Victory of Coins (The Judas Chronicles, #7) (12 page)

But it took nearly an hour to find our man... the contact who could tell us where to search next for the Damascus Coin.

It wasn’t until we reached the fourth church on our list—one of the most prominent structures, called the ‘Bet Giorgis Church’—that we heard something... a man moaning. Oddly, there was still no one else around at the moment, and as we stood above the two-story edifice it sounded like the painful groans originated from inside the first floor of the church.

“Careful, it could be a trap,” I advised, when Cedric scurried down the western side of the stone moat to get to the church. Roderick and I followed close behind.

“We don’t have time for caution!” Cedric called over his shoulder. “It sounds like the dude is hurt badly. You hear him? He knows we’re coming and...
what in the hell?!”

“Cedric? Wait—don’t go in there!” warned Roderick.

We ran to catch him as Cedric stepped up to a figure in one of the doorways, hanging from what looked like a cross made of heavy iron chains attached to railroad spikes driven into the church’s stone doorframe.

“Dr. Anderson? We’re here to help you—we’ll get you down from this!” said Cedric, his voice frantic despite a noble effort to remain calm. “Who did this to you?”

Really, who else could it be? And my earlier prediction about the former history professor preferring death over what he would endure at the hands of Kaslow was spot on. We had seen pictures of both historians when we visited with Bennevento the day before. Both were older gentleman, with Geoffrey Anderson being a virile sixty-six year-old and the slender and frail looking Corillo being closer to eighty at the time of their abductions. The death images of Dr. Corillo were disturbing enough, as Bennevento told us that some of his body parts had been severed while he was alive.

I had assumed that Kaslow delivered his worst cruelty between the two men to Corillo. I couldn’t have been further from the truth. Anderson was clad only in a loincloth, and it appeared that a halo of barbwire had been wrapped tightly around his head—and then to ensure it remained in place, it was imbedded into his skull with nails.

Much longer and thicker nails were driven through his hands and feet, and then bent to form loops to attach to the heavy iron links that formed the makeshift cross.

Was this gruesome portrayal of Jesus and His death at Golgotha for my benefit? Even the professor’s side had been pierced, and a mixture of blood and bile poured down his right leg from the wound.

“Check his back,” I asked Cedric, my voice dampened to a whisper. “What do you see?”

Cedric looked and shook his head without answering.

“I haven’t seen tears and welts like that since I watched the slave diaries on PBS a few years back,” he finally replied. “My God... what kind of devil would do this to another human being?”

“Dr. Anderson,” said Roderick. “We’re here to help you. Can you understand what we’re saying?”

Roderick gasped, as the bloodied mouth opened after the professor nodded in unspeakable agony. To all our horror, Dr. Geoffrey Anderson would never speak again... one needed a tongue to do that, and his had been torn out. I realized then the blood dripping from next to his eyes most likely indicated those organs had also been removed.

Cruel enough that Kaslow had brought us out here on a wild goose chase. but beyond comprehensible that he would make someone suffer so, and just to prove a point. Draconian behavior at its very worst!

Kaslow the demon king was far, far worse than the KGB version of the bastard could ever be.

Suddenly, the poor wretch that was once a jovial and well-respected historian struggled madly against his chains, as terrible wails emitted from his throat. Though he could never tell us anything about my blood coin or any other subject, his primal fearfulness told me enough.

“Kaslow’s near—Dr. Anderson can sense him... maybe he smells him. Maybe—”

My advisement to Roderick and Cedric was cut short. Blood spattered upon us all, and it took me a moment to realize that Dr. Anderson had just received a pair of crossbow bolts into his body. The first one split his head down the center and the other pierced his heart—either one killing him instantly.

I whirled around in time to witness another pair of bolts shredding the air to reach us. Roderick’s reflexes mimicked mine, and we escaped unharmed. However, one of the bolts ripped into Cedric’s lower back, and he collapsed onto the unforgiving stone steps below the doorway, writhing in terrible pain.

Viktor Kaslow stood above us, dressed in a black sari lined with gold; his crossbow ready with more bolts aimed at Cedric’s prone body. He smiled as he took aim. Instinctively, I stepped in front of my injured friend, leaving myself only a moment to internalize the fact that I might well be leaving this earth at any moment for the brief transition into a new body. Destined to awaken in some other time and place, and very likely far away from Azum, Ethiopia. Most definitely, I would return too late to save the lives of my last dear friends on Earth.

Surely, our enemy considered the prize before him as he held me in the crossbow’s sight. An easy checkmate and the elimination of the last obstacles standing in his way, he could now officially begin his quest to conquer the world. Hell, Kaslow had my last coin in his possession, which like all of my other blood coins, came with powerful and dark attributes to assist in the vilest of schemes.... Or did he have it?

Roderick joined me where I stood, while also keeping an eye on our critically injured cohort. Kaslow took his hand off the trigger and lowered the crossbow, studying us for a moment while he chuckled to himself. Then he turned away, dissolving into the air around him. Only a light breeze moving through the area, that carried the scent of decay and brimstone, bore witness that the Russian madman had ever been there.

––––––––

W
e almost lost Cedric.

If not for the advanced technology in Roderick’s latest cell phone, we would have. There was no way we could slow the bleeding
and
carry our wounded buddy out of there. In the end, the choice was to wait for Roderick’s medical contact in Cairo, Egypt to contact a trusted associate in Addis Ababa, who in turn placed an emergency call to the local hospital in Azum. The medical treatment provided to Cedric was primitive compared to the States, and significantly worse than in Egypt. But the Azum medical team did arrive more quickly than I expected. Best of all, they managed to stem the bleeding. Cedric now had a solid chance of surviving the plane ride to Cairo, and my optimism increased after Roderick produced a trio of milky-green crystals I never expected to see again.

“They once belonged to Alistair, and if you’ll remember, Judas, you allowed me to take them along with a pocket watch I gave him three Christmases ago. They would be keepsakes to remember him by, and apparently now I have another use for the crystals,” he explained, after Cedric on his IV-loaded gurney was lifted into the plane for our three-hour flight to Cairo.

Roderick positioned the crystals—which were the last ones Alistair had kept from the bounty he took home from the shattered Tree of Life in Iran—to cover the entrance and exit wounds in Cedric’s abdomen. He did it immediately after we secured his gurney near our seats on the plane. Fortunately, the surgeons who attended Cedric, after he was taken to the small hospital in Azum, gave my former CIA boss enough morphine to keep him largely oblivious to the pain, and anything else for that matter. Roderick’s and my hope was that the crystals would speed up the healing process; and if not, then give us enough time to reach Dr. Abdullah Khalil in Cairo.

Dr. Khalil had aided the CIA and other western intelligence agencies for nearly thirty years, and Roderick considered him a trustworthy ally. I had only heard of the renowned surgeon, who had long been regarded as the best available in this region of the world.

“There won’t be enough time to secure a donor for Cedric to receive a new liver,” Roderick advised, once we both were certain that he was unconscious again, and we could now speak freely about our comrade’s condition. “This simply has to work.”

“Why would Kaslow go out of his way to shoot him in the back?”

By my count this was my eleventh question that received a mere ‘shoulder shrug’ answer during the past several hours. But I couldn’t help myself.... We would arrive in Cairo around ten o’clock that night and it frustrated me that it had taken the better part of eight hours to get Cedric the medical attention he needed, and then stabilized enough to travel.

“You’re going to have to let your disbelief in what happened go, Judas,” said Roderick, glancing at Cedric before continuing. He might not verbalize all of his own questions, but I was ready to lay down a hefty wager the silent ones weren’t all that different from my own uncertainties. “Kaslow obviously wanted to see our reactions when he killed his promised messenger. And, for good measure, he took us down from a threesome to a pair. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he tries to take me out before this gets resolved. Then it would just be the two of you, going ‘mano a mano’—and maybe not even for a coin, but for him to test his new prowess as a demon lord.”

“You are joking, right?”

Roderick regarded me solemnly.

“You really think this is all a game to him and Kaslow has no intention of letting us in on where the Damascus Coin is presently kept?” I persisted, silently praying that my latest fear was unfounded.

“Despite Kaslow’s propensity for rare honesty, I believed he would be truthful about pursuing your coins.... I now feel like a fool,” he said. “And since you continue to cling to the same delusion, then you’re a fool, too, my friend. Without a fair race, where you and I have the same information he has access to, how can it work for us? If Kaslow knows where the coin is being held at present, he obviously isn’t in a sharing mood about it. And, if he doesn’t know—which I’m beginning to suspect might be true—then we are no closer to discerning the coin’s whereabouts than we were two hundred years ago.”

I suddenly felt more empty and alone than I could remember... other than when I had first deserted Beatrice and Alistair in the 1950s, and of course the night that Jesus died on the cross nearly two thousand years ago. Desperation constricted the very core of my soul, and I began to picture future centuries still wandering the earth in search of the very last of my thirty silver shekels.

“Do you think he realizes we know about the game?” I asked. “Maybe we should return to Virginia, and act like we could give two shits about this coin.... Perhaps it would draw him out to where he either provided better clues that could be verified, or he would tire of it all.”

“What... like us? If Kaslow tires of the game, we lose—
you
especially would lose, Judas,” he said, turning in his seat to better regard me. “It’s what we always feared after Kaslow beat us to the Holocaust coin in Germany, nearly two years ago. You and I both believed he’d take it to his new home in Bochicha’s realm and we would likely never see it or even hear from him again.”

True. And it should’ve bothered me greatly back then.... But having Alistair and Beatrice in my life, with the potential of spending untold centuries in perpetual earthly bliss made Kaslow disappearing with one of my cursed blood coins a good thing. Quite honestly, it was a
highly desirable
outcome in my mind at the time.

It spoke to Kaslow’s cruelty, that he couldn’t let it go... to leave my family and friends out of our longstanding contempt for each other.

“I have no choice but to keep looking for it,” I said, turning my attention to the darkness outside the plane, barely visible since the window visors were pulled down to where only a sliver of darkness could be seen. Having the visors pulled down at all spoke to a silly superstition in believing it would make us any less visible to terrorists or demon rulers intent on blowing us out of the night sky. And, just to be clear, it was Roderick’s preference instead of mine.

“Yes, I know.” He sighed. “And I will be there with you, once we get Cedric the care he needs.”

“So you don’t think the crystals will heal him quickly enough?”

“Did they turn your boy into a vibrant twenty-year old overnight? Of course not!” He laughed, but with compassion. “I anticipate that at minimum, Cedric will need a week to recuperate—and that’s with the aid of Dr. Khalil and a private room where he can rest.”

“In an Egyptian hospital, no less,” I quipped. “Sounds lovely.”

“You obviously haven’t seen the new facility at Dar Al Fouad Hospital in Nasr City,” said Roderick. “It’s very nice. In fact, I would wager it is superior to at least sixty percent of the metropolitan hospitals in America.”

“No shit?”

“Absolutely. Here... I’ll show you.”

After accessing the hospital’s webpage on his laptop, I was admittedly surprised. And here I thought I was above standard prejudice, after being on earth for so long. Yet the fact I hadn’t been in Egypt for quite some time had left me jaded to the fact things can change for the better anywhere, and at any time.

“Okay... you win,” I said, feeling a sheepish smile begin to tug on my lips. “I’ll quit bitching about stuff and let things ride until we get Cedric situated. But first... have you heard anything back from Michael Lavoie yet?”

Roderick closed his laptop and stood for a moment to get a better look at Cedric, whose breathing had become shallower in the last few minutes. I almost chided Roderick for not insisting on one of the staff doctors in Azum joining us to Cairo, to keep a better eye than we could on our buddy’s vital signs.

“For your information, none of the physicians on staff there have passports,” he advised, commenting on my latest disparaging thoughts. “Did you suppose we could keep one of the Ethiopian doctors prisoner on the plane while we gallivanted in Cairo for a few days?”

“I hadn’t considered that, no.” My turn to laugh.

“And, yes, Michael contacted me on the way to the plane this evening.”

“By text?”

“No... he sent an email that I accessed from my phone,” he said. “He’s sending someone to meet us in Cairo. One of our US operatives in Greece who has lots of expertise throughout the Middle East.”