TWENTY SEVEN
THOM NEARY LOVED tending his garden. It was simple, honest work before God and a hell of a lot less complicated than his other duties. He was down on his hands and knees in the dirt, seeing to a patch of dandelions that had sprung up overnight. Once, he’d led a medium-sized congregation in a Brooklyn church; now the beans and carrots, the fresh herbs were his flock. He’d been happy in his work back in the States before being recruited by the order. St. Mark’s in Brooklyn, a big old brownstone mass of singing and hard accents, incense, funerals, weddings, a long procession of Sunday services: they’d taken all that away from him on the day he witnessed the assassination.
Father Thom Neary—a parish priest then—had been waiting in line at a book signing. The author, a professor of ethics and theology at Catholic University in Washington, DC, had captured young Neary’s imagination with his radical—some said dangerous—ideas of doing away with the church altogether because Christ’s true church resided within the human heart. It was a gorgeous April morning in New York, the kind that put one in the mood to smile and wink after giving a fellow New Yorker the finger. The bookstore had the author positioned at a table on the sidewalk. Neary was within three places of him in line, gearing himself up to ask a question about the professor’s view on missionary work, when he happened to turn and look up. There was no reason for it, no flapping of pigeon wings or voice from above to grab his attention. Father Neary just looked at the third floor window of the hotel across the street in time to catch the muzzle flash. There was no sound but the stunned silence from the rest of the line, then the screams. When Neary turned around again, the professor’s career as a dangerous idea man was over, his idea-generator half sheared away by the shooter’s bullet.
Father Neary just stared. Later, in the safety and quiet of the rectory study he would think that he should have rushed forward, given the last rites, provided comfort to the rest of the crowd, done something. All he could do was stand and stare at the corpse with half a face. He could see the man’s stark white teeth on the side the bullet had torn through. He had a silver filling in one of his molars, his tongue reminded Neary of a moist, pink salamander. All he could do was look, and think, I was meant to see that.
Neary gave a statement to the police along with several other witnesses, a statement that amounted to very little. He’d seen a flash and the professor was dead. Okay, thanks, Father, you can go. But the fact that Neary had seen very little wasn’t as important as the fact that the shooter had seen much. The shooter had seen him. He showed up on Neary’s doorstep later that evening, a middle-aged man with a twisting scar on his chin and a Roman collar at his neck. Neary invited him in and they talked long into the night.
The older priest was a Bishop, but with no diocese. He was the single member of an ancient and secret order. And he was dying. Neary had a simple choice, now that had seen, now that he knew: he could join the order or become its next martyr. Even without the threat, Neary had been sold. To be a true solider of the Church, to take up the fight as a man of action instead of a man of words—it was a quick decision for him.
The cancer held off for five years, long enough for the Bishop to give Neary the training of ways old and new. Neary, like the rest of the Knights Templar before him, honed his skill over the years, adding tricks and traits to his portfolio. It was an evolution, sword and horse to M-16 and amphibious assault vehicle and everything in between.
So many years gone by, so much of the Lord’s good work done in the name of Holy Mother Church. Bishop Neary leaned forward on his haunches and thumbed the head off a dandelion before yanking it out by the roots. He thought of a martyr he’d made in America the better part of two decades ago. A trafficker of human flesh from the Balkans to the tenements of Chicago. Most of these refugees had been barely out of their teens. After a short stay in Detroit, many of them had stopped aging entirely. But the martyr was well connected to Rome and so Holy Mother Church had decided to take care of its own.
Neary engineered an exchange program for clergy at the Catholic hospital where the martyr was scheduled to undergo a procedure for gallstones. He made certain the anesthesia ear-marked for the operation was re-labeled and the IV drip delivered several CC’s of purified nicotine instead of a synthetic opiate. He’d been on his way out, pulling yet another disappearing act, when he stumbled upon the teenage boy held hostage by a demon. The Lord had provided Neary with a human tabula rasa upon which to scribble as he saw fit. It was providence, plain and simple. A few years of intensive training and the Knight Templar became the Knights Templar.
Neary had taught that boy everything he’d ever known about killing. Even better, he taught Calvin how to learn on his own, how to invent and transmogrify as the situation demanded. Calvin became twice the killer Neary had ever been. Cold and smart. An empty cartridge that could fill itself at will with whatever the circumstance might call for. And the speed with which the boy had learned was frightening. By the time he was nineteen and ready to go into the world as an ordained priest and consecrated Templar, Calvin had mastered every skill Neary had sought to teach him and created a few of his own.
Neary sat back on his hams for a moment in the strong Mediterranean sun; a white-haired, overweight old bible thumper with sweat stains in a weedy patch of vegetables. His back gave a twinge and he winced. The Bishop was not a young man anymore. Soon he’d have to retire in earnest, even giving up his role as coordinator and dispatcher for Calvin. He’d turn over the reins to Johnny and maybe help the kid teach his own apprentice when he found one. Johnny was such a maverick, maybe he’d take on a girl, a nun with a couple of .38s hidden beneath her habit, a pistol strapped to each creamy thigh. A smile shivered Neary’s jowls.
All this stuff about losing his mind and needing to retire was bullshit. Johnny was just feeling sensitive. He’d never been a big fan of the Church, but for all his blasphemy and misdirected anger he was still a man of God. Neary had seen to that. Had it not been for God the Father, that boy would have wasted away within the confines of his own skin, a demon riding him down into the very depths of Hell. It was the reason Neary selected Calvin in the first place. Was there anyone more suited, more motivated to battle the Devil’s work on earth than a man who’d suffered at the hands of a demon?
When the call had come through from his contacts in Rome about another possessed child, Neary had leapt at the opportunity to assign Calvin. It was the perfect object lesson, the perfect reminder for Johnny. In saving the child, Calvin would be brought back into the arms of faith while scoring points with one of the Church’s oldest and most valued business partners. Rome and the Mason family went back a lot longer than Neary himself. Again, it was divine providence. Could there be another explanation?
“Thanks be to God,” Neary gasped, wrenching a potato-sized stone from the dry earth. He lifted his head into the cooling afternoon breeze as the phone rang through the kitchen window. His brow creased. The phone rang again and Neary grunted as he stood, his knees cracking like rifle shots. Something on the back of his hand tickled. Neary absently brushed at it, knocking an amber scorpion to the ground. It scuttled back into the garden, looking for another cool place to hide now that its rock had been pulled away. It slipped into the shadows at the base of Neary’s favorite sunflower as the Bishop himself slipped into the shadows of his study.
Neary panted into his study and waited a moment to catch his breath—took longer every day—before answering the phone. He winced away from the handset as a series of beeps, followed by one long fading tone pierced his ear. Relay code. While understanding the need for total security and secrecy, he still hated this crap. Couldn’t a man just pick up the blessed blower anymore? He waited until the final tone faded all the way down then punched in a series of numbers. Neary hung up and plopped down in his worn leather chair. He reached for a decanter and poured himself a three finger glass of single malt. He held it up to the light
and waited.
Five minutes later, the whiskey nothing more than a warm sensation under his solar plexus, the phone rang.
Neary sighed, “Si?”
“My son’s gone.” Mason, voice flat as glass.
Neary sat up.
“Mr. Mason we talked about this at the beginning. You were not to initiate a relay to me unless under the most dire circumstance.”
“Gone, you choirboy-groping, fuck. Your boy’s got my son.”
“Father Calvin took your son? You mean he kidnapped…” Neary’s heart sank. Johnny’s complaints of going over the edge hadn’t been bullshit after all. “Mr. Mason, you’re sure of this?”
“Killed one of my men too. Broke his neck. The nurse I hired’s missing too. And he took one of my vehicles. Your special solution’s a goddamn psychopath, Neary.” Mason fell silent. The digital clicks and hums of the secured line were audible just below the dead air.
Neary’s mind raced. What in God’s name had Johnny done? Had he really snapped and taken the boy? Was this some kind of psychological transference; Calvin projecting his childhood self onto Mason’s boy? Neary’s mouth set in a straight line. The whiskey blush drained from his cheeks and forehead. “Have you informed the authorities?”
Mason sighed. “No, I figured I’d save time and call some of the smaller families direct, tell ‘em my kid was out in the open for anyone to waste or hold for ransom. I like to be helpful like that.”
Neary ignored the sarcasm. Mason was an ass, but he wasn’t wrong. Informing the police would complicate matters. Johnny would have expected that, which meant he was counting Mason and his resources as the only flight factor. He would have put more emphasis on speed of escape than on covering his identity in transit. Neary’s eyebrows rose like arched clouds.
“But you do have someone looking for them?”
“Of course,” Mason said. “My best man’s on that fucker’s back, but he’s run out of leads.”
“Mr. Mason, I’ve got an idea how to find your son. Do you have a number where I can reach your man?”
“No, I’ll deal with my own people.”
Neary sighed. “Mr. Mason, your son gets farther away from you with each…passing…second. Giving me direct access to your man in the field will simply save time. Now, the number, please.”
Mason let the silence spin out until it was obvious that it was his choice to answer, then spat Horton’s cell phone number.
“Fine,” Neary said. “I’ll call you in a few hours.”
Neary heard Mason’s intake of breath, but hung up before he could speak. He didn’t have time to play customer service to a mobster no matter how well connected he was. The important thing was finding Johnny. If Neary could recover Mason’s brat as well, then God be praised, but more was at stake than a prince of Babylon.
Neary got up and moved to his small writing desk. He leaned over with a squeak of chair springs and pulled a leatherbound bible, thick as a telephone directory, from the bookshelf. Neary placed it on the desk with the spine facing away from him and opened the cover, revealing a screen and keyboard. “En nomine Patri,” he said. The hidden laptop heard him and the screen glowed into life. He said a silent prayer that Calvin wasn’t using the computer Neary had sent to him in Vegas—if Calvin was on-line, he’d know what Neary was up to—and entered a series of commands. A moment later, a map of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan glowed before him, a blinking dot revealed the location of his wayward lamb.
Neary squinted at the screen and nodded. He should have guessed Johnny would head to familiar ground. The Jesuit retreat just south of the Canadian border was only a day’s drive from Mason’s house and a perfect hiding place. “Ah, that takes me back,” Neary sighed. The Jesuit cabin was where he’d begun Johnny’s education. The first lessons had been camouflage and concealment. Thom Neary warmed at the memory of a skinny fifteen year-old materializing from a pile of leaf litter and tagging his teacher with a rubber training knife. Gotcha’, Thom! , he’d shouted, joyful.
Neary put his finger on the glowing dot. “That you did, boyo.”
THREE HOURS LATER, Bishop Thomas Neary felt the deep ka-thunk of retracting landing gear in his tail bone as the plane yanked itself free of the earth’s pull. He stared out of the window, Italy shrinking, receding, and wondered if he would have the strength to do what God asked of him when the time came. It was all so biblical. Someone’s son would have to die. He hoped it wouldn’t have to be his.