Vampire a Go-Go

THE JESUIT SQUAD
SIXTEEN

After ten minutes, Father Paul began to wonder if Allen was coming back. When twenty minutes had passed, he knew something was wrong.

Father Paul touched the throat microphone hidden under his priest’s collar. “Are you monitoring, Finnegan?”

“Right here, Boss,” came the voice in his earpiece.

“I think I’ve lost Cabbot.”

“Did he rabbit?”

“I don’t think so. I think something happened.”

The priest twiddled his thumbs a moment, smoked the remainder of his cigarette down to the butt. “Finnegan, how many can you round up without jeopardizing our surveillance?”

“Let me see.” Ten seconds crawled by. “Five.”

Father Paul thought about it quickly. Five was enough. “Where’s the van?”

“Two blocks north of you.”

“I’ll see you in five minutes.”

The priest pushed away from the table, made his way through the Globe’s crowd and checked the restrooms. He circled the café once on the off chance that Allen had been caught in a conversation with some girl, but as suspected, Allen was nowhere to be found.

Father Paul went outside and turned north.

He stuck another cigarette in his mouth and considered. Somebody had gotten their hooks into the Cabbot boy. Father Paul thought he’d arrived early enough to preempt any sort of action by the opposition, and it irked him that he’d figured wrong. He’d planned to make Allen Cabbot his link to Evergreen. Father Paul could deal with Evergreen without the boy, but he didn’t want to have to try. A lot of careful thought had gone into the plan.

The black van came into view, and Father Paul broke into a trot. It was a large, nondescript van, parked in an alley. The priest reached it and knocked on the back door. It opened, and he entered, pulling the door closed behind him.

The interior of the van hummed with electronic equipment. Father Flynn Finnegan was a giant pale Irish block of meat with a headset perched on his fat noggin. It looked like some children’s toy headset. His black frock bulged with thick muscles. His red hair was growing gray at the temples. He nodded at Father Paul as he entered the van.

“Blake and Santana are on the way,” Finnegan said. “What’s the target?”

“Give me a quick rundown.”

The big Irishman swiveled in his chair and tapped at a laptop. Pictures of buildings and houses flickered on various monitors. “Target zones alpha and beta are quiet,” Finnegan reported. “But our people watching the house in Zizkov say a sedan pulled into the driveway six minutes ago. The lights are on, and there’s activity.”

“That’s the one,” Father Paul said. “Start the van.”

“Right.” Finnegan took off the headset, went to the front of the van, and squeezed into the driver’s seat, cranking the engine.

Father Paul opened the weapons locker under one of the bench seats and withdrew a flak jacket. All the Battle Jesuit flak jackets had a small emblem over the heart-a golden cross, the bottom of the cross in the shape of a sword blade. He shrugged into it, looked at the other two young priests in the back of the van. They looked of the same mold: young, athletic, a steely-eyed appearance that seemed to indicate a cool, calculated readiness for action. He’d seen their files but had yet to speak with them in person.

He nodded at the tall black man sitting across from him. “Father Starkes?”

William Starkes shrugged into his own flak jacket. “Yes, sir.”

“Good to meet you.” According to Starkes’s file, the man had served a hitch as an Army Ranger before earning a degree in religion from Princeton and then joining the seminary. Father Paul’s outfit had only recruited and trained him three months ago. He was a good man on paper, but he looked nervous.

The priests strapped on nylon shoulder holsters, checked the magazines of their 9 mm Glocks. Finnegan punched in the security code on the gun locker’s keypad and handed each priest a fully automatic H & K 9 mm submachine gun with laser sight and collapsible stock.

Father Paul shifted his attention to the short man sitting next to Starkes. Emile DeGaul had joined the French Foreign Legion at age seventeen and had already served eight years when his older brother-a priest-had been killed in an automobile accident. DeGaul had made some private deal with God that Father Paul didn’t completely understand, and DeGaul had answered the calling a month later.

“Are you ready for this, DeGaul?”

“Absolutely!” His French accent was thick, but his English was good.

Father Paul saw that Finnegan was strapping on a flak jacket also. “Where do you think you’re going, Monsignor?”

“You don’t think you’re going to keep an old warhorse like me out of this, do you, Father?”

“Didn’t you just celebrate your fiftieth birthday, Finnegan?”

Finnegan flexed, and muscles rippled beneath his frock. A grin spread across his ruddy face. “Would you like to arm wrestle?”

A smile tugged at the corner of Father Paul’s mouth. “No, I don’t think I would. Call off Blake and Santana. I don’t want to wait for them. Finnegan, take us to Zizkov.”

“Right.” The Irishman crammed himself into the driver’s seat and drove toward the target house.

The three priests in the back of the van checked one another’s equipment and made sure their gear was properly secured. They checked and rechecked their weapons. Father Paul handed out headsets. They put them on, plugged them into the compact radios on the shoulders of their flak jackets.

“Remember, this is an extraction,” Father Paul said. “I want Cabbot secured and out of there as fast as possible. Let’s try to keep casualties down. But never forget these are dangerous people. You see a threat, shoot to kill.”

Grim faces nodded back at him.

“Shall we say a quick prayer?” DeGaul asked.

“Lord, aid us in Your work and help us to triumph over evil in Your name. Amen.”

They all crossed themselves.

“How about grenades?” suggested DeGaul.

“Definitely not.” Father Paul wanted to keep the number of things exploded to a minimum.

“There’s a shoulder-based antitank missile in the storage compartment on top of the van,” Starkes said.

“No!”

“We’re a block away,” Finnegan shouted from the front of the van.

“Put us someplace dark,” Father Paul said.

“There’s an alley up here. Give me two seconds.”

Finnegan pulled in, the big van blocking the narrow alley. At this time of night, it probably wouldn’t matter, and Father Paul didn’t want to spend the time looking for a better parking spot. It would have to do.

“Stick to the shadows. Get into position. Wait for me to give the word. Go.”

They spilled out of the back of the van, scattered, then ran in the shadows toward the target house. Finnegan and DeGaul broke off for a back alley to take them behind the house. Starkes trailed behind Father Paul. It was late at night in a quiet, residential section. So far nobody had seen them, but they couldn’t count on luck for long. Best to get under cover as soon as possible.

Father Paul scooted under the low branches of a small tree in the front yard and signaled for Starkes to head down the narrow driveway to the side of the house. Father Paul then waited for everyone to get into position. The light was on in the front window. In a moment he’d need to creep forward and have a look.

“Where is everyone?” he asked in a low voice.

The earpiece crackled, and the priests reported in one at a time. Finnegan and DeGaul were in the rear, and Starkes was along the side. Father Paul covered the front. Nobody covered the other side because the target house was almost slap up against its neighbor.

“I want a quick scan. Tell me what you got.”

“One window downstairs. Two up,” Starkes reported. “All dark.”

“The lights are on back here,” Finnegan said. “Lots of movement. I see three people, no, make that four. Maybe they can-gun! I just spotted a weapon. They’re definitely armed, boyo!”

“That decides it for me,” Father Paul said. “We’re going in hot, safeties off. Just watch out for Cabbot. Pick your entry points, and wait for my word. Finnegan, is that one with the weapon upstairs or downstairs?”

“Upstairs. There’s a drainpipe. I can shinny up there, pop in, and handle the situation no problem.”

“It’s an old house, Finnegan, and you weigh ten tons. Send DeGaul up the drainpipe.”

A slight pause. “Understood.”

“Get into position and stand by.”

Father Paul checked his weapons, then slowly approached the front window, crouched over. The first-floor window was big and low, very easy access. He looked inside, saw the back of a man’s head, his chair back against the window. Beyond the man sat Allen Cabbot, looking tired and anxious. The priest wished he could get a better look at the other man. It was difficult to tell the exact situation. Father Paul had assumed that Allen had been abducted, but that wasn’t necessarily the case. Maybe there was a more subtle way to handle this.

Father Paul saw Allen’s eyes get big. Allen sat up in his chair, pointed at the window. The other man turned. There was a pistol in his hand.

Hell.

“Go!” Father Paul yelled into the headset’s microphone. He took three steps back, then leaped through the big front window.

Glass shattered and rained, sparkling fragments spraying the man with the pistol. The priest tucked and rolled, came up in a shooter’s stance.

The man with the pistol took a panicked step back and shouted, “Vatican thugs! Run!”

And then he pointed the pistol at Father Paul.

The submachine gun bucked in the priest’s hands, sprayed the man with lead. Red blotches sprouting across his chest and belly. The man jerked and fell, a pile of dead meat. Father Paul was simultaneously aware of more gunplay elsewhere in the house. His team was in.

Allen was up and running out of the room. The priest couldn’t blame him. People tended to flee from gunfire.

“Allen, wait!” Father Paul cried as he ran after him.

He ran into the kitchen, saw a young blond girl standing before Allen, her hand flung up in a Halt! gesture. Father Paul didn’t halt; he charged at her, machine gun raised.

He stepped on something, his foot sliding along the linoleum floor and out from under him. He went into the air, drifting backward, the kitchen a spinning blur in front of his eyes. He landed on his back. Hard. The air went out of him with a whuff, and his mouth worked silently, trying to find breath.

He glimpsed Allen and the girl dashing out a side door into the night.

There was a long three seconds before Father Paul could catch his breath again. He groaned into a sitting position, then scanned the kitchen floor and saw a small, delicate teacup turned upside down. He’d stepped square on top of it, and instead of crushing the thing into dust, he’d slid across the floor on it, as if it had been an ice skate. His back ached in several places.

A bearded man in denim rushed into the kitchen, screaming, “Damn Papist!” He leveled a shotgun at the priest. The shotgun blast shook the room as Father Paul rolled to the side. Buckshot scored the cabinets behind him.

Father Paul flattened to his belly, swung the H&K, one-handed, out in front of him and squeezed off two quick bursts. A slug smacked into the attacker’s shin, sprayed blood. He screamed, high-pitched and ragged, then collapsed on top of himself, the shotgun sliding out of reach.

“Oh, fucking shit. You shot my leg off. My fucking leg!” He writhed, tried to reach down and staunch the blood flow.

The priest lurched to his feet, went to the door, and looked outside. No sign of Cabbot or the girl.

“Damn.”

He heard somebody come in behind him. He spun quickly, bringing the machine gun to bear.

“It’s me.” Finnegan held up his hands. “The rest of the house is secure. Three more Society fanatics. They’ve been terminated.”

“Vatican scum!” said the bleeding man on the floor.

“Put a sock in it, boyo. We’ll get to you in a minute.”

“Fuck you!”

“Did you get Cabbot?” Finnegan asked.

Father Paul sighed. “I missed him.”

“He’s out of your reach now,” said the bearded man. “Kill me and ten more will rise to take my place.”

“Then I suppose we’d better patch you up and keep you alive,” Father Paul said. “I’d hate to have ten of you cluttering up the place. Plus it’s damn difficult to interrogate you if you’re dead.”

“Tough shit, priest. You won’t get anything out of me.” He dipped a thumb and forefinger into his shirt pocket, came out with a pill, prepared to put it in his mouth.

“Suicide pill!” shouted Finnegan.

Father Paul and the big Irishman dove on the wounded man, grabbed his wrist as he strained to get the pill into his mouth.

“You can’t stop me, you bastards!”

“No, you don’t.” Finnegan engulfed the man’s fist with his own hammy hand and squeezed. The fingers popped open, and Finnegan grabbed the pill. “Got it.”

“This is taking too long,” Father Paul said. The local authorities would soon respond to the commotion. He touched his throat microphone. “Gather up the strays and meet back at the ranch. One minute.”

“Hold on a second.” Finnegan held the blue pill close to his eyes. “This is an Aleve.”

“No, it’s not,” the fanatic said.

“The hell it isn’t. I take them for my knees. It’s an Aleve with the writing scratched off.”

“It’s a suicide pill. We’ve sworn not to be taken alive.”

Finnegan grabbed the fanatic’s face, squeezed until his mouth popped open, then shoved the pill inside. The fanatic squirmed, tried to spit it out, but the Irishman clapped a hand over his mouth. “Swallow it.”

The fanatic swallowed it, and Finnegan removed his hand.

“You son of a bitch!” the fanatic shouted. “You’ve poisoned me.”

“It’s not poison, idiot. It’ll probably make your leg feel better.”

“That’s enough,” Father Paul said. “Finnegan, throw him over your shoulder. We’ll fix his leg in the van. Let’s move.”

Somehow Father Paul would have to find the Cabbot boy. He was out there roaming Prague by night without the faintest notion of what was about to happen to him.