Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell (10 page)

The final burst of rounds popped off with nowhere to go. The top of the gun blew apart in the hijacker's hand, the chamber and the rear of the barrel turning into pieces of whizzing shrapnel. Hellboy felt one crack off the stump of one horn, another clip through the sleeve of his coat to hack a shallow chunk out of his arm.

But the stricken guard caught the worst of it, ragged debris tearing into him in half a dozen places to finish the job the bullets had started. Hellboy gritted his teeth with a groan, hating it all...having just watched men die, having been forced into a situation to
cause
them to die, because someone or something had decided they were expendable.

The armored car was out of control now, off the road and shearing through a wooded area, uprooting bushes and clipping small trees off at the bumper-line.

He wrenched at the hole he'd torn, widening it enough to squeeze the rest of himself into the cab, yanking the bodies out of the way so he could fit into the driver's seat. Grappling with the wheel and stabbing for the brakes, until he finally brought the armored car slaloming to a halt.

In relief, he sat for a moment, staring out at the headlight beams as they pierced the night. A few dozen more yards and they would've met up with trees big enough to stop the vehicle dead. A few beats of silence, nothing but the rumbling of the engine, but after the past minutes, it seemed quiet as a whisper.

He took a look back through the hole, saw Liz and Abe picking themselves up off the floor.

"You two okay?" he called. "Anything worse than bumps and bruises?"

"I'm good," Liz said.

Abe nodded. "How are things up front?"

"No survivors," he said softly.

A moment later, Liz was at the hole, looking in, looking down. "God," she said. "Was all this really...necessary?"

He gripped the wheel with his left hand. There wasn't much in this world or any other that pained him, but hearing doubt from Liz? That was one of them. He knew he was rash sometimes, rushing headlong where angels feared to tread. It was one fault he tried to be honest about, trying even harder not to let it get the better of his judgment. But he didn't think he ever gambled needlessly with lives.

Although if he had to make the choice, he supposed he would rather gamble with the lives of strangers than the lives of those he loved. She had to know that. But she would never want the responsibility of it. The possibility that she would come out on the winning side of a judgment call, because it meant someone else had to lose.

"I'm not sure what happened here," he told her. "But I think there's a good chance these men would've been dead soon either way."

"It doesn't help," Liz said.

"I know."

"A few pieces of paper, basically. That's all we're carrying. Pieces of old paper."

"I know."

He'd just ripped through an armored car and still, right now he wanted to tear something, anything, apart in the worst way. But the best thing to do, the
smart
thing to do, would be to find a map and get back to the coast. Before they found themselves waylaid by the convergence of police cars that were sure to be minutes away.

He turned away from Liz and stared through the windshield again.

Something was moving out there,
a couple of there-and-gone flickers amid the trees.

He'd opened the door before he could stop himself, leaping from the cab and hitting the ground with his revolver drawn again, sprinting in front of the armored car so its headlights burned past him, making him harder to spot while he could see everything in their beams.

He could hear them out there...slow, stealthy footfalls snapping twigs and crunching fallen leaves. Gut instinct told him that the armored car had traveled about as far as it was supposed to. Maybe a wilder arrival than someone had counted on, but this was the place.

Strangely enough, though, there didn't seem to be much here. The headlights burned through the thicket, until they were swallowed by the darkness that held fast between the trees. Overhead, a break in the branches, thinning out with autumn, showed the suggestion of hills just beyond the trees, stark black curves set against the starry sky.

So what was supposed to happen here, anyway? Lose the scroll--that seemed obvious enough. If destroying it were the objective, someone had gone to an awful lot of trouble to bring it to a specific location, rather than just getting the job done. So yeah, lose the scroll, that had to be the general idea...but into whose hands?

The trees stared back, divulging nothing. Whoever watched from the darkness, they had evidently seen enough to rethink what was supposed to have happened here.

"Hellboy." Abe's voice, behind him, from the door of the armored car. "I found three of these in the cab. I think they were meant for us."

"Three of what?"

Something thumped onto the ground beside his foot. Hellboy stooped to pick it up, brought it into the light. Found that he was holding a stun grenade. A flash-bang, commandos sometimes called them. Throw one into a confined space like a room--or the back of an armored car--and the burst of light and shock wave would scramble the circuits of whoever was close by.

"Or maybe all three were meant for you," Abe said.

Facing the darkness, knowing they were there and afraid, every muscle tensing to spring forward and catch one of them, find out what was going on here--

"Hellboy."
Abe again, his voice sharper, more insistent. "Some other time. We need to go now."

No arguments there. Just a lot of thwarted impulse and the need for self-control. He gave the trees and their secrets one last baleful glare, then turned back toward the armored car.

W
hen dawn came, it came at their backs, and far from the sight of land.

Underfoot, the teakwood deck of the
Calista
rolled against the horizon line with slow, gentle undulations. She was a two-mast schooner, a vintage seventy-eight-foot motor sailer built more than four decades ago and immaculately maintained ever since. From her foredeck Hellboy watched the sun come up in a spreading stain of rose and orange. It set fire to the shimmering surface of the sea, a tranquil inferno whose only sound was the slapping of waves against the hull, the snap of sails filled by a tailwind steady enough that they no longer needed to run the engines.

If dawn was the only fire from above, he would count this day among the good ones.

It had been a quiet night since shoving off from the docks at Ostia, abandoning the ruined armored car and its bloody cargo. They had established a radio link from the yacht to Kate Corrigan's mobile phone, letting her know they'd made it to the coast and filling her in on what had happened...or as much as they could explain. She wished them a safe rest of the journey, said she would spend an extra couple of days in Rome to help sort out the mess, but that she should still be there to meet them in Cornwall.

With the cuff and case reattached to his wrist--for the duration of the trip, he vowed, tolerating no risk, however small, that it could be lost overboard--he had taken up a vigil in an extra-sturdy deck chair near the bow, ahead of the cockpit and the rotating crew of four who manned the wheel through the night. From here he watched the sky, hours spent scanning the blackened heavens for a glimpse of shapes that might betray their presence by blotting out stars. But they had never come.

And so by most standards it was a quiet night. But quiet is relative. A night can never be truly quiet when you can't forget the faces of the dead. The armored car's driver and the African guard...they would stay with him a long while. Even he wasn't sure why they'd died, so how could
they
have made any sense of what they'd faced in their last hour, last moments? They had died knowing only that they were under siege--one from without, one from within.

That was the thing about the dead: They could so easily haunt, whether they meant to or not.

With the new morning sky still gray in the west, Abe came up from below to join him, squatting on the deck beside Hellboy's chair. He seemed to expend no effort at all in keeping himself perfectly counterbalanced against the roll of the yacht.

"We didn't talk much about what happened last night," Abe said.

"Guess not."

"But now that the sun's rising, and it'll be easy to see whatever might be up there, maybe we should."

Hadn't wasted any time, had he? Probably kept watch at a porthole in his cabin down below.

"What happened with that crew?" Abe asked. "I saw only the bodies. You saw the
men."

Hellboy had been running everything through his mind for hours, and still didn't have it all worked out.

"The driver, he was okay. Scared, that's all. I vouch for him, alive or dead. He didn't seem to have any choice but to go along with what was happening," Hellboy said. "The one in the middle? The driver gave me a look at him with the door mirror. I don't know what kind of spirit was inside him, but whatever it was, it had been around long enough to wear the guy like an old glove.

"The guard that loaded us in the back, none of us noticed anything wrong about him," he went on. "Just seemed to be doing his job. Then when things got heavy, at first I thought he must've been a plant...a mercenary, somebody's paid soldier. Or somebody's fanatic, on a mission. Until I got a look at him. Something was inside him too, Abe. But not like the other one. It must've happened not long before. Look deep enough and you can see the difference...two opposing minds looking out of the same pair of eyes, and the one that doesn't belong has got the one that does squashed over into one little corner."

"But he couldn't have been in thrall to the one in the middle."

"No, because that guy was the first to die."

"So who was
he?"

"I'm curious about that myself."

He'd given the body a quick search after they'd gotten to Ostia, although nothing of much help turned up--at least nothing to indicate who he'd been, where he'd come from, what he'd been mixed up in. He'd been wearing the same uniform as the other two guards, but his had fit poorly--too big around the waist, too short in the leg. It would've been an obvious conclusion that the uniform had been tailored for someone else even if its owner hadn't been discovered in an alley a couple of blocks from the Vatican's North Gate: one of the bodies that Kate had radioed about last night.

The only thing of interest that the man in the middle had been carrying was his sidearm, a vintage piece with sleek lines, a long thin barrel, and a distinctive enough shape to leave no doubt as to what it was. Hellboy was by no means an expert on firearms--was usually doing good just to handle the one he carried--but was pretty sure he knew a German Luger when he saw one.

Should've left it behind, maybe, for the Italian investigators. But his first impulse had been to take it along. Call it a jurisdictional dispute.

As for those two bodies in the alley...well, dead men could still tell tales, but sometimes you couldn't make out what they were saying, and this was one of them. With five corpses in all, three belonging to the security crew, there was nobody left who could testify to how the armored car had been taken over. It was an
armored car,
for crying out loud. All they'd had to do was stay inside the thing.

According to Kate, when they'd reached her from the
Calista
's VHF radiophone, about fifteen minutes after they had left the Vatican's North Gate last night, someone had spotted the lights of an ambulance and a pair of police cars converging down the Viale Vaticano. Two of the priests who'd been part of the scroll's guardian group--Father Artaud and his superior, Father Ranzi--had hurried down the street to the scene. At the time, they weren't thinking that this was around the same location as where the armored car had sat waiting, out of sight, until the BPRD trio was ready to board. They'd only gone in case someone was in need of Last Rites or some other assistance.

Too late. Discovered by tourists, the pair was beyond help. One of them, a malnourished and even desiccated looking fellow--sounded like the one Hellboy had shot--was dead for no obvious reason. No wounds, no injuries, just an overall physical condition that implied he might have dropped dead of natural causes.

The other, the fresh kill, had been the third original guard from the armored car. He'd died quickly, shot through the eye, and Hellboy wondered if this had been done with the Luger he'd confiscated. Once dead, the guard had been stripped of his clothes--no doubt the ill-fitting uniform worn by the hijacker Hellboy had killed, with the bit of brain on the collar--although they'd left behind the topcoat he'd worn. From what Ranzi managed to learn at the scene, the hijackers had tried to disguise the fact that they were leaving bodies behind by posing them as though they were sleeping vagrants--not an uncommon presence in Rome. Homeless equals invisible. Couldn't manage that nearly as well with a man naked but for his underwear and socks, though, and while they'd had spare clothes from the hijacker, it would've been no easy feat to re-dress the corpse in a hurry. Just curl him up and drape him with his topcoat. The illusion might have held up longer if not for the spreading blood.

Ultimately, it was the coat that had raised the alarm with Father Ranzi, while he conferred with the police. Its breast bore a patch with the emblem of the security company whose armored car had not half an hour before rolled away carrying the Masada Scroll.

"Who they were, how they did it...I'm not gonna worry about that right now. If there's anything to find out, Kate'll get to the bottom of it," Hellboy said. "What I'm more worried about is who put them up to it."

"Not the
Opus Angelorum,
then?"

"Last night, none of that seemed like their style. If I had to put a word to it, that was too
earthy
for them. Too down and dirty. It was just the opposite of a cleansing fire. No purity," Hellboy reasoned. "Seems like if the
Opus
had known we were on the move, they'd've just called in the flamethrowers again."

"Instead, if they've lost their ritual site," Abe said, referring to the observatory that Monsignor Burke had revealed, "it's possible they're on the move as well. Maybe out of the picture. For now, at least."

"Yeah. A group that's been around as long as Burke says this one has, hard to believe they'd let a little thing like eviction put them out of business permanently."

"So we're looking at the likelihood of another faction whose presence has gone unknown until now."

Hellboy nodded. "Except this one doesn't want the scroll destroyed. They just want it. Period."

"But for what?"

"Most of the time I'm smarter than I look," Hellboy said. "This isn't one of them."

"If we knew who sold us out, that's one step closer to the answer."

They tossed names back and forth, everybody they were aware of who had known their logistics. It was a short list: Artaud and Ranzi, the two archivists most directly connected with the scroll. Bertrand, the Swiss Guard Corporal who'd been assigned to them all day, and could easily have overheard their travel plans being made, although when the man could've gotten that information out, Hellboy didn't know. Then there was the head of the security company who'd furnished the armored car, although that seemed the least likely possibility; he hadn't even known what the cargo was, only that it was a valuable historical document. There was also Cardinal Capezza, who'd flexed connections to line up the car in the first place--a totally unknown commodity here, someone they hadn't even met. Instead, he'd been contacted by Archbishop Bellini, the plump guy who'd been nodding off at the beginning of yesterday morning's meeting in which they'd asked the BPRD to take custody of the scroll. So add Bellini to the list, too. Then there was Monsignor Burke to consider, if only because they'd spoken at length last evening, although he too was a long shot at best; Hellboy hadn't mentioned anything other than travel by sea, and Burke hadn't been involved in the plans for getting the scroll to the coast.

Anyone else? Not that they knew of, but then, any one of the above could have violated common sense and mentioned it to someone else. Dumb, but far from impossible. Like any bureaucracy, the Vatican thrived on gossip and power plays, and they'd already been warned of spies.

"Then again, at this point, does it even matter who sold us out?" Abe said. He reached across with one slim-muscled arm and tapped the attache case, resting beside the deck chair under Hellboy's oversized hand. "It's safe and I'm optimistic it'll stay that way. To get at it where it's going, they'd have to have a
very
long reach."

Hellboy ticked one eyebrow upward.

"Of course I know it matters to
you,
and I know why," Abe said. "You wouldn't be you if it didn't. What I'm pointing out is now that we have this"--he tapped the case again--"our part in their affairs is over. The one priest yesterday, the one that looks like he belongs in a soup kitchen..."

"Father Laurenti," Hellboy said. Something spooky about that guy...although not in a bad way. Spooky in the same way that somebody else might have leveled the same verdict against him, or Abe, or Liz, or even Kate, for that matter.

"Laurenti, right. He couldn't have made it any plainer that they do
not
want us meddling in their affairs any more than is necessary to get the job done and keep the scroll safe."

"And Monsignor Burke couldn't have made that any murkier by taking me to the observatory."

"Yes, but your field trip notwithstanding, there's an official position, and it comes not just from a Church hierarchy, but from a sovereign state. That carries weight...even with a bureau like ours."

He knew Abe was right. Didn't have to like it one bit, but there it was. Abe had always had more of the diplomatic about him.

"And according to the monsignor, they've taken at least one prisoner in this ideological conflict," Abe went on. "Prisoners, arson, deaths...this has gotten ugly. It was ugly before we were even a part of it. And the worst part is, we don't know which side is going to prevail. Who
should
and who
will
are two different things. We may have our sympathies, you and I, but you probably know what kind of directive is going to come down."

Here it comes,
Hellboy thought.
The P-word...

"Politically, we can't take an official side any more than we already have. You and I may not like it, but regardless, we
are
part of a government agency. And when our work comes into conflict with the demands of state..." Abe let the words hang, then shook his head.

And they were getting at the paradox of his whole existence, weren't they? Despite having spent his entire life in the care and then the employ of the government--or at least the only life he was cognizant of, given his apparent origins--he'd felt insulated from government's minutiae and dictates of policy. Face it: What they did in the BPRD, what they encountered, what they killed or were killed by...most senators and representatives and cabinet officials didn't even want to
know
about. True, the bureau had been founded in 1944 as a response to the Third Reich's increasingly successful occult experiments, seeking to turn the tide of the war back in their favor. Later, there'd been similar clashes with the Soviet Union. After which the bureau's political star had dimmed. This was inevitable. It had been decades since a government had harnessed such powers.