Jax
“ B ishop Knight!” called a voice from behind me. I stopped and turned, waiting for the monk to get close enough so that I could make out his face.
“Ah, Brother Will,” I said, forcing a smile as he approached me at a fast clip—not quite running, but certainly faster than normal.
I was exhausted beyond belief and wanted nothing more than to lie down before morning mass, but only a few scant hours would not be enough to alleviate the burden on my shoulders. And if one of the brothers was running to meet me—the news, I suspected, would not be good. I had a good idea who it would be about, however.
Caleb…
I had tried so long to protect him, but in trying, had only ever made things worse.
“Bishop,” repeated the brother, out of breath. He nodded and lifted a small tablet in his hands, slightly bigger than cell phone. “I thought you should see this first, given your request.”
“My… request?” I began, then stared down at the screen. On it, there was a paused video from what appeared to be an ATM. In the foreground was Caleb, glaring balefully at the dispenser. “Oh. Oh, I see.”
“I feel I need to warn you, this is… a bit alarming,” continued the younger brother.
Though he had to be in his early twenties, the man could have been forty if he was a day. The worried wrinkles in his face aged him considerably—but then again, many of the brothers in our surveillance teams—the ones who saw some of the most depraved actions of demons under our monitoring—frequently began as fresh-faced boys and seemed to wither before my eyes. Like so many others in this Godforsaken sect of the Church.
He pressed play and I watched as Caleb walked away from the camera, his entire body posture rigid as he sat down on the curb. The brother swiped the screen, moving the image of the picture to a higher angle—one of the bank’s main security cameras, I assumed—and then the black van pulled up.
I watched the silent footage as Caleb moved toward them, but the glint of something in Harry’s hand caught my eye. He’d brought a gun ? Why in God’s name would he have—there was an exchange, and Caleb’s demeanor changed. He headbutted Harry, then threw Special Investigator Banks—the man Caleb knew only as “Home”—over his shoulder with a single toss of one arm. Banks weighed over two hundred pounds, and I’d frequently heard him bragging to the others about his impressive bench-pressing weight, which was somewhere north of three hundred.
I gasped; unable to help myself, as Caleb appeared from the other side of the van, and then, the second van slammed into him.
Instead of pummeling Caleb’s body into paste, the van’s front grill conformed to his body for a fleeting moment before he went sailing over the hood and windshield and tumbled to the concrete. I shoved my glasses back up on my nose, nearly pressing myself against the screen.
“Harry apparently didn’t think I needed to know about this?” I spat.
Brother Will held up a finger, then pointed to the screen. “There’s more, father.”
Caleb staggered upright as four agents with assault weapons poured out of the van, guns trained on him. I held my breath and watched with nothing short of disbelief as Caleb effectively dispatched each of them, then pulled the driver from the inoperable van before Banks took aim with a dart gun at the same time Harry was leveling his silver gun toward Caleb.
Banks’ dart found its target first, and then again, twice more. Caleb stumbled, yanked the darts out, and then fell to the ground. Harry lowered his weapon; Banks appeared to bark orders, and the agents moved. Brother Will paused the footage, then looked up at me, horror in his eyes.
“Father,” he began, “that gun that Special Investigator Benedict has—I recognize it. I was speaking with Brother Jameson last week, and he was telling me about a prototype for a new weapon, but it’s not even meant to be out of the lab yet.”
“A new weapon?” I asked in alarm. “I hadn’t been told of any?—”
“It came from the special investigators’ unit, apparently. It was all very hush-hush, but the prototype was for a gun that can shoot bullets that are similar to hollow core—only they have a bead of holy water inside of them instead.”
I forced my face to remain impassive, nodding as I listened.
“There was also the matter of Investigator Benedict’s request,” continued Brother Will. “He wanted to have one of the holy water dispersal bombs when the request for backup came in from the other field agents. I don’t know if they used it, but I thought that we normally saved those for archdemons and the like, so it was a bit shocking.”
While as a leader within the organization, I should have condemned the agents under my care when I discovered they were idly gossiping like this, but it had shed dire light onto situations in the past—as it was doing for me right now—so I only waited for him to hand me the tablet. I stuffed it into the fold of my robes nearest my keychain.
“Does anyone else know about this?”
Brother Will shook his head. “I know you said for all information about Agent Knight to come to you first, so I thought?—”
I patted him on the shoulder. “Good lad. I will bring this to the archdiocese’s attention at our next meeting. Tell no one else—and erase the footage from the main databanks.”
Brother Will beamed at the praise and nodded emphatically. “Already done, father.”
“Wonderful. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off? Tell the others I’ve got you on a special assignment, but please, by all means, go and relax.”
Brother Will looked so pleased the stress evaporated from his face for a moment. “Thank you, Bishop Knight!”
He turned and headed back down the hall, a skip in his step as I frowned and turned back toward my room at the opposite end. I felt the presence following me—it had been for several minutes now—but paid no mind to it.
I know I’ve taught you better than that , I wanted to say, but sometimes playing the doddering old man gave me far more of an upper hand than displaying any kind of cunning ever had. I’d learned that lesson the hard way on many occasions. Caleb and I… we weren’t so unalike—though I’d never tell him the truth of it.
Harry had to have known when he’d assigned Caleb that there was the chance that when they got into that building, he wasn’t coming out the same again. He was always so confident in his sneakiness; his eagerness, however, usually made him as easy to read as an open book. Even now, thinking he was doing so well had made him sloppy in following me.
The truth of it was, if Archbishop Benedict hadn’t allowed Caleb to be on this team, then Harry would never have gotten his bait. This could only mean that Benedict had wanted Caleb there, in that room with the doctor… and quite possibly, Caleb’s mystery woman.
Coincidences were rare around here. Harry volunteered Caleb for every dangerous mission he’d been on, and the approval had never come down before.
So why now? There had to be a reason for it—but Benedict played his hand carefully this time—much more carefully than his son.
I don’t know what this will mean for Caleb… but I suspect bad things. Very bad things.
I made a slow, steady progress, allowing the weight of my worries to show in every step.