I, Judas the 5th Gospel (26 page)

“Prologue?” DiSalvo said. “I’ve seen this document in the Vatican. It is indeed short, but why do you say ‘prologue?’ Where is the rest?”

Judas laughed. “The Vatican? What they have is a perverted version of what I wrote, reworked to suit their desires. The only true version that ever left my hand was taken from here by Sir Richard Francis Burton.”

“His lost manuscript,” Angelique said.

“’Lost?’” Judas shook his head. “I heard the story. His wife, Isabella burned it over his body when he died. But that was a ruse. She’d made copies. Copies that were disseminated. Hand to hand. From one person to another they trusted. I have no clue how many copies were made over the years since Burton left here. He probably wrote out a few before he even made it back to England.”

“Why do you say ‘prologue?’” Angelique asked. “Where is the rest of the Fifth Gospel?”

“Ah!” Judas exclaimed. “That is the most important question. The answer will come very, very soon. Just bear with me for a little while longer, so you have all the information you need in order to make your decisions.”

This hardly satisfied any of the three, but they had little choice.

“Back to the author of Revelations. You’re going to find this darkly funny. He was a fellow named John from an island called Patmos, part of Greece around the turn of the first century, Anno Domino, which I think is pretty cool and Jesus will appreciate—having the entire calendar wrapped around his life.

“I should have said, Patmos is part of Greece
now
. The islands changed hands quite a few times over the centuries. John, who was not a Christian by the way, said he received a vision from Jesus. So he sat in a cave and wrote and wrote.” Judas shook his head. “He was crazy as the bats that lived further inside his cave. You do know, of course, that visions are usually a sign of some mental issue?”

Once more, he didn’t wait for an answer. “Here’s the bottom line on Revelations and the Rapture and all that fire and brimstone stuff. Jesus is the most peaceful man you could ever meet.” Judas touched the scar above his right eye. “This is the most violent thing I ever saw him do. He used a slingshot to work off the stress and I came around the corner of a wall at the wrong time. Gave me quite a headache. Jesus never used that slingshot again, and he kept this small black stone in his hand almost all the time afterward, as if to remind himself that even the most seemingly innocuous act could hurt. And, of course—” he added with a nod toward the two mercenaries, still as statues—“for the power it contains.

“I mean, come now. How can you reconcile a loving God with one that would unleash Armageddon on the world? The flaw in the logic is glaring, but the emotional dissonance with God’s message of peace and love should shake even the most hardened soul.

“The problem with Revelations is simple. John wasn’t writing about what was going to happen at the end of the world. He was writing about what had already happened that ended
his
world. Seventy A.D. saw the Romans obliterate Jerusalem. The world as the Jews knew it came to an end. The world as most Christians knew it also came to an end. And they were pretty upset to put it lightly. They’d figured that Jesus would come back like he’d promised and he would deal with the Romans. The fact that he didn’t caused many to question their faith. So, John wrote Revelations as a promise of vengeance. It obviously worked.

“And the six-six-six thing meaning the Devil or the anti-Christ?” Judas continued. “It actually stands for Emperor Nero, using Jewish numerology for his reign. Can’t speak badly of the Emperor openly or else you get nailed to a cross.”

“So you’re saying this thing coming at Earth,” Gates said, “isn’t Wormwood? That we’re not about to experience the Rapture?”

“Oh, it’s going to be a rapture,” Judas said with a smile. “But not like anyone expects. It will be the end for some, a beginning for others, and a start-over for most. To be honest, it disappointed me that the Christian Church, in all its various evolutions, saw fit to leave Revelations in the Bible, yet left out my small contribution.”

“But we will meet the Lord, our Savior?” DiSalvo pressed.

Judas got up and walked around the table. The three also rose as he came toward them. He halted in front of Angelique. He took her face between his hands and peered deep into her eyes. “Your hair, which you received from your mother. Always curly and dark and kept short. But your eyes, you have your father’s eyes.”

“Who was my father?” Angelique asked. “My mother?”

“Once more, my dear, you ask the wrong questions, although they are important.”

“What is the right question?” Angelique asked.

“Who you are.” Judas replied.

“And who am I?”

“The Fifth Gospel, of course.”

The Final Day: Terminal Impact In 12 To 0 Hours

Xangu River, Mato Grasso

DiSalvo stepped around a bend in the trail and dropped to one knee, signaling for the others to halt. Gates moved up next to the priest. Set on a stake in the middle of the river was a head. The two moved forward, alert for signs of ambush, but there were none. Finally, they signaled Angelique and Lee forward.

“Any ideas?” Gates asked Angelique.

“The Jivaro,” Angelique said. “I’ve heard of them, but they’ve never come this far down-river. The last tribe of headhunters in South America. Some think they’re extinct.”

“Obviously, they aren’t,” Gates said.

“It’s a warning not to go any further,” Angelique noted. She splashed out in the waist-deep water to check the gruesome trophy, and then came back. “The Jivaro worship El Diablo, by the way. They use blowguns to paralyze their victims, then cut their heads off while they are still alive, but unable to move. They leave the bodies behind. Usually they prepare the head, but this one is fresh.”

DiSalvo turned away, facing upstream. “We keep going.”

Abbottabad, Pakistan

Captain Martinez low-crawled, gravity doing most of the work, slithering him downslope with little effort on his part. He halted at the row of motion detectors. They were Chinese model, and Task Force Kali had spent time preparing counter-measures. Martinez stabbed a small transmitter in the shape of a tent stake into the dirt and pressed the button on the top. The frequency blanked out the motion detectors, so he moved forward, invisible to the probing electronic beams.

At least the timing was perfect, Martinez reflected as he crawled up on the first guard post. This was the hardest time for guards, far into the night, but with dawn still a few hours off. A two-man crew manned a heavy machinegun in a concrete pillbox set into the mountainside. There was a great field of fire at the road leading to the storage facility a hundred feet below.

Martinez lowered himself over the front of the pillbox, right near one edge. As he expected, one of the guards was sleeping. The other was leaning against the concrete slit, sleepily peering out. Martinez drew his silenced pistol and shot the upright one in the eye, the bullet easily slicing through into his brain, causing instant death. He put two rounds into the sleeping man’s head.

Then he continued.

It was knife work next. Three roving guards. Three slit throats, the arterial blood pulsing out into the dirt. Each time he slid the knife through flesh, Martinez silently mouthed a prayer for their souls. They guarded tools of destruction that could cost many their lives. He also killed from behind and none of the blood spattered onto him, leaving him clean, but more determined with each death.

He killed his way to the three-foot high concrete and steel ventilation shaft. He could feel the warm air being blown out of the grate. In all these years, this shaft had never been inspected or surfaced. So for three nerve-racking nights, a member of Task Force Kali had made his way to it and gingerly sawed away, leaving just the thinnest pieces of metal in the cuts and filling them in with similarly colored putty.

The grate gave at his first tug.

He looped rope around the base of the shaft exit, clipped the rope into the carabiner on the front of his combat vest and climbed in. He slid down until his feet touched metal. A horizontal shaft.

It had cost forty million dollars in bribes to the contractor who’d built the facility to get the plans. Forty million, a new identity, a new country and a new life for the engineer. Martinez, and every man on Kali, had the entire facility, including airshafts, electrical conduits, even which way doors opened, memorized. He knew it better than the one room apartment he’d suffered his childhood in. As he went, he placed claymore mines and small retransmitters at intersections so that he could keep a signal to the entrance.

He wove his way through the air ducts, half-crouched. He arrived at a series of hatches designed to keep the air inside the room. They kept a positive pressure up through a series of air locks, the first one starting with an atmosphere and a half, descending to just slightly positive pressure.

Martinez went through each one, making sure to secure each hatch behind him, booby-trapping it with a claymore mine. He didn’t arrive at an air grate, but at a Plexiglas insert. He peered into the dimly lit room. No air was supposed to ever be released from this room. The entrance was via a series of locks similar to the hatches he’d just negotiated. There was no one in the room, which made this much easier.

Martinez out pulled a battery-powered saw and cut through. After emplacing a last mine, he dropped the six feet to the floor.

The bombs were lined up like soldiers for inspection. Four of the bombs were on inspection tables, like logs ready for the first cut. Martinez swapped the battery out of the saw and onto a drill. He went to the vault door. Designed to work against intrusion from the outside, Martinez was easily able to access the controls for it. He placed a small charge against the controls with a remote detonator.

He backed off and fired the charge, effectively destroying the ability to unlock the massive steel door.

An alarm sounded in the distance, a klaxon. A tidal wave of alarms were set off, culminating in red lights flashing in the storage area.

Martinez took out his phone. He had a signal through the retransmitters. Not much of one, but enough to text with.

He unfolded the message he’d encoded and quickly typed in the letters.

In-Flight, Short of the Afghan-Pakistan Border

The commander of Task Force Kali was in an MC-130 Combat Talon. The Talon was modified for Special Operations and able to operate in all weather and flight conditions. The front half of the cargo bay was full of electronics and Air Force personnel manning them.

They were twenty minutes from crossing the border, and the Colonel hovered by the Air Force radioman, waiting on the ‘GO’ or ‘NO GO’ message from the President.

Everyone knew about the Intruder. That was something that had never factored into planning for Murphy to screw up the mission. In a way, the Commander felt the fact it was likely the Intruder was going to smash into the planet and eventually kill everyone, made the upcoming mission more palatable, in that they were only speeding up their own inevitable fate.

On the other hand, it made it seem rather futile. A tiny squeak of an action in the great cacophony that was the universe.

The screen in front of the radioman came alive as an incoming message was unscrambled:

GO

As the Commander turned to relay the order to his own Task Force radioman, who had a satellite uplink, the Sergeant First Class was writing quickly on a pad of paper.

The Commander leaned close, watching the five letter groups appear. He knew it had to be from the recon element in the hide hole. Every little bit of last minute intelligence would be useful.

The Sergeant handed the sheet to the Commander who pulled out his one-time pad and began translating the letters. When he was done, he stared at the result in shock:

HAVE SEIZED AND SEALED KALI

CODE WORD SALAMANDER REPEAT CODE WORD SALAMANDER

The Commander looked over at the message still blinking on the Air Force screen, and then at the words he’d deciphered in pencil on the paper.

There was no way the message he held in his hands could be true. How could Martinez and Daw have done it? But the message was in the proper code, and the code word to indicate the Pakistan nukes were secure was also correct: Pax.

The Commander grabbed the Air Force radioman on the shoulder. “Send to Washington. Salamander. I repeat Salamander.” He turned to his radioman. “Inform all units: Salamander. Repeat Salamander. Return to base.”

The Mato Grasso, The Amazon

“What happened to you?” Angelique asked Gates.

The two were about fifteen meters behind DiSalvo and Lee. The priest was pressing forward at an increasing rate, anxious to get to their destination. A bit unwise in Gates’ opinion, given the warning they’d just received via the head on the stake.