Calypso Directive (44 page)

VanCleave grimaced.

“Oh, one more thing,” AJ said, nodding sheepishly at the Sig pistol in his hand. “Before I go, can you please show me where the hell the safety is on this thing?”

Raimond Zurn emerged from the shadows of the west corridor with Julie standing on his left side. Her posture was erect and awkward. Something was wrong. They shuffled together toward the center aisle, stepping into the moonlight and stopping shy of the first pew. Will could not make out exactly what it was, but Zurn had something wrapped around her neck. It was pulled taught underneath her jaw and disappeared beneath her blonde hair. The tension on her neck was causing her visible discomfort. Will could not see Raimond's left hand, but surmised it held a cord that he was using to choke her. In his other hand, Zurn gripped a pistol and pressed it against the side of her face.

“I'm surprised you came, Foster. I figured you for a coward the way you're always running away,” said Raimond, his voice reverberating in the empty church.

“You mean like the time I kicked your ass in Prague,” Will said. “Let her go, Zurn. I'm the one you want.”

“Pretty arrogant for a man who's about to …” Raimond was interrupted by the sound of his mobile phone vibrating in its holster. He raised one eyebrow. He wanted to ignore the call, but if it was Stefan, the information could be critical. Raimond turned to Julie. He pressed the muzzle of the pistol firmly into the fleshy part of her cheek. “Reach down and grab my phone off of my belt. Show me the screen. Don't say a word. Don't press any buttons. Fuck with me and I'll blow a hole right through the middle of your pretty face.”

Julie did as he instructed, retrieving and raising the phone so he could see the backlit LCD screen. The screen read:

FOSTER HAS A GLASS VIAL IN HIS POCKET

“Put the phone back in the holster on my belt.” Raimond said.

She struggled to complete the task. The piano wire he had strung around her neck made it impossible for her to tilt her head to see what she was doing. Eventually, she felt the holster and slid the phone back inside.

“It seems that you've been holding out on me, Foster,” Raimond said. “The glass vial in your pocket. Let me see it.”

Will blanched. He thought he had been alone when he retrieved the sample. There was only one way that the bounty hunter could have learned about it. Someone else was in the church.

R. Parish—
RS:Coordinator
: “Physical, this is the Coordinator, standby for revised tasking from Founder One.”

K. Immel—
RS:Physical
: “What? Foster is in trouble, I need to get in there.”

R. Parish—
RS:Coordinator
: “Tasking sent. Check your handheld.”

Kalen pulled his phone from his pocket. The screen flashed with a text message:

REVISED TASKING
FROM:
FOUNDER ONE
TO:
RS:PHYSICAL
PRI 1—OBTAIN SAMPLE VIAL FROM FOXTROT
PRI 2—EXECUTE HOSTAGE RETRIEVAL

Dressed in black pants, a black shirt, and a Catholic priest's white collar, Kalen emerged from a door on the west side of the altar. His dark hair was colored with streaks of gray, and he had applied make-up to accentuate the fine wrinkles around his eyes and forehead, visibly aging him twenty years. He took three strained steps toward the altar, using a wooden cane in his left hand to assist him, and then stopped.

“What are you people doing in here? The church is closed!” he called out in German. “You must leave immediately or I'm going to call the police.”

“You're not going to call the police, Father,” Raimond replied from the other end of the church.

“Why not?” Kalen called back.

“Because if you do, I'll blow this nice young woman's brains all over your beautiful marble floor.”

Kalen feigned dismay, raising his right hand to his heart. He hobbled forward, pretending to try to get a better view of the intruders in his church.

Will turned toward Kalen, verifying the priest he heard was the priest he expected to see.

“Father Heigel?” Will said.

“Yes, I'm Father Heigel,” Kalen replied in English flavored with a thick Austrian accent.

“Just the person I was hoping to see.”

“Excuse me? Do I know you?”

“No, we've never met. I'm the one who left the message on your answering machine to meet me here tonight. Thank you for coming. As you can see, things are not going very well for me and my lady-friend,” Will said, gesturing to the captive Julie down the aisle.

Kalen shuffled down six steps from the altar into the nave. He hobbled slowly across the marble floor toward Will, leaning heavily on the cane. With his right hand raised in the air, palm facing forward he said, “Gentlemen, I'm not sure what is going on here, but you are in the Lord's house. This is no place for violence. Please, put down your guns. We can end this peacefully.”

“I'm sorry, Father,” scoffed Raimond, “but that is not going to happen. Why don't you just shut up and sit your holy ass down in one of those pews where I can see you.”

“Listen Zurn, you've got what you want. Why don't you let Julie go, like we agreed? She can stay behind in the church with Father Heigel, and I will go with you.”

A. Archer—
RS:Bio
: “Social, report status of balcony sweep.”

A. Mesnil—
RS:Social
: “The balcony is clear.”

A. Archer—
RS:Bio
: “Roger. I'm in the west corridor, but I can't see shit. Technical, I thought you told me that this EDGAR radar-scope could see through walls.”

E.VanCleave—
RS:Technical
: “Try adjusting the penetrating depth. Use the dial on the left to set the focal range. You'll see the number change in the top left corner of the screen. That's the focal depth in feet. If you turn the knob all the way to the left, past the detent, EDGAR will sweep automatically across a range of depths. I suggest you use sweep mode.”

A. Archer—
RS:Bio
: “Okay, I see it … going to sweep mode … It's working … I've got two bodies, our Romeo and Juliet I presume … and there's Foxtrot, and Physical … Bingo, I've got the shooter. EDGAR puts him directly above Foster and Immel. He's on some sort of truss structure.

A. Mesnil—
RS:Social
: “There's a scaffold in the middle of the church, on the West side of the nave. It goes all the way up to the top of the dome ceiling. That is the structure you're seeing.”

A. Archer—
RS:Bio
: “This shooter has taken a bird's eye position. Physical, this is Bio, you've got a shooter hiding in the scaffolding on the fifth level almost directly above you.”

E. VanCleave—
RS:Technical
: “Social, do you have a view of the shooter?”

A. Mesnil—
RS:Social
: “Negative. What's worse is that his position is 100 percent defensible. It's impossible for someone to approach the scaffold without traversing his line of fire.”

E. VanCleave—
RS:Technical
: “I have an idea. Bio, egress to the main entrance, and wait for me there. I'll need your help.”

Julie gagged. Raimond was unconsciously ratcheting up the pressure on the piano wire around her neck, matching the rising tension in the air. A drop of warm blood trickled down her neck. The piano wire complicated the scenario. He had absolute control of her. She couldn't crack him in the balls and run away. If he were to be shot, her head would almost certainly be severed from her body by the force of his body crashing to the ground pulling the piano wire with it.

She was trapped in a human guillotine.

“You're choking me,” she rasped.

Zurn ignored her.

“I said sit down, Father,” Raimond repeated with vehemence.

Kalen had crept forward to the point that he was now standing beside Will in the center aisle.

“Okay, okay. But please put down your gun.” Kalen made a lowering motion with his free hand.

Raimond cocked his head and lowered his eyebrows. A disapproving look for a disobedient child. He removed the pistol from Julie's cheek and took aim at the priest.

Kalen bowed his head subserviently, but did not move to take a seat.

Raimond tweaked his aim and fired a warning shot. The muzzle flare lit up the interior of the church like a flash of lightning, followed by the crash of thunder from the shot. The bullet whisked through the air and slammed into the back of a wooden pew with a splintering thud.

Will instinctively cowered.

Kalen collapsed on the ground at Foster's feet in a quaking heap, holding his right hand over his heart.

Will glowered at Raimond. He looked down at the fallen, crumpled Kalen at his feet, and then extended his arm to help the impostor priest to his feet.

Kalen clutched Will's right wrist with his right hand and pulled hard, yanking Will off balance. Will buckled at the waist and reflexively his left foot shot forward to catch his balance so he did not fall over. Kalen swung his body around, so his back faced Zurn. With his left hand, the priest pawed at Will's waist, finding a handhold on Will's right pants pocket. Will heaved Kalen up to his feet. Kalen feigned difficulty loading weight onto his supposedly bum left leg. He stumbled to the left, leaning heavily on Will.

“Help me to the pew, my son,” Kalen said to Will, trembling and eyeing the bounty hunter in mock terror.

Will lugged the groaning priest toward the closest pew. He could feel Kalen's thick and sinewy muscles flexing with each movement beneath the black garments. A lamb carrying a lion. Kalen played his part with the dramatic flare of a seasoned stage actor. With great effort Will helped lower him onto the pew bench.

Raimond watched the proceedings with increasing agitation.

Will stepped back into the aisle and bent at the waist to retrieve the priest's wooden cane from the marble floor.

“Leave it!” yelled Raimond.

Will froze, and then stood back up, leaving the cane to lie where it fell.

“Enough of these games!” Raimond snarled. “You lied to me, Foster. You have lied to me from the beginning. In your pocket, you have a glass vial. It contains something important. Important enough that you would risk your life, and Fräulein Ponte's life, to retrieve it. I want to know what it is. Give it to me now!”

Will stood motionless. The vial was his insurance policy. Turning it over to Zurn would shift the balance of power. It was a move he could not afford to make.

“I will separate this woman's head from her body if you test me, Foster. You have three seconds to show me the vial.”

Raimond increased the pressure on the piano wire around Julie's throat. The metal strand sliced into her soft skin like a cheese cutter. She whimpered. A dark stain grew across the front of her white blouse as dual trickles of blood snaked down either side of her throat, creating a Y-shaped crimson necklace.

“Julie,” Will mumbled, pleadingly.

“One …”

“TWO …”

“All right! All right. You can have it. Please, just let her go,” Will pleaded.

“Not until I see the vial.”

“Take this,” VanCleave said, trying to catch his breath after sprinting from the BMW to the church.

AJ set EDGAR down on the marble floor and took a stainless steel case from VanCleave. The case looked familiar; he had seen it before. “What's going on?”

“Open it,” VanCleave instructed, while he powered on a tiny notebook computer. “Inside you'll find a thermos-like cylinder with Abbey's spiders. Unscrew the lid and dump all the spiders on the floor. Count them.”

AJ did as instructed.

“Seven.”

“Good,” said VanCleave, and he began typing furiously on his laptop. Three-dimensional models of different polyhedrons on x, y, and z coordinates appeared and then detonated on his computer screen. The sequence accelerated, flashing through permutation after permutation, and then suddenly stopped. The screen depicted an elongated hexagonal pyramid and flashed the text: OPTIMAL YIELD GEOMETRY.

“Activate all seven spiders; just like you did in Prague. Do you remember?”

“Yes, I remember.” AJ moved quickly, methodically performing the activation procedure for each spider, and then setting it on the ground.

“They're activated. Now what?”

“Inside the case you will find six strips of plastic explosive. Three black. Three light green in color. Remove one of the green strips. Pinch off seven equal size portions. Roll them into a ball about the size of a gum ball,” VanCleave ordered, never looking away from his computer screen. AJ glanced at VanCleave's screen and noticed that the exploding polyhedron graphics were gone, replaced by the spider interface control software.

“Are you crazy! I'm not touching plastic explosive!” AJ protested.

“This compound requires a detonator charge. It's very stable. Now shut up, and do as I say.”

Reluctantly, AJ peeled a strip of green plastic explosive from a stowage slot in the briefcase. The feel and consistency of the material reminded him of modeling clay he played with as a kid. He pinched off seven blobs of the stuff, while trying to suppress gruesome mental images of his hands being blow off.

“Now what?” AJ asked, showing VanCleave his handiwork.

“I'll take it from here,” VanCleave said. He pressed the blobs of plastic explosive firmly onto the backs of the robot spiders, taking care not to let any of the substance cover the head sensors or leg joints. Then cupping his hands together as if he was going to take a drink of water from a stream, he added, “Now, hold out your hands like this.”

AJ extended his cupped hands, and VanCleave then gently placed the seven explosive laden micro-machines inside.

“Okay, let's go,” VanCleave said.

Will reached his right hand into his right pants pocket and felt for the vial. To his dismay, his fingers found nothing but pocket fabric. He began to panic. The vial was gone.