by Jon Steele
“A play of the absurd.”
He walked on, passed the entrance of a familiar-looking underground garage, and reached the wide steps rising to the ordinary-looking door of a nondescript building that might be the clinic or not. Except for the church, this was a neighborhood of nondescript concrete boxes. Maybe the underground garage led to another building entirely. Next to the door was a large brass plaque with a picture of a Swiss flag and the abbreviation BCSE. A closer inspection revealed this was the Bureau Central de la Statistique et de l’Étalonnages.
“Must be the place.”
He climbed the steps, pulled at the door handle; locked. He looked for a doorbell or intercom; nothing. He knocked. The door was just a door, not reinforced in any way. Harper heard his knock echo inside; no response. There was a mail slot in the door. He leaned down, lifted the flap, and peeked in. He saw a lobby with an empty desk and a long hall beyond that. Nobody was there. Why would there be? he thought. The place was a bloody front; not to mention the sun had just now come up in Vevey. He saw a small notice next to the mail slot. It translated as: In case of emergency please use the emergency call apparatus.
“An emergency call apparatus. At the Central Office of Statistics and Calibrations. Surely you jest.”
He stepped back from the doors and looked around. No button, no switch, no CCTV cameras; but there had to be something. He studied the cinder-block wall around the door casing. He noticed a block three up from the ground and two to the right of the door and flashed his trip to EPFL. Following the little man in the white coat down to the basement and coming to a steel door. Watching the chap tap Morse code against the same sort of stone, in the same sort of placement to open the steel door. Harper gave it a go.
O-P-E-N-S-E-S-A-M-E
Nothing happened.
“Sod it.”
Harper kicked open the door and marched in.
He wasn’t ten steps in when doors opened on either side of the lobby and two squads of Swiss Guard tacticals came rushing for him. Harper got the palm of his right hand up, did a blinding three-sixty before their eyes.
“Dulcis et alta quies placidæque simillima morti.”
The guards dropped into hibernation mode and froze in place. Harper walked by the reception desk and down the hall. He checked the small brass plates at each door. The plaques bore more gobbledygook acronyms for departments of this and that and offices of no idea what. The entire ground floor was a front.
“Second floor. Always took the lift to the second floor.”
He marched toward the stairwell at the end of the hall, heard the unmistakable clop of steel-toed work boots pounding down his way. It was Krinkle, had to be. Harper climbed quickly and made the landing between floors one and two at the same time as the roadie. The dull light of the coming dawn filled a huge glass window and highlighted the welcoming grin on the roadie’s face.
“Hey, brother. Karoliina said you might be coming. The new clothes look good on you.”
“Cheers.”
Harper tore into the roadie with a left jab to the gut. The roadie buckled over and his face met Harper’s right fist. The big man flew back into the wall and slumped to the floor. Harper rushed ahead, but Krinkle caught him in the chest with a size-eleven boot and kicked hard. Harper flew down the stairs and hit the lower landing. Something went crack and a stabbing pain ripped through Harper’s chest. For a second he couldn’t breathe. He reached for the railing to pull himself up. The pain flared and he fell back to the floor.
“Fuck me.”
Krinkle wiped the blood dripping from his own nose. “Did you break a rib?” he said.
“I think so.”
“Good. What the friggin’ hell was that about?”
Harper looked at him. “You failed to mention you got into Astruc’s files on me long before the Paris job. You’ve been playing me for a chump.”
“Orders from the cop.”
“Bugger the both of you.”
Krinkle got up, walked down the stairs to Harper. He knelt next to him.
“Where does it hurt?”
“Left side.”
Krinkle pulled open Harper’s trench coat, pushed aside the sports coat. He touched Harper’s ribs. “Breathe slowly, brother, let’s see if your lung inflates.”
Harper inhaled. It hurt like hell.
“Couple of cracks, that’s all,” the roadie said. “Nothing a couple hours in the tank won’t fix.”
“Swell.”
Harper came up quick with his right elbow and smashed Krinkle’s face. The roadie went over onto the floor. Harper got to his knees, drove his right fist into the roadie’s jaw. The roadie spit blood onto the floor.
“For fuck sake, would you lay off the friggin’ violence, brother?”
Harper struggled to his feet and braced himself on the handrail. He stood over Krinkle.
“What happened in 70 AD?”
“Jerusalem was destroyed.”
“Yeah, I got that on the History Channel. Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Like what?”
“Like what it’s got to do with me.”
“We’re working on it.”
Harper kicked the roadie in the stomach. The roadie gasped for air.
“Hey!”
“Why do I have to walk Via Dolorosa one more time? What the fuck does it mean?”
The roadie coughed up his answer. “Told you, we’re working on it.”
“Work harder.”
Harper went for him again. This time the roadie grabbed Harper’s foot and pulled. Harper hit the floor and landed on his side; pain stabbed his chest again. He curled into a fetal position, his back to the roadie.
“Bugger!”
Krinkle got up, rested his shoulder against the wall. He spit blood again and felt his teeth to check they were all still in his head. Satisfied with the count, he looked at Harper and sighed.
“You always were such a pain in the ass, brother. Stubborn, mule-headed, and self-righteous. Come on, let’s get you to the tank before you do any more damage to yourself.” He knelt down on one knee, slid his big hands under Harper. “Just roll over nice and slow. I’ll lift you up,” he said.
Harper obeyed till he got on his back. That’s when he pointed his SIG Sauer at the kill spot on Krinkle’s head. The roadie stood, eased back.
“Did I include ‘sneaky as shit’ in my list of complaints?”
“Afraid not,” Harper said.
Harper kept the roadie in his sights till he got to his feet. They faced off across the landing, staring at each other. Pain throbbed through Harper’s form. It was hard for him to speak.
“She told me things. Unimaginable things.”
“She’s a dream catcher, that’s what she does.”
“Is it true? Any of it?”
“Maybe. Could be. Probably.”
“Has she ever been wrong?”
Krinkle slowly shook his head. “No. But keep this in your head: She is only telling you what Ella pronounced in the belfry loge.”
“Pronounced. Like prophecy.”
“Like I don’t know what the fuck it is yet. It could be allegorical.”
“Or it could be the real deal.”
Krinkle spit blood again. “That too. But like I said, read my fat lip: We’re friggin’ working on it.”
Harper took a slow breath. “She said . . . She said you told her I made a choice once, that I changed the course of human civilization in making it.”
“That would be putting it mildly, brother.”
The pain dug deeper into Harper’s form; he started to lose focus. He bent over, squeezed his left arm into his ribs. “Bloody fucking hell.”
Krinkle moved in a blur, pulling a hypodermic from the pouch of his overalls, shifting toward Harper; Harper snapped up with the SIG. The death end of the gun was under the roadie’s chin.
“Don’t,” Harper said.
“Come on, brother. You’re not thinking straight.”
&nb
sp; “Step back. Put away the needle.”
The roadie complied.
“What choice did I make when Jerusalem was destroyed that changed the course of history?”
“It’s not like that.”
“What was the bloody choice?”
“Brother, you’re hurting . . .”
“You’re damn right I’m hurting! Tell me.”
Krinkle shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Please.”
“I can’t.”
Then a wheezing voice from above: “Perhaps, if you would allow me to explain.”
Harper looked up.
On the higher landing, against the window now flooded with the light of a rising sun, a silhouette loomed as if floating. Harper made out the broad shoulders, the heavy build, the shape of a man who could take care of himself in a barroom brawl, even dressed as he was. Hospital robe, flip-flop slippers, leaning on a walking cane. As Harper’s eyes adjusted to the backlight, he saw the head of wild black hair and the wispy Ho Chi Minh beard to match; the disfigured right eye and ragged scar running down the cheek as if clawed by some beast. But it was the spark of light in the form’s eyes that grabbed Harper’s eternal being. It was as dazzling as the rising sun behind him.
“Well, well. Christophe Astruc. Up and about, are we?”
“Still looking through a glass darkly now and again, but awakened enough to answer your question. Though I doubt it will give you much comfort.”
Harper lowered his SIG and laughed to himself. Here gathered at dawn in a stairwell of the Central Office of Statistics and Calibrations, a bloody front for a medical clinic attending to the needs of the creatures men called angels, were three of the last of their kind in paradise: one defrocked priest, one rock-and-roll roadie, and him, a dead soldier late of Her Majesty’s Special Reconnaissance Regiment. If only the cop in the cashmere coat walked in, the stage would be set.
“Une pièce de théâtre de l’absurde,” Harper said.
“Indeed,” Astruc said.
Harper put away his SIG. “All right, Padre, 70 anno Domini. Spill.”
Astruc held the handrail and descended the stairs. His cane made tapping sounds on the concrete steps.
“We three were there through the destruction of Jerusalem. There were four more of us then, but they are forever gone from us now. The last of them was Alexander Yuriev. He was lost a few years ago, during the cathedral job. Before you were fully awakened, before you could save him.”
Harper glanced at Krinkle. The roadie nodded. “It’s true, brother. The Yuriev thing was wiped from your timeline. There was nothing you could do.”
Harper looked at Astruc. “Stick with ancient history, Padre.”
“In those days we were on the back end of a thirty-seven-year mission. We held out as long as we could, but in February of 70 AD we had to flee. You see, by then the Romans had surrounded Jerusalem and laid siege to it.”
Astruc reached the landing where Harper and Krinkle stood. He balanced his cane against the wall, looked at Harper.
“On the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av, the Fifth, Twelfth, and Fifteenth Legions of Rome overran the city, then looted and destroyed the Second Temple, six hundred sixty-six years to the day that the Babylonians destroyed the First Holy Temple of God. Then were released the killers hidden within the Tenth Legion Fretensis, who had been encamped on the Mount of Olives. They entered the city, and in a matter of days they slaughtered more than one million Jews. The Jewish historian Josephus wrote of streets clogged with mountains of rotting corpses.”
Harper glanced at Krinkle again. “The Tenth Legion. The same outfit that destroyed Qumran three years later?”
The roadie nodded. Lines of causality sparked and crossed in Harper’s eyes.
“But they didn’t just wipe out the Essenes for the fun of it, they were looking for something,” he said.
The roadie pointed to the priest. “Brother Astruc got inside the enemy’s darknet before the Paris job. That’s how he got all the intel on you. Like Karoliina told you last night, I read through it back to 70 AD, but that’s all there was. Now that Astruc is fully awakened, he’s been spilling the intel he never wrote down. I’m still trying to get my head around it.”
Krinkle stopped talking. Harper looked at Astruc.
“They were looking for us, because they were looking for your dead body,” the priest said.
Harper stared at Astruc’s eyes; they glimmered like emeralds. His form had been cleansed of the homemade potions he’d been injecting to prevent his awakening. But up close, the disfigured right eye and ragged scar running down his face reminded Harper that the priest had tried to kill him in the tunnels under Paris.
“My body. Dead, you say.”
“Yes.”
Harper smiled. “For a minute, Padre, I thought you were on the mend. But you’re still as barking mad as you always were and still obsessed with my being dead.”
“You think me mad?”
“I’d say you’re well stuck behind the dark glass, yeah. If I was dead in 70 AD, how the hell did I make a choice to change history?”
Astruc looked at Krinkle. “He is very stubborn, isn’t he?”
“Always was,” the roadie said.
Harper lunged at Astruc, grabbed him by the lapels of his robe, and slammed him into the wall. “Sod off, Padre, and tell me.”
“You made your choice in 36 anno Domini. You chose to be crucified.”
Harper lost focus and felt himself stagger as he had when the dream catcher dropped the message from the dead lad: You need to walk Via Dolorosa one more time. Harper shook his head, regained focus. “Bollocks,” he said.
Astruc glanced down to Harper’s hands. “Then why do you bear the sign of stigmata?”
Harper tried to back away, but Astruc grabbed him by the hands. He pressed his thumbs into the gloved palms. All at once Harper was seized by bone-crushing pain.
“God, no!”
Harper sank to the floor; Astruc went down with him, never easing the pressure to Harper’s palms. Harper was held by Astruc’s blazing eyes. Harper gasped.
“Stop.”
“John 19:16,” Astruc said.
“Sod off, Padre.”
“John 19:16. Intuebitur eam.”
Images flashed through Harper’s eyes.
“It can’t be.”
“Tunc ergo tradidit eis illum ut crucifigeretur susceperunt autem Iesum et eduxerunt.”
Harper saw a suffering man stumbling through ancient streets, his broken hands strapped to the heavy crossbeam on his shoulders. Roman whips ripping at the open wounds on the man’s back, his eyes drenched by streams of blood flowing from the crown of thorns rammed onto his head.
“Please!” Harper cried.
“John 19:17. Intuebitur eam.”
“No, damn it!”
Astruc dug his thumbs into Harper’s palms.
“Et baiulans sibi crucem exivit in eum qui dicitur Calvariæ locum Hebraice autem Golgotha.”
“Christ!”
Astruc released Harper’s hands; the images vanished from Harper’s eyes. He slid to the wall, tried to press himself into the concrete. He looked at his hands. Blood and water were seeping through the bioskin palms of his gloves. He stuffed them inside his coat, hiding them from the others, hiding them from his own eyes.
“Torture a man long enough, he’ll see or say whatever you want him to. It won’t change the fact I don’t believe a word of it.”
Krinkle knelt next to Harper. “Listen to me, brother. I’m not going to hit you with the dogma of no choice unless I have to. I’m trying to reason with you. We are living in the realm of some very heavy shit. Astruc got his intel from the bad guys over the last fifteen friggin’ years. You know how Karoliina came by hers tonight. Each thread on its own has a probability of point-zero-zero-nothing, and yeah, it’s nuts to imagine either one. But together? From two different sources? They form two lines of causality coming at you, brother, and they ar
e coming with a friggin’ vengeance.”
Harper shook his head. “What about the prophecy? Madame Taylor’s child. He’s the one, he’s their savior. It had to be one of his soul’s past lives.”
“Madame Taylor’s child didn’t have a past life. ”
Harper’s mind began to spin, then came a suffocating weight on his eternal being. Astruc rested his hand on Harper’s shoulder.
“I had the prophecy wrong,” the priest said. “I needed it to be wrong and drugged myself into a stupor until I made it wrong. Because I was the same as you are right now. I couldn’t accept the truth.”
Harper tried to get up, but they pushed him down. Krinkle got in Harper’s face.
“We don’t know the reasons the job in 36 AD went down the way it did and who did what. Maybe the message you got tonight is allegory, but so what? We’re running out of time. We picked up chatter on the Internet. The bad guys are making a move. We think it means lights-out for Madame Taylor’s child. We’re not sure where, but Jerusalem is looking good on all counts. That’s intersecting line number three coming your way, brother. It’s why you need to do what you need to do.”
“What, go to Jerusalem? Choose to be crucified again?”
“Maybe. But one way or another, figuratively or literally, you’ve got to walk Via Dolorosa one more time.”
“Sod off.”
“Listen to my friggin’ voice, brother. Julian Magnolly’s last words dropped in today’s 24 Heures. He released a few lines from the first six scrolls from Qumran. Not a lot, but enough for us to know the scrolls are about seven angels of the Pure God passing through Qumran and telling Essene scribes about a man of signs and wonders, a man they said was crucified but would return to Qumran. The scrolls are addressed to that man. His name was Yeshua ben Yosef.”
“I’m telling you, it’s not me.”
“Maybe not, but like Brother Astruc says, you’re the one with the bleeding hands.”
Harper broke from their grip, scrambled to his feet. Krinkle and Astruc slammed him into the wall. Harper swung his arms and kicked and shouted to the heavens.
“Nescio quod dicis! Nescio quod dicis!”
