The Judas Line (6 page)

“Healing, Forgetting, Vigor, Avoidance, Clarity and Pain.” That stopped everyone cold, shock rippling through all of us. Six Words! There hadn’t been a holder of six Words since Rodrigo Borgia, who used his Words to help him become Pope Alexander the VI, the most corrupt and scandalous Christian religious figure of all time.

At that moment my fear of the twins disappeared in a flash because, even though Julian forbade Burke’s hand in any assassination attempts, my cousin hated me enough that he could not stop himself from trying.

“What about you, Olivier?” The Professor’s deep voice startled me out of my woolgathering.

Nodding quickly, I scanned the thick white papers in my hands, which had begun to tremble slightly. Each paper held a Word written in what I now know to be a mixture of squid ink, black hellbore and knotweed, a Botanical Magic brew. My eyes skittered over the first page, not wanting to acknowledge the black writing. In fact, for a second it seemed that there was no Word at all, just a blank page. Then it hit me like a pickaxe to the skull … the Word. It crawled right in and made itself at home in my cerebral cortex, shoving aside non-essentials like Latin and Swedish.

Imagine someone using Vicks VapoRub on your brain … that’s what it felt like.

Page Two: it hit me the same way—hard and fast with a mental taste of tinfoil.

Three … four … five …
Wham! Wham! Wham!

Done. I was done and the pages fell to the bare concrete around my Air Jordans. Twelve Words. I had all twelve Words rolling around my mind and I’m pretty sure I’d lost all functional use of Romanian.

Whoa …

“Well?” Henri asked, grabbing my black t-shirt in one huge hairy fist.

Okay … Risk Assessment Time. Henri’s big pug-ugly loomed into view and in my peripheral Burke and the twins were staring at me speculatively. If I copped to all twelve it would be the same as painting a Day-Glo bull’s-eye on my back and there would be no chance of dodging all of their attempts.

Good thing lying is second nature in my Family.

“Healing.”

Silence. Five pairs of eyes met mine, incredulous. It was Burke who broke the tension by erupting in a full-throated belly laugh that shook his slender frame from head to toe. As if a new Word had been spoken, the Word of Mirth, it spread to my siblings quickly, doubling them over with laughter until they gasped for breath, hands to the hitching stitches in their sides.

“Very funny, assholes,” I grumbled softly, but loud enough so they would hear and it set them to laughing again. The Day-Glo bull’s-eye began to fade. I hid my smile in the palms of my hands.

“Oh, that’s rich,” Henri gasped. “Julian will be fit to burst. His precious prodigy can only Heal!”

During the laugh-fest, Burke had kept his eyes on me and I think he was probably taken in like the others, but I knew my supposed deficiency wouldn’t stop him from tormenting me every chance he could. With the arrogance of six Words, he might find the balls to defy Julian and try for a kill.

Right then I knew that someday it would come down to him and me.



I set the pages down on my lap, stunned, confused and more than a little afraid. If what Jude, or Olivier, whoever he was, had written here was true, then what other strange, menacing magics were out there? Who was his father, Julian Deschamps, and why would he let his children kill each other off? If it was all some sort of delusion, then a madman drove my car through Oklahoma into Texas.

“Remember, Mike, to me … all that was perfectly normal. I didn’t know any other sort of life,” Jude commented sadly, as if reading my thoughts.

I licked my lips. “It’s unbelievable, but I saw what you did with that … that … air sprite, so I guess it’s no great stretch to … this.” I held up the envelope. “Now what?”

“Read the story.”

“It’s the strangest dang thing I’ve ever read, Jude … or do I call you Olivier?”

He made a face. “Olivier Deschamps wasn’t someone you’d want to know, man. and I’m glad he’s dead.”

“But you
are
Olivier Deschamps.”

Eyes sere and barren of hope glanced my way. “For both our sakes, man, you better hope not.”

Chapter Six

Jude

Mike was shaken down to the roots. Oh, he hid it well, but I could see; we’d been friends long enough that I had his tells down pat. If he’d been a poker player, I’d have cleaned him out ages ago.

The Corolla chugged its way through Oklahoma and at Oklahoma City I switched off the 35 to the 44, taking us to Wichita Falls, Texas. As drives went, it rated up there with watching the grass grow. Mike was no help. He kept his eyes closed as though asleep or attempting to absorb what he’d read and seen.

Did I feel sorry for him? Almost. He may be a Catholic priest, but he’s also one tough son-of-a-gun. The only thing that had kept him from becoming an outlaw biker was his calling, his faith.

He thought I didn’t know about his wild side, but thanks to the Internet, I had found out a lot about Mr. Mike Engel, the Catholic priest. No father, mother dead of a heroin overdose when he was nineteen, one older sister—whereabouts unknown—and a stint in the army at eighteen to avoid jail time for boosting a motorcycle. Hoofed it over the sands in Desert Storm, ended his time in service with a couple of years in Germany. Finally, the call to God.

By all rights he should have exited the army a raving lunatic, hell-bent on wreaking havoc and drinking himself to death, but I guess he took to discipline in the service because he emerged straight as an arrow and left his past behind. Although he did keep a 1985 Harley FXWG 1340 Wide Glide in his garage that he’d been restoring for the past couple of years, a lingering reminder of his younger self.

The rest is, as they say, is history.

It ate at me, though, that I had let him come. Maybe the desire for company had overwhelmed common sense or maybe, better yet, he was the one man who might understand my whole sordid history. Hell, he helped me parse through the more difficult passages of the Bible (the Song of Solomon bored me to
tears
) and explained the Americanisms and obscure references in
East of Eden
.

“Where are we going, Jude?”

Mike’s question derailed my train of thought. “West Texas.” He was still leaning back, envelope in his lap and eyes closed.

“What’s in west Texas?”

“A whole lot of nothing.”

“Then why?”

I grinned. “It’s what’s under that nothing that I want to get at.”

“What’s under that nothing?” he asked patiently as Wichita Falls receded in my review mirror.

There was no harm in spilling the beans. “After I established myself in Omaha, I traveled all over America to secure some spookers.”

“Spookers?” Mikes eyes cracked open and he stared at the surrounding countryside without interest.

“Stores of cash and false papers, just in case.”

“In case you had to go on the lam?”

I laughed. “Lam? Who talks like that? Really, Mike, you should stop watching television. Rots your brain, man.”

His icy blues rolled up. “You still haven’t answered my question, smart aleck.”

“Yes, in case I had to leg it. Passports, driver’s licenses, cash, the whole lot. Enough to disappear again and land comfortably on my feet.”

Mike snorted. “How very CIA-like of you.”

“You’ve read a bit of what my Family is like, Mike,” I said, voice cooling to just above absolute zero. “They would do, and spend, anything to find me, to get what I have.”

“That silver thing of yours?”

“Yes, the Silver. One of the most powerful magical artifacts in the world, second only to the Grail and the Arc of the Covenant.”

The explosion of incredulity I half expected didn’t come. When I spared a glance from the road, it was to see Mike staring at me with eyes colder and more pitiless than the spaces between the stars.

“What?”

“The Arc of the Covenant? The Grail? Like the real ones, the ones Indiana Jones found?” The arctic tundra was warmer than his voice.

“When I left the Family, I liquidated my assets and I’ve used a lot of that to find something that would help me destroy the Silver.”

“What about throwing it in the Laurentian Abyss?”

The vanishing point met my eyes as I answered. “You could stuff the Silver in a lead-lined box with a nuclear warhead set to detonate when it hit the ocean floor and you wouldn’t even scratch it. It would reappear where someone in the Family would find it. No, the only way to destroy the Silver is to use a more powerful artifact.”

Mike stayed quiet for quite some time, so long, in fact, that I began to worry. Finally he said, “So you’re trying to destroy this silver thing by using an artifact that people have been trying to locate for centuries? Perhaps millennia?”

“Yes, Mike, I have to because the Silver is the biggest threat to mankind next to global thermonuclear war. It needs to go away and I should have investigated more thoroughly and taken action sooner.” Regret tasted bitter in my throat. “Because I twigged onto the Grail six months ago.”

A long pause. “Why didn’t you?”

I exploded in a rush of verbal self-recrimination. “Damn me, Mike … I was too comfortable, man.” When he didn’t reply, I continued. “And maybe a little scared, too. Nebraska isn’t the center of the universe, but it’s a good place to be.” Better, I felt much better. Maybe confession
was
good for the soul.

Mike stroked his moustache “So that’s where we’re going? To get the Grail?” I nodded and he blew a sigh through his lips. “The Archbishop will never believe this.”

“I really wouldn’t tell him if I were you.”

Once again that cold stare. “Why?”

“The Family has … people in the Vatican.”

I reckon that all the shocks to Mike’s system must have aged him about five years, but he held strong, much stronger than most. What really touched me was his belief, not just in God, but also in me. He believed me and
in
me with no ulterior motives. I could see it in his honest features. Maybe God had put Mike in my way that day all those years ago at St. Stephen’s and if He had, I owed Him big time.

Mike sat there in the passenger seat, idly rubbing his moustache and sucking absently on his front teeth, making a
ssssk sssskk
sound that would normally have driven me nuts, but for some reason didn’t bother me at all in the moment. Then he pulled a rosary out of his pocket and began to pray.

Not big on prayer, myself. I always reckoned that God knew what I was up to, and he was busy enough without having to listen to my jibber-jabber. But, in the spirit of respect and fellowship, I kept my trap shut until Mike was done and had put the rosary back in his pocket.

“Listen,” I began, reaching into the cup holder next to the hand brake for the open packet of peanut M&Ms I’d placed there earlier—my favorite munchies. Only the strict discipline I’d learned over the years kept me from gaining two hundred pounds. “In 1998 I’d traced a valuable artifact to Chicago, to a private collector named Mori Munakata, a wealthy real-estate investor who made serious money during the wild speculation of that time. Seems it was lumped together with other items of perceived greater value and he acquired the lot by rather dubious means.

“Without going into specifics that could be used against me in a court of law, I managed to liberate the artifact from his private vault and bring it to Omaha.”

“I remember!” Mike interjected. “You said you went to Disney World. You lied to me, Jude.”

“Well, just a little white lie. For your own protection, man.”

Again he rolled his eyes, clearly unhappy.

“What I got was called the First Tablet. Ever heard of it?”

“I wasn’t in school the day they taught ‘Arcane Archeology.’ ”

“Just shows that you’re a slacker. How about the history of writing, its invention?”

“Mesopotamia, right?”

Not bad. Mike was better read than I thought. “Until 1998 that was the conventional wisdom, however writing at the tomb King Scorpion of Abydos near Luxor was found dating back to 3400 B.C.E., four hundred years before Mesopotamian writing.”

“Sounds like a bad movie starring The Rock.”

I laughed. “In Pakistan, 1999, at the ancient site of Harappa, archeologists discovered writing that dated back to 3500 B.C.E. and that’s generally considered to be the earliest known instance.”

“How come I have a feeling that’s not the case?”

M&Ms
crunched
between my teeth and I savored the peanut/chocolate flavor before I answered. “Because your instincts are sharp, man. The very first example of the written word was a stone tablet, about three-foot tall, that dated back to 5500 B.C.E., created by an unsavory character who
invented
writing so he could record his confession to God.”

“What? Are you saying that there’s written proof of writing that’s over
seven thousand years old?
And proof that man worshipped God so long ago? Do you understand the significance of that?” he blurted, expression eager. Despite what he’d learned on this trip, this news seemed to shake him the most. Not surprising, though. Most people equate the formal worship of God to the Hebrews a little over three thousand years ago. Adding four thousand years to the mix would be a serious blow to the Agnostics and Atheists and would stand the religious community on its head.