brief moment the senator saw his assassin’s face inches from his own—could feel the shallowness of the man’s breath graze against his flesh and instantly noted the profound hollowness within his eyes.
He never heard the assassin approach, nor did he hear the others leave the room.
He was alone with his killer.
“Where have the others gone?” he mustered, his head searching his surroundings. Was it possible for the Pieces of Eight to move so quickly, so quietly, and so fluidly without leaving so much as a trace that they had been there at all?
“You know protocol,” the assassin told him. “No one is to be left behind.”
“Then they’ll be disappointed,” he answered, “because there’s nobody else here.”
“There is the boy.” The assassin proffered this so coldly and without feeling or remorse, the senator knew they would complete their mission with unbiased obligation and kill anyone under executive order, even a child.
“My grandson is not here,” he reported too quickly.
Another stroke of lightning, the starburst moment providing a glimpse of the face of the man that held nothing more than indifference. His features were young and seamless, his skin tight over angular cheek bones and an even firmer jaw line; he was tall, standing six four with a physique engineered in the weight room with arms, chest and shoulders defined by long hours in the gym. He was also a prodigy in a line of killers, and the most junior of his team.
“Please,” the senator whispered. “I created you. I created the entire team. Without me the Force Elite would be nothing.”
In the darkness the senator could hear the slow draw of a combat knife being pulled from its scabbard.
“You overstepped your boundaries, Senator.”
“So now you see it fit to be my assassin?”
“I’m simply following orders from a higher command. You know that . . . And you know why.”
The senator backpedaled with his hands held up in front of him in supplication. “Please don’t hurt my grandson,” he pleaded in earnest. “All I ask of you is to let him be.”
“If I did that, then I would be remiss in my duties.”
“He’s a six-year-old boy, dammit!”
“He’s also a threat.”
The room flared up once again. In the assassin’s hand was a KA-BAR knife, a keen edge on one side of the blade, a serrated sharpness on the other.
“I found you—made you what you are today,” the senator said. “Will you destroy the one who made you the very heart of the Pieces of Eight and the lead commander of the Force Elite?”
The assassin said nothing. He merely edged closer, the blade poised to strike, to slash, to kill. Then, “As a courtesy to you, Senator, I’ll make this a quick kill.” With that he swept the KA-BAR in a horizontal arc and cut the senator’s throat, a deep gash that parted like a second horrible grin, the blood a pronounced color of red in the subsequent flashes of lightning as the senator brought a gnarled hand to his neck in eagle-clawed fashion. The other hand swept the darkness for the purchase of the desk’s edge, his world spiraling in a maelstrom of pooling shadows with a greater gloom meeting him from the depths.
Just as he found the edge, the senator fell to his knees and drew his bloodied hand across the panel. It was his last act before dying, the mark a final score as a tenured politician.
The moment the senator’s life bled out at the feet of his assassin, the killer began his search of the study.
Those dossiers, he knew, had to be here somewhere.
#
The child had heard the exchange from his seated position within the cabinet space beneath the library bookshelves—had heard his grandfather plead for his life. And then he heard the horrible sound of a man trying to breathe through the wetness of his fount that arced through the ruin of his throat.
Soon thereafter the silence became terrifying to the young child, the idea of not knowing what was going on beyond the cabinet door bringing a need to cry out to his grandfather, despite the old man’s warning.
And then the footsteps: soft, light and weightless across the carpeted floor, the footfalls coming closer to the bookshelves, toward the cabinet door.
Grandpapa?
Surrounding doors opened and closed, encouraging the child to bring his knees up into acute angles and flush to his chest. And then he folded his arms across his legs to draw himself into a tighter mass. The act, however, was not just an exercise of self-preservation; it was also a fut
ile measure as the door to the cabinet opened.
The child looked over his kneecaps, his cheeks wet with coursing tears, his tiny chest heaving and pitching with silent sobbing.
The assassin looked at him pensively for a long moment, their eyes meeting.
In the whitewash of a lightning that lit the study, the boy saw his grandfather propped idle against the side of the desk with his eyes at half-mast, and the front of his shirt glistening with the redness of candied apple. Following the child’s gaze, the assassin noted that the boy’s sight was alighting upon the senator. And then he returned his focus back to the child.
As the assassin looked in, as the child looked out, lightning strokes engaged in swordplay that seemed to light up the area longer than usual. In the assassin’s hand was the knife, which the boy directed his attention on. And then he understood: the knife, the senator’s blood-stained shirt, the man wielding the weapon.
And then the boy shook his head violently from side to side in a gesture of ‘no-no-no-no-no.’
In that moment the assassin reached into the recess, placed a soothing hand on top of the child’s head, then swept it downward into a gentle caress along the boy’s cheek. Without saying a word, the assassin withdrew his hand and softly closed the door, leaving the boy to wonder.
#
The boy was allowed to live.
Several hours after the storm subsided, with the morning sky the color of slate gray and filled with the promise of more rain, the child emerged from the cubbyhole of the cabinet and crawled his way toward his grandfather, who lay against the blood-streaked desk.
“Grandpapa?”
The child grabbed the old man’s arm, felt the stiffness of rigor settling in.
“Oh, Grandpapa.” And then he began to weep, feeling entirely alone.
After the child cried himself emotionless, he noted the blood stain across the desk panel which had become his hiding place so many times he and his grandfather played games of hide and seek. It was the panel of secrets.
Moving the panel he saw tied folders within, eight in all, the secrets of monsters. Pulling them out one by one, he studiously peeled back the pages of the folders and committed the photos and histories of those within to memory.
