The Vatican Knights

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Team Leader made it a point to separate the pope from the bishops of the Holy See and the governor. He wished to evaluate each man on his own mettle, without any support, encouragement, or comfort from the pope.

He wanted to see if the bishops truly believed in a paradisiacal afterlife, if they would readily accept death as a graduation rather than the end. He would watch them with studious appraisal to see if their eyes reflected hypocrisy or genuine belief in the moments before he pulled the trigger. In this fashion Team Leader was an observer, a scientist, a searcher for truth. Does an afterlife of absolute peace and tranquility exist? And is blind faith the wings that carry humankind to such a place? If he could discover the truth, he would gladly surrender to it.

But Team Leader had grown tired; his searching always ended in disappointment. He had seen nothing more than cowardice in the faces of all the men he had killed. Still, he searched for a spark of hope that a better life than this existed. Everybody wants to go to heaven, he considered, but nobody wants to pay the price of admission.

Shaking his head in disappointment, Team Leader walked into the dank and hollow corridor. In the slivers of fading light that penetrated the edges of the boarded-up windows, he walked to the room where his team had anchored the governor and the bishops of the Holy See to a wall with lengths of chain. The stench of their filth hung on their garments and in the air, constant and unyielding.

On the mattresses, still affected by the sedative, the bishops were moving humorously about like corpses in a George Romero film, as they reached mindlessly for the purchase of something not there. On the last mattress lay the governor, a silver thread of drool spilling from the corner of his lips as he lay unmoving.

“Tomorrow, my dear governor,” whispered Team Leader, “we’ll start with you and write a new chapter of history.” And then he turned to wake his team from their short, but granted time for rest.