Saint

by Ted Dekker

  Another sting on his shoulder, but this one hurt less. The poison would affect him more than the pain now.

  Slowly the sound faded.

  Slowly the pain eased.

  Then he was in.

  He snapped his eyes open and peered through the scope, no longer noticing the blur of insects streaking by. He didn’t even know where they were biting him now, only that they were.

  Carl found the target as he would on any other day, adjusted for the same range and wind factors he had earlier, and walked the trajectory the bullet would take. Then he squeezed his trigger finger and sent the bullet away.

  The report crashed against his ears in the enclosed space, but he took strength from it. His rifle was his savior, speaking to him with undeniable power.

  He chambered another round and sent it down the same path. Kissing cousins.

  Bullets were his dear friends, following his every instruction until they had wasted all of their energy in his service. There was no loy-alty greater than a bullet’s, speeding to a certain and willing death.

  The sensation of hornets stinging him felt like popcorn popping on his skin. A dull ache spread beyond the tunnel.

  Carl didn’t know how long it took him to fire the five rounds; he only knew that he was finished. And that the crate’s lid had been pulled off.

  He clambered to his feet and handed Kelly his rifle. Pain flared through his body. Kelly was yelling something at the guards. “Two pills only. Handgun, remember.”

  She placed a knife in Carl’s right hand, two pills in his left. “These won’t help the pain, but they’ll minimize the swelling and keep you alive. I will go with you.”

  He shoved the pills into his mouth and stumbled forward, glancing back at the other two crates. The buzzing inside would cover any sound he made now, but it wouldn’t take either assassin long to find his tracks.

  He cleared his head, turned to the north, and ran into the compound with Kelly close behind.

  THE SUN would be down in three or four hours. Nothing matters more than survival. This one thought hung before Carl, calling him forward. A buzz lingered in his mind, not from the hornets, but from their venom.

  He understood less of the world than he once had, but some things he understood better, and one of them was survival.

  The other was killing.

  Kelly ran lightly on her feet beside him, trusting him completely. At one time she would have offered him advice, but those days were behind them. He could now survive by instinct.

  “Do you have the key to my pit?” Carl asked.

  “Yes. Do you think—”

  “To the door in the wall behind my chair?”

  Hesitation. “Yes.”

  The guns were still booming behind them. Carl veered west and ran for his bunkhouse.

  “Carl, are you sure—”

  “We have to get in before they’re out. Faster.”

  They sprinted the last hundred yards, then flew up the steps and into the concrete barracks. The air was suddenly quiet. One of them, likely Englishman, had completed the task.

  Carl spun back to be sure they’d left no marks on the cement steps. None. He closed the door.

  “Into the pit,” he whispered. They descended the stairs on the fly.

  Kelly didn’t need her key for the pit; it was open. But the small door at the back was secured tightly with a dead bolt, which he assumed could be operated from either side of the door.

  “Where’s the key?”

  She pulled out a small ring of keys from her pocket. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “I do.”

  He pulled the door open, revealing a dark earthen tunnel reinforced with wooden beams. He stepped in and pulled her in behind him.

  “Do you know where this leads?” she asked.

  “No. Lock the door.”

  “There’s no light. The door on the other end is locked.”

  “Hurry, please. Lock it.”

  Kelly pushed the door shut, fumbled for the lock, and engaged the dead bolt.

  “Is there anything in this tunnel?” he asked.

  “No. It’s for emergency evacuation. Leads to the hospital.”

  “It’s a direct path? Straight?”

  “Yes.”

  Carl turned and walked into the darkness.

  “I can’t see a thing. Where are you going? There’s nowhere to go.”

  He reached back for her, felt her stomach, then her hand. Together they walked into the inky blackness. “Tell me when you think we’ve reached the halfway point.”

  She stopped him in twenty seconds. “Here.” He knew that they were nowhere close to halfway, but he decided it was far enough, so he stopped. Released her hand.

  Silence engulfed them. He listened for any sound of pursuit but expected none. Even if Englishman or Jenine stumbled into his pit, neither had a key to the tunnel. There was no way they could verify his presence here.

  “Now what?” Kelly whispered after a minute.

  A tension in her voice betrayed her insecurity. She’d been through training similar to his own, but he didn’t know how far they’d pushed her. And she hadn’t been in a pit since his coming. Perhaps that explained her fear of it.

  “Now we wait,” he said. “Please don’t talk.”

  Carl squatted. And waited. Home.

  “HOW LONG are we going to stay in here?” Kelly whispered.

  They’d only been in the tunnel for an hour.

  “Until I’ve rested and have the advantage,” he said aloud, thankful for the dirt walls that absorbed the sound of their voices.

  He could hear Kelly moving toward him. Only now had she realized that he’d moved away from her during the last hour so that he could hear above her breathing. It occurred to him that he was her protector here. In the tunnel, he was the master and she was the student. It made him proud.

  Do you believe?

  The soft voice echoed through his mind. Believe in what? In the Group, of course. His belief in everything he’d learned here was the fabric of his survival. He’d actually lowered the temperature in his cell! Imagine that.

  “Why did you move away from me?” Kelly asked, closer now.

  “I wanted to be able to hear,” he said, standing.

  “And?”

  “They entered my pit, walked around, and then left.”

  “This is like your mental tunnel,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  Her hand felt for him, touched his chest, his neck, and then drew back.

  “How are the bites?”

  He hadn’t given them much thought, but he felt his neck now. “Gone mostly.”

  For a long while they stood in silence.

  “When do you think you will have the advantage?” she asked.

  He shrugged in the darkness. “A day.”

  “A day? That long?”

  “Patience is always—”

  “I know about patience. I taught you that, remember? But how will a day help you?”

  “Do you want to leave now?”

  “I’m only the observer. I stay with you.”

  “Maybe it’ll be less than a day,” he said.

  He really was in complete control, not only of her safety, but in some ways of how she felt. Kelly settled to the ground, and he joined her.

  For several hours neither of them spoke. Carl was doing what he did best. He didn’t know what Kelly was doing.

  “Do you mind if I touch you?” she finally asked. “As much as I hate to admit it, the darkness is a bit disorienting.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  She felt for his knee, then found his hand. “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  They held hands in the dark for a while.

  “Do you know what’s so special about you?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Your innocence. You’re like a child in some ways.”

  A child? He wasn’t sure what to think about that.

  “But
there’s a man inside, waiting to be set free,” she said. “I’m very proud of you.”

  Her statement confused him, so he still said nothing.

  “Do you remember Nevada?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve always wanted to go to the desert. It’s so vast. Uncaring of the rest of the world. It’s just there, no matter what else happens. Golden sands and towering rocks. Coyotes that roam the land, free. When this is all over, I think I’d like to go to the desert in Nevada.”

  “When what is over?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer for a while. “It’s just a fantasy,” she said. “Something stuck in my head. I can imagine you and I walking into the desert like this, hand in hand, away from all of this. Do you ever think about leaving?”

  “To the desert?”

  “Not necessarily. Just leaving this place.”

  “I can’t leave.”

  “I know, but if you could. If you didn’t have the implant, would you go?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not so bad here.”

  “I once lived in the desert,” Kelly said. “In Ethiopia when I was ten. I was born in Israel and sold on the black market. To an Afghan warlord who loved me for my fair skin and hated me because I wouldn’t do what he wanted. I escaped into the desert when I was fifteen and ended up in Hungary, where I met Agotha. I studied under her, you know.”

  Another long stretch of comfortable silence filled the tunnel.

  “You’re scheduled to go on your first mission in two weeks if you succeed in your training,” Kelly said.

  “I will succeed.”

  She didn’t immediately agree, and he wondered why.

  “I’ve always succeeded.”

  “The final test will be very difficult. If you fail, Kalman will kill you, assuming the challenge hasn’t killed you already. Kalman doesn’t want anyone to succeed—it’s his way of making sure only the best enter the field.”

  She tightened her grip on his hand. “But I want you to succeed.”

  “I always succeed,” he said again.

  “If you do, you’ll be leaving this place.”

  “But with you. And then we’ll return.”

  “Yes, with me. Always with me.”

  “Will I always be in training?”

  “Is there any other way to stay sharp?”

  “Do you enjoy hurting me?” he asked.

  Carl had no clue where the question had come from. He was talking without really thinking. Half of his mind was still in the darkness, focused on the current objective, listening for any sound of approach. The other half was asking this odd question.

  She wasn’t answering him.

  “I know that your hurting me leads to strength,” he said, ashamed that he’d asked. “You’re helping me be strong. I’m thankful for that.”

  Kelly removed her hand from his. He’d hurt her feelings! She was upset with him. He wanted to shut his emotions down now, but he wondered if he really should. There was a strange life in this terrible empathy that had suddenly overtaken him. He wanted to comfort her heart. He was her protector, every part of her, which meant he could only protect her emotions with his own.

  It was the first time he’d thought of his role this way. But he felt powerless to do anything, so he just sat in the darkness and let himself feel uncomfortable.

  Kelly started to cry. The sound was very soft, a sniffing followed by a nearly silent sob.

  Carl reached his hand into the darkness. When he found her, he realized that she’d rolled over to her side and had curled up in a ball. She lay on the tunnel’s dirt floor, sobbing softly.

  But why? Didn’t she know that he loved her? Maybe she didn’t.

  Carl rested his hand on her hip, frozen by awkwardness. He couldn’t remember her ever being so hurt. It reminded him of a time, long ago, when he lay sobbing on his cell floor, overcome by his training. They’d cut him and inserted needles into him and placed electrodes on different parts of his body and forced him to look into light for long hours and then left him alone in his pit for two days. These things had made him want to die, and he cried like Kelly was crying now.

  It made him want to cry again.

  Carl laid his head on her hip. Before he could stop himself, he was crying with her. He didn’t know why.

  She cried harder then, which made him feel an even deeper sorrow. A flood of anguish gushed from the darkest place of his soul, and he couldn’t stop himself. He began to shake with sobs.

  It must have lasted for a full five minutes. Strange and terrifying minutes.

  Kelly sat up and wrapped her arms around him. She cried into his neck. “I’m sorry, Carl. I don’t want to hurt you. I hate myself for hurting you. I just . . .” Her voice was choked off by sobs.

  Carl sat back against the tunnel wall like an emptying sandbag, still unable to stop the flow of unidentified grief. He loved Kelly. He loved her so very much. The pain she was feeling was his fault. How could he have done this to the only person who cared about him?

  They held each other for a very long time until their crying finally subsided. Then stopped. Then they sat in silence.

  And Carl began to forget the way he’d felt. Englishman was out there somewhere, waiting.

  “IT’S TIME,” Carl said.

  They’d been in the black tunnel for almost a day, he guessed. Exhausted by his time in the pit leading up to this day, he’d fallen asleep and rested for ten hours. Kelly had slept through the night as well, although they couldn’t tell day or night down here.

  They didn’t speak of their emotional outburst, but Kelly kissed him on the lips and assured him that it wasn’t his fault. She loved him very much. They’d left it at that, much to his relief.

  “Can you open the door that leads to the hospital?”

  “You don’t want to exit through the hospital.”

  “My opponent, likely Englishman, is either there or waiting upstairs in my barracks.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He’ll know by now that we hid close, beyond the reach of the GPS monitors, which he’s likely examined. The monitors are in the hospital. My guess is that he’s there, waiting for me to show my signature, or above, waiting for me to show my body. I’ll show myself in the barracks, and if he’s not there, I’ll backtrack through here and come around behind him.”

  “If Englishman isn’t in the hospital?”

  “Then I’ll hunt him. Either way I have to go on the offensive.”

  She considered this for a moment, then agreed. “I’ll exit through the hospital and leave the door unlocked.”

  Carl started to leave, but she held his arm. “No matter what happens here, Carl, remember that I love you.”

  “I will.”

  She reached up in the dark and kissed him on the cheek. “Remember.”

  Carl waited until she opened the door at the far end before walking toward his pit. He hurried up the stairs, found the barracks empty, and waited by the window, eyes on the hospital a hundred yards away. From his vantage he would see anyone who attempted to leave the building.

  Five minutes passed. Then ten. Still no sign. If he was right, there should have been a sign by now. He had to change his course of action now, before—

  The door to the hospital flew open. Kelly ran out. Still no sign of Englishman. Was there a problem? Maybe something had happened after they’d gone into hiding. Why was she sprinting toward his bunker?

  He retreated to the stairwell so that his field of vision covered both the hall below and the door. If Dale came either way, he could make an escape under cover.

  Kelly pulled up to the door and threw it open. “He’s not there!”

  She was telling him this? Ordinarily she would only observe, never report. She’d unlocked the door for him only at his suggestion, not hers. The games were always between the recruits, never the handlers.

  Yet she was telling him that Dale wasn’t at the hospital.

  And then he knew for
himself that Englishman wasn’t at the hospital, because he stepped up behind Kelly.

  Carl dropped into the stairwell. He landed on the fifth step and saw then that Englishman didn’t have the gun trained on him.

  He’d shoved it into Kelly’s temple and was pushing her into the bunkhouse.

  “You go, she dies,” Englishman said.

  Carl’s first thought was that this maneuver had been planned by both of them. Why else would Englishman have waited for Kelly to arrive before stepping out? The coordination was too tight.

  Englishman smiled and jerked Kelly’s head back by her hair. “She’s right. I’m not in the hospital because I’m here, and I’m here because I knew within the hour yesterday that you were here, in your pathetic little pit. I’ve been waiting too. I didn’t expect such eager assistance from your lover. In the middle of the room, or she gets a bullet.”

  “He’s lying!” Kelly cried. “What do you think you’re going to do, shoot me? Agotha will kill you with the flip of a switch in a matter of seconds.”

  “I didn’t hear anyone say that I couldn’t use you to get to him. I have more than forty bites on my body, and they all tell me I should kill Saint. Why not the woman who loves Saint as well? We all know she’s nothing more than a mouthpiece for Kalman. I doubt he’d miss her that much.”

  To Carl he said, “Get up here, wonder boy.”

  Something was wrong, drastically wrong, but Carl couldn’t identify it. Surely Kelly had no role in Englishman’s appearance. She seemed genuinely frantic. Never mind that; she would never betray him!

  He came out of the stairwell in two long steps.

  “Knife on the floor,” Englishman said, pressing the gun into Kelly’s cheek.

  Carl backed toward the middle of the room.

  “Knife on the floor!”

  He raced through alternatives. In the moment Englishman removed his gun from Kelly’s head to adjust his aim, Carl could and would throw the knife. Englishman knew this. A quick flip of Carl’s wrist, and Englishman would have a knife buried in his eye.

  Carl could throw the knife now, while the gun was pointed at Kelly’s temple, but a simple spasm from Englishman and she would die.

  There were several other alternatives, but the only ones in which both he and Kelly lived depended on Englishman. Would he really hurt Kelly? The man would kill him, Carl was sure of that, but killing a handler was another matter.