Comes a Horseman (63 page)

“It's good to see you,” he whispered, not caring if the helmet transmitted his words or not; saying them felt right.

“You too,” she said. “What of you I can see.”

It took less than two seconds for him to register the shift in her eyes. They flicked up to something over his shoulder, then became saucers again.

In the picture-in-picture view from the rear-mounted camera, he caught a blur of motion.

“Brady!” she screamed. It came though the helmet's internal speakers as a crackling squawk that crescendoed in a deafening
BOOM!

HE CRUMPLED like an abandoned marionette. The helmet slammed against the stone floor. The left halogen light shattered; the top laser-guide snapped off and rattled away.

“Brady!” Alicia repeated.

A dent crushed one side of the helmet, too deep for him to have avoided injury.

Scaramuzzi stood over him, thumping a wooden baseball bat into the palm of one hand.

“When I heard there was a mechanical monster afoot in my tunnels, I was afraid my Louisville couldn't handle it.” He chuckled once, as if to say,
Silly me
. “That's what you call this, right? A Louisville?”

“Brady?”

He didn't move.

Scaramuzzi said,
“Osservilo sopra.”

Two men who had been waiting behind him stepped around and squatted on each side of Brady. One patted him down. The other produced a knife and cut the tape Brady had used to tether the pistol to his wrist. The man appraised the gun approvingly. Alicia saw it bore a silencer, a real one, not the toilet-paper-roll variety she had used to scare John Gilbreath. The man slipped it into his waistband at the small of his back.

“Niente,”
he said to Scaramuzzi.

Smiling charmingly, Scaramuzzi rotated on a heel. He disappeared into the left corridor, swinging the bat at his side as if he were an English gentleman and it was an unopened umbrella. The two men tugged at the helmet. One of Brady's arms and a leg flopped over.

“Brady?” she said quietly. Then, louder, to the men: “Turn it. Counterclockwise.”

They stared at her, uncomprehending.

She pantomimed the instructions, and they pulled off the helmet. Brady's head rose with it and dropped to the floor with a sickening thud.

One of the men snapped a word at Alicia and pointed toward the back wall. She stepped back, scrutinizing Brady's slack body. The man punched a code into the keypad and opened the cell door. The other man lifted Brady's legs and dragged him in. His charge duly deposited, the man scurried out. The door slammed shut.

Before they were out of sight, Alicia was kneeling beside her partner, rubbing his cheek, looking for a wound. His face was black and blue in spots; there were scabbed-over lacerations, but these obviously had been inflicted earlier. His left cheekbone was discoloring into a yellowish tinge. Blood clumped on his left earlobe. When she wiped it away with her fingers, she saw the cut was round and about the same size as one of the helmet's internal speakers.

His head turned, and he groaned.

“Brady!” she exclaimed. “Are you all right?”

Stretching the groan into a noisy breath, he fluttered his eyes open. He said, “I'm not having such a good day.”

She smiled and pulled him into a hug.

“Somebody hit me,” he said.

“Scaramuzzi tried to knock your head out of the park with a baseball bat.” She examined his eyes. Both pupils were the same size and not overly dilated or constricted. She made a peace sign in front of his face. “How many fingers?” she asked.

“Two, the same number of times I've been knocked flat today.” He rose onto his elbows. “First, by Arnold Schwarzenegger's brother. Now, by Antichrist.” He shook his head slowly.

“Do you know what day it is?”

“A bad day. A very bad day.”

“Brady.”

“Sunday . . . unless I was out longer than I think I was.”

“About a minute. I don't think you have a concussion, but how you escaped it, I don't know.”

“Guess your helmet works.”

“It looks worse than you do.”

He scanned the surroundings. “This ain't the Marriott.”

She patted a cot. “Try it; you'll like it. Come on.” She helped lever him up. He plopped onto the cot. She sat beside him.

He leaned into the wall, closed his eyes.

She wanted to ask him about his injuries, about the labyrinth, about his activities between the airport and here, but she appreciated his need to simply
settle
. Even the dimness of the cell could not hide the deepening discoloration of his cheekbone. Arteries in his temple and throat throbbed, slowing as he relaxed. She saw that his injured hand had bled through the bandages again. She squeezed the other hand.

After a minute, he sat up straight, trying hard to appear uninjured and unafflicted.

She told him about waking up to find Scaramuzzi in the cell with her and his reason for ordering the Pelletier murders and the attacks on them.

A spark in Brady's eyes flared, but he was too weary to effectively animate his outrage.

“So it was all a sham to make Scaramuzzi look sincere to his board of directors,” he concluded.

“Smoke and mirrors with life and death,” she agreed. She examined her gauzed forearm. She poked at a bloodstain, checked her finger; it was wet with fresh blood.

Brady shook his head. “I've squandered so many evenings contemplating the nature of evil. I thought I had stared it in the face. I thought I knew it.” His frown deepened. “But I've been raging at an impostor . . . at . . . at the smoke instead of the fire.”

“Scaramuzzi's the fire,” Alicia said.

“I thought Karen's death was senseless. Some clown behind the wheel, either drunk or distracted or careless, swatted her out of existence like a fly. As much as that hurts, what Scaramuzzi is doing is worse.” He raised his eyes to hers. “I've been in my own world, living in the past, mourning the present. I forgot about the real world, where the people I love live. And they're in danger from creatures like Scaramuzzi. If I'm the man my wife loved, then I have to let her go. She's in a different place now . . .”

His eyes drifted away, and Alicia knew he was speaking not only to her but to himself. And to Karen and Zach and perhaps even to his God, with whom she had watched him battle for as long as she'd known him.

“I can't hold on to her and hold on to the others I love at the same time,” he continued. “I wanted to be with her more than I wanted to be with them. Today, I decided I want to be with them more. They need me; she doesn't.”

His eyes came up again. They were moist and red-rimmed.

She wanted to say something comforting but was afraid any words she had would come out wrong, so she just squeezed his hand.

“This isn't the end,” he whispered. He was about to say more when a booming voice interrupted them—

“You're celebrities!”

Scaramuzzi walked toward the cell, his hands raised in mock greeting.

“Everybody's asking about you,” he said. “Who are these enemies who invaded my home, they want to know. Who are these infidels? One person was particularly interested, so I invited him to meet you. I hope you don't mind.”

He turned toward the blackened corridor and called, “Come, Father!” To Brady and Alicia he said quietly, “The poor man is ancient. He can barely walk.”

From the shadows shuffled a stooped old man in black slacks and shirt, wearing a cleric's collar. He raised his head, and Alicia felt Brady's body stiffen, even as hers did the same.

“Special Agents Moore and Wagner,” Scaramuzzi said, “meet my head theologian, Father Randall.”

The old man locked eyes with each of them in turn. He raised a quick finger to his lips, then scratched a day's worth of stubble on his cheek.

Brady and Alicia looked at each other. Alicia helped Brady rise off the cot and step up to the bars. There, they stood face-to-face with the man they knew as Cardinal Ambrosi.

82

C
ardinal Ambrosi—Father Randall—eyed them and nodded.

To his prisoners, Scaramuzzi said, “Father Randall asked me what you knew about me and how you got as far as my doorstep in just a few days of searching. I suggested he ask you himself.”

“Indeed . . . ,” Ambrosi intoned thoughtfully. His gaze had settled on Alicia. Trouble darkened his countenance, though he was trying to disguise it as curiosity. His eyelids fell slowly and opened again as if by great willpower.

“Don't be late for the Gathering,” Scaramuzzi said quietly to the cardinal or priest or whatever he was. Turning his smile to Alicia, he said, “Be nice to him. He has friends in high places.” He laughed, and Alicia realized he could have been referring to God or the Vatican or even himself; she suspected it was the ambiguity that pleased him. He gave Ambrosi's shoulder a friendly squeeze and strolled away.

The old man said, “Please, step to the back wall.”

“What have you done?” Brady said, each word as hard and heavy as a stone.

“Please. You can't leave yet. It's too dangerous.”

Alicia pulled Brady back. They watched the old man lean to the keypad, punch in a number, and yank the door open. He shuffled in and pulled the door shut behind him.

He shuffled over to Alicia's cot and sat. He sighed, deflating his shoulders and chest. He seemed smaller than Alicia remembered him from that morning. Frailer. She sat beside him.

Brady glowered. “Scaramuzzi's pawn,” he said spitefully. “He sent you to trap us.”

“No,” Alicia said, squinting at Ambrosi's weary expression. “Scaramuzzi doesn't know something. He doesn't know who you really are.”

Brady snapped,
“We
didn't know who he really was. Servant of Antichrist.”

Ambrosi adjusted himself on the cot, slowly, carefully, using the time to gather himself. He cleared his throat.

“I had hoped for a different resolution,” he said. “I tried to impress upon you how dangerous Scaramuzzi is, how volatile. I thought . . .” He shook his head, apparently at his own naïveté. “I thought with that knowledge and your desperation to save yourselves—and your son—you would not allow him to come close. I believed . . .” He lowered his gaze.

“What?” Brady said.

“I believed you would kill him first.”

“That's what you wanted?” Alicia asked. “For us to kill him?”

“He is a dangerous man, the destruction he is capable of.”

“So kill him yourself,” Brady snapped. “You obviously have access.”

Ambrosi tilted his head. “If I failed . . . First, I must find a successor. A priest who can carry on my work. Otherwise, who would watch for and stop future Antichrist candidates, and who would, someday, urge the faithful to hold strong against the schemes of the true Antichrist?”

“Shouldn't you have selected a successor about fifty years ago?”

He nodded. “I have had several. They grow bored and drift into different fields. God will send one to me when it's time.”

“And until then, you send other people to do your dirty work,” Brady said. He had gripped a bar to keep from collapsing. He stumbled to his cot and sat.

“You must understand,” Ambrosi said, “when I realized what Scaramuzzi intended to do with the near-death experience prophecy, I attempted to call in the cavalry, so to speak.”

Alicia said, “You told Father McAfee your name.”

“With hopes of attracting the whole of your Federal Bureau of Investigation or Interpol. Instead . . .”

“You got us,” finished Brady.

“I was working every angle I could,” Ambrosi said. “I had befriended Scaramuzzi's closest confidant, Pippino Farago. He was a childhood friend of Luco's who became his personal assistant. I discovered that he possessed evidence that would prove Scaramuzzi is a fraud. I had nearly convinced him to turn it over to the Watchers. I was nudging him toward doing the right thing for himself and mankind. I arranged a meeting between him and a Watcher who would love nothing better than to end Scaramuzzi's reign. That's when Pip disappeared, four days ago.”

“This is the Pip that Scaramuzzi thinks contacted us, and the file he thinks we have or can get?”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell him Pip contacted us?”

“I did. I am sorry.”

“But
why
?”

“To draw him out. You would never have come near him on your own. How could you kill someone you can't even see? The file is important enough to him, secretive enough, that he would never send his men after it. He would do it himself.”

Brady said, “You set up this Pip guy to turn on Scaramuzzi and he disappears. You send us to kill Scaramuzzi and here we are, as good as dead. You're pretty lousy at this whole spy game thing, aren't you?”

Ambrosi smiled. “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.”