The Judas Line

I wanted to puke. “The Anti-Christ?”

Jude nodded. “Yeah, he was Satan’s first born son, the one sent to betray Christ.”

The ground was warm and sandy under my butt; however, something prickled my left cheek. A thorn perhaps, but I didn’t feel it, not as pain, more as a minor irritation. That pachinko ball continued to bounce off the soft gray matter, scattering my thoughts, so I fell back on the only thing that could offer any comfort.

“’Our father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name …’”

I guess it was a kindness that Jude let me finish.

“You okay, Mike?” he asked when my voice trailed off.

Centered again, I nodded. It came to me that anyone else would haul Jude away to the laughing academy, even if they believed in magic, but in all my time in the army, as a priest, I know when someone is lying to me or delusional. Jude was neither. I just wished he were. “I’m fine.”

“Good, because here comes the fastball. Judas Iscariot … do you know the origin of the name Iscariot? It’s not a family name. Judas claimed to be the son of Simon. No, the name comes from the band of rebels he formed, fanatics who would do anything to drive out the Romans, led by a man who practically foamed at the mouth. A group of assassins called the Sicarii.”

“Judas Iscariot is-”

“The Founder. Founder of the Sicarii and of my Family. Except the spark that created the magi in the Family is not quite divine, is it?”

“Oh, dear Lord.” Ding ding ding. Why was he hitting me with all this? Was the sand shifting under me? No, I was lying flat on my back, staring at the stars. They winked at me, impervious to the shock my system had just received.

“Trust me, He has nothing to do with it.” There came a soft thump as Jude sat down beside me. “Sorry to hit you with all this, Mike, but you had to know. It wasn’t all in the memoir and we’re about to enter the lion’s den. It’s here, right before the plunge that you have to decide whether to fish or cut bait, man.”

Kind of him to give me the option, although it wasn’t needed, not by a long shot. Some things you feel right down to the bone because the people you share your strange little worlds with, the people you let inside the walls of your life and who let you into theirs, deserve the benefit of the doubt. But one essential truth shone like the light of the Lord:

He was my friend.

“Let’s see what we catch, then,” I said.

The phones little LED cast a harsh light on Jude’s features, turning them a ghastly green. Dit, Dit, Dit … He dialed, pressed the SPEAKER button, and gently balanced the phone on the center cup inside the ring.

Only three numbers? I thought.

Three numbers or not, a tinny ringing noise came from the cell. Two, three, four then five rings without an answer.

“Olivier, my boy, I am so glad you called.”

Oh my … that voice, the Voice. It had to be … It rolled out of the tiny speakers as if thrumming from the very atmosphere we breathed, bypassing any mere mechanical contrivance built by man. Smooth as silk, almost greasy, deep and vibrant with a paternal undertone that set my teeth on edge.

John Noble, I thought. The voice sounded like that of John Noble, the actor who played a crazy scientist on a sci-fi show called Fringe (a priest who watches and reads sci-fi, who’da thunkit?). The Voice had the same cadence and inflection, but there was a deep … wrongness to it that reminded me of a shark swimming just below the waves, dorsal fin breaching to declare its menacing intentions.

“Hello,” Jude said distantly, as if he didn’t care a whit about the Voice.

“You’ve blocked me. I’m impressed; no one has ever done that before. It just proves to me once again how special you are.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t need you tracking me or blowing a phone up in my face.”

“You’ll just have to forgive me that one, boy. I lost my temper. Won’t happen again.” It sounded sincere, but I could see the big muscles at the corner of Jude’s jaws clench.

“I think I’ll have to opt out of believing you this time.”

“No problem, my boy,” the Voice purred. “Come on home soon. All is forgiven, you have my guarantee. No one will gainsay me, you know that.”

“That’s true.”

“For fifteen years you’ve evaded me and the Family. That ought to prove to anyone with half a brain that you’re the One we need, my boy, despite the fact you have the Liar’s talking monkey traveling with you.”

Jude’s alarmed gaze met mine. “What?” he asked. “You talking about the priest who tried to help me fix a flat when one of your gate crashers attempted to trim my hair down to the neck? He was just passing by.”

“I think you’re using him to help you find the Liar’s Cup.”

Jude grimaced. “No, I’m not, but something tells me it’s no longer where I think it is. You’ve got it, don’t you? Or, I should say, one of your party boys has it.”

“Ah, so you’ve spoken with the lovely Ms. Winchester, have you?”

“Not really spoken. More like she screamed all she knew before I bled her out like the pig that she was.” I shot him a surprised glance, but he shook his head slightly.

“Good boy, nice to see that all your years in America have not dulled your killer’s edge.”

“Yeah, talk to Burke about it, man.”

“Burke was good, no doubt about it, no doubt at all.” A brief moment of silence. “You sound so very American, Olivier, the cadence, the inflection. It doesn’t suit you.”

“I spent a long time trying to blend in. Cultural camouflage.”

“So come home to us, boy. Tell me where you are.”

“I don’t think so, sir. I’m not strong enough yet to take on Julian.”

The laughter that burst forth from those speakers made my hair stand on end. “Boy, you have the Silver. With that you can remove Julian handily.”

Jude scratched his head. “Yeah, but I don’t have the Silver anymore.”

If the laugher was unnerving, the silence that followed was horrifying. In place of menace there was a thick, gelid sense of evil that froze the breath in my lungs and drained all electrical impulses from my brain, leaving me in a senseless limbo.

That limbo stretched to infinity and back before the Voice spoke again. “You are lying,” he said, breaking the pregnant pause with a snap.

“No,” Jude refuted. “I’m not. Three years ago in Libya I located the Ark. Took some working, but managed to smuggle it home in a tramp freighter out of Benghazi named Star of Rawiah. I had placed the Silver inside so you couldn’t track it, surrounded by all that holiness, but somewhere off the coast of Sardinia the ship went down with all hands. For all I know, the Ark is at the bottom of the Med with the Silver still inside.”

Oh, Lord … I felt it before it happened.

Screeeeccchhhhhh! Razor blades slicing through skin, fingernails on chalkboard, the ripping of tin and high pitched whine of a stressed turbo as it headed toward failure. The sound that leaked through those tiny speakers was all those and more; a mix of noises so ghastly it was if someone had stuffed them into a blender and hit frappe.

Mere seconds passed, but to my poor tortured ears it seemed a lifetime. Just when I thought the fine bones of my middle ear would shatter, the cell’s LED screen cracked with a soft pop and let out a curl of dark smoke.

“Well, that pissed him off.”

If that was an example of being pissed off, I sure didn’t want to be around when the Voice gave vent to some serious anger issues. I stared numbly at my friend as he removed the phone and threw it out deep into the desert before empting the cups of holy water. Surprisingly, there were only a few drops left in each.

Jude caught the edge of my curiosity. “The presence of holy water acts like buffer between the real world and the Voice so he can’t track us, but the sharper his focus, the more holy water is dissipated.”