The Hand of Christ (16 page)

The men were apostates and were willing to compromise their religion for personal gain. Never would a true Muslim bend to Zion; he had felt ashamed for having questioned the Messenger’s motives.

After the assassination of the security leader, the Messenger swiftly took the man’s place in an effort to
wash Hezbollah of Zionist sympathizers,
to bring purity back to Hezbollah. The assassin was proud of what he had done; he was helping to cleanse Islam’s ranks of soldiers that had no longer felt it necessary to adhere to Islam’s pillars. He viewed his work as the highest form of religious ablution he could imagine.

There was a growing movement of Muslims, the Messenger had said, that were working to concede to the demands of the West, of Zion. This could not be allowed. Muslim land belongs only to Islam, to god. No one could question this, not even a Muslim.

The assassin stood in front of the hotel’s washbasin in preparation for his own minor ablution. Beginning with his face, he washed it slowly and then continued on to his arms. With the moisture from his hands he slowly wiped his head and then his feet.

He stepped onto his musallah, the traditional Islamic prayer mat. The assassin faced in the qibla, the direction of the black silk adorned Kaaba, the cube shaped building in Mecca and the place all able Muslims must visit at least once in their lifetime: an act that is one of Islam’s pillars. He began the rituals of the Nafl Salat, a voluntary prayer. He had to hurry; the sun would soon be setting.

Before any mission, the assassin always prayed before Allah asking him to lay in front of him the right path. When the mission was completed, he would do so again, thanking Allah for having showed him the right way, for protecting him.

This mission had come as a surprise; it shocked the assassin to learn that the Ayatollah of Iran had become an apostate. But it wasn’t up to him to question the will of Allah. The Koran is very clear: apostates deserve nothing less than death. It was required.

Killing was his profession, and he wanted to do so only for his faith. He was a man strong with his religion and its fundamentals, he had convictions; he killed only for Allah: that’s what he told himself.

It was Allah that had sent him the Messenger, the man that had rescued him from a life that had lost its direction. He didn’t believe that he was a murderer or sociopath; he did not want to be a man that killed only for gain or to quell any urge.

But he was wrong: the urge to kill was always in him.

As the number of his victims grew, the assassin felt a growing intensity building within him and between his kills. The feeling would come sooner and be stronger than the last, and at times seemingly uncontrollable. Between missions, the assassin would walk the streets salivating, as if in search of prey. Every man he eyed was a potential victim. He would visualize how he could kill him: a blade to the throat, or the snapping of his neck.

In his mind he had slain a dozen men in the last week. He wanted to ravage them, to mutilate their bodies. The urge to slaughter grew with each passing day and caused him to break into cold sweats. Mostly, he would pray until it passed, sometimes praying for days. He often wondered how soon it would be before he gave in to the temptation, to kill just to kill. But the discipline required to be a Muslim helped to keep him from straying, from killing those that didn’t deserve to be killed.

Throughout his entire life, as a Muslim, he had been taught that death is the one and only true remediation for certain transgressions against Islam. The assassin felt that it was his duty to submit to and to serve his religion in this manner. If he was born with a god granted, insatiable desire to kill than killing should only be god’s will and not of his own; he often reminded himself of that during his prayers. But still, his urges persisted.

As a younger man and while a member of VEVAK – the intelligence arm of Iran – he had been taught his life’s skill. Naturally, he had been adept and a quick study in the craft of death. The assassin had been hand picked by the President of Iran himself to become his personal bodyguard. Large for a Persian, the assassin was dark and formidable. At just over six-feet tall and a well-formed two hundred and forty pounds, the assassin was a capable and devastating opponent to any man that found himself in his way.

He single handedly stopped two attempts on the President’s life; one attempt was by an American operative. The assassin skillfully tracked and killed the American operative who was sent with the US and Israeli backed mission to murder the President in his sleep.

The mission almost ended with their success and the assassin’s failure. However, he was able to find the American just as the man entered into the President’s bedroom, but not before the American shoved a silenced pistol into the temple of the President’s head. The assassin walked carefully toward that American operative with his own weapon aimed toward the two men; the assassin was not surprised that the American wanted to negotiate.

There had been no conversation.

The assassin didn’t hesitate, and expertly depressed the trigger of his weapon. While the horrified leader of Iran and his wife sat in their bed clutching one another, a single bullet entered the throat of the agent and exited through the base of the skull. The shot was designed to instantly paralyze the man rendering him unable to pull the trigger of his own weapon, but had left him alive, albeit for only moments.

Americans were so predictable and weak; unlike Muslims, they feared death – dying was not a well-accepted option to them – this one was no different. The American operative fell to the ground unable to move as his life quickly escaped; it was just as the assassin had planned.

He wasn’t finished with him.

The assassin remembered how he had looked down at the nearly dead agent, and how he had removed the small curved blade that was hidden in the buckle of his belt. He then, to the horror of the President’s wife, swiftly removed the agent’s eyes. The man would not be able to see in the afterlife.

He enjoyed that moment.

It was his first taste of death inflicted by his own hands. Killing the man was easier than he thought, and it satisfied him more than he realized it would.

The President gazed upon the assassin with the same look that a proud father casts upon his son.

After that moment, the two men became very close; saving a man’s life has a way of making the saved man beholden to his savior. The President soon became like a father to him, giving the assassin something that as a child he never had.

And then it changed.

Less than one year later, the assassin became distraught when the President died under mysterious circumstances while traveling. The assassin was asked by the President to stay back in Iran, to take some time off. After the burial, and suffering from the loss of his father figure, the inconsolable assassin changed.

It was as if a hidden switch had been flipped. Rage would build within and he would explode. It didn't matter who was near. On one day, when his rage nearly overflowed, a younger member of his unit made the mistake of showing up late for target practice. The young soldier was found half-dead, severely beaten, and with all of the fingers broken on his left hand – his firing hand.

It was never proven, nor did the young soldier reveal who attacked him, but his superiors suspected the assassin.

The assassin was dismissed from the service of VEVAK.

For a number of years he led a life of relative isolation in a small two-room home on the northern slopes of the Alborz mountain range in the Mazandaran Province of Iran. He was content to live a simple life and only under the eyes of god. With the absence of other people to remind him of his rage, his need to kill abated.

But one day, nearly seven-years ago, everything suddenly changed.

A heavily bearded man appeared outside of his home during one afternoon. Unsure upon who he was looking, or why the man was there, he politely asked him to leave. The man wouldn’t respond, but had just stood there defiantly. From underneath the rim of his cap, the man’s stare mockingly burned into the assassin.

Losing his patience and a cold sweat starting to mist at his color, the assassin ran at the man. But just as he reached him, the man stepped aside faster than he had ever seen any man move. The stranger thrust out a sharp kick to the assassin’s shins that was followed by a fist to the back of his head. The barrage of blows sent the assassin sprawling into the foliage of the temperate rainforest.

The assassin, angered at his own lack of discipline, jumped to his feet for a counter-attack. He moved to him slowly, carefully, and was circling him, looking for the strange man’s weakness. But the man just stood there unmoved. His thick, black beard hid his face and the only thing he moved were his strangely colored eyes: one intensely blue, and the other black.

The assassin remembered how he lashed out a series of blows and attacks that the strange man effortlessly had blocked and easily countered. A solid, single and vicious punch to the assassin’s sternum by the strange man threw the assassin to the ground.

The assassin lay there, gasping for air while staring straight at the heavens above. A number of ribs were cracked.

The strange man reached his hand to the broken assassin, which, in an act of concession, the assassin took. The strange man gently and gingerly pulled the assassin to his knees. The two men had stared upon one another in silence when the assassin, holding onto his broken ribs and with a grimace said, “What do you want? Are you here to kill me? Then do it quick, I am not afraid to meet Allah!”

“
Are you so ready to die already?” the strange man replied, “Why so soon? There is yet so much work to do for god.”

When he heard this, the assassin slowly raised his head until their eyes met. The man’s strange, two-toned eyes pierced him no different than they do today. The man told him that god sent him, that the assassin’s work was not yet finished. He was sent there as his personal Messenger: to find him, to train him, and to use him to cleanse Islam.

For the next three years, the Messenger trained the assassin in intelligence tactics, killing techniques, and how to use explosive devices and weapons that he never knew existed. For three years, he worked to turn him into what he called Allah’s Hashshashin – god’s Assassin.

As the years passed, the Messenger rose to greater power in the Islamic world, partly due to the work of the assassin. The Messenger spoke of a great and secret wealth that belonged to Islam. Stolen long ago, it was now in the hands of the infidels and being used to make Islam weak and apostates of its leaders. He said that for Islam to extend its reach world wide, they would need to recover what rightfully belonged to them.

The path to Islam’s final glory was unfolding just as the Messenger said. He would do what Allah wanted; he would take his guidance from the Messenger.

Finishing his prayer, the assassin stood from where he was prostrate moments ago. He rolled up the musallah and placed it in the hotel’s small closet. After, he put his shoes back on and then left the hotel for a walk. Through the back alleys, he slowly made his way, enjoying the respite from the day’s heat brought by the sudden cool breeze; the sun approached its nadir at the horizon, readying to set.

On his stroll, he came upon a beggar that sat cross-legged on a dirty piece of colored textile. The thin-skinned old man was severely emaciated and had a head of nearly non-existent silver hair. Bending down to the ancient man, the assassin placed a thick wad of rial notes onto the beggar’s dented tin plate. There were one hundred notes, all of them denominated in Iran’s highest face value of fifty thousand rials. In total, the amount roughly equated to around five hundred US dollars, a fortune for the beggar.

The old man smiled widely and revealed a mouth nearly free of all of its teeth. The few that remained were horribly blackened and chipped from a hard life of class-induced poverty and lack of care. The man softly grabbed the assassin’s hand and placed it upon his own forehead offering him a sign of his gratitude. With his other hand, shaking from age, he reached beneath the soiled cloth and pulled out a manila envelope and handed it over to the assassin.

The assassin waited until he returned to the hotel to open the envelope. Once in his room, he spilled its contents on the bed: a passport; a new, unused cell phone, a wad of rolled Euros, and an airline ticket. Pushing aside most of the contents, he picked up the plane ticket attached to which was an itinerary.

Holding the ticket closer, he read it and his destination was revealed: Leonardo da Vinci Aeroporti (ADR) – the Airport of Rome, and the home of the Vatican.

Chapter Seventeen

Mach Fifteen Plus

Into the Stratosphere

Inside of the sealed Shadow, the darkness enveloped Michael adding to the suffocating effects of the mask strapped firmly across his face. An irritating crackle permeated the small speakers built into the flight Helmet.

The sterile and deep voice of the Captain metallically piped into Michael’s head: “Dr. Sterling, how are you doing inside my bird?”

Michael spoke into the M-169A/AIC microphone built into the specially designed face mask, “Probably no different than if I had been tied up, blindfolded, and locked in a trunk.”

Michael had no desire to hide his lack of comfort: wrapped uncomfortably tight in the anti-g suit, head covered by the helmet and face mask, and laid backward nearly face up, he simply just wanted to get it over with.