The Crypts of Eden

CHAPTER ELEVEN

John Savage never smiled.

Those who met him said he was a man of cold fortitude who functioned by instinct alone.

He lived in a small flat east of Vatican City, the view from his window a web-like network of clotheslines full of sheets, obscuring his view of a distant hillside.

He sat reminiscing of the past, drinking his third bottle of beer with the two empties sitting on the table beside him. And then he closed his eyes, feeling empty and vacant, feeling completely alone.

When he was a Navy SEAL he had felt like a man who was complete and whole. But he also had a wife who felt incomplete, thereby filling her personal void with other men during his absences. He didn’t know why he was shocked to find out about her indiscretions, but when he did, he came apart unlike a Navy SEAL should.

He had taken her for granted, believing she could live with his absences the same way he lived with hers, believing in all the heart-warming stories that ‘trust’ was the foundation of all relationships. And that distance only made the heart grow fonder. What a crock.

He looked at the near empty bottle in his hand and toyed with the label by peeling it back from the glass in little strips. Was this the way she felt? he asked himself, looking around his spartan apartment. This hollow, lonely feeling?

He brought the bottle to his lips and finished it off, and then he opened his fourth. After taking a deep pull, he realized that he could not fault her for leaving him. If this was what she lived through, he considered, then the blame was entirely his.

After she left him and his military assignment was up at the urging of Special Forces Command, he opted to outrun the loneliness and sorrow — to Vatican City where he thought he could find God at some level. But he didn’t and the sense of loneliness clung to him like a pall.

In his duty to serve, he had killed people without so much as flinching. But when his wife finally left him, when she departed within the embrace of another man’s arms, he broke, seeing himself as a man of great frailty, too unworthy to hold the title of Navy SEAL.

How could a woman possess so much power? It was a question he’d been asking himself for the past three years. And still there was no answer. He took another sip and put the bottle down.

On the table lying between the empties was a Glock. Attached to the weapon’s tip was a suppressor that was as long as the barrel of the firearm, doubling its size. It had been three years since he had touched the gun, stowing it away the moment he entered Rome seeking salvation.

He picked it up, hefted it, the touch of the weapon in his grip feeling good, feeling right.

And then he lowered it to the tabletop and looked out the window. Beyond the sheets that obscured the hillside, he could see the soft afterglow of a sunset sky.

Tomorrow he would begin his call to duty. He would take that gun, his Glock, and head to Turkey where he would locate the girl, and, for the greater good of the Church, put a bullet in her brain. He closed his eyes. For some odd reason he was warring with himself, torn between duty and honor as a number of emotions passed through him. Working on behalf of the Church was an honorable cause, he considered — and to protect its interests just as noble.

But to kill an innocent woman?

He toiled with his own warring factions going on in his mind, trying to understand. And then he came to the conclusion that he was a Navy SEAL. And a SEAL never questions authority.

They simply don’t.

With the cold fortitude of a machine, John Savage, a man who never smiles, opened up his fifth bottle of beer and watched the sky turn every bit the color black that embraced him.