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

shaking off the cobwebs from his mind. Then as he turned on Hayden with eyes so pale that they appeared to have a milky glaze to them, he slowly skinned his lips upward along his teeth like a savage animal and began to make his way toward Hayden for the final kill.

 

CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

After the dust from the ceiling stopped falling and the Earth settled, Mr. Plato felt an overwhelming relief. Lowering his hands and taking inventory, he noted the soiled and dust-laden faces around him. They appeared like refugees who had followed their leader to the depths of Hell and madness, only to come out at the other end with the ‘Light’ shining upon their faces and with tears of gratitude shining like the facets of diamonds.

Mr. Plato, though he did not save everyone, saved most.

Walking through the pyramidal mounds of broken stone that seemed to be everywhere, he saw the occasional arm or leg extending from the cairn of stones that covered them, the limbs unmoving. At the opposite side of the chamber and lying beneath heavy stones, was the vociferous tech who had challenged Mr. Plato at the elevator shaft, who was now staring upward with his eyes wide with the surprise of his mortality.

His nametag read: Bjornson. The lead technician.

Waving a hand over the tech’s face to close the man’s eyes, they kept popping open as if they were trying to confirm his death, that this was nothing more than a scene to a bad dream. But on the third try they stayed shut.

Others slowly converged towards Mr. Plato waiting for the next words of hope from the mouth of their Savior. Intuiting this, Mr. Plato patted the air with the palm of his hand and said, “It’s all right . . . Help is on its way.”

There were cries of gratitude, along with cheers and explosive breaths of relief.

Mr. Plato, a member of the Consortium who was bred to save and protect and to balance the world in a way that equalizes good and evil so that evil never truly got a foothold, thought of his favorite quote from Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

Mr. Plato, in his role, did all he could as a good man.

 

CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

Salt came at Kimball Hayden as a man possessed rather than a man who was caught within agonizing pain. It was as if he had the ability to suppress the suffering and treated it as more of a nuisance rather than a hindrance, by tucking the sensation away until his obsession of regaining the Eye of Moses was completed.

As Salt skimmed and jumped his way across the face toward Hayden, Kimball launched himself directly at the approaching man, feet first, which seemed to catch the assassin with surprise, his eyes suddenly flaring to show nothing but whites.

Then Hayden caught Salt square in the jaw with the strike that snapped the assassin’s head backward with violence. Salt, with his arms and hands trying to find the wire he was secured to, though they failed to do so because his mind was seeing a starburst of internal stars, began his downward slide toward the valley floor.

It was slow at first, then he began to pick up speed, falling faster and faster until he was out of sight, out of range, the man eclipsed by the maelstrom of whirling snow beneath Kimball, and then the screaming of a falling individual, the man dropping faster and deeper until there was nothing but the sound of the howling wind.

Kimball waited along the wall.

Silence.

Salt was a wise man who knew his trade well, this much Kimball Hayden realized. What he also considered to be a possibility was that the screams which merged with the howl of the wind, could have been a ruse to draw Hayden unguarded to the bottom, where Salt would be waiting as the spider within its den.

Kimball Hayden felt for Aaron's rod and the rucksack containing the crucible, making sure they were still attached. Sighing with relief on that part, he now had to descend the final stretch wondering if Salt was expecting him from the shadows below.

Skipping and bouncing his way down along the face of the mountain, Kimball Hayden was about to get his answer.

 

CHAPTER EIGHTY

Mr. Spartan lay on his back upon the snow-covered landing looking at the sky. He could see the constellation like Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper until dark smoke wafted into their path to blot them out. That was when Mr. Spartan closed his eyes and prayed to his God, thanking Him.

For the most part, the topside of the mountain was gone, the remnants of what it used to be now laying in the valley below. And as he laid there, he saw the number of stones around him. The area was a moonscape with rocks everywhere. The trajectories of the explosion had propelled them upward until gravity had taken over, which then caused their long fall downward. Stones, in sizes that were both great and small, rained down and peppered the landing around him, though not a single piece of gravel had touched him. Another miracle.

Above him, the clouds dispersed and parted. And directly overhead, as the stars twinkled like a cache of diamonds spread over black velvet, he noted that the North Star was glittering extremely bright on this night.

It reminded him of the dark particle within its crystal cocoon, twisting and turning with a life of its own, the power of absolute greatness.

And then he wondered if Providence was giving him some strange and divine signal. Were the surrounding stones so great in numbers that not one delivered a fatal or crushing blow, a message?

All Mr. Spartan could do was wonder.

Then a scudding cloud of smoke, dark and serpentine in motion, covered the ceiling of stars once again.

Feeling incredible pain in his knee, Mr. Spartan presumed that most of his team was dead, if not all, within this mayhem. And