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Kimball stood, his towering frame looking down upon the monsignor’s bad comb-over until the monsignor got to his feet and offered his hand, which Kimball took in a crushing grip.

“Good luck, Kimball. If you take time to forget the past rather than reliving it, you may find the Light.”

“I’ll take prayer into consideration,” he finally said.

“Good. And can I ask you one more thing?”

“Sure.”

“Can you stop shaking my hand? You’re hurting it.”

Kimball released the cleric’s hand and left the office, leaving behind a lobby filled with clerics waiting to see the monsignor.

CHAPTER THREE

Kimball’s personal chamber was located next to the Tower of San Giovanni at the west end of Vatican City, approximately 200 meters west of St. Peter’s Basilica. The room itself was small, the ceiling high, the walls made of slump stone the color of desert sand and bore nothing else but a cross hanging above a small window that overlooked the magnificent Lourdes Gardens. Against the far wall lay a single-sized bed with night stand, light, and shelves lined with military texts and journals. Closer to the door was a kneeling rail and votive rack for prayer, the candles having gone unlit and the kneeling rail unused. Although exclusive of luxury comforts, it was still home to the Master of the Vatican Knights.

Closing the door behind him, Kimball crossed the floor with myriad thoughts swimming in his head after meeting with the monsignor, and sat on the edge of the bed, the frame bowing slightly beneath his weight. For the first time he had taken the session to heart, the monsignor’s insight bearing the frank truthfulness that the Light was not going to come to him, but he must make a viable effort to go to the Light.

Closing his eyes and raising his chin, the muscles of his jaw working, Kimball made a decision: He would pray. He rose from the bed and went to the kneeling pad before the votive rack and got on his knees. After striking a match, he lit two votive candles in homage for the two Knights who lost their lives during an earlier mission. He lit the candles for Hosea and Malachi, lost friends and comrades.

Closing his eyes and clasping his hands in an attitude of prayer, he tried to recite the ‘Lord’s Prayer,’ only to forget the words after the preamble of the first six words of the prayer were spoken. So he tried his hand with the ‘Hail Mary.’ But after forgetting the words beyond the first sentence he subsequently gave up, considering himself to be the worst Catholic in the world since he couldn’t recall a simple prayer.

And then he opened his eyes and noted the serene curl of black smoke rising from the candles’ wicks. Their motion was gentle and fluid, like the composites that once made up his friends — yet the flames could be caustic when need be. And then he wondered if the former Knights made it to the ethereal Light, then questioned if there was a Light at all. What Kimball needed to believe in was to see something far more wonderful beyond the pain and madness of killing, something well beyond the darkness in which he had spent his entire life.

What he wanted was peace.

Closing his eyes he once again prayed. Not in idle words written on the pages of text to be recited without feeling or emotion, but words from his heart and soul. He spoke in whispers and hushed tones, wondering if He was listening, and asked for forgiveness for the lives he had stolen without remorse.

However, in the aftermath of prayer came the passage of silence.

No feathers floated down from the ceiling, thunder did not sound off in the clear blue sky, nor did he receive any sign that God was even listening. Believing his fate had been determined, he surrendered his attempt of good faith by blowing out the candles.

“Well, so much for praying, Monsignor. At least I tried.”

Getting to his feet, Kimball crossed the short space to his bed and fell onto the mattress, the bed whining in protest beneath his weight.

With a strong light coming in through the window, he lay on the bed with his hands behind his head and stared at the pieces of leaden glass that formed the colorful figure of the Virgin Mother, who reached out to him with outstretched arms that glowed in the mid-day light.

With silence filling the room, Kimball Hayden turned away from the image and fell into a much needed sleep.

CHAPTER FOUR

Manila, Philippines

Twelve years ago his legs had been taken above the knees.

Twelve years later Marshall Theodore Walker, once an assassin with the Pieces of Eight, went commercial after the Force Elite disbanded.

In a small apartment five stories above the busy and chaotic streets overlooking Manila, Walker awoke in a wild tangle of sheets that had gone unwashed for several weeks. Through the windows he could hear the busy Filipino marketplace below, as vendors sold butchered strips of meat, gutted fish and fruit.

Sitting up in bed with his hair naturally unkempt and his eyes at half-mast, Walker stared at the stumps of his legs and recalled the exact moment of their loss.

As a consultant with a private military company in Iraq during the onset of the war, he was riding point during a recon mission in the Al Anbar Province, when the vehicle he was in tripped an IED. In a fiery flash the floor of the Humvee buckled upward into the cab as shrapnel as keen as surgical steel sliced through everything, including the bones of his legs in such neat precision that there were no ragged tears, mutilated muscle or jagged bones — just perfect saw-blade cuts.

When he came to he found his team dead, sliced and burned, the vehicle twisted around him like a protective capsule. Where they had died, Walker had lived. And often he found himself wishing he had followed his comrades to Glory.

Closing his eyes he sighed in the way of regret, the memories as vivid as the day the IED took his legs. The pain, the phantom itches, none of it fading or going away, the scars — real and imagined — a constant reminder of that life-altering moment in the Province.

Living mainly off a small government allowance, he pissed away most of it on cheap booze, low rent and Filipina whores, the sum of his life. And now he awoke with a headache, an empty bottle of some indigent liquor he couldn’t even pronounce on the nightstand beside him.

Scooting down along the bed, Walker maneuvered himself into position, propped himself into his wheelchair, and made his way across a room that was a fetid wasteland of dirty clothes and empty bottles.

When he got to the kitchen he felt something that had been lost to him that day in Al Anbar — that impression of an animal sensing great danger.

In the center of the kitchen he paused, waited, listened.

Nothing but the Manila crowds in the streets below plying their wares.

And yet: I know you’re here.

With his head on a swivel, his eyes aware, Walker reached for a Glock taped beneath the kitchen table.

But the holster was empty.

Clever creature, aren’t you?

In a movement so swift and from shadows so dense, something moved across the room with such speed and poetic grace that the action in itself was gloriously beautiful.

It was also the last thing Walker considered before being rendered unconscious with a blow to the head.

* * *

When Walker came to he found himself face down on the kitchen table with his arms draped over the sides and his wrists bound to the table’s legs with duct tape. He was bound so tightly that he was rendered immobile and, having partial legs, had no leverage to move.

He rolled his head to one side, kept it there, his eyes trying to tune in, to focus, his world now coming to a crisp clarity, the things around him beginning to take on definition and form.