Apocalypse Ark Read online

  Here came the happy couple, herded by the pastor, all three smiling broadly at the friends and relatives arrayed before them. If they noted Aldo Driessen in the mix, it didn’t seem to register.

  He drew two of his pistols, FNP in his right hand, Glock in the left, and raised them both together. Almost whispering, he offered up a final prayer: “My life for you, dear Lord.”

  And opened fire.

  Çorlu, Turkey

  HALLORAN TRANSLATED BISHOP AKDEMIR’S manuscript from Latin while reading it aloud to Bolan, skipping over parts that rambled into cult theology, seeking the bits that might assist them in locating the Ark and its Keepers. Bolan listened in their parked car while he scanned the maps that Akdemir had drawn by hand. No travel routes were depicted by dotted lines, but temples of Custodes Foederis were marked and labeled.

  “He believed that they would stop at Ios, in the Cyclades,” Halloran said. “I can’t say whether he was told that or surmised it on his own.”

  “No way to drive there,” Bolan said. “They’d have to fly or sail.”

  “A ship, then,” Halloran declared. “They couldn’t find a cargo flight to carry vehicles, or risk being observed with their peculiar cargo at an airfield.”

  And if they traveled overland, driving along the east coast of the Adriatic Sea, then doubling back toward Rome, it meant driving the width of Greece, then passing through Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia—five countries in all, with seven border crossings, before they reached Italian soil.

  Too much. Too far.

  “Okay,” he said. “They’ve got a ship and a head start that we can only estimate. But why Ios, when they could keep on going through the Med to Italy?”

  “They may do that,” Halloran said. “In fact, it would be logical. The better choice. But I suspect that they are on a pilgrimage, as well as a crusade. Compare it to the stations of the cross, perhaps.”

  “Even if it turns out to jeopardize their mission?”

  Halloran could only shrug at that. “I won’t pretend to fully understand their thinking,” he replied, “but if we grant that they’re sincere believers, then we must expect a fair amount of ritual in this, their effort to evoke the End of Days.”

  “That’s good for us, then, if it slows them down,” Bolan observed.

  “If we’re correct in estimating where they will ‘touch base,’ as you might say.”

  “But if we can’t catch them at one of their pit stops, we’re still just playing catch-up,” Bolan said.

  “Correct.”

  “Ios won’t have an airstrip, I suppose?” Bolan asked.

  “No. A seaplane could deliver us, but it would also draw a great deal of attention.”

  Meaning greater likelihood of fighting that would place civilian lives at risk.

  “Fly to another island, then,” Bolan suggested. “Catch a charter boat from there. At least we’d save some time.”

  “That’s good,” Halloran said. “The local airport only serves AnadoluJet and Germania commercial flights, but we should find private pilots somewhere in the neighborhood.”

  “More bribes,” Bolan said.

  “No doubt,” the brother agreed.

  “In for a penny, in for a lira.”

  “And a euro, when we land in Greece.”

  “Sharing the wealth,” Bolan replied.

  And maybe, in a short while—if their luck improved—sharing the pain.

  Paris, France

  MARCEL HARNOIS WASN’T a tall man, nor a heavy one, but he was strong. While serving terms for larceny in each of three Parisian prisons there had been ample time for him to build his upper body strength by lifting weights, and several opportunities to use his muscle against the people who thought he’d be an easy conquest.

  They were wrong. But Harnois still had much to learn.

  His true enlightenment hadn’t begun until his third incarceration, when he’d met a chaplain unlike any other in his personal experience. The priest had opened Harnois’s eyes to facts about the world and universe at large that had eluded him throughout his thirty-seven years. Harnois had been amazed to learn that he wasn’t to blame for his pathetic life of crime. In fact, his parents and their rotten church had set him on a course that led inevitably to a courtroom and a prison cell.

  Once carefully explained, it was as clear as day.

  He had promptly pledged his life to Jesus and the One True Faith. And as with many midlife converts to religion or some other cause, Harnois displayed a gratifying zeal. Why else would he be chosen when the moment came to strike Notre Dame de Paris?

  That morning he had gone for one last walk along the Seine, mixing pleasure with duty, enjoying sunshine on his face while he scouted the Île de la Cité. From shore, on the river’s south bank, the Gothic cathedral looked invulnerable, unapproachable, but that was an illusion. Harnois crossed the river on the bridge supporting Rue Lagrange and made his way on foot to stand before the church that harbored the official chair of the Archdiocese of Paris.

  Inside, he knew, there was a reliquary said to house the very crown of thorns Christ wore when he was crucified. Harnois presumed that was a fictional embellishment, on par with Victor Hugo’s famous novel of the hunchbacked bell-ringer, advanced to awe a flock of sheep who worshipped things they couldn’t see or touch. And if the crown was hidden somewhere in the church, what of it? That just meant it had been stolen and defiled, along with so much else, by the malignant Scarlet Whore of Babylon.

  And that would end today.

  Notre Dame had suffered major damage—”desecration,” as the bishops termed it—at the hands of rioting Huguenots in 1548, and again from revolutionaries in 1793, but each time it was rebuilt at the expense of parishioners who valued the edifice more than their own humble abodes and families. Marcel Harnois didn’t suppose that he could do more damage than a mob, even with forty kilos of Semtex strapped beneath his raincoat, but it hardly mattered.

  His action this day was only part of something greater, an attack on all fronts that the Scarlet Whore couldn’t resist. Although he wasn’t privy to the details, Harnois understood that something extra-special had been planned for Rome, a lesson for the Vatican that no one drawing breath on earth would soon forget.

  It was a privilege to play his humble part in something great, and thereby ensure his seat in paradise. What more could any true believer hope for?

  Harnois approached the cathedral with a straggling group of tourists, striding toward the central set of double doors, each pair beneath a looming archway crowded with saints carved from stone. None of the supplicants and gawkers paid the least bit of attention to him as he passed among them, right hand in the pocket of his raincoat, wrapped around the detonator that would send his soul to heaven while the rest went hurtling to their individual rewards or punishment. They meant no more to Harnois than a stream of ants bustling across the pavement, seeking crumbs.

  His lips moved silently, one final prayer. “My life for you, dear Lord.”

  Amen.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Tekirdağ Çorlu Airport, Turkey

  It was a stretch to call Tekirdağ Çorlu an international airport, although Germania’s once-daily flight would carry passengers to Düsseldorf. Bolan and Halloran had better luck with a private pilot, Ekrem Arikan, operating as Aegean Tours.

  Arikan’s one and only aircraft was an Italian-made Piaggio P.136, a twin-engine amphibian last manufactured in the early 1960s. It seated five and had a range of nine hundred miles, powered by two Avco Lycoming GSO-480 flat-six piston engines mounted on its overhead gull wings. Cruising at 208 miles per hour, with a service ceiling of 25,000 feet, the Piaggio could drop them on Sikinos, southwest of Ios in the Cyclades, in something under two hours.

  Halloran handled the ne
gotiation with their flyboy, Bolan handing over the equivalent of seven hundred dollars in Turkish lira. The Piaggio was fueled and ready, waiting only for a clearance before Arikan taxied onto the airport’s lone runway and sent them hurtling skyward. The Piaggio seemed to be straining at first, but once off the ground, with its landing gear retracted, it was smooth enough. The noise from its engines and rear-mounted pusher propellers vibrated through the passenger compartment, making conversation iffy, but Bolan was happy to sit back and think without having to talk for a while.

  They’d picked Sikinos as the island nearest Ios. It harbored two villages, one at the harbor where they would be landing, with a total year-round population of 238 inhabitants. Halloran took for granted that they’d find at least one local sailor who would either carry them to Ios or rent a boat to them to make the journey on their own, and Bolan had no reason to dispute it. Living off the sea made people happy to collect a little money on the side, even though they were prone to viewing strangers with suspicion.

  Traveling by water, Bolan and Halloran would avoid the notice that attended landing at Ios itself, where spotters might report their arrival to the Temple of Immaculate Conception. Even so, the word of new arrivals on the island might precede them, as it often did in tiny insular communities, but there’d be less time for the Keepers to prepare a welcome if they didn’t know trouble was coming until it set foot on the beach. Another dicey problem was the presence on Ios of two small police outposts—one for Port Police, the other for Tourist Police. Given the reputation Ios carried as a “party island,” there would likely be at least a dozen officers in residence at any given time, and they would not have far to travel from the port to any other point on the island’s forty-two square miles of rocky soil.

  A challenge, then, to hit the temple, see if they had come in time to catch the Axum raiding party still ashore, and either take it out or get a pointer to its next stop on the way to Rome, while managing to duck the cops. Their pilot had agreed to wait for them at Sikinos and take them on from there to anyplace within his flying range, not bothering to inquire about their business in the Cyclades. He likely figured them for smugglers, but was disinclined to jeopardize his fee by asking any questions.

  Skimming over the Aegean, Bolan was reminded of the Greek myths that he’d read in school, tales of heroes, gods and monsters battling in an ancient world where magic was accepted as the norm. No demigod himself, he sympathized with Hercules and his appointed labors. Bolan’s enemies were like the fabled Lernaean Hydra, sprouting two fresh heads for every one he severed, and his battleground resembled an extended version of the Augean stables, packed with filth from a thousand cattle left untended for decades. Bolan spent his life hacking and shoveling, hoping for light at the end of the tunnel, with no break in sight.

  But he kept on, because he could. And when he thought about it, Bolan knew he wouldn’t have it any other way.

  Custodes Foederis Headquarters, Rome

  UGO TROISI USED a small brass key to unlock the lower right-hand drawer of his spacious mahogany desk. Inside the drawer, behind a rack of hanging files he’d filled with office correspondence, lay an Olympus WS-700M digital audio recorder with four gigabytes of internal memory, permitting Troisi to record more than one thousand hours of conversation. Its battery’s life was a maximum twenty-five hours, but that was actual recording time, when its remote “intelligent” microphones transmitted human voices.

  From Mania Justina’s bedchamber.

  Troisi had planted the tiny mikes last week, racked by guilt but compelled by suspicion. He still wasn’t sure, precisely, what had driven him to mount this audio surveillance on his lover—and the reigning Reginae Matris of Custodes Foederis. He couldn’t say her attitude toward him had changed, exactly; she was still both energetic and explosive in their couplings. But there had been something: darting glances, worried little frowns that vanished when he caught her at it and was too afraid to ask what might be preying on her mind.

  This day, as usual, Troisi used an earpiece to review the night’s recordings in perfect privacy. None of his aides would dare to enter without knocking, and even if Marcellus barged in uninvited he would simply see his second in command transcribing figures from the sect’s far-flung accounts. Nothing suspicious about that.

  Technology spared Troisi from dead-time hissing static. The first thing that he heard was Mania greeting someone, clearly male, who answered in a voice Troisi didn’t recognize. Who could it be? Access to Marcellus and his wife was by invitation only, strictly limited. Contributors, reporters and the like were never welcomed into private quarters—and they certainly wouldn’t have said the things that set Troisi’s cheeks aflame with jealous rage, sparking a pain that throbbed between his eyes.

  The couple wasted little time on small talk, and said nothing that would help Troisi name the man. Not Marcellus, that was clear; Troisi would recognize his voice immediately. This was someone else who knew Mania intimately and was taking pains to please her, even as he taunted her with gutter language, which she didn’t seem to mind.

  Sickened, Troisi switched off the recorder and removed the earpiece, shoving the equipment to the far side of his desk. He’d thought to pick up private conversations between Marcellus and Mania, maybe learn if either one of them had grown dissatisfied with him in any way, or if there was some plan afoot from which he’d been excluded. He’d expected that they might engage in sex from time to time, although he had Mania’s word that such events were few and far between.

  But this! To learn that she’d betrayed Troisi and her husband with another man? The thought had never crossed his mind.

  This meant that he had never truly satisfied her. Worse, he could no longer trust a single thing she’d said to him while they lay tangled in her sheets or stood beneath the warm spray of her shower. Every word out of her luscious mouth had been a filthy lie.

  What could Troisi do about it? That required some earnest thought. He craved revenge, but not if it rebounded on himself.

  He stowed the digital recorder in its drawer and settled back to think.

  Over the Aegean Sea

  MACK BOLAN CHECKED his watch and saw that they had roughly half an hour left before their touchdown at Sikinos. Halloran had given him a rundown on the Temple of Immaculate Conception: twenty-five to thirty members, kept under loose surveillance by a Catholic pastor who tended his own flock on Ios. Keepers came and went on errands that could only be surmised, but they’d been quiet, peaceable so far, and kept to themselves for the most part.

  Halloran had called his spotter midway through their flight from Çorlu, but there’d been no answer at his church. Peculiar, since he should have been on high alert the past few days—guarding against attacks, if nothing else—and Bolan saw that Halloran was worried. If there’d been an incident like those still making news around the world, Bolan supposed it would have been reported. But with mayhem like the Paris bombing and the shootings in Johannesburg, would Ios even rate a mention for a missing priest?

  “I wish that we had time to check on him,” Halloran said, as islands passed beneath them, flecks of color in the azure offshore water indicating vessels.

  “Not likely,” Bolan said, meaning, no way at all.

  They had to focus on their targets first, and once they’d tangled with the Keepers there’d be no time left for anything but mopping up, dodging police and getting back to Sikinos as soon as possible. They couldn’t count on Ekrem Arikan to hang around and take a fall on their behalf. Missing their charter flight meant being stranded, cut off and caged, if they were even taken in alive.

  “You’re right, I know,” Halloran said. “Priorities. He was a good man. Father Pananides.”

  “Maybe still is,” Bolan said. “Don’t write him off until you’re sure.”

  “He knew that we—or, rather, I—was coming. He’d have tried to update his intelligence
on what the Keepers have been doing. Possibly he had new information on the Ark.”

  “No point in speculating,” Bolan said. “We’ll have to run with what we’ve got.”

  Halloran was silent for a moment, then pressed on. “Perhaps I shouldn’t ask this, but do your people have some contingency in place? In case we fail?”

  “I don’t get into that.” In fact, while failure was a possibility on any mission, Bolan rarely let it cross his mind. “Your team must have a backup plan in place,” he said.

  “Oh, yes. There is security, of course. Even before the failed attempts to murder John Paul II, the threat of terrorism was assessed and measures taken. It’s mandatory in a world that hovers on the brink of madness.”

  “So you’re covered.”

  “Ah. That’s something else. It would depend upon the weapon, naturally.”

  “Something supernatural about the Ark, you mean?”

  Halloran shrugged. “As you must know, sincere belief in God dictates that there must also be an adversary. Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Satariel—select your name of preference. That doesn’t mean that I expect to meet him on our present journey.”

  “Let’s hope not,” Bolan replied.

  “As to the Ark, if it exists, how can a true believer think God would allow His enemies to wield it as a weapon to destroy His holy church?”

  “No problem, then,” Bolan said.

  “But, as we’ve discussed, some earthly weapon masquerading as the Ark could still wreak havoc, both in Rome and through the world at large, if wrongly taken as a symbol of God’s wrath.”

  “The PR isn’t my department. I try to tackle one thing at a time.”

  “You won’t mind if I pray, then?”

  Bolan turned back toward his window as he said, “It couldn’t hurt.”

  Aboard the Oceanus