Guilt.
The priest looked up at him, tear-filled eyes wild, rage and grief distorting his features almost beyond recognition. With a low, animal-like growl he hurtled himself at Emilio.
A bullet in the head would have been the simplest, most efficient response. But Emilio couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. Not again, not here, with...her here. Instead he dodged aside and slammed the Llama’s butt and trigger guard hard against the priest’s skull, staggering him. Before the man could shake off the blow, Emilio hit him again, harder this time, knocking him to the floor where he lay still with a trickle of red oozing from his scalp.
Mol had already started back down the center aisle.
“Where are you going?”
He turned and looked at Emilio, fear in his eyes. “I—”
“Shut up and stand still. Listen!”
Emilio strained his ears through the silence. And as he’d hoped, it remained just that: silent. None of the noise in here had penetrated the heavy oak front doors; the cop outside had no idea anything was going on inside.
“All right,” Emilio said, gesturing toward the altar. “Let’s get moving.”
Mol hesitated, glanced once more at the front doors, then shrugged and hurried toward the altar. Emilio directed him toward the head of the body while he took the other end.
But as he reached to take hold of the feet, he hesitated. He hadn’t believed in this church-priest-God-religion bullshit since he’d been a little boy in Camino Verde and watched his older sister screw the neighborhood men in the back corner of their one-room shack. Any guilt he’d felt a moment ago had been a leftover from the times his grandmother would drag him off to church before he was big enough to tell her to go to hell. And yet...a deep part of him was afraid to touch this mummified old woman, afraid a lightning bolt would crash through the ceiling of the church and fry him on the spot.
“Bullshit!” he whispered and gripped the body’s ankles.
Nothing happened.
Angry with himself for feeling relieved, he nodded to Mol who had her by the shoulders, and together they lifted her off the altar.
Surprisingly light. They each got a comfortable grip on her, then hurried down the center aisle, Emilio leading, carrying her feet first. Through the vestibule, down the steps into the locked-up soup kitchen in the cellar, through the tunnel, and back up into the rectory. All still quiet there. Decker would have been inside if anyone had come in. They eased the body out the side door, slipped her into the back atop the grocery bags, and locked the doors.
Emilio climbed into the cab next to Decker and slapped the dashboard. “Let’s go.”
“Any trouble?” Decker said as he nosed the truck into the street.
“Not really,” Emilio said.
Mol snorted. “Like hell!”
“What happened?”
“I’ll tell you later,” Emilio said. “Just drive.”
He wanted Decker cool and calm for the drive back past the police and through the crowd, but he needn’t have worried. The police waved them by, and even made a path for them through the horde of Mary-hunters beyond.
Once they were free of the crowd and rolling toward the FDR Drive, Emilio allowed himself to breathe a little more easily. And he’d breathe even more easily when they ditched this rig and switched the body to the Avis panel truck he’d rented earlier. But he knew he wouldn’t be able to relax fully until they had it aboard the Senador’s waiting jet and were airborne over LaGuardia.
‡
Angkor, Cambodia
As the rays of the rising sun touch the five towers of the Temple to Vishnu, the stone begins to dissolve. By the time the sun is fully above the horizon, the temple is no more.
‡
Manhattan
She is gone!
Kesev violently elbowed his way through the crowd near St. Joseph’s, leaving a trail of sore and angry Mary-hunters in his wake. Let them shout at him, wave their fists at him, he didn’t care. He had to reach the church, had to know if his suspicion was true.
During the past hour he had felt a dwindling of the Mother’s presence, and then suddenly it was gone.
He’d sensed something else, felt a change coming over the world. A wheel had been set in motion. What would its turning bring?
Finally he reached the front of the crowd, but as he squeezed under the barricade, two blue-uniformed policemen, one white, one black, confronted him.
“Back on the other side, buddy,” the white one said.
“You don’t understand,” Kesev told him. “She’s gone. They’ve stolen her.”
He heard the crowd behind him begin to mutter and murmur with concern.
“Now don’t go starting trouble, Mister,” the black one said. “The lady’s fine. We’ve been out here all night and nobody’s been in or out of that church.”
“She is gone, I tell you!” Kesev turned to the crowd and shouted, “They have stolen the Mother right out from under your noses!”
“Shut up!” the white policeman hissed in his ear.
But Kesev wrenched free and began running toward the front of the church.
“Come!” he shouted to the crowd. “Come see if I am not telling you the truth!”
That was all they needed. With a roar they knocked over the police line horses and surged onto the street, engulfing any cop who tried to stop them.
The lone policeman stationed in front of the church backed up to the front doors but decided to get out of the way as Kesev charged up the steps with the mob close behind him. A few good heaves from dozens of shoulders and the doors gave way and they flowed through the vestibule and into the nave.
And stopped with cries of shock that rapidly dwindled, finally fading into horrified silence.
The altar was bare. And near the end of the center aisle two figures huddled on the floor. Kesev recognized them immediately—the nun and the priest from the El Al plane back in July.
The priest was kneeling in a pool of red, weeping, his deep, wracking sobs reverberating through the church as blood from a scalp wound trickled down his forehead to mingle with his tears. In his arms lay the limp, blood-soaked form of the nun.
Kesev, too, wept. But for another reason.
‡
Mumbai, India
The rosy fingers of dawn grasp the decorative tower of the Mahalakshmi Temple and squeeze it and the rest of the structure from existence.
‡
Manhattan
“Do you remember me?”
Dan forced his eyes open. He was cold, he was sick, he was emotionally drained and numb; his head was pounding like a cathedral gong, and his scalp throbbed and pulled where it had been stitched up. But the greatest pain was deep inside where no doctor could see or touch, in the black void left by Carrie’s death and the brutal, awful, finality of her dying.
The four hours he’d spent here seemed like minutes, seemed like ages. He’d sat in a daze, occasionally staring at the TV screen suspended from the ceiling. Something was happening in the Far East. Temples, mosques, churches were disappearing, vanishing as if they’d never been, leaving not a trace even of their foundations. Only empty holes remained where they’d stood. But all other buildings around them remained intact. It was happening with the rising of the sun. Dawn was sweeping across the world like a scythe, leaving not a single place of worship standing. Words and phrases like Antichrist and End Times filled the airwaves.
So what.
Dan looked up from his seat in the Emergency Room of Beekman Downtown Hospital. For a rage-blinded instant he thought the black-bearded man with the accented voice standing over him was the bastard who’d shot Carrie. He tensed to launch himself at him, then realized this was someone else. Just as intense, but much too short. He’d seen this man before but his grief-fogged brain couldn’t recall where or when.
“No,” he said.
“At Tel Aviv airport last summer...I was questioning your nun friend and you—”