Rise of the Nephilim (13 page)

“We were taken by surprise and with overwhelming force, sir. I can’t really explain much past that. I’m having a hard time figuring it out myself. I’ve got a guy with me who claims to know, and I would have passed him off as some nut job a few days ago. Now… I’m not sure…”

The commander prodded him, “What else can you tell me? Are Chambers and the Miller with you? Give me a quick debriefing.”

Eric fumbled with his words in response to the question. “The archbishop insisted we keep our distance while the conference was in session. We couldn’t get to him in time, once the attack began. It seems that the conference was infiltrated by a sleeper cell of terrorists posing as attendees. They took the rest of the security forces by surprise, but we managed to neutralize a few of the assailants and extract a few other key personnel. We were escorting these personnel back to their accommodations when we were attacked again. Chambers…Brad… didn’t survive the encounter. Now, it is just me and one of the staff. His name is Jude Sullivan. Mister Sullivan believes he has vital information related to the attack and that his life is in extreme danger, so I am going to help him get out of Geneva and get to safety.”

Reynolds took a second to process Eric’s report. “I’m sorry about Brad. He was a good soldier. I know you two were good friends, and you don’t want his death to be in vain, but this Mister Sullivan isn’t part of the mission parameters. I’m ordering you to send him on his way and rendezvous with what’s left of the Geneva team.”

“There isn’t a Geneva team anymore, Jim!” Eric protested. “I can’t just let this one go. It isn’t some little babysitting job I’ve picked up to make myself feel better about Brad. You have to just trust me, ok?”

“Strauss, this isn’t some office job where you can come and go as you please. When I give you orders, I expect you to follow them. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly,” Eric mumbled to himself, as he slammed down the phone receiver and hung up on his boss.

He stepped away from the phone booth and saw Jude walking down the hallway in the same daze he had been in and out of since they fled the alley. The soldier approached him and grabbed his arm, leading them the opposite way toward a nearby
Credit Suisse
banking kiosk. He pulled a plastic card out of his wallet.

Eric explained. “I need to get as much cash out of this card as I can before it’s canceled.”

“Canceled?” Jude asked.

“Yeah, I’m on my boss’ bad side right now, and I think I might have just turned in my resignation. What does the news say?”

“Well,” Jude recalled, “they have video of the bombing from one of the news cameras. The good news is that none of our faces made it on there.”

“I’ll call that a win,” Eric murmured.

Jude looked nonplussed, “The bad news is that those two goons you killed
are
on it, and one of them was caught using telekinesis. The cat’s out of the bag now.”

Eric shook his head, “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it. Should you call ahead and let someone know you are on your way?”

“I have the Vicar General’s number, but I don’t know how deeply the Vatican has been infiltrated,” Jude admitted. “I think it’s best to wait until we get to Rome and find a safe place to lay low.”

Jude left Eric and returned to his bench on the platform.  The excited hubbub of the throng gathering around the television bank persisted, but he had had enough news for the day. The only item on his agenda was to wait for the coming train. Finally, he had no other distractions to stay the tide of emotions welling inside him.

He quietly buried his face in his hands and began to cry again. He cried for Emily and Inanna. He cried for all the lives lost and his uselessness in preventing it. He cried for his wayward friend Antonio and all innocence lost. He cried, because he was afraid.

“Keep working, people! I want you to uncover who released that video!”

Mike Carpenter’s hands were shaking under the heat of his supervisor’s glare. He and the rest of his group were working as diligently as they could to determine the source of the rogue transmission released by the BBC. To his chagrin, however, the signal had been routed through so many masked IPs that even the experts at the NSA were having trouble tracing it.

The camera capturing the footage had been a custom-shielded model provided indirectly by the agency to national media outlets. That shielding was the only reason the picture had held out so long before succumbing to the strange, localized electromagnetic jamming like most of the other electronics in the building. The true mystery, and current source of ire for his superiors, was how this classified data had been pirated and distributed in such a short period of time.

Mike’s hands were shaking after what he had seen in the leaked video. If he did not know it had been captured with agency equipment, he would have assumed it was some publicity stunt for a new found-footage movie or something. Panic and confusion were exploding across the blogosphere and message boards, as speculation grew over the authenticity of the clip. Conspiracy nuts were already analyzing individual frames to justify claims ranging from Illuminati plots to the beginning of Armageddon.

Whatever the reality was behind this disaster, he and everyone he worked with knew they had been caught unawares and their network possibly compromised. This fear, coupled with an acute curiosity, had kept him immersed in his work for hours. He traced the virtual pathways around the world, cracked firewalls, and wrestled with encrypted servers. Each success placed a new brass ring in front of him to grab. It was just enough to help him weather the tirades of his department chief.

Finally, his search came to an abrupt halt. He just sat and stared at the results of his hard work on his computer screen for what felt like an eternity, before he realized his boss was angrily marching up to his desk.

“Mike! What do you think you’re doing? This isn’t time to daydream!”

“I…I’m not, sir,” Mike protested. “It’s just that I found origin of the transmission.”

“Well?” demanded his high-strung superior,” Where the hell did this come from, and how did they leech it off of our encrypted networks?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

His manager looked at him as if he were conversing with an inmate at a mental asylum. “You don’t know? I thought you just told me you know where it came from?”

Mike shook his head. “The signal begins in Geneva, but that’s all I can tell. I followed its trail to the router of a local internet café, and it ends there. It’s likely whoever sent it hacked into the Wi-Fi.”

His supervisor leaned forward to puzzle over the evidence Mike had compiled on-screen. “Dammit! Send me what you have, so I can go over it. The last thing I want to do is cooperate with the Swiss government on this, if possible.”

The man stormed away and shot a glance over to his administrative assistant. “Kelly, get Stevens on the phone. I want to know how we stand on information control. We don’t need riots in the streets over supposed supermen storming the peace conference.”

Mike slipped on his headphones, as the man walked into his office for his teleconference.
Supposed
supermen
…
Maybe his boss was onto something. Surely it was just the static and distortion playing tricks on the viewers’ perception. That had to be it... Just tricks….

Around one a.m. local time, Jude and Eric stepped off the train and onto the arrival platform of the
Stazione di Roma Termini
, the final station on this leg of the railway, just east of the heart of Rome. Eric remained alert for any sign of suspicious activity, as he led Jude past the shops to the north entrance onto the Via Marsala. A glut of hotels operated in the surrounding blocks to capture the influx of daily arrivals to the Eternal City, so it would be relatively easy to find a place to stay without the worry of being spotted. The cash Eric had extracted from the ATM in Geneva would doubly ensure their anonymity.

The two men walked out of the large, enclosed station under the cover of darkness. Jude, in a fervor fueled by grief and panic, had argued the merits of hurrying straight to the Holy See to inform the Vicar of what had happened, but Eric intervened.

“We don’t know when your friend Antonio was taken over by this Azazel character. If it was within the Vatican, then you can be damn sure there will be more. What better way to destroy a nuisance than from within? The most dangerous thing you can do right now is let your guard down, and we don’t need to lose one of the few people still alive who knows what happened back there.”

“You’re right,” Jude finally relented. “I’ll call ahead, once we find a place to lay low for a bit.”

They walked a few blocks north of the station before deciding on a small establishment nestled in the urban landscape named
Il Duce
, or the Duke. The inn looked as if time had left it behind. The worn carpet and dusty chandelier in the front lobby suggested it might have once been worthy of its lofty name, but now it was nothing more than a budget retreat. It looked as if it were less likely to welcome people with the social stature of its namesake and more likely be the temporary solace of drug runners and johns looking to score with the prostitutes outside. The tired clerk at the counter spoke little English, but the wad of cash Eric shoved at him translated into a mutual understanding.

Jude tossed and turned restlessly. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Emily’s dull lifeless eyes or imagined Gallo’s face twisted in demonic glee by the creature inside him, smiling over the chaos he had wrought. The sun eventually began to rise, and he finally abandoned his poor attempt at slumber. He quietly stood up to use the bathroom.

“Couldn’t sleep either, huh?” Eric asked from his bed.

“I don’t know if I’ll sleep again for a long time,” admitted Jude sadly. “Yesterday was… overwhelming...”

“The pain may fade with time,” Eric said with empathy. “It never really goes away, though. I did two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. I saw friends blown to pieces in front of me by suicide bombers, and innocent civilians executed just because they showed compassion to a wounded soldier. Experiences like those take something from you. They leave something hollow behind that can never be filled back up. Eventually you have to accept it as a part of who you are, or it will swallow you whole.”

Jude suddenly realized that he wasn’t the only person suffering from recent loss. “Eric… I’m sorry about your friend. He seemed like a great guy. He didn’t deserve what happened to him. None of them did.”

Eric looked up at Jude. “You mentioned a name back in Geneva. Was it something that began with an A?”

“Azazel,” offered Jude. “He’s believed to have first been identified in the non-canonical Christian book of Enoch. He taught mankind the art of warfare, metallurgy, and deception. He is traditionally credited for being one of the leaders of the angels that came down to live with men.”

“In other words,” said Eric. “He’s one bad dude.”

Jude nodded grimly, “Yeah. I’m pretty sure he was the mastermind behind the attack on the conference, as well.”

Eric looked confused. “I thought you were scanning everyone there, though.”

“He was part of the committee that organized the damn thing! We didn’t think he’d need scanning,” Jude hung his head. “I just… I should have kept a better eye on him. He was pretty torn up after finding out the truth about Emily. He was… is... a devout man. He must have been tricked into letting Azazel in.”

Eric waved his hand angrily. “What difference does it make whether he was possessed willingly or not? People are dead because of it.”

Jude replied indignantly, “It makes a difference whether we can save him or not! You can’t drive out something out if the person doesn’t want it out.”

Eric conceded Jude’s point and stared out the window toward the glittering cityscape. “If we get the chance, we will do all we can. Right now, I’m more worried about what the general reaction is to what happened yesterday, especially since that video has probably been seen by just about everyone in the world by now.”

Jude stepped forward to stare at the fusion of ancient and modern architecture sprawling out into the horizon. He held his hands behind his head, as he thought out a plan. “I’d rather not find out just yet. I know it won’t be good. That was the Nephilim’s plan; I’m sure of it. It was naive to try to gather so many important people in one place and not expect retaliation, but what else could we do? We aren’t just fighting for our lives here, Eric. We are fighting for the very essence of what it means to be human. You’re a smart guy. You know just as well as I do that most of our species won’t have the strength of will to resist any type of invasion like that, not the way things are right now.”

Eric whistled and rubbed his hand through his hair, “You know, this is the first time I’ve really thought about what all this means. I’m with you for as long as I can be useful. I won’t let Brad and Emily die in vain.”

“Thanks man. I really mean it,” Jude said sincerely, as he sat back down on the bed. “I’m going to try to get some more rest before I feel comfortable calling the Vicar. What time is breakfast?”

Jude and Eric ventured downstairs at about nine, local time, for the hotel’s continental breakfast. After a quick meal of cold cuts and freshly baked bread, Jude walked back up to the room, leaving Eric behind to sip coffee and watch the foot traffic on the sidewalk. He sat down on the bed next to the telephone, took out his wallet, and pulled out the scrap of paper the Vicar had given Emily when they had first met so many months ago.

He nervously punched in the number scrawled on the piece of paper and waited for it to ring. It rang five or six times before Jude began to grow impatient. He was on the verge of hanging up and trying again later, when he heard the click of a receiver being picked up.

“
Pronto? Chi parla?”
asked the familiar voice of the Vicar in the ubiquitous Italian telephone greeting.

“
Bongiorno
, your Eminence,” greeted Jude. “It’s Jude.”

He could hear the old cardinal suck in a sharp breath. “Please hold, Father,” he announced aloud.

Jude heard some background movement and the muffled voice of the Vicar giving directions to others in the room with him, before returning to the phone.

“My apologies,
Signore
, I needed to ensure we had complete privacy. Things have been… difficult these past twenty-four hours.”

“I understand,” Jude answered with sympathy. “I need to speak with you about what happened. Is it possible to meet later today?”

Vicar gave a pregnant pause before speaking again. His hesitation confirmed Jude’s misgivings. “Jude, you can’t come back to the Vatican. You shouldn’t even be in Europe right now. Interpol is looking for you in connection to Geneva.”

Jude was dumbfounded. “What are you talking about? I barely made it out alive! Why would they think I had anything to do with it?”

The Vicar responded. “The authorities contacted us about it yesterday. They said you and an accomplice named Eric Strauss orchestrated the attack, used a group of survivors as cover to escape the building, and then murdered them all before fleeing the country.”

“What?” Jude exclaimed in disbelief. “You know that’s not true. It must be Antonio. You have to believe me! Inanna told me before she and Emily died that he had been possessed!”

“Father Gallo has succumbed to the Nephilim?” Cardinal Savelli responded with dismay. “
Mio Dio!
Even our own are not safe… We can do little to address it at the moment, though. You are an international person of interest, and I doubt you will be receiving a fair trial, if one at all, if you are caught. The public is looking for someone to hang, not for justice. I have to prepare for His Holiness’ funeral and coordinate a new papal vote.”

“Funeral? You mean the pope is dead?” Jude felt the growing knot in his stomach tighten even further. The Catholic Church in disarray meant at least one sixth of the world’s population might be in danger of a vulnerable mental state.

“He died a few hours ago,” Savelli informed him. “He survived the blast and managed to make it out with the remainder of his security detail, but the trauma was too great. The entire Catholic world is in an uproar right now.”

“What do I do?” asked Jude. The shock of the situation made his voice seem a thousand miles away “Where can I go?”

The Cardinal offered a solution, “I like to maintain my own private resources in case of emergencies like this. I know of a nice couple just outside the city, who will be happy to hide you and get you off the Continent. It’s the best I can do on such short notice.”

“Thank you, Your Eminence,” Jude said with appreciation, although he was still trying to grasp the direness of the situation.

“I am sorry. I cannot talk further,” the temporary head of the Church apologized, “It must not be known that we conversed. I will be sure to have my contacts meet with you in a few hours. Go to the central clearing at the Villa Ada around nineteen hundred and wear an Italia football jersey. You will be approached by a couple who will comment on it and ask if you saw Pirlo play last weekend. Tell them you will only care about Pirlo when he plays for Roma. This will be your password. Follow their instructions from there. I wish I could do more for you, Jude.”

“Saving my life is more than enough, Your Eminence,” Jude responded. “Please, be wary of Antonio if he comes back to the Vatican. He is incredibly dangerous.”

“Thank you for the warning, my son,” the old priest thanked him with sincerity. “Peace be with you.”

“And also with you,” Jude replied, before the line went dead. He returned the phone back to its base and stared blankly at the wall, reflecting on the deviousness of Azazel’s plan. They had thwarted his plan to kill them all, so he had implicated them instead. Europe was no longer safe for him or Eric.

Eric ran into the room shortly thereafter and slammed the door behind him. He stopped in the entryway when he noticed Jude’s anxiousness. “Hey, man…” he began slowly. “I don’t speak much Italian, but suppose our photos aren’t all over the news because the authorities are concerned about our well-being. Did you speak with the Vicar? What are our options?”

Jude sighed and fell back on the bed with his arms spread wide. He gave Eric a quick summary of what the Vicar said. “Antonio seems to have told the Genevese police that we executed the raid on the conference center, so the Vatican has officially broken ties with us.” He paused to allow Eric to finish cursing. “Savelli offered us an out, though. It seems we’re going to be smuggled out of the city tonight, so get your cloak and dagger ready.”

“Good,” Eric said. “We can’t stay here much longer. Someone is bound to identify us.” The first thing we need to do is get you that shirt. Stay here, and I’ll go get it for you. I have some other shopping to do, too.”

Jude began to protest the idea of secluding himself to the hotel room, but Eric shushed him with a firm finality. “Listen, they are looking for two people right now, so it’s safer if I go out alone. I’m experienced at being able to keep a low profile, so it only makes sense I do it. I can pose as a German tourist if I need to. The quickest way to draw attention right now is to walk around speaking American English. Any scrutiny could lead to recognition.”

“I submit,” surrendered Jude graciously. “Just be careful out there, ok? I’m the whole reason you’re in this mess to begin with.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” assured Eric. “Those bastard angels or ETs or whatever they are are the reason I’m here, not you.” He pulled out a blue scarf he had bought in Geneva and wrapped it around the lower half of his face. “Do you have anything to hide or alter your facial features? If we are being hunted, I guarantee every camera feed in the city will be subject to a facial recognition scan in search of us. We need every advantage we can make for ourselves.”

Jude shook his head in the negative.

“Ok then,” remarked Eric. “I should be back in thirty minutes to an hour. If I’m any longer than that, assume I’m caught and you’re on your own.” He swiftly opened the door and stepped out. “See you in a bit.” His footsteps faded back down the hallway, and once again Jude was alone.