The Terminals Read online

  I had the years of army-speak to thank for making my tone crisp: “You will die of a disease, sir; no one will know.”

  “I will know.”

  “There’s a hundred percent chance you will die of your pancreatic cancer, and it’s a painful death. That death will happen; it is inevitable. Your friends will mourn your passing, but it will have little impact besides.” I managed to keep the threatening quaver from my voice. “This is something you can change. By going terminal, you have the power to save eleven lives. You’re an expert on Gnosticism. We need your help now.”

  “How convenient.” His eyes smoldered, and I could see him reaching for reasons, hurriedly erecting shields to block my executioner’s axe.

  “We didn’t know we needed you until today.”

  He squinted as if peering into shadows. “I was only diagnosed three days ago.”

  “We couldn’t have known.” I met his stare, relieved when he turned back to the ceiling. I let the silence extend between us, fighting an urge to fill it.

  “If I’m dead, how can I tell you the location?” he asked.

  A smile played at my lips and I hated it.

  “We have a way—a medium.” Back on firmer ground, my resolve strengthened. This was a game. What did he want? What was his desire? Was it absolution for his darkness? Find the answer, and then give it to him.

  “Why not just use this psychic to talk to the killer?”

  I had asked the question myself. “Because, Brother Harkman, Hillar doesn’t want to talk to us. Someone needs to trick him into giving up the information.”

  “You can’t just contact some other dead Gnostic to do the job?”

  “No, the connection to the dead dissipates over time, within a few months, sometimes as little as a week or a few days, then the connection is gone.” This was the armor of my atheism. I believed that wherever the terminals went, it was a mental construct, a lingering energy that linked to other energy, which vanished as the energy died away. If there was an afterlife, it was transient. Some found solace in the role of the terminal; I sought oblivion.

  “What about you, Colonel. How do you feel about murdering your terminals?” he asked, and I felt the barb like a bullet.

  “I haven’t … You’d be my first.”

  “First person you’ve killed?”

  Images of soldiers’ bodies lying in a hard-pack alleyway flooded my mind and made my burn itch. “No, Brother—not that.”

  Charlie shrank under his woolen blanket, pulling it to his Adam’s apple that bobbed as he swallowed. I felt no victory at the change, having expunged the sparks from his eyes.

  “The truth is,” he whispered breathily, but in the quiet of the monastery the words were clear, “I knew you were coming.” I bit my lip in confusion. “I’ve felt this guy—his joy and frustration. He scares me.” From beneath the blankets, he pulled a large leather-bound scrapbook. In it were numerous yellowed clippings and photos. I recognized some of the newer items, they were the same ones I’d laid on his bed, but most of it was old, decades old.

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand, Brother.”

  “It may be that this isn’t the first time the world has run across Hillar McCallum.” He drew a deep breath. “And it would not be the first time I supposedly faced him, either.”

  “You’ve met him?” I struggled with the turn of events. I reminded myself that we were dealing with a foreign religion here, a religion that was evidently just as valid as any other.

  “It’s mysticism and I’m still not sure I believe it all, but, yes. The first time his name was Seth. The year was 156 A.D.”

  “Excuse me—156?”

  “Anno Domini.” My eyebrow lifted but he simply raised a hand for patience. “Hillar was not just a Gnostic; he was a Borborite. A Gnostic sect almost two millennia old.”

  “How can you possibly know this?”

  He folded his hands in his lap and sighed. “Jo. Jo Wentworth. She was my ...” Charlie swallowed and he looked like he’d be sick again. “Jo was my mentor. I learned it from her, but it wasn’t until recently that I believed it could actually be true.”

  I started in with another question, but he cut me off.

  “Let me explain. It’ll be clearer after I explain what Jo told me.”

  I nodded, and he continued.

  “As I said, Hillar was a Borborite. In Roman times, the deeds of the Borborites were so heinous that they went unrecorded in the Roman registry.” As Charlie spoke, he opened the tome in his lap to various pages. The first was an illustration of a robed monk with a cowl covering his face, standing before an altar. He held a serpentine blade that pointed above a human sacrifice. Notes in the margins were written in different hands and languages. “Only after their expulsion from Rome in 80 A.D. did tales of orgy and magic come to light. The Borborites believed that experience was the ultimate manifestation of godhood, and by the satisfaction of all carnal desires they could perpetuate their lives for eternity.” He paged through scenes of sex, feasting, torture, and drunkenness.

  “After their exile, reports of their experimentation continued, but no proof of their whereabouts emerged. The disappearances of village children, the shift in slave routes to include a stop near Nag Hammadi, Egypt—all were ignored in the larger context of the Roman Empire’s glorious expansion.” Charlie unfolded a map, frayed and yellowed with age. On it was a red line that traced down the Nile and into the Mediterranean. His fingertip covered a village on the edge of the Nile.

  Charlie glanced up and must have registered my bewilderment, because he let out a deep breath and chewed his lip before continuing.

  “The Borborites were just one Gnostic sect, others were good. The Valentinians left Rome to found a monastery in the desert. Little did they know that they did so in the shadow of the Borborite stronghold. The Valentinians sought gnosis as well, but their days were filled with fasting, prayer, and labor dedicated to the discovery of their inner knowledge: their divine spark.”

  “Gnosis?” I asked. “What’s gnosis?”

  Charlie’s brow furrowed in concentration. “Gnosis is what we seek. It is knowledge so powerful that to earn it is to gain power over eternity. Transcendent knowledge.”

  I noted his use of we. “All right, so the Borborites tried for gnosis through experience and the Valentinians through introspection. Two paths to the same goal.”

  “Yes, the Valentinians traded with villagers, but kept to themselves, shunning outside contact.” His finger traced from the village into the desert to the site of an oasis.

  “But eventually the good that lay within them and the evil that lay without the walls of their monastery forced the Valentinians beyond their gates. In the desert they discovered evil so rancid that the sand had been soaked with blood. The founding members of the Borborites—their leader Seth and the Keeper of Secrets Theudas—they both neared the end of their natural lives. They would do anything to extend them.”

  “So the Valentinians and the Borborites exist today as well?” I interrupted.

  “Though few would call themselves such,” Charlie agreed. “Very few.”

  “But you said, you’ve met Hillar.”

  “Yes. You see, the Borborites believed that by finding gnosis they could reincarnate, allowing them to live on and continue their depravity across millennia. The leader of the Valentinians, Valentinus, saw this future where Seth and Theudas became murderers and military leaders. He bound his spirit and that of Pius, his follower, to the spirits of Seth and Theudas. They gave up the Pleroma, what you’d call heaven, in order to protect the Earth from the Borborites until they could stop the cycle of rebirth and move on themselves. And so it has continued across time, the good reincarnations battling the evil reincarnations: pirates, Nazis, dictators, and serial killers.”

  Brother Harkman held my gaze for a minute before I realized
he waited for a response. The monastery was entirely silent. The music done. Night had come.

  “You’re a Valentinian?” I asked. “You’re not just an expert on Gnosticism, but actually Gnostic?”

  Charlie appeared to hunch under a great burden and flushed with embarrassment.

  “I am Gnostic, and if I’m to believe my mentor, I’m Valentinus himself.”

  I struggled to understand. How did he know?

  “So this Jo Wentworth, she was a Valentinian and told you all this?”

  “Her name almost two thousand years ago was Pius. My job is not only to track the reincarnation of evil, but to train the good.”

  “So you’re telling me that you met Hillar … Seth, whatever, when you weren’t Charlie Harkman but Valentinus?”

  “Jo told me that we confronted Seth in his lair just as he was murdering his partner Theudas and in so doing, discovering the secret of a very twisted gnosis. I can barely believe this myself. But maybe I can break the cycle and enter the Pleroma.” Charlie fingered the IV in his arm. “I think I’ve always felt Hillar McCallum—part of me knew he was my duty, I suppose. Now you’re here.”

  “Let me get this straight,” I say slowly, trying to understand the full scope of the stakes. “By helping us, you think you might be able to prevent his reincarnation?”

  It was moments like this that made it easier to be atheist.

  He flushed.

  “So … you’ll do it.” I’d discovered what he wanted, and although I should have been pleased, I couldn’t take pleasure in killing the man, no matter how many kids he might save. “This is your chance at whatever you call it … gnosis, too, isn’t it?”

  I realized that his embarrassment was not due to the strange belief that he thought he was the reincarnation of some two-thousand-year-old mystic, but rather shame. His arm lay like its own little corpse, impaled and limp on the sheet. The lives of some eighty souls hung about his neck.

  After a moment, I looked the monk in the eye—my understanding didn’t matter—this was irrelevant to the orders. He appeared to sadden further.

  “You were meant to do it. You’ve been doing this for millennia.”

  His eyes flared. “I—”

  “Eleven children, Brother Harkman, versus the few weeks you have left.” The words tumbled in a rush, and my voice rose too loud for the confines of the cell and monastery beyond.

  He regarded me. “Months I have left.”

  “Do the other monks know all this?”

  The light in his eyes diminished again. I can relate to guilt. I know guilt. My own guilt would kill me, as it would kill him. Duty and guilt, so closely linked, but for a soldier this came as no surprise—what is patriotism but the repayment of debts owed to your country?

  “Why’d you keep your beliefs a secret? As a monk, isn’t belief all you have?” I asked.

  “I’ve lived in this community for my adult life. If I admitted that I was not simply a Gnostic researcher, but a practicing Gnostic, I’d be thrown out. I love these people.” He heaved a sigh, fingers rubbing at his scalp again. “I’ve wanted to tell them. I’ve told myself I would eventually. Now it’s too late.”

  “Not too late to be true to yourself.”

  He paused and looked up at me. “You may feel comfortable in the jacket of your cold rationale, that I am dying and this will help children who have long lives ahead of them. But it is still wrong, and it will blacken both your soul and mine.”

  I caught my breath; it’s not every day that you are cursed by a monk, and a mystic monk at that. Then I set my jaw. “Blackened Cajun-style,” I said and smiled grimly.

  “One stipulation to all this …” As he spoke, his hand went to the IV as if it were an electrical switch. “You live.”

  I waved him off. “It’s a secret organization, Brother Harkman. It stays secret because its agents die.” A flush of heat went through me, and I regretted sending the general the missive regarding Sister Angelica.

  He shrugged. “As you said, I’m dying anyway—you’re not. If I do this for you, you must agree to live.”

  “You’re doing this for the kids, not me.”

  “I’m dying based on a three-day-old diagnosis and the slim chance that I can redeem myself in death—you’re my insurance policy. There’s no guarantee that I’ll be successful or that the children are still alive, or even if you’re telling the truth. I save you now, it’s a good start.”

  So it all came back to insurance. “Why care about me?”

  “It’s a trade. An eye for an eye. How else can I rationalize this?” He leaned forward and the timbre to his voice deepened, giving another glimpse of the man inside. “No suicide.”

  I shrugged and lifted a mocking eyebrow. “No suicide.” What did I care? Discover what he wants and give it to him.

  Charlie ripped the IV from his arm as if I’d written an oath in blood. “In all my life, I couldn’t be certain I’d ever saved anyone.” He smiled. “To get the chance now,” he shrugged, “perhaps it makes sense.”

  I ignored his remark and tried to shake off the lethargy that flooded through me. “Let’s go.”

  “Give me half an hour.”

  “You don’t need to pack for this trip.”

  “Christine.” His annoyance slackened and the kind, calm countenance I’d first encountered upon my arrival faced me. “I need a moment to say goodbye.”

  “You can’t tell anyone.” I held back the word else.

  He tucked his feet into sandals that lay beside his bed and eased upright. He stood half-a-head shorter than me and brushed past.

  Once through the door, I hung back, but followed as he made for an alcove deep set into the garden border. In the gloom, it was filled with shadow. Singing—Evensong, I guessed—filtered into the quad. Offering Charlie privacy, I dwelled in my own darkness, sitting on the cold stone of a bench. I’d texted the pilot, Pat, to ready for the flight and thought I could hear the distant whine of helicopter engines.

  When Charlie returned, his face was wet. I sensed his tears were not for himself, rather for the pain he’d caused another, and I wondered how far Sister Angelica’s and Charlie’s relationship extended beyond the fraternal.

  Chapter 9

  “Is your name Charles Harkman?” Doctor Deeth asked.

  I watched through the one-way pane as Deeth administered the lie detector test. The baseline questions had droned on, but now he neared the end. Charlie sat forward on the bed, a black strap around his stomach and chest, electrodes taped to his hands, and blood-pressure cuff over his slender arm. It was his second time through the questions, surprise not being allowed in a polygraph, and the clock indicated they’d eaten into another hour. I couldn’t help thinking that, somewhere in Iowa, kids hadn’t been fed for a day or more.

  “Were you born in Los Angeles, California?”

  “Yes,” Charlie replied tonelessly. Through the questions I’d learned that Charlie had had a younger brother killed in a traffic accident. He’d lost his father to Alzheimer’s and his mother to a heart attack. He was a dissatisfied, guilt-ridden man, the admission of which the general suspected had succeeded in landing him here. I didn’t like being congratulated by the general, and certainly not for killing a man.

  “You understand the doctrine of Gnosticism?” Through the intercom Deeth’s words sounded distant. The indicators of heart rate, blood pressure, respiration and electro-dermal activity zigzagged on Deeth’s laptop screen.

  “Yes, and I believe in it, Doctor,” Charlie said. On the white bed, in his dark robe, he wrung his hands and then looked apologetically at Deeth.

  “You passed,” Deeth replied.

  “Not sure I want to pass.”

  Deeth snapped the laptop closed and gave the thumbs up to the general and me.

  “‘Bout fucking time.” The general pushed the in
tercom. “Listen, if you guys want to wax philosophical, I’ll bring Padre Arthur and his gang in here and we can talk theology.”

  Despite his cynical tone, I had to laugh. Arthur, Francis, and Sundarshan still waited their turn in the palliative unit beyond the retinal-scan locked door. Walking past them, I felt like an insect trying to slip past a spider’s web. Inevitably they snared me in conversation. If Arthur and Francis in particular were given the chance to speak to Charlie, the kids would be long dead before he shut up.

  In Purgatory, Attila sipped from a black coffee cup and concentrated on Charlie as if trying to memorize him. In his hand, he fondled the crystal bulb of his doorknob. It was smooth rather than faceted, the only imperfection a small bubble of air in the glass where it met the silver fitting. He leaned against a counter half-filled by an espresso machine. He drank so much I began to wonder if the general paid him in espresso beans.

  “You’re going to pull the trigger on him,” the general told me.

  My lingering smile vanished. The general’s teeth were twisted and yellow, and even at this distance I could peer into the pores of his nose. “Pardon me?”

  “You’re the one to kill the monk. Learn what you should have done in the sand.”

  Again, his eagerness sent a chill through me, as if he were a teenaged boy poised to get his dick wet for the first time. Blood rushed to my face and my fingers balled into fists.