God's Lions - The Dark Ruin (4 page)

As he waited for the computer to do its work, Eduardo thought back to the year before, when Rene was spreading his lethal virus and killing thousands in his quest for world domination. Even then, some had voiced their opinions that Rene was the Beast ... the Antichrist. After all, it was a logical assumption considering his ruthless methods, but Rene was dead. Only Adrian remained.
Adrian
! Oh, God ... no ... it couldn’t be. Were people really starting to believe that Rene was just some kind of cosmic sleight of hand, a diversion from the fact that Adrian was the real Antichrist? Even though the caller seemed concerned for the boy’s safety for some reason, Eduardo realized that his young son was now in danger, making his departure from Foix even more urgent. He had to take his family to a location that was so difficult to travel to that it would be almost impossible for the lunatic fringe to get to them.
He had to go somewhere that most people would be afraid to go!

Suddenly the computer program stopped on a page from Genesis. Across the top, written in Hebrew, Eduardo read the first of several phrases circled in red. The name,
Eduardo Acerbi
was crossed diagonally by a second phrase—
Father of the dark one
. Below that, he saw the word he had been dreading—
Antichrist
.

Eduardo hit the scan button again and the computer froze at the bottom of the page. Two more words jumped out at him—
dark star
, and running across the bottom of the page, he saw a new phrase that made chills run down his spine—
it will appear in the child’s sixteenth year
.

Eduardo shouted to his wife, and as she rushed upstairs, Acerbi quickly dialed the head of the Acerbi Corporation’s science division.

“Yes ... hello?”

“I need you to do something for me.”

“Do you know what time it is?”

“This is Eduardo Acerbi.”

“Oh ... Mr. Acerbi. My apologies. What can I do for you, sir?”

“What is your name?”

“This is Paul Comstock. I’m the head of your science ...

“I know who you are. You have a connection at the Kleck Observatory in Hawaii. I need you to call him and find out if there is such a thing as a dark star, and if so, ask him if one has appeared within the past year.”

“I don’t need to call him. We had lunch together last week in Kona. Are you calling me on a secure line?”

“Yes, of course. You’re on speaker, and only my wife is listening.”

“Good, because what I’m about to tell you is highly classified to prevent panic among the general populace.”

“Go ahead ... I’m listening.”

“Apparently, a new star suddenly appeared at the edge of the solar system back in August.”

“Another sun?”

“Yes ... in a manner of speaking.”

“But that’s impossible ... isn’t it? I mean, wouldn’t another sun that close to the Earth be visible to the naked eye?”

“Not if it’s dark. Up until now their presence was just theoretical. Dark stars were thought to have existed early on in the history of the universe before conventional stars were able to form, but it appears that astronomers have discovered one right in our own cosmic neighborhood. These massive dark objects are practically invisible, because no visible light can escape from their strong gravitational pull. However, this one has been emitting vast amounts of gamma rays, so the astronomers in Hawaii who discovered it are classifying it as a star in the Newtonian sense. Nothing like it has ever been seen before.”

Eduardo held his breath as he gripped the phone. “When did this thing show up?”

“It appeared this year ... on the 6
^th
of August”

Colette let out a gasp as she held her hands to her mouth.

“Thank you, Mr. Comstock. I don’t have to tell you that this call never happened. You’ll find a nice bonus in your next paycheck.”

Hanging up the phone, Eduardo stared up at his trembling wife, and as they clung to one another, deep sobs began to shake Colette’s body. “Oh, my God, Eduardo ... our son. Adrian was born on August 6
^th
, sixteen years ago.”

“What?” Eduardo paled. “But he was left on our doorstep with no note ... nothing. How do you know this?”

“I’m sorry,” Colette sobbed, wringing her hands. “I know I wasn’t supposed to talk to anyone about Adrian, but I couldn’t help myself. After we decided to keep him, I checked around with some of the ladies in town when I went to the marketplace every weekend. One of them finally told me that a woman had suddenly appeared in Foix with an infant. She seemed distressed and told them she had been traveling non-stop since the day the child was born ... on August the sixth.

“They were worried about the infant, so they took the woman to a house and fed her while they summoned the local midwife to make sure the baby was healthy, but while they were waiting for the midwife, the woman had snuck out the back door with the child. By this time the women were suspicious, so two of them decided to follow her. They saw her walk to our house and leave the infant on the porch before knocking on the door and running off into the darkness. As soon as the women from the village saw us take the baby in, they left. Apparently, they figured we needed a child, and after they saw how much we loved him, our Cathar neighbors decided to keep the entire incident a secret.” Colette buried her face in her hands. “Oh, Eduardo! What if word of this ever leaks out?”

For a few minutes, Eduardo had stroked his wife’s hair, and then, with gentle hands guiding her, he led her down the stairs to their son’s room. Peering inside, they could see that the boy was sleeping soundly, his relaxed features highlighted by moonlight as it crept through the open window and across his bed. Suddenly they both began to weep, for they loved him with all their hearts, and no matter what happened, Eduardo Acerbi knew at that moment that he would do whatever had to be done to protect Adrian.

Now, with their lives thrown into chaos by an unknown caller, Eduardo and Colette prepared to flee. They had been gifted with a burden from which there was no escape—a burden they could never reveal to outsiders. After all, who knew what any of this really meant? The child seemed happy and well-adjusted, and in all the years they had lived together as a family, the boy had always displayed a tender and loving side that had touched his parents. Polite and deferential in his interactions with them, he never once displayed any hint of a cruel or vicious nature—a nature that would almost certainly have manifested itself somehow if he was truly the Beast.

In fact, things had been boringly normal. In all the years the boy had lived in their house, there had been no hint of an evil presence lurking nearby. No strange visitors, no snarling dogs, no bumps in the night—no strange occurrences of any kind. In short, he possessed none of the ghoulish attributes that seemed to spring from the minds of Hollywood screenwriters when they tried to imagine the Antichrist.

In the days that followed the call, Eduardo had surrounded his house with the best security force money could buy while he began searching for an area of the world where he could protect his son from outsiders. After much deliberation, he had finally decided to flee to Iraq—to a part of the world where he could buy his safety behind the walls of a palace in the ancient city of Babylon.

But before they left, on the very night before they walked through the door of their home in Foix for the last time, Colette had come to him with a sudden request. She told him of a dream she had the night before—a dream so strong that she felt compelled to follow the vision she had seen. In the dream she had been surrounded by monolithic ruins in the rolling hills of southeastern Turkey, but when pressed for more details, all she could tell him was that she felt there was something there of great importance, and that if they took Adrian with them, the significance of the dream would somehow be revealed to them.

For Eduardo, the decision to go had been fraught with mixed emotions. At first he had been reluctant to follow a dream that would divert them from their direct route to Babylon, thus putting Adrian at even greater risk from those who would seek to do him harm. But in the end he realized that in all the time he and Collette had been together she had never really asked anything for herself, and as a husband who loved his wife dearly, he knew he must honor the request of the woman who had brought so much joy and happiness to his life.

In the early morning hours on the day of their departure, Eduardo looked out from the second story window of his upstairs library as he had done so many times before. He gazed out at the lengthening shadows created by the rising sun as it crept over the distant mountains, filling the narrow vertical canyons before rushing out over the land and filtering through the fat leafy trees that ran along the side of the road.

In the past, the shadows had frightened him, for he had been a man who had lived in fear of shadows, and as any man who had ever lived in hiding can tell you, it is the unknown that dwells within the shadows that holds the terror. It would be in the shadows that the hunters would linger, waiting for the right moment to reach out and jerk everything he held dear away from him. But now, as he gathered up his family and boarded a private train for Turkey surrounded by security men, the shadows seemed less fearful.

As the lights of the villages flashed by outside the train’s windows, Acerbi sat in his private car and wondered at the turn of events. After throwing off the shackles of an immense family fortune and disappearing without a trace forty years before to live a simple life of peace in accordance with his newfound Cathar faith, he now found himself forced back into the world of money and power, all to protect his son. The world he had returned to was full of the material things he abhorred, and as he looked through the reflective glass at the passing countryside and watched the sleeping forms of his wife and son on opposite sofas, he knew what he had to do.

Rising from his seat by the window, Eduardo made his way back down a narrow hallway into a private office and closed the door. There was something he felt compelled to do, and as he sat at a wood-paneled desk and stared straight ahead, he thought of what he would say. In the darkness of the small room, flashing pools of light marked the passage of the train through small villages, and as the moonlight flowed in through the thin curtains covering a small overhead window, it cast an ethereal glow over the blue veins in his wrinkled, fragile skin as he picked up a satellite phone and dialed a private number.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Marcus ... or should I say ... Your Holiness.”

“Hello, Eduardo,” Pope Michael replied. “This is quite a surprise. We’ve been trying to contact you.”

“It’s been a long time.”

“Yes ... it has. How are you?”

“As well as can be expected, Your Holiness. I wanted to call and congratulate you last year, but at that time everyone still believed I was dead, so I thought I should let sleeping dogs lie.”

“Are you calling about your son?”

“Which one?”

“The one that is with you now.”

“Yes, but before we get to that, I want you to know that I make no request for absolution when it comes to my actions concerning Rene. I leave the matter of my soul in God’s hands. I did what had to be done. Rene was a monster ... an aberration within the human race. I had no other choice than to put an end to his tortured existence.”

“Yet you protect the Beast.”

“The boy has done nothing to warrant that kind of judgment, Your Holiness. He’s kind and sweet. There’s absolutely no sign to indicate he is anything but an innocent child. There must be some other explanation ... it’s only a star for God’s sake.”

“You know about the star?”

“Yes. Someone called.”

“I’m afraid there’s no mistaking the signs, Eduardo.”

“We’ll see. We must give it some time, Your Holiness ... just in case.”

“Time? You have all the time in the world, my friend. If your son is who we think he is, we are powerless to do anything about it. His reign has been foretold. This is not a matter for man to decide, for we are all only witnesses to God’s greater plan. You were forced to save the world by taking the life of one who had once been close to you, and that took a special kind of strength. I’ve always admired you, Eduardo. My father always said you were one of his closest friends. He was devastated when you disappeared. He said you had a warrior’s heart and a scholar’s mind. You would have made a great soldier of the cross.”

“I may have a warrior’s heart, Marcus, but I would have made a lousy Jesuit. I don’t follow orders very well.”

“The life you chose after you disappeared was very similar. Very few men could walk away from billions of dollars over a matter of faith.”

Eduardo could almost see the striking blue eyes of the tall Norwegian pope, his mind clicking in the silence on the other end of the line. “What are your plans now, Eduardo?”

“I’ve decided to support Adrian, Your Holiness. I may have made a mistake by leaving Rene behind when I fled to Foix. Maybe if I would have been there while he was growing up ... who knows? What I do know is that I’m going to protect Adrian now. I called to ask ... to beg you to call off your dogs and leave me and my family in peace.”

“I can assure you that you have nothing to fear from me, Eduardo. As a Jesuit warrior, you know that I am sworn to fight evil wherever it exists, but only through peaceful means. Although signs appear to point to your son, I agree with you that he has done nothing to warrant any premature speculation. Despite Rene’s chilling ruthlessness, we were all mistaken in our assumption that he was the embodiment of the Evil One. We don’t want to make the same assumption again, especially against someone who may be innocent.”

“It is not you that I fear, Marcus, but those under your control. Such witch hunts have happened in the past.”

“The modern Church is not in the business of bringing people to justice, my friend ... even evil ones. We leave that to God. As for those I have no control over, I can make no promises, but I will do everything within my power to make sure that you and your family remain safe. You have my sacred word on it.”