Rick Jones
The Iscariot Agenda
CHAPTER ONE
Senator Joseph Cartwright, an ambitious man whose weighted arrogance was so often exhibited at the podium on the Senate floor, knew he was about to die at the hands of the very monster he created.
Inside the study of his residence, the senator closed the blinds against the inconstant flares from the evening’s lightning storm and moved as quickly as possible to his desk to bundle together some very special dossiers.
There were eight in all, the documented pieces of the creature he helped assemble into a single, unstoppable mass that was forever at the beck and call of the man holding the highest political seat in the land.
In haste the senator bound the manila folders together with rubber bands, his arthritically challenged hands moving with surprising deft while hoping that his death would serve as the beginning of the end of something that had gone horribly wrong.
Closing his eyes and clenching his teeth as he leaned over the files, Senator Cartwright couldn’t help the pang of regret that tormented him for believing that he was untouchable, which allowed his conceit to carry him too far by pushing certain dignitaries too hard, too fast, or without giving any measurable thought of the terrifying powers they wielded.
Now with his senatorial tenure about to come to a quick and deadly finish, the man struggled in hindsight and wished he kept himself from challenging those whose scepters were loftier.
Beyond the louvered windows of his estate, a staircase of lightning struck close by. The lights in the study winked, died, the house then succumbing to darkness as deep and vacuous as a celestial hole.
Feeling his heart misfire to an unsteady beat, the senator realized that the Pieces of Eight were coming for him.
At best he had a minute, maybe two.
Hunkering next to his desk with the dossiers held within his twisted hands, the senator pressed a shoulder against the desk’s side panel and gave a nudge. The panel slid inward, then upward, giving approach to a small compartment the size of a breadbox. It was an area where he had kept the untold secrets of others and often used the information against them as an aid of blackmail to reshape, retool or destroy the political lives of those who affronted his views.
Now he would use it one last time, hoping that someone would discover the dossiers and use them to destroy the Pieces of Eight, and the man who drove their reins.
After the files were placed inside, the senator pulled down on the interior panel and secured it, the seams of the wood matching so closely that the divide of the partition was barely perceptible.
Laboring to his feet with pain beginning to cinch across his chest to the point of crushing breath from his lungs, the senator placed his knuckled hands against the desktop and steadied himself.
Where are you?
Beyond the blinds another stroke of lightning ignited: a quick and dazzling flash of pure, unadulterated light that poured in through the edges of the closed blinds and bled hotly across the area, the quick strokes catching movement across the room.
The senator stood and waited, expecting the punch of a bullet to end his life.
Instead he received a comparable blow equal to a bullet’s impact; it was the voice of a preadolescent child crying out to him. “Grandpapa?”
Oh, no!
In the mix of his own fears he had forgotten about his grandson, the only living tie to his bloodline and the only family left. If the child was discovered by the Pieces of Eight, they would kill him without mercy as predicated by the same protocols he created.
The senator got to a bended knee and beckoned his grandson to rush into his outstretched arms. Pulling his grandson close, his gnarled hands caressing the child, the senator kept repeating ‘I’m so sorry,’ and wept into the wild tangle of the boy’s hair.
“Grandpapa, are you afraid of the lightning, too?”
The child sounded so innocent that the impending nature of what was going to happen to them crushed the senator’s blighted soul.
“I’m so sorry,” the senator whispered as he buried his face against the crown of the boy’s head. “I’m… so… sorry.”
In that moment he noted the shared features of his daughter within the boy as he appraised him, the child possessing the eyes and lips of his mother, beautiful and petulantly full. “You look so much like your mother,” he told him. Oh, how I wish she was here to see how much you’ve grown.
Two years ago his daughter was driving along a causeway when a drunk driver caromed off a barrier and struck her vehicle head on, killing her the moment her body made its trajectory through the windshield. In the tragic aftermath the coroner painstakingly pieced her together. But it was not enough for the aesthetic appeal needed for an open-coffin viewing.
It was also the first time in the senator’s life where he’d been rendered completely powerless to reshape the outcome of an event. Even with all his command, the senator quickly realized that he was limited in capacity with resurrection regrettably not one of his strengths; therefore, this painful lesson drove him back to the status of a mortal with perceived weaknesses.
But as a man of steadfast conviction, he tempered the loss of his daughter by burying his remorse deep and regained momentum, his power going unchecked as his sense of invincibility rose once again to the surface with the senator becoming a political demigod who ruled over others without the impression of impunity or consequence.
Until now.
The old man closed his eyes and rubbed a hand adoringly along his grandson’s back.
Then taking on a more sobering appearance, the senator grabbed the child firmly by his triceps to let him know that anything less than undivided attention was unacceptable. “Markie, I need you to listen to me and I need you to listen good and hard. Do you understand me?”
The boy nodded.
“I want you to find a hiding place,” he told him. “I want you to hide from the lightning, and from the thunder. And no matter what, no matter what you see or hear, you are not to come out from your hiding place. Is that clear?”
“Grandpa—”
“Is that clear, Markie?”
“Yes.” The boy was obviously frightened, his chin shaking with a gelatinous quiver that prompted the senator to pull him into a hug.
“I love you, Markie. Never forget that. I love you more than life itself.” And then he drew back and held his grandson in regarded appraisal for the last time, wondering what kind of man he might have become if granted the time to live.
From the area of the entryway came a sound, the tiny snicker of the bolt being drawn back, and then the subsequent following of the study’s doorknob turning slowly in the darkness.
The senator directed the child with a mild goading toward the darkest area of the room. “Quick, Markie. Hide. And don’t come out.”
As the child ran towards the darkest shadows of the study, the senator labored to his feet with the stiff joints of his knees popping off in protest, and waited with a warrior’s stoicism, his chin held brazenly outward in defiance.
The moment the door swung slowly inward on its own accord a silver-mercury flash of lightning exploded throughout the entire estate, divulging an empty doorway before the flashes died off.
The senator swallowed; his throat as dry as old parchment.
Then, in a warbled tone that sounded unlike the voice of a poised senator, he said, “Show yourselves.”
Upon the utterance of his final word a stroke of lightning flashed on cue, igniting the world in a white-hot flare that revealed the Pieces of Eight.
Each master soldier stood as still as a Grecian statue before him.