Tomas absentmindedly stared out the bridge’s forward windows. “I don’t know where, where it all went wrong.” Another few unstable steps away from Bernhard. “It doesn’t matter why. I suppose, it only matters that it happened. They aren't the forgiving type of men.” With sudden, resolute confidence, Tomas stood upright and looked back at Bernhard. “Goodbye, old friend.”

  Unable to intervene, Bernhard watched in horror as his colleague proficiently retrieved a Glock pistol concealed beneath his uniform shirt. Tomas decisively placed its barrel under his chin, pointing up, and ended his life.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  February 20, 10:03am local.

  43,452 feet above Western Portugal.

  Rogelio sat in a plush loveseat aboard a private jet registered to a front company that owned nothing but that aircraft and a post office box on Grand Cayman. Its extravagant, custom red leather interior surrounded him in luxury, but did little to alleviate his concerns over the failed operation.

  He replayed some of the last day’s events in search of the linchpin, the one fuck-up that had ensured their failure. There’s always a series of mistakes, but they all lead back to a single decision that must be analyzed and reprimanded.

  Rogelio realized how little he actually knew. I became so busy trying to recover the cash and the shipment that I never stopped to ask why this had happened. I returned to the Sacher and saw the chaos in König’s office. I called Tirador to bring the men, but the cops showed up long before they did. We left immediately and drove through the night for Slovenia, for the port in Koper. Leaving was the right decision. A shootout with Western authorities is suicide, especially in cities where surveillance cameras are so common. Austria isn’t like Mexico, and I don’t have the right influence there. At least, not yet.

  Once we arrived near the port, word came from the advance team that dozens of cops and military were already hiding on the docks. They got there well in advance of the ship, so they must have been tipped off somehow. König’s ship didn't even finish docking before they raided it. With only fifteen men, we had no chance to prevail and recover our shipment. No, we had no chance at all. Those fucking pigs knew what was there, and they knew where to find it.

  While Rogelio’s men fled south to meet their plane in Croatia, he’d specifically diverted his aircraft to the nearest usable airstrip. Two hours after leaving Koper, they were still on a foreign highway and Rogelio was safely airborne. Best not to leave witnesses or paper trails that Interpol and the D-E-A can put together later.

  Rogelio didn’t understand what led to this total loss, much less how to explain it to the other four men who helped him govern the Santa Lena cartel at the moment. I don’t know how König managed to fuck this up so bad, but he somehow did nothing right. He lost the drugs, the cash, the network, and exposed all of it to the public and the cops. Dozens of law enforcement agencies from all over the world will fight for some piece of jurisdiction on this, and D-E-A will be very near the front of that group.

  Wait...of course...

  Rogelio pulled out his laptop. It didn’t stream online yesterday, some loading error after I left for the brothel. He booted the device and brought up the video surveillance files from the hard drive. It opens fine. Skipping ahead, he found the approximate time he left his hotel room yesterday afternoon and confirmed the camera had continued recording. Rogelio clicked toward the end of the timeline, and thermal images showed numerous people in König’s office and hidden room. Must be after the cops arrived and stole everything.

  He clicked on the time control and pulled it left, back to 3:31pm, at about the time he had been at Stockerau Airfield picking up his men. The image froze for a moment, but then displayed two bodies inside the hidden room. One was on the floor in an awkward position, and it didn’t move. The second sat nearby. Rogelio leaned forward in his seat. “That one’s gotta be tied up, must be König. What the fuck is this…”

  The video played for several seconds. The person sitting down appeared to be showing something to the one lying next to them. An epiphany struck as he remembered a directional microphone had been attached to the camera. If it worked...

  He turned up the laptop’s speaker volume to 100.

  “...failing business, and how you scchhhht it. We know about the partnership with the drug cartels, about the shipments, about sccchhhhhhhhht that you chose to both ignore the deaths as they happened and to import more death before the la—”

  Although the video continued, the audio file did not. Rogelio desperately clicked through the few minutes after that last audible moment. He then clicked on times before the audio segment dropped. The two bodies were in roughly the same position as before, but the one knelt over König and touched his chest.

  “Herr König, there is much that I must now try to explain to you. The two most imscchht them are, first, we are very short on time, and, second, I am not here to negotiate with you in any way or for any thing. I am only here for one sccchhhhhtt that is the eternal salvation of your soul.”

  click

  Rogelio paused the replay and sat back in disbelief, away from the image before him. Real, intrinsic fear crept up through his body, like that he’d only known as a child. “What, the fuck is this??”

  SIXTY-FIVE

  February 21, 10:56PM local.

  San Miguel Chapel. Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  Michael sat in an aging, rickety wood chair in the living area of the small residential quarters attached to the back of San Miguel Chapel. With his back to the wall and a square bistro-sized dining table between them, he and Monsignor Hernandez drank beers together to close out their day. Ira, the black-and-white heeler-collie mix he rescued from the abandoned camp in Wyoming, rested his head on Michael’s legs. The dog closed his eyes and smiled while Michael petted him.

  “He missed you, ya know?” Hernandez took another pull from a coffee mug filled with Belgian Trappist ale.

  Michael nodded and smiled. He sighed and drank his ale from a Mason jar. His entire body hurt and the bruises on his face, chest, and arms had only worsened since he’d wrestled his life away from the African delivery driver in Vienna little more than forty-eight hours ago. What a difference a day makes...

  “The whole time you were gone, he didn’t wanna sleep in my room. He stayed in your bed and curled up on your old W-N-M-U sweatshirt. I covered him up with the fleece blanket you brought back with him, but he only wanted that sweatshirt. Must stink like you do.”

  Michael laughed, which made him hurt again. “Easy, H, you’re killin’ me.”

  “Oh yeah? So, three priests walk into this bar—”

  “Stop it,” Michael begged, “seriously, it all hurts right now!”

  “That’s the first time you’ve smiled since you got back from gettin’ your butt kicked. Anything you wanna talk about, or do I gotta keep tellin’ bad priest jokes until you do?”

  Michael stopped petting the dog, so Ira looked up at him and pouted. “Good boy, Ira, go lay down.” The dog reluctantly moved over to the small couch. After climbing up, he turned three tight circles, flopped down, and sighed.

  Hernandez smirked and took another swig of beer. “With a name like that, all the elders are gonna wonder why their Catholics priests are keeping a Jewish shepherd.”

  Michael chuckled again. “Seriously, stop it, H. It’s Latin, not Yiddish.”

  “Oh, didn’t realize that,” Hernandez explained. “Oh, wow. Really?”

  “Yep.”

  “You named your dog, ‘Wrath?’”

  Michael fidgeted in the chair and tried to get comfortable. Not possible right now, everything’s bruised somewhere. “Gotta be the most Catholic name ever, right?”

  “That’s no shit,” Hernandez agreed and finished his mug of ale. “So, you wanna talk about it or not?”

  Michael nodded and crossed himself. H did the same. “Forgive me, Father. It’s been two days since my last confession.” The memory of his recent, Lazarus-like return from the dead came forward. God sent Stefanie to give me the exact second chance that I failed to give Isadore, and that König refused. Michael inhaled deeply and continued on, knowing he had to confess his failures, no matter how painful. “I fear that I’m not fulfilling God’s intended purpose for me, and that, along the way, I’m condemning men to hell and adding grave, mortal sins to my eventual judgment.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Michael recounted a summation of his perceived shortcomings on the Vienna operation, as well as how he still felt he’d failed in Rome with Pietro Isadore. “Basically, H, I firmly believe in the divine intent of what I’m doing, but I’m terrified that I’m mucking it up. Those two nights haunt me, and often make me question my decisions. I’m, actually, kinda terrified that those two dead men are gonna drag my soul down to Hell with them.”

  Hernandez waited until Michael looked at him to speak. “‘Mucking’ it up?”

  “Yeah, you know I’ve got a swearing problem. I’m trying to work on my language, even in private. I keep hearing that priests aren’t even supposed to know the word ‘fuck.’”

  “Who told you that?”

  “You know. People.”

  “We’re people, too, not homogenous robots that exist in a sterile vacuum devoid of emotion and fallibility.”

  “Well aware, H.”

  ‘Well, you know what I always say.”

  “There’s two kinds of people in this world?”

  “No, the other one: ‘fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.’ If we can’t even be people in private, we’ll never be good at shepherding people through public. I digress. Back to your problem.”

  Michael nodded, leaned forward, and stared at his clasped hands as he spoke. “I thought the end result would be different, H. I imagined all the beauty and ideology of saving evil from itself, and it was all gonna be rainbows and white doves, and Godly light beams shining down through rain clouds. I had no idea it was gonna be like this.”

  Hernandez poured more ale into his coffee mug. “You know how many death row inmates ever truly come to God? Humble themselves, before that fateful Eleventh Hour? Not many. Even fewer come to God before ten-thirty. Man is a proud and self-righteous species, Michael. Even though we’ve been made in God’s image, we do stupid shit, like get, ‘Only God Can Judge Me,’ tattoos. No one gets ink like that because they spend all their time volunteering in homeless shelters and digging wells in third-world nations, they get ‘em because they like doing bad shit and hate being called out on it.

  “Here’s the way I see it, Michael. You, and those like you, have chosen to thread this narrow, nearly impossible gap. You’re trying to save the greatest evils on earth from themselves, and you’ve been led to accomplish that by reconciling their sins and killing them. I still wrestle with the paradox, but I can’t argue that humanity benefits from sending those kinda men to meet God. I’m glad that someone’s willing to arrange the meeting, I just don’t know if I have the confidence in its morality to do it myself. That make sense?”

  “Sure. You see that it needs to be done, but you personally don’t want the burden. That part feels a lot like cop work to me.”

  “You present very few of God’s children with immediate reconciliation and delivery home to our Father. Only the greatest of evils, right? That means the soccer mom that’s been just a little bit too bad to get into heaven doesn’t get this chance. Perhaps her salvation is on the fence, but she doesn’t get a visit and advance notice of an immediate, scheduled departure time for her judgment. If you look at this from your perspective, that you’re there to save the souls of these evil men, then, shouldn’t that only-kinda-bad soccer mom get that chance first? She’s not been evil at all, not one day in her life, and she’s maybe gonna end up in hell anyway, so why are those assholes getting a chance at eternal salvation that’s never offered to her? Why is God sending you to darken the doorways of the most prodigal and agnostic of His children if you’re being sent there to save their souls? God doesn’t like being tested, so there must be another reason for it.”

  Michael considered H’s point, but struggled to find the answer.

  “So, in my position, looking at this from the outside,” Hernandez continued, “and, also, looking at it from your burdened and biased perspective, I want you to consider something. You think that God has sent you-all in to save these souls, to salvage them from Satan’s grasp and return them home like prodigal children so God and all the angels on high can celebrate their triumphant return. To give them that one last chance to exercise their free will to choose God and submit to his divine and universal authority, but, what if you’re all wrong?”

  Michael scowled at his mentor. “That’s what I’m asking you, H. How does that help?”

  “No, you didn’t hear me right. What if God isn’t sending you in to save them, to convince them of their terrible and imminent eternal fate, and let them use their free will for good, just this one last time? What if God has been watching them over their whole life, their choices, their conduct, their evil. And, now that he has you all, whoever and however many there are, and he can send you in to confirm the decision He believes they’ve already made, and that they seem guaranteed to make later. He’s just using you to see how committed they are to that decision today, to prove to Himself that their free will is gonna damn them to Hell eventually. If that’s true, then maybe it’s best for everyone that they go home to meet Him now. You’re not responsible for saving anyone, Michael, and you never have been. You’re merely there to force them into a final decision under the pressure of both time and consequence. Their eternal salvation will always remain their own responsibility.”

  Michael guffawed, amazed at the revelation. He physically felt a tremendous spiritual burden lifted from his heart, shoulders, and mind. That changes everything! Tears welled in his eyes. “H, I can’t even begin to tell you what a difference that makes.”

  “I didn’t change anything about all the negative stuff that you have to deal with to get to that end-point, but I think that’s a much more realistic perspective. It’s always gonna come down to free will, and you can’t make decisions for anyone else. I mean, what fun would that be, anyway?

  “You can’t blame yourself for their choices, either, Michael, or consider it a failure when they deny the inevitability of their eternal destination. God certainly won’t see it that way, and He can’t hold you accountable for doing something that He can’t even do himself. Free will, right? God can’t overcome it, so you ain’t got a snowball’s chance in Hell.”

  Michael still looked down at the floor, but nodded his acceptance and understanding of the man’s argument. “I couldn’t see that. Free will, it’s such a blessing and a curse. Thank you, H.”

  “Didn’t do anything but point out the obvious. You’re the one that’s been out doing the backbreaking work on God’s behalf.”

  Michael scoffed at his mentor’s self-deprecation. “It’s made all the difference, though. I couldn’t have gone on much longer the way I was headed.” He sat up, leaned back in the chair, and briefly rubbed his face. “Shit was gettin’ bad, man. I just kept replaying those absolutions, and in my mind, my psyche, all I could do was see them as failures. I was certain they’d irreversibly stained my soul.”

  “We Catholics are great at alcoholism and guilt, Michael, and we’re not meant to carry either burden." He poured more beer and winked at his subordinate and friend. “You look like you really got the shit kicked out of you. I expect this last trip didn’t exactly go as planned?”

  Michael chuckled at the understatement, which shot pain through his ribs. “You should, oww, you should see the other guy!” He laughed aloud, even though it hurt like hell.

  Hernandez smirked and skeptically watched him.

  “Seriously, H, either one of ‘em!” Michael howled at his own gallows humor and sharp pain immediately stymied his laughter. One probably lost an eye and the other one’s D-R-T. He slowly inhaled through his nose and tried to manage his pain. Dead Right There. That never stops being funny, which is something God might wanna chat about one day.

  SIXTY-SIX

  February 22, 08:05am local.

  Vatican Housing Complex. Rome, Italy.

  Cardinal Paul Dylan sat in his official Vatican residence at a zebrawood dining table and sipped his first cappuccino of the day. Today’s schedule demanded evening commitments with Italian government officials to discuss shared economic concerns, so Paul had directed Harold to clear his morning. As such, he still wore a plush, dark red bathrobe and slippers while Harold sat across the table and briefed him on the progress of their ongoing side project.

  Dressed in the black cassock typical of his working day, Harold had apparently been up for several hours. He’d even passed on a cappuccino when Paul offered it. “So, it appears the matter in Vienna is concluded.”

  Paul scowled at his subordinate and set his coffee cup back on its matching saucer. “How can you say that, Harold? We have ongoing exposure there! The police in Austria are still investigating König’s office almost three days later! C-N-N, Sky News, hell, even Univision set up satellite vans on the street outside to update their viewers every hour, on the hour! The Austrian National Police are in the middle of an active manhunt for a gunman who shot a rifle at them and fled before they locked the building down! The matter is decidedly not concluded!”

  Harold cleared his throat and briefly averted his gaze. “Yes, Your Eminence, all that is true, but, our target is absolved, as much as he would allow, our man is out of the country, and it appears the police have no leads to tie him back to the scene. I will concede this is not the outcome we ever endeavor to achieve, but there are a tremendous number of positives here. Given all the obstacles that spontaneously presented themselves along the way, our operation should have failed entirely. König’s dealings and his drug network have been publicly exposed for all the world to see, and agencies like Interpol and the D-E-A will take over much of it. The Austrian police are focused on finding the African gunman, and no one is talking about the ‘priest who got away.’ It does seem that we are, actually, ‘clean,’ as John would say.”

 

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