by Jon Steele
Then a paregoric voice wrapped in a Russian accent: “Now the dog of war raises his angry hackles to fight for the stripped bones of majesty and snarls in the gentle face of peace.”
Harper looked up and saw a tall man standing in the entrance hall. He had long silver hair and wore a black overcoat. There was a black scarf around his neck and dark glasses over his eyes.
“Well, well, what do we have here? If I didn’t know better I’d say you’re the spitting image of Komarovsky. I was just thinking about you, I think. Can’t be sure, there’s a lot of looping going on in my head just now. I suppose that’s to be expected, yeah? How about dropping the shades so I can get a positive ID.”
Harper saw the slightest of smiles form at the corners of Komarovsky’s mouth.
“Give me the whore,” he said.
“You can’t be serious, pal. You’ve already drugged her and raped her, kidnapped her son, and condemned her to hell. Hard to top all that for a night out, isn’t it?”
“She belongs to me.”
Harper smiled. “Well, well, what do you know? You’re as surprised to see her here as I was, aren’t you? I’d say you’re smitten in your own sick way. I get it, she’s rather special. In fact, she’s more than special, she’s one-of-a-kind.”
“I will have her.”
Harper picked up his SIG and got to his feet. “Over my dead form. And by the way . . .” He fired a round into Komarovsky’s skull. The bullet passed through as if passing through a cloud. “. . . sod off with the apparition shit and send in the clowns.”
Komarovsky disappeared.
“Everything A-OK out there, brother?”
Harper turned, saw Krinkle, Astruc, and Katherine standing behind the firewall at the passage to the Place of Mourning.
“No worries. I thought I saw a ghost. Is the lantern safe?”
“Yup.”
Out in the real world, automatic weapons cracked and another Israeli rocket found a target. The outer courtyard flared with a burst of light, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre shook again. Harper watched the light spark on the Anointing Stone.
Flash.
. . . the soldiers haul the prisoner from the ground, drag him to the post standing between the two crucified men. They tie a thick rope around the crossbeam, toss it over the top of the post, and haul up the prisoner from the ground. One soldier grabs the prisoner’s legs and lifts him so the hole in the crossbeam lines up with the top of the post. The crossbeam drops into place and the prisoner’s weight pulls against the nails in his hands. God! The soldiers grab the prisoner’s dangling legs and hold his ankles to either side of the post. The commander sets the third nail to the prisoner’s left ankle bone, swings the hammer, and drives the nail through flesh and bone. The prisoner lifts his head to cry out, but there is no sound. The commander sets the fourth nail to the prisoner’s right ankle and hammers it into place. Dear God, the pain!
“Harper, look out!” Katherine cried.
He blinked, saw a goon with a spear charging through the doors.
“I bring you forever death!”
Harper dived to the side, raised his SIG, fired a round into the goon’s chest. The thing flew back, but it had anticipated Harper’s move. The spear caught him in the stomach.
“Ah, fuck!”
“Harper!”
iii
Krinkle jumped through the firewall. Katherine made the same move, but Astruc grabbed her cloak and held her back.
“We stay and kill anything coming through the doors,” he said.
“Understood.”
The two of them crouched into firing stances and targeted the doors. Near the Anointing Stone, Krinkle checked Harper’s wound.
“How bad?” Harper said.
“Sliced your side. No organ damage.”
“Incoming,” Astruc shouted.
Two more goons with spears now. SIGs opened up and the goons went down. Krinkle pulled a pressure bandage from his overalls, ripped it open, and set it over the wound.
“Press down on this, brother, and keep your head up.”
The roadie jumped up, grabbed Harper by the ankles, and dragged him over the floor stones toward the firewall at the passageway.
“Make a hole!”
Astruc and Katherine moved out of the way and Krinkle crashed through the firewall.
“More company at the door,” Katherine said.
She crouched behind the left corner; Astruc took the right. Three goons crossed the threshold with spears, then five more. They spread out in the entrance hall forming two lines of four. They spotted Astruc and Katherine.
“Give us the whore!”
“Drop dead,” Katherine said.
The first line let go with their spears. Astruc and Katherine ducked behind the stone walls and the spears whipped by. The first line of goons was marching forward with swords drawn; the second line followed with lowered spears. Astruc and Katherine jumped out from behind the walls and fired. Muzzles flashed as SIGS exploded in rapid fire. Bullets caught skulls and body mass; goons squealed and dropped. The floor stones and walls of the entrance hall were splattered with dead black. Out beyond the doors hundreds more shadows descended into the courtyard.
“Holy crap. That’s a hell of a lot more than fifty,” Katherine said.
“Let’s fall back.”
“Wait. Where is my son? He’s supposed to be here. What’s happening?”
Astruc looked out the doors once more for a recce of the ground.
“That’s what we need to figure out, Madame Taylor. Come on.”
They hustled into the rotunda. Harper and Krinkle were in an alcove behind a firewall. Harper’s sports coat had been pulled off. His shirt and regimental tie were stained with blood. Krinkle was next to him, pulling long bandages from his duffel bag and wrapping them around Harper’s midsection. Astruc and Katherine passed through the firewall.
“What’s happening out there?” Harper said.
Astruc leaned against the wall, swapped out magazines in his SIG.
“Looks like the entire Fifth Cohort is arriving now, four hundred more players at least. The word must be out they had the man of signs and wonders and his accomplices cornered.”
Krinkle snorted. “Stupid shits. Only took them two thousand years to track us down.”
Harper thought about it. “With that many goons, we’ve got five or six minutes until they all materialize.”
“How is the wound?” Astruc said.
“Ask Krinkle.”
The roadie was wrapping up Harper’s shoulder now. “It took a chunk out of his external oblique muscle. I cauterized the wound with healing potion, but the tip was coated with snuff,” he said.
“How much?”
“Almost enough to do the trick.”
Katherine didn’t like the expressions on the angels’ beat-up faces. “What the hell is snuff?”
“Here, let go of the pressure bandage, brother. I got it now,” Krinkle said.
Harper lowered his hand, and the roadie did a quick mummy job around Harper’s midsection.
“It’s what it sounds like, Madame Taylor,” Harper said.
“Well, there’s an antidote, isn’t there? You have the antidote in your bag, don’t you, Krinkle? You’ve got enough for everyone, don’t you?”
The roadie shook his head. “Snuff is expressly designed for specific targets based on intel picked up from previous encounters.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
Harper shifted his weight to ease the pain. “It means the bad guys had a crew scouring the battlegrounds in Lausanne and Paris looking for any trace of my DNA. Once they found it they could develop a potion to slowly destroy the platelets in my blood. All they had to do was get it inside me.”
“So what do we do about it?” Katherine said.
“It’s all right, Madame Taylor,” Harper said. “It won’t kill me, not unless they get me again. In the meantime I need to duck a bit faster.”
&n
bsp; Silence.
“Madame Taylor was asking about her son,” Astruc said.
Harper nodded. “I’ve been sitting here asking myself about him, too. How much time till midnight?”
“Thirty-eight minutes.”
Harper looked at Katherine. “The ghost out there before I was hit. It was an apparition of Komarovsky. He’s smitten with the brand-new you. He wants to kiss and make up, make you a goddess in his temple.”
“Bullshit,” Katherine said.
“Of course it’s bullshit. But it’s bullshit we can use. Padre, how long will it take to get out of this place if we blast our way out through the quarry?”
Astruc pulled at his goatee. “If we move before the next attack, five minutes. Otherwise we’ll have to fall back in stages.”
“Right. We wait for the next attack. Madame Taylor, you’ll stay here in the alcove, the rest of us position ourselves around the rotunda. We’re going to stage it so the goons cut you off from us and force us to run for it.”
“Then what?” Katherine said.
“You surrender.”
Katherine stared at him. Harper read she wasn’t that surprised at the suggestion.
“And do what?” she said.
“Tell Komarovsky you saw me take another spear or a sword, or whatever the hell they use this time. We’ll fake it for their bloody viewing pleasure. Tell him you heard someone yell something about snuff potion. Tell him you thought it was over and you want to make a deal: you for your son. Make him believe he can have you as long as he lets Max live. Make him believe he can have whatever he wants from you. Make him believe you’ll make all his dreams come true. After all, that’s why Inspector Gobet sent you on this mission, isn’t it?”
Silence again as Krinkle tied off the bandages. Katherine stared at Harper, waiting for Krinkle to hit him with an injector jet for pain.
“Feeling better?” she said.
“Good as new.”
“Then fuck you, Harper. And as you seem to have a problem figuring it out, I’m the one on this crew who’s going to confirm that evil piece of shit ends up forever dead.”
“No worries. Took me a little time, but I did figure it out. What I haven’t figured out is if you know what it means.”
“Harper . . .”
“Do you what it means to confirm forever death?”
“Yes.”
“And do you have the power?”
“Yes.”
“How? Did the cop juice you with potions or cast a spell?”
Astruc rested his hand on Harper’s shoulder. “Monsieur Gabriel gave it to her.”
“Why?”
The priest did not answer. Harper grabbed the roadie’s arm. “Why?”
Krinkle shook his head. “Sorry, brother, you know how it is.”
“More orders? More orders to not tell me the truth?”
“Check.”
Harper looked at Katherine.
“That leaves the truth-telling to you, Madame Taylor. Why are you the one to confirm his forever death?”
Katherine drew a slow breath. “Gabriel said you were too weak to do it.”
“To do what? What did he tell you about me, exactly?”
Krinkle coughed. “Brother, you’re asking her to spill things from the messenger. That’s a huge no-no. Brother Astruc and me aren’t even clued in to his exact instructions.”
“But Madame Taylor can choose to tell me anything she bloody well wants. Isn’t that true . . . Kat?”
Katherine nodded. “He said, ‘The light within him struggles to live. He will draw out the enemy and wound him, but he is too weak to destroy him. It falls to another.’”
“You.”
“Yes. But is doesn’t mean you’ll die in your form. Gabriel told me . . .”
“Stop, don’t say anymore. You’ve told me all I need to know. Now I’ll tell you something. Komarovsky will get inside your head. When he does, he’ll know you’re lying to him and he’ll punish you. You must hold on until we get back.”
“I understand.”
Harper stared at her; the dead soldier in his head piped up. . . . Good soldiers always understand their orders; many of them die anyway, boyo. Doesn’t mean they won’t end up dead anyway.
“Good. Krinkle, get a bandage and wipe blood on Madame Taylor’s cloak and my coat. Leave my coat here. Get me the lantern and let’s get into position, smear blood over the floor stones along the way.”
“Should we reset the firewall?”
“No, let them come.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
i
Two minutes later bad shadows gathered at the passage to the Place of Mourning. When the shadows took form, twenty-five goons were lined up in rows of five; they carried bloodred shields. The first line drew swords, slapped the fronts of their shields, and marched through the gap in the firewall. The second line bore spears.
SIGs fired. A few bullets caught skulls and those goons dropped; most bullets hit shields, sparked with fire, and fell to the floor stones. The goons formed a wall across the rotunda and spears came flying over the shields at Harper, Astruc, and Krinkle. They drew back behind corners and the spears crashed into stone walls. Harper watched Krinkle reach into his duffel bag and pull two stun grenades. The roadie pulled the pins, reached around the corner, and tossed them across the floor stones toward the goons. Just under the shields the grenades detonated with deafening bangs. The goons staggered and tripped. SIGs opened again and nine goons fell before they reset their shields, then came another wave of spears. One was coming for Harper, and he went hyperspeed: dropping his gun, catching the spear, and pulling it to his stomach.
“Fuck!”
Astruc and Krinkle rushed to him. Krinkle broke the shaft from the tip, wiped it against Harper’s bloodied shirt, and dropped it on the floor; he stuffed the tip of the spear in his overalls.
“You ready, brother?”
“Make it look good.”
The roadie yelled toward Katherine. “They’ve got him with snuff! We need to get him out of here! Madame Taylor, fall back!”
“I can’t, I’m surrounded!”
Krinkle shouldered his duffel bag and Astruc grabbed the lantern; they hauled Harper into the Catholicum and passed under the gaze of the Byzantine Christ.
“And the friggin’ Oscar goes to our sneaky butts,” the roadie said with a laugh.
They got to the far end of the room before nine goons appeared at the entrance. Krinkle pulled his second SIG and fired both his guns at the bad guys; Astruc fired through the locks of the doors and kicked them open.
“Let’s go,” he said.
They carried Harper through the doorway and into the ambulatory. It was dark at this end of the church, and the lantern filled the space with hallowed light. A wide set of stone stairs was dead ahead. Harper got to his feet and took the lantern from Astruc.
“Hold them for five minutes, then catch up, Padre.”
“Avec plaisir, mon ami.”
Harper and Krinkle charged down the stairs. Harper leaned back into a wall and pressed his hands to his sides.
“You doing okay, brother?”
“For someone too weak to finish the job, you mean? Like the last time?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Me. Golgotha. The last time. I was too weak to finish the job then, too. That’s the truth of it, isn’t it?”
“What you did the last time was give our kind a way out when we were trapped. What you did the last time was reset the cosmic clock, brother. BC became AD. That bought the human race two thousand years of hope, and our kind one more chance to deliver some cosmic payback.”
“You sure about that, mate?”
“Ask me if we get through tonight in one piece. But yeah, that would be my guess at the moment.”
“Fair enough. What else do you have in your bag of tricks?” Harper said.
“Enough to bring down the house.”
“How about just enough to slow down
the goons until we get them into the tunnels? Then we bury them.”
Krinkle nodded. “I can do that.”
Krinkle dropped the bag, opened it, and pulled out six small IEDs, all of them radio-controlled.
“These charges won’t damage the church, but they will fuck up any goon walking by. At least that’s what Gobet told me.”
“Go to work.”
Krinkle gaffer-taped the charges to the pillars at the bottom of the stairs. Harper panned the lantern through the dark. It was a huge underground cavern with hundreds of Armenian lamps hanging from the domed ceiling. Icons and paintings on the walls, a large mosaic on the floor, an altar across from the stairwell.
“This must be the Chapel of Saint Helen. Where is the Chapel of the True Cross?” Harper said.
Krinkle was setting two more charges in the middle of the cavern. “To the right of this place, a small set of stairs going down, Astruc said. I think.”
Harper walked ahead, panned the lantern, and found the stairs. He called back, “It’s over here.”
“Cool. I’m coming with Brother Astruc, soon as we—”
Gunshots and flashes of fire exploded from the Catholicum and rotunda. Another wave of goons closing in, Harper thought. Then it went quiet. Thirty seconds later, Krinkle appeared at the entrance to the Chapel of the True Cross.
“—kill a few goons.”
Astruc came with the lantern in hand.
“What’s happening in the rotunda, Padre?”
“They’re closing in on Madame Taylor, but being very careful about it. It’s obvious their orders are to not harm a hair on her head, not yet. Another platoon is coming after us, they’re regrouping in the ambulatory now.”
Harper looked at Krinkle. “Give me the detonator.”
Krinkle handed it over. “Just flip the switch,” the roadie said.
“Got it. Same setup here as the other place, on the same detonator. Shape the charge back into the Chapel of Saint Helen. Then Astruc shows you where we need to blow through the wall.”
It took a few minutes to rig the charges, then Astruc took the lead and headed down the stairs. They came into a low-ceilinged, rock-cut alcove with a simple stone altar and cross. There was a brown mosaic in the floor; it held an image of a plain wooden cross. Harper scanned the place. He saw chisel strikes in the ceiling and remnants of frescoes on the walls.
