Apocalypse Ark Read online

  Bolan primed the frag grenade and lofted it over the altar, toward the chapel’s nearest pews. Somebody saw it coming, and called a warning to the rest, but the four-second fuse gave little time for anyone on the receiving end to find cover. When the blast erupted, he heard shrapnel peppering the altar inches from his head, but none of it came through. Screams rising with the smoke from the explosion told him that he had an opportunity to move and shouldn’t let it go to waste.

  Another second saw him up and running toward the bishop, who was sprawled and moaning on the floor behind him. Bolan reached the man and rolled him over, and was about to pose a question when a shout from the direction of the street drew his attention to a crowd of gunmen entering the chapel, weapons drawn.

  Bolan beat the storm of bullets by a heartbeat, dashing through the door he’d entered by and along the hallway toward the alley at the chapel’s rear. Were other gunmen waiting for him in the darkness there?

  One way to know. He hit the back door at a sprint and plunged into the night.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Washington, D.C., two days earlier

  A handful of early-bird tourists were clustered outside the Lincoln Memorial at 9:00 a.m. Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, watched them from a distance, mostly couples taking turns as they approached the throne of Lincoln, posing almost bashfully while their partners snapped photos to memorialize the event. Looming nineteen feet above them, Lincoln remained impassive, as he had since May 1922, staring across the National Mall toward the upthrust spire of the Washington Monument with a look of resignation.

  Or could it be sadness?

  Bolan didn’t know what the sculptors had had in mind when they’d started carving Honest Abe from Georgia marble more than ninety years earlier. Had they been striving to depict a president well pleased by the results of catastrophic civil war? Perhaps bemused by his own murder at Ford’s Theater less than a week after the rebel Army of Northern Virginia’s surrender at Appomattox? As Bolan knew from high school, fighting had continued for a month after Lincoln’s death, and the last sizable force of Confederate troops hadn’t surrendered for another five weeks after that.

  Did Lincoln, dying, even know he’d won?

  Was any battle between Good and Evil ever truly won?

  Spring sunshine on his face made Bolan disinclined to chase that question in an endless circle, as he had for years, since the beginning of his one-man war against a world of human predators. In fact, he knew the answer: victory was never more than temporary. You could kill a human enemy—or hundreds of them, sure—but killing Evil was impossible. It grew like cancer in the dark corners of human hearts and minds, somehow invulnerable to the chemotherapy of education and enlightenment.

  Were some people born bad, or turned into monsters by hellish childhoods?

  By the time Bolan encountered them as murderous adults, what difference did it make?

  He checked his watch and saw that it was 9:06. The meeting had been set for 9:15, no reason asked or offered. Maybe Hal Brognola had some paperwork to finish off at Justice, across the Mall on Pennsylvania Avenue. Most likely, he’d be walking over from his office.

  A few more tourists had arrived to stare at Lincoln, climbing granite steps that rose from the Reflecting Pool toward fluted Doric columns with a frieze above them, naming all fifty states with dates when they’d entered the Union that Lincoln had fought and died to save. Bolan couldn’t have said if they were properly impressed, but none were laughing, cavorting or blaring music from boom boxes.

  The soldier rated that a plus.

  He saw Brognola coming now, dressed for the office in a stylish charcoal suit, white shirt, a red tie adding color. The big Fed was wearing a fedora. His hangdog face, as grim or simply tired as Lincoln’s, indicated that the world’s weight rested on his shoulders.

  So far, it appeared that he was bearing up all right.

  Bolan met the man halfway, automatically checking his old friend for tails. No one was tracking him, as far as Bolan could determine, but with the technology available these days there could have been surveillance on Brognola from the far end of the Mall—or from the depths of outer space. At least Mack couldn’t spot a human stalker within killing range.

  “Been waiting long?” Brognola asked, as they shook hands.

  “Not very.”

  “I thought this would make a change of pace from Arlington,” the big Fed said. “And with the heat on, I’ve been tethered to my desk. Getting away to Stony Man is problematical.” Stony Man Farm was the site of the country’s top covert counterterrorism organization, the Sensitive Operations Group. Brognola was its director.

  An hour’s flight or less by helicopter from the capital. Brognola had to be under the gun.

  “Which heat is that?” Bolan asked, conscious that the temperature ran high in Washington, regardless of the season.

  “It’s weird this time,” the man from Justice said.

  “This time?” Bolan replied, half smiling.

  “Okay, weirder.” Brognola observed the nearby tourists for a moment, frowning at them. “We should take a walk.”

  They walked. When they had put a hundred yards or so between themselves and Lincoln, the big Fed slowed down and asked, “What do you know about the ark, offhand.”

  “Which ark is that?” Bolan asked. “Noah and the flood, you mean?”

  “The other one. The Ark of the Covenant. The Ten Commandments. All that.”

  Bolan had to smile, then. “I saw Raiders years ago, on cable in some hotel room. Beyond that, nothing much. Why do you ask?”

  Brognola cocked his head, peered skyward with a squint, as if he sought the satellite that could be tracking them from somewhere out beyond the exosphere. Or was he seeking something else?

  “Okay,” he said at last. “Get ready for the weird. Have you ever heard of Custodes Foederis?”

  “Not a whisper that I can recall,” Bolan said.

  “It’s Latin for Covenant Keepers. A cult that popped up after Y2Kaos fizzled and left all the doomsayers dressed in their sackcloth and ashes with nowhere to go. They were pissed, if you noticed. Some big names with egg on their faces, and donations dropping like stock market prices when Standard & Poor’s knocked an A off the U.S. credit rating.”

  “Stands to reason,” Bolan said. “When prophets drop the ball, their profits suffer.”

  “In my opinion,” Brognola replied, “it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of con men. Rip-off artists selling misery they can’t deliver to a bunch of folks who can’t afford it. What the hell, don’t get me started.”

  “Anyway,” Bolan said.

  “Anyway, when the dust starts to settle, there’s Custodes Foederis, operating from a modest base in Rome. At first glance, you’d mistake it for a Catholic splinter group, on a par with the Latin Rite Church, the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen and various others.”

  Bolan nodded, though the names had a vague familiar ring. “But it’s different?” he asked.

  “In spades,” Brognola said. “Turns out, for all their trappings, that the Keepers are as anti-Catholic as any outfit you could name, the Ku Klux Klan included.”

  “And they’re based in Rome?”

  “To keep a sharp eye on the Vatican,” Hal said. “Or, as they like to call it in their literature, the Scarlet Whore of Babylon.”

  “That kind of thing still sells?” Bolan asked.

  “Like ice cream in August, to the proper target audience,” the big Fed said. “Turns out you’ve got a sizable collection of defectors from the church who’ve split over one grievance or another. Everything from Vatican II and masses in English to pedophile padres, you name it. Somebody doesn’t like the pope’s red loafers, they can find a place to bitch about it with the Keepers. They’ve even got a formula worked out that br
ands the pope as Satan, from his crown.”

  “Say what?”

  “There’s an inscription on the papal mitre,” Brognola explained. “Vicarius Filii Dei. It translates from Latin as ‘Vice-regent of the Son of God.’”

  “And how do you get Satan out of that?” Bolan asked.

  “Roman numerals. Throw out the letters with no numerical value, noting that the u in Vicarius looks like a v, and it adds up to 666. The Mark of the Beast from Revelation, that is.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I wish,” Brognola said. “Of course, whoever did the math forgot that ‘IV’ counts as four in Roman numerals, not one plus five, so the actual total is 664. Try telling that to crazy people, though.”

  “Okay, you’ve taught me something,” Bolan said. “But what’s this got to do with me? With us?”

  “Good question,” Brognola replied. “As luck would have it, Custodes Foederis isn’t just another bunch of kooks ranting about the papacy and Armageddon. They’re convinced they had a destiny to crush the Scarlet Whore of Babylon and save the world.”

  “With faulty math?” Again, Bolan was forced to smile.

  “If only. This is where the Ark comes in.”

  “How’s that?”

  “If you remember your Old Testament—or Raiders, take your pick,” Brognola said, “Moses received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. Twice, in fact, but that’s another story. Anyway, he stashed them in a wooden chest—the Ark—along with other magic goodies, including a jar of manna from heaven, the staff he used to strike Egypt with plagues and the first Torah scroll. He covered it with cloth and goat skins, mounted it on golden poles and got a team of priests to carry it twelve hundred yards ahead of the wandering Israelites.”

  Bolan nodded, still waiting for the story to make sense.

  “Your movie viewing may have told you that the Ark was powerful,” Brognola said.

  “Melts Nazis,” Bolan said. “It would’ve come in handy on D-day.”

  “In fact, whoever touched it without God’s express permission was supposedly struck dead. Its power allowed Joshua’s trumpet players to drop the walls of Jericho, after they’d marched around the town for seven days.”

  “And this connects to your cult in Rome...how, again?”

  “Funny that you should ask. They claim to have the Ark,” Brognola stated.

  “Okay. I thought you said—”

  “You heard me right. There are several stories about where the Ark and its contents wound up. One version says a cave on Mount Nebo, in Jordan. Another claims it’s in a cavern in the Dumghe Mountains of South Africa. Some Frenchman said the Knights Templar found it and took it to Chartres Cathedral during the Crusades. Another has it hidden at Rennes-le-Château, in southern France, then found by GIs and brought back to the States after World War II.”

  “So, how do the Covenant Keepers claim they bagged it?”

  “From Axum, in northern Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has claimed to have the Ark for decades, under guard. The church’s head man announced its unveiling to the public in June 2009, then changed his mind the next day, telling the world to take his word that it exists.”

  “Must be a tough sell,” Bolan said.

  “Not to Custodes Foederis,” Brognola replied. “They claim to have it now, extracted by a special action team sometime last week. We’ve verified a raid against the Chapel of the Tablet there, in Axum. Half a dozen sentries killed by shooters who escaped with something.”

  “That sounds like a job for Ethiopian police, or maybe Interpol,” Bolan said.

  “Would be,” Brognola agreed, “if it was just a theft.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “The kickoff for a new Crusade, apparently. The Keepers claim they’ll use the Ark to crush the Vatican and bring on the Apocalypse.”

  “Don’t tell me that you buy it,” Bolan said.

  “It’s hard to swallow, I admit. The last bit, anyway. But they can raise hell trying, and the word’s come down to head it off if possible.”

  Bolan had tackled killer cults before, and terrorists who claimed their marching orders came from the Almighty. Hoping he could spot a way inside the mission being offered to him, he told Brognola, “Okay, then. Run it down.”

  “Deep background’s on a DVD I brought along,” the big Fed said, and took a slim disk from the inside pocket of his suit coat, passing it to Bolan in a jewel case. “As for the basics, Custodes Foederis popped up out of nowhere, as far as we knew at the time, in the summer before 9/11. The founding father, or Pontifex Rex to the faithful—that’s ‘Patriarch King,’ by the way—calls himself Janus Marcellus. Born Giovanni Capasso in Naples, June 1974.”

  “Why the name change?” Bolan asked.

  “The Keepers are big on their Latin,” Hal said. “His pick translates roughly as ‘Hammer of Janus,’ whom, you may recall, was the two-faced Roman god of beginnings and transitions. Also doorways, gates, endings and time.”

  “Two-faced,” Bolan said. “Pun intended?”

  “His father was a Catholic priest, defrocked and excommunicated for his opposition to Vatican II. Couldn’t keep his mouth shut under orders, so they booted him.”

  “So, no more celibacy,” Bolan said.

  “His son was born six months after the excommunication,” Brognola replied. “You do the math.”

  “And little Giovanni grows up hearing that the church his father left is everything corrupt and evil in the world.”

  “You got it. Giovanni’s partner in the Keepers—and his wife, in fact—is known as Mania Justina, known to the sect as Reginae Matris. ‘Queen Mother,’ that is. On her birth certificate, she’s plain old Clara Vitti, born in Palermo, October 1981.”

  “Mafia territory,” Bolan said.

  “Correct, and she’s connected. One of her cousins got life for murder and extortion at the Maxi Trial in 1987. Clara was in court to hear the verdict. Six years old.”

  “So...what? The whole church thing’s some kind of scam? A racket to extort cash from the Vatican?”

  “I wish it were that simple,” Brognola replied, “but no such luck. The shrinks at Quantico have been dissecting Janus and his queen since the attack at Axum. They read both players as sincere in their professed beliefs, as far as profiling can take it.”

  “So, sincerely crazy,” Bolan said.

  Brognola shrugged. “I doubt they’d qualify as legally insane, but what’s the difference? We’re not collecting evidence for court. It all gets shaky when you’re dealing with religion, anyway. Somebody claims God told him he should run for president. Another one jumps in and says, ‘No, He told me!’ Toss in your miracles and prophecies, the so-called history that can’t be verified, jihads, crusades and clinic bombings. Hey, don’t get me started.”

  “And the job is what? Retrieve the Ark and haul it back to Ethiopia? Confirm its power as an icon or a weapon?”

  “We don’t even know there is an ark,” Brognola said. “The church in Axum swears there is, and it’s been taken. But remember, no one else has seen it since the middle of the thirteenth century, if then. Let’s grant that they had something, and it’s gone now. If Custodes Foederis can use it to stir up dissension and bloodshed, whatever it is, that makes it a weapon.”

  “Same question,” Bolan said. “What outcome are you hoping for?”

  “Job one,” Brognola answered, “is to neutralize the threat by any means required. Church politics doesn’t concern me when we’ve got lives riding on the line.”

  “Okay. How public is this thing?” Bolan inquired. “I have to say, this is the first I’m hearing of it.”

  “Chalk that up to clergy saving face,” the big Fed said. “Our knowledge of the Axum raid came in through diplomatic channels, from Addis Ababa
. Janus and his Keepers have been taking credit for it on the down-low, circulating word among their chapters, not admitting anything to get them in hot water with the media or Interpol.”

  “And you know this because...?”

  “A couple of informants in the cult have passed the word along, but can’t say where the prize is, much less what it is.”

  “And I’d be starting on the ground in Ethiopia?” Bolan asked.

  “Familiar territory, more or less,” Brognola said. “You had that rumble in Sudan, next door, not long ago.”

  “No reason to believe the Ark’s still there,” Bolan observed.

  “Unlikely. But the Keepers have a congregation in the capital. Smart money says they must know something about heavy action in their own backyard.”

  “Makes sense,” Bolan agreed. “I’ll need a flight.”

  “I took the liberty of booking one,” Brognola said. “In case you ran with it. You’re on British Airways out of Dulles International tonight, connecting with BMI at London Heathrow down to Addis.”

  “Right. Connections at the other end, for gear?”

  “It’s on the DVD.”

  “In case I ran with it,” Bolan said, smiling.

  “If you’d rather pass it...”

  “Not likely,” Bolan said. “May need a hat and whip, though, so I’ll measure up to what’s-his-name.”

  * * *

  THE DVD FILLED Bolan in on the strange history of Custodes Foederis. Based in Rome, as Brognola had said, the sect had twenty-three additional congregations, in Italy, Holland and France, Great Britain, Canada and the United States, Latin America, Africa and Australia. Headquarters—dubbed the Seat of Enlightenment—claimed thirty thousand followers worldwide, but verification was dicey at best. The church kept secret membership rolls, and no concerted effort had been made on any front to track its followers before the Axum incident.