Judgment Stone (9781401687359) Read online

  Beth looked to the top of the wall nearest her, the monk cells rising almost as high. She believed she could reach the top from the cell’s roof, and darted to the rickety wood stairs that serviced the cells.

  [ 87 ]

  On the third circle around, Owen brought the jet into a steep descent. They flew into the junction of two valleys, occupied by the village of St. Catherine’s, crossed it, dipped onto the road leading to the monastery. The plane’s landing lights showed asphalt much curvier than Jagger remembered; but then again, he’d never traveled so fast on it—150 miles per hour on touchdown. Owen, simultaneously slowing, engaging the reverse thrusters, and keeping the plane on the road, said, “I think we’re going to end up in the desert.”

  “What?” Jagger said.

  “Oh, crumb,” Owen said, and Jagger saw why: the jet had jarred left, following the road, and its lights now illuminated the little guard shack that was more like a visitor’s information center than it was anything to do with security. The plane swerved left, bounding off the road, but too late to avoid its wings from clipping the shack. The sound was like a mountain splitting in two. The entire plane canted right, settled back, trembled.

  Then they were in the desert, shaking and bouncing—seeming to Jagger that they were about to take flight again. The lighted monastery grew larger in the windshield, its many walls, levels, outbuildings, and the garden’s trees, which would make the prospect of actually hitting the monastery pretty slim, but Jagger wondered what would happen to the jet.

  The first of the trees appeared to slide at them, and Jagger got the sensation that the jet wasn’t moving, but it was the earth that was rolling toward them, bringing destruction.

  The jet slowed without easing its bouncing-shaking whitewater-raft movement. Then it stopped, just like that: one last jolt and Jagger was staring at a tree twenty feet in front of the jet’s nose.

  He turned to look at Owen, the man’s eyes huge. Jagger said, “Holy—”

  The jet exploded.

  Or seemed to: to the sound of crunching metal, shattering glass, wood, plastic—the Boanerges lurched into the tree, seeming to swallow it. It continued forward, crushing more trees, bounding up onto them, and plummeting down as they gave out under the plane’s weight. Finally the encore ride stopped, the plane’s front angled down, its landing lights filtered through a pile of branches and leaves.

  “What was that?” Jagger said.

  Owen was snapping out of his harness. “Nothing good,” he said, rushing out of the cockpit, having to ascend the floor like a ramp to do it. Jagger released the harness’s hold and followed. The cabin was half the length it was when they’d taken off. The rear had crumbled toward the cockpit like a tube of toothpaste. The polished mahogany that formed the bathroom and storeroom walls was shattered and splintered in midcabin. The ceiling had peeled back, showing sky.

  Owen used his palm to break the glass of the door’s emergency release and pulled the handle. The door thumped! and flew off. Owen jumped into darkness. A few seconds later, when Jagger reached the door, Owen was sidestepping away, staring toward the rear of the plane. He gestured toward Jagger. “Come on! Hurry!”

  Jagger jumped, looked: the Clan’s black Bombardier was canted upward, pushing and lifting the aft of the Citation—where its tail used to be. Its nose was crushed, its windshields shattered. The metal skin running under the Bombardier’s side cockpit windows, as well as the entirety of the Boanerges’s skin, was crinkled, all of it looking like crumpled and reopened chewing gum foil. The Bombardier was much larger than Owen’s jet, and the wreck was akin to a semi smashing into a minivan.

  Dirt and smoke filled the air around them, creating a dream-like atmosphere. Jagger had the notion that if he tried to get away, he would run in place.

  But none of this changed anything: he was here to save his family from the Tribe, and the Clan wasn’t going to stop him. He grabbed Owen’s arm. “Let’s go! We have to get into the monastery.”

  They scrambled over the dirt and trees the jet had plowed into a pile. Coming down the other side, they heard Bale behind them, calling: “Hey! Where you going? I came to give you a hand!” And he laughed.

  [ 88 ]

  When they saw the jet coming directly for the monastery and then dipping out of sight, Nevaeh and Toby sprinted across the front wall to the corner where it met the garden-side wall. They watched the jet land on the road, weave and waddle, shear the roof off the guard shack, and streak out into the desert—still heading for St. Catherine’s, but on the road. Incredibly, another plane was hot on its tail. This other jet—larger, black—touched down farther back on the road, but appeared to be going faster and not slowing as quickly as the first jet.

  “They’re going to hit,” Toby said, excited. And they did, the second jet smashing into the first, pushing it into the gardens. The first jet mowed down four or five trees. They came to rest at odd angles, one with its much-shorter rear end raised up; the other with its crumpled nose in the air, holding up the other’s rear. The front plane was also canted sideways, resting on the tip of its right wing.

  Someone behind them stomped up the roof of the monk cell building. Phin leaped up onto the top of the wall. “What happened?” he said.

  Toby waved at him. “Com’ere, com’ere, com’ere! Two jets just crashed into each other.”

  “In the air?”

  “They were landing,” Nevaeh said.

  “Here?” Phin said. “In the desert?”

  Elias’s voice, sounding small: “What was that?”

  Nevaeh pulled out her radio and told him.

  “They’re here for us,” he said.

  “I realize that, Elias,” she said.

  Toby showed her a puzzled look. “What do you mean, here for us?”

  Nevaeh dropped the radio in her pocket. She looked at Toby for a few seconds before answering. “I think Beth’s white knight just arrived.”

  Tyler couldn’t see anything, just a big cloud of smoke. But the sounds told him the plane had crashed. He wanted to run to it, but Jordan was holding him, both arms around his chest and back.

  “It’s my dad!” Tyler said. “I know it. Let go!”

  “It’s not safe,” Jordan said. “Dad or not, Nevaeh and the others are still after you.”

  Tyler squirmed, trying to see more. “I think there are two planes.”

  “Two?”

  “Let me go!”

  Some people came out of the first plane. Two, Nevaeh thought. “Toby, I want you down there,” she said.

  “To do what?” Toby wanted to know.

  “If they head toward the monastery,” Nevaeh said, “they’re coming to interfere with our mission. Make sure they don’t.”

  “Do I get the rifle?”

  “Use your pistol.”

  Toby looked over the edge, doing nothing.

  “Well?” Nevaeh said.

  “I’ll jump down at the back,” Toby said. “It’s not so far.” He ran along the wall toward the Southwest Range Building.

  Phin’s head moved as though he were listening to seriously rocking tunes, but the earbuds attached to his MP3 player were dangling over his chest. Whatever beat he was rocking to, it was in his head. If that’s what crazy looked like, Nevaeh had a fleeting thought that she’d be hearing that melody herself soon enough.

  She told him, “You know the Siege Door?” It was the small iron door near the rear of the garden-side wall, where Toby had said he’d jump down.

  “You mean the one Creed used when he came here?”

  “That’s it. I want you to reach it from the inside. Go through the Southwest Range Building. I think Jagger and Owen are going for it. I don’t want them to see you or they’ll try something else. If they come that way, take care of them.”

  “Yeah, baby,” Phin said and leaped down, straight to the courtyard in front of the mosque. He didn’t land right and tumbled. Cursing, he got up and limped toward the back of the compound.

  Nev
aeh turned on the rifle’s electronic scope and switched it to night vision. She raised the rifle and scanned through the trees and branches toward the first plane. Showing in shades of green, the scope put her right in front of the jet’s windshield, obstacles scattering dark blurry blotches across her field of vision. She panned down, scanned right and left. There. Someone moving. An arm and hand—carrying something; must be a gun—swept through the scope’s optics. As she moved her sight to catch the person, she realized what she’d seen: not a hand and gun, but hooks. And then he was there: Jagger.

  I thought so.

  She centered the crosshairs on his head, moving as he did, panning to keep him dead center.

  She pulled the trigger.

  [ 89 ]

  Jagger stepped over a tree that the jet had apparently cut down and hurled forward, his feet coming down on defoliated branches. He reached out to a standing tree for balance, gripping it with RoboHand. He started to turn to make sure Owen was keeping up when the tree exploded. Something knocked RoboHand off it, and splinters sprayed into his face.

  Then he heard the shot.

  He ducked, looking first at the tree. A large-caliber bullet had taken a bite out of it, leaving a splintery semicircle cutting halfway into its eight-inch-diameter trunk. “Down!” he said.

  Both men fell on their stomachs and scrambled to a foot-high wall encircling a tree. Owen was lying on top of Jagger’s knees, his head at his hip.

  “Was that a gunshot?” Owen asked.

  “Almost took my head off,” said Jagger.

  Owen was looking back at the planes.

  “It came from the monastery,” Jagger said. “I think from the top of the wall.”

  Another shot rang out and a crack, like the sound of a sledgehammer on stone, sounded from the other side of the little wall, opposite his head.

  “One of the Tribe?” Owen said.

  “That’d be my guess.” He looked back. Four people were heading toward them, their figures backlit by a white taillight on the Clan’s Bombardier, their silhouettes oversized and fuzzy, bobbing up and down.

  The gun—a sniper rifle by the sound of it—spat out another round, this one going high. It pinged on the Boanerges’s wing. The Clan scattered, diving under the plane, running behind the wreckage. With the light no longer directly behind them, Jagger could make them out: Bale; the commando—Artimus, he thought; and Lilit, the rock band girl. A few seconds later another one darted from behind a tree to a boulder. Cillian.

  Thank you, Mr. Sniper, whoever you are, Jagger thought. He said, “They think the shooter is targeting them, covering for us.”

  “They wouldn’t know that somebody inside the monastery wants us dead.”

  “I suppose you started praying as soon as we hit the ground.”

  “Long before that, my friend.”

  [ 90 ]

  Where are they? Nevaeh thought. She was sure they’d dropped down behind a low wall after her first shot, but now she couldn’t see them. Wait a minute. Something moved behind the wall. She centered the crosshairs on it. A tuft of hair was sticking up in all directions. Had to be Owen. Good enough.

  She fired.

  Directly behind the hair, a small explosion on the flat paving stones marked the bullet’s point of impact. She kept her aim in the area, sweeping a little to the left, then the right. They had to pop their heads up sometime. They’d probably move together, running for the next protective obstacle closer to the monastery. She’d sniped before, the last time using a bolt-action M40A3, which required manually ejecting a spent cartridge and chambering the round. Too slow between shots for target-rich environments. She was glad for the XM500, which was a gas-operated semiautomatic, able to fire bullets as fast as she could pull the trigger. So it was quite possible, probable even, that she’d nail them both, seconds apart.

  Boom. Boom. Mission salvaged.

  Movement, off to the right. Oh, look, a foot. The .50-caliber round would blow it right off. In fact, a foot was nothing. Toby had been right, mimicking Dirty Harry: this thing could blow a head cleeeeean off. She took aim on the foot, preparing for three quick shots: the foot would cause the victim to scream and writhe, most likely revealing himself; the other man would try to help, putting himself in her sights if only for a few seconds. That’s all she needed.

  Footsteps approached her on the wall.

  “Toby, get your butt down there,” she said. “Now, shhhh, I got ’em.”

  “I don’t think so,” Beth said.

  Nevaeh spun her head half a second before a two-by-four wood stud slammed into her face. She reeled back—catching a glimpse of Beth holding the board in one hand, one end wedged against her shoulder, rifle-like; the other arm in a sling—and the stud smacked into her face again. She heard her nose break, sucked in breath, and started gagging on blood. She reversed, stumbled, and fell onto her back.

  Her mind moving, moving, moving past the pain, the panic of choking. She’d dropped the rifle, and Beth was bending to pick it up. Nevaeh arched her back, flipped up onto her feet, spun, and slammed the ball of her foot into Beth’s head. Beth staggered sideways, hit the parapet, dropped the gun. Nevaeh jumped for it. Beth kicked it, hard. It slid on the top of the wall, past Nevaeh, who turned to grab it. Bent over, arms out, she ran for it, grabbed it, and spun—thinking, Whoa, whoa . . . don’t kill her . . . leg shot, shoulder shot . . .

  The top of the wall was empty. Beth would have had to flip over the edge to be gone so fast. She took a fast glance over the parapet. No, she’d splatter on the ground going that way. She looked on the other side. A roof lay six feet below. She could have dropped down, then over the edge to a balcony.

  Nevaeh jumped to the roof, verified the balcony below, and jumped to that. A row of doors to the monk cells. Nevaeh spat out blood, blew blood out of her nostrils. She wiped the sleeve of her coat over her lips and kicked open the first door.

  [ 91 ]

  Vasco de Sousa had stopped needing alarm clocks three decades ago. His biorhythms were conditioned to wake him at 4:30 in the morning. In all that time, they had never failed him by more than a minute. This morning the clock read 4:19. He lifted it and held it close to his face. Eleven minutes! He wondered what it meant. Was this it, the start of a rapid decline ending in a grave?

  Rapid? Ha!

  He’d had aching joints, failing eyesight, bowel problems for years. But he’d been able to take care of himself, which was more than he could say for a lot of people thirty years his junior. He fixed his own meals, went for walks, could still make people laugh. He had his mother to thank for it. Even half her genes, however, passed through a generation, had limitations.

  He’d always thought that the way he’d go was a steady, gradual decline, then a plunge: slide down the hill, go over the cliff. And that was fine by him. He wanted people to say, “What? Vasco’s dead? I saw him just yesterday. He was shuffling around, telling stories—good ones too.” Much better than: “Oh, what a blessing he’s gone. Finally out of his misery, poor dear.”

  Maybe it was his mother’s visit that had thrown him off. Lord knew he was excited about this morning, his morning prayers. That must have been it. Anxious to pray. He stood and turned to pull his sheet and bed cover up, making them straight. At his age, you never knew when the ticker would stop ticking, and heaven forbid he’d leave a mess for someone else to clean up. He went to the marble-topped sideboard in his room and poured water from a pitcher into a basin. His son had upgraded the bathroom when he remodeled, all the modern conveniences, but some things you couldn’t let go of, and washing his face and brushing his teeth from a freestanding basin was one of them.

  After his personal hygiene routine, he went to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee—percolated, not dripped. Normally he’d fry an egg, toast a slice of bread while waiting for the coffee, but he thought this morning he’d start his prayer time early. Why not? He’d woken up early for a reason, he supposed, and it wasn’t to spend extra time in the kitchen.
r />   He’d been so excited about praying today, he’d told the children about it last night. They’d smiled and nodded, their little faces saying, Whatever, old man, where’s the pastéis de nada? But they were good kids from good homes: he’d known their parents as babies and their grandparents as babies, and even most of their great-grandparents.

  He considered forgoing the fire pit on the patio and simply diving in with My dear Father in heaven—and everything he wanted to say. But the mornings had been chilly lately, and his body didn’t insulate his bones the way it used to. Two logs would do.

  He picked up the magazine from the table by the patio doors, brushed a curtain aside to get to the handle, and opened a door. He froze in place. The fire pit was blazing, and sitting around it and his favorite chair were all the children—not just the ones who came in the evenings for pastéis, but their siblings as well, children—teens now—who’d grown too old to listen to an old man’s stories in exchange for something to eat. And their parents . . . a few grandparents as well. Every one of them held a white votive candle, all the flames illuminating a congregation of compassionate faces.

  He began to weep, and a man stepped up to help him to his chair. He grinned, trying to communicate his joy to each person in turn. It wasn’t unusual for most of them to be up so early in the morning; despite its newfound resort status, Sesimbra was still a fishing village, after all, and boats hitting the water by five pulled in the best hauls. But that they came to support him . . . that meant the world to him. His shaking fingers opened the magazine in his lap and picked up a card. He said, “I guess your children told you how special today is for me. I’m going to tell you some things that you won’t believe, and that’s okay. Just chalk it up to a senile old man.”