Shepherd One

CHAPTER FOUR

The Papal Symposiums began in Washington D.C. a day after Pope Pius XIII arrival at Dulles, and ended up at the Rose Bowl in California twelve days later, the circuit sometimes grueling and contentious, the topics discussed before the masses numbering into the millions about the need for Christian conservatism over the desire of Christian reform.

For years congregates had been abandoning the traditional, if not antiquated, mores of the Roman Catholic Church with growing liberalism and a call for change. Pius, however, served to unite his dwindling flock by rekindling the spark of religious hope, sermonizing that certain liberties can only summon the beginning of the end, if traditions of old were not maintained with discipline. The rebuttal, of course, was the Medias stance regarding the Vatican’s unwillingness to conform to the wishes of its Catholic citizenry, citing there could be ‘no progress without evolution. The Church, on the other hand, judiciously retorted with an aphorism stating that ‘the price of progress is destruction.’

Fighting an undeclared war to resurrect a waning faith by marshalling a new crusade, Pope Pius realized that the Church had survived numerous insurrections in the past and would continue to do so in the future. How to promote unity, however, had proven to be a huge undertaking which had sapped the old man to a state of near exhaustion. Although he found his inner strength on several occasions, he realized that it, too, was in decline and found it far more difficult to summon as the days wore on.

Releasing an exhaustive breath, the pontiff crossed the Berber carpeted floor of his hotel suite and poised himself before a chair made of soft leather and let his knees buckle, which allowed him to fall back with ease into the comfort of its cushion. At the moment the man was feeling every bit of his seventy-two years of age. Nevertheless, a smile formed at the corner of his lips.

There had been 90,000 people at the Rose Bowl—90,000 souls seeking either salvation, redemption, or merely to glimpse upon a living icon having no clear objective other than to view the pontiff as a novelty. If he had reached some of them, no matter how small in numbers or how little they had taken the Lord into their heart, then he had succeeded.

For a long moment he gazed through the sliding glass doors that overlooked the west and soaked in the view, watching the delicate shades of light combine subtly into a rainbow swirl of colors against the skyline. In time, as the sky became a blanket of darkness, the City of Angels became a dazzling display of lights reminiscent of a cache of diamonds spread over black velvet.

Closing his eyes, the pontiff realized that sleep would come early. On most evenings he would read from the Bible and gaze through its passages. But tonight he was too tired to flip back the cover of the leather-bound volume. However, in recompense, and in an attitude of prayer, Pope Pius placed his hands together and worshiped his Lord, thanking Him for raising him from the ranks of obscurity to that of prominence.

He had come from a family of eleven, all poor, some sickly, but none without faith or hope. Never in his life had he witnessed war or famine or the plagues of man by living in a small village sixty kilometers west of Florence. Nor did he have an epiphany to follow the Lord’s path. Amerigo was simply enamored as a boy who loved God and everything He stood for: The Good, the Caring, and the ability to hold dominion over others, and to lead them toward the world of Light and Loving Spirits.

He also dreamed of sermonizing and of passing The Word.

But his father would have none of it and obligated his son to work the fields of the homestead alongside his brothers knowing the true measurement of a man was calculated by the crops he yielded rather than the knowledge of academia, which in this remote village took a man nowhere.

So having been taught by his mother at home, having read and memorized the passages of the Bible, having learned the basics in rudimentary math tilling the fields with his siblings for nearly a decade, Amerigo Giovanni Anzalone had become a learned young man with calloused hands from driving the yolk, and came to realize that tilling the soils was not his calling in life.

Every Sunday he went to church with his mother and siblings. And for every day thereafter, as he worked the soil beneath a relentless sun, he dreamed of wearing the vestments of a priest and giving sermon. What Amerigo wanted, what he needed, was to be empowered by the Church to give direction.

Upon his eighteenth birthday, and against his father’s wishes — but with the aid of the village priest, which his father was unwilling to contest — Amerigo gave up the yoke and headed for Divinity School in Florence, his first stepping stone toward Rome.

In the years to follow, Amerigo was recognized as a cardinal and became a respected member within the Curia, which ultimately led the College of Cardinals, who chose him as the successor to John Paul the Second. Upon his acceptance, Amerigo took the name of Pope Pius the XIII.

And like his predecessor, Amerigo would offer a hand to every race and religion, leaving nobody out and nobody alone. He would embrace the world with love and tolerance, beginning with the European nations, and then following up with added appearances in South America and Mexico before concluding his trip in the United States.

Removing his glasses and placing them on the armrest, the pope ran a hand along a face that had grown into tired folds of flesh, and then proceeded to caress away the burning itch from eyes that were once strikingly blue, but had grayed during his tenure as pope. The intelligence behind them, however, remained firmly intact, and the color grayness of steel, a prominent indicator of his mettle.

With a prayer issuing softly from between his lips, as his words began to trail, Pope Pius fell asleep with his hands slowly drifting apart, and then falling idly to his sides.

The images came to him every night.

Behind the dusty scrim wall of an oppressive sand storm figures followed in his wake. In a world that was the color of desert sand with sand clouds blotting out the sun, the man was constantly mired in a world that moved with the slowness of a bad dream. Pressing forward against the buffeting winds with the tail of his tattered cloak flapping behind him like a banner in a strong wind, and with his face partially covered with a smudged cloth bearing the telltale signs of a lifelong journey, the man moved toward an unknown horizon.

And the dead followed him.

Behind the desert veil followed two masses, their features undulating shadows breaking apart then coalescing, but never uniform as their mournful whispers blended with the soughing of the desert wind.

And then the man closed his eyes as he stood on top of a large dune, the granules of sand rolling like waves across the desert terrain, the tail of his cloak waving steadily behind him. Here he was, the dictator over a kingdom in which no one else cared to rule.

So he moved on, marching through this quagmire looking for a savior in a distant land that might not be.

And the shadows followed, the two shepherd boys he killed a lifetime ago.

Their voices were soft and sweet, their melodic tones almost lost within the course of the wind. Yet the message was always clear: “No matter how far you try to run, Hell will always follow.”

At this juncture Kimball Hayden woke with a sharp pain in his head akin to a mule kick to the temple. By Freudian standards everything playing in his mind was easy to determine, but difficult to let go.

Why? The answer was simple: Because he had set his path long ago.

Several years ago he was team leader of the Force Elite, a group of special commandos who did Black Ops known only by the president of the United States and the reigning members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Since targeted assassinations had been banned by the Ford administration in ‘76, secret meetings were always the norm in the Situation Room in which the ban went virtually unnoticed by future presidents and the JCS.

By military design he was a Black-Op commando primed to work on foreign soils as an assassin. And in 1990 he was assigned to kill three key members of Saddam Hussein’s Cabinet who were responsible for brokering deals with Russian dissidents for high-grade plutonium. Not only was the plutonium not delivered, but the brokers were found shot to death in Chelyabinsk, Russia, by a Rav-.22LRHA, Mossad’s weapon of choice for assassinations. This weapon was also the red herring that ultimately led to the finger pointing at Israel.

From that moment on, Iraq never attempted to develop a nuclear arsenal in earnest.

Then in 1991, he was asked to commit another assassination. This time the objective was Saddam Hussein.

The moment Iraq ventured onto Kuwaiti soil to pillage the country, the United States and its Middle Eastern coalition ordered Hussein to withdraw from the country immediately. However, several weeks of wasted negotiation took place before the commencement of the counterattack by U.S. and coalition forces. But it was during this period that President Bush and his top-ranking members from the JCS called upon Kimball to take out Hussein before the allied assault began, believing war could be averted if the file and rank of the Republican Guards fell into disarray because Hussein was no longer manning the helm. The imminent withdrawal of troops from Kuwaiti soil would certainly be guaranteed before the approach of coalition forces.

However, as the window of opportunity slowly closed while negotiations continued, Kimball breached his way onto Iraqi territory asking no questions and killing simply because it was obligatory. It was this icy-cold fortitude with all the forbearance of a heartless instrument that led White House circles to consider Kimball as a glimmering shadow that possessed no conscience, remorse or care. As far as the White House was concerned, Kimball Hayden was the perfect killing machine. And he prided himself with that image, regarding himself as someone larger than life.

On the seventh day while working his way toward Baghdad, he happened upon a flock of goats herded by two shepherd boys, the older no more than fourteen, the younger no less than ten, each carrying a gnarled staff of olive wood.

Kimball remained stealthily out of view with his back pressed against the sandy wall of a gully, listening to the goats bleating a few feet away. And then a shadow cast over him from the younger boy who had spied him from above. The child’s small body was silhouetted against the pure white sun, a diffusion of light shined behind him like a halo. And then the boy was gone, shouting a warning, the sun assaulting Kimball’s eyes with a sudden and terrible brightness.

Kimball stood, immediately engaged his weapon, drew a bead and pulled the trigger, the bullet’s momentum driving the boy hard to the sand-laden surface with plumes of dust going airborne the moment he impacted the ground. The older boy stood unmoving with his mouth open in mute protest, a perfect O, his eyes moving to the body of his brother, to Kimball, and then back to his brother. When he took flight Kimball took a single shot, the bullet killing the boy before he hit the ground.

That night he buried the children and their staffs within the trench.

With no spoken words of piety, Kimball Hayden covered their bodies with sand and scattered the goats. Once the task was completed he sat between the two small rises in the earth and thoughtfully considered that perhaps the White House cronies were right after all: maybe he was less than human, someone without the will or reasoning to determine the difference between right or wrong, a man who pressed onward by cold obligation.

For hours he mused and reexamined himself in self-consideration.

And when day turned to night, after the sun blistered his lips, he refused to take cover as he lay between the two mounds with a clawed hand on each rise of soft earth and prayed for forgiveness — not from God, but from the boys.

His only answer was the soft whisper of wind through the desert sand.

As he lay there watching the moon make its trajectory across a field marked with countless pinpricks of light, Kimball Hayden made a decision.

On the following morning he headed for the Syrian border with President Bush and the JCS never to hear from him again, the White House notion being that he was killed during the commission of his duty. Less than two months into the campaign against Iraq, the man who was considered to be without conscience was posthumously honored by the Pentagon brass.

Two weeks after his defection, however, while sitting in a bar in Venice drinking an expensive liqueur, the United States and the Coalition Forces attacked Iraq. It was at this same bar that a man wearing a Roman Catholic collar and cherubic smile took the seat opposite him without permission.

“I really want to be alone, Father,” he told him. “It’s too late for me, anyway.”

Nevertheless, the priest continued to smile. “We’ve been watching you,” he told him.

Kimball could only imagine the look he gave the priest. “I‘m sorry?” he said. “You’ve been what?”

“Kimball Hayden,” the priest offered his hand. “My name is Bonasero Vessucci… Cardinal Bonasero Vessucci.”

And a new alliance was born.

So the man, who was once considered to be without contrition, would now be an elite commando for the Church.

He is not a member of the Swiss Guard.

Nor is he a member of an Italian military faction.

He is a Vatican Knight.

Kimball Hayden sat up in bed, his partially naked torso that of a well-developed body builder — his upper arms, including his triceps, as large as a common man’s thigh.

Seeking salvation through the Church had always given him a comfort zone, but not one that was complete and absolute. He had been repeatedly plagued by this dream time and again, the same scenario never changing, the Freudian calculation being an overwhelming guilt for killing two children which led to a sudden epiphany that was apparently not enough.

Closing his eyes, Kimball asked these questions: Will You ever forgive me, Lord? Could You ever forgive me? But deep inside Kimball believed that true forgiveness would always elude him for the fact that he had given up one war to wage another against his own personal demons. And these demons would never let him forget, coming night after night eroding what little hope he had of someday being free of a past laden with the bloodshed of others by his hands.

Climbing out of bed, now fully nude in the glow of the moonlight, he stood before the sliding glass doors overlooking L.A. The pinpricks of light reminded him of the night in the Iraqi desert, as he lay there looking skyward and praying for forgiveness so long ago with the bodies of two youths lying buried beneath his outstretched arms.

It remains, without doubt, his darkest memory.

In the shadows he sighed, then took a seat before a window, craving a drink.

What… really… is different? he considered.

Although his agenda had changed, his criteria had not. Under Kimball’s command his team of commandos had entered the jungles of the Philippines and South America to save the lives of missionaries held hostage, often implementing tactics hardly acceptable in the eyes of the Catholic citizenry, but acceptable in the eyes of the Church in order to achieve the means. Other times they traveled to eastern bloc countries to aid in the protection of priests against dissident insurgents, and often interceded in bloody skirmishes between opposing factions of religious orders in Third World nations. The differences always dispelled upon the appearance of the Vatican Knights.

The bottom line: People continued to die.

But this time it was under the quiet acceptance of the Church.

So again, what really is different? The question caromed off the walls of his mind as his headache continued to rage on. The answer, however, continued to elude him.

Although his comfort zone was the front line of the battle zone, Kimball Hayden needed a reprieve from everything that was a major part of his world. What he needed was a sabbatical, a vacation away from the dark side of man’s constant wages of sinning. And he got that by serving as the pope’s personal valet during the Papal Symposiums.

Of all the damaging dreams he was mired in, Kimball Hayden never dreamed he would have to utilize his very particular set of skills to save himself, the pope… and most of the free world.

He looked at the emblazoned numbers on the clock: It wasn’t even midnight.

Nevertheless, he would sit and wait for morning.