Judgment Stone (9781401687359) Read online

  She had the sense that he was stalling, trying to keep her from rushing out to save her son, give himself and Leo time to come up with a plan. But there was only one course of action: get Tyler.

  She pushed the phone away. “You call him. I’m going to get my son.”

  “He needs to hear it from you,” Gheronda said. “He won’t need explanation, just a word from you: ‘Get back here now.’ At least do that, in case . . .”

  In case I don’t make it back, she thought. Maybe he was trying to save himself a call to Jagger telling him the Tribe had murdered her or taken her. And on one level, he was right: one word from her would bring Jagger running, no matter what he was caught up in trying to track down the Clan.

  But seriously . . . he wanted her to make a phone call when her son was hurt and in danger?

  Stalling.

  “Fifteen seconds,” Gheronda said, lifting the phone at her again. “Call the cavalry.”

  “Do you have Owen’s number?”

  He turned the phone toward himself, punched buttons, handed it to her.

  She held it to her ear. Beeping and clicking came through the speaker. She wiped a tear off her cheek. Somewhere in the world, a satphone started ringing.

  “Hello?”

  “Jagger!” Beth said in a rush. “The Tribe’s attacking the monastery. They’re here now. Tyler—”

  Gheronda held up his hand, stopping her. “Shhh, shhh.” He tilted his head. “What was that?”

  The door leading to the tunnel burst open and Elias stepped in, flamethrower in hand, a small flame in front of the muzzle hissing. He said, “If you’re going to hide, hide. Don’t talk.”

  Flame shot out in a stream, just left of the tight group, panning toward them.

  Leo raised his hands, ducked his head, as though intending on blessing Gheronda and Beth. He threw his body into them, shoving the old man into Beth and pushing her back into the door. She crashed through it and fell. The men fell on top of her, and she saw Leo bend his leg, stretch it out. He hooked the door with his foot and swung it around, kicking it closed. He rolled off them onto his back, rocking back and forth. He was on fire, flames and sparks coming up from under him. He could have been employing an unusual method of putting out a campfire. Gheronda scrambled off Beth, reaching for Leo. He ripped at Leo’s collar, pulled the flaps of the cassock back.

  “Slip out!” he yelled. “Get out of the robe!”

  As Leo yanked his arms out, rolling back and forth, Beth jumped to the door, pressed her palms against it. She could already feel the heat on the other side coming through. The door was equipped with a crude locking mechanism, a piece of wood that slid into a U-shaped bracket mounted to the wall beside it. She slammed her palm into the back of the wood, engaging the lock. The door thumped, rattled—Elias trying to get in. Kicking in, probably; the door at his side was still on fire, and she remembered from her conversations with Jagger that one of the awful things about the flamethrowers was the fuel it used: it was like glue, sticking to whatever it hit and burning until it had completely consumed itself. It was an agonizing, terrible way to die.

  She turned away from the door. A streak of burning fuel ran across the floor, lighting the room. Leo was hopping up, away from the burning cassock. Sparks fell away from Leo as he brushed at his shoulders, his pant legs. Gheronda walked around him, slapping out little fires.

  The door thumped again. Flame and smoke came in from the crack under it.

  Beth looked at her empty hand. She spun around, scanning the floor. “The phone,” she said. “I lost it. It must have gotten knocked out of my hand!”

  Now Gheronda approached her, patting the air with his hands. “You got word to Jagger. That’s good enough.”

  She looked at the door, heard another thump, watched it shake. She found the door opposite it and headed for it. “I have to go to Tyler.”

  Leo stepped in front of her. His clothes were still smoking. He said, “I’ll go,” and raised his hand when she started to protest. He looked at Gheronda. “Take her someplace safe, back in the cells on the other side of the tunnel. I’ll find you.”

  Beth said, “But if we all go—”

  “Then we’ll all be caught,” he said. “One person has a better chance at slipping past them. I can move faster alone, faster than you. I’ll get him back.”

  She looked at Gheronda, whose contoured face was twisted into an expression of sadness and concern. But he closed his eyes and nodded. She turned in time to see Leo slipping out the door, closing it behind him.

  She ran, tugged it open. “Leo!” The room beyond was empty.

  [ 69 ]

  “Beth! Beth!” Jagger yelled into the satphone. He hit the redial button, looked up at Owen as he listened to it ring.

  Owen had stopped on the third step leading to the manor’s front doors. The light coming out of his head had faded away; the angels who’d walked up the road with them, through the gates, and along the long drive to a courtyard anchored by a fountain—they were gone too.

  Not gone, Jagger remembered. He hoped not gone, simply invisible.

  “What is it?” Owen said. “What’s happening?”

  The call rolled into voice mail, Gheronda saying in Egyptian, “You’ve reached—”

  Jagger disconnected, ran to the first step, grabbed Owen’s wrist, and tugged him off the steps. “We have to get back to St. Catherine’s,” he said.

  “Now? Why?”

  “The Tribe’s there. They’re after Beth . . . something about Tyler! We have to leave, now!”

  “What’s the Tribe want with—”

  “It doesn’t matter. She got cut off. Something happened.”

  Owen’s hand clamped over his own mouth, squeezing down the beard on his cheeks.

  “Owen! We have to go back, we have to go!” Jagger tugged on his wrist, forcing him to take a step.

  Owen looked over his shoulder at the manor doors, then back to Jagger. He began shaking his head. “We can’t, Jag. You know that. We have to warn the orphanage.”

  “My family!” Jagger pleaded. But he knew Owen was right. They were there because the Clan was coming, and if they left now, the blood of the children and their adult guardians would be on his hands. Whatever was happening at the monastery, he couldn’t stop it, not from twenty-five hundred miles away. But what if Beth and the monks could hold them off . . . for a time . . . and then he and Owen got there moments too late?

  “What are they after?” Owen said again.

  Jagger shook his head, resigned to having to wait. But that didn’t mean they could dawdle. He brushed past Owen, started up the stairs. “Come on, let’s do this and get out of here.” Even then, he had to fight the urge to argue with Owen that they had to leave that very moment . . . or climb into the pilot’s seat himself and try to get back to the monastery, if that’s what it took.

  And he did turn and descend the stairs. “I can’t do this,” he said, torn, knowing his anguish was showing on his face. “I can’t think of anything but—”

  A boy and girl had just emerged from the woods encircling the courtyard. The boy, about thirteen, carried a flashlight in need of new batteries; the girl, whose hand he held, was no older than six. He was dressed in slacks and a button shirt. She had on a pink dress with an embroidered hem. She was clutching a handful of small white flowers. They saw Jagger and Owen and smiled.

  They came into the light, and the boy switched off his flashlight. The boy spoke in what Jagger guessed was Romanian. Owen replied in the same language, said to Jagger, “The boy is Aleksandar and the girl is Rayna. He says she slipped out to get the flowers.”

  The boy spoke again.

  Owen said, “She has a habit of doing that. One of the other children has to fetch her.”

  Jagger couldn’t take his eyes off her little face. She was cherubic. Pursed doll lips, dark liquid eyes, cheeks that looked like she’d stuffed her mouth with gumballs. A scar, pink and thick, ran from her temple to the corner of her
mouth, looking to Jagger like a worm was stuck there. “What happened to her?” he said.

  Owen knelt, spoke gently to her, touched her head. He stood, leaned close to the boy—Aleksandar—and whispered. He listened to the boy’s hushed words and turned to Jagger. “She came to Mondragon with an injury suffered at the hands of her father, a drunk.”

  It broke Jagger’s heart to think of her with her face sliced open, bleeding, crying. He wondered if the injury was worse for her because it was inflicted by someone who was supposed to love her.

  He said, “Owen, we’re in a hurry. The Clan—”

  Owen spoke quickly to Aleksandar. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and pulled him forward a step, pointing to the front door.

  “Nu,” Aleksandar said, shaking his head. He gestured toward a corner of the manor and began walking that way, pulling Rayna along.

  Owen clapped Jagger on the back, urging him to walk with him as he followed the children. “He says the front door’s locked. He’s taking us to a side entrance.”

  As they hurried behind Aleksandar and Rayna, Jagger said, “You acted like we had all the time in the world back there, chatting with the kids.”

  Owen didn’t say anything. Jagger caught a slight smile bending the man’s mouth. He said, “There’s nothing funny about this.”

  “Not funny, no,” Owen said. “Just amazing.”

  “What?”

  “I suppose you think Aleksandar and Rayna showing up like that was a coincidence?”

  “No, it was God,” Jagger said flatly, sorry it came out that way as soon as it did.

  “Seeing them,” Owen said, “their faces, the living, breathing, human side of what we’re doing here . . . Tell me you’re not more committed to saving them.”

  “We still have to hurry, for their sake, and Beth and Tyler’s.” But Owen was right: Jagger couldn’t just leave now anymore than he could kill these kids himself. Something occurred to him. “Are you saying you stalled back there so I could get a good look at them?”

  “Maybe just a little.”

  They followed the kids around the corner, onto a large stone patio. Beyond a waist-high wall on the right, ancient pines blocked the moon. Through them Jagger could see another building, one of the mansion-like structures he’d viewed from the plane. On the left they passed rows of French doors.

  “Want to bet there’s more to these two showing up than giving your heart a thump?” Owen said.

  “Like what?”

  He raised his voice and spoke in Romanian. Aleksandar replied over his shoulder, gesturing toward the house.

  Owen told Jagger, “The staff doesn’t answer the front door after seven.”

  “We would have found an open door or pounded on different ones until someone inside came to find out what we wanted.”

  “After wasting how much time?”

  “You’re convinced God’s guiding us?” Jagger said.

  “At least helping.”

  “Then He should make the Clan’s jet crash.”

  Owen smiled at him. So comfortable with the way he believed things worked. Jagger wished he possessed a small fragment of Owen’s confidence. He said, “How do you know it’s not just . . . I don’t know, the world turning, things happening just because they happen? Does it always have to be God?”

  “Or those working against Him or man’s own decisions catching up with him.”

  “See?” Jagger said. “Maybe it wasn’t God helping us.”

  “Why are you so insistent that it isn’t?”

  Because a helpful God isn’t the God I know, Jagger thought. He still struggled with a God who allowed bad things to happen, only to help with things that maybe/kinda/sorta lessened the severity of the blow. It seemed fickle. It was easier to accept that things simply happened, for good or for bad, than that the world was guided by a Supreme Being who either changed His mind with abrupt and stunning frequency or was altogether arbitrary.

  The boy had stopped near the back corner of the manor, past the glass doors. He opened a wooden door, and the girl rushed in. He said something to Owen.

  Owen translated as they entered a long hallway, the boy shutting and locking the door behind them and hurrying past to lead the way. “The headmaster’s name is Mr. Stanga. He’s with the rest of the children and staff in the chapel.”

  Up ahead, Rayna pulled open a heavy door and disappeared inside. Aleksandar caught it before it closed and called into the room. He stood there holding the door, looking in, obviously waiting for someone.

  Owen turned in front of Jagger, stopping him. He said, “Quick, get the fragment.”

  [ 70 ]

  Evidence of Owen’s theory of divine guidance sprang into view as soon as Jagger touched the fragment. Angels everywhere, filling the halls, towering over Aleksandar, whose beam of light pierced the ceiling over his head even while he was saying something to Owen.

  Owen’s light was thicker and brighter than the boy’s, but come on, he was John the Apostle.

  Jagger reached his real hand to the wall, steadying himself. The shift from normal vision to what he’d started thinking of as God’s-eye vision was dizzying. Forget the millions of swirling embers, which were somehow part of the angels and seemed to be forming images as they moved, like secret messages he was meant to decipher; forget the melodic chorus of voices, dim but insistent, and the sense that there was so much more right in front of him he should be seeing, a sort of shifting of vague colors, like putting on 3-D glasses outside of a theater. The mere instant appearance of angels was enough to knock you back and make your head do cartwheels.

  A man came through the door Aleksandar held. He was a head shorter than Owen, wavy black hair down to his shoulders, salt-and-pepper mustache drooping to the bottom of his chin—and thick sideburns. He reminded Jagger of half the leading men in movies from the 1970s—Al Pacino, James Caan. Not the dapper, buttoned-down English sort of gentleman he’d expected. A blue beam rose from his head.

  He and Owen spoke, and the two stepped into the room. Owen leaned out through the door to wave Jagger in. The chapel appeared to be a converted ballroom. It was about half the size of a football field with a wooden floor and round, ornamental medallions spaced evenly over the ceiling where Jagger guessed chandeliers used to hang. The long wall opposite the doors was a huge grid of paned glass, starting at a sill three feet high and rising twenty or more feet to the ceiling. It was too dark outside to make out the view, but he caught the hints of trees, needles and branches swaying in the wind.

  Candelabras bearing tall white candles, each capped by a flickering flame, lined the walls and appeared to be the room’s only source of light . . . if you didn’t count the pulsing blue beams extending from the heads of at least two hundred children and a dozen or so adults. He squinted against their brightness and noticed that they were as varied in appearance as were the faces turned toward him and Owen. Some were as thin as spider’s silk, others as heavy as industrial extension cords. Gold flakes sparked in some, while in others the gold looked more liquid, spiraling around the beams. The hues of blue ranged from the color of a washed-out summer sky to stunning sapphire.

  As far as Jagger could tell, none of the people were praying, not in the classical sense of focused and exclusive communication with God. If they produced beams this vivid when they weren’t praying, he thought, what a stunning display they must send to heaven when they all bowed their heads in communal worship. No wonder they’d drawn the Clan’s attention.

  There were no pews or chairs in the room. All the children—ranging in age from toddlers to teens—knelt on colorful woven mats. It called to mind Muslim prayer rugs, but these were round. They were in rows, facing a freestanding wooden cross at the front of the room to Jagger’s right; he’d entered on the side at roughly the midpoint of the rows. The children appeared to be organized by age, with the youngest in front.

  Rayna headed toward an empty mat in the third row. Aleksandar walked straight ahead and sat cross-l
egged on a mat in the center.

  The adults were stationed around the kids. As soon as they saw Owen and Jagger, they came toward them.

  A boy about Tyler’s age waved at him, and Jagger waved back. That started a flock of fluttering hands, and Jagger felt like a politician, waving at everyone at once. Light laughter rippled among them.

  They looked like ordinary kids, the boys dressed in jeans, slacks, or shorts and button shirts or colored tees; most of the girls were in dresses or skirts, though a few wore slacks and blouses. They could have been the student body of any small K–12 school. That made him realize what he had half expected: starched uniforms—black, buttoned to the neck—Quaker hats, creepy smiles, glazed eyes. He’d read too many Stephen King books.

  Angels stood or knelt by some of the kids. More angels hovered near the roof, and Jagger remembered reading somewhere that churches were originally designed with high ceilings to accommodate the congregant’s guardian angels. Those architects were onto something, though Jagger doubted low ceilings would keep the angels out.

  Owen was conversing quietly with Mr. Stanga, his waving arms at odds with the volume of his voice. As each new adult joined in, the tight group grew more animated. Jagger wanted to say, Enough! Everybody hide!

  He set the duffel bag down and stepped over and put his hand on Owen’s back. “What’s going on? We don’t have time for a discussion.” He leaned his lips close to Owen’s ear, whispered, “Look, this is life or death. Let’s whip out the guns and force them to hide. We can apologize later.” He thought about how quickly he wanted to be gone and added, “By phone.”

  Owen turned away from the group, took Jagger by the arm, and walked toward the back of the room with him. Keeping his head down and his voice low, he said, “I convinced them of the danger. Told them we’ve been tracking a very dangerous group of serial killers, and we know they’re coming to the home within the hour.”

  “They just believed you?”

  Owen lifted one shoulder. “I had to impress them a bit first.”