Wild Cards: Death Draws Five (5 page)

An intricate baroque altar of black marble ornamented with detailed bronze friezes, sat atop three marble steps under the center of the soaring dome. The altar was surrounded by what looked like golden bars, but according to the guidebook the apparently metal bars were actually only gilt wood. Four marble angels holding unlit silver lamps clustered protectively around the altar like holy guardians. A reliquary, an iron box covered in intricate silver facings and spangled with precious stones, sat atop the altar’s highest point, protected by a gilded iron fence.

“There,” Nighthawk said quietly, gesturing at the reliquary.

Grubbs grinned. “Like taking candy from a baby,” he said.

He went up the marble dais, brushing away the gilt wood fence contemptuously as if it wasn’t even there. One of the guardian angels stood close enough to give him a boost up the altar. He clambered up to the altar’s pinnacle and braced himself to get a good grip on the gilded iron bars caging the reliquary. He pulled hard and a length of grillwork broke away with a loud screech.

Nighthawk glanced around the darkened room. It was probable that the chapel had a security system of some kind, but they’d been unable to discover any details concerning it. A brotherhood called the Savoias was charged with protecting it since an anti-religious fanatic had tried to burn it down a couple of years before.

“Careful,” Nighthawk hissed.

“Don’t worry,” Grubbs said in a too-loud voice. He reached out and lifted the reliquary effortlessly, though it must have weighed several hundred pounds. He held it over his head triumphantly. “The Mandylion is ours!” he said ecstatically, and John’s revelation suddenly came true as a single shot rang out from somewhere in the shadows and struck Grubbs right in the middle of his chest.

Grubbs’ expression changed only slightly, crossing that thin line from ecstatic to pained, and he slipped from his perch atop the altar, falling heavily against one of the statues that decorated the altar’s middle tier like a tiny bridegroom on an overly-ornate wedding cake. The reliquary slipped from his fingers, bumped the same statue and bounced with a thunderous boom onto the marble altar, then rolled downward and crashed through the remnants of the gilt guardrail.

The reverberations from the single shot still echoed across the chapel as Magda and Usher both fired into the darkness from where the bullet came. Nighthawk moved in the shadows, black in black, and reached the dying man at the base of the altar. Grubbs was numb and confused, but he felt and clearly recognized the sharp talons of death crawling up his body as organs shut down and blood flowed like a river from the hole punched out through his back. The dying man spoke despite all his terror and confusion.

“John!”

“Hush,” Nighthawk said in a soft whisper.

“John, what happened!”

“Time to sleep, boy,” the old man told him. “Time to rest.” He took his glove off, reached out and touched Grubbs’ left cheek and stopped his heart.

He had only a moment in which to act. Grubbs’ soul was leaving his body, taking with it the energy that would have powered his life to its natural conclusion if he hadn’t stopped a bullet some forty-odd years ahead of schedule. Nighthawk stripped it of that energy, leaving it weak and uncertain.

Nighthawk had no concrete knowledge, but little hope for the nature of the ultimate destination of Grubbs’ soul. But Grubbs’ fate was out of his hands. He had to concentrate on the situation unfolding around them, or there was little doubt that they’d all be joining Grubbs on that Hell-bound train before the night was over.

They hadn’t expected an armed and trigger-happy guard. This was, after all, sacred ground. But times were different. Terrorists were ready, willing, and able to strike anytime, anywhere, and the Capella della Sindone had been attacked in the past. Clearly, Nighthawk realized, they had underestimated the strength of the Savoias’ resolve and willingness to shed blood in protection of their sacred charge.

“Usher,” he said in a calm but strong voice, “retrieve the reliquary. Magda—keep up the suppressive fire.”

He caught a glimpse of her teeth shining in a feral smile. She was a fanatic. She had no more regard for the lives of the Savoias’ than if they were animals. Nighthawk did. In a strange sense, they were all part of the same brotherhood, though it was a truism that families often fought bloody battles amongst themselves.

She ripped the darkness with automatic fire as Usher scuttled forward to retrieve the reliquary. Bullets flew. They whined off marble surfaces, smashed through stained glass, and even bit through flesh here and there. Three members of the Savoias fell as Magda screamed in some Slavic tongue that Nighthawk didn’t recognize. He reached out eagerly with his mind. Two were dying, dissipating their precious energy into the void. He held himself back. He couldn’t get greedy and slow of thought and action. He needed his wits about him if he was to lead his team to safety. He could already feel Grubbs’ energy crackling though his system like logs added to the furnace of the engine that drove his body. He smiled. He didn’t feel a day over eighty. They had to get back to the Holy See where they had diplomatic immunity from most conceivable crimes, and even from some inconceivable ones. From there they would take the Mandylion over the ocean, back to New York, where the others waited.

For a few moments it was tricky. Nighthawk didn’t like blind firefights where anything could happen. But he felt no sign of a coming revelation, and again, he was right.

Usher retrieved the chest. Nighthawk and Magda laid down suppressive gunfire, and no one came out of the chapel after them. After that it was only a matter of keeping quiet. Of keeping to the darkness and avoiding the growing search. Their car was ready. They made it past the roadblocks before they could be set up.

They reached Rome at dawn and Nighthawk took the reliquary into the Vatican before the rest of the tiny city-state was even waking up. Only then could Nighthawk relax. He’d gotten the Mandylion, the actual burial cloth, the Shroud of Jesus of Nazareth, into the hands of the Allumbrados. That was the hard part. The rest, getting it to New York and the Brothers who waited there, would be easy.

The mission was practically over. It had cost the life of one of his team members and an uncounted number of Savoias, but it had been worth it. Returning Jesus Christ to the world would be worth it all.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

New York City: Waldorf-Astoria parking garage

“Save my soul from evil, Lord,” the Midnight Angel murmured, “and heal this warrior’s heart.”

She stood up, leaning over the driver’s side door of the vehicle next to her. It was an SUV, big, shiny, and new looking. She wondered at the idiocy of a city dweller buying a vehicle like this. Was it excessive pride? Envy? Of course, maybe she was guilty of immoderate judgement herself. This was a hotel parking lot, after all. Maybe the SUV’s owner lived in the country somewhere and actually needed it.

She had, she suddenly recalled, little time for moralizing.

She punched through the window effortlessly, her arm protected by a leather gauntlet and full body, form-fitting leather jumpsuit. A burglar alarm clanged raucously as she quickly leaned in through the shattered window and slipped the transmission into neutral. She shoved the SUV, sending it skittering toward the Allumbrado, who had halted his approach when the alarm started to scream.

The Angel peered out from behind the car in the next parking slot—it was a late model Ford of some sort, and she approved much more of its lack of ostentation and relative utility than she did of the conspicuous and consumptive SUV—and watched as the Allumbrado, suddenly frowning, make a complicated set of hand gestures as the SUV bore down on him.

He finished with his left hand clenched into a fist, held chest high. His right hand was next to it, palm open. He pushed that hand out, extending his right arm fast, like he was throwing some kind of open-handed punch at the SUV, which was now almost upon him.

A wall of force met the SUV head-on. Its front end crumpled as if it had hit an invisible fence and it rebounded backwards right at the Angel as a sudden wind buffeted her, stirring her long, thick hair in its passing.

Her heart pounded with desire. She wanted nothing more than to stay and fight this man, but she knew that there was a chance, however slim, that he and his companions might overpower her and prevent her from getting her message to The Hand. She scuttled back among the parked cars as her opponent threw another force wave in her general direction, setting off numerous car alarms as the vehicles in the wave’s pathway rocked as if in an earthquake.

The message was foremost in her mind as she slipped away in the darkness.

The Cardinal has come. And he has brought aces with him.

But also, not so far buried, was an image of the man who accompanied the Cardinal. The handsome, strong-looking one.

There, she thought, was a proper foe.

Or perhaps, something else entirely.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Hokkaido, Japan

It was two in the morning, about an hour and a half before the unsui would strike the sounding board with his wooden mallet, waking everyone for the start of the long monastery day, but Fortunato was already awake.

He’d been having trouble sleeping lately. Not even lengthy recitation of the Heart Sutra, which by virtue of its hypnotic repetitiveness was supposed to pacify the chanter by affording him a glimpse into his true nature, could lull him to sleep. It never had, and Fortunato was beginning to suspect it never would. He was having trouble sleeping because he was beginning to suspect that he had made a mistake.

I’m sixty-two years old, Fortunato thought.

The zendo, the hall where the monks practiced zazen and which also doubled as their sleeping quarters, was pitch dark. It was silent but for the various rustlings, snortings, and snorings of the other fifty-some monks who slept fitfully or soundly on their tatami.

He envied them their slumber.

He realized that part of his problem was physical. After sixteen years of a fairly rigorous vegetarian diet, Fortunato was even leaner than he’d been as a pleasure-loving ace in New York City. The temple’s harsh physical discipline helped keep him fit, but he’d developed arthritis a couple of years back, presumably from sleeping on a hard, cold floor on only a thin straw mat wrapped in a single blanket. It had settled in his neck and shoulders and was getting worse with every passing month. Now he was even occasionally feeling biting pain in his long, thin, fingers. Pain was something to be endured as part of monastic life, as there were few drugs in the monastery’s frugal medicine cabinet, except for aspirin for fevers and colds, tiger balm for sore muscles and joints, and Preparation H for the hemorrhoids brought on by hours and hours of sitting on a hard floor in the lotus position.

Worse yet, the brief Hokkaido summer had barely started and the season would turn again all too soon. Fortunato did not look forward to the change. In Hokkaido the winter came early and lingered long. The winter winds were razor sharp and the snowfall was measured in feet, not inches. He had a single quilted blanket from which the mice had already been stealing stuffing. He couldn’t in all good conscience blame them for taking the cotton batting to line their nests against the terrible cold.

Lately Fortunato had been beginning to suspect that this portion of his life, the ascetic self-denial of pleasure, was as much of a dead end as his earlier years spent reveling in Tantric sex, drugs, and the sheer gusto of life as one of the most powerful aces in the world, a life he’d turned his back on in a quest to find his true nature in the way of a Zen monk.

Dogen, his Zen roshi and head of the small monastery, had told him when he’d first asked to join, “If you want to live in the world you must admit your power. If you want to feed your spirit you must leave the world.”

Only, Fortunato thought as he lay staring into the indecipherable darkness, his spirit was as hungry as ever. Have I actually progressed down the Tao this last decade and a half, he wondered, or become petrified, congealed in an unbreakable lump of amber closed off from the world? Is that what I’d really wanted?

He wondered why.

There was a sudden disturbance in the zendo, as a fully-dressed figure made his way among the sleeping monks. Fortunato recognized Dogen’s secretary and chief assistant. Fortunato had disliked the man ever since he’d entered the monastery, and the feeling was mutual. He had a sour look on his face, as if he’d been up all night sucking lemons, as he nudged Fortunato with his tabi-covered foot.

“Wake up,” he said in a voice loud enough so that those next to Fortunato stirred, grumbling in their sleep. “Dogen wants to see you.”

Fortunato didn’t question him, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of offering useless answers. He rose silently on stiff joints, and followed him out of the room. They went wordlessly down dark and silent corridors, Fortunato wondering what Dogen wanted at such an unlikely hour. This wasn’t the first time he’d been summoned to the abbot’s private quarters. He’d gone there plenty of times for instruction, to receive a new koan to meditate upon, or even for conversation about his varied experiences in the outside world. He’d even been summoned into the abbot’s presence once or twice for disciplinary measures.

But, Fortunato reflected, not for the latter reason for years. The last time had been after Tachyon’s visit. Fortunato had gone over the wall after the little alien Fauntleroy had left and spent a week drunk in the village at the base of the mountain. But those days had passed. He couldn’t even begin to guess why Dogen wanted to see him now.