Predator One (28 page)

“No. Father, please…”

The priest increased the pressure of his grip. “You know they’re going to die, don’t you?”

“No!”

“Don’t lie to me, Doctor Sanchez,” said the priest. “Don’t you know it is a sin to lie to
a priest? It’s a sin to lie in church.”

Rudy stared at him, suddenly very afraid. “How … how do you know my name?”

“You come to the house of God and you commit sins. Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

“Father, I did not tell you my name. How do you know my name?”

“You told me, Doctor Sanchez. You told me your name.”

“I did not.”

“Oh—not today,” said the priest, squeezing so hard now that Rudy gasped. “You
told me when we met before.”

“That’s a lie. We’ve never met before.”

“I warned you about being disingenuous.”

“No. Let go of my hand.”

“You don’t remember me, doctor?” The priest’s voice seemed to change. It slurred into a kind of southern drawl. But not a real one—a cartoon one. Like someone pretending to be southern. “Don’t you remember me at all? We had such a lovely conversation, oh yes
we did. We spoke of many things. We spoke of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings. Surely you remember that.”

The light in the chapel seemed to shift and change, and with it the color of the priest’s eyes changed. They were no longer a medium green, but instead seemed to swirl with colors. Bad colors. Ugly colors. The green was now the sickly green of toad skin, and eddied with
a fecal brown and infectious yellow. A sudden stink permeated the room. An outhouse stench of putrescence and human waste, of methane and sulfur.

Rudy recoiled and pulled furiously to free his hand, but the priest held on to it. Easily. With no visible effort, even though he was much smaller and slighter than Rudy. The heat of his touch increased, and now Rudy could feel his flesh begin to blister.
Steam rose from between the priest’s fingers. The pain of that burning grip was intense.

“I weep for you,” said the priest. “I deeply sympathize. To lose everything that you love. To have them taken from you so cruelly, so completely. How will you ever survive it? How will you live, Doctor Sanchez, when your whore and that insect that curls asleep in her womb have turned to rot and ashes?”

Rudy’s cane was hooked over the back of the pew, and he snatched it up with his free hand, raised it, and brought it whistling down on the priest’s forearm. The shock of that impact was incredibly, insanely powerful. Pain shot like electricity through Rudy’s wrist and up his arm, and his hand spasmed open. The cane rebounded and flew from Rudy’s hand, falling with a clatter on the seat of the pew.

The priest looked at the hand-carved cane. He bent and sniffed at the wood, then winced and swatted it away from him as if it was something vile.

“Hawthorn and silver,” he said. “You must think I’m a witch. Or a vampire.”

He opened his mouth and laughed.

And laughed.

And laughed.

As he laughed, his mouth seemed to open wider and wider. Far too wide. And that laughing mouth was filled with
far too many teeth.

Rudy screamed.

The shriek was torn from deep inside his chest, and it boiled out of him to fill the chapel. On the altar, the silver crucifix toppled and fell so that the dying Jesus landed on His face. The flickering lights of the candles were instantly snuffed out.

Rudy felt himself suddenly falling.

Backward, out of the pew.

Onto the floor.

His hand slipped free from
the priest’s burning grip.

His head struck first the edge of the seat and then the floor, each blow feeling as hard as a kick. Lights detonated in Rudy’s eyes, and the whole of reality seemed to cant sideways and fall off its hinges.

He tried to call for Cowpers. He couldn’t understand why the agent hadn’t already burst into the room. But the man did not come. Instead, Rudy lay sprawled and
helpless as the little priest bent over him. Those strange, strange eyes seemed to glow as if lit from within. Lambent and so wrong. The priest reached out and caressed Rudy’s cheek with the familiarity and intimacy of a lover.

“Listen to me, Rudolfo Ernesto Sanchez y Martinez,” the priest said in an accent unlike either he had previously used. This was the creaking voice of an old man. Dry and
dusty and filled with malevolence. “We have met before, and we are ill met now. We will meet one more time, and it will be on the day of justice, when the conquerors are conquered and those who steal the blood of the earth are brought low by their own greed and hubris. Then I will come and take everything you love and leave you with bones and dust.”

Rudy cringed back in horror. He beat at the
priest’s face and felt his hand bones crack and the skin of his knuckles split, but he did no damage to the man—to the thing—that crouched over him.

“What are you?” cried Rudy.

In answer, the priest bent closer still and, with his hot, wet tongue, licked Rudy’s face. First his chin, then over Rudy’s lips and nose, up his check, over his one good eye, through the bristle of his eyebrow, and up
his brow to his hairline.

“The whore and the maggot are mine, doctor. Mine. There is nothing you can do to save them.”

Rudy Sanchez screamed.

The priest straightened and stood over him.

“They are mine.”

He raised his foot, and, though Rudy tried to turn away to protect his face, the heel filled his vision as the priest stamped down.

Everything went black, and Rudy felt himself falling.

He never felt himself land.

Chapter Fifty-six

Boyer Hall

University of California, Los Angeles

March 30, 5:33
P.M.

The president of the United States wanted to hit someone. Anyone. It didn’t matter to him. He sat in a stuffed armchair, fists balled in his lap, jaw clenched, his people clustered around him as they all watched his political world come crashing down.

Even though he had not been president when Osama
bin Laden—through his involvement with both al-Qaeda and the Seven Kings—had sent planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, this was on him. Even though he had not been president when SEAL Team Six breeched the compound in Abbottabad and killed the man everyone believed to be bin Laden, this was on him.

It was all on him.

He was the captain of the
Titanic,
and the ship had just hit the iceberg.

The so-called Friends of the Truth had fired their shot.

They had released the video from the DMS hit on the Resort. Seventy-one seconds that showed three big men in the distinctive black clothes of covert special ops standing around the nearly naked and thoroughly abused corpse of Osama bin Laden.

Already, news channels were using facial recognition software to confirm the identity of the dead
man. The video footage was in ultra-high-definition, which allowed them to focus tightly on the smallest mole and scar. On the shapes of the nose, ear, eye, and mouth. On the precise distances between the landmarks of that hated face.

Experts were being added to the hysterical conversation. Everyone was on the same page.

This was Osama bin Laden.

They could see this corpse.

No one had seen
the body of the man killed in Pakistan. The corpse had been mangled by gunfire, bagged, shipped, and then buried at sea. All of the conspiracy theories that had begun burning after Abbottabad now caught like brushfire, the flames driven by winds of doubt and what seemed incontrovertible proof.

The chief of staff and the top advisors were bent together in a cluster, firing verbiage back and forth,
trying to construct a response that would not put them all on the public chopping block, not to mention the unemployment line.

“Fix this,” muttered the president. Everyone looked up at him, and for a moment the only sound was the chatter from the TV. The president repeated it. Again and again. Whether he was talking to his staff or himself was unclear.

Chapter Fifty-seven

Over Nevada Airspace

March 30, 5:38
P.M.
Pacific Standard Time

Boy sat alone in the cabin of the Boeing 747–8 VIP. The cabin was a demonstration of absolute excess and vulgar luxury on an aircraft with a sticker price over $230 million. Boy did not need or even enjoy such luxury. Her tastes were simple, but this was the closest Kings jet available at an airfield outside
the Philadelphia no-fly zone. She’d driven to Virginia to catch this flight.

The jet had once belonged to Hugo Vox and was one of three different ultra-high-end aircraft that still remained in the inventory of the Seven Kings. She looked around at all the wasted space. At the piano and winding staircase and heavy furniture. All of it requiring so much fuel to lift. Thirty thousand per trip, minimum.

Now the jet shot through the American skies.

There was an elaborate computer setup aboard the plane with a big high-end, flat-screen TV whose display was broken into several smaller windows. One window was a continuous feed from the ballpark in Philadelphia. Another looped the president’s speech and the resulting hit of the full bin Laden video file. A dozen smaller screens showed the media firestorm
that had resulted, including footage of riots in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Lebanon. Another cluster of windows showed a burning house in Fort Myers, Florida, a townhouse in Brooklyn, a hospital in San Diego, a house in Chula Vista, and other locations. Some events were past tense. Others were in progress. Everything was running according to a timetable that no longer needed her oversight.
No orders needed to be given. Not for this phase. From here, it was the great machine of the Seven Kings grinding away the old version of the world to make room for whatever was next.

After the fires and explosions.

After the deaths.

After the chaos.

The jet flew on through sunlight and clouds.

She wondered how long it would be before no planes flew over this country anymore?

Soon.

So soon.

Chapter Fifty-eight

27 Eighth Avenue

Park Slope, Brooklyn

March 30, 5:39
P.M.

“Will you need me, Auntie?” asked the DMS agent as he held the door open for his boss.

Aunt Sallie shook her head. “No, that’s okay, Tank. Just want to grab a change of clothes. I’ll only be a minute. Go wait in the car.”

Tank, who was a tall, wide, muscular man with no visible neck and the cold eyes of a reptile,
nodded. He was one of three agents on permanent detail to protect the woman who was second in command of the Department of Military Sciences. He’d worked for her since the DMS scouts recruited him from the army military police. Tank’s partners, Colby and Kang, were on the street. Colby stood by the open door of the Escalade, her humorless face turned toward the foot traffic. Kang was looking
at the traffic. Every few moments, they would shift position to check the other direction, overlapping their line-of-sight surveillance.

“I can carry the stuff for you,” offered Tank.

“And I can carry it my own damn self,” she fired back. Aunt Sallie was in her midsixties, short, heavier than she used to be, but still capable of pulling a suitcase. “Now go down to the street like a good dog.”

Tank did not take offense. He was too practiced at working this detail. No one made the cut for Auntie’s team unless they had thick hides, a balanced ego, and the ability to keep their opinions and reactions to themselves.

“Of course,” he said.

Once, when he first joined the detail, he’d made the grave mistake of calling Auntie “ma’am.” She had promised to kneecap him if he ever—
ever
—called
her that again. Not only had her glare been convincing, Colby and Kang, who were already on the detail and who stood behind Auntie, shook their heads in warning and silently cut their hands back and forth across their throats. The look of alarm on their faces was eloquent, and Tank was quick-witted enough to jump in the right direction when he thought there was a land mine.

He waited until she
was inside the townhouse, then retreated down the steps to stand on the pavement. He would not wait in the car.

*   *   *

INSIDE HER HOME
, Auntie tossed her keys on the table by the door, picked up the mail from the rug and threw it in on the couch without looking at it, and headed upstairs. Her house was lovely, understated, nicely appointed, and virtually unused. Most of the time she slept
in her suite at the Hangar, the main DMS headquarters buried under a hangar at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. But she’d been there for three days straight now, and she needed fresh clothes and a few of her prescriptions. Valsartan for her blood pressure. Celebrex for her arthritis. Extra syringes and insulin for her diabetes. It annoyed her to be a slave to both age and medicine, but there wasn’t
much she could do about either. Well, maybe she could cut down on the sweets and lose a few pounds. But, as she often said to her doctor, fuck it. Life was too short to live small.

She stood for a moment at the base of the stairs, listening to the quiet. It was nice. And for her it was rare. The DMS was a loud place. Hundreds of employees, lots of machines, conversation, videoconferences. This
place, though somewhat sterile, was soothing and quiet.

She sighed, rubbed her tired eyes, and began climbing the stairs. With the mess in Philadelphia now tied to the Seven Kings, she knew that once she got back to the Hangar, she’d probably be living there for at least a week. She hoped she had enough clean clothes.

The wall beside the stairs was lined with paintings. All original—some valuable,
some not. Each was important to her, though. Not in terms of the art—something she understood but didn’t treasure—but because each piece reminded her of something. Or someone. The small Picasso litho midway up was bought after the death of her first husband. Simeon. Every time she passed it, Auntie remembered him and smiled. He’d been a man’s man. And an agent’s agent. An American version of
James Bond. Suave, sophisticated, deadly as a pit viper. Great in the sack. He’d been part of one of the Deacon’s early teams. Way back when. But, sadly, he’d been ambushed in Diyarbakir, Turkey. Forty-nine bullets and a closed coffin. Simeon had loved Picasso.