The Thieves of Heaven (38 page)

Michael had finally fallen asleep in the last hours of the flight. It hadn’t been a restful sleep, but at least it got him away from Simon. Michael pitied Simon and yet he feared him. While the horrific loss of a mother would surely be devastating to any child, particularly when the loss came at the hands of his father, this loss had created Simon. And while Simon hid behind the veil of the Church, he was surely even further from salvation than Michael. The enigma that Simon posed baffled Michael. He knew the Church was like any other government. Any religion with over one billion followers wielded enormous power and sought to protect that power no matter the cost or the means. Simon had become the means of the Church. In order to protect it, he would break any and all of the commandments; this man upheld his law by breaking it.

“Meet me at the hotel,” Simon told him curtly, passing an envelope to Michael as he hailed a taxi from the virtually empty lot outside the airport terminal. “I need to pick up some supplies.”

“Don’t be late,” Michael warned.

Simon hopped in the cab and took off without replying. Supplies, Michael thought. God knew what that meant. Certainly not a bunch of prayer books. He slung his bag over his shoulder and jogged across Lehrter Strasse. His body felt fatigued from the flight, from being cramped for six hours. It felt good to give it a stretch.

The traffic was light, so it wasn’t hard to pick out the limo: about one hundred yards off, headed up the street in Michael’s direction. He didn’t pay it much mind. Instead, he continued down Wastin Hagen Platz. The limo—a black stretch Mercedes—continued to approach. Michael cut down Silberstrasse, a shop-filled street to his left. He was probably just overreacting. It was lack of sleep and too much stress. He was just being paranoid.

The limo turned down the road behind him. Coincidence. That was all. Michael attempted to ignore the car. Michael, slowing to a leisurely pace, looked in the shop windows. All were closed but their keepers could be seen milling about inside, readying for a busy day. As the limo pulled alongside, he saw its dark reflection in the plate-glass storefront of a butcher shop: the rear passenger window was coming down. He strained to see the outline of a face within. He quickened his pace.

So did the limo. This was no coincidence.

Michael took off.

The car screeched out in pursuit, its back end shuddering as it spewed gravel and black tire smoke. It was gaining fast, fishtailing around the turn. Michael’s legs were pumping; the adrenaline surged through his muscles. He had no idea where he was headed, the street signs were all in German. The jet-black car was a blur as it cut the distance to him. The vehicle was intent on running him down, of this Michael was sure. The throbbing of the engine grew louder in his ears. Somewhere in the distance he thought he heard someone scream. He needed a plan and he needed it now. It was only seconds until his death. The black German auto was almost on him. And that’s when the question hit him: If he died, what would become of Mary?

Michael cut right. He was in an alley, garbage-filled, medieval and dark. Too narrow for the limo. He heard the tires scream, grabbing the pavement. He didn’t look back. Seconds later, the twisting sound of bending, crunching metal echoed through the narrow street. Michael hurled himself atop a garbage bin, two cats scattering as he did so. He vaulted to the adjacent fence. And as he flung himself over it, he stole a glance back down the alley. There was nothing there. Only daylight at the other end. The limo had vanished.

He landed in a patch of wildflowers on the edge of what appeared to be a large city park. There was a lake at its heart, a lush meadow off to the left, a playground in the distance. And there were people. Lots of people. The up-before-dawn crowd, out for their morning jog, strolling with their newborns, enjoying a walk with their loved ones. People in their daily routines. This was a place where Michael could blend. A place he could get lost in.

He finally stopped running at the pond’s edge, slumped back against a huge weeping willow. It was an ideal surveillance point. Two means of egress at opposing ends led back out into the city, tall cast-iron gates anchored in white polished marble propped open, affixed to the twenty-foot wall that seemed to run the circumference of the park. Michael wondered whether the original architectural intention of foreboding concrete enclosures and enormous gates was to keep people in or keep people out. He couldn’t shake the impression that if the gates were closed, the park would become a grotesque nature preserve, humans trapped within its confines for all the world to view.

Catching his breath, he replayed the last two minutes in his mind. Mercedes limo, German plates. It had picked him out at the airport. It had known his arrival time. It had waited for Simon to leave, had pursued Michael only when he was alone. When the window slid down he had glimpsed the passenger inside. An older man, he couldn’t make out his features, they seemed to melt into dense shadows within the car. But Michael had no doubt. The man in the limo had been Finster.

It was one minute after ten and Anna Rechtschaffen was ready to close for the day, maybe the week. Ten minutes earlier, the tall, dark, handsome hero of her latest lust novel had walked in and Anna swore that if she wasn’t seventy-seven years old she would have hurled her one-hundred-and-eighty-pound frame on him for a roll in the hay. She hadn’t had a six-thousand-mark sale since the Pope visited in ’86.

The man never said why, just that he would take the entire lot, all of them. The gold ones, the silver ones, antique and wood, even the cheap plastic ones she’d bought from the little Spanish man two years earlier that nobody wanted. Didn’t matter if they were to be hung from the wall or from someone’s neck. He bought every single one in the store. She never asked him why and he never offered an explanation. In fact, he hadn’t said much, nothing worth remembering except for that last question. The one right after he paid in cash and thanked her. The man with no name had asked if Freudenshaft was one or two blocks down. When Anna asked him what he was looking for, he smiled and answered, “Stingline’s.” She’d pointed him in the right direction and helped him load the boxes into his car. As he drove off, she couldn’t help but wonder what a man who had just purchased every holy cross in her store would want with a gun shop.

To everyone else they appeared to be two friends out for a jog in the park, mixed in with the other
volk,
approaching from the southern gate. But the two men stirred something in Michael’s stomach and he had learned long ago to trust his instincts. Both men were six-foot-plus. Both wore sweat suits, ran with a sense of power, like professionals, with a military precision. They coasted along the jogging path toward Michael, never removing their eyes from him, maintaining an even pace, he was sure they could run around the world without running out of breath. They were a quarter of a mile off. It was half that distance to the gate ahead of him.

Michael broke into a full-out run, racing for the gates. Against his better judgment, he looked back. The two men had increased their pace to a sprint, their four legs moving in perfect rhythm. And the fuckers weren’t even breathing hard.

Michael was only fifty feet from freedom when the black limo reappeared on the street. Its front grill was shattered but that didn’t seem to affect its performance, its engine revving like a lion ready to spring.

Michael ran harder, through and out the gate. The limo window was coming down but this time he didn’t bother looking inside. He raced along a large mall, vacant and bordered on either side by gleaming, glass-tower office buildings. He could taste bile in his dry mouth. His lungs seemed at the point of bursting.

The sweat-suit twins emerged from the gate seconds later, chasing him down, arms pumping and that was good, there weren’t any guns out—yet. Michael imagined it was to be a silent hit: they’d get him in the limo, tarp on the floor, and kill him without witnesses.

The limo sped along the interior service road, her racing accomplices at her side. Michael swung out of the mall and tore into the two lanes of morning traffic. Cars squealed and screeched. He dashed down the sidewalk, his voice pounding in his head,
please, please, please,
over and over again like a mantra in sync with his pounding heart.

The sweat-suit twins were unfazed by the speeding traffic. They pounded along the roadway only ten yards back from Michael. They leaped and hurdled cars and barriers in their way as if such obstacles were mere bumps in a field.

Gasping and winded, Michael looked desperately for a way out, sanctuary. And found it. Drawing on his final reserve of energy, he veered left…he could even hear them breathing now; no, heaving like he was.

His pursuers were closing in on him. He braced his running body for their pounce, but the blow never came. With his last bit of waning strength, Michael vaulted the two-meter stone wall—the twins hurtling forward and grabbing for his feet—and missing by inches.

On the street, the limo instantly screeched to a halt. Motionless, it just sat there. The twins didn’t bother with the fence, though they could each easily leap it in a single bound. Their faces remained cold and emotionless, their arms hung at their sides. Not a word was spoken as the two men impassively watched Michael race through the open doorway of the stone church.

Chapter 21

T
he morning sun poured through the open
window, flooding the crisp white sheets and landing on Busch’s closed eyelids. He was awake but always preferred to let his senses rise in the morning before he did. The smell of the fresh sea air, like a shot of tequila, always got his blood going. He had designed and remodeled the house to take full advantage of its waterside location. His bed faced the easterly window so when he finally did open his eyes he would immediately see the ocean that had captivated him since he was a child. His father was an Old World fisherman who had sailed the great south bay of the Long Island Sound, venturing out into the wide open ocean, trawling along the Atlantic shelf for seasonal fish. When Paul was old enough, he’d become a mate, a linesman, a plebe, whatever his dad wanted. In his youth, it wasn’t so much the ocean that attracted him but his father. Hank Busch had been a big man. His hands were powerful, his skin like leather. He had a long mat of sandy blond hair and a full beard—Paul could never figure out where the hair ended and the beard began—which was always wind-whipped and tangled. Paul loved his dad, plain and simple, but he dreaded the weeks that would go by when his father would be at sea. Children of twelve shouldn’t worry but Paul did. He knew the dangers of the sea, knew that she could never be tamed and never be appeased and that on occasion she would pull down a ship just to remind the seafaring world that they were always at her mercy. Each time his father did return, Paul would cling to him and refuse to let go, lost in the warmth and security of his embrace.

His father had taught him all the tricks and skills of commercial fishing, hoping one day to pass his boat,
The Byram Blonde,
to his son, who could then follow in the family footsteps. Paul never had the heart to tell him he didn’t care for fishing; he knew that would break his old man’s heart. And anyway, if spending time with his dad meant hanging with the stinky fish and drunken sailors, so be it. Puking over the side when his dad wasn’t watching, that was fine. At least they were together.