Azrael (26 page)

They said they looked, but they didn’t find anything wrong with the car. They started trying to tell him about his father, but Roger got very upset, and told them not to try to slough their incompetence off on somebody else. He apologized later. Maybe the flawed part had been burned up in the crash. He was sure the police had done their best. He consoled himself that Mom and Dad had found True Justice at last, and all the bad luck would be made up for, and all the striving for goodness would be taken into account.

Now he had to face his own life. He was completely alone, now. Well, never completely. He summoned his strength, and he prayed, and it came to him that as soon as school was done, he would join the Army. Yes, he would be fighting, but he would be fighting for Freedom. Fighting for the Lord.

He did very well in Basic Training. He requested to be sent to Vietnam. He met Will Nelson soon after he got there. They were assigned adjoining bunks. But something special happened. Will just seemed to fall into treating Roger like a friend, as though Roger had grown up next door to him in Chicago.

They talked a lot, about their lives and families. Will was a recent orphan, too. That is, his mother had died years ago. His father, a policeman, had been shot by a drug dealer. He’d been working his way through college (there were no other relatives to go to for help) when the low number came up in the draft, and he decided to go and get it over with. “Save something up, get GI benefits, cut down on the work hours, stay awake in class for a change.”

Will seemed to take things with a stoicism that would have been impossible for Roger without the Lord’s help. Will claimed not to believe in the Lord.

“Whatever happens, happens,” he would say. “My father had plenty of chances to go into private security, but he insisted on staying a cop. You put yourself out on the street between the pushers and fucking crooked politicians, you’re asking to get shot. Like the kind of idiot who’d volunteer to come to Vietnam.” He’d grin at that, since he’d told Roger he’d volunteered himself. Roger reminded him. Will said, “Maybe I feel like shooting somebody myself,” and laughed.

Then came the night patrols, one particular night patrol. They were supposed to tempt the enemy out of hiding. There was a reason for that, but Roger never learned what it was.

“We’re dead,” Will had said, smoking a last cigarette before they pulled out of camp.

“You think that way, we will be,” Roger said.

“This is a suicide mission. I won another lottery.” Roger had tried to protest, but Will went on. “You know, I bet we’ve cost the government something like a hundred thousand dollars each in training, equipment, pay, transportation, and food.”

“So?”

“So, when someone is willing to spend money like that to set you up to be killed, you’re better off dead if you ask me.”

Roger asked him, as a friend, to stop, and Will, as a friend, did. The sergeant called, and they went on patrol.

They succeeded. They tempted the enemy into attacking. And it
was
a suicide mission. Fire came from alongside the path; fire came from the tops of trees, from in front of them and behind them. Roger was hit three times. He went down, lost consciousness, and died.

He
must
have died—either that or he’d come so close no one could tell the difference. Because it was routine for both sides to cut the throats of anyone who managed to survive the killing fire. Will had been spared. He was sick and confused, but he was alive with his throat intact.

His only coherent thought had been to find Will. He had to do it by dog tags because several of the corpses had no faces, and one had no head. Somehow, Roger got to his feet and staggered back toward camp. He would have stayed with Will, but the many creatures of the jungle who grew fat on death were beginning to work, and Roger didn’t want to wind up on the menu by mistake.

He was found, after a few days, field-treated, then transferred to a hospital ship for surgery and flown back to the States for recuperation.

And counseling. They gave him counseling. A lady doctor, sympathetic, but somehow too sincere, told him not to worry about his guilt feelings. She said survivors of incidents like this often felt guilt.

Roger smiled and nodded and thanked her for her help, but the idea of guilt had never occurred to him. He had been dead, or hopelessly close to it, but he had been spared. Only God had the power to do something like that. God had saved him for a purpose. He didn’t know yet what the purpose was, but strength and prayer would lead him there in God’s own time.

People came around distributing Bibles to the men in the hospital. Roger was happy to see them—his own had been lost in the jungle. He had a dream once of it taking root, fertilized by the essence of his buddies, and converting the Communists by the miracle of itself. Roger knew how silly that was as soon as he awoke. He was alive. How many miracles did he want?

In any case, he had a Bible, and he read it, and in
Exodus,
he saw it. The Lord sent the Angel of Death among the Egyptians and took the firstborn son of each household. And he saw more. The Angel of Death visited not only the Egyptians, but the Philistines, and others. Individuals as well as groups.
Every
individual, in fact.

Some background material reminded Roger that in non-Biblical Hebrew (and Islamic) lore, the name of the Angel of Death was
Azrael.
“Help of the Lord,” it meant. It was Azrael who greeted each soul as it left the body and escorted it to Judgment. And it was Azrael who was sent to perform the merciful harvest of souls when God’s great Plan said they were ripe. Roger did not believe that the firstborn of Egypt suffered when Azrael called. That would be cruel, and God was Good. They had simply been taken to a better life, perhaps Heaven itself, even though they were not of the Chosen.

Death today was so cruel.

And then he knew why God had spared him.

Will had prepared the way, with his talk about money being spent to get people killed, and the inevitability of death in those circumstances.

It was a truth so blazingly obvious that Roger had almost been blinded by the realization of it:
When someone is so determined to have someone dead that he is willing to sacrifice money and his immortal soul to see it done, the death in question is part of God’s plan for us, and is therefore inevitable.

What was needed, then, was someone who
understood
this, who treated it as the holy mission it was. Who executed the Will of the Lord with compassion and mercy. Who delivered the soul into the Hand of the Lord without suffering and without judgment.

“That ye be not judged,” Roger whispered.

What was needed was a modern avatar of Azrael.

And he had been chosen.

He would accept the honor, but not in his own name. When he was released from the hospital, he went to Chicago, to the Bureau of Records. He knew Will’s birthdate, he knew his father’s and mother’s names; it was easy to get a certified copy of Will’s birth certificate. He became Will Nelson.

Roger stole nothing from his only friend’s life but his identity. He did not try to get transfer credit from Will’s old college when he enrolled in a different school. He didn’t even use his friend’s high school record—he told the admissions officer the transcripts had been lost and took a battery of tests to make up for their absence.

He kept to himself, pretty much, except when he was cultivating the criminal element on campus—the drug dealers, the gamblers, the pimps. He made much of his Army training. He intimated he was insane and acted in a way to back up the claim. Soon, he was introduced to some of the big boys. He was offered a commission. There was a student, a distributor, who was skimming the profits. He was to be put in the hospital and taught a lesson.

“I’m not a teacher,” the new Will Nelson said. “And I’m not in this business to leave witnesses.”

The bravado impressed them, as he’d known it would. He was handed another commission, across the river in the next state, someone who had skimmed more deeply, and for a longer period of time, and who had already been warned once.

Azrael had paid him a visit. He had rendered the man unconscious with chloroform, then he’d done what he could to help him on his way before putting him in his garage with the motor running. The authorities said suicide, in fear of his associates. The job was done so smoothly, in fact, that even Roger’s employer had his doubts. Roger convinced him, and his ministry was born.

He met Donna about the same time. Donna was a home ec major. Roger saw her as a tangible sign from the Lord that he was following the right path. She understood him, and she made him happy. Once he met her, he was never lonely again. And she was a good woman, a wise woman. She was good enough so that when Will (for he was coming to think of himself now as Will—he was Roger to himself only while engaged in Azrael’s work) had to leave campus over a weekend on one of his increasingly frequent business trips, he never wasted a fraction of a second worrying about her. She was wise enough to know she never had to waste any time worrying about him, either. By the end of sophomore year, they were engaged.

Before long, he started working for the Russians. He wasn’t sure how they learned about him. He suspected that someone in the drug business was working for them. He suspected, in fact, that the Russians had a
lot
to do with the drug business, that they thought by pouring poison into America, they could weaken and destroy her.

It was this kind of situation that gave the new Will Nelson an occasional small glimpse of the machinery of God’s plan. Will felt sure that just as one of the effects of pesticides was the breeding of super bugs, the ultimate effect of the flood of drugs would be to breed super Americans, by killing off the morally weak, the foolish, the self-hating.

So Roger worked for the Russians, through college, the seminary, and all during his open ministry as substitute pastor for churches all over the country. They paid well, better than the criminals did, and every time Will wrote out a check for his tithe, it amused him to think the Communists were underwriting so much of God’s work in America.

It was a good life, and a fill-in pastor had a lot of free time to enjoy it. It gave him more time, too, to do his hidden work.

This particular assignment had posed certain problems. It would involve his being on the scene for several months, perhaps longer. Control had told him it could be as much as a year. How could he arrange to get Mr. Nethercott out of the way that long? Will didn’t think it was in the Plan for him to be killed. If it was, it hadn’t been revealed yet to the Reverend Will Nelson. Will had used some of his extra time to examine the whole situation, Mr. Nethercott and his family. He found out that Mr. Nethercott’s son had been selling cocaine at a ski resort. It occurred to him to tip off the local police and get the boy arrested, but that was chancy. Would Mr. Nethercott take a leave of absence to see the boy through the trial? Would he disown him? Or something in between? Will did something he rarely did and discussed the situation with Control, which (he presumed) had led to the boy’s horrible skiing accident, which had lured Mr. Nethercott away for months to stay at his bedside.

Lord, they were ruthless. It was that kind of ruthlessness that relieved Will’s conscience about using them, fooling them into helping God with the Plan.

This had been, he decided, his best mission ever. Usually, to the extent someone honored by being allowed to go about the Lord’s business could, he felt sad. He was always sending to judgment filthy, corrupted souls who had no chance to repent and make amends for their wrongs. He did what he could for them, but the Lord was a stern judge.

But in Kirkester, the joy of serving the Lord was magnified by the knowledge that Azrael had been summoning souls destined directly for Heaven (the two children; Hannah Stein in the first grace of her Conversion). Even the young man under the car was the most venial of sinners. The only soul he was sure he’d consigned to hell was that of Smolinski, who was a spy, a traitor, and a murderer.

Personally, then, he was pleased with his work. Control seemed anxious over the larger operation (it had something to do with Jimmy’s mother, but Will didn’t know exactly what), but that concerned him not at all. If the plotters of the Kremlin were finding themselves in difficulties, it could only be because they were being thwarted by a Plotter greater than they could ever be.

“Is that all?” he asked the transmitter.

“You confirm your mission accomplished? Without complication?”

“Any complications were added later. You insult my competence.”

“My apologies.”

Will smiled. He would have thought the roughly accented voice that spoke to him at times like this would have choked over an apology, but the man had gotten the words out almost as if he meant them.

“Your apologies are accepted.”

“Thank you. Hold yourself in readiness.”

“I am always ready.” Will said it proudly. He was doing the Lord’s work. He
had
to be ready.

“Again, my apologies.” He was getting positively good at it, Will thought. “I may contact you again as soon as this evening, your time.”

“I’ll make it a point to be here.”

“The mother has at last promised to cooperate.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You know more than you show.” It sounded, amazingly, as though Control were talking through a smile. “The mother,” he said again, “has promised to cooperate. If she reneges, the son will pay.”

“I will be ready,” Will assured him. They broke transmission. Carefully (he did everything carefully) he put the radio back in its hiding place.

He went downstairs to the church itself. He knelt at the altar and said a prayer of thanksgiving. Jimmy was such a
good
young man, caring and God-fearing. The Lord would surely forgive the anger and hate he felt after the loss of the girl he loved. When Azrael called on him, he would do it with more joy than ever. Not only would he be sending another good soul to its reward in Heaven, he would be reuniting Jimmy with his lost love.