Face To Face
By
Brian Downes
He arrived by air, carrying nothing but the stage-dressing of his cover identity. Antonio Defiore’s commlink said he was Salvatore Ciccione, a midlevel manager for Finisterra Biotech from the Republic of Tuscany, on holiday in Istanbul. Finisterra was a subsidiary of Meridional Agronomics, the European agricorp that had a strong influence in Turkish government. Also on his commlink was a library of popular music, heavy on Japanese, and a copy of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, a VR detective role-playing game based on the 20th century novel. There were also two programs that tested Defiore's faith. In order to preserve his cover, he had to access them both at least a few times a week. In one, he endured augmented reality instruction in the pagan state religion of Aztlan; in the other, virtual sex encounters with an 18th century teenage geisha, who had a view of a street of wooden houses lit by paper lanterns outside her sliding door.
Defiore sought the refuge of his faith as the High-Speed Civilian Transport began its descent toward Istanbul, for he was a Poor Knight of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, operating under special Papal dispensation. He was going, in the name of Christ, into the boiling infidel cauldron that had birthed the Jihad, and he would do battle there.
As the town on the Bosphorus rose up, he hoped that Christ would forgive that he did not pray aloud, and he did not make the sign of the Cross, for he was among Christ’s enemies.
On a legal document, Istanbul was a free and secular city state; as he left the airport, Defiore saw more than one of the small drone helos of the 10,000 Daggers mercenary corporation on patrol, machine guns showing hard use. But within sight of the airport he saw the minaret towers of mosques, and the baggage attendants wore beards and turbans. Defiore was not fooled, and he was not comforted that political confusion had for the moment defanged the serpent. The enemies of the Church were nefarious, and forever regenerating.
This know also, it was written in the Second Book of Timothy, that in the last days perilous times will come.
*****
If Istanbul had all the sins of a secular city. Defiore’s elven cab driver tried Arabic, which Defiore did not admit to, then Greek, which Defiore did not have. Then the cabbie hit English and said, “You like girls? I know many clubs. Girls love a good looking Spaniard. Yeah? Yeah? A-OK? Elf girls? Human girls? Maybe…ork girls?”
“I’m Italian,” Defiore told him. “And my fiancé will be joining me.”
“Happy wedding! May you have good-looking children!”
That night, the Templars met above a walk-in clinic that operated as a Catholic safehouse. A Vatican operative named Frederick Hammerwald was their local contact - a digital artist by day, painting seascapes and drinking in Turkish cafes. He was a human in his late fifties, originally from Berlin, and he had several packages laid out on the black bedspread in the small bedroom into which the four-man team crowded for their briefing. The artist Hammerwald was not a Templar - he merely carried out the secret instructions of the Church. He did not even know of the existence of Defiore’s order - only of the existence of Defiore and his teammates.
“We seem to have privacy here,” John Kennedy told them. Kennedy was a dark-haired, dark-eyed Irishman in his late twenties, one of the children of the diaspora that had fled when Ireland fell to the pagan elves in the ’30s. His accent was a scoured amalgam of his parents’ Irish and the Scottish of his adopted home. Kennedy was a Raphaelite Sergeant, and their hacker. His head was packed with implanted computers and wireless communications; he could scan the building for listening devices without any outward sign of it.
Hammerwald opened a plastic case stamped ARES PISTOLS. “The Ares LP-11, essentially a copy of the Fichetti 500, in 7.5 mm. With wireless smartlink and Ares silencer, also two thirty round magazines and Level 4 encryption from Mitsuhama Computer Technologies to prevent hacking attempts. The ammunition is Ares flechette.” Hammerwald looked Defiore in the eyes. The German’s own eyes were watery, the sockets corrugated. “Aim for the face, ja? Not so good is the flechette at penetrating body armor. We have one also for you, Herr Kennedy,” Hammerwald said to the hacker.
Defiore plucked the pistol from its bed of protective foam. Made mostly out of plastic, it was a featherweight in his hand. The German told him, “The smartlink is already subscribed to the commlink, ja? Everything will work together.”
The painter turned to the metahuman. “For you now we have something a little different.” He unzipped a black leather carry-on bag and took out a submachine gun. “The Ares Smartgun, modified, you see, for convenient use by dwarves.” He handed it to Jean Lusson. Defiore watched the dwarf eject the magazine and check the chamber, then peer down the barrel. Hammerwald looked uncomfortable. “A previous owner, yes. But very operable, ja?”
“For thou art with me,” the blond-bearded dwarf said, the modified SMG in his short-fingered fist, pointed for testing purposes at a nightstand. “Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”
Defiore was slightly annoyed that Lusson, a Templar sergeant of Michael, would quote a Psalm that was usually seen on bulletin boards and bumper stickers. He knew that Lusson had been a street samurai in the slums of Paris until 2058, when he repented his murders and his sins of lust, and rejoined the Church he had been raised in; the lamb that returned to the flock. It was not for Defiore to object to Lusson’s metatype, for Pope John XXV had declared metahumans possessed of souls and worthy of salvation. It was not for Defiore to doubt Lusson when the Pope and the Master of the Temple did not; but Defiore could remember, and he did remember, that the Frenchman had been a murderer and a thief, and a chip addict.
The fifth man in the room was a priest. Jan Rattenbak was an Austrian, a Knight of Michael, and a blessed of Christ, gifted with the miracle of magic. There were no weapons for Rattenbak. He needed none, and he said nothing, the overhead fluorescent throwing a severe light on his aquiline nose and bald head.
“Well, that takes care of the guns, ja?” the painter said. “Now for the other things.”
*****
According to the precis they had studied, their target cell was made up of Amir Muqbar, an Egyptian cleric and magician. Mohammad al Damascus, an Arabian dealmaker; and Momir Abdullah and Saladin Hassan, two Syrians with experience in the paramilitary security forces of Saeder-Krupp Heavy Industries. Apparently the cell subcontracted for Matrix services, but the Templars did not know with whom. It wasn't hard to find black market matrix support, hackers motivated by believe in Allah or belief in nuyen.
The precis they had been given had not included specific information on the target cell’s activities, but Defiore knew that Istanbul was a funnel for nuyen and equipment going to radical Muslim operations in Europe: political agitation in France and the Italian Confederation, killings and bombings in Spain, nuyen laundering in Swiss banks, subversion and blackmailing of corporate and government officials in every nation. The Church’s battle of centuries to keep Christian lands pure of this influence went on.
There were rumors, Defiore had heard, of Templar cells operating in the Holy Land itself. He prayed to be reassigned there, to liberate the sacred city of Jerusalem from the Jews and the Muslims. He prayed that he might live to walk the Via Dolorosa as the Savior had, and although he wasn’t a magician, feel Christ’s living power glowing in those sacred streets. He prayed that God’s grace and favor would see him through the perilous hours of this Istanbul operation. With grim preparation and a tremor of fear, Defiore thought of Psalms 11:2: “For lo, the wicked bend their bow, they make ready their arrow upon the string, that they may privily shoot at the upright in heart.”
Hammerwald apparently had some method of tracking the target cell. The morning after he distributed their equipment, he emailed them to say that the cell would be at a place called the Dance Café that night. Two minutes later Defiore’s commlink received an audio download from Rattenbak. The Austrian priest said, “The operation will be executed at location 2 tonight at 0030 hours.”
Location 1 was the safehouse. Location 2 was the club. And in a simple bit of misdirection, all the Templars knew to subtract an hour and ten minutes from any time assignment. They would go to the Dance Café in Istanbul at 2320 hours to kill Amir Muqbar, Mohammad al Damascus, Momir Abdullah and Saladin Hassan in a dense crowd of club-goers, in Jesus name, amen.
But before that, while the afternoon sun was still in the sky of the city named for that Roman Emperor who had accepted Christ, the Templars would gather for their benediction.
They gathered in the same bedroom where Hammerwald had given out the gear. The room was too small until Lusson put his sturdy body against the bed and shoved it squalling across the floor as easily as Defiore might have nudged a football out of the way with his toe.
The faithful warriors knelt - the Irish hacker, the Italian spy, the French cyborg dwarf. The floor was hard but their knees were practiced in this posture.
The bald Rattenbak stood over them and put the body and blood of Jesus Christ in their mouths. As always, the wafer going soft on his tongue, the routine miracle of transubstantion, filled Defiore with a warm yellow glow. Like sunset over the sea, when he as a boy would go with his mother to visit his sister, Maria, at the convent on the coast near Salerno. From the convent’s courtyard they could look down the street, past a restaurant, and a store that sold suntan lotion, and see the orks wading in the surf with fishing spears held ready near their tusked jaws. The orks would sometimes come up to the convent and cross themselves before entering the courtyard to negotiate sale of the catch in their gravelly voices with the nuns who worked in the kitchen. Defiore remembered there had been an old ork named Furio with a cyberleg and a nano-tattoo of the 11th Italian Mechanized Regiment, a veteran of the bloody ’30s, the end of the Republic and the rise of the Church.
After they took the Eucharist, Rattenbak passed down the line of them again. From a yellow nylon courier bag he took a small flat jar, labeled “Nanopaste” in English. He paused at each supplicant to paint with his fingers a nanite trode net on their temples and at the base of their neck. Each of the commlinks Hammerwald had given them were modified for hot sim, to give the most vivid simsense experience. Most governments regarded hot sim as illegal - but their purposes were holy.
As important as the body of Christ was, it was this second dispensation that made Defiore’s blood race. This was a rite reserved only for the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, to fortify them before battle and again prepare their souls for the crucible of war.
This was the Golgotha program.
In the small room there was a smell of antiseptics and sterilization from the clinic below. There was a smell of the laundered sheets on the bed, and the polymer smell of Rattenbak’s new yellow bag. There was the sound of Rattenbak’s bullet resistant overcoat sliding against the priest’s body, the gritty noise of the priest’s fingers in the paste, and the breathing of the three men on their knees.
Rattenbak stepped back from them and pursed his lips, one finger lightly on the control surface of his Erika Elite commlink.
“Be you now with the son of God,” the priest said, and pressed the button.
There was a vast whiteness, and a drilling buzz like a steel wasp in a glass jar.
Then there was a hill. A hill of raw white rock, with stubborn fibrous brush growing in the cracks.
Defiore felt, as he always did at this early moment in the program, the beginning of a golden glow in his heart, an infusing perfection. He was dressed in a coarse wool robe, but the specific details of the body of the actor who’s sensations he was experiencing had been blurred out.
The hill was crowded. There was a group of Roman soldiers neglecting their duty by dicing among themselves. The stakes included some cheap clothes and some coins - apparently after the condemned man’s clothes had been won, the money had been added to keep the game going.
Behind the soldiers there were the squares and rectangles of a low-to-the-ground, sand-colored city, about two kilometers away. But the city was not something that the sim gave him a chance to study.
His eyes did linger on a crowd of jeering spectators, dirty, squawking people with gaps in their teeth and bony wrists poking out of their sleeves, looking upward and shouting. “Let God bring you down from there, if you’re so close. Get your servants to pry out those nails, King of the Jews.”
There were priests, too, members of the Sanhedrin, looking satisfied. Defiore heard one of them say, “Now this is all over. By next Passover no one will remember this Nazarene.”
The fluid perfection Defiore felt in his soul was colored now with a curdled loathing for the priests and the mockers.
For one instant Defiore saw out of the corner of his eye a group in mourning, looking exhausted, heartbroken, Mary the Mother of God a small figure next to the tall Peter and the pudgy Matthew, who had gotten fat being a tax collector.
But then the sim led Defiore’s gaze up the freshly planed shaft of the Cross. He saw the bloody feet. He had an impression of long, striated muscles, bony hips, a circlet of the driest thorns, a shaggy mane of hair and blood, but he had been inside the Golgotha program enough times to know that he would not look into the face of Christ - he had a glimpse of a board painted with the Latin words THIS IS JESUS THE KING OF THE JEWS - a rolling golden blaze of light like a solid thing expanded in all directions, and Defiore felt his heart and soul made into a mote of dust in the infinite triumph of all joyful creation. He felt himself borne upward toward the Throne of God.
*****
He came back to his own senses curled partly on the floor, partly on top of Kennedy the Irishman, who he recognized by the smell of his cologne. In front of him the dwarf Lusson was flat on his back with his short legs pulled up to his chest and his fat fingers wrapped around the bottoms of his boots. Lusson was shaking, convulsing, his biceps threatening the seams in his sleeves; tears were running out of the corners of his rolled-up eyes, and Defiore knew that he was doing the same, and drooling onto Kennedy’s sweater. The Golgotha program had prostrated them before God.
*****
“This is Herr Rattenbak. I am with an angel of the Lord now blessed.”
The priest’s words were widely traveled, thanks to Kennedy’s communications security. They bounced from Rattenbak’s commlink to the local telecommunications grid to a Japanese corporate satellite, which was fooled into beaming them to an illegal data haven in the Front Range Free Zone in the mountains of North America, which scrambled their identifiers and transmitted them to a Nissan dealership in Portugal, which fed them through an anarchist community syndicate in Paris, which scrambled their identifiers again, and sent them to Defiore’s commlink in Istanbul, again by way of the Istanbul local grid. It happened nearly at the speed of light, so that Defiore heard the priest through his glasses’ tiny speakers with only .13 seconds lag.
An angel of the Lord, Defiore thought. A night of miracles, all praise to the Lord God on High.
He was in an alley strewn with garbage. Kennedy and Lusson were behind him. While Rattenbak had walked through the Dance Café’s security in the front, they had to sneak in the back, because they were armed with material things. There were two bouncers at the back door, both wearing big yellow commlink goggles. Defiore smiled at them. “This is Dance Café, right?” He hollered in English, and a New York accent - it was the only American accent he really had. He pulled a wad of cash nuyen out of his pocket. “Do you guys have hot dogs in here? I’d kill my mother for a hot dog, do you know what I mean? I haven’t seen a hot dog since I got in this town!” Salvatore Ciccione, Defiore’s cover identity, had spent a lot of time in New York.
One bouncer’s head twitched suddenly; he was seeing something in his goggles that upset him. “Alarm of fire in men’s room 2,” he said to his companion, and in English, unconsciously following Defiore’s lead. “Wait, it’s gone - no, it returns again. What the hell?”
“Go check it out,” the other one snapped. Defiore had this second one as the boss.
“Jesus Christ!” Defiore cried out. “This place is on fire?”
Between the yelling and the waving nuyen and Kennedy’s fake fire alarm, the three Templars went through the back door without being searched. “My wife’s littlest sister is in New York,” the remaining bouncer told Defiore while Defiore drunkenly paid the door charge for six instead of three. “Her husband manages a bakery.”
“New York bagels number one!” Defiore shouted.
The main floor of the Dance Café was a carpet that felt almost like a pebbly beach through Defiore’s shoes. A latticework overhead held lasers and lights, and these were supplemented by three rotodrones, rising and falling over the heads of the dancers, trailing long tails of glittering fiberoptics, and raking the crowd with strobing spotlights. One was yellow, and labeled LOVE in four different languages. One was red, and labeled LUST. One was white, and labeled HATE.
Defiore heard his Irishman’s voice through his commlink. “Please stand by for Kennedy.” Their hacker was going to seize control of some systems for them. Over the commlinks the Poor Knights spoke Latin, which, if overheard, was unlikely to be understood.
The main floor was gigantic, more than a hundred meters long, with island groups of little round tables among open spaces full of dancers - Defiore spotted a group of dwarf women made up for a night on the town with the name of a British fashion designer on their fitted T-shirts; he saw a troll with skin as black as basalt and his horns capped in silver, dancing with an olive-skinned human girl riding on his shoulders.
Defiore could hear hundreds of feet pounding the floor, and a chaos of shouting, but he couldn’t hear any music. Dance Café’s central computer was communicating simultaneously with the personal commlinks of each of the dancers, offering a selection of music to choose from and dance to through their earbeads. Defiore’s own Erika Elite commlink was projecting a music menu into the vision of his Scottish-made artificial eyes, and an ARO, pulsing upside down every half second, that read DRINKS? With one thumb on his wrist-mounted commlink, Defiore clicked out of the café’s menus. He also shut off the social networking displays of the people in the crowd, so he wouldn’t have to see what they’re commlinks were trying to tell him. Just as those AROs were vanishing he noticed that the troll with the girl on his shoulders was from Egypt, and loved sandboarding.
“Kennedy ready,” the Irishman reported through the comm. Defiore, Lusson, and Kennedy had spread out in the crowd to look less suspicious.
Defiore clicked back to the café’s drink menu and ordered a vodka and soda water. He went to the nearest bar and the drink was waiting for him there with an ARO on it that read “VODKA AND SODA, Salvatore C.” When he clicked on the ARO and then picked up his drink he heard a warm woman’s voice say, “Thank you for your order. Please drink in moderation.”
He tipped a mouthful of the drink onto the floor, grinned loopily, and started into the crowd.
It was a cold March in old Istanbul, sometimes called Constantinople, which meant Defiore had an excuse for the jacket that concealed his silenced pistol and the armor vest underneath his shirt. He imitated dancing even though he heard no music, and he ordered his commlink to feed the video from his cybereyes to his teammates, so that they could see what he saw in their own augmented reality displays.
Lusson would have waddled straight through the crowd like a dwarf samurai with an automatic weapon zipped under his coat. Rattenbak would have looked like a Catholic school headmaster. But this was Defiore’s training - he looked like a tourist.
His Transys Neuronet cybereyes included vision enhancement and thermographic subsystems - the flashing lights gave him a little trouble, but he saw right through the heavy smoke that poured from machines in the ceiling. Making his way through the dancers, he came within sight of an island of small tables, Amir Muqbar and Mohammad al Damascus sitting at one of them.
Rattenbak saw them through Defiore’s eyes, and the priest’s voice grew thin as he said, “Now! Now! Be the instrument of God!” And Defiore pointed at Al Damascus, and looked up and over his shoulder, and there was the angel, looking at whomsoever Defiore pointed out.
It stood in the air over the heads of the crowd. Its hair was reddish gold. Its only clothing was a white cloth slung around its hips. Its wings were white, and they were molten gold, and they were tucked close to its shoulders. Its visage was terrible, the purity of justice - smoke came from its eyes, and in its right hand it held a flaming sword a meter long that was the just and omniscient vengeance of the almighty God.
In that split second Defiore thought that no one saw it yet, save himself, and his teammates looking through his eyes.
Defiore remembered the words of Gideon in the Book of Judges: Alas, O Lord GOD! For because I have seen an angel of the Lord face to face.
And the LORD said unto him, peace be unto thee; fear not: thou shalt not die.
The computer controlled lights and lasers in the ceiling suddenly all pointed directly at Muqbar and Al Damascus’ table; Kennedy had illuminated their enemies while leaving the Templars in the cover of darkness - for what the cover was worth when microcircuits in a pair of contact lenses could see through it.
The angel crashed into Muqbar and Al Damascus’s table and a ball of flame spurted into the air. But something else came barreling in, too; in a fraction of a second it appeared from the crowd and ran forward with its arms spread. Defiore had only a glimpse, but his expensive eyes showed him skin of a cerulean blue and corded muscles, copper-colored arm bracelets, and a bare foot with only two thick toes in the front and one thick toe in the back. Its head was bald, but like a cloud. It grappled with the angel.
It was an infrit of the air, a pet of Al Damascus’s from the pit of Hell. Defiore knew now that the advantage of surprise was not with the Templars - this thing was the bodyguard of their enemy.
The angel and the ifrit struggled together on the floor. The ifrit was trying to dig its thumb into the angel’s eye, and the angel was trying to lay its fiery sword across its adversary’s throat. Muqbar and Al Damascus’s table was overturned. By the time Defiore had his silenced pistol in his hand a great ball of fire enveloped both the spirits and blocked his view of his enemy. He fired twice into the spot where he thought the magician’s face should be.
Then the crowd split apart as panic shocked the impious, a hole opening all around the embattled table and Defiore with both hands on his Ares LP-11.
The fireball flew upward, clearing the view: Defiore heard behind him to his right the frantic fwap-fwap-fwap-fwap-fwap-fwap of a suppressed automatic weapon, and he saw the ifrit’s face twist in pain before the unholy thing disintegrated into blue smoke. Then he saw Al Damascus half-standing behind his overturned table. The bearded cleric pointed one finger at the angel lying on its back and snapped something in Arabic that Defiore didn’t hear - but the air between Al Damascus and the gold-winged spirit rippled like the liquid-hot air of a desert oasis, and the angel vanished in a puff of fire.
Defiore felt his eyes fill with tears.
Then he felt himself shot. The bullet went right through the vest over the right side of his chest. It spun him completely around and knocked him down. All blood seemed to run out of his head for a second or two, leaving him dazed.
His shoulder and chest went numb, but for some small reason of neurology he felt the wound very badly in his right hand.
There was a lot of yelling and screaming and a hard volley of unsilenced pistol shots - and he thought he heard also the fwap-fwap-fwap-fwap-fwap-fwap of Lusson’s Smartgun again. Before he could force himself to his feet he felt thick hard arms and fat short fingers picking him up, and the next thing he knew he was slung across the blond dwarf’s shoulders. Defiore’s face sagged only half a meter from the floor.
“Hold on tight!” Lusson barked at him in his French-accented Latin. Defiore heard a sliding noise of metal on plastic and an empty magazine hit the floor while Lusson pulled a new one from under his coat. Then the dwarf spoke into his commlink while he ran for the back door, as fast as he could with Defiore across his shoulders. “Defiore is down and Rattenbak is dead. Evacuate!”
“Say again, Rattenbak’s status?” Kennedy asked over the commlink.
Lusson shouted, “Decapitated! I don’t know how! Al Damascus and one of the Syrians are dead, by the grace of God.”
Even through the pain of the gunshot wound Defiore knew the operation had gone wrong.
He got one hand trailing in the café’s knobby carpet and pulled himself off Lusson, flopping onto the floor on his back. His Scottish-made eyes cut the glare of the overhead lights.
“What are you doing?” Lusson shouted.
With shouting in the day of battle, Defiore thought, remembering a passage from the Book of Amos. With a tempest in the day of the whirlwind.
He didn’t answer the Frenchman. But he thought that if they had fought for God and been found inadequate - if he had witnessed the killing of an angel - then he should die in battle as the priest had done. He tried to get up. He wanted to stagger toward a Syrian muzzle.
“In the name of Christ!” Lusson swore. His hand clamped around Defiore’s ankle, and with his Ingram in one hand he dragged Defiore off the field with the other, his blond beard turning right and left and behind, alert for attack.
You filthy beetlehead, Defiore thought glumly as he was pulled across the floor, feeling his blood sop the back of his shirt. You were never a true Christian.