The Eye of Moses - Vatican Knights Series 22 (2020), Rick Jones [learn to read books txt] 📗

Three years ago, his daughter Alison, age six with Shirley Temple curls and glowing cheeks, was standing along the edge of the water tossing small pieces of bread to the carp. His wife was sitting on a red-and-white checkerboard-patterned blanket with a basket by her side that was filled with fried chicken, cornbread, and potato salad, everything that made for a perfect family outing. Mr. Spartan, whose real name was Marty Southerland, stayed close to his daughter along the bank and smiled every time she cried out with glee, or whenever a carp surfaced to steal the floating piece of bread, before ducking beneath the surface. Whenever she laughed, Southerland swore that he had never heard anything so musical or magical in his entire life. Whether it was the lilt of her tone or her heightened squeal, there was nothing more pleasant to a parent’s ear.

Along the hillside crest that overlooked the lake, a sedan parked near the edge. Inside were two males, both well-dressed in dark suits, sunglasses, and fedoras. After a moment of observation, they exited the vehicle and began to saunter down the slope wearing gregarious smiles and sociable appearances. But when they reached the checkered-patterned blanket, one of the men pulled out a suppressed pistol and shot his wife with a shot to center mass and another to the head, which was the hallmark work of a trained assassin.

Everything seemed to move horrifically slow with the world beginning to tilt oddly upon its axis. The assassin’s voice sounded as if it was dragging like the slow play of a record on a turntable with every word impossibly drawn out, as he spoke to Southerland. “The location of your home base,” he said. “Tell me where it is.” Then the killer raised his weapon in Southerland’s direction. “The Consortium Stronghold . . . I won’t ask again.” Then he directed the point of his firearm at his daughter, who was screaming.

Southerland’s world was now chaotic and spinning, something of a bad acid trip as the assassin loomed tall before him like a colossus. Now with the point of his Glock looking like the mouth of a cannon, he kept it pointed at Southerland’s little girl. “Last chance. Where is the Stronghold?”

Southerland was locked within himself, his tongue a paralytic strip of muscle. When he was able to voice syllables, however, they came out as nonsensical, nothing but ridiculous sounds. It was all the meaning he could provide, however, given that his wife was laying on the ground with a peach-sized hole on one side of her face and a half-smile on the other.

“You have five seconds, Mr. Spartan, to tell me where I can find Mr. da Vinci . . . Four.”

Then standing between the assassin and his daughter, he recalled saying, “The Consortium Stronghold is not—”

“. . . Three . . .”

“—broadcast to field operatives like—”

“. . . Two . . .”

“—me.” Southerland regretted this lie the moment he said it, the response an automatic reaction to disavow everything.

“. . . One . . .”

“I can find out!”

“Wrong answer.”

The assassin pulled the trigger twice, two muted shots, with a bullet catching Southerland in each thigh, which sent him to the ground. Alison ran to her father and pulled him close after folding her arms around his neck.

“Tell me something, Mr. Spartan? Is what’s about to happen to you worth the cost of disavowing the whereabouts of the Consortium . . . or Mr. da Vinci?”

“Please.” Mr. Spartan recalled saying as though he were a man on his knees who begged to be spared, as he held his hands together in an attitude of prayer when in actuality, he was embracing his child. “She’s only six . . . Let her walk away and I’ll get you whatever information you need.”

“You expect me to stand here and believe that you don’t know the location of the Consortium or the whereabouts of Mr. da Vinci? It’s a noble quality to be loyal to the hand that feeds you, Mr. Spartan, but there are costs for such loyalties as well. So again . . . wrong answer.”

There was another sound, that of a loud spit. And then Mr. Spartan could feel his daughter’s arms falling away from him, the softness of her touch letting go forever as she fell backward into the water she loved so much when feeding the carp. Southerland reached out to his daughter and cried out her name, only to watch her drift lazily away from him along the surface of the pond. When she was beyond his grasp, and with little of her chiffon-green dress showing above the surface as she began her slow descent to the bottom, Southerland turned to the assassin and pinned him with a hard and vengeful stare. Behind the sunglasses and beneath the fedora, Southerland could see little of the man’s face except for his white goatee. “One day,” he told the assassin through clenched teeth, “I’ll find you and when I do . . . I’ll kill you.”

“Unlikely,” was all the assassin said as he pumped three more rounds into Southerland, believing him dead.

After watching the killers return to the vehicle along the hillside crest, Southerland was seeing the world through a haze of red gauze, then purple, and then black. When he came to three weeks later after emergency surgery, that’s when the realization that he was alive and alone struck his gut like a hammer blow, causing him to retch.

Mr. Spartan opened his eyes. I had lied to protect the Consortium at the cost of my family, he corroborated to himself. This man, this assassin, had known my weakness and used it against me. And then: May God forgive me for the choices I’ve made . . . Because I cannot.

Since that day, the moment of his family being murdered had been indelibly inked into his mind. They were images he would never forget as the need for retribution