With Aziz dead, that left Hakam with three able-bodied men and a marginal warrior in al-Marid, which worried him. Not even three hundred miles into their journey and half his team was down.
Walking to the First Class cabin where Pius sat, Hakam took the seat next to him but did not speak.
“I begged you,” said Pope Pius. “I pleaded with you. I implored you. But you wouldn’t listen and now a man lies dead.”
Hakam remained silent, his eyes focused to an imaginary point on the wall in front of him.
“How many more will you kill or send to their death unnecessarily?” asked Pius. “How many more are going to die for this twisted cause you call justice?”
Hakam was not in the mood. “Who is this man?” he asked. “Who is this Vatican Knight? And if you say ‘your personal valet,’ I will have another bishop killed.”
Pope Pius looked at Hakam’s profile and saw a man who was fighting to remain calm.
“He is an elite soldier,” he answered evenly, “with credentials rivaled by no one, as you have just witnessed. There are fourteen more like him who are willing to make everything wrong with this world right.”
Hakam hesitated before speaking. “When I was seventeen and living in New York,” he said evenly, “I stood on the sidewalk and watched a vendor, an Arab, get accosted by three men because he was praying.” His gaze remained fixed. “They grabbed him, a man who loved his God as much as you love yours, and they nearly beat him because of what he was, an Arab. They did not know this man or the content of his character. They did not know if he was good or bad or wished ill of his neighbor. All they saw was an Arab. And that was the day I realized no matter what, I, and those like me, have become inherently mistrusted because of what happened on Nine-Eleven. Since then my life has become a constant struggle.”
“So you think God has given you the impunity to kill because of what three men did a long time ago?”
Hakam shook his head. “I do what I do because Allah has shown me that under one God, the one true God, that tolerating false gods is evil in its whole. As long as the masses continue to worship false deities, then true evil will never fall and the world forever divided.”
Pope Pius could not believe his ears. Did this man think he was some kind of savior?
“My team is similar to your Vatican Knights,” he continued. “They are soldiers who fight for a particular cause in the name of Allah, but condemned by the masses. Your soldiers fight for a cause and their actions are justified by the Church. Yet you keep these Vatican Knights hidden in fear of worldwide denunciation because the measures they use to achieve the means are no different in principle, as long as the desired result is obtained. Both kill under the waving banner of God. So tell me the difference between our soldiers, Your Holiness, since they fight under the same fundamental causes of redirecting the world to a more glorious path. And please try doing it without sounding hypocritical.”
The pope leaned his head closer to Hakam’s ear, his lips less than a foot away. “You’re missing the one fundamental point that matters most,” he said. “The intent of the Vatican Knights is to preserve and save lives, not take them away.”
“I see. So those three men who accosted the Arab vendor, if they believed that beating him would somewhere down the road save and preserve lives because they thought he would ultimately cause harm, would that come under the same guidelines as your principals? Keep in mind that this man who openly worshipped his God was branded at the scene as someone inherently mistrusted, his only crime.”
“You’re speaking theoretically rather than fact. The Vatican Knights go into volatile situations already existing.”
The plane took a jolt from an air pocket before resettling.
“You will die,” Hakam stated with apathy. “And so will I. But what better way to serve as a symbol to a dying religion while another rises for all to inherit without condemnation: one law, one religion, one God.”
“Your God is the same as mine,” said Pius, prompting Hakam to face him. “Your God, my God, the God of the Jews, the God of Islam. We are all His children no matter how differently we perceive him. There is already that one God you speak of — the God of many faces but only one voice. And what you speak of is intolerance. And intolerance is the plague of man, which you seem to be infected with.”
Hakam turned away. “Intolerance paves the way to Oneness.”
“Intolerance paves the way to insanity. If you get your way of one god and one religion, then you’ll always find something else to forbid. Perhaps it would be the way a man wears his beard or the way he dresses. In time the rules become such a stranglehold on the masses that He would be viewed as an unmerciful God who could never be pacified. The people would then turn and look for a more benevolent God, which will put you back right where you started from — with several gods and several religions.”
“Allah would not allow that,” he said. “Once the people see Allah’s ways, then they will accept no other.”
Pius eased back into his seat disturbed by this man who was blinded by irrationality and bipolar in his reasoning. This man of calmness was totally corrupted by fanaticism, leaving the shell of a person who appeared visibly sound but fundamentally insane.
For an awkward moment neither man spoke. They simply stared at the wall before them, the plane riding flat pockets of air like a mini-roller coaster before leveling off.
“Your Knight will not save you,” Hakam finally said. “And that is the will and power of Allah, the will and power of the one true God.”
“I wouldn’t cut my man too short,” he countered.
Hakam proffered a lazy smile. “Oh, but I can,” he said. “Because there isn’t anything he can do with what’s in the hold.” Hakam stood with a cherubic smile on his face. “If you wish to pray to your God,” he said, “you may do so.”
And then he was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The cavern beneath Raven Rock had become increasingly active, the list of investigating principals growing. The Director of the FBI had been flown in to navigate his troops from the same vantage point as the president and the attorney general. Aides, secretaries and political staffers had been repositioned from their White House posts to the Raven Rock Underground, their roles to amass data from varying intel sources and submit them to the principals as corroborated information. House and senatorial giants now filled the once vacant seats surrounding the presidential table. And space was beginning to run thin as people milled about the cavern. The proverb ‘beehive of activity’ could not have been more appropriate with the generators putting out a waspy hum.
President Burroughs was tired and haggard, the gray half moons beneath his eyes more obvious, darker, the lines surrounding them more pronounced. For several hours he had gone without sleep, his world sometimes going fuzzy with fatigue, forcing him topside to walk the compound, only to return hardly refreshed.
So far he had nothing. The Muslim Revolutionary Front was not on anybody’s radar and did not exist by any conventional means to find them. If a shadow group were ever present, they were it.
“Mr. President.”
Burroughs looked up from a stack of documents. His attorney general had just been given a detailed message from Homeland Security and the FBI’s Los Angeles field office regarding the discovery of Shepherd One’s entire flight crew found dead.
“Shepherd One?”
Dean Hamilton expounded. “Shepherd One is the pope’s plane,” he said. “Apparently the crew had been murdered. And preliminary reports suggest the victims were strangulated in similar fashion.”