The Devil's Labyrinth (28 page)

C
HAPTER
49

F
ARROOQ
A
L
-H
ARBI GENTLY
clipped the thread and then inspected the little red pouch he had made. Perfect.

It measured eight inches long by three inches wide. He would fill it from the top and then sew it closed.

He needed to make five more just like it.

He cut the yardage of red fabric into identical pieces, sewed them into pouches, then turned to the three brilliant red cassocks hanging in the closet.

The seam allowances on the inside of the altar server cassocks were generous, fortunately. They were cheaply made, and not well finished, which worked to his advantage. He had plenty of room to sew, but the loaded pouches might bulk up a bit at the sides. Fortunately, the white cotton cotta that each of the children would wear over the cassock would cover any bulges.

Not that anyone would be watching the servers anyway, even in their gaudy high-mass garments.

No, every eye in the entire area would be fixed on only one figure.

The Pope.

His fingers moving swiftly, Al-Harbi pinned the six pouches into the side seams of the three cassocks, then carried the first of the cassocks from the table to the sewing machine. Though he’d failed in one task tonight, he would not fail again.

He felt the spirit of his mother next to him, encouraging his fumbling fingers, as they worked hard to feed the heavy material through the machine. His father used to glower when he watched his mother work at her own machine at home, but he had still watched, though more interested in the machine itself than the use to which his mother had put it. Though the clothes she made fit perfectly well, he’d always preferred the ones his father bought for him at the store.

But who—even Farrooq Al-Harbi himself—would have guessed what good use those hours spent watching his mother sew would come to?

When the six pouches were firmly stitched into the seam allowances of the cassocks, he unlocked the single closet in his tiny apartment and took out the pound of C-4 his brother had given him only yesterday. He held the explosive reverently in his hands, and then held it up as an offering to Allah.

“For the glory of God,” he whispered.

Then he returned to his sewing machine and unwrapped the brick of plastique. He marked it into thirds, and then sixths. Very slowly and with well-rehearsed movements, he began pinching off pieces of the gray compound, rolled them into balls that were slightly less than an inch in diameter, and dropped them down into the first pouch. When a sixth of the brick had disappeared into the pouch, Farrooq gently squeezed it to press the plastique into a single mass.

Next went the small blasting cap, along with the batteries to which it was wired, and the firing mechanism, all of which had been fitted together by someone with far more knowledge of such things than he himself possessed.

All he had to do was follow the instructions he’d been given.

Soon, all that was left to do was to feed the trigger wire through the seams to the cuff, where the detonation button would be sewn, easily accessible to the altar servers.

When all three cassocks had been completely wired, each with two sets of explosives, carefully wrapped in tissue paper and packed into their original boxes, he let out a great sigh.

It would be a very dramatic High Mass.

Something that Boston had never seen before.

And Catholics the world over would watch, and know the wrath of Allah.

For him, though, and for his brother, the fate of the Pope would be far more personal. All of the wrongs committed by the Church against his family would at last be avenged. He and his brother would at last be at peace.

Farrooq clicked off the light over his sewing machine and rotated his head to stretch some of the stiffness from his neck. He had worked through the night, but the project was nearly finished. He had yet to deliver the garments and demonstrate how they worked. When that was done, though, all would be left in the hands of Allah.

He opened the refrigerator, and squinted against the bright light in the gloom of the predawn apartment. The shelves were empty but for a shrink-wrapped case of bottled water. He pulled one free, twisted off the top and drained it in a single protracted gulp.

Farrooq stretched out on the floor to ease his aching muscles. The early light of dawn crept in around the closed blinds. He would rest—just for a few moments—before morning prayers. He closed his eyes and gloried in the satisfaction that he had done good work tonight.

He had done Allah’s work.

Now the rest was up to his brother, who would see the mission to completion.

C
HAPTER
50

R
YAN LOOKED INTO
the gaping jaws of Hell.

Jagged shards of poisonous multicolored razors surrounded him, growing ever closer. If he could only take a giant leap, he could jump over them to safety, but with each breath, they came nearer. He couldn’t get a running start. In fact, they were now slicing into the toes of his shoes, but he couldn’t back up, they were all around. He couldn’t escape them. In a moment, the greedy, bloodthirsty things would carve away his feet until he fell and let them rip him to shreds.

No, wait, this is a dream!

Like looking up through deep water toward the light, Ryan saw consciousness above, and he began to swim toward it, but it wasn’t water, it was some thick, gelatinous stuff that clogged his nose and mouth. He could barely move his arms and legs. As he got closer to the light, he felt colder. He strove to wrap his arms around his chest, to curl up in a cozy position, but he couldn’t move his arms or legs. They seemed to be strapped down.

He heard a low, soothing voice intoning.

Break the surface. Take a breath!

He swam hard against the current that sucked him down, the gelatin smelling of sickening, noxious fumes.

Then something tugged hard from the inside of his stomach, pulling on his naval, and he felt his belly rip open.

He paused in his desperate ascent to consciousness and looked down to see what it was.

A gnarled hand reached out of his gut and sank its claws into his flesh, and began to haul itself out of him.

No! No!

Ryan flailed at it with ineffective hands that seemed to move right through the creature. He thrashed desperately in slow motion, but the creature was with him, of course, it was inside him.

Stop! Think! This is just a dream!

But it wasn’t just a dream. The creature sank back inside before showing his face. But now Ryan could feel it roaming around inside of him. Then it started to inhabit him. It felt as if it were trying him on, as if Ryan were nothing more than a rubber suit.

He felt the thing squeeze into his legs, then his torso. Ryan felt pinched out of his own chest. The creature commandeered his heartbeat, and then it rammed itself inside Ryan’s arms.

But when it started pushing up through Ryan’s neck, he began to choke and gag.

And then he was lying on a stone slab, tied down.

His stomach heaved, and he retched.

Sister Mary David held a cloth to his lips to catch the bile.

Father Sebastian raised a bloody heart high in an offering, and when he placed the dripping thing on Ryan’s naked chest, Ryan thought he was going to throw up again, and his entire being was seized by a terrible dizziness and disorientation. He lay inert for a moment, cold and confused.

And then his mouth opened and a voice—a voice he’d never before heard, emerged from his lips. As the strange voice uttered words he couldn’t even begin to understand, Ryan felt himself slipping into the dark abyss of unconsciousness. He fought against it, struggling against the blackness, but when he opened his eyes, he was faced not with any reality, but a scene from a nightmare that seemed to be suspended directly above him. It was a face, but a face that wavered and changed with every breath Ryan took. One moment it looked like the face of evil incarnate, but the next moment Ryan recognized it as something else.

It was his own face, twisted and contorted into something terrible.

Ryan tried not to look at it, but he couldn’t turn away.

“Get away from me!” he whispered.

The thing suspended above him only laughed, but the laughter seemed to emerge from somewhere deep in his own mind.

He was going crazy—right there, right at that moment, and he knew it, and there was nothing he could do about it.

“No!” Ryan screamed, but even as he tried to banish the vision, he felt the demon becoming part of him.

A part of him he would never be rid of again.

“Dad!” he cried, the word emerging as nothing more than a broken sob. But from a long way off, a tiny whisper rose out of the echoing vastness.

It was his father’s voice—he was sure of it.

“Dad?” Ryan clung to his own awareness even as it slipped away from him. “Dad?”

Again, he heard the whisper of his father’s voice, but could not make out what he was saying.

Suddenly the vision was gone, and above him someone was chanting while someone else smeared blood on Ryan’s forehead.

He had lost. The thing—whatever it was—was inside him now. He tried to struggle, tried to protest, tried to cry out, but all that came out of his mouth was a foul-tasting breath.

Then his mouth opened again, stretching wider and wider until his jaws burned with agony and the flesh of his lips threatened to rip apart, and a bellowing roar came forth from deep within him.

All the strength left Ryan. He lost whatever grip he held on himself and slipped quietly under the evil’s crushing personality.

The battle was over, and Father Sebastian had won.

C
HAPTER
51

P
OPE
I
NNOCENT XIV
sat rigid in his chair for several long moments after the large video screen went black, his eyes still fixed on the monitor, his features frozen.

“Holiness?” Cardinal Morisco said softly, uncertain whether to interrupt the Pontiff’s reverie, but equally uncertain that the aging cleric hadn’t gone into some strange form of shock as he’d watched the images unfold before his eyes. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” the Pope sighed, sinking back into his chair. He retrieved his handkerchief from some hidden pocket in his cassock and wiped the moisture from his face. “Yes,” he said again, his voice slightly stronger. “I’m quite all right. Just give me a moment, please.”

“Surely.” Morisco busied himself with putting away his computer while the Pope collected his thoughts.

The first time he’d seen this ritual—in the first clip that had been forwarded from Boston—every bit of his intellect had told him to dismiss it as a prank. It had certainly been as badly photographed and ill lit as all the thousands of miracles he’d reviewed over the years, and even if what he’d seen was real, it had to be nothing more than a fluke.

Yet despite what his intellect had told him, his faith—and his guts—had told him something different.

They had told him to keep his mind open.

But the second clip had been far clearer and he’d been certain that the girl Father Sebastian Sloane had put through the ritual could not have faked her reactions.

So it was not a fluke.

But did Sloane really know what he was doing?

The Pope had been interested enough after the second clip to retrieve Sloane’s complete file, including the archived copy of his dissertation at Notre Dame.

It appeared that both he and Sloane had become interested in the same ancient Catholic rite, though the man who was now the Pope had begun many years before Sebastian Sloane, put in decades more time in research, and come up with nothing but dead ends.

Sloane, on the other hand, seemed to have had an intuitive sense that led him down pathways the Pope had never considered, even for a moment. The man had made seemingly irrational leaps of logic that, however unlikely, had eventually proved to be correct.

Could it be that the man had been divinely inspired?

Or could he somehow have actually discovered the text of the ancient rite?

Or, even more improbably—and important—had Sloane
re-created
the ancient Rite of Invocation?

The Rite of Invocation that had never, in the Pope’s experience, proved to be anything more than rumor.

Old stories handed down from centuries ago, undoubtedly twisted and embellished by every teller of the tale.

The possibility that Sloane had, indeed, either resurrected or re-created the Rite of Invocation had led to a series of sleepless nights for the Pope, as he speculated on the implications of such an event.

If Sloane had done what the Pope was now all but certain he had, this could be the most important event in Catholic history since the loss of the rite hundreds of years ago.

If it had ever existed at all.

Which was why even after witnessing this latest clip, the Pope had his doubts. It wasn’t, after all, simply that no one had ever been able to find the Rite of Invocation itself—it was far more than that; scholars had searched for centuries for evidence merely that the rite had ever truly existed. Teams of researchers had scoured every church archive in the world for years, and secular libraries and collections as well.

All to no avail.

So how could a priest from Indiana in the United States have found the answer?

It was beyond improbable.

And yet, in the afterglow of this latest video clip from Boston, the Pope’s doubt had all but vanished. He’d watched as Sloane invoked the evil that dwells in every man’s soul and done far more than merely banish it from the boy.

This was no simple exorcism as Morisco thought. Indeed, the Pope was quite certain that even Sloane’s deputies thought they were assisting at nothing more than an exorcism.

But the Pope knew better.

And so did Sloane. He wasn’t merely banishing evil.

He was taming it, controlling it.

Harnessing it to his own will.

And it was clear in the clip that Sloane knew exactly what he was doing.

“Holiness?”

The Pope looked up to see Morisco anxiously awaiting his words.

He trembled with indecision, and then certainty surged through him. “We shall go to Boston right away,” he declared, paying no attention at all to Morisco’s look of utter horror. “It shall be the first stop on our trip. A brief stop. I want no fanfare at all. A private Mass for the children of this St. Isaac’s school, and nothing more.”

Morisco’s horrified look deepened, but still the Pope ignored it.

“That is all, Guillermo. I shall meet with this priest who performs this ritual. Then we will continue with the tour exactly as it has been planned. Though perhaps we may stop in Boston again on the way back.”

“But Your Holiness—” Morisco pleaded.

“Thank you, Guillermo,” the Pope said as he rose out of his chair. “You have no idea how important this may be for all of us.” Leaving Cardinal Morisco staring at his back, he made his way slowly to the door of his apartment.

As always, the door opened just before his hand touched the knob.