Virgin

  Wasn’t brotherly love wonderful?

  But repeated reminders never hurt. Emilio had worked this one out and memorized it: “No heroics, please, Father. We’re not here to hurt anyone, but we’re quite willing to do so without hesitation if the need arises. Remember that.”

  Why are all these things happening, Mother?

  Carrie sat in the front pew, staring at the Virgin where she lay upon the altar.

  She could not get the sight of her father—now that he was dead, had died so horribly, it seemed all right to call him that—out of her head. The flames, the oily smoke, the smell, the obscene sizzle of burning human flesh haunted her dreams and her waking hours, stealing her appetite, chasing her sleep. That had been no ordinary fire. Only the man had burned, nothing else.

  Did I do that, Mother? Did you? Or was that the work of Someone Else’s hand?

  And now the church was closed, the sick and lame turned away, the building sealed, the street blocked off. What next? Tomorrow these aisles would be crowded with investigators from the Archdiocese and the Vatican, trailed by nosy, disrespectful bureaucrats from City Hall and Albany, from Washington and Israel, all poking, prodding, examining.

  They’ll be interrogating me about how you got here. I won’t tell them a thing. It’s not me I’m worried about, Mother. It’s you. They’ll treat you like a thing—an it. They may even decide you belong back in Israel. What’ll I do then, Mother?

  Carrie felt tears begin to well in her eyes. She willed them away.

  There’s a plan, isn’t there, Mother? There has to be. I just have to have faith and—

  She heard a noise in the vestibule and turned. She smiled when she saw Dan leading two other strange-looking men up the aisle, but he did not return her smile. He looked pale and grim.

  And then she saw the pistols.

  She shot to her feet. “Dan? What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know.” His voice was as tight as his features. “They came into the rectory and—”

  “What we want is very simple,” the bigger, bearded one said. He stopped a dozen feet or so down the aisle from Carrie and let Dan continue toward her. He gestured toward the altar with his pistol. “We want that.”

  Carrie was stunned for a few seconds, unable, unwilling to believe what she’d just heard.

  “Want her for what?” she managed to say.

  “No time for chatter, Sister. Here’s how we’ll do this. You two will carry her back through the tunnel to the rectory, and we’ll take her from there. No tricks, no games, no heroics, and no one gets hurt.” He gestured with his pistol at Dan. “You take the head and she’ll take the feet. Let’s move.”

  “No!” Carrie said.

  The bearded man snapped his head back in surprise. Obviously he hadn’t expected that.

  Neither had Carrie. The word had erupted from her with little or no forethought, propelled by fear, by anger, by outrage that anyone could even think of stealing the Virgin from the sanctuary of a church.

  She faced him defiantly.

  “Get out of here.”

  He stared at her for a heartbeat or two, then pointed his gun at Dan.

  “You cause me any trouble and I’ll shoot your priest friend.”

  “No, you won’t. There’s a cop outside that door. All I have to do is scream once and he’ll be in here, and that will be the end of you. Get out now. I’ll give you a chance to run, then I’m going to open the front doors and call the police inside.”

  “I’m not kidding, lady,” the big one said through his teeth. “Get up there and do what you’re told.”

  “Carrie, please,” she heard Dan say from her left. “It’s okay. They can’t get past the cops with her anyway. So just do as he says.”

  Dan might be right, but Carrie wasn’t going to let these creeps get their filthy hands on the Virgin for even a few seconds.

  “Get out now or I scream.”

  The shorter one looked about nervously, as if he wanted to take her up on the offer, but the bearded one stood firm. His eyes narrowed as he raised his pistol and aimed it at her chest. His voice was low and menacing.

  “No me jodas.”

  He wouldn’t dare, she thought. He’s got to be bluffing.

  “All right,” she said. “I gave you your chance.”

  Still they didn’t move, so she filled her lungs and—

  She saw the flash at the tip of the silencer, saw the pistol buck, heard a sound like phut!, felt an impact against her chest, tried to start her scream but she was punched backward and didn’t seem to have any air to scream with. And then she was falling. Darkness rimmed her vision as a distant roaring surged closer, filling her ears, bringing with it more darkness, an all-encompassing darkness …

  Nara, Japan

  As the first rays of the sun crest the horizon and light the flared eaves of the Todaiji temple, the largest wood structure in the world, it begins to dissolve, to melt into the air. And as the sun rises farther, the temple further dissolves. Finally the sun strikes the bronze surface of the Daibutsu. The bronze of the Buddha seems to glow for a moment, then it too dissolves.

  In a manner of minutes, nothing of the Todaiji or its Buddha remains.

  Manhattan

  Emilio stood frozen with his automatic still pointed at where she had been standing as he watched her fall and lay twitching on the marble floor, the red of her life soaking through the front of her habit and pooling around her.

  “Christ, Emilio!” Mol gasped beside him.

  “Carrie!” the priest cried, dropping to his knees beside her and gripping her limp shoulders. “Oh, God, Carrie!”

  I’m sorry, Emilio thought. I’m so sorry!

  And that shocked him. Because he’d killed before without the slightest shred of guilt. Anyone who threatened him or stood between him and what he wanted didn’t deserve to live. It had always been that simple. But here, now, in this place, before that old woman’s body on the altar, a new emotion, as unpleasant as it was unfamiliar, was seeping through him.

  Guilt.

  The priest looked up at him, tear-filled eyes wild, rage and grief distorting his features almost beyond recognition. With a low, animal-like growl he hurtled himself at Emilio.

  A bullet in the head would have been the simplest, most efficient response. But Emilio couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. Not again, not here, with … her here. Instead he dodged aside and slammed the Llama’s butt and trigger guard hard against the priest’s skull, staggering him. Before the man could shake off the blow, Emilio hit him again, harder this time, knocking him to the floor where he lay still with a trickle of red oozing from his scalp.

  Mol had already started back down the center aisle.

  “Where are you going?”

  He turned and looked at Emilio, fear in his eyes. “I—”

  “Shut up and stand still. Listen!”

  Emilio strained his ears through the silence. And as he’d hoped, it remained just that: silent. None of the noise in here had penetrated the heavy oak front doors; the cop outside had no idea anything was going on inside.

  “All right,” Emilio said, gesturing toward the altar. “Let’s get moving.”

  Mol hesitated, glanced once more at the front doors, then shrugged and hurried toward the altar. Emilio directed him toward the head of the body while he took the other end.

  But as he reached to take hold of the feet, he hesitated. He hadn’t believed in

  this church-priest-God-religion bullshit since he’d been a little boy in Camino Verde and watched his older sister screw the neighborhood men in the back corner of their one-room shack. Any guilt he’d felt a moment ago had been a leftover from the times his grandmother would drag him off to church before he was big enough to tell her to go to hell. And yet … a deep part of him was afraid to touch this mummi
fied old woman, afraid a lightning bolt would crash through the ceiling of the church and fry him on the spot.

  “Bullshit!” he whispered and gripped the body’s ankles.

  Nothing happened.

  Angry with himself for feeling relieved, he nodded to Mol who had her by the shoulders, and together they lifted her off the altar.

  Surprisingly light. They each got a comfortable grip on her, then hurried down the center aisle, Emilio leading, carrying her feet first. Through the vestibule, down the steps into the locked-up soup kitchen in the cellar, through the tunnel, and back up into the rectory. All still quiet there. Decker would have been inside if anyone had come in. They eased the body out the side door, slipped her into the back atop the grocery bags, and locked the doors.

  Emilio climbed into the cab next to Decker and slapped the dashboard. “Let’s go.”

  “Any trouble?” Decker said as he nosed the truck into the street.

  “Not really,” Emilio said.

  Mol snorted. “Like hell!”

  “What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” Emilio said. “Just drive.”

  He wanted Decker cool and calm for the drive back past the police and through the crowd, but he needn’t have worried. The police waved them by, and even made a path for them through the horde of Mary-hunters beyond.

  Once they were free of the crowd and rolling toward the FDR Drive, Emilio allowed himself to breathe a little more easily. And he’d breathe even more easily when they ditched this rig and switched the body to the Avis panel truck he’d rented earlier. But he knew he wouldn’t be able to relax fully until they had it aboard the Senador’s waiting jet and were airborne over LaGuardia.

  Angkor, Cambodia

  As the rays of the rising sun touch the five towers of the Temple to Vishnu, the stone begins to dissolve. By the time the sun is fully above the horizon, the temple is no more.

  Manhattan

  She is gone!

  Kesev violently elbowed his way through the crowd near St. Joseph’s, leaving a trail of sore and angry Mary-hunters in his wake. Let them shout at him, wave their fists at him, he didn’t care. He had to reach the church, had to know if his suspicion was true.

  During the past hour he had felt a dwindling of the Mother’s presence, and then suddenly it was gone.

  He’d sensed something else, felt a change coming over the world. A wheel had been set in motion. What would its turning bring?

  Finally he reached the front of the crowd, but as he squeezed under the barricade, two blue-uniformed policemen, one white, one black, confronted him.

  “Back on the other side, buddy,” the white one said.

  “You don’t understand,” Kesev told him. “She’s gone. They’ve stolen her.”

  He heard the crowd behind him begin to mutter and murmur with concern.

  “Now don’t go starting trouble, Mister,” the black one said. “The lady’s fine. We’ve been out here all night and nobody’s been in or out of that church.”

  “She is gone, I tell you!” Kesev turned to the crowd and shouted, “They have stolen the Mother right out from under your noses!”

  “Shut up!” the white policeman hissed in his ear.

  But Kesev wrenched free and began running toward the front of the church.

  “Come!” he shouted to the crowd. “Come see if I am not telling you the truth!”

  That was all they needed. With a roar they knocked over the police line horses and surged onto the street, engulfing any cop who tried to stop them.

  The lone policeman stationed in front of the church backed up to the front doors but decided to get out of the way as Kesev charged up the steps with the mob close behind him. A few good heaves from dozens of shoulders and the doors gave way and they flowed through the vestibule and into the nave.

  And stopped with cries of shock that rapidly dwindled, finally fading into horrified silence.

  The altar was bare. And near the end of the center aisle two figures huddled on the floor. Kesev recognized them immediately—the nun and the priest from the El Al plane back in July.

  The priest was kneeling in a pool of red, weeping, his deep, wracking sobs reverberating through the church as blood from a scalp wound trickled down his forehead to mingle with his tears. In his arms lay the limp, blood-soaked form of the nun.

  Kesev, too, wept. But for another reason.

  Mumbai, India

  The rosy fingers of dawn grasp the decorative tower of the Mahalakshmi Temple and squeeze it and the rest of the structure from existence.

  Manhattan

  “Do you remember me?”

  Dan forced his eyes open. He was cold, he was sick, he was emotionally drained and numb; his head was pounding like a cathedral gong, and his scalp throbbed and pulled where it had been stitched up. But the greatest pain was deep inside where no doctor could see or touch, in the black void left by Carrie’s death and the brutal, awful, finality of her dying.

  The four hours he’d spent here seemed like minutes, seemed like ages. He’d sat in a daze, occasionally staring at the TV screen suspended from the ceiling. Something was happening in the Far East. Temples, mosques, churches were disappearing, vanishing as if they’d never been, leaving not a trace even of their foundations. Only empty holes remained where they’d stood. But all other buildings around them remained intact. It was happening with the rising of the sun. Dawn was sweeping across the world like a scythe, leaving not a single place of worship standing. Words and phrases like Antichrist and End Times filled the airwaves.

  So what.

  Dan looked up from his seat in the Emergency Room of Beekman Downtown Hospital. For a rage-blinded instant he thought the black-bearded man with the accented voice standing over him was the bastard who’d shot Carrie. He tensed to launch himself at him, then realized this was someone else. Just as intense, but much too short. He’d seen this man before but his grief-fogged brain couldn’t recall where or when.

  “No,” he said.

  “At Tel Aviv airport last summer … I was questioning your nun friend and you—”

  Now Dan recognized him. “The man from the Shin …” He fumbled for the word.

  “Shin Bet. The name is Kesev. But I’m here unofficially now.”

  “I wish we’d never gone to Israel,” he said, feeling a sob growing in his chest.

  Carrie … dead. Dan still couldn’t believe it. This had to be a dream, the worst nightmare imaginable. A dream. That was the only logical explanation for all these fantastic, unexplainable events, the most unbelievable of which was Carrie’s death. Life without Carrie … a Carrie-less world … unthinkable.

  But it had seemed so real when he’d held her limp, cold, blood-drenched body in his arms back there in St. Joe’s.

  So real!

  “I wish you’d arrested us and jailed us. At least then Carrie would still be alive.”

  “So do I,” Kesev said. “For more than her sake alone. There are other matters to consider.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  Dan heard the belligerence creeping into his tone, into his mood. What right did this Israeli bastard have to come up to him here in the depths of his grief and start bothering him about Carrie? What did anything matter now that Carrie was dead?

  “We must find the Mother.”

  “You find her! She’s brought me nothing but grief.”

  He started rise but Kesev restrained him with a surprisingly strong hand on his shoulder.

  “If we find the Mother, we find the killers.”

  Dan leaned back into the chair. Find the killers … wouldn’t that be nice? To wrap his fingers around that big bearded bastard’s throat and squeeze and squeeze, and keep on squeezing until—

  “Father Fitzpatrick?”

  Dan looked up. One of the homicid
e detectives who’d questioned him before was approaching—Sergeant Gardner. He carried a black plastic bag in his hand. What did he want now? He’d told him everything, given descriptions of the killers, the sound of their voices, anything he could think of. He was tapped out.

  He noticed Kesev slipping away as the detective neared.

  “They’re shipping her remains uptown,” Gardner said.

  Dan lurched to his feet. “Why? Where?”

  “S-O-P. To the morgue. They’re going to autopsy her right away.”

  “So soon?” Hadn’t Carrie been through enough? “I’d’ve thought—”

  “The pressure’s on, Father. We’ve got a big, mean, unruly crowd outside your church, and from what I hear, the commish has already heard from the cardinal, the mayor, Albany, even the Israeli embassy. Everybody but everybody wants these guys caught and that relic returned. The commish wants a full forensic report on his desk by six a.m., so they’re going to do her right away.”

  “Can I see her before—?”

  Gardner shook his head. “Sorry. She’s gone. Saw her off myself.” He held out the black plastic bag. “But here’s her personal effects. You want to return them to the convent? If not …”

  “No, that’s all right. I’ll take them.”

  Detective Gardner handed the bag over and stood before him, awkward, silent. Finally he said, “We’ll get them, Father.”

  Dan could only nod.

  As the detective hurried away, Dan sat and opened the bag. Not much there: a wallet, a rosary, and Carrie’s Zip-loc bags of the Virgin’s clippings and nail filings.

  For an insane moment Dan thought of cabbing up to the morgue—it was up in the Bellevue complex, wasn’t it? … First Avenue and 30th … he could be there in a couple of minutes. He’d sneak into the autopsy room. He’d sprinkle the entire contents of both bags over Carrie’s body and …

  And what? Bring her back to life?

  Who am I kidding? he thought. That’s Stephen King stuff. Carrie’s gone … forever.

  Without warning, he broke into deep, wracking sobs. He hadn’t even felt them coming. Suddenly they were there, convulsing his chest as they ripped free.